Drood

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Where am I?

Gad’s Hill. But not Gad’s Hill Place, merely Gad’s Hill, the site where Falstaff attempted to rob the coach but was set upon by “thirty ruffians”—actually just Prince Hal and a friend—and was all but robbed himself before he fled in panic.

My black coach is parked to one side of the Falstaff Inn. The hired coach looks rather like a hearse, which is fitting. It is almost invisible in the shadows under the tall trees as the last of the evening’s twilight begins to fade. The driver up on the box is no driver, but a Hindoo sailor I have hired for this one night, paying him the equal of six months’ salary for a real driver. He is a poor driver but he is also a foreigner. He speaks no English (I communicate with him through our mutual schoolboy bits of German and some sign language) and knows nothing of England or its famous people. He will be at sea again in ten days and may never return to English shores. He is curious about nothing. He is a terrible driver—the horses sense his lack of skill and show him no respect—but he is the perfect driver for this night.

When is it?

It is the gentle evening of 8 June, 1870, twenty minutes after the sun has set. Swallows and bats dart through the shadows and into the open, the wings of the bats and the forked tails of the swallows showing as flattened V’s against the flat, clear pane of paling water-colours that is the twilight.

I see Dickens trotting across the road—or trying to trot, since he is hobbling slightly. He is wearing the dark clothing that I had suggested he don for this outing and has some sort of soft slouch hat on. Despite his obviously sore foot and leg, he carries no cane with him this evening. I open the door and he hops up into the coach to sit next to me.

“I told no one where I was going,” he says breathlessly. “Just as you requested, my dear Wilkie.”

“Thank you. Such secrecy will be necessary this one time only.”

“This is all very mysterious,” he says as I rap the ceiling of the coach with my heavy cane.

“It is meant to be,” I say. “Tonight, my dear Charles, we shall each find the answer to a great mystery—yours being the greater.”

He says nothing to this and only comments once as the coach careers and wobbles and jolts and lurches its way east along the highway. The sailor-driver is working the horses far too hard, and his crashing into holes and wild swerves from the slightest oncoming object threaten to spill the coach and us into the watery ditch from moment to moment.

“Your driver appears to be in an unholy hurry,” says Dickens.

“He is foreign,” I explain.

Some time later, Dickens leans across me and looks out the left window at the approaching tower-spire of Rochester Cathedral rising like a black spike against the dimming sky. “Ah,” he says, but I believe I detect more confirmation than surprise in the syllable.

The coach grinds and squeals to a stop at the entrance to the churchyard and we climb out—me carrying a small unlighted lantern and both of us moving somewhat stiffly due to the jouncing and bouncing of the wild ride here—and then the driver applies his whip again and the black coach rumbles away into the deepening twilight.

“You don’t wish the coach to wait for us?” Dickens enquires.

“The driver will come back for me when it is time,” I say.

If he notices my use of “for me” rather than “for us,” he does not comment on it. We move into the graveyard. The church and this old part of the city and the cemetery are empty and silent. The tide has gone out and we can smell the decaying reek of the mudflats, but from somewhere beyond that there comes the fresh salt scent of the sea and the sound of slow breakers. The only illumination is from a waning crescent moon.

Dickens says softly, “What now, Wilkie?”

I pull the pistol from my jacket—fumbling a moment to get the protruding hammer and sight free of the pocket lining—and aim it at him.

“Ah,” he says again, and again there is no audible tone of surprise. To my ear, through the pounding of my pulse, the syllable sounds merely sad, perhaps even relieved.

We stand there like that for a moment, an odd and awkward tableau. The wind from the sea rustles the boughs of a pine tree close to where the graveyard wall hides us from the street. The hem and loose collars of Dickens’s long summer jacket swirl around him like black pennants. He raises a hand to hold on to the brim of his soft cap.

“It’s the lime pit, then?” asks Dickens.

“Yes.” I have to try twice before the word comes out properly. My mouth is very dry. I am dying for a drink from my laudanum flask, but I do not want to divert attention from Dickens for an instant.

I gesture with the pistol and Dickens begins walking towards the blackness that is the rear of the graveyard where the open pit waits. I follow several feet behind, taking care not to get too close in case the Inimitable were to make some lunge for the gun.

Suddenly he stops and I do as well, taking another two paces away from him and raising and aiming the pistol.

“My dear Wilkie, may I make one request?” His voice is so soft that the words are all but lost to me under the hiss of the wind in the few trees and many marsh grasses.

“It hardly seems the time for requests, Charles.”

“Perhaps,” says Dickens, and I can see him smiling in the weak moonlight. I do not like him looking at me this way. I had hoped that he would keep his back turned until we reached the lime pit and the deed was done. “But I still have one,” he continues softly. Maddeningly, I cannot detect fear in his voice, which is far steadier than mine has been. “But only one.”

“What?”

“It may sound odd, Wilkie, but for some years now, I have had the strong premonition that I would die on the anniversary of the Staplehurst accident. May I reach in my waistcoat and look at my watch?”

To what purpose? I think dizzily. To prepare for the evening, I had drunk almost twice my usual allotment of laudanum and injected myself twice with the morphine, and now I feel the effects of these medicines not so much as reinforcment to my resolve but as a giddiness and odd light-headedness. “Yes, look, but quickly,” I manage to say.

Dickens calmly takes out his watch, peers at it in the moonlight, and winds it slowly and maddeningly before setting it back. “It is some minutes after ten,” he says. “The summer twilight lasts so late this time of year and we left late. It shan’t be long until midnight. I cannot explain why—since your goal is obviously for no one to know the means or location of my death or interment—but it would mean something to me if I were allowed to fulfil my various premonitions and leave this world on nine June rather than eight June.”

“You are hoping that someone comes along or that something arises to allow your escape,” I say in my new and shaky voice.

Dickens merely shrugs. “Should someone enter the graveyard, you can still shoot me and make your escape through the sea grasses and back to your carriage waiting nearby.”

“They would find your body,” I say in flat tones. “And you would be buried in Westminster Abbey.”

Dickens laughs then. It is that loud, unselfconscious, carefree, and infectious laugh that I have heard from him so many times before. “Is that what this is about, my dear Wilkie? Westminster Abbey? Does it calm your fears any that I have already stipulated in my will that I demand a simple, small funeral? No ceremonies at Westminster Abbey or anywhere else. I make clear that I want no more than three coaches in the final funeral procession and no more people at the burial than those three small coaches can carry.”

My pounding pulse—and now pounding headache—seem to be trying to synchronise with the distant pounding of surf on a sandbar somewhere to the east, but the irregular rhythm of the wind denies the syncopation.

I say, “There will be no funeral procession.”

“Obviously not,” says Dickens and infuriates me with another small smile. “All the more reason to grant me this one, last kindness before we part company forever.”

“To what purpose?” I ask at long last.

“You spoke of each of us solving a mystery tonight. Presumably my mystery to be solved is what—if anything—there might be after the instant of one’s death. But what is yours, Wilkie? What mystery did you wish to have solved this beautiful evening?”

I say nothing.

“Let me venture a guess,” says Dickens. “You would like to know how The Mystery of Edwin Drood was to have ended. And perhaps even learn how my Drood connects to your Drood.”

“Yes.”

He looks at his watch again. “It is only ninety minutes before midnight. I brought a flask of brandy—at your suggestion (although Frank Beard would be horrified to know this)—and I am sure you brought some refreshment for yourself. Why don’t we find a comfortable seat somewhere in this place and have one last conversation before the bells in that tower toll my appointed day?”

“You think that I will change my mind,” I say with a malicious smile.

“In truth, my dear Wilkie, I do not for a second believe that you will. Nor am I sure that I would want you to. I am very… weary. But I am not averse to a final conversation and taste of brandy in the night.”

With that Dickens turns on his heel and looks amidst the surrounding stones for some place to sit. My choice is either to follow his lead or shoot him there and drag his corpse the many yards to the waiting lime pit. I had hoped to avoid this last indignity for both of us. And, in truth, I do not mind the idea of sitting for a few minutes until this temporary light-headedness passes.

THE TWO FLAT GRAVESTONES he chooses for our chairs, separated by almost four feet of a longer, wider headstone that might be a low table, remind me of the day in this very churchyard when Dickens played waiter to Ellen Ternan, her mother, and me.

After receiving permission, Dickens removes his brandy flask from his jacket pocket and sets it on the table-stone in front of him and I do the same with my silver flask. I realise that I should have patted the Inimitable’s pockets when I first aimed my pistol at him. I know that Dickens keeps his own pistol in a drawer at Gad’s Hill Place, as well as the shotgun with which he murdered Sultan. Dickens’s apparent lack of surprise at the purpose of our “mystery outing” makes me think that he might have secreted a weapon on his person before coming out to the coach… and this might explain his otherwise inexplicable insouciance.

But it is too late now. I shall just keep a careful eye on him for the short time remaining.

We sit in silence for a while. Then the bells in the looming tower strike eleven, and my jagged nerves leap to the point that I almost accidentally pull the trigger on the pistol I am still aiming at Dickens’s heart.

He notes my reaction but says nothing as I lay the gun along my upper leg and knee, keeping it aimed at him but removing my finger from the inside of what Hatchery called, I believe, the “trigger guard.”

Dickens’s voice after the long silence makes me jump in my skin again. “That is the weapon that Detective Hatchery showed us once, is it not?”

“Yes.”

The wind rustles grasses for a moment. As if afraid of this silence, as if it is weakening my resolve, I force myself to say, “You know that Hatchery is dead?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And do you know how he died?”

“Yes,” says Dickens. “I do. Friends on the Metropolitan Police Force told me.”

We have nothing else to say on this topic. But it leads me to the questioning that is the only reason Charles Dickens remains alive this final, extra hour. “I was surprised that you used a character—obviously a detective in disguise with his huge head of false hair—named Datchery in Edwin Drood,” I say. “Such parody of poor Hatchery, especially given the… ah… lamentable details of his death, hardly seems sensitive.”

Dickens looks at me. As my eyes have adapted to the churchyard darkness, so far from the nearest streetlamps or the windows of inhabited homes, the headstones around us—and especially the flat one of light marble lying between Dickens and me like a games table upon which we have laid our final hands in poker—seem to be reflecting the moonlight into Dickens’s face like weak imitations of the focused gaslights he had rigged for his readings.

“Not a parody,” he says. “An affectionate remembrance.”

I sip from my flask and wave that away. It is not important. “But your Drood tale is less than half done—only the four monthly instalments have seen print and your entire manuscript to date is completed to only half the length of the full book—and yet you have already murdered young Edwin Drood. Asking as one professional to another—and as one with decidedly more experience and perhaps greater expertise in writing about mysteries—how can you possibly hope to sustain interest, Charles, when you have committed the murder so early in the tale yet have only one logical choice for the murderer… the very clear villain, John Jasper?”

“Well,” says Dickens, “as one professional replying to another, we must remember that… wait!”

The pistol jerks up in my hand and I blink away distraction as I aim the muzzle at his heart some four feet away. Has someone entered the graveyard? Is he trying to distract me?

No. It appears that the Inimitable simply has been struck by a thought.

“How is it, my dear Wilkie,” continues Dickens, “that you know of Datchery’s appearance and even of poor Edwin’s murder when these scenes, those numbers even, have not yet appeared and… ahh… Wills. Somehow you got a copy of the finished work from Wills. William Henry is a dear man, a trusted friend, but he has not been the same since that accident, what with all those doors creaking and slamming in his head.”

I say nothing.

“Very well, then,” says Dickens. “You know of the murder of young Drood on Christmas Eve. You know of Crisparkle’s discovery of Edwin’s watch and tie-pin in the river, although no body is found. You know of the suspicion falling on the fiery-tempered young foreigner from Ceylon, Neville Landless, brother to the beautiful Helena Landless, and of the blood found on Landless’s stick. You know of Edwin’s engagement to Rosa having been broken off and you know of Edwin’s uncle, the opium-eater John Jasper, fainting after the murder when he first learns that there had been no engagement and that his obvious jealousy had been for naught. I currently have six of the contracted twelve instalments written. But what is your question?”

I feel the laudanum warmth in my arms and legs and I grow more impatient. The scarab in my brain is even more impatient than I. I can feel it scurry back and forth past the inside of the bridge of my nose, peering first from one eye, then from the other, as if jostling for a better view.

“John Jasper did the murder on Christmas Eve,” I say, waving the pistol just a trifle as I speak. “I can even name the murder weapon… that long black scarf you have taken pains to mention at least three times so far for little reason. Your clues are hardly subtle, Charles!”

“It was to be an overly long cravat or neck tie,” he says with another damning smile. “But I changed it to the scarf.”

“I know,” I say impatiently. “Charley told me that you emphasised that the cravat must be shown in the illustration and then told Fildes to change it to a scarf. Neck tie, scarf, it makes little difference. My question remains—how can you possibly hope to keep the readers engaged for the full second half of the book if we all know that John Jasper is to be revealed as the murderer?”

Dickens pauses before speaking as if struck by an important thought. He sets his brandy flask down carefully on the weathered stone. For some reason, he has put his spectacles on—as if discussing his never-to-be-finished book might require some reading aloud to me—and the moon’s now twice-reflected glow turns the lenses of his spectacles to opaque silver-white disks.

“You want to finish the book,” he whispers.

“What!”

“You heard me, Wilkie. You want to approach Chapman and tell him that you can finish the novel for me—William Wilkie Collins, the famous author of The Moonstone, stepping in to carry on the work of his fallen friend, his deceased onetime collaborator. William Wilkie Collins, you will tell dear mourning Chapman and Hall, is the only man in England—the only man in the English-speaking world—the only man in the entire world! — who knew Charles Dickens’s mind sufficiently that he, William Wilkie Collins, can complete the mystery so tragically truncated when the aforesaid Mr Dickens disappeared suddenly, almost certainly taking his own life. You want to complete The Mystery of Edwin Drood, my dear Wilkie, and thus quite literally replace me in the hearts of readers as well as in the annals of great writers of our time.”

“That’s absolutely absurd,” I shout so loudly that I cringe and look around in embarrassment. My voice has echoed back from the cathedral and its tower. “It’s absurd,” I whisper urgently. “I have no such thought or ambition. I have never had any such thought or ambition. I write my own immortal books—The Moonstone sold better than your Bleak House or this current tale! — and as a mystery tale The Moonstone—as I was pointing out to you tonight—was infinitely more carefully plotted and thought out than is this confused tale of the murder of Edwin Drood.”

“Yes, of course,” Dickens says softly. But he is smiling that mischievous Dickens smile again. If I had a shilling for every time I have seen that smile, I would never have to write again.

“Besides,” I say, “I know your secret. I know the ‘Great Surprise,’ your clever plot hinge, upon which this rather transparent tale—by my professional standards—obviously hangs.”

“Oh?” says Dickens affably enough. “Please be so kind as to enlighten me, my dear Wilkie. As a newcomer to this mystery business, I may have failed to see my own obvious Great Surprise.”

Ignoring his sarcasm and idly pointing the pistol at his head, I say, “Edwin Drood is not dead.”

“No?”

“No. Jasper attempted to murder him, that is clear. And Jasper may even think that he succeeded in his efforts. But Drood survived, is alive, and shall join forces with your oh-so-obvious ‘heroes’—Rosa Bud; Neville and his sister, Helena Landless; your Muscular Christian, Minor Canon Crisparkle; and even that new sailor character you drag in so late…” I rack my memory for the character’s name.

“Lieutenant Tartar,” Dickens offers helpfully.

“Yes, yes. The heroic rope-climbing Lieutenant Tartar, so instantly and conveniently fallen in love with Rosa Bud, and all these other… benevolent angels… shall conspire with Edwin Drood to reveal the murderer… John Jasper!”

Dickens removes his spectacles, considers them with a smile for a moment, and then folds them carefully away in their case and sets the case back in his jacket pocket. I want to shout at him, Throw them away! You will have no more use for spectacles! If you keep them now, I will simply have to fish them out of the lime pit later!

He says softly, “And will Dick Datchery be one of these… benevolent angels… helping the resurrected Edwin to reveal the identity of the attempted murderer?”

“No,” I say, unable to hide the triumph in my voice, “for the so-called ‘Dick Datchery’ is actually Edwin Drood himself… in disguise!”

Dickens sits on his headstone and thinks about this for a moment. I have seen this silent motionless statue of the always-in-motion Charles Dickens before, but only when I have put him in checkmate in one of my few victorious chess games against him.

“You are… this extrapolation is… very clever, my dear Wilkie,” he says at last.

I have no need to speak. It must be almost midnight. I am both anxious and eager to get to the quick-lime pit and to finish the night’s business and then to go home and take a very hot bath.

“But one question, please,” he says softly, tapping at his flask with his manicured forefinger.

“What?”

“If Edwin Drood survived the murder attempt by his uncle, why does he have to go to all these labours… staying in hiding, enlisting allies, disguising himself as the almost comedic Dick Datchery? Why does he not just come forward and tell the authorities that his uncle attempted to murder him on Christmas Eve? Attempted, perhaps, even to the point of dumping Edwin’s presumed-dead but in-truth-unconscious body into a pit of quick-lime (from which he must have awakened and crawled out as the acidic substance began to eat upon his skin and clothing… a delicious scene, I admit to you, as one professsional to another, but not, I also confess, one that I had cause to write)… but surely then we have no murderer, only a crazy uncle attempting murder, and no reason for Edwin Drood to remain in hiding. There is then no murder of Edwin Drood and precious little mystery.”

“There are reasons for Drood to stay in hiding until the proper time comes,” I say confidently. I have no idea what they might be. I take a long drink of laudanum but make sure that I do not close my eyes for even an instant.

“Well, I wish you luck, my dear Wilkie,” Dickens says with an easy laugh. “But you should know this before you attempt to complete the book according to the outline I never wrote… young Edwin Drood is dead. John Jasper, under the influence of the same opium-laudanum you are drinking at this moment, murdered Edwin on Christmas Eve, just as the reader suspects at this point halfway through the book.”

“That’s absurd,” I say again. “John Jasper is so jealous of his nephew over Rosa Bud that he murders him? But what then… we have half the novel ahead to fill with nothing but… what? John Jasper’s confession?”

“Yes,” says Dickens with a truly evil smile. “That is precisely correct. The remainder of The Mystery of Edwin Drood is indeed—or at least the core of it shall be—the confessions of John Jasper and his alternate consciousness, Jasper Drood.”

I shake my head but the dizziness only grows worse.

“And Jasper is not Drood’s uncle, as we are given to believe,” continues Dickens. “He is Drood’s brother.”

I mean to laugh at this but it emerges as a particularly loud snort. “Brother!”

“Oh, yes. Young Edwin, you must remember, is planning to go to Egypt as a member of a troupe of engineers. He plans to change Egypt forever, perhaps make it his home. But what Edwin does not know, my dear Wilkie, is that his half-brother (not his uncle), Jasper Drood (not John Jasper) was born there… in Egypt. And he learned his dark powers there.”

“Dark powers?” I keep forgetting to aim the pistol but now bring the muzzle up again.

“Mesmerism,” whispers Dickens. “Control of the minds and actions of others. And not merely our English parlour-game level of mesmerism, Wilkie, but the serious sort of mind-control which approaches true mind reading. Precisely the sort of mental contact we have seen in the book between young Neville Landless and his beautiful sister, Helen Lawless. They honed their mind abilities in Ceylon. Jasper Drood learned his in Egypt. When Helen Lawless and Jasper Drood finally meet on the field of mesmeric battle—and they shall—it will be a scene spoken of in awe by readers for centuries.”

Helena Landless, not Lawless, I think, noting Dickens’s confusion of his own characters. Ellen Lawless Ternan. Even in this last unfinished fragment of a failed book, Dickens cannot restrain himself from connecting the most beautiful and mysterious woman in the novel with his own fantasy and obsession. Ellen Ternan.

“Are you listening, my dear Wilkie?” asks Dickens. “You look as if you may be on the verge of dozing.”

“Not at all,” I say. “But even if John Jasper is actually Jasper Drood, the murder victim’s older brother, what interest will that be to the reader who has to suffer through another several hundred pages of mere confession?”

“Never mere confession,” chuckles Dickens. “In this novel, my dear Wilkie, we shall be in the mind and consciousness of a murderer in a way that no reader has ever before experienced in the history of literature. For John Jasper—Jasper Drood—is two men, you see—two complete and tragic personalities, both trapped in the opium-riddled brain of the lay precentor of the Cloisterham…”

He pauses, turns, gestures theatrically to the tower and great structure behind him.

“… of the Rochester Cathedral. And it is within those very crypts…”

He gestures again and my dizzied gaze follows his gesture.

“… those very crypts where John Jasper / Jasper Drood will hide the quick-lime-reduced bones and skull of his beloved nephew and brother, Edwin.”

“This is sh—,” I say dully.

Dickens brays a laugh. “Perhaps,” he says, still laughing under his breath. “But with all the twists and turns ahead, the reader will be… would have been… delighted to learn of the many revelations that lie… would have lain… ahead in this tale. For instance, my dear Wilkie, our John Jasper Drood has committed his murder under the influence of both mesmerism and opium. The latter, the opium in greater and greater quantities, has been the trigger for the former—the mesmeric command to murder his brother.”

“That makes no sense,” I say. “You and I have repeatedly discussed the fact that no mesmerist can successfully command someone to commit murder… to commit any crime… against that person’s conscious moral and ethical convictions.”

“Yes,” says Dickens. He drinks the last of his brandy and slides the flask away in his upper left inside pocket (and I make note of where it is for later). As always when discussing some plot device or other element of his art, Charles Dickens’s voice is a mixture of the veteran professional and the excited boy eager to tell a story. “But you were not listening, my dear Wilkie, when I explained that a sufficiently powerful mesmerist—myself, for instance, but certainly John Jasper Drood or those other, as yet unmet, Egyptian figures beneath the surface of this story—can mesmerise a person like the precentor of Cloisterham Cathedral to live in a fantasy world where he literally knows not what he is doing. And it is the opium and perhaps—say—morphine in great quantities which fuel this ongoing fantasy that can lead him, without his comprehension, to murder and worse.”

I lean forward. The pistol is in my hand but forgotten. “If Jasper kills his nephew… his brother… while under mesmeric control of this shadowy Other,” I whisper, “who is the Other?”

“Ah,” cries Charles Dickens, slapping his knee with delight. “That is the most marvellous and satisfying part of the mystery, my dear Wilkie! Not one reader in a thousand—no, not one reader in ten million—not even one fellow writer amongst the hundreds that I know and esteem—shall, until the full confession of John Jasper Drood is complete, be able to guess that the mesmerist and true murderer in the mystery of Edwin Drood is none other than…”

The bells in the tall tower behind Dickens begin tolling.

I blink at them. Dickens swivels on his headstone to watch, as if the tower is going to do something other than silently and coldly and blindly house the bells tolling his doom.

When the twelve strokes are sounded and the final echoes die out over the low, dark streets of Rochester, Dickens turns back to me and smiles. “We have heard the chimes at midnight, Wilkie.”

“You were saying?” I prompt. “The identity of the mesmerist? The real murderer?”

Dickens folds his arms across his chest. “I have told enough of this tale for tonight.” He shakes his head, sighs, and gives the smallest of smiles. “And for this lifetime.”

“Stand,” I say. I feel so dizzy that I almost fall. It is difficult to get a proper grip on the pistol and the unlighted lantern, as if I have forgotten how to do two things at once. “Walk,” I command, although whether to Dickens or to my own legs, I am not certain.

I REALISE LATER how infinitely easy it would have been for Dickens to flee in that brief moment or two as we walked to the rear of the graveyard and then into the rougher grasses at the edge of the marsh where the quick-lime pit waited.

If Dickens began running—if I missed with my first hurried shot—then it would have been child’s play for him to run and crawl and hide amongst the high marsh grasses. It would be difficult to find him there in the daylight and nearly impossible at night, even with the small lantern I was carrying. Even the sound of his running or crawling would be disguised by the rising wind and crash of distant surf.

But he does not run. He leads the way. He seems to be humming a soft tune under his breath. I do not catch the melody.

When we stop, he is at the brink of the lime pit but facing me. “You must remember,” he says, “that the metal objects in my pockets will not melt in the lime. My watch, given to me by Ellen… the flask… my pin and…”

“I remember,” I rasp. I suddenly find it very difficult to breathe.

Dickens glances over his shoulder at the lime but remains facing me. “Yes, this is precisely where I would have had Jasper Drood confess that he brought the corpse of Edwin Drood… Jasper is younger than you and I, Wilkie, so even though the opium has reduced his physical abilities by half, carrying the dead boy a few hundred yards was no hardship…”

“Be silent,” I say.

“Do you want me to turn around?” asks Dickens. “To look away? To face the pit?”

“Yes. No. Suit yourself.”

“Then I shall continue looking at you, my dear Wilkie. My former friend and fellow traveller and once-eager collaborator.”

I fire the pistol.

The incredible noise it makes and the unexpected recoil in my hand—I could not in all honesty say that I truly recall the experience of firing it in the servants’ stairway two winters ago—causes me almost to drop the weapon.

“Good God,” says Dickens. He is still standing there. He pats his chest, belly, groin, and upper legs almost comically. “I believe you missed,” he says.

Still he does not run.

There are, I know, three bullets left in the gun.

My entire arm shaking, I take aim this time and fire again.

The tail of Dickens’s jacket leaps up about level with his waist. Again he pats himself. This time he holds up the jacket and in the moonlight I can see his forefinger poking through the hole the bullet made. It must have missed his hip by less than an inch.

“Wilkie,” Dickens says very softly, “perhaps it would be better for both of us if…”

I fire again.

This time the bullet strikes Dickens in the upper chest—there is no mistaking that sound, like a heavy hammer striking cold meat—and he spins around once and falls on his back.

But not into the lime pit. He lies at the edge of the pit.

And he is still alive. I can hear the loud, pained rasping of his breath. It seems to be burbling and gurgling somewhat, as if there is blood in his lungs. I walk closer until I am towering over him on the side away from the quick-lime. I wonder as he looks up if he sees me as a terrible silhouette against the stars.

In my writing, I have had—upon a few occasions—to use that ugly French term coup de grâce—and for some reason I always have trouble remembering how to spell it. But I have no trouble remembering of what it consists—the final shot must be to the brain, to be certain.

And there is only one bullet left in Hatchery’s pistol.

Going to one knee, I set the lantern down and crouch next to the Inimitable, the creator of fools such as the Dedlocks and the Barnacles and the Dombeys and Grewgious, but also of such villains and parasites and dark souls as the Fagins and Artful Dodgers and Squeerses and Casbys and Slymes and Pecksniffs and Scrooges and Vholeses and Smallweeds and Weggs and Fledgebys and Bumbles and Lammles and Hawks and Fangs and Tiggs and…

I set the muzzle of Hatchery’s heavy gun hard against the moaning Charles Dickens’s temple. I realise that I am holding my empty left hand up as a sort of shield to protect my own face from the spatter of skull shards, blood, and brain matter that will erupt in a second or two.

Dickens is mumbling, trying to speak.

“Unintelligible…” I hear him moan. Then, “Wake up… awaken… Wilkie, wake…”

The poor deluded b— d is trying to wake himself from what he must think is a terrible nightmare. Perhaps this is how we are all dragged out of this life, moaning and grimacing and praying to an absent and unfeeling God that we might wake up.

“Awake…” he says, and I pull the trigger.

It is done. The brain that conceived of and brought to life David Copperfield and Pip and Esther Summerson and Uriah Heep and Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit and Bob Cratchit and Sam Weller and Pickwick and a hundred other living beings that live on in the minds of millions of readers is now spread across the edge of the lime pit in a grey-and-red line of slime that looks oily in the moonlight. Only the shattered bits of skull look white.

Even with his helpful warning, I almost forget to take his gold and other metal possessions before rolling the corpse into the pit.

I hate touching him and try to touch only fabric, which is possible in getting the watch, the flask, the coins in his pocket, and the pin, but for the rings and studs, I am forced to make contact with his cooling flesh.

I light the shielded bullseye lantern for this final operation and notice—with some small satisfaction—that my hand is steady as I strike the match and set it to the wick. I’ve brought a rolled-up burlap bag in my outside jacket pocket and now set all the metal objects in it, making sure not to drop anything into the high grass here near the pit.

Finally I am finished and set the sack away in my bulging pocket next to the pistol. I will have to remind myself to stop at the nearby river and throw all those things—pistol and sack—into the deep water there.

Dickens lies sprawled in the impossibly unselfconscious attitude known only to the dead. Standing with my booted foot on his bloodied chest, I consider saying some words but decide not to. There are times when words are superfluous, even to a writer.

It takes more effort than I have imagined, but after several strong shoves with my boot and a final kick, Dickens rolls once and slides into the quick-lime. Left to its own devices, the body would have half-floated and remained visible until daylight arrives, but I fetch the long iron pole that I have set away in the weeds for this night and push and poke and lean my weight into it—it feels rather like pressing a rod down into a large bag of soft suet—until the body goes under the surface and stays under the surface.

Then, holding the lamp close just long enough to check that I have no blood or other incriminating material on my person, I douse the light and walk back to the road to summon the waiting sailor-driver and coach. I whistle a soft tune as I walk through the glowing headstones. Perhaps, I think, it is the same tune that Dickens whistled under his breath just a few minutes earlier.

AWAKEN! WILKIE… wake up! Awake.”

I moaned, rolled, thrust my forearm over my forehead, but managed to open one eye. My head pounded with a laudanum-morphia headache that sang of overdose. Thin moonlight painted random stripes across furniture in my bedroom. And across a face mere inches from mine.

The Other Wilkie was sitting on the edge of my bed. He had never come so close before… never.

He spoke.

His voice this time was not my voice, nor even an altered imitation of my voice. It was the voice of an old, querulous woman, the voice of one of the Weird Sisters in the opening scene of Macbeth.

He or she touched my bare arm and it was not the touch of a living being.

“Wilkie…” he/she breathed at me, the bearded face almost touching mine. His breath—my breath—stank of carrion. “Kill him. Wake up. Listen to me. Finish your book… before June ninth. Finish Man and Wife quickly, next week. And on the day you finish it, kill him.”