Are you indeed? I thought sarcastically. Aloud, I said, “If my dream was real, if the meeting was real, how did Drood get into the house? I happen to know that the building was securely locked.”

Dickens smiled as he applied marmalade to a second piece of toast. “He did not enlighten me on that topic, my dear Wilkie. My impression over the past two years has been that there are few places that Drood cannot go if he wishes to go there.”

“You’re saying that he is some kind of ghost.”

“Not at all, my dear Wilkie. Not at all.”

“Will you tell me, then,” I said with some asperity, “the content of our ‘hours’ of discussion… a content that this phantom has ordered me to forget?”

Dickens hesitated. “I shall,” he said at last. “But I believe it might be best if I wait to do so. There are imminent events that may not be in your interest to know about at the present time, my dear Wilkie. And other facts that it is in your interest not to be aware of in terms of your own honour… so, for instance, you can be truthful when you tell Inspector Charles Frederick Field that you did not meet with Drood and have no knowledge of the phantom’s plans.”

“Then why did he—or you—tell me about them last night?” I pressed. I had not taken my morning laudanum yet and my body and brain ached for it.

“To receive your permission,” said Dickens.

“Permission for what?” I was close to becoming angry.

Dickens smiled again and patted my arm in an insufferable way. “You shall see soon enough, my friend. And when these things come to pass, I shall tell you all the details of our long conversation last night. You have my word on this.”

I had to settle for this, even though I was far less than convinced that there had been any meeting of Drood, Dickens, and the Other Wilkie. It seemed far more likely that Dickens was taking advantage of my laudanum dream for his own inscrutable purposes.

Or that the Other Wilkie had his own secret purposes and plans. This possibility made my skin grow even colder.

WE MOVED TO Number 90 Gloucester Place in early September of 1867. I had been forced to raise a loan through my solicitors for the £800 purchase of the lease, but Inspector Field had been correct about the prospect of renting the stables on the mews behind the house; I sublet them to a woman with four horses for £40 a year, although I was to have a devil of a time getting her to pay on time.

The house on Gloucester Place was much larger and grander than the home we had leased at Melcombe Place. This house was set back from the street and terraced, five storeys high, with ample room for a family much larger than ours and for servants far more numerous and well-trained and better turned-out than our three poor waifs. We now had enough guest rooms to accommodate a small army of visitors. The dining room on the ground floor was thrice the size of that in Melcombe Place, and we used a comfortable room behind it as our family sitting room. I immediately took possession of the huge L-shaped double drawing room on the ground floor as my study, although it was directly in the path of visitors passing by in the hall, servants cleaning, Caroline working in the nearby sitting room, and all the other intrusion and traffic of daily life. But with its huge fireplace, high windows, central location in the home, and airy feeling, it had none of the closed-off darkness of my Melcombe Place study. I could only hope that the Other Wilkie would not make the move with us.

When remodelling work on the house was finally completed in the late autumn, it was much to my liking. I had books and pictures everywhere, of course, and the panelled walls of Gloucester Place lent themselves to displaying my art much better than had the dark, wallpapered walls at our previous residences.

I had a portrait of my mother as a young girl in a white dress— painted by Margaret Carpenter—that I hung in my study. My mother never saw it there (since it would have been inappropriate for her to visit the house with Caroline G— in it), but I reported to her in a letter that it was “still like you after all these years.” (This was not quite true, since my mother was now in her seventies and age had taken its toll.)

Also in my study were a portrait of my father and a painting of Sorrento by him, large paintings that flanked my massive writing table, which had also been my father’s. On another panelled wall in that room hung a portrait of me as a young man done by my brother, Charley, and another portrait of me by Millais. The only work of my own in the house was my Academy painting The Smuggler’s Retreat, which I hung in the dining room.

I did not trust the novelty of gas lighting—although Dickens and others doted on it—so my rooms, books, drapes, writing table, and paintings in Number 90 Gloucester Place continued to be lighted by wax candles and kerosene lamps just as in my previous homes. I loved the soft light that candles and fireplaces imparted to everything—not the least to people’s faces when gathered around a hearth or dining table—and would never have supplanted it with the harsh, inhuman glare of gas lighting, even though working by candlelight or lantern glow often gave me severe headaches which required the administration of more laudanum. It was worth the price for the ambience.

The house, however grand-looking from the outside, had fallen into some disrepair under the regime of the late Mrs Shernwold, and it took a small army of workmen more than a month to paint, repair or install plumbing, knock down partitions, repanel, retile, and generally bring the house up to the standards one would expect of a famous author’s home.

My first step in dealing with this chaos was to end all social visitations, either coming or going. My second was to absent myself from the potential felicity of Number 90 Gloucester Place—sleeping and working for weeks exclusively at my mother’s cottage at Southborough or at Gad’s Hill Place—and to leave the dusty, dirty supervision to Caroline. As I wrote to my friend Frederick Lehman on 10 September, the day after we moved in—“I had an old house to leave—a new house to find—that new house to bargain for and take—lawyers and supervisors to consult—British workmen to employ—and through it all, to keep my literary business going without so much as a day’s stoppage.”

That autumn was a warm one, and Dickens and I carried out our collaboration on No Thoroughfare primarily in his lovely little Swiss chalet. Dickens had turned his long writing table up on the first floor there into a sort of partners desk—with two leg wells—and we put in long hours of scribbling together with only the hum of bees and the corresponding hum of the occasional comment or question passing between us to disturb the comfortable autumn silence.

Back near the end of August, Dickens had sent me a note that typified the easy give-and-take of ideas and narrative that would mark our work on this project:

I have a general idea which I hope will supply the kind of interest we want. Let us arrange to culminate in a wintry flight and pursuit across the Alps, under lonely circumstances, and against warnings. Let us get into all the horrors and dangers of such an adventure under the most terrific circumstances, either escaping from or trying to overtake (the latter I think) some one, on escaping from or overtaking whom the love, prosperity, and Nemesis of the story depend. There we can get ghostly interest, picturesque interest, breathless interest of time and circumstance, and force the design up to any powerful climax we please. If you will keep this in your mind, as I will in mine, urging the story towards it as we go along, we shall get a very Avalanche of power out of it, and thunder it down on the readers’ heads.

Even by late September we had no Avalanche yet and Dickens could only report that “I am jogging at the pace of a wheelbarrow propelled by a Greenwich Pensioner” and “Like you I am working with a snail-like slowness…,” but the work together at Gad’s Hill accelerated both the pace of our separate and co-mingled narratives and raised our levels of enthusiasm.