Drood

CHAPTER FORTY

Islept until noon on New Year’s Day and awoke alone and in pain. The week before this first day of 1869 had been strangely warm, with no snow, no clouds, little sense of the season, and finally—for me—far too little human companionship. But this day was cold and dark.

My married servants, George and Besse, had asked my permission to go to Besse’s ancestral home in Wales for at least a week. It seemed that both her senile father and—until recently—healthy mother were choosing to die at the same time. It was unheard-of (and ridiculous) to release my entire staff at once for so long a time—I assumed that their dull-witted and homely seventeen-year-old daughter, Agnes, would be accompanying them—but I let them go out of the kindness of my heart (after informing them, of course, that they would not be paid during their Welsh vacation). Because of a party I had planned for Gloucester Place on New Year’s Eve, I made them delay their travels for a week; they finally left on New Year’s Day, two days after I returned from my week at Gad’s Hill Place.

Carrie had been staying with me for most of December (her time with her mother and new stepfather, who, she whispered to me, drank heavily, had lasted less than two weeks), but her employer family (who still treated her more like a guest than a governess) were going to the country on Christmas Eve for at least two weeks and I’d urged her to go along with them. There would be parties and masked balls and fireworks on New Year’s midnight, there would be sleigh excursions, there would be ice skating in the moonlight, there would be young gentlemen.… I could offer none of those things.

There was very little that I felt I could offer anyone that New Year’s Day of 1869.

After Caroline’s marriage, I had avoided the five-storey empty home at Number 90 Gloucester Place as much as I could, staying with the Lehmanns and the Beards in November as long as those kind people would have me. I had even spent time with Forster (who disliked me very much) at his ridiculous (but comfortable) mansion at Palace Gate. Forster had grown more pretentious and tiresome than ever after his marriage into wealth, and his dislike of me (or jealousy, I should say, since Forster had always competed angrily with anyone who was closer to Dickens than he) had grown apace with his wealth and girth, but he was still too much the presumed and assumed gentleman to turn me out or ask why I had chosen to come visit him at that time. (If he had asked, I could have answered honestly in three words—your wine cellar.)

But no one can visit friends forever, so for some of December it had been just Carrie and me in the large old place at Number 90 Gloucester Place, with George, Besse, and the shy Agnes all scuttling along busily in the background in an unsuccessful effort to avoid my surly moods.

When Dickens had sent word inviting me to come with Kate and Charley to spend yet another Christmas at Gad’s Hill Place, I hesitated—it had felt almost dishonest to accept such hospitality from someone you fully planned to murder as soon as the time was right—but in the end I acquiesced. When the house at Gloucester Place was empty, it was just too empty.

Dickens was home for the week resting up in preparation for the remainder of his reading tour—he’d planned his first Murder of Nancy in front of the paying public for 5 January, again in St James’s Hall—but was already exhausted and ailing from the limited readings he’d given in December. In a brief letter he’d written to me in December while travelling to Edinburgh on the “Flying Scotchman,” he’d penned—

My dear Wilkie,

Dolby is sleeping stentoriously nearby as we have just jolted over what felt to be several disaster-inducing gaps in the rails, causing not so much as the slightest pause in our ursine friend’s snores, so I have just taken a few minutes to calculate the amazing fact that travelling the distances required on a tour such as this involves more than thirty thousand distinct and separate shocks to the nerves. And my nerves, as you know, have not of recent been at their best. The memory of Staplehurst is never far from my mind, and when it does recede a bit, one of these shocks or jolts reminds me of it yet again. And even when I am stationary, there is no rest for the wicked. I said recently to our estimable American friend Mrs Fields that I spend most of the remaining and dwindling hours of my life travelling towards the tiring exposure to my special gas lamps on the platform and that the hour has almost come once more when I to sulphurous and tormenting gas must render up myself.

Dickens had found ways other than his tour and this convoluted syntax by which to exhaust himself. Although he had finally abolished the accursed “Christmas Issue” of All the Year Round (years after it should have been discontinued, to my way of thinking), he was still spending many hours a week at the Wellington Street offices, fiddling with the look and layout of the magazine, testing typography sizes on anyone who wandered by, and writing enthusiastic “Editor’s Notes” about the New Series he was launching, assuring any readers alarmed by the disappearance of the Christmas Issue that “… my fellow labourers and I will be at our old posts, in company with those younger comrades whom I have had the pleasure of enrolling from time to time and whose number it is always one of my pleasantest editorial duties to enlarge…”

I’m not sure who these “younger comrades” at the magazine were, since I had refused greater participation, his son Charley was allowed to do little but respond to letters and pursue the odd line of advertising, and, although Wills had returned to his post, he was capable of little more than sitting in his office and staring into middle space while doors kept slamming in his ruined skull. Wills would hardly have been counted as a “younger comrade” in any case.

All the Year Round was—as it had always been—an extension of the mind and personality of Charles Dickens.

As if all this office work and his readings in Scotland and continued rehearsals for the many Murders of Nancy yet to come were not enough, Dickens was spending many hours every day obeying the request in the will of his late friend Chauncey Hare Townshend, who’d asked in his dying delirium that the Inimitable collect his (Chauncey’s) various and scattered writings on the subject of religion. Dickens did this doggedly and to the point of even deeper exhaustion, but on Christmas Eve, over an indifferent brandy, I heard Percy Fitzgerald ask him, “Are they worth anything as religious views?”

“Nothing whatever, I should say,” said Dickens.

When Dickens was not in his study working during my week’s stay at Gad’s Hill Place, he was taking advantage of the clement weather to take walks of twenty miles and more per afternoon rather than his usual paltry twelve-mile winter outings. Percy and a few others attempted to keep up with him on these forced marches, but my rheumatical gout and Egyptian scarab would not allow me to take part. So I ate, drank brandy, wine, and whiskey, smoked the Inimitable’s rather disappointing cigars, increased my laudanum intake to make up for melancholy, read the books that Dickens and Georgina always set especially for their guests in each guest room (De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater had been left un-subtly on my night table, but I had already read it and, indeed, had grown up knowing De Quincey), and generally lazed away the days before New Year’s Eve, for which I had planned a dinner party at Gloucester Place for the Lehmanns and Charley and Kate and Frank Beard and a few others.

But my week at Gad’s Hill was not totally wasted.

Charles Fechter did not have a complete Swiss chalet hidden in his pocket this particular Christmas, but he had brought a rough scenario for the play called Black and White that he had first proposed, in the most general outlines, some months earlier.

Fechter could be a tiring and tiresome friend; he was always in the middle of some sort of pecuniary disaster and his ability to handle (or retain) money approached that of a particularly careless four-year-old. Still, his story idea about an octoroon French nobleman who contrives to get himself on a Jamaican auction block to be sold as a slave seemed to me to have great potential. Perhaps more to the point, if I were to write the play based on his outline, Fechter promised to help me avoid the problems in theatrical pacing, economy of plot, conciseness in dialogue, et cetera from which—according to Dickens and my right-eye scarab—No Thoroughfare had suffered.

Fechter was as good as his word on this promise and would be, for the next two months, quite literally at my elbow more often than not as I worked on Black and White—the actor excising, condensing, making dialogue more precise and “alive,” fixing awkward entrances and exits, pointing out missed opportunities for exciting stage moments. We began our joint (and not unenjoyable) labours on Black and White over Dickens’s brandy and cigars in our host’s library on those days around Christmas 1868.

And then the visit ended and we all temporarily went back to our respective efforts—Dickens to killing Nancy, Fechter to scrounging for parts and plays worthy of what he considered his great talent, and me back to the great, empty pile that was Number 90 Gloucester Place.

My brother, Charley, came to my New Year’s Eve dinner party despite his worsening stomach condition. To cheer everyone up, I treated Beard, the Lehmanns, and Charley and Kate (who had been chipper but formal in my company since my unfortunate visit to her on 29 October) to a pantomime at the newly reopened Gaiety Theatre just before the dinner party proper.

My New Year’s Eve dinner party should have been a success: I had helped Nina Lehmann find a new cook, and this person had been on loan to prepare a fine French meal for us; I had supplied plenty of champagne and wine and gin; the pantomime had put us in a generally relaxed mood.

But the long night of forced amusement was a dismal failure. It was as if each of us had somehow suddenly become capable of peeking through the veil of time to see all the bad things that would happen to us in the year to come. And our obviously strained attempts at revelry were not aided by my servants George and Besse’s equally obvious eagerness to finish their duties and be away in the morning to Besse’s parents’ respective Welsh deathbeds. (Their daughter, Agnes, was upstairs in bed with a vicious case of croup, so did not add her usual plodding clumsiness to the evening’s service.)

So thus it was I awoke with a roaring headache on New Year’s Day noon, rang for George to bring me tea and draw a hot bath for me, and then—when no one came—remembered with a curse that the three had already left for Wales. Why had I let them go when I needed their services?

Plodding around the cold house in my robe, I found all vestiges of last night’s party tidied up, everything cleaned and put away, the teakettle ready to be put on to boil, and an assortment of breakfast choices ready for me on the kitchen counter. I moaned and made only the tea.

The fireplaces had all been set but not lighted, and I had to fumble with forgotten flues before I had flames going in the parlour, study, bedroom, and kitchen. The sunlight and unusually warm weather that had made the entire Christmas week seem so strange had fled as the new year came in—it was grey, windy, and sleeting outside when I finally parted the drapes to peer out.

After finishing my mid-day breakfast, I considered my options. I had told George and Besse that I would probably spend the week at my club, but a query at the Athenaeum two days earlier had informed me that there were no rooms to let to members until the sixth or seventh of the month.

I could always return to Gad’s Hill Place, but Dickens was performing his murder before the unsuspecting public for the first time at St James’s Hall on Tuesday, 5 January, and then resuming his tour to Ireland and beyond—this abominable New Year’s Day I was suffering through was a Friday—and I knew his household would be in a buzz of preparation and rehearsal until then. I had Black and White to write, Fechter was in London right then, and the distraction and isolation of Gad’s Hill were the last things I needed.

But I needed servants, food prepared, and the company of women.

Still brooding about this, I wandered the empty house, finally looking into the study.

The Other Wilkie was there in one of the two leather chairs by the fire. Waiting for me. Just as I had expected him to be.

I left the study doors open, since there was no one else in the house that day, and took the other chair. The Other Wilkie rarely spoke to me anymore, but he did listen well and sometimes he nodded. Other times he might shake his head or give me a bland, noncommittal look that I knew from Caroline’s comments about my own expressions meant disagreement.

Sighing, I began telling him about my plans to kill Charles Dickens.

I had been going on in a normal voice for ten minutes or so and had just gotten to the part about Mr Dradles finding the empty space between the walls of the crypt under Rochester Cathedral and the efficacy of the lime pit on the puppy’s carcass when I saw the Other Wilkie’s opiate gaze shift up and focus on something over my shoulder. I quickly turned in my chair.

Agnes, George and Besse’s daughter, was standing there in her robe and nightgown and tattered slippers. Her round, flat, homely face was so pale that even her lips were white. Her gaze moved between the Other Wilkie and me, then back and forth again. Her small hands with their bitten nails were raised like a puppy’s paws. I had no doubt whatsoever that she had been there for a while and had heard every word I’d said.

Before I could speak, she turned and ran to the stairs, and I heard the slap of her slippers on wood continue on towards her room on the third floor.

Panicked, I looked back at the Other Wilkie. He shook his head more in sadness than in alarm. His expression alone told me what I had to do.

EXCEPT FOR THE FIREPLACES, the house was now dark. Outside, the Christmas week that had been so warm was ending on a New Year’s Day night ice storm. I kept rapping on Agnes’s door.

“Agnes, please come out. I need to speak with you.”

No response but sobbing. The door was locked. Candles were lit in her room, and from the shape of the shadows glimpsed in the crack under the door, she had pushed some heavy bureau or washstand up against that door.

“Come out, Agnes, please. I didn’t know you were here, in the house. Come out and talk to me.”

More sobbing. Then—“I’m sorry, Mr Collins… I ain’t dressed. I ain’t well. I didn’t mean to do nothing wrong. I ain’t well.”

“Very well, then,” I said calmly. “I’ll speak to you in the morning.”

I went back down to the dark parlour, lighted some candles, and found the note I’d missed earlier in the day. It was from George and had been left on the mantel:

Mr Collins, Sir:

Our daughter Agnes is sick. She was coming with Besse and me to Wales but we did think better of it early this Morning, as the Poor Child has Fever. It would Not Do, we think, to bring High Fever to two Death Beds.

So with your permission, Sir, we leave Agnes behind under your Care and Protection until next Tuesday, when I (George) hope to Return to Your Service, no matter what the Disposition of Besse’s parents’ Fates be.

She can cook for you, Sir. (Agnes) After a fashion. And though that will not be up to Your Standards, she will keep the place Clean if you choose not to spend all the time at Your Club. At the very least, Mr Collins, she will let the Burglars, as she Recuperates and carries out her Humble Duties, know that the House is not Empty in your Absence.

Yours O’bdtly,

George

How had I not noticed the paper hours earlier when I had wrestled with the flue and lit the fire? I started to throw the note into the fire but then thought better of it. Careful not to wrinkle it, I set it back on the mantel where I had found it. What to do?

Too late for that now. I needed to deal with this first thing tomorrow. And for that I needed money.

I WOKE AT dawn on Saturday, the next morning, and thought about the situation. As the grey light grew stronger in the room—I’d left the heavy drapes pulled back the night before for just that purpose—I noticed that there was a tidy stack of the Other Wilkie’s notes on the straight-backed chair near the door. I hadn’t noticed them the day before, but they had probably been written that night, since Frank Beard had been kind enough, in the early morning hours after our New Year’s Eve dinner party, to inject my morphine before he’d left. Most of my Droodish dreaming and dictation occurred while under the influence of morphia.

There was no immediate urgency. I kept telling myself this. Whatever the dull-witted girl had overheard was safe within these walls until her parents returned—or at least until George came back.

It fascinated me, as I lay there in the big bed with the light coming up, how little attention I had paid to Agnes’s presence over the years. At first she had simply been the extra little mouth to feed (but not to pay)—a side condition to my hiring of George and Besse, who were themselves a compromise as servants: never terribly efficient, but always very cheap. With the money I had saved with George and Besse’s wee salary over the years, I had always been able to hire a fine cook when necessary. Actually, the rent I received from the stables behind the big house there at Number 90 Gloucester Place paid for Agnes’s parents’ salaries with a good bit left over.

Agnes—with her chewed fingernails, flat, round face, constant clumsiness, and slight stammer—had been so familiar a part of the background here (and at Melcombe Place before this) that I simply thought of her as part of the furniture. For years she had also existed for me less as a servant than as a counterpoint to Carrie’s intelligence and good looks, although the girls had played together when they were younger. (Agnes had been too dull and unimaginative a playmate to hold Carrie’s interest once both girls were out of their nursery years.)

But what to do now that the girl had seen the Other Wilkie and overheard me describing my plans to murder Dickens?

I needed money, that was certain. The sum of £300 came to mind. Lying there visible and tangible in bills and gold coins, it would be a staggering fortune to the simple-minded girl, but not so much as to seem abstract to her; £300 seemed about right for what I was to propose.

But where to get it?

I’d spent the last of my cash and written too many personal cheques over the past few days, obtaining tickets for the pantomime, purchasing gin and champagne for the party, and paying Nina Lehmann’s new cook for the feast. The banks were closed until Monday, and although I knew the manager of my bank, it simply would not do for me to show up at the door of his home on a weekend, asking to cash a personal cheque for £300.

Dickens would loan that amount to me, of course, but it would take half the day for me to get to Gad’s Hill Place and back. I did not want to leave Agnes alone here for that length of time. She had no one with whom to speak with her parents and Carrie gone, but there was no guarantee that she would not write and post a letter in the time I was absent. That would be disastrous.

And I also did not want to raise Dickens’s curiosity as to why I needed £300 that weekend.

The same applied to other people in London who might have loaned me that amount of cash on a moment’s notice—Fred or Nina Lehmann, Percy Fitzgerald, Frank Beard, William Holman Hunt. None would let me down, but all would wonder. Fechter would never ask me why I needed that particular sum and would never worry about where it went or if he would ever get it back, but Fechter was—as always—broke himself. Indeed, I had made so many personal loans to him in the past year and poured so much of my own money into “theatrical expenses” (as yet unrecouped), first for No Thoroughfare and now, already, for Black and White (even though the writing for it had just begun), that I was in some financial difficulty myself as the new year began.

After I had bathed and dressed especially well, I heard bustling coming from the kitchen downstairs.

Agnes had also dressed to the apex of her poor ability—the thought that she was in her best clothes to travel caused a flurry of panic in me—and was in the process of fixing a full breakfast for me as I came into the kitchen.

The girl actually flinched, pulling back into a corner.

I gave her my warmest and most avuncular smile, even as I held both hands up, palms towards her, and stopped in the doorway to show her that I held no aggressive intentions.

“Good morning, Agnes. You are looking especially lovely today.”

“G-g-g-g-good morning, M-m-m-m… Mr Collins. Thank ’ee, sir. Your eggs ’n’ beans ’n’ bacon ’n’ t-t-t-toast is almost r-r-ready, sir.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “May I sit here in the kitchen with you to eat it?”

The idea obviously horrified her.

“On second thought, I’ll have it in the dining room as always. Has the Times arrived?”

“Y-y-y-yess—yesss—sir,” she managed. “It’s on the dining room table, as always.” She omitted the second “sir” rather than get stuck on it again. Her face was a bright red. The bacon was burning. “D-do you want coffee this mornin’… Mr Collins… or tea?”

“Coffee, I think. Thank you, Agnes.”

I went in and read the paper and waited. Everything on every plate she brought was either burned or raw or—somehow—both at once. Even the coffee tasted scorched, and the girl slopped it into my saucer when she poured it. I ate and drank it all with every sign of relish.

When she came in to refill my cup, I smiled again and said, “Can you sit down and talk to me for a minute, Agnes?”

She looked at the empty chairs at the table and gave me another look of horror. Sit at the master’s table? Such things were not done.

“Or stand, if you’re more comfortable with that,” I added amiably. “But I think we should chat about…”

“I di’n’t hear nothing las’ noon,” she said in a tumble of rushed syllables. The main word came out as nothink. “N-n-nothing at all, Mr Collins, sir. And I saw nothing as well. I di’n’t see anyone else there with you in your study, Mr Collins, I swear I di’n’t. And I heard nothing…” Nothink. “… about Mr Dickens or nobody and nothing else.”

I forced a chuckle. “It’s all right, Agnes. It’s all right. My cousin was visiting…”

My cousin, yes. My identical-twin cousin. My Doppelgänger cousin. My perfectly identical cousin of whom I had never spoken, never mentioned to George or Besse. Identical down to the glasses and suit and waistcoat and belly and hint of grey beginning in the beard.

“… and I would have introduced you to him if you’d not left in such a hurry,” I finished. It was hard to hold such a wide and gentle smile in place for so long, especially while speaking.

The girl was shaking from head to foot. She had to set one hand on the back of a chair to help hold her upright. I noticed that the already-bitten nails were now bleeding.

“My… cousin… is also a literary gentleman,” I said softly. “It’s possible you heard the tag end of a fanciful story we were devising… about the murder of a writer somewhat like Mr Dickens, whom you know has visited here often and would have been amused by our tale. Like Mr Dickens—we used his name as a sort of shorthand—but not really Mr Dickens, of course. You are aware that I write sensationalist stories and plays, aren’t you, Agnes?”

The girl’s eyes were actually fluttering. What would I do if she fainted or screamed or ran out into the street in search of a constable?

“At any rate,” I finished, “neither my cousin nor I wanted you to get the wrong idea.”

“I’m sorry, Mr Collins. I di’n’t see nor hear nothing.” She repeated this four times.

I set down my paper and pushed back my chair. Little Agnes jumped half a foot into the air.

“I’m going out for a few minutes,” I said briskly. There would be no more mentions of last night from me. Ever. “I shall be back shortly. Would you be so kind as to iron my eight best evening dress shirts?”

“They was ironed by Mum jus’ before she left,” managed Agnes, her voice constricted. At the words “Mum” and “left” her eyes grew moist and her hands shook more fiercely.

“Yes,” I said almost harshly, “but they were not ironed to my satisfaction. I’m going to the theatre several times this week and will require those shirts to be perfect. Could you do that at once, please?”

“Yes, Mr Collins.” She ducked her head and left with the coffeepot. As I went to the foyer closet to find my overcoat, I could hear the iron being heated in the kitchen.

I had to keep her busy the next hour. I had to be sure she would have no time to write and send a letter, nor time enough to think and then run away.

If I could keep her here the next hour, there would be nothing for me to fear.

Nothink.

MARTHA R— WAS HAPPY to see me at her door. She was always happy to see me at her door. And her door was only a short distance from Gloucester Place, and I’d been lucky enough to find an empty cab leaving Portman Square near my home. With a little more such luck, I’d be back before Agnes had ironed the first shirt, much less before she had time to write and go post a letter.

At first blush, Martha—known to her landlady and other Bolsover Street residents as “Mrs Dawson”—would be an unlikely place to find £300, despite the fact that I gave her a most generous allowance of £20 per month. But I knew Martha’s habits. She purchased almost nothing for herself. She ate frugally, sewed her own dresses, and got by on very little. She always set aside some of the money I gave her monthly and had brought some savings with her from Yarmouth.

I told her what I needed.

“Of course,” she said and went into the other room and came back with £300 in various bills and coins.

Perfect.

I had not taken off my overcoat and now I thrust the money into my coat pocket and opened the door. “Thank you, my dear. I will return the amount first thing Monday, after the banks open. Perhaps before then.”

“Wilkie?”

Her voice stopped me. She rarely called me by name.

“Yes, my dear?” I had to work to keep the impatience out of my voice.

“I am with child.”

I blinked rapidly behind my small round glasses. My neck was suddenly very warm and prickly.

“Did you hear me, Wilkie? I am with child.”

“Yes, I heard you.”

I opened the door to go but paused. She had no idea how precious were these seconds and minutes I was giving her. “How far along?” I asked softly.

“I believe our child will come in late June or early July.”

A little over two months ago, then. It had been that night in October after all—the night of Caroline’s wedding.

I smiled. I knew I should take three steps forward and put my arms around her—I knew that Martha expected this, even though she usually expected or asked for so little—but I could not. So I smiled instead.

“We shall have to raise your allowance when the time comes,” I said. “Perhaps from twenty pounds to twenty-five pounds.”

She nodded and looked down at the worn carpet.

“I shall return this three hundred pounds as soon as I can,” I said. And then I left.

COME INTO THE PARLOUR, child,” I said.

Agnes had been ironing my third shirt when I returned. I’d left the cab waiting outside. During the ride back from Bolsover Street, I’d given careful thought to where the girl and I should have our conversation. The kitchen was too informal… and I did not want her in that room yet. Normally, I would have asked a servant who needed a talking-to to come into my study, but that would have frightened Agnes now. So it was the parlour.

“Sit down, please,” I said. I had taken the large leather chair near the fire and I waved her to a lower, less comfortable wooden chair I had pulled into place. This time my tone left no room for her not to comply.

She sat. Her eyes were down, focusing on nothing save for her red hands folded on her lap.

“Agnes, I have been giving much thought recently to your future.…”

She did not look up. Her entire body was trembling slightly.

“You know that not too long ago I placed Carrie… Miss G—… in a wonderful position as governess to an excellent family?”

She said nothing.

“Speak up, please. You are aware of Miss Carrie’s new position?”

“Yes, sir.” The syllables were so soft that an ember crumbling in the fireplace could have muffled them.

“I have decided that it is time for you to have the same opportunities,” I said.

She looked up then. Her eyes were as red-rimmed as her fingernails. Had she been crying while she ironed?

“Please read this,” I said, handing her a letter I had written the night before on my best stationery.

The heavy cream paper vibrated in her hands as she read—slowly, her lips moving as she silently sounded out the words. Finally she finished and tried to hand it back to me. “That is… very kind of you… sir. Very kind.”

At least the d— ned stutter was gone.

“No, you keep it, my child. That is your letter of reference and an excellently worded one, if I do say so myself. I have chosen the family you will work for. They have an estate near Edinburgh. I have sent word to them that you are coming and that you will begin your duties there tomorrow.”

Her eyes widened and continued to widen. I thought she might faint.

“I don’t know nothing about governessin’, Mr Collins.”

Nothink.

I smiled paternally. I was tempted to lean forward and pat her shaking hands, but was afraid she might bolt if I did so. “That doesn’t matter at all, Agnes. Miss Carrie knew nothing about being a governess before she began her employment. And look how wonderfully that has worked out.”

Agnes’s eyes darted down to her folded hands. When I stood suddenly, she physically flinched. I began to understand at that moment why thuggish men beat their women; when someone acted as a puppy acted, the urge to beat them like a puppy was very strong. I was too aware of the heavy iron poker by the fireplace.

I parted the drapes. “Look out here, please,” I commanded.

Her head came up, but her eyes were wide and wild.

“Stand up, Agnes. That’s a good girl. Look out here. What do you see?”

“A closed carriage, sir.”

“That’s a cab, Agnes. It’s waiting for you. The driver shall take you to the railway station.”

“I ain’t ever ridden in a cab, sir.”

“I know,” I sighed, allowing the heavy drapes to swing closed. “There are all sorts of new experiences waiting for you, my dear child. This will be the first of many wonderful new things.”

I went to the nearby table and returned with a writing board, a page of stationery, and a pencil for her. In her current state, I did not trust her with pen and ink.

“Agnes, you are now going to write a short note to your parents, telling them that a wonderful employment opportunity has arisen and that you have left London to pursue it. You will give them no details… simply tell them that you will write them once you have begun employment there.”

“Sir… I… I cannot… I do not…”

“Just write what I dictate to you, Agnes. Now take up the pencil. That’s a good girl.”

I made the note short—four sentences as simple as this dull child would write—and I looked it over when she had finished. The clumsy letters were formed in a spidery, nervous hand, the capitalisation was random, and several simple words were misspelled, but that would have been true in any case.

“Very good, Agnes. Now sign it. Add your love and sign it.”

She did so.

I put the writing board and pencil back and folded the note, slipping it into my pocket.

I set the £300 on the ottoman between us.

“This is for you, my child. The family to whom I have recommended you will pay you, of course… pay you very well, in truth, even more than Miss Carrie is currently earning (old families in Scotland can be very generous)… but this amount, which you must admit is also very generous, will allow you to purchase new clothes, more fitting for your new employment and responsibilities, upon your arrival in Edinburgh. Even that shall leave adequate funds for your first year or two.”

I had never noticed the girl’s freckles. When she looked up at me now, her round face was so pale that those freckles stood out in bold relief. “Me mum…” she said. “Me dad… I can’t… they…”

“They will be delighted,” I said heartily. “I shall explain it all to them as soon as they return and they will almost certainly come to visit you as soon as they are able. Now go on upstairs and pack everything you want to bring to this new life. Do not forget your prettiest dresses. There will be parties and balls.”

She continued sitting.

“Go!” I commanded. “No! Come back! Take the money with you. Now go!”

Agnes scurried up the stairway to pack her clothing and few pitiful personal items.

I followed her upstairs to check that she was complying. Then I went down to the basement to the workbench and toolbox that George kept in order there. Selecting the large hammer with its pry jaws and a heavy pry bar, I went back upstairs.

DEAR READER from another time, if at this point you are tempted to judge me, I would ask you not to. If you knew me in real life as opposed to through these mere words, you would know that I am a gentle man.

I have always been gentle in demeanour and actions. My fiction is—was—sensationalist, but my life is—was—a testimonial to quiet gentleness. Women always sensed this about me, which is why a short, bespectacled, slightly rotund gentleman such as myself was so popular with the ladies. Even our friend Charles Dickens used to joke about my gentleness, as if a lack of aggression were a reason to be made fun of.

During my ride home from Martha’s, I’d realised again that I was incapable of harming a hair on young Agnes’s head, no matter how devastating her inevitable indiscretion would be to my life and career. I had never raised my hand against anyone in anger.

But ah! you say, Dear Reader, what of your plans to shoot Drood and Dickens?

May I remind you that Drood is not a human being as we estimate people as being human. He has murdered scores, if not hundreds, of innocents. He is a creature of and from the Black Lands I dream about every time Frank Beard injects me with morphia.

And Dickens… I have shown you what Dickens has done to me. You may be the jury there, Dear Reader. How many years of arrogance and condescension would you have tolerated from this man… this self-named Inimitable… before you finally raised a hand (or weapon) in righteous anger?

But you must understand that I would never raise a hand to a poor dull child like Agnes.

SHE CAME DOWNSTAIRS dressed in her best cheap outfit and wearing an overcoat that would not keep her warm for ten minutes out of doors in England, less than two minutes in Scotland. She was carrying two cheap valises. And she was weeping.

“Now, now, my dear young friend, none of that,” I said and patted her back. Again she flinched from me. I said, “Would you check to see that the cab is still waiting?”

She looked out through the blinds that covered the lights on either side of the front door. “It is, sir.” She began weeping again. “I don’t know how t-t-to pay the man who d-d-drives the cab. I d-d-don’t know how to find my carriage at the st-station. I don’t know how to d-do anything.” The miserable child was working herself towards hysterics.

“There, there, Agnes. The driver has already been paid. And I have paid him extra to help you find your carriage and your seat. He will make sure you are on the right train, in the correct carriage, and comfortable in your seat before he leaves you. I asked him to watch and make sure you are safe until the coach actually departs. And I have telegraphed members of the fine family you will be serving.… They will meet you at the Edinburgh station.”

“My mum ’n’ dad…” she began again through her tears.

“Will be delighted that you were brave enough to rise to this singular and wonderful opportunity.” I started to open the door and then stopped. “I had forgotten. There is one thing I would like you to help me with before you leave.”

She stared at me with red, wide eyes, but I saw the sense of hope stirring there as well. Perhaps, she was thinking, this was a reprieve.

“This way,” I said and led her back to the kitchen.

At first she did not notice that the boards and nails had been removed from the door to the servants’ stairs, but when she did, she stopped in her tracks.

“I have decided to use this back staircase again, Agnes, and need the candles lit on all the landings going up. But my tired old eyes have trouble seeing in the dim light within.…” I was smiling at her.

She shook her head. Her cheap valises dropped to the floor. Her mouth was open and her expression was—to speak frankly—very close to that of the kind of female idiot they lock away in asylums.

“No… sir,” she said at last. “Dad said that I mustn’t…”

“Oh, there are no rats or mice in there now!” I interrupted with a laugh. “Long gone! Your father knows that I am opening up the stairway. It shan’t take more than a minute to light the candles in their sconces on each landing and then you’re off on your adventure.”

She only shook her head.

I had already lit a candle. Now I put it in her hand and stepped behind her. “Don’t be stubborn, Agnes,” I whispered in her ear. I wondered even at the time if my voice sounded a bit like Drood’s hiss and lisp. “Be a good girl.”

I moved forward and she had to move ahead of me to avoid my touch. She did not try to resist until the door was open and I had herded her into the black rectangle.

She balked then, and turned, her eyes as certain and sad and unbelieving as Dickens’s Irish bloodhound Sultan’s on that last walk he’d taken with us.

“I won’t…” she began.

“Light every candle, Agnes dear, and knock when you want out,” I said and pushed her in and locked the door.

Then I fetched the hammer and lumber and nails from where I had stored them on the counter and began pounding everything back the way it had been, making sure that the nails were driven into the same holes in the door frame so that everything would look undisturbed when George and Besse got home.

She screamed, of course. Very loudly, although the walls at Number 90 Gloucester Place were very thick and so were the doors. Her screams were just barely audible in the kitchen a few feet away and certainly could not be heard, I trusted, from the sidewalk or street outside.

She banged at the other side of the thick oak door, then clawed (from the sounds of it), then stopped about the time I had got the last board nailed into place at the bottom. This would have cut off any tiny bit of light that came from the kitchen under the door and into that dark stairwell.

I set my ear to the wood of the boards and thought I could hear ascending footsteps—slow and hesitant—as she started up the stairs. Part of her must have been certain even then that this was a cruel game on my part and that when she had lit the candles on each landing, I would let her out.

The final screams, when they came, were very loud. But they did not go on for long. They ceased—as I had known they would—suddenly and terribly and in mid-cry.

I went upstairs then and looked in her room. I looked carefully, not worrying about how late it was getting or about the coach driver I was paying to wait outside. When I was certain that the girl had not left a note in either her room or her parents’ room or anyplace else in the house, I made sure that all of her important clothes and belongings had been packed in her two cheap valises.

On her carefully made bed, under the coverlet, there was a shapeless and now eyeless little rag doll. Would she have taken that to her new life in Edinburgh? I decided that she might have and brought it downstairs and crammed it into the larger of her two bags.

There was no sound whatsoever from the sealed-up servants’ staircase.

Taking the hammer and pry bar, I went back down to the cellar. Once there, I put on the long rubber apron that George used when he did messy tasks down there. I also borrowed his heavy work gloves.

It took me only a few minutes to shovel coal clear of the back wall of the half-filled coal cellar. The blocked-up crack in that wall was still visible, but the mortar was loose between the bricks and stone blocks. Using the pry bar, I began to work the bricks loose.

It took longer than I had expected, but again, I did not rush. Eventually the gap that I had always known Drood had come through that ninth of June two years earlier was revealed. I extended a candle through the hole.

The flame flickered to distant and damp currents but did not quite go out. Everything beyond the circle of light was blackness and a long drop into more blackness.

I shoved both of Agnes’s overpacked valises through and listened for the splash or crash of impact, but none came. It was as if there were no bottom to the pit beneath my house.

It took me even longer to wrestle the stones and bricks back into place and to trowel new mortar between them. The simple masonry was a skill my uncle had shown me and I had been proud of it when I was a boy. It certainly came in handy now.

Then I shovelled the coal back into place, stowed all tools and the apron and gloves, went upstairs, washed up carefully, packed a week or two worth of clothes—including two of my freshly ironed evening dress shirts—into a steamer trunk, went into my study and packed all of the writing materials and resources I would need (including the manuscript holding the beginnings of Black and White), went up to Agnes’s tiny room and left her note where it would easily be found by her parents, made a final check of the house to be sure it was locked up with everything in its proper place—there still was no sound from the back stairway, of course, and, I trusted, never would be—and then I went outside with my large trunk and leather portfolio and locked the front door behind me.

The driver hurried off the cab to wrestle the trunk down the steps, over the kerb, and into place in the boot of the carriage.

“Thank you so much for waiting,” I said, out of breath myself but in a good mood. “I had no idea packing would take me so long. I hope the cold and inconvenience haven’t bothered you.”

“Not a bit, sir,” the driver said cheerily. “I had myself a bit o’ a nap up on the box, sir.” From the looks of his red cheeks and red nose, he’d availed himself of something more than a nap.

He held the door while I stepped up and into the carriage. Once in place above, he opened the trapdoor and called down, “And where to this afternoon, sir?”

“The Saint James Hotel,” I said.

It was a bit of a luxury—Charles Dickens put up guests such as Longfellow and the Fieldses there when they visited London, and he sometimes stayed there himself, but it was more than I usually wished to pay for mere rooms. But this was a special occasion.

The little trapdoor closed with a thud. I raised my gold-headed stick, rapped sharply on the ceiling of the cab, and we rolled away.

It later dampened my spirits only a little when I remembered that I had forgotten to take back the £300 before closing the servants’ staircase door forever.