Drood

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

It was May and we were in Dickens’s alpine chalet. It was a pleasant place to be.

After a wet, cold, slow-to-waken spring, late May had suddenly erupted in sunlight, flowers, blossoms, green lawns, warm days, long evenings, soft scents, and gentle nights perfect for sleeping. My rheumatical gout had improved to the point that I was using the least laudanum in two years. I had even considered discontinuing my Thursday-night trips into King Lazaree’s world.

It was a beautiful day and I was on the upper level of the chalet enjoying the breeze through open windows and telling the partial story of my book to Charles Dickens.

I wrote “telling” advisedly because although I had forty pages of my written outline and synopsis on my lap, Dickens could not read my handwriting. That has always been a problem with my manuscripts. I have been told that printers scream aloud and threaten to resign when confronted with the manuscripts of my novels—especially the first half of the book, where I admit that I have a tendency to rush, to scratch out, to write in all available margins and open spaces, and to substitute until the cramped words and letters become a blur of ink and a riot of lines, arrows, indicating marks, and violent scratches. The laudanum, I admit, does not increase the legibility.

I also wrote “partial story of my book” advisedly, since Dickens wanted to hear my general outline of two-thirds of the novel even though I had not decided the particulars of the specific ending. That longer reading-aloud, we had decided, would happen in June, when Dickens would make the final decision on whether my Eye of the Serpent (or perhaps The Serpent’s Eye) would appear in his magazine All the Year Round.

So on this beautiful late-May day in 1867, I spent an hour reading and telling the story of my novel to Charles Dickens, who—to his credit—was fully attentive, not even interrupting to ask questions. Other than my voice, the only sounds were the occasional waggon going by on the road below, the soft wind rustling leaves and branches in the trees on either side of the chalet, and the occasional humming of bees.

When I was finished I set the manuscript notes aside and took a long drink of water from the chilled carafe that Dickens kept in his writing space.

After a few seconds of silence, Dickens literally leaped out of his chair and cried, “My dear Wilkie! That is a wonderful tale! Wild and yet domestic! Filled with excellent characters and carrying a great mystery! And the surprise near the part where you leave off—well, it was an absolute surprise to me, my dear Wilkie, and it is hard to surprise an old writer warhorse such as myself!”

“Indeed,” I murmured shyly. I always craved praise from Charles Dickens, and now the pleasure from his words spread through me rather like the warm glow from my daily medicine.

“We shall definitely want this book for the magazine!” continued Dickens. “My prediction is that it shall outshine anything we have serialised to date, including your marvellous Woman in White!”

“We can hope,” I said modestly. “But would you not prefer to hear the outline of the last fourth of the book—when I decide how to tie up the obvious loose ends, such as the reenactment of the crime—rather than commit to purchasing it now?”

“Not in the least!” said Dickens. “However much I look forward to hearing you tell me the true ending in a week or two, I have heard enough to know what a splendid story it is. And that plot surprise! To have the very narrator not know of his own culpability! Wonderful, my dear Wilkie, absolutely wonderful. As I say, I have rarely been so taken by surprise by another writer’s dexterous plotting!”

“Thank you, Charles,” I said.

“May I pose a few questions or make a few minor suggestions?” asked Dickens as he paced back and forth in front of the open windows.

“Of course! Of course!” I said. “Besides being my editor at All the Year Round, you have been my collaborator and fellow-plotter for too many years for me to not benefit from the sagacity of your advice at this stage, Charles.”

“Well then,” he said, “about the crucial plot twist. Is it at all possible that having our hero, Franklin Blake, perform the robbery of the diamond under the influence both of laudanum—however surreptitiously administered—and the mesmeric control of the Hindoo jugglers, too much of a coincidence? What I mean is, the Hindoos he encountered on the lawn could not have known that our Mr… what was his name?”

“Who?” I asked. I had taken out my pencil and was hurrying to make notes on the back of my manuscript page.

“The medic who died with a scrambled memory.”

“Mr Candy,” I said.

“Of course!” said Dickens. “Well, my only point is that the Hindoos encountered randomly on the estate’s grounds that night could hardly have known that Mr Candy would have put opium in Franklin Blake’s wine as a sort of prank. Could they?”

“No…” I said. “I suppose not. No, they could not have.”

“So, in truth, the dual revelations of secretly administered laudanum and the mesmeric magnetism of the Hindoo mystics on the lawn may be redundant, no?”

“Redundant?”

“I mean, my dear Wilkie, it would only take the coincidence of one or the other to allow Franklin Blake to carry out his somnambulistic thievery, isn’t that so?”

“I think… yes… it is,” I said, making a few notes.

“And how richer it is for the reader’s imagination that poor Mr Franklin Blake steals the diamond from his beloved’s bureau drawer in an attempt to protect it, not under the evil influence of the Hindoos, don’t you think?”

“Hmmm,” I said. This reduced my Huge Surprise to a sort of odd coincidence. But it might work.

Before I could comment, Dickens had gone on. “And the odd, lame servant—I apologise; what was her name?”

“Rosanna Spearman.”

“Yes, lovely name for that odd and disturbed character— Rosanna Spearman. You say, early on, that she is a product of— that is, that Lady Verinder had hired her from, I believe—a Reformatory?”

“Precisely,” I said. “I rather imagined that Rosanna had come from some institution very similar to your Urania Cottage.”

“Ahh, which I set up some twenty years ago with Miss Burdett-Coutts’s help,” said Dickens, still smiling and pacing. “So I thought, my dear Wilkie. But I’ve taken you to Urania Cottage. You’re quite aware that all of the women there are Fallen Women, being given another chance.”

“As was Rosanna Spearman,” I said.

“Indeed. But it’s simply unthinkable that Lady Verinder or anyone of her obvious calibre would hire Rosanna if the lady knew that she had been a… a woman of the streets.”

“Hmmm,” I said. Having Rosanna being a reformed woman of the streets had been, precisely, my goal. It explained both her doomed infatuation with Mr Franklin Blake and the erotic subtext to that infatuation. But it was difficult to argue that anyone so refined as my fictional—and equally as doomed as Rosanna Spearman—Lady Verinder would have hired a prostitute, however reformed. I made a note on my page.

“A thief,” Dickens said with that ring of certainty that was so common to him. “You can make the poor Rosanna a former thief—then Sergeant Cuff shall still be able to recognise her, but as someone who came through his jail rather than a woman on the street.”

“Is thievery so much less evil than being a woman of the street?” I asked.

“It is, Wilkie, it is indeed. Make her a woman of the streets, no matter how well reformed, and Lady Verinder’s home has been contaminated. Make her a former thief, and the reader shall see the magnanimity of Lady Verinder’s spirit in her attempt to help her through honest employment.”

“A point,” I said. “A palpable point. I shall make a note to review Rosanna’s background.”

“And then there is the problem of Reverend Godfrey Ablewhite,” went on Dickens.

“I wasn’t aware that there was a problem with Reverend Ablewhite, Charles. During the reading you laughed and interjected that you loved the exposure of such a hypocrite.”

“And so I do, Wilkie! So I do! And so shall your readers. The problem is not with the character—whom you have admirably drawn as the hypocrite, social climber, and would-be pilferer of a lady’s fortune—but with his title.”

“Reverend?”

“Precisely. I am pleased that you see the problem, my dear Wilkie.”

“I am not sure that I do, Charles. Certainly the accusations of hypocrite and liar are all the more meaningful if it’s a man of the cloth who…”

“Of course you are right!” said Dickens. “We have all known such sanctimonious men of the clergy—men who wish all to see them as doing good, even while they are secretly striving mightily to be doing well—but the charge is no less effective if we soften the indictment to a Mr Godfrey Ablewhite.”

I started jotting the note but then stopped and rubbed my head. “It seems so… lessened, diluted, pared down. How is it that Reverend Godfrey is the chairman of so many Ladies Charities if he is not clergy? And what would such a change do to the wonderful line I had already set in my outline—‘He was a clergyman by profession; a ladies’ man by temperament; and a good Samaritan by choice.’ You yourself laughed aloud when I recited that to you not an hour ago.”

“So I did, Wilkie. But it shall work just as well if you substitute… say… ‘barrister’ for clergyman. And we shall have saved the sensibilities of many, perhaps many thousands, of our readers from offence when none need be given in service of your admirable plot.”

“I am not sure…” I began.

“Make a note, Wilkie. And merely promise me that you will consider this change during the composition. It is, of course, the kind of thing that any diligent editor of any general magazine such as ours would be remiss not to bring up with the author. Indeed, if you were editing another’s manuscript, I am sure you would have raised the issue of demoting Reverend Godfrey Ablewhite to Mr Godfrey Ablewhite.…”

“I am not sure…” I began again.

“And finally, my dear Wilkie, there is the matter of the title.…” continued Dickens.

“Ahh,” I said, with some eagerness this time. “Which do you prefer, Charles? The Eye of the Serpent or The Serpent’s Eye?”

“Neither, actually,” said Dickens. “I have been giving the titles some thought, my dear friend, and I confess that I find both a bit diabolical and perhaps a trifle wanting from the commercial point of view.”

“Diabolical?”

“Well, the eye of the serpent. It does have Biblical connotations, Wilkie.”

“It has heathen Hindoo connotations as well, my dear Dickens. I have done a tremendous amount of research into various cults in India.…”

“And do any of them worship a serpent?”

“Not that I have discovered to date, but Hindoos worship… everything. They have monkey gods, rat gods, cow gods.…”

“And undoubtedly serpent gods as well, I agree,” Dickens said soothingly. “But the title still hints of the Garden and the serpent therein… that is to say, the Devil. And the obvious connection with the Koh-i-noor diamond makes any such connection absolutely unacceptable.”

I was totally at a loss. I had no idea what Dickens was talking about. Rather than splutter, however, I carefully poured myself more water, sipped it, and eventually said, “Unacceptable in what way, my dear Dickens?”

“Your gem, diamond, whatever you end up calling it, is so very obviously connected with the Koh-i-noor.…”

“Yes?” I said. “Perhaps. So?”

“You remember certainly, my dear Wilkie, or I am certain that your research has reminded you, that the original Koh-i-noor came from the region of India called, I believe, the Mountains of Light, and there was a persistent rumour, even before the diamond arrived on these shores, that the Mountains of Light had bad luck attached to every artefact from that area.”

“Yes?” I said again. “Such a deeply buried mental association will be perfect for The Eye of the Serpent… or perhaps The Serpent’s Eye.”

Dickens stopped pacing and slowly shook his head. “Not if our readers associate such bad luck with the Royal Family,” he said softly.

“Ahhh,” I said. I had meant the syllable to be mildly and noncommittally ruminative, but it sounded, even to me, as if there were a chicken bone stuck in my throat.

“And I am sure you remember, Wilkie, what happened two days after that stone arrived in England and six days before it was to be presented to Her Majesty.”

“Not precisely.”

“Well, you were young at the time,” said Dickens. “A fellow named Robert Pate, a retired lieutenant in the hussars, physically attacked the Queen.”

“Good heavens.”

“Precisely. Her Majesty was not harmed, but the public immediately connected the near-tragedy to the gift of the stone to the Royal Family. The Governer General of India himself felt he had to write an open letter to the Times explaining that such superstitions were absurd.”

“Yes,” I said, still jotting notes, “I have been researching Lord Dalhousie quite a bit in the Athenaeum library.”

“I am sure you have,” said Dickens in what I might have interpreted as an especially dry tone if I had been more critical. “And then there was the other terrible event associated with the Koh-i-noor… the death of Prince Albert.”

I quit writing notes. “What? That was just six years ago, more than eleven years after the stone arrived in England and was displayed at the Great Exhibition. The Koh-i-noor had been broken up into smaller stones in Amsterdam long before Albert died. What possible connection could there be between the two events?”

“You forget, my dear Wilkie, that the consort had been the designer and chief sponsor of the Great Exhibition. It was he who suggested putting the Koh-i-noor in the odd place of honour it held in the Great Hall. Her Majesty, of course, is still in mourning black, and some close to her say that at times, in the depths of her mourning, she blames the Indian stone for her beloved’s death. So you see, we must be careful in any names we give the book and any subtle references that might connect the Koh-i-noor and its effect on the beloved Royal Family with our fictional tale.”

I had not missed the use of “we” and “our tale.” Keeping my own tone dry, I said, “If not The Eye of the Serpent… or The Serpent’s Eye… what title do you imagine might apply to the tale of a diamond that had been set in the eye of a Hindoo statue to a serpent god?”

“Oh,” Dickens said airily, perching on the edge of his writing desk and grinning his editor’s grin, “I think we can dispense with the serpent god and the eye altogether. What about a title that avoids the sensational and invites the young female readers into the novel a bit more enthusiastically?”

“My books do wonderfully well with women readers,” I said stiffly.

“And so they do, my dear Wilkie!” cried Dickens, clapping his hands. “No one knows that more than I after your absolute triumph with The Woman in White. Why, there were a hundred eager readers for each instalment of that for every one reader who looked forward to my much more modestly selling Our Mutual Friend.”

“Oh, I would hardly say that…”

“What about… The Moonstone?” interrupted Dickens.

“Moonstone?” I said stupidly. “Do you suggest I have the stone brought back from the moon rather than from India?”

Dickens laughed easily in that loud, boyish laugh of his. “A marvellous jest, my dear Wilkie. But seriously… something like The Moonstone would interest the potential lady readers—or certainly not alienate them—and it has an aura of mystery and romance about it, without any hint of the profane or diabolical.”

“The Moonstone,” I muttered, just to hear the sound of it from my own lips. It sounded terribly flat and colourless after The Serpent’s Eye (or possibly The Eye of the Serpent).

“Wonderful,” cried Dickens, rising again. “We shall have Wills draw up a draft of the agreement with that as the proposed title. I tell you again that your outline was as exciting as reading the finished—or almost-finished—work itself will surely be. A marvellous tale filled with marvellous and delightful surprises. Your twist of the opium-induced sleepwalking where the hero himself steals the stone without remembering he did so is a stroke of genius, Wilkie, sheer genius.”

“Thank you, Charles,” I said again, rising and putting away my pencil. My tone held a tad less enthusiasm than it had earlier.

“It’s time to walk, my dear Wilkie,” cried Dickens, going to the corner to take up his stick and to pull down his hat from a peg. “I thought perhaps all the way to Rochester and back this beautiful May day. You are looking fit and ruddy these days, my friend. Are you game?”

“I am game for the first half to Rochester, where I shall catch the afternoon train back to London,” I said. “Caroline and Carrie expect me home for dinner this night.”

This last was a tiny fib; Carrie was visiting relatives in the country and Caroline thought I was spending the night at Gad’s Hill. But someone expected me for dinner that night.

“A half walk with a full friend is better than none,” said Dickens, setting his own manuscripts away in a valise and striding quickly to the door. “Let us away before the roads and pathways get dusty and the day gets a minute older.”

IT WAS THE EVENING OF THURSDAY the sixth of June, and I was indulging in a minor pleasure I had cultivated since the early spring—that is, taking the mountainous mass of Detective Inspector Hibbert Aloysius Hatchery out for a pint and a snack at a local public house before turning myself over to his guardianship and then descending into the dockside slums and the even darker world beneath Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery in order to partake of what I had come to think of as King Lazaree’s Emporium of Subterranean Delights.

As I’d gotten to know Detective Hatchery better during our Thursday-night public-house stops, I had been surprised by some of the revelations from this huge man whom I had considered from our first meeting to be little more than a comic figure. It seemed he lived in a decent Dorset Square neighbourhood near my own home at Melcombe Place, and although his wife had died some years earlier, he had three grown daughters whom he doted on and a son who had just entered Cambridge. Most surprising, Hatchery himself read widely, and some of his favourite books, it turned out, were of my creation. The Woman in White was foremost amongst these, although he had only been able to afford reading it during its serialisation in All the Year Round some years before. I had brought a copy of the bound book this very night and was in the process of autographing it for my sometimes guardian when someone stopped at our table.

I recognised the brown tweed suit first, then the compact but heavy body poured into it. The man had removed his hat, and I noticed that his curly grey hair seemed longer than it had in Birmingham—but it had been wet then.

“Mr Collins,” he said, two fingers flicking towards his brow as if touching the brim of a hat that was no longer there, “Reginald Barris at your service, sir.”

I grunted a reply. I did not wish to see Detective Reginald Barris. Not that night, not any night. The memory of those terrible few seconds of violence in that Birmingham alley was just beginning to fade.

But Barris greeted Hatchery, who nodded back even as he was accepting the gift of my autographed The Woman in White—a conjunction of events that I found, unreasonably perhaps, treacherous—and Barris joined us at the table without even asking permission, boldly pulling up a chair and seating himself backwards on it, straddling it, his powerful forearms set atop the chair’s back. Aghast at his bad manners, I wondered for a moment if Barris—despite his Cambridge accent—was an American.

“A fortunate coincidence, Mr Collins, running into you like this,” said Barris.

I did not honour that nonsense with a reply, but looked at Hatchery in a way that showed cool disapproval of his being so free with the details of our habits. Then I remembered wryly that the huge man worked for Inspector Field—and almost certainly reported to this insufferable Barris as well, since the younger man seemed to be a lieutenant of the tiresome inspector—and reminded myself that there had been no real friendship between Hatchery and me, despite my generosity towards him in recent weeks.

Barris leaned forward over his forearms and lowered his voice. “Inspector Field was hoping for a report, sir. I volunteered that if I were to run into you, I would mention it. Time is getting short.”

“I gave Inspector Field a report less than a fortnight ago,” I said. “And time is getting short for what?”

Barris smiled but set a quick finger to his lips, his eyes darting left and right in a melodramatic reminder that we must be discreet. I always forgot that Field and his men presumed agents of the phantasm Drood to be lurking everywhere.

“Until the ninth of June,” Barris whispered.

“Ah,” I said and took a drink. “The ninth of June. The sacred anniversary of Staplehurst and…”

“Shhh,” said Mr Reginald Barris.

I shrugged. “I’ve not forgotten.”

“Your report was a little less than clear, Mr Collins, on…”

“Less than clear?” I interrupted, my voice loud enough to be heard throughout the public house if anyone had been interested in eavesdropping—which certainly none of the few inhabitants seemed to be. “Mr Barris, I am a writer. A journalist for several years, a novelist now by vocation. I hardly think that my report could have been less than clear.”

“No, no, no,” agreed the young detective, smiling in his embarrassment. “I mean, yes. That is, no—I chose the wrong words, Mr Collins. Never less than clear, but… perhaps… perfectly clear but a trifle sketchy?”

“Sketchy?” I repeated, giving the word the disdain it deserved.

“As in perfectly captured in a few strokes,” purred the young detective, leaning even lower over his massive forearms, “but not fully filled in with details. For instance, you reported that Mr Dickens continues to say that he has no knowledge of Mr Edmond Dickenson’s current whereabouts, but did you… as we liked to say in school and the regiment… drop the bombshell on him?”

I had to smile at this. “Mr… Detective… Barris,” I said softly, noticing Hibbert Hatchery’s apparent lack of concern with everything his superior and I were saying, “I not only dropped the bombshell, as you put it, on Mr Dickens—I dropped the entire mortar.”

BARRIS WAS TALKING about Dickenson’s money as a motive in the boy’s disappearance.

I was feeling so well that beautiful May day that I actually had been enjoying the long walk to Rochester from Gad’s Hill Place, despite having to keep up with Dickens’s killing pace, and we were about two-thirds of the way to our urban destination when I dropped the shell, mortar, and caisson on the Inimitable.

“Oh, I say,” I said as we followed the walking path along the north side of the highway towards the distant church spires, “I happened to run into a friend of young Edmond Dickenson the other day.”

If I had expected shock or surprise from Dickens, I received only the mildest twitch of one magisterial eyebrow. “Really? I would have guessed that young Dickenson had no friends.”

“Evidently he had,” I lied. “An old school chum by the name of Barnaby or Benedict or Bertram or somesuch.”

“Are those the friend’s last name or Christian name?” asked Dickens, clicking along with his walking stick touching the ground at its usual precise and rapid intervals.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, wishing that I had taken greater care in constructing this part of the introductory fiction I’d set to trap Dickens. “Just someone I met at my club.”

“It might matter in the sense that the chap you met may have been a liar,” Dickens said lightly enough.

“A liar? How is this, Charles?”

“I am quite sure that young Dickenson informed me that he never went to university—even to drop out—nor had ever darkened the door of any school,” said Dickens. “It seems the poor orphan had a succession of tutors, each less imposing than the last.”

“Well…” I said and hurried to catch up to Dickens. “Perhaps they weren’t school chums, but this Barnaby…”

“Or Bertram,” offered Dickens.

“Yes, well, it seems that this chap…”

“Or Benedict,” said Dickens.

“Yes. May I tell this, Charles?”

“By all means, my dear Wilkie,” said Dickens, smiling and extending his open hand. Some small grey birds—doves or partridges—exploded from the hedges we were approaching and flew into the blue sky. Without breaking pace, Dickens raised his walking stick to his shoulder like a shotgun and pantomimed pulling a trigger.

“It seems that this chap, a former friend of young Dickenson from somewhere,” I said, “was told by Dickenson himself last year that he—Dickenson—had legally changed guardians during the last months before he reached his majority.”

“Oh?” was all that Dickens said in response. It was a polite syllable only.

“Yes,” I said, waiting.

We walked a hundred yards or so in silence.

Finally I dropped my bombshell. “This same chap…”

“Mr Barnaby.”

“This same chap,” I persisted, “happened to be involved with some transactions at his friend Dickenson’s bank and happened to overhear…”

“Which bank is that?” asked Dickens.

“Pardon?”

“To which bank are you referring, my dear Wilkie? Or rather, to which bank was your friend of young Dickenson referring?”

“Tillson’s Bank,” I said, feeling the power in the two words. It was as if I were moving a knight into place before pronouncing checkmate. I believe it was Sir Francis Bacon who said, “Knowledge is power”—and the power I now held over Charles Dickens’s head had come through the knowledge obtained by Inspector Charles Frederick Field.

“Ah, yes,” said Dickens. He hopped slightly to clear a branch that had fallen in the gravel path. “I know that bank, my dear Wilkie… an old-fashioned, boastful, small, dark, and ugly place with a musty odour.”

By this point I had almost, but not quite, lost the thread of the interrogation by which I’d hoped to catch the conscience of this king.

“A sound enough bank, it seems, to have transferred some twenty thousand pounds to the account of Edmond Dickenson’s new guardian,” I said and wondered if my Sergeant Cuff would have added an “Ah-hah!”

“I should have added ‘indiscreet’ to old-fashioned, boastful, small, dark, and ugly with a musty odour,” chuckled Dickens. “I shall do no more business with Tillson’s.”

I had to stop. Dickens took a few final steps and then—frowning slightly at the interruption of our pace—also stopped. My heart was pounding in my chest.

“You do not deny receiving such monies then, Charles?”

“Deny it? Why would I deny it, my dear Wilkie? What on earth are you going on about?”

“You do not deny having become Edmond Dickenson’s guardian and having transferred some twenty thousand pounds—his entire inheritance—from Tillson’s Bank to your own bank and chequing account?”

“Not for a second could I or would I deny it!” laughed Dickens. “Both statements of fact are statements of fact, and therefore true. Come now, let’s walk.”

“But…” I said, catching up to him and trying to match him stride for stride. “But… when I asked some short time ago whether you knew where young Dickenson was, you said you had heard he’d gone to South Africa or somesuch place but otherwise had no idea.”

“Which is, of course, the absolute truth,” said Dickens.

“But you were his guardian!”

“In name only,” said Dickens. “And only for a few weeks before the poor boy came into his majority and his full inheritance. He thought he was doing me an honour by naming me such, and I allowed him to think so. It certainly was no one’s business other than Dickenson and myself.”

“But the money…” I began.

“Withdrawn, on Dickenson’s request, the day after he turned twenty-one and could do anything he wished with it, my dear Wilkie. I had the pleasure of writing him a cheque for the full amount that same day.”

“Yes, but… why through your account, Charles? It makes no sense.”

“Of course it does not,” agreed Dickens, chuckling again. “The boy—still thinking I had saved his life at Staplehurst—wanted to see my signature on the draught that would start his life anew as an adult. All nonsense, of course, but it cost me nothing other than the energy of receiving the payment and writing my own cheque to the lad. His former barrister and advisor—a Mr Roffe, I believe—made all the arrangements with both banks.”

“But you say that you have no idea where Dickenson went…”

“And so I do not,” he said. “He talked of visiting France and then truly beginning his life anew… South Africa, perhaps, or even Australia. But I received no letters from him.”

I started to speak again and realised that I had nothing to say. When I had rehearsed this confrontation in my mind, I had imagined Sergeant Cuff surprising the culprit into an admission of murder.

Dickens seemed to be inspecting my face as we walked. He was clearly amused. “When you heard all this from this amazingly ubiquitous Mr Barnaby or Benedict or Bertrand, my dear Wilkie, did you imagine that I had insinuated myself into the position of guardian for poor young Dickenson and then murdered him for his money?”

“What!? I… Of course I did not… Ridiculous… How could you…”

“Because that would be what I would have made from all these otherwise circumstantial clues,” Dickens said brightly. “An ageing writer, perhaps suffering from money problems, happens to save this rich orphan’s life and soon realises that the boy has no friends, no family, no close acquaintances to speak of—only a doddering old barrister who tends to forget whether he has had lunch that day or not—and the writer then arranges to have the trusting boy appoint him, the avaricious writer with money problems, to a position as guardian.…”

“Are you having money problems, Charles?”

Dickens laughed so loudly and easily that I almost laughed with him.

“How would I have killed him, do you think, Wilkie? And where? Gad’s Hill Place? Frightfully public with so many visitors coming and going all the hours of the day and night.”

“Rochester Cathedral,” I said dully.

Dickens glanced up over the green trees. “Yes, so it is. We are almost there. Oh-hoh! No, wait, you mean… I would have killed Dickenson at Rochester Cathedral. Yes, of course. It all fits in. You are a genius of deduction, my dear Wilkie.”

“You like to show it to people at night, in the moonlight,” I said, not believing that I was saying these words aloud.

“Indeed I do,” laughed Dickens. “And Mr Dradles and the cathedral’s cleric, whom I shall call Septimus Crisparkle in my novel, have given me keys to gain access to the tower at all hours when I bring guests there.…”

“And the crypts,” I muttered.

“What’s that? Oh, yes! Very good. The same keys would give me access to the crypts. So all I would have to do would be to invite young Dickenson on a private outing with me—showing off Rochester from its cathedral tower in the moonlight; why, I took you and Longfellow’s brother-in-law and his daughters up there in the moonlight just last year—and, at the appropriate second, as I urged the boy to lean over better to see the moonlight on the sea around the base of the tower… just give him the slightest shove.”

“Let us stop this, Charles,” I said raggedly. I felt the rheumatical gout creeping behind my right eye like a geyser of pent-up blood and pain.

“No, no, it is too wonderful,” cried Dickens, twirling his walking stick as if he were leading a parade. “No pistol needed—nor hammer, nor shovel, nor any grimy, heavy instrument needed to do the deed and then to be cleaned or disposed of—only gravity. A brief cry in the night. And then… what then? Say the boy had impaled himself on one of the black iron spikes rising from the fence surrounding the sacristy, or dashed out what few brains he had on one of the ancient headstones… what then, Sergeant Cuff?”

“Then the lime pit,” I said.

Dickens actually stopped and seized his forehead with his free hand. His eyes were wide, his smile broad and beatific.

“The lime pit!” he exclaimed. A rider trotting past on a bay mare looked over from the road. “Of course! How could I have forgotten the lime pit? And then, perhaps in a few days’ time… the crypts?”

I shook my head, looked away, and bit my lip until I could taste blood. We resumed walking.

“Of course,” said Dickens, swinging his stick absently at a weed, “I would then need old Dradles as an accomplice, to take down and put back up the crypt walls, I mean. This is how murder plots are found out, you know, Wilkie—taking an accomplice is too often a step towards the gallows.”

“Not at all,” I said, my voice still flat and lifeless. “You will have used your power of magnetic influence on poor Dradles. He will have no memory of his aiding and abetting of your disposal of Dickenson’s corpse… skeleton… watch, glasses, and other metal effects.”

“Mesmerism!” cried Dickens. “Wonderful! Shall we add laudanum to the mixture here, my dear friend?”

“I don’t believe that is required, Charles. Mesmeric control alone will account for the accomplice’s unwitting help.”

“Poor old Dradles!” cried Dickens. He was almost skipping in his delight. “Poor young Dickenson! Those few people in this world who even knew he had ever lived believe him—on the word of his murderer! — to be off to France or South Africa or Australia. No one to mourn him. No one to bring a single flower to his sealed and shared crypt. And the killer solves his… money problems… and goes on as if nothing has happened. This is too wonderful, my dear Wilkie.”

My heart pounding wildly again, I decided to explode the bombshell I had dropped perhaps so prematurely. “Yes, Charles, but this is all predicated on the murderer in question knowing that he is the murderer… knowing that he has done murder.”

“But how can he not know…” began Dickens, and then ran his hand furiously through his scraggly beard. “Of course! The murderer, the same man who has mesmerised his crypt-keeper accomplice into compliance, has been acting under the control of magnetic influence himself!”

I said nothing but watched Dickens’s face as we walked.

He shook his head. “I fear it breaks down here, Wilkie.”

“How so, Charles?”

“Professor John Elliotson, my first instructor in the magnetic arts—you quoted him yourself, Wilkie! — and all other experts I have read and conferred with, insist that someone under the magnetic influence of another, stronger will, still cannot commit any deed which he would not perform or agree to when not under mesmeric control.”

“But you had old Dradles help you dispose of the body,” I said.

“Yes, yes,” said Dickens, walking more quickly even as he ran his hands through his hair and beard, lost in deep contemplation of the plot elements here. “But burying the newly dead in graves and the crypts—transporting them when necessary—then walling up the corpses, is Dradles’s job. The controlling mesmeriser would simply construct a waking dream of a story around him. But to command murder… No, I think that will not work in our story, Wilkie. Not if the murderer is a sane man.”

“Even sane men have dark thoughts,” I said softly as we came into the very shadow of Rochester Cathedral. “Even sane men—eminently sane men, public men—have dark sides which they show to no one.”

“True, true,” said Dickens. “But to the point of being able to do murder?”

“But what if the real puppet master behind this crime were to be a Master Mesmeriser and mass killer himself?” I said. “He might have many covert ways of convincing the men and women under his control to do his bidding, no matter how horrible. Perhaps they are made to think that they are players in some theatrical experience and that their murdered victims will hop up and take a curtain call bow at the end.”

Dickens looked at me very sharply. “You are more of a sensationalist than I gave you credit for, Wilkie Collins. This new book of yours—The Moonstone—will do very well indeed, given the public’s literally insatiable appetite for slaughter, gore, and the unwholesome aspects that stir to life in the darkest folds of the human mind.”

“One can only hope,” I said softly.

We had come into the town and were less than a block from Rochester Cathedral. The great tower threw its shadow over us and over the whole cluster of low, grey houses on either side of the road.

“Would you care to go up and look around?” asked Dickens, gesturing towards the tall stone spire. “I happen to have the key with me.”

“Not today,” I said. “But thank you all the same, Charles.”

“Some other time, then,” said the Inimitable.

SO HE SHOWED no visible guilt or remorse about the twenty thousand pounds,” said Reginald Barris. “But what about the anniversary?”

“I beg your pardon?” I said. I had been thinking of other things.

“The anniversary of Staplehurst,” whispered the young detective. “Inspector Field asked you to do your utmost to accompany Dickens when he comes into town on that date, and the ninth is only three days away. You said nothing in your report on whether he had accepted or rejected your offer of spending the day and night with him at Gad’s Hill Place or during his inevitable return to the city and Undertown London on that night.”

I finished my ale and smiled at Hibbert Hatchery as the huge man, in his attempt not to overhear us, was respectfully browsing through the copy of The Woman in White that I had just signed for him. “Does the book meet with your approval, Detective Hatchery?”

“It is a gift beyond measure, Mr Collins,” rumbled the giant.

“The anniversary, Mr Collins?” prompted the insufferable Barris.

“Mr Dickens did not invite me to stay at Gad’s Hill or to wander the city with him on Sunday night—the ninth—in search of his phantom Drood,” I said, still not turning to look at Barris.

“Then, sir,” said the detective, “it is imperative that we arrange a time for you to meet with Inspector Field. He has laid on twenty-three operatives for Sunday night’s watch and…”

“Instead,” I continued, smoothly interrupting the upstart, “Mr Dickens has agreed to come to dinner at my house at Melcombe Place on Sunday and…” I paused just an instant for full effect. “… to spend the night there in my home.”

Barris blinked. “Dickens will be at your house on the night of the Staplehurst anniversary?”

I nodded, feeling some well-earned condescension in the slow motion of my head.

Barris jumped to his feet and turned the chair around with a clatter. “I must deliver this information to the inspector at once. Thank you, Mr Collins. This is an… extraordinary… development.” He touched his invisible hat brim and, to Hatchery, said, “Stay safe there, Hibbert.”

And then Barris was out of the public house, and Hatchery and I walked the mile and a half or so to St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery. There he set out his few things for his long vigil—a small lantern, a greasy sack with his three AM dinner inside it (packed, no doubt, by one of his daughters), a small flask of water, and his pristine copy of The Woman in White.

Descending the stairs into the ancient catacombs, I reflected—not for the first time—on the human creature’s infinite ability to adapt to circumstances. Two years ago, this descent as I followed Dickens down to the catacombs had been strange and not a little terrifying for me. Now it was as nothing—as commonplace as walking to my corner chemist’s to renew my weekly jug of laudanum.

King Lazaree the Chinee and his two bodyguards met me at the tattered curtain to their alcove. My pipe was filled and ready for me.

Eight hours later, when I ascended the stairs to a new day, Detective Hatchery had tidily tucked everything away except the novel, which he was reading in a thin strip of morning light coming in through the partially opened crypt door.

“Everything all right, sir?” he asked as he slipped the book into one of his many voluminous pockets.

“Everything is very much all right, Detective Hatchery. Very much so. It appears to be a beautiful day.”