Drood

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

No—er—Dickens! I swear! Not this—er—er—not this, this Our Mutual Friend nonsense! No! It is—er—it is—Copperfield, by God! I swear to Heaven that, as a piece of passion and playfulness—er, ah—indescribably mixed up together, it does—No, really, Dickens! — Copperfield! — amaze me as profoundly as it—er—as it moves me. But as a piece of Art—and you know—er—that I—No, Dickens! By God! — have seen the best Art in a great time—it is incomprehensible to me. How it is got at—er—how it is done—er—how one man can—well! It lays me on my—er—back, and it is of no use talking about it.”

This was our Surprise Guest speaking and mopping at his huge, pale, perspiring forehead with his paisely silk handkerchief. Then the old man began mopping his rheumy eyes as they began leaking tears.

Our Mystery Guests were, of course, William Charles Macready, the Eminent Tragedian, and his new wife, Cecile.

I hope and pray that I do not sense a silence on your distant end of this memoir through time, Dear Reader, for if your era has forgotten William Charles Macready, what hope do I have that the name or work of little Wilkie Collins has survived?

William Charles Macready was the Eminent Tragedian of our age, inheriting Kean’s mantle and—according to many—surpassing that earlier giant of Shakespearean Theatre in both subtlety of interpretation and refinement of sensibility. Macready’s most memorable roles in his many decades of dominating the English stage were as Macbeth in that unnameable production and as King Lear. Born in 1793, if my arithmetic is correct, Macready was already a mature and recognised star of the stage and famous public man when young Dickens—the Inimitable Boz, as he was known in his first flush of success after The Pickwick Papers—was just a stagestruck lad. Macready’s unique mastery of pathos and remorse on stage, often at the expense of any sense of the nobility or greatness so often worn by Shakespearean actors, resonated strongly with the young writer’s own abilities in those areas.

Macready also was, as was Dickens, a complex, sensitive, and paradoxical man. As outwardly certain of everything as the Inimitable himself, Macready was—according to those who knew him best—also privately in doubt much of the time. Proud of his profession in the same way that Dickens was of his, he also was insecure (just as Dickens sometimes was) that such a profession could allow him to be a true gentleman. But from the late 1830s on, the rising star Dickens and his friends Macready, Forster, Maclise, Ainsworth, Beard, and Mitton composed an inner circle of talent and ambition rarely equalled in our little island’s history.

Of all these men, William Charles Macready was—until Dickens’s ultimate ascendency—by far the most famous.

For many years (decades actually), the Inimitable Boz wrote admiring reviews from the sidelines, especially cheering on (along with his co-writer and editor John Forster) such theatrical innovations as Macready’s production of Lear—which restored Shakespeare’s true and tragic vision after more than a century and a half in which audiences had no choice but to suffer through Nahum Tate’s abysmal “happy ending” adaptation. Macready had also reintroduced the Fool to the cast of Lear, an act of inspired salvage to which Charles Dickens’s sensibilities had resonated as if he had been a bell struck by a hammer. I once looked up Dickens’s writing on this particular matter, and beyond Dickens’s referring to the renewed presence of the Fool as “singular and masterly relief” to the overwhelming presence of the Lear character, the ecstatic Boz had called Macready’s production “magnificent” and had elaborated—

The heart, soul, and brain of the ruined piece of nature, in all the stages of its ruining, were laid bare before us.… The tenderness, the rage, the madness, the remorse, and sorrow, all come of one another, and are linked together in one chain.

In 1849, the upstart American Shakespearean actor named Edwin Forrest—who had once been good friends with Macready and who had benefitted from his largesse—visited England and insulted Macready’s interpretation of Hamlet, going so far as to say that our great English Tragedian minced his way across the stage and delivered his lines like an effeminate fop. Forrest was not treated well by the entirety of English audiences during the remainder of his tour here. Englishmen laughed at his Macbeth delivering the Bard’s immortal lines in that atrocious American accent. Then, in May of that same year, Macready did his own tour of America—he had been there before and been welcomed warmly for the most part—and the gangs of Boston and New York, serious Shakespeare aficionados, theatre-goers, and vicious hooligans all, had pelted Macready, during his performances, with rotten eggs, chairs, dead cats, and even more disgusting items. Many American theatre-goers attempted to defend our Eminent Tragedian. More of the hooligan gang members organised to strike a blow against Macready and the English ascendancy and hegemony in all things Shakespearean. The result, on 10 May, 1849, had been one of the bloodiest riots in the history of New York City. Before it was over, fifteen thousand people had turned into either a pro- or anti-Macready mob near the theatre called Astor Place, the mayor and governor panicked and called out a militia which the Americans called the National Guard, the crowd was fired into, and somewhere between twenty and thirty citizens lay dead on the street.

Through this all, Dickens had sent encouraging and congratulatory telegrams to Macready, as if he were the manager with the towel and smelling salts in a pugilist’s corner.

Over the years, Dickens had quietly written and shyly submitted many short plays and theatre comedies to the great actor, but Macready had tactfully rejected all of them (although Dickens was involved in mounting such memorable performances for Macready as his 1838 presentation of Henry V). Somehow these rejections had not antagonised or alienated the Inimitable, who—in my experience—could tolerate no such rejection from anyone else, including the Queen.

So their friendship had endured and matured for three decades now. But as friends in common had fallen by the wayside—either falling out of Dickens’s favour or dying—I had sensed from the Inimitable’s comments in recent years that his prominent reaction to Macready was now one of sadness.

Life had not treated the Eminent Tragedian gently. The Astor Place riot had convinced the ageing actor to retire, but even as he hit the road for his farewell tour, his beloved oldest child, nineteen-year-old Nina, died. Macready, always a soul-searching man of faith, literally locked himself away to confront his newly powerful doubts about both the universe and himself. His wife, Catherine, was in confinement at the time with their tenth child. (The parallels between the Dickenses and the Macreadys were more than superficial—the couples were so close that when Charles Dickens took his own Catherine on his first American tour in the early 1840s, it was the Macreadys to whom he entrusted their own children at the time—but William Charles Macready never fell out of love with his Catherine.)

Macready’s last performance was at Drury Lane on 26 February, 1851. Macbeth—the role he had been most identified with and the play he had been booed and attacked during in New York two years before—was, of course, his choice for his farewell. There was the inevitable grand banquet as a footnote to this farewell, this one so large that it had to be held in the echoing old Hall of Commerce. Bulwer-Lytton lisped his way through a sincere speech. John Forster read an abysmally bad verse written for the occasion by Tennyson. Thackeray, whose only task was to toast the health of the ladies in attendance, almost passed out from nerves. Dickens, of course, who had organised the entire night and who was wearing a bright blue coat with astounding brass buttons and shiny black satin waistcoat, gave a moving and sad and humourous and heartfelt speech that was truly memorable.

Catherine Macready died in 1852. As had been the case with their daughter Nina, Macready’s wife succumbed after a long, terrible battle with tuberculosis. Dickens had told me about his last visit to her bedside and how he had written a friend shortly after that—“The tremendous sickle certainly does cut deep into the surrounding corn, when one’s own small blade has ripened.” The next year, both of Macready’s sons, Walter and Henry, also died, followed immediately after by their sister Lydia. None of his children had gotten out of their teens.

After eight years of mourning in seclusion in his gloomy Sherbourne retreat, in 1860, at the age of sixty-seven, Macready had remarried—the twenty-three-year-old Cecile Louise Frederica Spencer became the second Mrs Macready—and moved to a handsome new home in Cheltenham, only four or five hours from London. Soon after that they had a son.

Dickens was delighted. The Inimitable loathed, feared, and despised the idea of getting older (it was the reason that Mary Angela, his oldest grandchild, Charley and Bess’s daughter, this very evening was calling Dickens “Venerables,” as the writer had insisted—he would not allow the word “grandfather” to be used around him) and he did not wish to see or acknowledge signs of age or decay in those closest to him.

But the William Charles Macready at our table this Christmas Day night of 1865, at age seventy-two, showed every possible sign of age and decay.

The same features that so many had found interesting in an actor—the powerful chin, massive forehead, large nose, sunken eyes, pursed and budlike lips—now conveyed the sense of some once-proud bird of prey collapsed into itself.

As an actor, Macready had developed a technique, still taught at theatrical schools, called “the Macready pause.” I had heard it on stage myself. Essentially it was nothing more than a hesitation, an odd pause or ellipsis put into a line of dialogue where no punctuation existed, and it’s true that it could add impact or emphasis to a line, to the point of changing the meaning of the words on either side of the pause. Macready had incorporated this pause into his regular speech decades ago and his dictatorial ways as a director of plays had been parodied by many—“Stand—er—er—still, damn your eyes!” or “Keep your—er—er—eye on me, sir!”

But now the Macready pause had devoured most of the Macready meaning.

“I can’t—er—er—can’t tell you—er—er—Dickens, how… What is that preposterous and—er—er—horrible hubbub from the other… Children? Your children, Charley? What cat is that? Do—do—do—a—a—a—a—damn it! Cecile! What was I about to say before… Collins! No, you, the other one—with the spectacles! I read your—er—er—saw your—you—you—you—cannot possibly have meant that she… Do, fair Georgina, pray unburden us all of this—er—er—relieve us of this—a—a—banging of pewter pots from the kitchen, no? Yes! By God! Someone should tell the stage manager that these children should… Oh, A Woman Is White is what I meant to—er—er—capital turkey, my dear! Capital!”

THE TURKEY WAS good. Some people have written that no one in England had been more responsible in the past decades for turning English families gathering around their tables on Christmas away from the bony and greasy goose and towards the rich, plump turkey than had Charles Dickens. His ending to A Christmas Carol alone seems to have pushed thousands of our previously goosified countrymen over the poultry bodice brink onto the white breast of true turkey feasts.

At any rate, the turkey was good this day, as were all the steaming side dishes. Even the white wine was better than that which Dickens usually served.

This was a small Christmas gathering by Dickens’s standards, but the long table was still more crowded than any Caroline had ever hosted for a Christmas dinner. At the far end was Charles Dickens, of course, the carved carcass of the larger of the two depleted turkeys still in front of him like a trophy of war. To his immediate right was Macready, and across the table from the Eminent Tragedian was his young wife, Cecile. (I am sure that there is some ironclad social rule against seating spouses across from one another—almost as bad as next to each other, I would think—but Charles Dickens was never one to pay much attention to Society’s dictates. Mere Podsnappery, he would say.)

Next to Macready was his god-daughter and namesake, Kate Macready Dickens Collins, but she did not look pleased to be seated next to her god-father—or pleased to be at the table with us, for that matter. After darting venomous glances at her father and wincing at Macready’s endlessly elliptical and indecipherable pronouncements, she would look down the table towards her sister Mamie and roll her eyes. Mamie—Mary—who was seated on my left (since, for some unknown reason, Dickens had bestowed upon me the honour of sitting at the opposite end of the table from him), had put on even more weight in the few weeks since I had last seen her and was looking more and more like her matronly mother.

Across from Katey was my brother, Charles, who did indeed look ill this evening. As much as I hated to agree with Dickens on this particular matter, Charley’s pale countenance did look like a death’s head.

To Katey Dickens’s right sat the Young Orphan, our very own Staplehurst survivor, Edmond Dickenson, who spent the evening grinning and gazing and beaming at everyone like the fool he was. Across from Dickenson was another young bachelor, twenty-six-year-old Percy Fitzgerald, who managed to be just as jovial and enthusiastic as Dickenson, sans the idiocy.

Sitting between Dickenson and Mamie Dickens was Charley Dickens. The Inimitable’s oldest child seemed the happiest of any of us there that night, and the reason may have been sitting across the table from him. I confess that young Bessie Dickens, his wife, may have been the loveliest woman there that night—or at least a close second to Cecile Macready. Dickens had been furious at Charley for falling in love with Bessie Evans—her father, Frederick Evans, had been a long-time friend of the Inimitable’s, but Dickens had never forgiven Evans for representing Catherine during the ugly separation negotiations—nor for being her trustee afterwards—even though Dickens himself had asked Evans to take on those roles.

Luckily for Charley Dickens’s happiness and future, he had ignored his father’s blusterings and ultimatums and married Bessie. She was quiet and contained this night—she rarely spoke in the presence of her father-in-law—but the candlelight on her lovely neck was statement enough. On Bessie’s left sat Georgina Hogarth, who did her best to preside over the table and cluck about each dish and entrée in the author’s wife’s very palpable absence.

To Georgina’s left and to my immediate right sat young Henry Fielding Dickens. As far as I could recall, this was the first time that the sixteen-year-old had eaten at the grown-ups’ table on Christmas Day. The boy looked proud of that fact in his shiny new satin waistcoat with buttons far too visible. Less visible were the long side-whiskers the boy was attempting—none too successfully—to wish into existence along his downy cheeks. He kept touching, not consciously, I believe, his smooth cheeks and upper lip as if to see if the desired whiskers might have grown in during dinner.

To my immediate left, sitting between Mamie Dickens and me, was the true (for me) “Surprise Guest” of the evening—a very tall, very thickset, very ruddy-complexioned, very bald man with the kind of luxurious moustache and side-whiskers that poor young Henry D. could only dream of. The man’s name was George Dolby and I had actually met him at the Household Words office once or twice, although my recollection was that his background was in theatrical or business management, not publishing. During the evening’s introductions before dinner, it became obvious that Dickens had known Dolby slightly, had some business to discuss with him, and—since Dolby was at loose ends this Christmas—had invited him to Gad’s Hill on the spur of the moment.

Dolby was an energetic and skilful talker, despite a stammer that disappeared only when he was imitating other people (which he did frequently). His stories centred on theatrical gossip and, except for the slight stammer when he was speaking as himself, were told with almost perfect theatrical emphasis and timing—but he also knew how to listen. And to laugh. Several times this evening he had given forth with a noisy, jolly, reverberating, unselfconscious laugh that may have made Katey Dickens and Mamie roll their eyes but which, I noticed, always brought a smile to the Inimitable’s face. Dolby seemed especially amused by Macready’s nearly impenetrable tales and waited patiently through the “— er—er—er” for the “by God!” final lines before erupting in mirth.

The communal part of the evening was almost over, the children and grandchildren had come in to wish “Venerables” and their parents good night, the conversation had reached a pause where even Dolby seemed thoughtful and a little sad, Katey and Mamie had quit rolling their eyes and looking displeased with us all, but obviously the women were ready to retire to wherever they retire when the men move to the library or billiards room for brandy and a cigar, when young Dickenson said, “Excuse me, Mr Dickens, but if I may be so forward, what are you writing now, sir? Have you embarked upon another novel?”

Instead of frowning at the upstart, Dickens smiled as if he had been looking forward to this question all evening.

“Actually,” he said, “I have put aside my writing for the time being. I don’t know when I shall pick it up again.”

“Father!” cried Mamie in mock alarm. “You not writing? You not in your study writing every day? Shall the next announcement be that the sun no longer shall rise in the east?”

Dickens smiled again. “In truth, I have decided to embark upon a more rewarding endeavour over the coming months—perhaps years. A creative undertaking that shall be more rewarding to me in both artistic and financial terms.”

Katey showed her own version of the Inimitable’s smile. “You’re becoming an artist, Father? An illustrator, perhaps?” She looked at her quiet husband, my brother, across the ruins of the turkey. “You had best watch out, Charles. You have yet another competitor.”

“Nothing like that,” said Dickens. Kate often irritated her father, but his response to her taunt tonight was filled with equanimity. “I have decided to create a new art form altogether. Something the world has never experienced—has never imagined! — before this.”

“Another—eh—eh—a new—eh—eh, that is to say—by God, Dickens!” offered Macready.

The author leaned to his left and said softly to Cecile, “My dear, of all men at this table, your husband knows best the beauty and power of the new endeavour I shall be embarking upon in a very few weeks.”

“You’re going to become a full-time actor, Father?” chirped up Henry, who had seen his father on the amateur stage his entire life and who had been tossed around by him on that same stage during the early performances of my The Frozen Deep.

“Not at all, my boy,” said Dickens, still smiling. “I daresay that our friend Wilkie at the other end of the table here might have a glimmer of what I have in mind.”

“I have no clue whatsoever,” I said truthfully.

Dickens set both hands on the table and spread his arms in a way that reminded me of da Vinci’s The Last Supper. That thought had hardly entered my mind before another followed fast on its heels—If this is the Last Supper, which amongst us here is Judas?

“I have authorised Wills to negotiate on my behalf with Messrs Chappell of New Bond Street for an engagement consisting of at least thirty readings,” continued Dickens. “While the negotiations have only yet begun, I am quite confident that this shall happen and that it shall herald a new era of my career and of public entertainment and education.”

“But Father,” cried Mamie, obviously shocked, “you know what Dr Beard has said to you during your recent illnesses—degenerations of some functions of the heart, the need for more rest—your previous reading tours have so exhausted you…”

“Oh, nonsense,” cried Dickens but with even a broader smile. “We are considering appointing Mr Dolby there…”

The huge man blushed and bowed his head.

“… as my business manager and companion on these trips. Chappell would organise all business and administrative arrangements, as well as pay for my own and Mr Dolby’s and probably Mr Wills’s personal and travelling expenses. All I shall have to do is to take my book and read at the appointed place and hour.”

“But reading from your books is hardly… what did you call it, Father?… a new art form,” said Katey. “You’ve done it many times.”

“So I have, my dear,” agreed Dickens. “But never the way I shall on this and future tours. As you know, I never simply… read from my books, although sometimes I feign to. All of my performances are done from memory and I reserve the right to edit, conflate, alter, and rewrite scenes to a great extent… even improvise completely upon occasion, just as the Eminent Tragedian here has done count-less times to the betterment even of Shakespeare.” He patted Macready’s arm.

“Ah—yes—I, of course—but, Bulwer-Lytton, yes, I would gag away at will,” said Macready, reddening under his pale skin and wrinkles, “but the—er—er—the Bard. By God… never!”

Dickens laughed. “Well, my prose is not the Bard’s. It is not inscribed in stone anywhere like Moses’ Commandments.”

“But still,” said my brother, “a new art form? Can any reading be such?”

“Mine shall be from this tour forward,” snapped Dickens. His smile had faded.

“Your readings are already unique in their tone and brilliance, sir,” said young Dickenson.

“Thank you, Edmond. Your generous spirit is appreciated. But in my future readings, beginning on this tour and continuing… as I said… perhaps for many years, I plan to bring to the proceedings a totally unprecedented level of theatricality combined with a true understanding of the manipulation of animal magnetism.”

“Magnetism, by Jove!” exploded Dolby. “Sir, do you propose to mesmerise the audience as well as to entertain them?”

Dickens smiled again and stroked his whiskers. “Mr Dolby, I shall assume that you read. Novels, I mean.”

“Indeed I do, sir!” laughed Dolby. “I have enjoyed all of yours and also Mr Collins’s here… Mr Collins at the end of the table to my right, I mean to say.” He turned to me. “That book Armadale that Mr Dickens’s press published for you, Mr Collins. Wonderful stuff, sir. That heroine—Lydia Gwilt, I believe her name was. What a woman! Wonderful!”

“We did not have the pleasure of publishing that book of Mr Collins’s in serial form,” Dickens said formally. “Nor shall we have the honour of publishing it in book form. It shall appear in May of the coming year from another publisher. Although I am delighted to be able to say that we are in the process of wooing our dear Wilkie back to publish his next novel in All the Year Round.”

“Ah, wonderful, wonderful!” said Dolby, all hearty good cheer. He had no idea of the faux pas he had committed with his praise.

Indeed, my most recent novel, Armadale, riding on the success of The Woman in White that had appeared in Dickens’s Household Words, had been serialised—with a much higher payment for me—in The Cornhill Magazine. And it was to come out in full book form from Smith, Elder & Company, who also published The Cornhill.

But this was not the full faux pas, nor the reason that Dickens’s face—beaming and relaxed and eager just a moment earlier—now looked pinched and old. The reason for his change of mood was, I am certain, precisely the heroine Lydia Gwilt whom Dolby had been so inopportune to mention.

At one point I had had Lydia, who was no stranger to pain, hers and that of those mortals close to her, say in the novel—

Who was the man who invented laudanum? I thank him from the bottom of my heart, whoever he was. If all the miserable wretches in pain of body and mind, whose comforter he has been, could meet together to sing his praises, what a chorus it would be! I have had six delicious hours of oblivion; I have woke up with my mind composed.

I had heard through numerous intermediaries, my brother and Katey included, that Dickens had not been pleased with those words… nor with the general tolerant tone towards laudanum and other opiates shown throughout the novel.

“But you were going to tell us how our act of reading novels relates to the new art form of your proposed readings,” I said to Dickens down the length of the cluttered table.

“Yes,” said the Inimitable, smiling towards Cecile Macready as if in apology for the interruption of his narration. “You know the incomparable and—I would dare say—unique feeling one has when reading. The focus of attention to the exclusion of all sensory input, other than the eyes taking in the words, one has when entering into a good book?”

“Oh, rather!” cried Dickenson. “The world just fades away. All other thoughts just fade away! All that remains are the sights and sounds and characters and world created for us by the author! One might as well be anaesthetised to the mundane world around us. All readers have had that experience.”

“Precisely,” said Dickens, his smile back in place and his eyes bright. “This happens to be precisely the receptive state a person must be in for a mesmeric therapist to be able to do his work. It is, through the judicious use of language, phrases, descriptions, and dialogue, a form of lowering the reader into the same sort of receptive state of mind that a patient under Magnetic Influence must feel.”

“By God!” cried Macready. “The—er—the audience at the theatre enters into just such an—a—a—sort of receptive trance. I have always said that the—er—er—audiences are the third point of the collaborative—ah—collaborative triangle with the playwright and the actor.”

“Exactly,” said Dickens. “And this is the crux of my new performing art as opposed to mere readings. Building upon the receptive state of the audiences—so much more intense even than that of readers alone at home or in a railway carriage or even sitting in their gardens—I intend to use the incipient magnetism, combined with my voice and words, to put them into an even deeper receptive and appreciative and collaborative state than either literature or theatre alone could produce.”

“Through mere words?” asked my brother.

“And the judicious and carefully honed gesture,” said Dickens. “In the proper setting.”

“That setting being the st… st… stage,” said Dolby. “Yes, by Jove. That should be extraordinary!”

“Not merely the stage,” said Dickens, nodding slightly as if he were already prepared to take his bows. “But the darkened room. The precise and scientific use of gas lighting to illuminate my face and hands above all else, the careful seating of the audience so that no one is out of direct line of sight with my eyes…”

“We shall be bringing our own gas and lighting experts on the tour,” interrupted Dolby. “Wills has made it a central item to our negotiations.”

Macready pounded the table and laughed. “Little do audiences know that the—er—er—the—er—er—gaslights are a form of—er—intoxication. Intoxication, by God! They deprive the room, the theatre, the space, of oxygen!”

“Indeed they do,” said Dickens with a mischievous smile. “And we shall be using that to our advantage in putting these—I should modestly hope—very large audiences at the readings into the properly receptive state.”

“Into the properly receptive state for what?” I asked flatly.

Dickens pinned me upon the point of his mesmeric stare. His voice was soft. “That is what these readings—this new art form—shall determine.”

AFTER DINNER, WE men decamped with brandy and cigars to the billiards room behind Dickens’s study. This was a pleasant space, well-lighted, with one wall half-tiled to prevent any damage from our flailing cue-sticks, and I had spent many a pleasant hour in it. Dickens took his game of billiards seriously—he liked to say that billiards “brings out the mettle in a man” and then, often, glancing at my brother, would add, “or the lack of.” In either case I shall always remember the Inimitable leaning long over the green-baized table, his coat off and wearing those large double-glasses which gave him an odd, Pickwickian, earlier-era old-mannish look.

One of the reasons that Dickens enjoyed Percy Fitzgerald was that the younger man was serious about the game of billiards and quite good at it—at least good enough to give Dickens and me a game. I could more than hold my own at the game, as befits any serious bachelor, but I was surprised this night to find that our Resident Orphan, young Edmond Dickenson, played rather like someone who earned his living on the winnings. (And perhaps he did, for all I knew and for all of Dickens’s talk of the boy’s being independently wealthy.)

Macready played for a loud while before his wife trundled him off to bed after a glass of warm milk. But it was George Dolby—Dickens’s future business manager and reading-tour companion—who brought that night’s games to life: roaring with laughter, telling truly amusing stories with no hint of his earlier stammer, his great bald scalp and forehead gleaming with perspiration in the light from the overhead lamps, Dolby repeatedly dispatched Percy, then me, then Dickens, and finally the stubborn and oddly skilled young Dickenson, whose play showed both an appreciation of ballistics and a deviousness which one would never credit by looking at him.

Dickens, as was his usual habit, retired at midnight but urged us all to continue playing. Usually I did when there were interesting male guests still awake, often playing and enjoying our host’s brandy until dawn, but when Dolby set down his cue and retired soon after Dickens said his goodnights—perhaps not yet certain of his prerogatives as a guest at Gad’s Hill—the game broke up, Percy set off for the Falstaff Inn with a servant holding a lantern for him, and Dickenson and I went upstairs to our respective rooms.

Despite my earlier ministrations of my medicine, the rheumatical gout was racking me as I got ready for bed. Measuring the amount of laudanum remaining in my travel jug, I took two more glasses of the restorative and soporific.

I say “restorative and soporific” because laudanum, as you almost certainly know in your more medicinally enlightened future, Dear Reader, serves to quiet the nerves and allow sleep or to awaken the sensibilities and allow long bouts of hard work and provide a higher than usual level of attention. I did not know—perhaps no one knew—how the same drug served both opposing needs, but I knew beyond doubt that it did. This night I needed its ministrations as soporific.

My busy mind wanted to dwell on Dickens’s bizarre plans for a reading tour to serve as “an entirely new art form” and to connect the strands of nonsense he’d spoken about mesmerism and magnetism to the visits he purported to have been making to see the cellar-dweller named Drood, but the blessed laudanum relieved me of those turgid questionings.

My last thoughts before going to sleep that night were about a piece of information that Inspector Field had given me some weeks earlier.

It seemed that Ellen Ternan had been followed to this area and even to Gad’s Hill several times since autumn. Of course, reported Field, the former actress had relatives in Rochester which brought her to the area separate from any collusion with Dickens, but it was certain that she also came to visit at Gad’s Hill repeatedly and appeared to have spent at least five nights here since September.

How, I wondered, did Mamie and Katey react to this usurpation of their mother’s place? I could easily imagine Mamie following Georgina Hogarth’s lead in welcoming the intruder into their home, knowing—as they must have—that Charles Dickens was a man racked by loneliness and a need for the illusions of youth that only romance can bring to the ageing male mind and soul. But Katey? Kate Macready Dickens, as lonely as she appeared to be in her own right—her father had mentioned to me in October that my brother’s wife “was so discontented… so intensely eager to find other lovers, that she is burning away both character and health slowly but steadily, Wilkie”—still seemed to be loyal to the memory of her exiled mother. I could not imagine Katey, who was the same age as Ellen Ternan, opening her heart to her father’s probable mistress.

It is a hard thing to tell the brother of your daughter’s husband that she is so discontented with her husband that she is eagerly searching for other lovers, and I suspect that Dickens said those words so that I might repeat them to Charley. But, of course, I did not.

Yet Katey must not have vocally opposed Ellen’s visits or the former actress would not have kept returning to Gad’s Hill.

With these thoughts still in mind, I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

SOMEONE WAS SHAKING me violently and whispering my name.

I rolled over groggily. The room was dark except for a strange light that seemed to be coming from the floor at the side of the bed. A fire? There was a dark form looming over me, shaking me.

“Get up, Wilkie.”

I focused on that shape.

Charles Dickens in a nightshirt with a woollen coat thrown over his shoulders, carrying a two-barrelled shotgun in one hand and a crumpled shroud in the other.

The time has come, I thought.

“Get up, Wilkie,” he whispered again. “Quickly. Just put your shoes on. I brought your coat.”

The shape dropped the shroud on my legs and I realised it was my overcoat. “What…”

“Sshhh. You’ll wake the others. Get up. Quickly. Before he gets away. We have no time to waste. Just the coat and shoes. That’s a good man.…”

We went down the back stairs, Dickens with his gun and lantern ahead of me, both of us trying to make as little noise as possible.

Sultan, the ferocious Irish bloodhound, was tied up in the back hall, muzzled and leashed but straining to get out the door.

“What is this?” I whispered to Dickens. “What’s wrong?”

The Inimitable’s wisps of hair atop his head and long whiskers were curled this way and that in the tangle of sleep, some standing straight up, all of which would have been very amusing under different circumstances. But not tonight. There was something like real fear in Charles Dickens’s eyes—something I don’t believe I had ever seen before.

“It was Drood,” he whispered. “I could not sleep. I kept thinking of something I should have noted for Wills. So I rose from my bed, intending to go down to the study to make a note, and I saw it, Wilkie.…”

“Saw what, man?”

“Drood’s face. That pale, tortured face. Floating at the window. Pressed against the cold panes.”

“Of your study?” I said.

“No,” said Dickens, his eyes as wild as a runaway horse’s, “at the windows of my bedroom.”

“But, Dickens,” I whispered back, “that is impossible. Your bedroom is up on the first floor, with the guest rooms. Drood would have to be standing on an eight- or ten-foot ladder to peer into those windows.”

“I saw him, Wilkie,” rasped Dickens.

He flung the door open and with the lantern and leash in one hand and his two-barrelled gun in the other, was pulled out into the night after his straining dog.

IT WAS VERY COLD and very dark in Dickens’s back yard. There was no moon, no stars, no light from the house. The cold wind cut through my loosely donned coat in a second and I shivered under my fluttering nightshirt. My legs and ankles were bare between the coat and my shoes, and the night air was so frigid against my flesh there that I felt as if the frozen grass were slashing at me with tiny razors.

Sultan snarled and surged. Dickens let the dog lead us as if we were outraged villagers on the trail of a murderer in a second-rate sensationalist novel.

And perhaps we were.

We hurried around the side of the house in the dark and stood in the garden beneath Dickens’s bedroom windows. Sultan pulled and snarled and tugged to continue, but Dickens paused long enough to unshutter the small lantern and focus its beam on the frozen soil in the flower bed. There were no incriminating footprints and no signs that a ladder had been set there. We both glanced up towards his dark bedroom window. A few stars appeared between rapidly moving clouds and were then erased.

If Drood had stared into that window without a tall ladder beneath him, he must have been floating ten feet off the ground.

Sultan growled and tugged and we followed.

We returned to the back of the house and paused in the small field where Dickens had burned all of his letters in 1860. The cold wind moved bare branches with skeletal clicks. I whispered to Dickens, “How could it be Drood? How could he be here? Why would he be here?”

“He followed me from London one morning,” Dickens whispered back, slowly turning in a full circle, the long double-barrelled weapon in the crook of his right arm. “I am sure of it. I have seen a shadowy figure on the other side of the road, by the chalet, many nights now. The dogs bark. When I emerge, the form is gone.”

More likely to be the agents of Inspector Field, I thought and was tempted to say aloud. Instead, I said again, “Why would Drood come out here to stare in your window on Christmas Day night?”

“Shhhh,” said Dickens, waving me into silence and clamping his free hand around Sultan’s jaws to silence the bloodhound’s growling.

For a second I thought that a sleigh was approaching, even though there was not a hint of snow on the ground, but then I realised that the faint jingling of bells was coming from the dark stables. The pony Newman Noggs’s Norwegian bells were hanging on the wall there.

“Come,” said Dickens and hurried towards the barn.

The stable doors were open—a blacker rectangle in the near-black night.

“Did you…” I started to whisper.

“They are always closed,” Dickens hissed back. “I checked them at sunset tonight.” He handed me the suddenly silent dog’s leash, set the lantern down, and lifted the shotgun.

From inside the stables there came a final faint jingle of bells then sudden silence, as if a hand were muffling the harness.

“Unclip Sultan’s muzzle and then release his leash,” Dickens whispered very softly, still aiming his weapon at the open doors.

“He’ll tear whoever it is apart,” I whispered back.

“Unclip the muzzle and release him,” hissed Dickens.

I went to one knee, heart pounding, shivering in the cold, and fumbled with the clasps on the muzzle. I was half-certain that the straining, wild-eyed Irish bloodhound—he weighed almost as much as I—would rip me limb from limb the second I removed the muzzle.

He did not. Sultan ceased growling and straining as I dropped the muzzle to the ground and fumbled off the clip of the leash.

“Go!” Dickens said aloud to the dog.

Sultan went, exploding into a run as if he were made of metal springs rather than mere muscles. But he did not run into the darkness of the barn. Instead, the bloodhound veered to the left, leaped a hedge in a single bound, and disappeared out into the fields, heading towards the forest and distant sea.

“D— n that dog,” said Dickens. I realised how few times I had heard the Inimitable curse. “Come, Wilkie,” he said peremptorily, as if I were a second hound he had kept in reserve.

Handing me the shielded lantern, Dickens ran towards the open door of the stable. I hurried to keep up, almost slipping on the frozen grass even as Dickens reached the doorway and entered without waiting for light.

I came into the gloom feeling rather than seeing Dickens’s presence a few feet to my left, knowing—perhaps clairvoyantly—that he stood there with his shotgun raised and aimed towards the long avenue within the barn, even as I sensed rather than saw the stir and breath of the horses and ponies standing here.

“Light!” cried Dickens.

I fumbled open the shutter on the lantern.

A vague blur in the stalls where the horses—all awake but silent—shifted uneasily, a glimpse of their breath like fog in the cold air, and then a blur of white motion at the far end of the dark space, beyond where the bells and harness and tack hung.

Dickens lifted the weapon higher and I could see his eyes white in the lantern light as he prepared to pull both triggers.

“Wait!” I shouted, the volume of my voice causing the horses to shy. “For God’s sake, don’t shoot!”

I ran towards the white blur. I believe Dickens would have fired despite my cries if I had not thrown my body between him and his target.

The white blur at the closed end of the darkness revealed itself in the circle of light from my lantern. Edmond Dickenson stood there, his eyes wide but staring blankly, not seeing us, not hearing us. He was in his nightshirt. His feet were bare and pale against the cold black cobbles of the livery stable floor. His hands hung like small white stars at the end of his limp arms.

Dickens came up and began laughing. The loud laughter further alarmed the horses but did not seem to register with Dickenson. “A somnambulist!” cried Dickens. “By God, a somnambulist. The orphan walks abroad at night.”

I held the lantern closer to the young man’s pale face. The flame reflected brightly in the boy’s eyes, but he did not blink or acknowledge my presence. We were indeed in the presence of a sleepwalker.

“You must have seen him in the garden below your window,” I said softly.

Dickens scowled at me so fiercely that I expected him to curse me just as he had cursed his failure of a dog, but his voice was soft when he spoke. “Not at all, my dear Wilkie. I did not see anyone in the garden. I arose from my bed, looked at my windows, and clearly saw Drood’s face there—his foreshortened nose against the glass, his lidless eyes staring at me. Pressed against the window, Wilkie. My high, first-storey window. Not in the garden below.”

I nodded as if in agreement but knew that the Inimitable had to have been dreaming. Perhaps he had taken some laudanum to help him sleep—I knew that Frank Beard the physician had urged the drug on Dickens when the writer had been unable to sleep in the autumn. I could still feel the pulse and ebb of the medicine in my own system, despite the cold that caused my arm holding the lantern to shake as if I were palsied.

“What do we do with him?” I asked, nodding towards Dickenson this time.

“What one must do with all serious somnambulists, my dear Wilkie. We shall lead him tenderly back to the house and you shall take him into his room to his bed.”

I looked in the direction of the slightly lighter rectangle that was the open stable door. “And Drood?” I asked.

Dickens shook his head. “Sultan often returns the day after his nighttime hunts with blood on his muzzle. We can only hope that he does so again in the morning.”

I was tempted to ask Dickens what he meant by this. (Inspector Field would value the information.) Had he and his Egyptian mesmerism mentor had a falling-out? Did he wish the phantom dead? Killed by Dickens’s own killer dog? Was he no longer a student of the underground mastermind who—according to the former head of the Scotland Yard Detective Bureau—had sent out his agents to kill more than three hundred men and women?

I said nothing. It was too cold to start a conversation. My gout was returning, sending tendrils of agony through my eyes and into my brain the way it was wont to do before a serious episode.

We took Mr Dickenson by his limp arms and led him slowly out of the stable and across the wide yard to the back door. I realised that I would have to towel off the sleepwalking idiot’s feet before I tucked him beneath his bedcovers.

As we reached the door, I looked back over the dark yard, half-expecting Sultan to come running into the circle of lantern light with a pale arm or albino ankle or dismembered head in his mouth. But nothing moved other than the cold wind.

“And so ends another Christmas Day at Gad’s Hill Place,” I said softly. My glasses fogged slightly as we stepped into the relative warmth of the house. I let go of Mr Dickenson long enough to remove and polish them on my coat sleeve.

When I had tucked the ends of the metal frames behind my ears and could see again, I noted that Dickens’s mouth had turned up in that boyish smile with which he had favoured me so many times in the past fourteen years of our acquaintance.

“God bless us, every one,” he said in a childish falsetto and we both laughed loud enough to wake the entire household.