Drood

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

That same summer of 1867 came close to seeing Caroline, Carrie, our three servants (George, Besse, and Agnes), and me without a home. We were almost turned out onto the street.

We had known that the lease on 9 Melcombe Place was expiring, of course, but I had been confident that the terms of the lease could be and would be renewed for another year or two, at the very least, despite my frequent quarrels with the landlord there. My confidence turned out to have been misplaced. So July was given to much rushing around London trying to find a place to live.

It hardly bears saying that I was so busy with The Moonstone up through June—I had the first three numbers written to show Dickens by then—and so busy after June with another project that Dickens had brought to me, that it was Caroline who had to do the rushing about.

While she rushed, I retired to the peace of my club to complete work on the first three numbers of The Moonstone.

On the last two days of June, I spent the weekend at Gad’s Hill and read the completed chapters to Dickens, who was so delighted with what he heard that he agreed on the spot to pay about £750 so that All the Year Round would have the rights, with publication of the first number slated for 15 December. I immediately used this news to get the Harper brothers in the United States to match that amount for serial rights there.

When I returned to London on 1 July, Caroline was buzzing around my head like a hungry fly, asking me to go see various possible homes that she had found for lease or sale. I did so and all were obviously a waste of my time except for the possibility of one place on Cornwall Terrace. I chastised Caroline for looking at places outside of Marylebone, since I had grown fond of that neighbourhood. (Also, of course, I needed any new residence with Caroline and Carrie to remain within easy distance of Bolsover Street, where “Mrs Dawson” had all but taken up permanent residence.)

My quarrelsome landlord at Melcombe Place now insisted that we have the house there vacated by the first of August—a demand that I met with equanimity and was willing to ignore when the time came, but one which gave Caroline severe headaches and provoked days of even more frenzied searching and long evenings of voluble complaining.

In May, Dickens had invited me to collaborate with him on a long tale for the Christmas 1867 issue of All the Year Round and I had agreed, but only after long and sometimes almost comically bitter negotiations on payment with Wills at the magazine (Dickens, prudently, avoided all financial negotiations with me). I had demanded the very high rate of £400 for my half of the tale, although I confess to you, Dear Reader, that this sum had come to mind only because it was precisely ten times what I had been paid for my first successful submission to Dickens’s magazine—a story called “Sister Rose”—in 1855. I finally agreed to £300 not out of weakness or failure of nerve, but because I wanted to associate myself publicly with Dickens again and, in private, bind up any minor wounds that might have been inflicted over the Drood affair that month.

Dickens was, throughout that summer, in the best of spirits. I was ready to return to work on The Moonstone for the rest of July, but during my weekend at Gad’s Hill Dickens convinced me that we should begin the collaboration on the Christmas tale immediately. He had suggested a story based upon our journey across the Alps in 1853—happier times for both of us in many ways—and had contributed the title, No Thoroughfare.

Caroline was delighted to hear that I was putting The Moonstone on the shelf for a while; she was furious to hear that I would be spending much of the next several months at Gad’s Hill.

That same Monday upon my return from Gad’s Hill—with Caroline locked in her room crying and snivelling accusations about my abandoning her to find a home for us with no help from me—I received a note from Dickens, who had come into town to work at his offices at the magazine:

This is to certify that I, the undersigned, was (for the time being) a drivelling ass when I declared the Christmas Number to be composed of Thirty-two pages. And I do hereby declare that the said Christmas Number is composed of Forty-eight pages, and long and heavy pages too, as I have heretofore proved and demonstrated with the sweat of my brow.

This then was the bantering mood that Charles Dickens was in that July of 1867.

Martha R— was in a much better mood than Caroline G— that summer, and most days, after I finished my work at the Athenaeum Club, I found myself heading to Bolsover Street to dinner and to spend the night. Since I did keep a room at my club from time to time and since I was also frequently taking the train out to Gad’s Hill to confer with Dickens on No Thoroughfare and would sometimes spend the night there as well, Caroline asked no questions.

Then one evening, just as I was finishing an early dinner at my club, I looked up to see Inspector Charles Frederick Field striding across the dining room. Without asking permission, he pulled a chair up to my solitary table and sat down.

My first temptation was to say, “Only gentlemen are allowed in this club, I fear, Inspector,” but seeing his visage creased by a very uncommon smile, I merely dabbed a napkin at my lips, raised an eyebrow in interrogation, and waited.

“Good news, my dear Mr Collins, and I wanted to be the first to tell you.”

“You caught…” I looked around at the few other diners in the large room. “… the subterranean gentleman?”

“Not yet, sir. Not yet. But soon enough! No, this concerns your current problem of acquiring new lodgings.”

I had not told Inspector Field about our losing our lease, but I was far beyond being surprised at any information the man might have in his possession. I continued waiting.

“You remember the obstacle that Mrs Shernwold was presenting,” he said softly, glancing around as if we were two conspirators.

“Of course.”

“Well, sir, the obstacle is no more.”

I was truly surprised at this. “The lady has changed her mind?” I said.

“The lady,” said Inspector Field, “is dead.”

I blinked several times and leaned forward myself, whispering even more conspiratorially than had the inspector. “How?” Mrs Shernwold was one of those skinny, crotchety crones in her sixties who showed every sign of living into her skinnier, even more crotchety nineties.

“She had the good grace to fall down a flight of stairs and break her neck, Mr Collins.”

“Shocking!” I said. “Where?”

“Well, in the house at Number Ninety Gloucester Place, it is true, but on the servants’ stairway. No place you would have to be reminded of her misfortune should you move there.”

“The servants’ stairway,” I repeated, thinking of my lady of the green skin and ivory tusks. “What on earth was Mrs Shernwold doing on the servants’ stairs?”

“We shall never know,” cackled the inspector. “But the timing could not be more fortuitous, could it, Mr Collins? Nothing stands in the way of you making an offer for the house now.”

“The missionary son,” I said. “Surely he will return from Africa or wherever he is and…”

Inspector Field waved this consideration away with one calloused hand. “It turns out that the mortgage on Number Ninety Gloucester Place was never paid off by poor Mrs Shernwold. The house was never hers to give away, sir.”

“Who has the paper on it, then?”

“Lord Portman. It turns out that the house was always under the control of Lord Portman.”

“I have met Lord Portman!” I cried, loudly enough that several of the diners turned to stare. In a much lower voice, I said, “I know him, Inspector. A reasonable man. I believe that he owns much of the property there around Portman Square… on Baker Street as well as Gloucester Place.”

“I believe that you are correct, Mr Collins,” said Field with that satisfied and strangely evil grin.

“Do you have any idea what he is asking for the place?” I said.

“I did take the liberty of enquiring,” said Inspector Field. “Lord Portman says that he would agree to a twenty-year lease on the property for eight hundred pounds. That includes those lovely stables in the mews, of course. One could sublet those to offset the rent.”

My mouth went dry and I sipped some port. £800 was a fortune—more than I had free at the time—but I also knew that upon the event of my mother’s death, Charley and I would inherit, in equal shares, some £5,000 left to her by her aunt, even though—due to the terms of our father’s will—the rest of the capital in his estate and hers would remain tied up. And the inspector was undoubtedly right about the prospect of subletting the rather handsome stables.

Inspector Field had removed two suspiciously dark cigars from his jacket pocket. “I presume your club’s policies allow smoking in the dining hall,” he said.

“Of course.”

He clipped off the ends of both cigars, handed me one, lit his, puffed happily, and held the match out to light mine. I bent forward and allowed him to do so.

Inspector Field waved over Bartles, the oldest and most dignified of the club’s waiters, and said, “My good man, be so kind as to bring me a glass of what Mr Collins is drinking. Thank you.”

As Bartles hurried away—frowning slightly at this indifferently dressed stranger’s peremptory tone—I marvelled, not for the first time, at how my destinies had become so intertwined with this strange, imperious policeman’s.

“Good cigar, don’t you think, Mr Collins?”

It tasted like something grown and harvested in a mouldering boot in a forgotten cellar. “First-rate,” I said.

The inspector’s wine arrived and the always-aware and always-conservative parsimonious part of my mind added it, reluctantly, to my already significant tab here at the club.

“To your very good turn of fortune, sir,” said Inspector Field, lifting his glass.

I lifted mine and touched crystal to crystal, thinking as I did so that perhaps Caroline would now—finally—quit complaining and caterwauling. I confess that not once then or in the coming days did I think of poor Mrs Shernwold and her ironic fate, except when I lied to Caroline about where and how the old lady had met her demise.

I BELIEVE THAT this is time, Dear Reader from my posthumous future, for me to tell you a little bit about the Other Wilkie.

I have to presume that until now you have believed this Other Wilkie to be either a figment of my imagination or a function of the laudanum I am forced to take. He is neither.

All my life I have been haunted by a second self. As a very young child I was sure that I had a twin as a playmate and often told my mother about him. As a boy, I would hear my father speak of giving drawing lessons “to Wilkie” and know that I had not been in the house at the time. It was my Doppelgänger who had benefited from those lessons. As a very young man of fifteen, encountering my first experience of physical love with an older woman, I was not surprised to look over into the shadowed corner and see the Other Wilkie—as young and bright-eyed and unbearded as myself—watching with great interest. In my early adulthood, this second self seemed to recede into the grey realm from which he had come. For several years, I was sure that I had left him behind.

But a few years before the period I write of in this memoir, when the rheumatoid gout became too persistently painful to endure without the help of tincture of opium, the Other Wilkie returned. While my personality had become softer, more convivial, friendly to all, that of the Other Wilkie seemed to have grown harsher and more aggressive during our absence from one another. Years earlier, when I had first met Percy Fitzgerald (before Fitzgerald had become such a favourite of Dickens), I confided to the younger man how I “was subject to a curious ghostly influence, having often the idea that ‘someone is standing behind me.’ ”

I was never dismissive of the effect that the laudanum had on summoning this Other Wilkie. As Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater and a friend to both my parents, once wrote—“If a man ‘whose talk is full of oxen,’ should become an Opium-eater, the probability is, that (if he is not too dull to dream at all)—he will dream about oxen.” My obsession, in both my writing and my life, has been about double identity—of a Doppelgänger hovering just beyond the hazy boundaries of day-to-day reality—so there is little wonder that the opium I consumed daily, a drug so frequently and effectively used to open doors to other realities, should have summoned the Other Wilkie who had been my nursery-room playmate.

Should you know my writings, Dear Reader, you would be aware that this question of identity has permeated most of my stories and all of my novels, beginning with Antonina, which I began when I was only twenty-two years of age. Doubles, often representing good and evil, wander the pages of my tales. Frequently my characters (I think of Laura Fairlie in my Woman in White and Magdalen Vanstone in my more recent No Name) have their identities cruelly and violently taken from them so that they must go inhabit the hollow husks of other names, other minds, other skins.

Even when my characters are permitted to retain their own identities, more often than not in my novels they must conceal those identities, assume the identities of others, or face the loss of that identity through injury to their sight, hearing, speech, or because of loss of limbs. New personalities are constantly surfacing within my characters, a transformation brought about more and more frequently by the use of drugs.

Charles Dickens despised this aspect to my writing, but my readers apparently loved it. And I should mention that I was not the only writer to be obsessed with the questions of “the other self” and of dual, twin, or confused identities: a certain scribbler with the name of William Shakespeare had included such themes and conventions in his work far more frequently than I.

I often wondered—even before the nightmare period of Drood began—if I was a lesser man because of the traits missing in me but presumably present in the Other Wilkie. There is, for instance, the matter of my name. Or, rather, other people’s use of my name.

I seemed to be “Wilkie” to everyone: not “Mr Collins” (although Inspector Field and his operatives had gone out of their way to use the honourific) nor even “Collins” (as in the way I might call Charles Dickens “my dear Dickens” to his face)… merely “Wilkie.” It was as if I had always remained a child to others, even to children. Carrie grew up calling me Wilkie. Dickens’s many children, during all the years of their growth, called me Wilkie unless ordered otherwise by Dickens or Catherine or Georgina. Men at my club, who would never address their peers with their Christian names, even though they may have known these others for decades, felt free to call me Wilkie almost immediately after our introductions.

It was a curious thing.

The morning after I peered in on Dickens speaking with Drood and the Other Wilkie in my study—and then hastily retreated—I confessed to the Inimitable over breakfast that I had had a strange dream about such a meeting.

“But it was real!” cried Dickens. “You were there, my dear Wilkie! We spoke for hours.”

“I remember none of the content of the discussion,” I said, feeling my skin prickle with icy needles.

“That is perhaps for the best,” said Dickens. “Drood sometimes uses his magnetic influence to erase some or all memory of a meeting, should he think that such a memory would put him or his interlocutor in danger. Such mesmeric erasure does not work with me, of course, since I am a co-practitioner of the mesmeric arts.”

Are you indeed? I thought sarcastically. Aloud, I said, “If my dream was real, if the meeting was real, how did Drood get into the house? I happen to know that the building was securely locked.”

Dickens smiled as he applied marmalade to a second piece of toast. “He did not enlighten me on that topic, my dear Wilkie. My impression over the past two years has been that there are few places that Drood cannot go if he wishes to go there.”

“You’re saying that he is some kind of ghost.”

“Not at all, my dear Wilkie. Not at all.”

“Will you tell me, then,” I said with some asperity, “the content of our ‘hours’ of discussion… a content that this phantom has ordered me to forget?”

Dickens hesitated. “I shall,” he said at last. “But I believe it might be best if I wait to do so. There are imminent events that may not be in your interest to know about at the present time, my dear Wilkie. And other facts that it is in your interest not to be aware of in terms of your own honour… so, for instance, you can be truthful when you tell Inspector Charles Frederick Field that you did not meet with Drood and have no knowledge of the phantom’s plans.”

“Then why did he—or you—tell me about them last night?” I pressed. I had not taken my morning laudanum yet and my body and brain ached for it.

“To receive your permission,” said Dickens.

“Permission for what?” I was close to becoming angry.

Dickens smiled again and patted my arm in an insufferable way. “You shall see soon enough, my friend. And when these things come to pass, I shall tell you all the details of our long conversation last night. You have my word on this.”

I had to settle for this, even though I was far less than convinced that there had been any meeting of Drood, Dickens, and the Other Wilkie. It seemed far more likely that Dickens was taking advantage of my laudanum dream for his own inscrutable purposes.

Or that the Other Wilkie had his own secret purposes and plans. This possibility made my skin grow even colder.

WE MOVED TO Number 90 Gloucester Place in early September of 1867. I had been forced to raise a loan through my solicitors for the £800 purchase of the lease, but Inspector Field had been correct about the prospect of renting the stables on the mews behind the house; I sublet them to a woman with four horses for £40 a year, although I was to have a devil of a time getting her to pay on time.

The house on Gloucester Place was much larger and grander than the home we had leased at Melcombe Place. This house was set back from the street and terraced, five storeys high, with ample room for a family much larger than ours and for servants far more numerous and well-trained and better turned-out than our three poor waifs. We now had enough guest rooms to accommodate a small army of visitors. The dining room on the ground floor was thrice the size of that in Melcombe Place, and we used a comfortable room behind it as our family sitting room. I immediately took possession of the huge L-shaped double drawing room on the ground floor as my study, although it was directly in the path of visitors passing by in the hall, servants cleaning, Caroline working in the nearby sitting room, and all the other intrusion and traffic of daily life. But with its huge fireplace, high windows, central location in the home, and airy feeling, it had none of the closed-off darkness of my Melcombe Place study. I could only hope that the Other Wilkie would not make the move with us.

When remodelling work on the house was finally completed in the late autumn, it was much to my liking. I had books and pictures everywhere, of course, and the panelled walls of Gloucester Place lent themselves to displaying my art much better than had the dark, wallpapered walls at our previous residences.

I had a portrait of my mother as a young girl in a white dress— painted by Margaret Carpenter—that I hung in my study. My mother never saw it there (since it would have been inappropriate for her to visit the house with Caroline G— in it), but I reported to her in a letter that it was “still like you after all these years.” (This was not quite true, since my mother was now in her seventies and age had taken its toll.)

Also in my study were a portrait of my father and a painting of Sorrento by him, large paintings that flanked my massive writing table, which had also been my father’s. On another panelled wall in that room hung a portrait of me as a young man done by my brother, Charley, and another portrait of me by Millais. The only work of my own in the house was my Academy painting The Smuggler’s Retreat, which I hung in the dining room.

I did not trust the novelty of gas lighting—although Dickens and others doted on it—so my rooms, books, drapes, writing table, and paintings in Number 90 Gloucester Place continued to be lighted by wax candles and kerosene lamps just as in my previous homes. I loved the soft light that candles and fireplaces imparted to everything—not the least to people’s faces when gathered around a hearth or dining table—and would never have supplanted it with the harsh, inhuman glare of gas lighting, even though working by candlelight or lantern glow often gave me severe headaches which required the administration of more laudanum. It was worth the price for the ambience.

The house, however grand-looking from the outside, had fallen into some disrepair under the regime of the late Mrs Shernwold, and it took a small army of workmen more than a month to paint, repair or install plumbing, knock down partitions, repanel, retile, and generally bring the house up to the standards one would expect of a famous author’s home.

My first step in dealing with this chaos was to end all social visitations, either coming or going. My second was to absent myself from the potential felicity of Number 90 Gloucester Place—sleeping and working for weeks exclusively at my mother’s cottage at Southborough or at Gad’s Hill Place—and to leave the dusty, dirty supervision to Caroline. As I wrote to my friend Frederick Lehman on 10 September, the day after we moved in—“I had an old house to leave—a new house to find—that new house to bargain for and take—lawyers and supervisors to consult—British workmen to employ—and through it all, to keep my literary business going without so much as a day’s stoppage.”

That autumn was a warm one, and Dickens and I carried out our collaboration on No Thoroughfare primarily in his lovely little Swiss chalet. Dickens had turned his long writing table up on the first floor there into a sort of partners desk—with two leg wells—and we put in long hours of scribbling together with only the hum of bees and the corresponding hum of the occasional comment or question passing between us to disturb the comfortable autumn silence.

Back near the end of August, Dickens had sent me a note that typified the easy give-and-take of ideas and narrative that would mark our work on this project:

I have a general idea which I hope will supply the kind of interest we want. Let us arrange to culminate in a wintry flight and pursuit across the Alps, under lonely circumstances, and against warnings. Let us get into all the horrors and dangers of such an adventure under the most terrific circumstances, either escaping from or trying to overtake (the latter I think) some one, on escaping from or overtaking whom the love, prosperity, and Nemesis of the story depend. There we can get ghostly interest, picturesque interest, breathless interest of time and circumstance, and force the design up to any powerful climax we please. If you will keep this in your mind, as I will in mine, urging the story towards it as we go along, we shall get a very Avalanche of power out of it, and thunder it down on the readers’ heads.

Even by late September we had no Avalanche yet and Dickens could only report that “I am jogging at the pace of a wheelbarrow propelled by a Greenwich Pensioner” and “Like you I am working with a snail-like slowness…,” but the work together at Gad’s Hill accelerated both the pace of our separate and co-mingled narratives and raised our levels of enthusiasm.

By 5 October I was back at my mother’s cottage, enjoying good meals and a feeling that the end of our joint endeavour was in sight, while Dickens was sending the following note:

I have brought on Marguerite to the rescue, and I have so left it as that Vendale—to spare her—says it was an accident in the storm, and nothing more. By the way, Obenreizer has received a cut from Vendale, made with his own dagger. This in case you want him with a scar. If you don’t, no matter. I have no doubt my Proof of the Mountain adventure will be full of mistakes, as my MS. is not very legible. But you will see what it means. The Dénouement I see pretty much as you see it—without further glimpses as yet. The Obenreizer question I will consider (q’ry Suicide?). I have made Marguerite wholly devoted to her lover. Whenever you may give me notice of your being ready, we will appoint to meet here to wind up.

I wonder, Dear Reader, what importance these working notes between two such professional authors might have a century and more hence? Very little, I would suppose, but given Dickens’s fame, even in my lifetime, perhaps even these hastily scribbled and cryptic missives might be of some interest to some minor scholar one day. Could we say the same of the notes I sent Dickens? Alas, we shall never know, since Dickens still regularly burned all correspondence sent to him, continuing—as it were—the ongoing conflagration that he first began in the autumn of 1860.

It was that same 5 October, the first Saturday of the new month, that I returned home to Number 90 Gloucester Place—having not written or cabled Caroline ahead of time that I would be returning—only to arrive late, to find most of the new home’s rooms unlit, and to discover Caroline having dinner with a strange man in the kitchen.

I confess to being startled, if not angered. Caroline smiled at me from her place at the table—the servants were gone that night—although I saw the blush begin at her neckline and work its way up behind her ears and then around to her cheeks.

“What is this?” I asked the man. “Who are you?”

He was a thin, sallow, short, unimpressive little weasel of a man, his jacket of the most common moleskin. Everything about him was common. He rose and began to answer me, but before he could speak, I said, “Wait, I know you.… I hired you a month ago. Clow, isn’t it? Or something like that. You’re the plumber.”

“Joseph Clow, sir,” he said, his voice all whine and adenoids. “And yes you did, sir. We’ve just finished the last of the upstairs plumbing today, and your housekeeper, Mrs G—, graciously extended me an invitation to take dinner here, sir.”

I gave my “housekeeper” a withering look, but she merely smiled back at me. Such insolence! I had just borrowed and spent a staggering £800 to buy this insolent baggage one of the finest mansions near Portman Square, and here she was arranging an assignation with a common workman behind my back in my own home!

“Very good,” I said, giving a smile that communicated I shall deal with you later to Caroline. “I just dropped by to pick up some fresh linen. I shall be off to my club.”

“Your housekeeper prepares an excellent spotted dick,” said this person. Had I detected any insolence or sarcasm, I believe I would have struck him, but his comment seemed innocent.

“Mr Clow’s father is a distiller and he has part-interest in the business,” said Caroline, brazen to the end. “He brought a very fine sherry to help celebrate the completion.”

I nodded and went upstairs. I did not lack for linen in my portmanteau. I had come back to renew the laudanum from my large jug. Filling my travel flask and drinking down two large glassfuls, I went to my dresser, felt around in the lower drawer beneath my linens, and found the loaded pistol that Hatchery had given me so long ago.

Who would blame me if I shot both Caroline and her skinny, moustached, grimy plumber of a lover? The man had probably been in my bed in my new home even before I had—or at least it was certain he had hoped to.

Then again, I realised, to the world at large, Caroline G— was indeed my housekeeper, not my wife. I was certainly justified in shooting Joseph Clow as an intruder, but few juries or judges would see the justification of my shooting a gentleman caller who had agreed to have dinner in the servants’ kitchen with my housekeeper. Even the accursed sherry might be put into evidence by an eager prosecutor.

Smiling grimly, I set the pistol away, gathered up a valise of clothing merely for the show of it, made sure my flask was topped off, and went out the front way to spend the night at my club. I did not go to the back of the house to look in again at Caroline—who had looked flushed and lovely in the candlelight, despite her advanced age of being in her thirties—or at her weasel-plumber of a prospective lover and husband.

By the time I reached my club, I was whistling and in a good mood. I could see even then how I could use Mr Joseph Clow to my own advantage.

DICKENS AND I completed No Thoroughfare in late October, weeks later than we had anticipated. I was in charge of reprint rights and dealt with Frederick Chapman in the negotiations, but in the end George Smith of Smith and Elder made a better offer and I immediately transferred the rights to him.

Dickens and I both saw the theatrical potential in No Thoroughfare and because, in those days, any thief with a stage and a few actors could steal literary material simply by adapting it first, we decided to steal a march on any potential thieves and adapt it ourselves. Dickens—in a hurry to wind up his affairs so that he could depart for America—rattled off a rough scenario to our actor-impresario mutual friend Fechter and gave me the responsibility of doing the hard work of adaptation after he, Dickens, had left the country.

At the end of October, the tall house at Number 90 Gloucester Place was finished to my satisfaction—even the plumbing—and Caroline and I gave a house-warming dinner that also served as a farewell party for Dickens, who was scheduled to sail for America on 9 November. I hired an excellent French cook for the affair—she was to work for us on a semi-permanent basis in the coming years, although she did not live in the house—and took an active part in preparing the menu and overseeing the preparation.

The party was a great success and the first of many at the Gloucester Place home.

A few days later, on 2 November, I was one of the stewards at a huge and much more formal farewell banquet for Dickens that we held at the Freemasons’ Hall. There were 450 invited guests, the crème of London’s art, literary, and dramatic universe—all male of course—crowding the main body of the hall, while some 100 women (including the duplicitous but lovely Caroline G— as well as Dickens’s sister-in-law Georgina and daughter Mary) sat sequestered up in the Ladies Gallery, though the women were allowed to join the men for coffee afterwards. Caroline’s daughter, Carrie, now almost seventeen, was also there that night. In my nervousness, I had written the organisers twice to make sure that my request for tickets for the two ladies had been honoured.

The Grenadier Guards’ band played from another balcony that night. One surprise guest was Dickens’s son Sydney, a sailor whose ship had just docked in Portsmouth two nights before. British and American flags bedecked the main dining hall, and panels above twenty arches honoured with golden laurels each bore the title of one of Charles Dickens’s works. Lord Lytton, now sixty-four years of age but looking twice that, was the chairman for the evening and hovered over the proceedings like a gimlet-eyed bird of prey in all-black formal dress.

When Dickens finally rose to speak after a series of increasingly hyperbolic speeches of praise, my collaborator at first faltered and then began to weep. When he finally could speak, his words were eloquent but not, many agreed afterwards, as eloquent as his tears.

I confess to sitting at the main table that night, my head spinning with wine and an extra fortifying round of laudanum, and wondering what all these famous guests—Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, Sir Charles Russell, Lord Houghton, a veritable gaggle of Royal Academicians, the Lord Mayor of London—might say if they could have seen Dickens descending into the sewers of Undertown as I had. Or if they had any suspicion of the probable fate of a lonely young man named Edmond Dickenson.

Perhaps it would not have mattered to them.

On 9 November, I went up to Liverpool with Caroline and Carrie to see Dickens off as he departed for America.

The author had been given the Second Officer’s spacious cabin on the deck of the Cuba. (Carrie later asked me where the Second Officer might be sleeping during the crossing, and I had to admit that I had no idea.) Unlike most accommodations on the ship, the cabin had both a door and a window that could be opened to take advantage of the fresh sea air.

Dickens was fretful and distracted during our short visit and only I knew why. And I knew why only because of my continued association with Inspector Field.

Despite his first-hand knowledge of the Puritanical conservative nature of Americans from a quarter of a century earlier, Dickens somehow had not yet surrendered his plan to bring Ellen Ternan to America so that she could share the tour with him, perhaps in the disguise of an assistant to Dolby. This would never come to pass, of course, but Dickens was truly a hopeless romantic when it came to such fantasies.

I was not supposed to know about it, but the Inimitable had arranged with Wills at the magazine office to forward a coded telegram to the young actress in which she would be instructed on what to do once Dickens arrived in the New World. A message of “All well” would have her speeding on the next ship to America, all expenses paid through an account Dickens had left under Wills’s supervision. A reluctant code of “Safe and well” would mean that she would remain on the Continent, where she and her mother were currently vacationing while she waited word on her fate.

In his heart—or perhaps “in his rational mind” would be more appropriate—Dickens must have known that fair day of 9 November, as I had known when I first heard of the foolish scheme through Inspector Field, that the message “Safe and well,” meaning “Lonely but very, very much in the scowling, prying, judging, public American eye,” would be the one sent to Ellen via Wills.

Our own goodbyes were emotional. Dickens was aware of how much work he had left for me to finish—the proofings and revisions of No Thoroughfare as well as the scripting and staging with Fechter—but there was more to the emotion than that. After Carrie, Caroline, and I had descended the gangplank, I returned to the airy Second Officer’s cabin under the pretext of having forgotten one of my gloves. Dickens was expecting me.

“I pray God that Drood will not follow me to America,” he whispered as we again clasped hands in farewell.

“He will not,” I said with a certainty I did not feel.

As I turned to leave, thinking that it was possible—even probable—that I would never see my friend Charles Dickens again, he stopped me.

“Wilkie… in the conversation with Drood in your study on nine June, the discussion you do not remember… I feel it necessary to warn you…”

I could not move. I felt as if my blood had turned to ice and that the ice had invaded my very cells.

“You agreed to be Drood’s biographer if something happened to me,” said Dickens. He looked seasick even though the Cuba was still firmly tied to the wharf in Liverpool Harbour and was not rocking in the least. “Drood threatened to kill you and all of your family if you reneged on this promise… just as he has threatened, repeatedly, to kill me and mine. If he finds out that I went to America to escape him rather than to speak to publishers there about his biography…”

After a minute I found that I could blink. In another minute I could speak. “Think nothing of it, Charles,” I said. “Have a good reading tour in America. Return to us safe and healthy.”

I went out of the cabin and down the gangplank to a waiting Carrie and a sulking, worried Caroline.