Drood

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

In early October, Dickens invited me to spend a few days at Gad’s Hill during the Fieldses’ last visit there before they returned to Boston. It had been some time since I had been invited to spend the night at Dickens’s home. In truth, after Dickens’s show of support at my March premiere of Black and White, intercourse between us had been somewhat rare and decidedly formal (especially in comparison to our intimacy of earlier years). While we continued to sign our letters “affectionately yours,” there seemed to be little affection left on either side.

As I travelled to Gad’s Hill, I stared out the railway carriage window and wondered both about the real reasons for the Inimitable’s invitation and also what I might tell him that would surprise him. I rather enjoyed surprising Dickens.

I could have described my Overtown excursion four months earlier on 9 June while he and Fields and Dolby and Eytinge went slum-hopping under the protection of their policeman, but that would have been too much of a revelation. (And I had no excuse for following them through the first part of that night.)

I could certainly surprise Dickens and the Fieldses and whoever the Inimitable’s other guests were this weekend by describing my new baby daughter Marian’s presumably cute facial antics and burbles and other such ten-for-a-’apenny common baby anecdotes, but that would most definitely be too much of a revelation. (The less Charles Dickens and his entourage and sycophants knew of my private life, the better.)

What to amuse him with, then?

I would almost certainly inform everyone of how well my book Man and Wife was coming along. If Dickens was my only interlocutor, I might tell him about the letters that Mrs Harriette (Caroline) Clow was now sending me almost monthly—details of emotional estrangement and physical punishment from her plumber-lout of a husband. It made for wonderful research. All I had to do was substitute the Oxford-athlete lout for the almost illiterate plumber-lout—there was really very little difference in the two classes of men when one thought about it—and the beatings and occasions of being locked in the cellar that Caroline was suffering instantly became the plight of my highbred but poorly wed heroine.

What else?

I could, if we had an extended period alone and any renewal of our old sense of intimacy, tell Charles Dickens about my late-night visit on 9 June from the young man he had pulled from the wreckage at Staplehurst four years earlier to the day—our Mr Edmond Dickenson.

DICKENSON HAD NOT ONLY taken possession of my writing chair behind my desk and set his unclean boots on my extruded lower drawer, but the impertinent whelp had somehow got upstairs to my bedroom, unlocked the closet, and brought down the eight hundred pages of my dreams of the Gods of the Black Lands scrawled in the Other Wilkie’s tight, slanting script.

“What is the meaning of this intrusion?” I snapped. My attempt at masterly command may have been weakened somewhat by the fact that even with the cape-coat on I was as soaked through as a wet-slick alley cat and now dripping puddles onto my own study floor and Persian carpet.

Dickenson laughed and relinquished my chair (although not the manuscript). The two of us circled the desk as cautiously as knife-fighting adversaries in a New Court tavern.

I sat in my writing chair and slid the lower drawer shut, and Dickenson dropped into the guest’s chair without asking permission. My coat made wet, squishy sounds beneath me.

“You look thoroughly miserable, if you don’t mind my saying so,” said Dickenson.

“Never mind that. Give me back my property.”

Dickenson looked at the stack of papers in his hands and showed a caricature of surprise. “Your property, Mr Collins? You know that neither your dreams of the Black Land nor these notes are your property.”

“They are. And I want them back.” I brought Hatchery’s pistol out of my coat pocket, set the base of the heavy stock or grip or handle or whatever it is called against the surface of my desk, and used both hands to pull back the resisting hammer until it clicked and cocked. The muzzle was aimed directly at Edmond Dickenson’s chest.

The insufferable youth laughed. Once again I could see the strangeness of his teeth: they had been white and healthy when I had seen him during Christmas of 1865. Had they decayed or been filed down to these stumps and points since then?

“Is this your writing, Mr Collins?”

I hesitated. Drood had met with the Other Wilkie two years ago this very night. Drood’s emissary here would certainly know about that.

“I want the pages back,” I said. My finger was now on the trigger.

“And you intend to shoot me if I do not give them to you?”

“Yes.”

“And why would you do that, Mr Collins?”

“Perhaps to ascertain that you are not the spectre you pretend to be,” I said softly. I was very tired. It seemed like weeks, rather than a mere dozen hours or so, since I had watched Dickens take his guests out to luncheon at Cooling Cemetery.

“Oh, I will bleed if you shoot me,” said Dickenson in that same maddeningly happy tone with which he’d infuriated me at Gad’s Hill so long ago. “And die, if your aim is good enough.”

“It will be,” I said.

“But to what purpose, sir? You know that these documents are the property of the Master.”

“By ‘Master’ you mean Drood.”

“Who else? There is no doubt that I will leave with these pages—I would rather face your pistol at three paces than the Master’s slightest displeasure at a thousandfold-greater distance—but, since you have me at this disadvantage, perhaps there is something you wish to know before I leave?”

“Where is Drood?” I said.

Dickenson merely laughed again. Perhaps it was the sight of those teeth that made me ask the next question.

“Do you eat human flesh at least once a month, Dickenson?”

The laugh and smile disappeared. “And where have you heard that, sir?”

“Perhaps I know more about your… Master… and his slaves than you give me credit for.”

“Perhaps you do,” said Dickenson. He had lowered his chin and now looked at me with eyes raised and brow lowered in a strangely disturbing way. “But you should know,” he added, “that there are no slaves… only disciples and those who love and volunteer to serve the Master.”

It was my turn to laugh. “You’re speaking to someone with one of your accursed Master’s scarabs in his brain, Dickenson. I can think of no worse form of slavery.”

“Our mutual friend Mr Dickens can,” said Dickenson. “That is why he has chosen to work with the Master towards their shared goal.”

“What in the world are you gabbling about?” I snapped. “Dickens and Drood have no common goals.”

The young man—formerly round faced to the point of being cherubic, now actively gaunt—shook his head. “You were in New Court and Bluegate Fields and the surrounding areas tonight, Mr Collins,” he said softly.

How does he know I was there? I thought in some panic. Have they caught and tortured poor mad Barris?

“Mr Dickens understands that such social evil has to end,” Dickenson continued.

“Social evil?”

“The poverty, sir,” said Dickenson with some heat. “The social injustice. The children forced onto the streets with no parents. The mothers who have become… women of the street… out of sheer desperation. Those ill children and women who will never receive treatment, the men who will never find work in a system that…”

“Oh, spare me this communistic talk,” I said. Water dripped from my beard onto my desk top, but the aim of the pistol did not waver. “Dickens has been a reformer for most of his life, but he is no revolutionary.”

“You are wrong, sir,” Dickenson said very softly. “He works with our Master precisely because of the revolution our Master will bring first to London and then to the rest of the world where children are left to starve. Mr Dickens will help our Master bring a New Order into being—one in which the colour of one’s skin or the amount of money one has will never stand in the way of justice.”

Again, I was forced to laugh and again my laughter was sincere. Four years earlier, in autumn of 1865, a mob of Jamaican blacks had attacked the Court House in Morant Bay. Our governor there, Eyre, had overseen 439 of those blacks being shot or hanged and another 600 flogged. Some of our more deluded liberals had opposed Governor Eyre’s behaviour, but Dickens had told me that he’d wished the retaliation and punishment could have gone further. “I am totally opposed,” he’d said at the time, “with that platform-sympathy with the black—or the Native or the Devil—and believe it is morally and totally wrong to deal with Hottentots as if they were identical with men in clean shirts at Camberwell.…”

During the Mutiny in India long before I had met him, Dickens had cheered on the British general whose answer to the rebellion had been to tie captured mutinous Indians across the muzzles of cannon and to blast them “homeward” in pieces. Dickens’s wrath and contempt, in Bleak House and a dozen other of his novels, had long been aimed more at the idiotic missionaries who were more concerned with the plight of native brown and black people abroad than with the problems of good Englishmen and Englishwomen and white children here at home.

“You’re a fool,” I said that night in June to young Edmond Dickenson. “Your Master is a fool if he thinks that Charles Dickens wants to plot against white men in favour of Lascars and Hindoos and Chinamen and Egyptian murderers.”

Dickenson smiled tightly and rose. “I need to deliver this instalment of the notes to my Master before dawn.”

“Stay,” I said and raised the pistol until it was aimed at the man’s face. “Keep the d— ned papers, but tell me how to get this scarab out of my body. Out of my head.”

“It will leave when the Master commands it to leave or when you die,” said Dickenson with that hungry, happy cannibal’s look again. “Not before.”

“Not even if I were to kill an innocent person?” I said.

The young man’s light-coloured eyebrows rose. “You’ve heard of that ritual exception, have you? Very well, Mr Collins. You might try that. One cannot guarantee that it will work, but you might try that. I shall show myself out. Oh, and be assured that the young lady who let me in tonight will not remember doing so tomorrow.”

And without another word he had swung on his heel and left.

And it turned out that Dickenson was right about Carrie not remembering his visit; when I asked her the next morning about what aspect of our visitor’s appearance had disturbed her, she looked at me oddly and said that she remembered no visitor, except for a bad dream about some stranger in the rain, beating at the door and demanding to be let in.

Yes, I thought as we pulled into the station where someone from Gad’s Hill Place would be meeting me with a carriage or pony cart, telling my story of the end of that busy night in June might surprise the Inimitable.

But then, I thought, how terrible it would be if it did not surprise him.

ON THE SUNDAY of my pleasant weekend visit at Gad’s Hill Place—and it is difficult for me, even now, to forget or overstate just how pleasant such convivial times at Dickens’s home truly were—I was in James Fields’s chambers talking with him about the literary life in Boston when there came a knock at the door. It was one of Dickens’s older servants, who stepped into the room as formally as a courtier to Queen Victoria, clicked his heels, and handed Fields a note written in a fine calligraphic hand on a scroll of rich parchment. Fields showed it to me and then read it aloud:

Mr Charles Dickens presents his respectful compliments to the Hon. James T. Fields (of Boston, Mass., U.S.) and will be happy to receive a visit from the Hon. J.T.F. in the small library as above, at the Hon. J.T.F.’s leisure.

Fields had chuckled, then coughed with embarrassment at having read it aloud, and said to me, “I am sure that Charles means for both of us to join him in the library.”

I smiled and nodded but was sure that Dickens had not meant the joking invitation for me. He and I had not shared two private words in the four days I had been at Gad’s Hill Place, and it was increasingly apparent that the Inimitable had no plans to alter that unhappy state of public politeness but private silence between us. Nonetheless, I followed Fields as the American hurried down to the small library.

Dickens could not quite conceal his frown when he saw me enter, even though the expression crossed his features for only a fraction of a second—only an old friend who had known him for many years would have noticed the flicker of surprised displeasure—but he then smiled and cried out, “My dear Wilkie—how fortuitous! You have saved me from labouriously writing out my invitation to you. Penmanship was never my strongest quality, and I feared it would take me another half hour to produce the document! Come in, both of you! Sit down, sit down.”

Dickens was perched on the edge of a small reading table and there was a short stack of manuscript pages next to him. He had set out only two chairs where an audience might sit. For a slightly vertiginous moment I was sure that he was going to read notes from his own dreams of the Gods of the Black Land.

“Are we all the audience for… whatever this is?” asked the obviously delighted James T. Fields. The two men seemed to revel in each other’s presence, almost literally shed years as they carried out their boyish adventures, and I’d sensed a sadness in Dickens the last few days. Well, why not? I thought at that moment. When Fields and his wife leave England for America this week, it will be the last time the two men will ever see each other. Dickens will be long dead before Fields ever returns to England.

“The two of you, dear friends, are indeed the only audience for this reading,” said Dickens, who went to shut the door to the library himself and then returned to his easy perch on the edge of the thin-legged table.

“Chapter the First, The Dawn,” read Dickens.

“An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral tower be here! The well-known massive grey square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours…”

And so he read on for almost ninety minutes. James Fields was obviously enthralled. The longer I listened, the colder my skin and scalp and fingertips felt.

Chapter One was an impressionist (and sensationalist) description of an opium smoker coming up and out of his dreams in an opium den obviously based upon Opium Sal’s. Sal herself is there—properly described as “a haggard woman” with a “rattling whisper”—alongside a comatose Chinaman and a Lascar. The viewpoint character, obviously a white man awakening from his own opium dream, keeps muttering, “Unintelligible” as he listens to (and struggles with) the incoherent Chinaman and unconscious but muttering Lascar. He leaves, returning to a “Cathedral town” that is obviously Rochester (under the clumsy pseudonym of “Cloisterham”), and there in the second chapter we meet a cluster of the usual Dickens-style characters, including the Minor Canon, the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle, who is one of those kindly and dim-witted but well-meaning “Muscular Christians” of precisely the sort I was parodying in my own novel-in-progress.

It also becomes clear in this second chapter that the rogue opium-eater whom we’d glimpsed in the first chapter is a certain John Jasper, the lay precentor of the Cathedral. Jasper, we understand at once, has a beautiful voice (strangely more beautiful at some times than at others) and a dark, convoluted soul.

Also in this second chapter, we meet Jasper’s nephew, the shallow, callow, easygoing but obviously lazy and complacent Master Edwin Drood.… I admit that I jumped when Dickens actually read that name aloud.

In the third chapter we hear some rather well-written but gloomy descriptions of Cloisterham and its ancient history and then are introduced to yet another of Dickens’s near-infinite series of perfect, rosy-cheeked, virginal young heroine—romantic interests: this one with the cloyingly insipid name of Rosa Bud. Her few pages of presence did not make me want to strangle her immediately—as so many of his young, virginal, Dickens-perfect young characters such as “Little Dorrit” made me want to do—and by the time Edwin Drood and Rosa Bud take a walk together (we learn that they have been betrothed since childhood through the agencies of conveniently acquainted but deceased parents, but also that young Edwin is condescendingly complacent towards Rosa and the entire engagement, while Rosa simply wants out), I could feel the echoes of Dickens’s estrangement from Ellen Ternan as I’d heard it discussed between them outside the Peckham rail station that evening.

And in these first chapters, Fields and I heard that Dickens had made his Drood—the boy-man Edwin Drood—a young engineer who is going off to change Egypt. And he will be, says some silly woman at the orphanage where Rosa lives (why, oh why must Dickens’s young virgins always be orphans!), buried in the Pyramids.

“But don’t she hate Arabs, and Turks, and Fellahs, and people?” asks Rosa, speaking of the fictional perfect mate for “Eddy” Drood.

“ ‘Certainly not.’ Very firmly.

‘At least she must hate the Pyramids? Come, Eddy.’

‘Why should she be such a little—tall, I mean—goose as to hate the Pyramids, Rosa?’

‘Ah! You should hear Miss Twinkleton,’ often nodding her head and much enjoying the Lumps, ‘bore about them, and then you wouldn’t ask. Tiresome old burying-grounds! Isises and Ibises, and Cheopses, and Pharaohses; who cares about them? And then there was Belzoni, or somebody, dragged out by the legs, half-choked with bats and dust. All the girls say: Serve him right, and hope it hurt him, and wish he had been quite choked.’ ”

And I could see that Dickens was headed towards a continued and almost certainly elaborated comparison of the dust of the crypts and graves in Cloisterham—which is to say Rochester and its very real cathedral—with the real explorers of Egyptian tombs such as Belzoni, “half-choked with bats and dust.”

His third chapter—which is as far as he read to us that day—ended with his coquettish (but still uninterested, in Edwin at least) Rosa saying to this “Drood”—

“ ‘Now say, what do you see?’

‘See, Rosa?’

‘Why, I thought you Egyptian boys could look into a hand and see all sorts of phantoms. Can’t you see a happy Future?’

For certain, neither of them sees a happy Present, as the gate opens and closes, and one goes in, and the other goes away.”

It was as if Dickens were me writing about what I had seen of Ellen Ternan and him at Peckham Station.

When Dickens set down the last page of his short manuscript—his reading had been quiet, professional, cool, as opposed to the overheated acting of his recent reading tours and especially that of his Murder—James Fields burst into applause. The American looked to be close to weeping. I sat in silence and stared.

“Capital, Charles! Absolutely capital! A wonderful beginning! A marvellous, provocative, intriguing, and beguiling beginning! Your skills have never been more on display.”

“Thank you, my dear James,” Dickens said softly.

“But the title! You’ve not told us. What do you intend to call this wonderful new book?”

“Its title shall be The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” said Dickens, peering over his reading spectacles at me.

Fields applauded his approval and did not notice my sudden sharp intake of breath. But I am certain that Charles Dickens did.

FIELDS HAD GONE upstairs to change for dinner when I followed Dickens back to his study and said, “We need to talk.”

“Do we?” said the Inimitable as he slipped the fifty or so manuscript pages into a leather portfolio and locked the portfolio into one of his desk drawers. “Very well, let us step outside away from the press and eager ears of family, friends, children, servants, and dogs.”

It had been a warm October and it was a warm early evening as Dickens led me to his chalet. Usually by this time of the year the chalet was sealed for the coming wet winter, but not this year. Yellow and red leaves skittered across the lawn and were captured by bushes or the bloomless red geraniums planted along the drive as Dickens led me not down into the tunnel but straight across the highway. There was no traffic this Sunday afternoon, but I could see rows of high-spirited and well-bred horses tied or being tended outside the Falstaff Inn. A fox group had come by for refreshment after the hunt.

Upstairs on the first floor of his chalet, Dickens waved me to the spare Windsor chair and then sprawled in his own. I could see by the neatly arranged boxes of blue and cream paper, pens, ink pots, and his small statues of fencing frogs that Dickens had been writing out here recently.

“Well, my dear Wilkie, what do you feel we need to talk about?”

“You know very well, my dear Dickens.”

He smiled, took his spectacles out of a case, and set them on his nose, as if he were going to read some more. “Let us assume I do not know and proceed from there. Is it that you did not like the beginnings of my new book? I have written more, you know. Perhaps another chapter or two and your interest would have been engaged.”

“This is dangerous stuff, Charles.”

“Oh?” His surprise did not appear fully feigned. “What is dangerous? Writing a tale of mystery? I told you some months ago that I was sufficiently intrigued by the elements of your Moonstone—the opium addiction, the mesmerism, the Oriental villains, the central mystery of theft—that I might try my own hand at such a novel. So now I am. Or at least I have made a start.”

“You’re using Drood’s name,” I said so softly that it came out as an urgent whisper. I could hear male voices rising in a drinking song from the inn nearby.

“My dear Wilkie,” sighed Dickens. “Would you not agree that it’s time that we—or you—got over this fear of all things Droodish?”

What could I say to that? For a moment I was speechless. I had never told Dickens about Hatchery’s death—the grey glistening cords in the crypt. Or about my night at Drood’s Temple. Or of Inspector Field’s invasion of Undertown and what I now understood of its dire consequences to Field and his men. Or of Reginald Barris—filthy, bearded, living in rags and on scraps, hiding in fear—or of the Overtown temple-hideouts Barris had shown me just four months earlier…

“If I had time this evening,” said Dickens, as if musing to himself, “I would cure you of that obsession. Release you from it.”

I got to my feet and began pacing impatiently back and forth in the small room. “You’ll release yourself from your life if you publish this book, Charles. You once told me that Drood had requested you write a biography of him… but this is a parody.”

“Not in the least,” laughed Dickens. “It shall be a very serious novel which explores the layers and levels and contradictions of the criminal’s mind—in this case, the mind of a murderer, but also an opium addict and both master and victim of mesmerism.”

“How can one be both a master and victim of mesermism, Charles?”

“Be so kind as to read my book when it is finished, my dear Wilkie, and you shall see. Much will be revealed… and not only of the mystery, but perhaps of some of your own dilemma.”

I ignored that, since it made no sense. “Charles,” I said earnestly, leaning on his table and looking down at him as he sat, “do you really believe that smoking opium causes one to dream of flashing scimitars, scores of dancing girls, and—what was it? — ‘countless elephants careering in various gorgeous colours’?”

“ ‘… white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in numbers and attendants,’ ” corrected Dickens.

“Very well,” I said and stepped back and removed my spectacles to clean them with my handkerchief. “But do you really believe that any number of caparisoned or careering elephants and flashing scimitars are the stuff of an actual opium dream?”

“I have taken opium, you know,” Dickens said quietly. He seemed almost amused.

I confess to having rolled my eyes at this news. “So Frank Beard told me, Charles. A tiny bit of laudanum, and that just a few times, when you could not sleep on one of your last reading tours.”

“Still, my dear Wilkie, laudanum is laudanum. Opium is opium.”

“How many minims did you use?” I asked as I still paced back and forth, from open window to open window. Perhaps it was my own increased laudanum use that morning that kept me so excitable.

“Minims?” said Dickens.

“Drops of the opiate distillate in your wine,” I said. “How many drops?”

“Oh, I have no idea. Dolby handled the ministrations the few evenings I tried that medicinal approach. I would say two.”

“Two minims… two drops?” I repeated.

“Yes.”

I said nothing for a minute. That very day, as a guest at Gad’s Hill Place and having brought only a flask and a small refill jug in my baggage for the long weekend, I had drunk at least six hundred minims and possibly twice that. Then I said, “But you cannot convince me—or anyone who has actually researched the drug as I have, my dear Charles—that you dreamt of elephants and scimitars and golden domes.”

Dickens laughed. “My dear Wilkie, just as you said you… ‘tested,’ I believe your word was… your Moonstone character Franklin Blake’s ability to enter his fiancée’s bedroom while she was sleeping…”

“Sitting room next to her bedroom,” I corrected. “My editor insisted on it for propriety’s sake.”

“Ah, yes,” said Dickens with a smile. He had been that editor, of course. “Enter into his fiancée’s bedroom’s sitting room to steal a diamond, all while he was asleep, merely under the influence of laudanum he hadn’t known he’d taken…”

“You’ve expressed your doubts as to the realism of that more than once,” I said sourly. “Even though I’ve told you that I did experiment with similar situations under the influence of the drug.”

“Exactly my point, my dear Wilkie. You stretched the point to serve your plot. And so my caparisoned pachyderms and flashing scimitars—to serve the greater story.”

“This is not the point, Charles.”

“What is, then?” Dickens looked sincerely curious. He also looked sincerely exhausted. Those days, when the Inimitable wasn’t reading to others or at play, he tended to look like the old man he had suddenly become.

“The point is that Drood will kill you if you publish this book,” I said. “You told me yourself that he wants a biography, not a sensationalist novel filled with opium, mesmerism, all things Egyptian, and a weak character named Drood…”

“Weak but important to the story,” interrupted Dickens.

I could only shake my head. “You won’t heed my warning. Perhaps if you had seen the face of poor Inspector Field the morning after he was murdered…”

“Murdered?” said Dickens, suddenly sitting up straight. He removed his spectacles and blinked. “Who said that Charles Frederick Field was murdered? You know very well that the Times said he had died in his sleep. And what is this talk of having seen his face? You certainly could not have, my dear Wilkie. I remember you were in bed ill for weeks at the time and didn’t even know that poor Field had died until I told you many months later.”

I hesitated, considering whether to tell Dickens then about Reginald Barris’s explanation of Inspector Field’s true demise. But then I would have to explain Barris and why and where I saw him and all about the Overtown temples.…

While I was hesitating, Dickens sighed and said, “Your belief in Drood is enjoyable in its own dark way, Wilkie, but perhaps it is time it drew to a close. Perhaps it was a mistake for it ever to have begun.”

“Belief in Drood?” I snapped. “Must I remind you, my dear Dickens, that it was your story of your meeting with him at Staplehurst and your later stories of meeting with the monster in Undertown that got me involved in all this in the first place? It’s a little late, I would say, for you to tell me to cease believing in him, as if he were the ghost of Marley or Christmas Yet to Come.”

I thought Dickens would laugh at this last broadside, but he only looked sadder and more weary than before and said, as if to himself, “Perhaps it is too late, my dear Wilkie. Or perhaps not. But it is definitely too late this particular Sunday. I must go in and prepare to enjoy one of the last meals I may ever share with dear James and Annie.…”

His voice had become so soft and sad by the end of that sentence that I had to strain to hear the words over the sound of the fox hunters riding away from the Falstaff Inn.

“We shall speak of this another time,” said Dickens as he rose. I noticed that his left leg seemed unable to support his weight for a moment and that he steadied himself with his right hand on the table, getting his balance and teetering there a moment with his left hand and leg flailing uselessly, like a toddling infant taking his first steps, before he smiled again—ruefully this time, I thought—and hobbled out the door and down the stairs as we headed back to the main house.

“We shall speak of this another time,” he said again.

And we did, Dear Reader. But too late, as you will see, to avoid the tragedies to come.