Drood

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Ineed to murder someone,” said Dickens.

I nodded but said nothing. The train to Rochester had passed Gad’s Hill already.

“I am quite sure I need to murder someone,” said Dickens. “It is the one thing missing from the readings. Every other emotion is included in the greater list of excerpts I have prepared for this upcoming tour. All but… murder.” He leaned on his stick and looked at me. “What do you think, my dear Wilkie? A modified and intensified version of Bill Sikes murdering Nancy perhaps?”

“Why not?” I said.

“Why not indeed,” chuckled Dickens, patting his jacket. “It is only a human life.”

He was garrulous in part because he had thrice imbibed of brandy during the ride. Each time the carriage shook or jolted, Dickens would either grasp the seat ahead of him with a death-grip or feel in the pocket of his coat for the small flask.

When I had confronted Dickens about the scene I had come upon of him mesmerising Caroline, he’d laughed and explained that my dearest had been upset and telling him of my pain from rheumatical gout, my increasing difficulty in getting to sleep, and what she saw as my growing dependency upon laudanum. Dickens had assured her that magnetic influence would whisk me off to slumber without any of the harmful side-effects of laudanum, and he had been in the process of teaching her the art when I’d entered.

“She was an adept pupil,” he said now as the train rumbled and jolted on towards Rochester, passing the marshes around which Dickens and I had walked more than a few times. “You must allow her to attempt the mesmeric influence tonight. I guarantee it will allow you to sleep without opiate dreams or morning fatigue.”

I made a noncommittal noise. In truth, I was close to falling asleep to the rocking of the railway carriage and the metronomic sound of its wheels on rails. It had been a long night in King Lazaree’s den and I could not say that I had actually slept. Luckily, although the November day was unusually pleasant, there had been a brisk wind and most of the telltale scent of the pipe had been removed from my clothing during our fast walk to the station.

“You say we’re meeting someone in Rochester?” I asked.

“Precisely,” said Dickens, clasping both hands on the brass head of his cane. “Two ladies. An old friend for me and a lady companion for you, my dear Wilkie. We are having a luncheon there in a splendid place. I understand that the service is exemplary.”

The splendid place with exemplary service, as it turned out, was the graveyard behind the huge old heap of grey stone that was Rochester Cathedral. The two ladies were Dickens’s not-very-secret love, Ellen Ternan, and Miss Ternan’s mother. Logic dictated that Mrs Ternan was to be my “lady companion” for this outing.

As I stood there amidst the headstones while nodding, bowing, and making small talk with the two women in the weak November afternoon sunlight, I seriously considered the possibility that Dickens had lost his mind.

But no, the answer to Charles Dickens’s behaviour was never that simple. I realised as the four of us strolled into the graveyard—Mrs Ternan and Ellen had explained that they were visiting Ellen’s uncle in Rochester and could only stay a short while—that this meeting made sense from Dickens’s tortured, twisted, self-exculpating way of looking at the world. His liaison with Ellen Ternan was something he was hiding from almost everyone in the world—my brother, Charles, had told me that Dickens had brought his daughters and Georgina somewhat further into the conspiracy after Mamie had stumbled across her father walking with Miss Ternan in London one Sunday, and Inspector Field had informed me that Ellen had visited Gad’s Hill Place on several occasions—but Dickens obviously felt that I was harmless to his intrigues. Whom would I tell? Not only did Dickens know from experience that I would keep the confidence, but he also knew that because of my own domestic arrangement (which had become even more complicated in the past week as Martha R— had returned to London for an extended visit), I was such a social outcast that I could never publicly look down on Dickens’s own arrangements, in print or through gossip.

Perhaps Mrs Ternan knew of my situation with Caroline G—, for the old lady seemed very cool during our picnic. The former actress (I understood that both she and Ellen were now giving elocution lessons from their new home in Slough that Dickens paid for) obviously had accumulated more pretensions of gentility since I had gotten to know the two women during and after the performances of The Frozen Deep. Mrs Ternan carried her acquired gentility with her like an ageing sloop with a hull heavy with barnacles.

The four of us walked slowly through the graveyard until Dickens had found a flat gravestone to his liking. This long marble block was surrounded on either side by lower flat stones. Dickens disappeared behind a nearby stone wall—one that was about five feet high and beyond which stood the rented carriage (with a liveried servant on the box)— we could see only the Inimitable’s head as he conferred with the driver and as both then repaired to the boot of the carriage. Then Dickens returned with four cushions, set them on the flat gravestones on either side of the longest one, and bade us to sit.

We did so. Ellen and Mrs Ternan were obviously disconcerted by this unusual—not to say ghoulish—introduction of cushioned comfort to such surroundings. A tall tree to the west of us drew the ink-scrabble shadows of its bare branches across us and our chosen gravestones. None of us could manage any small talk as Dickens hurried to the gate and trotted around behind the wall to confer with his servant again.

In a flash, Dickens was back, carrying one long chequered cloth— which he proceeded to drape across the longest gravestone, transforming it into a caricature of a domestic dinner table—and with another white napkin draped over his free arm in the manner of self-important waiters since Adam’s day. A few seconds later he was out of sight and—with little help from his man—had laid a row of plates atop the wall. I must say that it all felt very familiar—rather as if we were at a Parisian sidewalk dining establishment. Then Dickens bustled back into sight, napkin still in place, the very image of a first-class headwaiter, and one by one he served each of us, beginning, of course, with the ladies.

Out of a large hamper set atop the wall, Dickens magically produced fried sole and whiting with shrimp sauce, crackers and pâté, a brace of well-grilled birds which I first thought were squab but which I soon realised were delightful little pheasants (to which Waiter Dickens applied the sauce with a flourish), then ladles full of roast haunch of mutton with stewed onions and browned potatoes, all followed by pound puddings. Along with the food came a chilled white wine—which Dickens, now turned sommelier, uncorked and poured with much ado while awaiting our judgement with batting eyes and pursed lips—and then a large bottle of champagne still in its bucket of ice.

Dickens was having such fun playing waiter and wine steward that he had little time to eat. By the time he had produced the pound puddings—offering a rich sauce, which the ladies declined but which I accepted at once—his face was flushed and he was perspiring despite the November afternoon’s slow cooling into evening.

At rare times in one’s life, Dear Reader, even the most gentle person is given a tool—a weapon, actually—without wishing it, sometimes having it thrust into his hand, by which he can bring down an entire edifice with a single sentence. Such was my situation during our strange repast in the Rochester graveyard, for I had recognised much of the luncheon’s menu from a book popular some fifteen years earlier. The book was titled What Shall We Have for Dinner? and the recipes therein had been accumulated, according to the publishers, by a certain pseudonymous Lady Maria Clutterbuck.

Oh, how the Ternan ladies, miss and missus, now gay from the wine and champagne, would have sobered instantly to learn that their delightful (if ghoulish) graveyard luncheon menu had been planned by none other than Catherine Dickens, the rejected and exiled wife. Although Catherine had been completely abandoned (my brother, Charley, told me that she had written Dickens an imploring letter about their son only a month earlier, requesting a conversation in person about Plorn’s problems, to which Dickens refused even to pen a reply, instructing Georgina to send a cold, curt note in his stead), but quite obviously her incarnation as Lady Clutterbuck (Catherine had not yet become so heavy when she’d collected and published the menus in 1851) was still very welcome at Gad’s Hill. Or at least her recipes were.

During the meal and the inconsequential conversation, I studied Ellen Ternan even as she ignored me. It had been eight years since I had spent any time in her presence. The years had not enhanced her beauty. She had been youthfully attractive as an eighteen-year-old ingenue but now qualified only as “handsome.” She was the kind of woman with sad, soulful eyes (which did little for me, since such sad eyes usually hinted at a poetic character given to melancholy and a rigidly defended virginity), descending brows, a long nose, and a wide, thin-lipped mouth. (I prefer just the opposite in my young women—tiny noses and full lips, the latter preferably curved upward in an inviting smile.) Ellen had a strong chin, but where that edifice had suggested a certain perky strength in her youth, it now implied only the prideful stubbornness of a woman beyond her mid-twenties who had not yet married. Her hair was attractive, not terribly long and receding in artfully sculpted waves from a high, clear forehead, but the hairdo exposed ears that were much too large for my taste. Her earrings, which hung down like three bullseye lanterns, hinted of the underlying vulgarity of her former profession. Her carefully elocuted but somehow terminally empty sentences suggested stilted conversation arising from a simple lack of education. Her lovely vowels and precise, theatrically honed cadences could not conceal an underlying ignorance that should have instantly disqualified this ageing ingenue from being the consort of England’s most honoured writer. Nor did I perceive from her the slightest hint of a hidden passionate nature that could have made up for her obvious shortcomings… and my Wilkie-antennae were highly sensitive to any such subtle sub-rosa erotic transmissions from even the most proper and upstanding ladies.

Ellen Ternan was simply a bore. She was as dull as the proverbial ditch water and soon would be a matronly bore to boot.

We finished dining as the shadows of the afternoon were falling across us and as the chill from our gravestone chairs had begun to creep up through the cushions into our posterior regions. Tired of playing waiter, Dickens wolfed the last of his pudding, gulped the last of his champagne, and summoned his servant to tidy up. Plates, glasses, utensils, serving dishes, and finally the table cloth, napkins, and cushions all disappeared into hampers and then into the back of the carriage in a blur of liveried efficiency. Only crumbs remained as evidence of our graveyard feast.

We walked the Ternans to the carriage.

“Thank you for a lovely—if unusual—afternoon,” said Ellen Ternan, taking Dickens’s cold hand in her gloved one. “It was a great pleasure seeing you again, Mr Collins,” she said to me, her cool tone and curt nod belying the warm words. Mrs Ternan clucked similar sentiments while exerting even less effort to make them sound convincing. Then the servant was up on the box again, the whip was out, and the carriage clattered away into Rochester, presumably towards Ellen Ternan’s waiting uncle.

I could tell by the concupiscent gleam in Charles Dickens’s eyes that he knew he would be seeing Ellen that very evening, most probably in the privacy of his or her secret house in Slough.

“Well, my dear Wilkie,” he said in a tone of pure satisfaction, tugging his gloves back on, “what did you think of our luncheon?”

“I thought it delightful, in a terrifically morbid way,” I said.

“Mere prelude, my friend,” chuckled Dickens. “Mere prelude. Fortifying ourselves for the serious purpose of our day… or evening. Ah, here’s our man!”

THE MAN APPROACHING US there in the gathering gloom with his shapeless hat in hand was ragged, short, dirty, and drunk. He was clothed head to foot in layers of grimy grey flannel that seemed to have been liberally dusted with flakes of stone and a frosting of lime. At his feet he had dropped a heavy bundle tied in a grimy canvas cloth. I could smell the rum fumes flowing from him—from his pores, from his clothes, most probably from his very bones. At the same time I was sniffing him, he seemed to be sniffing me; perhaps he could smell the opium on me through his own reek. We stood and stared and sniffed each other like two dogs in an alley.

“Wilkie,” said Dickens, “I would like to introduce Mr Dradles, who goes by just Dradles, although I have heard folks in Rochester say that his first name is Granite, which I have to assume is a nickname. Dradles is a stonemason—chiefly in a gravestone, tomb, and monument way—but he is also hired by the Cathedral for rough repairs and thus is the holder of all the keys for the Cathedral tower, crypt, side doors, and other such obvious and forgotten entrances. Mr Dradles, it is my honour to introduce you in turn to Mr Wilkie Collins.”

The stooped, bewhiskered figure in the rough flannel and chipped horn buttons grunted something that might have been a greeting. I bowed and offered a more polite salutation in return.

“Dradles,” I then said brightly. “What a marvellous name! Is it real or a by-product of your profession in some way?”

“Dradles is Dradles’s name,” growled the little man. “And Dradles wonders—is Collins your real name or made up some way? And Dradles don’t remember Wilkie as being no Christian name.”

I blinked and straightened, gripping my walking stick more tightly in pure manly reflex to this hint of an insult. “I am named after Sir David Wilkie, the famous Scottish painter,” I said stiffly.

“If you say so, gov’ner,” grunted Dradles. “Although I never heard of a Scotsman who could paint a stables right, much less a church or house.”

“Wilkie’s given first name is actually William,” said Dickens. He was smiling as if amused.

“Billy Collins,” grunted Dradles. “Dradles knew a Billy Collins when Dradles was a lad. A troublesome Irish boy with no more brains nor common sense than a sheep.”

I gripped my stick harder and looked at Dickens, sending the clear message—Must I stay here and suffer this from the local village drunkard?

Before Dickens—who was still smiling—could answer, we were both distracted by a missile that flew between us, barely missing Dickens’s shoulder and my ear, and which then bounced off the russet-coloured cap that Dradles was holding in his filthy right hand. A second small stone zipped by my left shoulder and hit the stonemason squarely in the chest.

Dradles grunted again but seemed neither surprised nor injured.

Dickens and I turned in time to see a young boy, no more than seven or eight and all unkempt hair, ragged clothes, and untied bootlaces, hide behind a headstone near the wall that separated this graveyard from the road.

“It ain’t time! It ain’t time!” shouted Dradles.

“Yer lie!” shouted the ragged youth and pitched another stone at the mason. Dickens and I took a step away from the boy’s sturdy target.

“D— n your blasted eyes!” shouted Dradles. “If Dradles says it ain’t time, it ain’t time. No tea today! Get yourself off to the Thatched and Twopenny and leave off on the pitching or there’ll be no ’apenny from Dradles to you today!”

“Yer lie!” returned the Young Devil and pitched another rock, a larger one this time, which caught the stonemason just above the knee. Dirt, tiny chips of stone, clumps of old mortar, and lime dust flew from the man’s trousers as his tormentor screamed, “Widdy widdy wee! I—ket—ches—’im—out—ar—ter—tea!”

Dradles sighed and said, “Dradles sometimes pays the lad a ’apenny to pelt him homewards should Dradles forget to head home for tea or t’ the house after ten. This is my usual tea time and I forgot to turn the reminding apparatus off, as it were.”

Dickens howled and slapped his thigh with delight at this information. Another small stone flew by us and just missed the stonemason’s cheek.

“Hold your hand!” bellowed Dradles to the tiny loose-laced phantom flitting from headstone to headstone. “Or there’ll be no ’apenny for you this fortnight and more! Dradles has business with these here gentlemen and they don’t ’preciate the pelting.”

“Yer lie!” shouted the boy from the gloom behind some shrubbery between ancient headstones.

“He’ll not bother us more ’til our business is done,” said Dradles. He squinted at me and then squinted less malevolently at Dickens. “What is it you wanted Dradles to show you this evening, Mr D.?”

“Mr Wilkie Collins and I would like to see if there’s anything new down in your place of business,” said Dickens.

Dradles grunted rum fumes at us. “Anything old is more what you mean,” he growled. “The crypts ain’t much for novelty. Not in these days, at least.”

“We shall be delighted to see what is old, then,” said Dickens. “Lead the way, sir. Mr Collins and I shall offer our willing, if not broad, backs as a shield between you and your quick-armed tormentor.”

“Bother the Deputy,” Dradles grunted cryptically. “Stones is Dradles’s work and life and only love, other ’n drink, and a few more pebbles won’t bother him none.”

And thus, with Dradles striding ahead and Dickens and me muddling along shoulder to shoulder behind him, we proceeded towards the great cathedral whose cold shadow had now enveloped the entire graveyard.

BEYOND THE EDGE of the graveyard there was a high-mounded pit with fumes rising from it. Dradles, clutching his heavy bundle to his chest, walked past it without comment, but Dickens paused and said, “This is lime, is it not?”

“Aye,” said Dradles.

“What you call quick-lime?” I asked.

The old man squinted over his shoulder at me. “Aye, quick enough to eat your suit and buttons and boots without any help, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins. And with a little stirrin’, quick enough to eat most of your spectacles, watch, teeth, an’ bones as well.”

Dickens pointed to the fuming pit and smiled enigmatically. I removed my spectacles, rubbed my watering eyes, and followed them.

I had assumed we were going up into the tower. Dickens often brought guests to Rochester—it was a short enough ride from Gad’s Hill—and he almost always arranged to have them go up into the tower to take in the view of the old city, all grey blocks and shadowed streets, and of the sea beyond to one side and the forests and roads stretching back to Gad’s Hill and beyond to the other horizon.

Not this day.

After much clanking of key rings (the old man seemed to have keys in every oversized pocket of his flannel trousers, jacket, and waistcoat), Dradles opened a heavy side door and we followed him down narrow stone stairs into the crypt.

I do not mind telling you, Dear Reader, that I was terribly weary of crypts. I do not blame you if you are as well. I had spent the previous night in an opium-scented space that resembled nothing so much as a crypt, and too much of my following Charles Dickens the past year and more had led into dank places like this.

Dradles had brought no lantern and we did not need one: the dying November light came down from above in dim shafts through groined windows that had long been devoid of glass. We walked between massive pillars that rose above us up into the cathedral proper like great roots or tree trunks of stone, and in their shadows the darkness was almost absolute, but we kept to the narrow lanes of fading light.

Dradles set his lumpy bundle on a stone ledge, untied laces at the top, and fumbled in the bag. I expected him to disinter a bottle—I could hear it sloshing—but instead he came out with a small hammer.

“Watch this, Wilkie!” whispered Dickens. “And listen! And learn.”

I thought I had learned quite enough for one day, but I followed as Dradles re-lashed his bundle and led the way down an even narrower corridor between even thicker columns and darker pools of shadow. Suddenly he began tapping the inner walls.

“Hear that?” the old mason asked—absurdly, I thought, since the taps echoed and rebounded everywhere in the crypt. “Tap and solid,” he whispered. “Now I go on tapping… solid still. And more. Solid still. And more… halloa! Hollow! We keep going around the corner here—mind your step; there’s some stairs there in the dark—we keep going and keep tapping and Dradles’s ear keeps hearing what your ear and others’ don’t and can’t hear and… ahah! Solid in hollow there! And inside solid, hollow again!”

We all stopped. It was very dark here around the corner, where more steps presumably led down to deeper vaults.

“What does it mean?” I asked. “Inside solid, hollow again?”

“Why, it means that there’s an old ’un tumbled and crumbled in there, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins!” growled Dradles. “An old ’un in a stone coffin, and the stone coffin in a vault!”

I could feel Dickens’s gaze upon me as if this Dradles-person’s deduction were a significant feat, but I reserved the right to remain something less than overwhelmed. This was not a case of that French phenomenon in which I had some interest—clairvoyance, or “bright seeing.” I mean, it was, after all, a church crypt. It did not take a rude, drunken man playing with a mason’s hammer to tell us that there were bones behind the walls.

Dradles led us deeper into the crypt vault. We needed a lantern now and we did not have one. I used my walking stick to sound out the irregular stone stairs beneath my feet as they spiralled down around one of the great stone trusses that housed the crypts and held up the cathedral. I had dressed for the unusually warm and sunny afternoon, and this subterranean cold made me shiver and wish for home and a fire.

“Aye,” said Dradles as if I had spoken aloud, “the cold here is worse ’n cold. It’s the damp. The rising damp. It’s the cold breath of the dead old ’uns on either side of us and beneath us and, in a minute, above us. The dead ’uns’ breath reaches to the cathedral up ’bove and stains the stone and discolours them pretty frescoes and rots the wood and causes the choir to shiver in their robes. Dradles can hear the rising damp seeping out of the chinks and crevices of these older coffins as surely as Dradles can hear the dead old ’uns echo back their answer to his taps.”

I started to give a sarcastic retort, but before I could speak there came the startling TAP, TAP, TAP of his hammer again. This time I imagined that I could hear something of the complex echoes myself. Dradles’s voice seemed extraordinarily loud in the winding stone chamber.

“There’s two of them about seven feet in, both of them old ’uns with a crook—I fancy they must’ve crook-hitched one another good when they met promiscuous-like, the way it must’ve been in the dark when candles were the thing—and they’re laid out in what was an underground chapel here long time ago, closed up back when all the heads was rolling and everyone was lifting toasts to Bonnie Prince Charlie and all that.”

Dickens and I stood in the dark where we were while Dradles descended another dozen steps. The chill touch of rising damp moving past our ankles and necks made my hackles rise.

TAP, TAP, TAP… TAP, TAP… TAP, TAP, TAP, TAP.

“There!” cried Dradles, his voice echoing terribly. “Hear that?”

“What do we hear, Mr Dradles?” asked Dickens.

There came a scraping and slithering sound.

“Just my foot rule,” said Dradles. “Dradles measuring in the dark. Measuring in the dark is what Dradles is doing. Wall’s thicker here… two foot of stone, then four of space beyond. Dradles hears the tap-back of some rubble and rubbish that the careless ones who interred this old ’un left between the stone coffin and the stone wall. Six feet in there an old ’un is waiting amidst the fall-down and left-behind—just lying and waiting, no top to his box. If I were to break through with my larger hammer and pick, this old ’un, bishop-hatted crook-type or no, would sit up and open his eyes and say, ‘Why, Dradles, my man, I’ve been waiting for you a devil of a time!’ And then he’d turn to powder sure as not.”

“Let us get out of this place,” I said. I meant to whisper it, but my voice sounded very loud in the winding dark and rising damp.

OUTSIDE IN THE LAST OF THE NOVEMBER evening light, Dickens paid the insolent man some coins and waved him off with thank-yous and what I heard as conspiratorial laughter. Dradles slumped away, still clutching his bundle. He’d not got twenty feet when there was a cry of “Widdy widdy wive! I—ket—ches—’im—out—ar—ter—five… Widdy widdy wy! Then—E—don’t—go—then—I—shy!” and there came an absolute hailstorm of small stones pelting around and against the grey-flannelled figure.

“What a character!” cried Dickens when Dradles and the insane child finally disappeared from sight. “What a wonderful character! Do you know, my dear Wilkie, that when I first met Mr Dradles he was busy tap-tapping away at an inscription on some headstone soon to be set in place—it was for a recently deceased pastry-cook and muffin-maker, I believe—and when I introduced myself, he immediately said, ‘Here in my world I’m a bit like you, Mr Dickens.’ And then Dradles gestured to all the tombs and headstones and headstones in the making around him and added, ‘Surrounded by my works and words like a popular author, I mean.’ ”

Dickens laughed again, but I remained uncharmed and unmoved. Inside the now-lighted cathedral, a choir was singing, “Tell me shep-herds, te-e-ell me.…”

“You know, Wilkie,” said Dickens, still in good humour despite the late hour and growing chill as a breeze came up around us, stirring the brittle leaves across the flat headstone we had dined on only hours earlier, “I believe I know the name of that choirmaster.”

“Yes?” I said, allowing my tone to convey my total lack of interest in this fact.

“Yes. I do believe his name is Jasper. Jacob Jasper, I believe. No, John Jasper. That is it. Jack to his beloved and loving nephew.”

It was not like Dickens to babble on like this, at least not with such banal content. “You don’t say?” I said, using the tone I used with Caroline when she prattled at me while I was reading a newspaper.

“I do say,” said Dickens. “And do you know Mr Jasper’s secret, my dear Wilkie?”

“How could I?” I said with some small asperity. “I did not even know of the choirmaster’s existence until a second ago.”

“Indeed,” said Dickens, rubbing his hands together. “Mr John Jasper’s secret is that he is an opium addict.”

The skin on my face prickled and I found myself standing very straight. I do not believe I breathed for half a minute or so.

“The worst kind of opium addict,” continued the Inimitable. “No laudanum or tincture of opium for Mr John Jasper, the way a civilised white man uses the drug for medicinal purposes. Oh, no! Mr John Jasper takes himself to the worst parts of London, then to the worst slums in those worst parts, and seeks out the worst—that is, to him, the best—opium den.”

“Does he?” I managed. I could feel the rising damp stealing up through my bones to my brain and tongue.

“And our choirmaster Jasper is also a murderer,” said Dickens. “A cold-blooded, calculating murderer, who, even in his opium dreams, plans to take the life of someone who loves and trusts him.”

“Dickens,” I said at last, “what in the blazes are you talking about?”

He clapped me on the back as we began walking across the graveyard towards the road where his carriage had just returned. “A fiction, of course,” he said with a laugh. “That ghost of a glimmer of a shade of an idea—a character, a hint of a story. You know how such things happen, my dear Wilkie.”

I managed to swallow. “Of course. Is that what this afternoon and evening have been about then, my dear Dickens? Preparation for one of your books? Something for All the Year Round, perhaps?”

“Not preparation for my book!” cried Dickens. “For your book, my dear Wilkie! For your Serpent’s Tooth.”

“The Eye of the Serpent,” I corrected. “Or perhaps, The Serpent’s Eye.”

Dickens waved away the difference. It was becoming difficult to see him in the growing darkness. The lamps on the carriage were lit.

“No matter,” he said. “The idea is the tale, my friend. You have your wonderful Sergeant Cuff. But even the best detective requires a mystery to solve if he is to be of any use or interest to your readers. That is what I hoped would come of our luncheon and Dradles outing today.”

“A mystery?” I said stupidly. “What mystery was there today?”

Dickens opened his hands and arms to take in the dark cathedral, the darker graveyard, and the many tombs and headstones. “Imagine a villain so devilish and clever, my dear Wilkie, that he murders someone simply to have had the experience of murder. Not murder a family member, as was the way of it in the Road Case in which you and I were both so interested—no, but to murder a stranger, or near-stranger. A murder with no motive whatsoever.”

“Why on earth would any human being do that?” I asked. Dickens was making no sense to me whatsoever.

“I just explained,” he said with perhaps some small exasperation. “To have the experience of having murdered someone. Imagine what a boon that would be to an author such as yourself—or to me. To any writer of imaginative prose, much less the sensationalist imaginative prose for which you are known, my dear Wilkie.”

“Are you talking about preparation for reading a Murder in your upcoming tour?” I asked.

“Good heavens, no. I have my poor Nancy waiting to be done in by that ultimate villain, Bill Sikes, someday. Not now. Already I have jotted down improvements on the method and description of that bloody massacre. I am talking about your tale, my friend.”

“But my tale is about a diamond that brings bad luck to the family that…”

“Oh, bother the diamond!” cried Dickens. “That was just an early draft of an idea. The Koh-i-noor diamond was a disappointment to everyone who went out of their way to see it at the Great Exhibition. Its color was a sickly, urine yellow—no real diamond to the English eye. Toss away your worthless gem, Wilkie, and follow the path of this new tale!”

“What tale?”

Dickens sighed. He ticked off the elements on the fingers of his gloved hand. “Element the first—the idea of someone murdering a near-stranger simply for the experience of having murdered. Element the second—the perfect way to dispose of a body. Your Sergeant Cuff will have a devil of a time figuring that out!”

“What are we speaking of?” I said. “I encountered no sure-fire way of disposing of a body in our bizarre luncheon or more-bizarre tour with the drunken Dradles.”

“But of course you did!” cried Dickens. “First there is the quick-lime. Certainly you have not forgotten that Pit!”

“My eyes and nose have not.”

“Nor should they, my dear Wilkie! Imagine your readers in terror as they come to understand that your murderer—your casual, random murderer, like Iago, moved by a motiveless malignancy—has dissolved the body of some poor chap in a pit of quick-lime. Everything down to the last few bones and pearl buttons and perhaps a watch. Or a skull.”

“There would still be those remaining last bones. And the watch and skull,” I said sullenly. “And the pit would be right there in the open for Sergeant Cuff and the police to discover.”

“Not for a minute!” cried Dickens. “Did you not understand the gift I gave you in Dradles? Your villain shall enlist—knowingly or unknowingly shall be up to your novelistic judgement, of course—just such a character as Dradles to help him inter the poor, pitiful remnants of his murder victim in just such a tomb or vault as we saw, or heard, rather, this evening. The last bits of the murdered man—or woman, if you truly want a sensational novel, my friend—shall be interred alongside the old ’uns, and that will be an end to him—until your clever Sergeant Cuff works it all out through a series of clues that only Wilkie Collins could provide.”

We stood there for a moment in a silence broken only by the shifting of the two carriage horses and the more furtive shifting of the cold servant on the driver’s box. Finally I said, “All very wonderful… very Dickens-like, I am sure… but I believe I prefer my original idea of a fabled gem sacred to the Hindoos or other heathens, bringing bad luck to some illustrious English family.”

Dickens sighed. “Oh, very well. Have it the way you insist. Look a gift horse in the withers, if you must.” But I heard him say much more softly, “Even though the gem and the Hindoos were my idea, which I have now seen to be too weak to bear the tale.”

More loudly, he said, “May I drop you at the station?”

Dickens’s uncharacteristic omission of an invitation to Gad’s Hill for supper told me what I already knew—that he would be dining with Ellen Ternan and that he had no intention of returning to Gad’s Hill Place that night.

“That would be fine,” I said. “Caroline will be waiting for me.”

As he held the carriage door for me, Dickens said softly, presumably so the coachman would not hear, “Before you dine with the lovely Landlady or the delightful Butler tonight, my dear Wilkie, I would advise a change of raiments and perhaps a warm bath.”

I paused with one foot on the step, but before I could say something related to opium or to anything else, Dickens added innocently, “The crypts do leave an echo of the rising damp on one, you know… as our friend Dradles illustrated so wonderfully this evening.”