Drood

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

In response to my letter replying to his “Perhaps you may be glad to see me by and by. Who knows?” overture, Dickens invited me down to Gad’s Hill Place on the fifth of June, a Sunday. I sent word that I would be there by three PM, after the Inimitable’s usual Sunday writing time, but actually took an earlier train and walked the last mile or so.

The beauty of the June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming was in bloom and blossom. The sunlight was a benediction. The breezes were so caressingly soft and intimate on the skin as to be embarrassing. A few white puffy clouds moved like aerial sheep above the green and rolling hills inland, but towards the water there was only more blue, more sunshine. The air was so clear that one could see the towers of London from twenty miles away. The farmlands beyond my carriage window and on either side of the dusty road as I walked the last mile or so were busy with playful little calves, running colts, and the occasional cluster of rural human children intent upon whatever games such a species pursues in early-summer fields and forests. It was almost enough to make a confirmed city-dweller such as myself want to buy a farm—but a jolt of laudanum followed by some brandy from a second, smaller flask cured that idiot’s passing impulse.

No one greeted me at the drive of Gad’s Hill Place this day, not even the pair of sentry dogs—sired by that assassinated Grendel-of-dogs, Sultan, I was sure—that Dickens usually kept chained there by the entrance pillars.

The red geraniums (still Dickens’s favourite flower, the annuals faithfully planted by the author’s gardeners every spring and left, at his command, as late into the autumn as possible) were everywhere—along the drive, in the sunny section near the bow windows outside Dickens’s office in the main house, paralleling the hedges, out along the road—and, as always and for reasons I did not yet understand, I recoiled from their serried ejaculations of red blotches with a sense of real horror.

Guessing that Dickens might be in his chalet on such a perfect day, I went down through the cool tunnel—although there was almost no traffic on the highway above it—and emerged near the outside stairway that led up to the first-storey office.

“Halloa the bridge!” I called up.

“Halloa the approaching sloop,” came down Dickens’s strong voice.

“Permission to come aboard?”

“What is the name of your ship, sirrah? And where are you from and where are you bound?”

“My poor barque is called the Mary Jane,” I called back up the staircase, putting on my best attempt at an American accent. “Set sail from Saint Looee and bound for Calcutta, by way of Samoa and Liverpool.”

Dickens’s laughter came down on the soft breeze. “Then by all means, Captain, you must come up!”

DICKENS HAD BEEN WRITING at his table and he was setting his manuscript pages into his oiled-leather portfolio as I came in. His left foot was propped up on a pillow which sat on a low stool, but he took his leg down as I entered. Although Dickens waved me to the only other chair in the room, I was too agitated to sit and contented myself with pacing from one window to the next and back.

“I am so delighted you chose to accept my invitation,” Dickens was saying as he secured his writing utensils and buckled the portfolio closed.

“It was time,” I said.

“You look a bit heavier, Wilkie.”

“You look thinner, Charles. Except for your foot, which seems to have put on a few pounds.”

Dickens laughed. “Our dear and mutual friend Frank Beard has warnings for both of us, does he not?”

“I see less of Frank Beard these days,” I said, moving from the east-facing window to the south-facing one. “Frank’s lovely children have declared war on me since I revealed the hypocrisies of Muscular Christianity.”

“Oh, I hardly think it is the revelation of hypocrisy that has made the children angry at you, Wilkie. Rather the heresy of impugning their various sports heroes. I have not had the time to read it myself, but I hear that the instalments of Man and Wife have ruffled quite a few feathers.”

“And sold more and more copies as it has done so,” I said. “Before this month is out, I plan to publish it in book form, in three volumes, with the firm of F. S. Ellis.”

“Ellis?” said Dickens, getting to his feet and reaching for a silver-headed cane. “I wasn’t aware that the Ellis firm published books. I thought it dealt with cards, calendars, that sort of thing.”

“This is their first venture,” I said. “They will be selling on commission and I will be receiving ten percent on every copy sold.”

“Marvellous!” said Dickens. “You seem somewhat restless—perhaps even agitated—today, my dear Wilkie. Would you care to join me in a walk?”

“Can you walk, Charles?” I was eyeing his new cane, which was indeed a cane, of the long-handled type one saw being carried by lame old men, rather than the sort of dashing walking stick preferred by young men such as myself. (As you may remember, Dear Reader, I was 46 in this summer of 1870, while Dickens was 58 and showed every year and month and more of that advanced age. But then, several people had recently commented on the grey in my beard, my ever-increasing girth, my problems catching my breath, and a certain hunched-over quality my tired body had assumed of late, and some had been so impertinent as to suggest that I was looking much older than my years.)

“Yes, I can walk,” said Dickens, taking no offence at my comment. “And I try to every day. It is getting late, so I do not suggest a serious walk to Rochester or some other daunting destination, but we might manage a stroll through the fields.”

I nodded and Dickens led the way down, leaving—one presumes—the portfolio with his unfinished manuscript of The Mystery of Edwin Drood there on his chalet worktable where anyone might come in off the highway and filch it.

WE CROSSED THE ROAD towards his house but then went around the side yard, past the stables, through the rear yard where he had once consigned his correspondence to a bonfire, and out into the field where Sultan had died some autumns earlier. The grasses here that had been dead and brown then were green and high and stirring in the breeze today. A well-worn path led off towards the rolling hills and a scrim of trees that marked the path of a broad stream that ran towards the river that ran to the sea.

Neither of us was running this day, but if Dickens’s walking pace had been diminished, I could not discern it. I was huffing and puffing to keep up.

“Frank Beard tells me that you’ve had to add morphine to your pharmacopoeia in order to sleep,” said Dickens, the cane in his left hand (he had always carried his stick in his right hand before) quickly rising and falling. “And that, although you’ve told him you discontinued the practice, a syringe he lent you some time ago has gone missing.”

“Beard is a dear man,” I said, “who often lacks discretion. He was keeping the world informed as to your pulse rate during your final reading tour, Charles.”

My walking partner had nothing to say to that.

Finally I added, “The daughter of my servants, George and Besse—still servants of mine for the time-being at least—had been pilfering things. I had to send her away.”

“Little Agnes?” cried Dickens. “Stealing? Incredible!”

We crossed the brow of the first low hill so that Gad’s Hill Place, the highway, and its attending line of trees all fell behind. The path wound parallel to the tree line here for a way and then crossed a little bridge.

“Do you mind if we stop for a moment, Charles?”

“Not in the least, my dear Wilkie. Not in the least!”

I leaned on the little arched bridge’s railing and took three sips from my silver flask. “An uncomfortably warm day, today, is it not?”

“You think so? I find it close to perfect.”

We headed off again, but Dickens was either tiring or walking slowly for my benefit.

“How is your health, Charles? One hears so many things. As with our dear Frank Beard’s ominous rumblings, one doesn’t know what is true. Are you recovered from your tours?”

“I feel much better these days,” said Dickens. “At least some days I do. Yesterday I told a friend that I was certain I should be living and working deep into my eighties. And I felt as if this were true. Other days… well, you know about the hard days, my friend. Other days, one does what one must to honour commitments and to honour the work itself.”

“And how is Edwin Drood coming along?” I asked.

Dickens glanced at me before replying. With the terrible exception of Dickens’s savaging of The Moonstone, we rarely, either one of us, offered to discuss work in progress with the other. The ferruled base of his cane swung with a sweet, summery swish-swish against the tall grass to either side of the path.

“Drood is coming along slowly but well, I think,” he said at last. “It is a much more complicated book, in terms of plot and twists and revelations, than most I have attempted in the past, my dear Wilkie. But you know that! You are the master of the mystery form! I should have submitted all my novice’s problems to you for a Virgil’s guidance in the ways of mystery and suspense long before this! How goes your Man and Wife?”

“I look to finish it in the next two or three days.”

“Marvellous!” cried Dickens once again. We were out of sight of the brook now, but its soft sounds followed us as we passed through more trees and then came out into another open field. The path continued winding towards the distant sea.

“When I do finish it, I wonder if you would do me a great favour, Charles.”

“If it is within my poor and failing powers, I shall certainly attempt to do so.”

“I believe it is within our powers to solve two mysteries on the same night… if, that is, you’re willing to go on a secret outing with me on Wednesday or Thursday night.”

“A secret outing?” laughed Dickens.

“The mysteries would have a greater chance of being solved if neither you nor I told anyone—no one at all—that we were going anywhere that evening.”

“Now that does sound mysterious,” said Dickens as we came to the brow of a hill. There were large barrow stones—Druid stones, the children and farmers called them, although they were nothing of the sort—scattered and heaped there. “How could keeping our outing a secret improve the chances at success of that outing?”

“I promise that if you join me when I come to fetch you a half hour or so after sunset on Wednesday or Thursday night, odds are great that you will discover the answer to that question, Charles.”

“Very well, then,” said Dickens. “Wednesday or Thursday night, you say? Thursday is the ninth of June. I may have a commitment for that evening. Would Wednesday suit you?”

“Perfectly,” I said.

“Very good, then,” said Dickens. “Now I have something that I have been waiting to discuss with you, my dear Wilkie. Shall we find a relatively comfortable perch on one of these great fallen stones? It should only take a few moments, but it is the reason I asked you here today and it truly is of some importance.”

Charles Dickens stop and sit down during a walk? I thought. I never believed the day would come. But since I was soaked through with perspiration from our stroll and wheezing like a lung-shot warhorse, I welcomed it.

“I am your obedient servant, sir,” I said and gestured for him to lead on and choose our fallen stone.

FIRST OF ALL, Wilkie, I owe you a deep and sincere apology. Several apologies, actually, but one above all for a certain treatment of you that is so unfair and so wrong that I truly do not know where to begin.”

“Not at all, Charles. I cannot imagine anything that…”

Dickens stopped me with a raised palm. From where we sat on the high barrow stone, Kent stretched out and rolled away in all directions. I could see the haze of London in the pure light and the Channel to our left. The tower of Rochester Cathedral was like a grey tent spike in the distance.

“You may not be able to forgive me, my dear Wilkie,” he continued. “I would not… could not… forgive you should the tables somehow be turned.”

“What on earth are you going on about, Charles?”

Dickens gestured towards the distant treetops of the highway and his home as if that explained something. “For almost five years now—five years this week—you and I have jested back and forth about a creature named Drood.…”

“Jested?” I said with some impatience. “Hardly ‘jested,’ I would say.”

“That is precisely the point of my apology, my dear friend. There is, of course, no Drood… no Egyptian Temple in Undertown…”

What was he up to? What game was Dickens playing with me now? I said, “So all your tales of Drood, going back to the accident, were lies, Charles?”

“Precisely,” said Dickens. “Lies for which I apologise abjectly and totally. And with a shame it is impossible even for me to express… and I have known shame.”

“You would not be human if you had not,” I said drily. Again I could but wonder what game he was at now. If I had been a simpleton depending upon Dickens’s tales for my knowledge that Drood was real—as real as that white sail we both could see at that moment as we looked towards the sea—then perhaps the Inimitable would have something to apologise for.

“You don’t believe me,” said Dickens, looking warily at me.

“I don’t understand you, Charles. You are not the only one who has seen Drood and suffered from his actions, you know. You forget that I have seen other living men and women who have become slaves of the Egyptian. What about the Undertown river gondola and the two masked men who piloted it that night we descended far below the crypts and catacombs? Are you trying to tell me that the gondola and those men who took you away were mere phantasms?”

“No,” said Dickens. “They were my gardeners, Gowen and Smythe. And the ‘gondola,’ as you call it, was a mere Thames river barque with the roughest wooden adornments painted and hammered on fore and aft. It would not have passed muster in the crudest amateur theatrical—or any place that had lights. As it was, Gowen and Smythe had the Devil’s own time carrying that leaking barque down endless flights of sewer-access stairs—they never did bring it back up, merely abandoned it there.”

“You went off to Drood’s Temple with them,” I said.

“I sat there as we paddled around the bend of that stinking sewer until we were out of sight and then spent hours finding my way back through adjoining tunnels,” said Dickens. “I almost became lost for good that night. It would have served me right if I had.”

I laughed at this. “Listen to yourself, Charles. Someone would have to be out of his mind to plan and carry out such an elaborate charade. It would be not only cruel, but actively mad.”

“Sometimes I agree with you on that point, Wilkie,” sighed Dickens. “But you must remember that the descent into Undertown and the gondola were meant to be the last scene of the last act of this particular pretence, at least as far as I was concerned. How was I to know that your novelist’s deeper consciousness and vast quantities of opium would keep the play going on in your head for years more?”

I shook my head. “Drood’s men on the gondola were not the only others involved in this. What about Detective Hatchery? Did you even know that poor Hatchery was dead?”

“I did,” said Dickens. “I heard about it upon my return from America and made it my business to enquire at the Metropolitan Police Force Detective Bureau to discover what had happened to him.”

“And what did they tell you?”

“That former detective Hibbert Hatchery had been murdered in the same crypt in Saint Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery where I had led you sometime earlier in our faux expedition into the underground world there.”

“I fail to see what was ‘faux’ about that descent into Hell,” I said. “But that is irrelevant right now. Did they tell you how Hatchery died?”

“He was struck unconscious during an attempted robbery and then they disemboweled him,” Dickens said softly. The words seemed to give him pain. “I guessed at the time that you were almost certainly there—down in Lazaree’s den—and I know that coming upon his corpse when you emerged must have been horrible.”

I had to smile. “And who is the they that the Detective Bureau thought responsible, Charles?”

“Four Hindoo sailors who had jumped ship. Thugs. Evidently they had followed you and Hatchery to the crypt—the police did not know it, of course, Wilkie, but I assumed that you were down in King Lazaree’s den below and knew nothing of this—waited until the huge detective was sleeping in the crypt sometime before dawn, and attempted to rob him. Evidently they wanted his watch and the money he had in his pocket.”

“That’s absurd,” I said.

“Given the size of our late detective friend, I agree,” said Dickens. “And Hatchery did manage to break the neck of one of his four assailants. But this incensed the others, and after they knocked Hibbert unconscious with some sort of sap, they… did what they did to him.”

How very tidy, I thought. Scotland Yard would have an explanation for everything they did not understand. “And how did the Detective Bureau know that it was four Hindoo sailors?” I asked.

“Because they caught the three living ones,” said Dickens. “Caught them after the body of the fourth man was found floating in the Thames. Caught them and made them confess. They still had Hatchery’s inscribed watch, purse, and some of the money with them. The police were not gentle with them… many of the officers had known Hatchery.”

I had to blink at this. They are very thorough in their lies. “My dear Charles,” I said softly but with some irritation, “none of this was in the newspapers.”

“Of course it was not. As I said, the police did not deal gently with these Hindoo policeman-killers. None of the three survived to see trial. As far as the press was concerned, there had never been an arrest in the case of the murder of Hibbert Hatchery. Indeed, none of the details of the murder ever reached the press, Wilkie. The Metropolitan Police Force is, all in all, a good institution as government institutions go, but they have their dark side, as do we all.”

I shook my head and sighed. “And this is what you wanted to apologise to me about, Charles? Lying to me about Drood? Staging such a farce with the crypts and gondola? Not telling me about how—you believe—Detective Hatchery died?” I thought of the many times I had seen Drood, talked to Inspector Field about Drood, listened to Detective Barris talk about Drood, seen Edmond Dickenson after his conversion to Drood, and seen Drood’s minions in Undertown and his temples in Overtown. I had seen a note from Drood and seen Drood himself sitting and talking with Dickens in my own house. Dickens’s simple lie on this beautiful Sunday was not going to make me believe that I was mad.

“No,” he said, “that is not what I want to chiefly apologise for, although it is a subsidiary element of my larger apology. Wilkie, do you remember that first day you came to my home and office after the Staplehurst accident?”

“Of course. You told me all about your initial encounter with Drood.”

“Before that. When you first came into the room. Do you remember what I was doing and what we talked about?”

I had to work to recall this, but eventually I said, “You were fiddling with your watch and we talked for a moment about mesmerism.”

“I mesmerised you then, my dear Wilkie.”

“No, Charles, you did not. Can you not recall that you said you would like to and began to swing your watch, but that I simply waved it all away? You yourself agreed that my will was too strong to submit to magnetic control of any sort. And then you put away the watch and told me about the Staplehurst accident.”

“Yes, I said that your will was too strong to be mesermised, Wilkie, but that was after ten minutes of having you in a mesmeric trance.”

I laughed aloud at this. What game is he playing here? I adjusted my hat brim to keep the bright sun out of my eyes. “Charles, now you are lying… but to what purpose?”

“It was a sort of experiment, Wilkie,” said Dickens. He was literally hanging his head in a way that reminded me of Sultan. If I’d had his shotgun right then, I would have dealt with Dickens precisely the way that Dickens had dealt with Sultan.

“Even then,” continued Dickens, “even then, I had some vague notions of writing a novel in which a man carries out certain… actions… while under an incredibly extended period of mesmeric post-trance suggestion. I confess that I was especially interested in how such a suggestion of belief would affect a creative artist. That is, someone with a well-honed professional imagination to begin with and—I confess even more—such a creative person, a writer, who was, even then, using large quantities of opium, since opium was to be a leit motif in the mystery tale I had in mind.”

Here I not only laughed but I slapped my leg. “Very good! Oh, very good, Charles! And you’re telling me that you simply commanded me—via your mesmeric control—to believe in the Drood tale that you then told me when you awoke me from the trance?”

“I did not command such belief,” Dickens said morosely. “I merely suggested it.”

I patted both knees with both hands. “Oh, very good. And now you will tell me that you made up the entire idea of our friend Drood from whole cloth, using that incredible Charles Dickens imagination and love of the macabre!”

“Not at all,” said Dickens. He looked towards the west and I could have sworn that there were tears in his eyes. “I had dreamt of Drood the night before—dreamt of the creature moving amongst the dead and dying at Staplehurst, just as I described to you, my dear Wilkie, mixing and interweaving the fantasy of Drood with the horror of the real experience.”

I could not keep from smiling broadly. I removed my spectacles, mopped my brow with a paisley handkerchief, and shook my head in admiration of the audacity of what he was telling me and of the game he was playing. “So now you say that you dreamt Drood into existence.”

“No,” said Dickens. “I had first heard the legend of Drood from Inspector Charles Frederick Field more than a decade before Staplehurst. Why I interwove the old inspector’s obsessive fantasy into my nightmare about what happened at Staplehurst, I shall never know.”

“Field’s fantasy?” I cried. “Now it is Inspector Field who invented Drood!”

“Before you and I first met, my dear Wilkie. You remember that I did a series of essays on crime and the city that were published by my old magazine Household Words as far back as eighteen fifty-two. I was actually introduced to Inspector Field by other actors who had known Field when he had been an amateur actor at the old Catherine Street Theatre more than a decade earlier. But it was indeed Police Detective Charles Frederick Field, during our long walks through the night streets of the Great Oven back in the early eighteen fifties, who told me about the spectre in his mind whom he called Drood.”

“Spectre,” I repeated. “You are telling me that Inspector Field was insane.”

“Not at first, I believe,” said Dickens. “I later spoke to many of his colleagues and superiors in the Detective Bureau about this—as well as with the man who succeeded Field as Chief of Detectives when the inspector actually did break down.”

“Broke down because of Drood,” I said sarcastically. “Because of Field’s fantasy about an Egyptian occultist killer named Drood.”

“Yes. At first it was not a fantasy. There were a series of incredible murders about the time that Charles Frederick Field was becoming Chief of Detectives—all were unsolved. Some seemed to relate to cases that Inspector Field had been unable to solve in earlier years. Some of the Lascars and Malays and Chinamen and Hindoos that the police dragged in at the time tried to blame a spectral figure called Drood—the details were always hazy, but consistent at least on the basics that this monster was Egyptian, was a serial-murderer, could control other people by the powers of his mind and by the rituals of his ancient cult, and that he lived in some vast temple underground—or, according to some of the opium-eating villains, in a temple beneath the Thames itself.”

“Shall we walk back?” I said.

“Not yet, Wilkie,” said Dickens. He set his trembling hand upon my forearm for a moment but pulled it away when he saw my glare. “Do you see, though,” he went on, “how this became first an obsession with Field, then a fantasy? According to the many policemen and detectives I later spoke to, including Hatchery, it was when Lord Lucan was murdered so foully while under Charles Frederick Field’s personal protection, and the identity of the murderer never discovered that… what is funny, Wilkie?”

I simply could not stop laughing. This story, this plot, was so wonderfully baroque yet somehow so tidily logical. It was so, so… Dickensian.

“It was his fantasy about this make-believe master criminal, Drood, that eventually cost Field his job and then his pension,” said Dickens. “Inspector Charles Frederick Field simply could not believe that the terrible crimes which he saw and had reported to him every day of his working life could be so random… so meaningless. In his increasingly confused mind, there had to be a single master criminal behind all the terror and misery he saw and experienced. A single villain. A master criminal nemesis worthy of him, of the great Inspector Charles Frederick Field. And a nemesis who was not really human, but who—when caught (by Inspector Charles Frederick Field, of course)—would bring an end to the literally endless series of brutalities that he was spending his life observing.”

“So you are saying,” I said, “that the respected former Chief of Detectives whom we both knew, Charles Frederick Field, was insane by the end.”

“As mad as a hatter,” said Dickens. “For many years. His idée fixe had become an obsession, the obsession a fantasy, the fantasy a nightmare from which he could not awaken.”

“It’s all very neat, Charles,” I said softly. This was such nonsense that it had not even caused my pulse to speed up. “But you forget the others who have seen Drood.”

“Which others?” Dickens asked softly. “Besides those thugs from decades ago and your mesmeric hallucinations, my dear Wilkie, I can think of no other instances of persons who ever believed in the Drood phantom—with the possible exception of Field’s son.”

“His son?”

“He had a boy out of wedlock by a young West Indies woman he had been seeing for some years. She lived not far from Opium Sal’s den that you and I got to know so well—you better than I, I believe. The inspector’s wife never learned of the woman (who died, I learned, shortly after childbirth, probably from an opium overdose) nor of the boy, but Field did right by the lad, paying to have him raised by a good family far from the docks, then sending him to fine public schools, and finally to Cambridge, or so I hear.”

“What was the boy’s name?” I asked. My mouth was suddenly very dry. I wished that I had brought water rather than laudanum in my flask.

“Reginald, I believe,” said Dickens. “I did enquire about him in the past year, but the young man seems to have disappeared after his father died. Perhaps he went to Australia.”

“And how do you think Inspector Charles Frederick Field died, Charles?”

“A heart attack, my dear Wilkie. Just as the papers reported. We have discussed that.”

I slid down from the stone and stood on legs that were tingling from lack of circulation. Not caring if Dickens watched, I drank deeply from my flask. “I need to get back,” I said thickly.

“Surely you will stay for dinner. Your brother and Katey are down for the weekend. Percy Fitzgerald and his wife are coming by and…”

“No,” I interrupted. “I have to get back to town. I need to work. I need to finish Man and Wife.”

Dickens had to use his cane to get to his feet. I could tell that his left foot and leg were putting him through agony, although he refused to show it. He took his watch and chain from his waistcoat.

“Let me mesmerise you, Wilkie. Now. At this moment.”

I took a step away from him. My laugh sounded frightened even to my own ears. “You have to be joking.”

“I have never been more serious, my dear friend. I had no idea when I mesmerised you in June of eighteen sixty-five that the post-trance suggestions would—or could—go on for so long. I underestimated both the power of opium and the power of a novelist’s imagination.”

“I do not wish to be mesmerised,” I said.

“I should have done it years ago,” said Dickens. His voice was also thick, as if he were close to weeping. “If you remember, my dear Wilkie, I tried to mesmerise you again on more than one occasion—so that I could cancel the mesmeric suggestions and have you wake from this endlessly constructed dream you’re in. I even tried to teach Caroline how to mesmerise you, giving her the single command code word I had implanted in your unconsciousness. Upon hearing that key word when you are in a mesmeric trance, you will awaken at long last from this extended dream.”

“And what is the command… the code word?” I asked.

“ ‘Unintelligible,’ ” said Dickens. “I chose a distinctive word you would not hear every day. But for it to work, you must be in mesmeric sleep.”

“ ‘Unintelligible,’ ” I repeated. “A word you said you used on the day of the Staplehurst accident.”

“I did use it then,” said Dickens. “It was my response to the horror.”

“I believe it is you who is mad, Charles,” I said.

He shook his head. He was weeping. The Inimitable, weeping in a grassy field in the sunlight. “I do not expect you to forgive me, Wilkie, but for God’s sake—for your own sake—let me put you under magnetic influence now and release you from this accidental curse I put upon you. Before it is too late!”

He took a step towards me, both arms raised, the watch in his right hand glinting goldly in the sunlight, and I took two steps backwards. I could only guess what his real game was, and all those guesses were dark indeed. Inspector Field had once said that this was all a chess game between himself and Drood. I had once seen it as a three-way game with Dickens. Now I had taken the inspector’s place as a player in this very real game of life or death.

“You really want to mesmerise me, Charles?” I said in a friendly and reasonable voice.

“I must, my dear Wilkie. It is the only way I can begin to make amends to you for what is the cruelest joke I have ever—however inadvertently—played on anyone. Just stand there and relax and I shall…”

“Not now,” I said, taking another step back but holding both palms out towards him in a calm, placating manner. “I am too disturbed and agitated to be a successful subject now anyway. But Wednesday night…”

“Wednesday night?” said Dickens. He suddenly seemed confused, battered, like a prizefighter who has gone rounds beyond his stamina but who is still standing out of sheer reflex, yet unable to protect himself from further blows. I watched him hop, using the cane, unable to put any weight on his obviously swollen and throbbing left foot and leg. “What is Wednesday night, Wilkie?”

“The secret outing you agreed to accompany me on,” I said softly. I stepped closer, took the watch from his hand—the metal was very hot—and tucked it into his waistcoat pocket for him. “You agreed to go with me on a short adventure during which I promised that we would solve at least two mysteries together. Remember the time we went to investigate that haunted house in Cheshunt?”

“Cheshunt,” repeated Dickens. “You and Wills went ahead in a brougham. John Hollingshead and I walked to the village.”

“Sixteen miles, if I remember correctly,” I said, patting his shoulder. “It was long ago.” Dickens was suddenly and irrevocably an old man.

“But we found no ghosts, Wilkie.”

“No, but we had a wonderful time, did we not? Great fun! And so we shall on this coming Wednesday night, the eighth of June. But you must tell no one that you are going with me.”

We had started walking back, Dickens hobbling painfully, but suddenly he stopped and looked at me. “I shall go on this… expedition… if you promise me, my dear Wilkie… if you promise me now, and give your word of honour… that you shall let me mesmerise you first thing that night. Mesmerise you and release you from this cruel delusion I foisted upon you through my sheer arrogance and lack of common sense.”

“I promise, Charles,” I said. And when he continued to stare, “Our first item of business shall be you mesmerising me and me helping you in that endeavour. You can say your magic word… ‘Unintelligible’… to your heart’s content and we shall see what happens. You have my word of honour.”

He grunted and we continued the slow hobble back towards Gad’s Hill Place. I had left the Swiss chalet in the company of a middle-aged man filled with guilt, creative energy, and enthusiasm for life. I was returning in the company of a dying cripple.

“Wilkie,” he muttered as we approached the shade of the trees. “Did I ever tell you about the cherries?”

“Cherries? No, Charles, I don’t believe you did.” I was listening to a confused old man gather wool, but I wanted to keep him moving, keep him hobbling forward. “Tell me about the cherries.”

“When I was a difficult London youth long ago… it must have been after the awful Blacking Factory… yes, definitely after the Blacking Factory.” He feebly touched my arm. “Remind me to tell you about the Blacking Factory someday, my dear Wilkie. I have never told anyone in my life the truth about the Blacking Factory in my childhood, although it was the most horrible thing that…” He seemed to drift off.

“I promise to ask you about that someday, Charles. You were saying about the cherries?”

The shade of the trees was welcome. I walked on. Dickens hobbled on.

“Cherries? Oh, yes… When I was a rather difficult London youth so long ago, I found myself walking down the Strand one day behind a workingman carrying a rather homely big-headed child on his shoulders. I presumed the boy was the workingman’s son. I had used almost the last of my pence to purchase this rather large bag of ripe cherries, you see…”

“Ah,” I said, wondering if Dickens might have had a sunstroke. Or a real stroke.

“Yes, cherries, my dear Wilkie. But the delightful thing was, you see, that the child looked back at me in a certain way… a certain, singular way… and I began popping cherries into the boy’s mouth, one after the other, and the big-headed child would spit out the pits most silently. His father never heard nor turned. He never knew. I believe I fed that big-headed boy all of my cherries—every single last one. And then the workingman with the boy on his shoulders turned left at a corner and I continued on straight and the father was never the wiser, but I was the poorer—at least for cherries—and the big-headed boy was the fatter and happier.”

“Fascinating, Charles,” I said.

Dickens tried hobbling more quickly, but his foot could bear no weight at all now. He had to rest all of his weight on his cane at each painful step. He glanced at me. “Sometimes, my dear Wilkie, I feel that my entire career as a writer has been nothing more than an extension of those minutes popping cherries into the mouth of that big-headed boy on his father’s shoulders. Does that make sense to you?”

“Of course, Charles.”

“You promise that you will allow me to mesmerise you and release you from my cruelly inflicted magnetic suggestions?” he said suddenly, sharply. “On Wednesday night, eight June? I have your word on that?”

“My word of honour, Charles.”

By the time we reached the stream with its small, arched bridge, I was whistling the tune I remembered from my dream.