Drood

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

In November, Dickens previewed his murder in front of an intimate audience of a hundred of his closest friends.

For more than a year now, the Inimitable had been negotiating with Chappell and Company for yet another reading tour—what he called his “farewell series of readings.” Chappell had suggested seventy-five readings, but Dickens—whose illness, weakness, and list of other ailments were increasing almost daily—insisted on a hundred readings for a round sum of £8,000.

His oldest friend, Forster, who had always opposed reading tours for the very real reason that they kept Dickens from writing novels and always left him exhausted, weak, and ill, told the Inimitable flatly that if the author attempted one hundred readings now, in his current condition, it would kill him. Frank Beard and the other doctors whom Dickens had seen more frequently in the past year, fully agreed with Forster. Even Dolby, whose continued presence in Dickens’s life depended totally upon these tours, felt it was a bad idea to enter into one now and a terrible idea to attempt one hundred separate readings.

And no one in Dickens’s circle of family, old friends, physicians, and trusted advisors thought that he should include the Nancy Murder as part of his farewell tour. Some, like Wills and Dolby, simply thought it was far too sensationalist for such an honoured and revered author. Most others, like Beard, Percy Fitzgerald, Forster—and me—were all but certain it would kill him.

Dickens perversely saw the coming exhaustion of travel and performance, not to mention the mental anguish of travelling on railways every day, as (he told Dolby) “a relief to my mind.”

No one understood Dickens’s attitude in this except me. I knew that Charles Dickens was a sort of male succubus—he not only brought hundreds and thousands of people under his personal mesmeric, magnetic control at these readings, but he sucked the energy out of them as he did so. Without this need and ability, I was sure, Dickens would have died of his ailments years ago. He was a vampire and needed public occasions and audiences from which to drain the energy he needed to stagger on another day.

So he and Chappell agreed on his terms of one hundred readings in exchange for £8,000. The Inimitable’s American Tour—which, he had confessed to me, had brought him to the verge of total prostration—had been scheduled for eighty readings but, in the end, reduced to seventy-six because of a few cancellations. It was Katey who had told me (long before our 29 October meeting) that Dickens’s labours in America had brought in total receipts of $228,000 against expenses in that country—mostly travelling, rental of halls, hotels, and a 5 percent commission to the American agents of Ticknor and Fields—of not quite $39,000. Dickens’s preliminary expenses in England had been £614, and, of course, there had been Dolby’s commission of £3,000.

This suggests that Dickens’s profits from the American readings in 1867–68 should have amounted to a small fortune—a serious fortune for any of us in the writing trade—but he had chosen to do his tour only three years after the Americans’ Civil War had ended. That war had lowered the value of the dollar everywhere, and by early summer of 1868, the American currency had yet to go back to its earlier and more normal exchange value. Katey had explained to me that if her father had simply invested his American Tour earnings in securities in that country and waited for the dollar to regain its old level, his profits would have been almost £38,000. Instead, he had paid a 40 percent tariff for converting his dollars to gold at the time. “My profit,” he had bragged to his daughter, “was within a hundred or so of twenty thousand pounds.”

Impressive, but not reflective of the travel, labour, exhaustion, and diminishment of his authorial vigour that the tour had demanded.

So perhaps his current deal with Chappell was, after all, as much about simple greed as it was about his theoretical vampiric needs.

Or perhaps he was attempting suicide by reading tour.

I admit, Dear Reader, that this final possibility not only occurred to me and made sense to me, but confused me. At this point, I wanted to be the one to kill Charles Dickens. But perhaps it would be tidier if I merely helped him commit suicide this way.

DICKENS HAD BEGUN his tour in his favourite venue of St James’s Hall in London back on 6 October, but without the Murder as part of it. He knew that there would be a necessary hiatus in his travels and readings—the national general election was to be held in November, and he would have to set aside his tour during that campaign if for no other reason than the fact that there would be no suitable public halls or theatres to rent while the politicians were on the rampage. (It was no secret that the Inimitable supported Gladstone and the Liberal Party, but more—his closer friends knew—because he had always detested Disraeli than for any great hopes he had in the Liberals’ carrying out the sort of reform that he, Dickens, had always advocated in his fiction, non-fiction, and public advocacy.)

But even the easier, Murder-less October readings—London, Liverpool, Manchester, London again, Brighton, London—took a great toll on him.

In early October, Dolby had told me of the Chief’s high spirits and joy at renewing his readings, but two weeks into the actual tour and Dolby was admitting that his beloved boss was not sleeping on the road, suffered terrible bouts of melancholy, and was terrified every time he boarded a railway carriage. The slightest bump or swerve, according to Dolby, would cause the Chief to cry out in terror for his life.

More to Frank Beard’s concern, Dickens’s left foot was swelling again—always a sign of more serious troubles—and his old problems of kidney pain and bleeding bowels had returned more fiercely than ever.

Even more telling, perhaps, were the reports through Katey via my brother that Dickens was weeping frequently and was on occasion almost inconsolable during these early travels. It was true that Dickens had suffered enough personal losses during the summer and early autumn.

His son Plorn—now almost seventeen—had sailed in late September to join his brother Alfred in Australia. Dickens had broken down weeping at the station, which was totally unlike the coolness the Inimitable usually showed at family partings.

In late October, as his tour began wearing so heavily on him, Dickens learned that his brother Frederick, from whom he had been estranged for many years, had died. Forster told me that Dickens had written him—“It was a wasted life, but God forbid that one should be hard upon it, or upon anything in this world that is not deliberately and coldly wrong.”

To me, during a rare dinner shared at Vérey’s in London during a gap in his reading schedule, Dickens said simply, “Wilkie, my heart has become a cemetery.”

By the first of November, with Nancy’s Murder looming in two weeks, my brother reported Katey overhearing the Inimitable telling Georgina, “I cannot get right internally and have begun to be as sleepless as sick.”

And he had again written Forster, “I have not been well and have been heavily tired. However, I have little to complain of—nothing, nothing; though, like Mariana, I am weary.”

Forster, who was weary himself in those days, had shared the note in confidence—the conceit was that there was a circle of us, Dickens’s closest friends, who were monitoring his health with concern—but admitted to me that he could not immediately place the “Mariana” reference.

I could and did. And it was hard to suppress a smile as I recited to Forster Mariana’s lines from Tennyson’s poem to which I was certain Dickens was referring—

“… I am aweary, aweary,

Oh God, that I were dead!”

During one of his October London readings at St James’s Hall to which I had gone without telling Dickens that I would be in attendance, I saw him begin the reading with his usual energy and with every appearance of personal delight at revisiting The Pickwick Papers—either a fact or an illusion that always delighted audiences—but within minutes he seemed to find it impossible to say “Pickwick.”

“Picksnick,” he called his character and then paused, almost laughed, and tried again. “Peckwicks… I apologise, ladies and gentlemen, I meant to say, of course… Picnic! That is, Packrits… Pecksniff… Pickstick!”

After several more such embarrassing tries, he stopped and looked down at his friends in the front seats reserved for them (I was far back in the balcony on this night), and showed something like amusement in his expression. But it was also a look of some small desperation, I thought, as if he were asking them for help.

And—even far back in the laughing, loving mob—I could all but smell his sudden rush of panic.

Through all these weeks, Dickens had been honing his reading script for Nancy’s Murder but had not used it. As he confided to me at Vérey’s, “I simply am afraid to read it, my dear Wilkie. I have no doubt that I could perfectly petrify an audience with it… with reading one-eighth of it!.. but whether the impression would be so horrible, so completely terrifying, as to keep them away from my readings another time, is what I cannot satisfy myself upon.”

“You shall know when you have sounded them out through a few more readings, my dear Charles,” I had said that night. “You shall know when the time is right. You always do.”

Dickens had simply acknowledged the compliment with a nod of his head and a distracted sip of wine.

Then I heard, through Dolby, that I was to be a special guest—along with a hundred and fifteen or so other “special guests”—at a private reading (it was during the campaign hiatus) at St James’s Hall on Saturday, 14 November.

Dickens was finally going to slaughter Nancy.

EARLY ON THE AFTERNOON of his reading, I went to Rochester. Mr Dradles met me in front of the cathedral and I went through my usual ritual of gift giving. The brandy that I was buying for this dusty old man was more expensive than that which I usually purchased for myself and special guests.

Dradles accepted it with a grunt and quickly tucked it away somewhere in his voluminous layers of thick canvas and flannel coats and moleskin and flannel waistcoats. He was so flannelly bulky and moleskin-and-canvas bulbous to begin with that I couldn’t even make out the bulge where the bottle had gone.

“Dradles says, this way, Guv’ner,” he said and led me back around the cathedral and tower to the crypt entrance. He was carrying a bullseye lantern with its cover down and set it down briefly as he patted himself for the proper key. The countless pockets on his person gave up countless keys and rings of keys before he found the right one.

“Watch yer ’ead, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins,” was all he said when he lifted the blindered lantern as we entered the dark labyrinth. The November day was overcast enough that almost no light filtered down through the glassless trapezoids fitted into the groined ceiling. Tree roots, shrubs, and in some places actual sod had covered over the spaces that had been meant by the long-dead cathedral builders as skylights for this necropolis. I followed him mostly by sound, finding my way by sliding my hand across the slick-slate stone. The rising damp.

TIP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TIP-TIP-TAP. Dradles seemed to have found an echo he liked. He unshrouded the lantern and showed me a joining of masonry where the corridor curved and followed narrow steps lower into the crypt.

“Does Mr Billy W. C. see?” he asked. His breath filled the cold space between us with rum fumes.

“It’s been taken down, newer stones set in place, and remortared,” I said. I had to work to keep my teeth from chattering. Caves are said to be warmer—with their constant temperature in the fifties or whatever—than the cold November wind outside this day. But not this crypt-cave.

“Aye, by Dradles ’imself not two year ago,” he breathed at me. “No one there is, not the rector, not the choirmaster, nor even ’nother mason, would notice—after a day or three—if the new mortar were newer. Not if Dradles done it.”

I nodded. “And this wall opens directly into a crypt?”

“Nay, nay,” laughed the flannelled mason. “Be two more walls ’tween us an’ the ol’ ’un. This ’ere wall opens just to the first space ’tween it an’ the older wall. Eighteen inches, at the most.”

“Enough?” I asked. I could not finish the sentence properly with “for a body?”

Dradles’s rheumy red eyes gleamed at me in the lantern light. He seemed very amused, but he also seemed to be reading my mind perfectly. “No’ for no body, no,” he said far too loudly. “But for mere bones, vertebrae, pelvis, ’tarsals, a watch or chain or gold teeth or two, an’ for a nice, clean, smiling skull… more ’n ’nough room, sir. More ’n ’nough room. The ol’ ’un farther in won’t begrudge the new lodger ’is space, nosir, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins, sir.”

I felt my gorge rising. If I didn’t leave this place soon, I would be sick right across the headstone carver’s filthy undifferentiated boots. But I stayed long enough to ask, “Is this the same spot you and Mr Dickens chose for any bones he’s to bring?”

“Oh, no, sir. No, sir. Our Mr Charles Dickens, famous author, ’e chose a darker, deeper spot for the bones ’e’ll bring Dradles, right down them stairs there, sir. Would the Wilkie gen’mun like to see?”

I shook my head and—without waiting for the little lantern light to follow—fought my way up and out and into the air.

THAT EVENING, as I sat in St James’s Hall with about a hundred of Charles Dickens’s closest friends, I wondered how many times the Inimitable had stood on that stage and performed—either theatrically or as the first of a new breed of authors who read their works. Hundreds of times? At least. He was—or had been—that “new breed of authors.” And no one seemed to be equalling or replacing him.

This public Murder of Nancy would be yet another unprecedented departure for a man of letters.

Forster had told me that it was he who had convinced Dickens to ask the Chappells their opinion on this—to Forster’s mind—calamitous idea of including Nancy’s Murder in the reading programme. And it had been the Chappells who had suggested this private audience to test the reaction to such a grim and grisly reading.

Just prior to the performance, I overheard a very famous London physician (not our dear friend Beard) say to the Inimitable—“My dear Dickens, you may rely upon it that if only one woman cries out when you murder the girl, there will be contagion of hysteria all over the place.”

Dickens had only modestly lowered his head and given a smile that anyone who knew him would have classified as more wicked than mischievous.

Taking my place in the second row next to Percy Fitzgerald, I noticed that the stage was set a little differently than for Dickens’s usual readings. Besides his regular personalised frame of directed gas lighting and the violet-maroon screen that set him off to such advantage on a darkened stage, Dickens had added two flanking screens of the same dark colour and even similarly hued curtains behind them, the effect of which was to narrow and focus the wide stage to the tiny, dramatically lighted space immediately surrounding him.

I admit that I had expected Dickens to open the reading with something less sensational—probably an abbreviated version of his perennial and always popular Trial Scene from The Pickwick Papers (“Calling Sam Weller!”)—so as to lead up to the Sturm und Drang of Nancy’s Murder and to give us all a sense of how the sensationalist finale would be somewhat ameliorated by the other readings in a full evening’s presentation.

But he did not do this. He went straight to Nancy.

I know, Dear Reader, that I have described the Inimitable’s own notes on an early summer draft of his reading script for this scene, but I cannot tell you how inadequate those notes—or my own poor powers of description, as honed by writing prose as they may be—are in describing the next forty-five minutes.

Perhaps, Dear Reader, in your incredibly distant future of the late twentieth or early twenty-first century (if you still even bother measuring time in terms of Years of Our Lord), you have, in your advanced scientific alchemy, created some looking glass that can peer back through time so that you can watch and listen to the Sermon on the Mount or Pericles’ orations or Shakespeare’s original performances of his plays. If so, I would suggest that you add to your list of Historical Orations Not to Be Missed a certain Charles Dickens’s presentation of Bill Sikes murdering Nancy.

He did not leap immediately to the details of the Murder, of course.

You may remember my earlier descriptions of Dickens’s readings—the calm demeanor, the open book held in one hand although never truly referred to, the element of theatricality coming primarily through the wide range of voices, dialects, and postures as Dickens recited. But never before had he fully acted out the scene he was reading.

With the Murder, Dickens began slowly but with much more theatricality than I had ever seen from him (or any author reading his work). Fagin, that evil Jew, came alive as never before—wringing his hands in a way that suggested both eager anticipation of money stolen and guilt, as if he were trying to wash away the blood of Christ even as he schemed. Noah Claypole came across even more cowardly and stupid than he had in the novel. Bill Sikes’s entrance made the audience shudder in anticipation—rarely had male brutality been so conveyed through a few pages of dialogue and the dramatic portrayal of the drunkard thief and bully’s demeanor.

Nancy’s terror was palpable from the beginning, but by the time of her first of many shrieks, the audience was pale and totally absorbed.

As if showing us the boundary between all of his previous readings over the decades (not to mention the weak and inferior efforts by his imitators) and this new era of sensationalism for him, Dickens tossed aside his book of reading script, left his reading stand, and literally leaped into the scene he was depicting for us.

Nancy shrieked her entreaties.

Bill Sikes growled his relentless fury. There would be no mercy despite her cries—“Bill! Dear Bill! For God’s sake, Bill! For God’s sake!”

Dickens’s voice filled St James’s Hall so thoroughly that even Nancy’s final, whispered, dying entreaties could be heard as if each of us in the audience were on stage. During the few (but terrible) silences, one could have heard a mouse stirring in the empty balcony behind us. We could actually hear Dickens panting from the exertion of bringing his invisible (all too visible!) club down on the dear girl’s skull… again! Again! Again!

Dickens used the powerful lighting to amazing effect. Now he is on one knee as Nancy, the lighting showing only the bent-back head and two pale hands raised in useless imploring. Now he is rearing back as Bill—the club raised behind his shoulders and his body suddenly, impossibly, larger and burlier and taller than Dickens had ever been, the deep shadows filling his eye sockets except for the terrifying whites of Sikes’s not-sane eyes.

Then the beating—and clubbing—and beating again—and worse clubbing. The dear girl’s dying voice, growing duller and fainter as both life and hope departed, caused the breathless audience to gasp. One woman sobbed.

When Nancy’s pleading ceased, there was an instant of relief—even hope—that her entreaties had been listened to by the brute, that some small bit of life would be left to the battered form, but even as many in the audience chose that second to open their eyes, then Dickens roared out Sikes’s loudest and most insane bellows and began clubbing the dying girl again, then the dead girl, then the shapeless mass of battered and bleeding flesh and hair beneath him.

When he was finished, crouched over the body in the same terrible attitude that his son and my brother had first glimpsed in the meadow behind Gad’s Hill Place, Dickens’s laboured gasping for air filled the hall like the bellows of some deranged steam machine. I had no idea whether the panting was real or only part of his performance.

He finished.

Women in the audience were sobbing. At least one was hysterical. Men sat rigid, pale, with their fists clenched and jaw muscles working. I realised that Percy Fitzgerald next to me on one side and Dickens’s old friend Charles Kent on the other were both struggling to take in a breath.

As for me, the stag beetle scarab behind my eyes had gone crazy during the reading, turning and burrowing and boring from one part of my brain to another. The pain had been beyond description, yet still I could not close my eyes or block my ears to shut out the Murder, so mesmerising had it been. As soon as Nancy was well and truly dead, I pulled out my silver flask and took four long drinks of laudanum. (I noticed that other men were drinking from similar flasks.)

The audience was silent for a long moment after Dickens finished, returned to his lectern, straightened his lapels and cravat, and bowed slightly.

For that moment, I thought there would be no applause and that the obscenity that was the Murder of Nancy would never be perpetrated on stage again. The Chappells would hear their verdict in the shocked silence. Forster, Wills, Fitzgerald, and all of Dickens’s other friends who had advised against this will have been justified.

But then the applause began. And rose in volume. And continued to rise as people began to stand throughout the hall. And would not end.

Soaked with sweat but smiling now, Dickens bowed more deeply, stepped out from behind his high reading table, and gave a magician’s gesture.

Members of his stage crew trotted out and the screens were whisked aside in an instant. The maroon-violet curtains pulled back.

On the stage was revealed a long, shining banquet table piled high with delicacies. Bottles of champagne lay cooling in countless silver buckets of ice. A small army of formally attired waiters stood ready to open oysters and send the champagne corks flying. Dickens gestured again and called his invitation (over a second round of enthusiastic applause) for everyone to come up on stage and partake of refreshments.

Even this part of the evening had been carefully staged. As the first men and women filed shakily onto the stage, the powerful gaslights illuminated their flushed faces and the men’s gold studs and the women’s colourful dresses in a wonderful manner. It was as if the performance were still under way but now all of us were to be included in it. With a terrible but darkly thrilling shock, we realised that we were all attending the wake of the murdered Nancy.

Finally on stage myself, I stood back from the banquet and eavesdropped on what people were saying to Dickens, who was all smiles behind a flurry of his handkerchief as he continued mopping his wet brow and cheeks and neck.

Actresses such as Mme Celeste and Mrs Keeley were among the first to reach him.

“You are my judge and jury,” Dickens said happily to them. “Should I do it or not?”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes, oui, yes,” breathed Mme Celeste. She looked to be close to fainting.

“Why, of course do it!” cried Mrs Keeley. “Having got at such an effect as that, it must be done. It must be. But I must say…” And here the actress rolled her large black eyes very slowly, very dramatically, and enunciated the rest of her line with elaborate slowness, “… the public have been looking for a sensation these last fifty years or so, and by heaven they have got it!”

And then Mrs Keeley took in a long, ragged breath, expelled it, and stood there as if speechless.

Dickens bowed low, took her hand, and kissed it.

Charley Dickens came up with an empty oyster shell in his hand.

“Well, Charley,” said Dickens, “and what do you think of it now?” (Charley had been among those closest to Dickens who had advised against it.)

“It is even finer than I expected, Father,” said Charley. “But I still say, don’t do it.”

Dickens blinked in what looked to be real surprise.

Edmund Yates came up carrying his second glass of champagne.

“What do you think of this, Edmund?” said Dickens. “Here is Charley, my own son, saying it is the finest thing he has ever heard but who also persists in telling me, without giving any reason, not to do it!”

Yates glanced at Charley and—in serious, almost funereal tones—said, “I agree with Charley, sir. Do not do it.”

“Dear heavens!” cried Dickens with a laugh. “I am surrounded by unbelievers. You… Charles!” he cried, pointing to Kent standing next to me. Neither of us had yet availed himself of refreshments. The crowd noise around us was growing louder and less restrained by the moment.

“And Wilkie,” added Dickens. “What do my two old friends and professional accomplices think? Do you agree with Edmund and Charley that I should never repeat this performance?”

“Not a bit of it,” said Kent. “My only objection is of a technical nature.”

“Oh?” said Dickens. His voice was level enough, but I knew how little he cared for “objections of a technical nature” when it came to his readings or theatrical work. Dickens considered himself a master of stagecraft and technical effects.

“You end the reading… performance… with Sikes dragging the dog from the murder room and locking the door behind him,” said Charles Kent. “I believe that the audience is ready for more.… Perhaps Sikes’s flight? Almost certainly Sikes’s fall from the rooftop on Jacob’s Island. The audience wants… it needs to see Sikes punished.”

Dickens frowned at this. I took his silence as an invitation.

“I agree with Kent,” I said. “What you have given us is astounding. But the ending is… truncated? Premature? I cannot speak for the women in the audience, but we men are left lusting for Sikes’s blood and death as much as he was lusting to kill poor Nancy. Adding ten minutes would move the ending from the current blank state of horror into a fierce and passionate rush for the end!”

Dickens clasped his arms across his chest and shook his head. I could see that his starched shirtfront had been soaked through with perspiration and that his hands were shaking.

“Trust me, Charles,” he said, addressing Kent, “no audience on earth could be held for ten minutes— or five! — after the girl’s death. Trust me to be right on this. I stand there…” He gestured to the lectern and low reading platform. “… and I know.”

Kent shrugged. Dickens’s tone of absolute certainty—the Master’s voice, often used by him to settle discussions of things literary or theatrical—had spoken. But I knew then, and was not surprised later to see, that Dickens would brood over this suggestion and later lengthen the reading, adding at least three pages of narrative to the performance, to do precisely as Kent had suggested.

I went to get oysters and champagne and joined George Dolby, Edmund Yates, Forster, Charley Dickens, Percy Fitzgerald, Charles Kent, Frank Beard, and others standing farther back on the stage, just out of the rectangle of brilliant light. Dickens was now surrounded by ladies whom he’d invited to the event, and they seemed as emotionally overwrought and positively eager about his Murdering Nancy in the future as the actresses had been. (Dickens had told me to bring the Butler—meaning Carrie—but I had not passed on the invitation and was glad that she’d not been there. Many of us, in crossing the stage with our drinks and oysters, unconsciously looked down to make sure that we were not placing our polished black pumps in the pools of Nancy’s blood.

“This is madness,” Forster was saying. “If he does this for any significant part of his remaining seventy-nine performances, he will kill himself.”

“I agree,” said Frank Beard. The usually jovial physician was glowering at the glass flute in his hand as if the champagne had gone bad. “This would be suicide for Dickens. He will not survive it.”

“He invited reporters,” said Kent. “I’ve heard them talking. They loved it. They will write it up wonderfully in the papers tomorrow. Every man, woman, and child in England, Ireland, and Scotland will be selling their teeth to get a ticket.”

“Most of them have already sold whatever teeth they had left,” I said. “They will have to find something else to bring to the Jews’ pawnshops.”

The men around me laughed politely, but most went back to frowns in the silence that followed.

“If the reporters praise it,” rumbled Dolby, that bear of a man, “then the Chief will do it. At least four times a week until next summer.”

“That will kill him,” Frank Beard said again.

“Many of you have known Father for much longer than I have,” said Charley Dickens. “Do you know of any way to dissuade him once he realises the sensation he has created and can create with this?”

“None, I fear,” said Percy Fitzgerald.

“Never,” said Forster. “He will not listen to sense. The next time we meet may be at Westminster Abbey for Dickens’s state funeral.”

I almost spilled my champagne at this.

For some months now, since Dickens had first declared his intention of performing Nancy’s Murder in the majority of his proposed winter and spring readings, I had considered such suicide a mere means to an end for which I already devoutly wished. But Forster had made me realise something that was almost certainly true—however Dickens died, either through suicide-by-readings or by being run over by a dray waggon tomorrow on the Strand, there would be a huge public demand for a state funeral. The London Times or some other rag that had been Charles Dickens’s political opponent and literary scold for so many years would lead the way in demanding that the Inimitable be interred in Westminster Abbey. The public—sentimental as always—would rally around the idea.

The crowds would be stupendous. Dickens would end up lying with the other most-loved bones of English literary genius.

The certainty of all this made me want to scream right there on the stage.

Dickens had to die, that was certain. But I realised now what my deeper, darker mind must already have known and begun advance planning for months earlier—Dickens not only had to die, he had to disappear.

There could be no state funeral, no burial in Westminster Abbey. That idea was simply intolerable to me.

“What do you think, Wilkie?” asked Yates.

Lost in the horror of my revelation, I had not been following their conversation closely, but I vaguely knew that they were still discussing ways and means of dissuading Dickens from murdering Nancy scores more times in public.

“I think that Charles will do what he believes he has to do,” I said softly. “But it is up to us—his dearest friends and family—to keep him from being buried in Westminster Abbey.”

“Soon, you mean,” said Fitzgerald. “Buried there soon, you mean.”

“Of course. That is precisely what I meant.” I excused myself to get more champagne. The crowd was growing a little thinner now, but also more boisterous. The corks continued to pop and the waiter continued to pour.

A movement backstage, where the crew had been moving the lectern and equipment, caught my eye and made me stop.

It was not the crew moving now. A single figure stood there, all but cloaked in darkness, his silly opera cape catching the slightest gleam of reflected light from the stage. He was wearing an old-fashioned top hat. His face was absolutely white, as were his strangely long-fingered hands.

Drood.

My heart leapt to my throat and the scarab in my brain surged to its favourite viewing place behind my right eye.

But it was not Drood.

The figure bowed theatrically in my direction and swept off the top hat. I saw the blond, thinning hair that was growing back and recognised Edmond Dickenson.

Certainly Dickens did not invite Dickenson to this trial reading? How could he have found him? Why would he have…

The figure straightened up and smiled. It looked, even from this distance, that young Dickenson’s eyelids were missing. And that his teeth had been filed to sharp points.

I wheeled to see if Dickens or the others had seen this apparition. No one else appeared to have noticed.

When I turned back, the form in the black opera cape was gone.