is about seventeen; John Jasper is twenty-six. He is conductor of
the Choir of the Cathedral, a "lay precentor;" he is very dark,
with thick black whiskers, and, for a number of years, has been a
victim to the habit of opium smoking. He began very early. He
takes this drug both in his lodgings, over the gate of the
Cathedral, and in a den in East London, kept by a woman nicknamed
"The Princess Puffer." This hag, we learn, has been a determined
drunkard,--"I drank heaven's-hard,"--for sixteen years BEFORE she
took to opium. If she has been dealing in opium for ten years (the
exact period is not stated), she has been very disreputable for
twenty-six years, that is ever since John Jasper's birth. Mr.
Cuming Walters suggests that she is the mother of John Jasper, and,
therefore, maternal grandmother of Edwin Drood. She detests her
client, Jasper, and plays the spy on his movements, for reasons
unexplained.

Jasper is secretly in love with Rosa, the fiancee of his nephew,
and his own pupil in the musical art. He makes her aware of his
passion, silently, and she fears and detests him, but keeps these
emotions private. She is a saucy school-girl, and she and Edwin
are on uncomfortable terms: she does not love him, while he
perhaps does love her, but is annoyed by her manner, and by the
gossip about their betrothal. "The bloom is off the plum" of their
prearranged loves, he says to his friend, uncle, and confidant,
Jasper, whose own concealed passion for Rosa is of a ferocious and
homicidal character. Rosa is aware of this fact; "a glaze comes
over his eyes," sometimes, she says, "and he seems to wander away
into a frightful sort of dream, in which he threatens most . . . "
The man appears to have these frightful dreams even when he is not
under opium.