I had been standing, but now my legs went so weak that I had to sit.

“The… prognosis?” asked Charley.

“There is no hope,” Beard said flatly. “The internal neuralgia and obstruction to the brain are too severe. She may regain consciousness—she may even become more clear in her mind before the end—but I am certain that there is no hope. It is just a matter of days or weeks now.”

Mrs Wells made as if to faint, and Charley and Frank helped her back to the divan.

I sat and stared at the fire. It was early afternoon in America. Somewhere comfortable and bright and clean, Charles Dickens was being treated like a king and was preparing for another evening of public adoration. In a recent note that Wills had shared with me, Dickens had written—“People will turn back, turn again and face me, and have a look at me… or will say to one another, ‘Look here! Dickens is coming!’ ” and talked about being recognised every time he rode in a carriage—“… in the railway cars, if I see anybody who clearly wants to speak to me, I usually anticipate the wish by speaking myself.”

What noblesse oblige! How unspeakably generous of my erstwhile collaborator and eternal competitor! There he was, condescending to speak to tens of thousands of adoring (if wilfully ignorant and terminally illiterate) Americans who worshipped the very ground he walked on, while I sat here in pain and misery and hopelessness, my mother dying horribly, a… scaraby thing… scrabbling in my skull like a…

“I’ll be leaving now. I’ll stay with friends in the village here and check on Harriet before taking the train back to London in the morning.” Frank Beard had been speaking. Some time had passed. Evidently Charley had shown the weeping Mrs Wells to her room and was now in his topcoat and heavy artist’s cap and waiting by the door to take Beard away. I jumped to my feet and shook my physician’s hand with both of mine and thanked him profusely.

“I will stay with Mother,” I told Charley.

“I shall sit up with her through the night when I return,” said my brother. “You look exhausted, Wilkie. Build up the fire so you can sleep on the long couch when I get back.”

I shook my head then, although whether to say that I would stay up with Mother through the night or that I was not exhausted or that I did not need a fire, I do not know. Then Charley and Frank Beard were gone, and I could hear the treacherously false happy winter sounds of the bells on the horses’ harnesses as they drove back into the village.

I went into Mother’s room and sat on the hard chair pulled up next to her bed. Her eyes were still open but apparently sightless, the lids fluttering from time to time. Her arms and wrists were bent like a small bird’s broken wings.

“Mother,” I said softly to her, “I am sorry that…”

I had to stop. I was sorry that… what? That I had killed her through my association with Drood. Had I killed her?

“Mother…” I began again and stopped again.

For months I had written and spoken to her of little save for my own success. I had been too busy in writing of the play and rehearsals for the play and attending early presentations of the play to spend any time with her—even Christmas had been a grudging few hours before I’d rushed for the train back to the city. It seemed that every note I had written to her since last summer had been either about myself (although she dearly loved hearing about my successes) or about adjusting the terms of the inheritance that would come to Charley and me if she should die before us.

“Mother…”

Her eyelids fluttered wildly again. Was she trying to communicate? My mother always had been a busy, articulate, confident, capable, and socially secure person. For years, even after my father’s death, she had presided over a salon of artists and intellectuals. I had always associated her with competence, dignity, an almost regal self-possession.

And now this…

I do not, Dear Reader, know how long I sat there by Mother’s bedside. I do know that at some point I began sobbing.

Then, finally, I had to know. I set the candle closer. I bent over her insensate form and drew the bedclothes down.

Mother was in her nightgown, but there were only a few buttons at the neck—not enough for my purpose. Still weeping, wiping my streaming nose on my sleeve, I pulled the top sheet down to Mother’s pale, blue-veined, and swollen ankles, and—sobbing more loudly while holding the candle in one hand—slowly pulled up her flannel sleeping gown.

I covered my eyes with my left forearm, the candle singeing my brow and hair, so that I—her loving son—would not see her ultimate nakedness. But I confess that I had rolled the sweat-clammy nightgown too high before looking, still shielding my range of vision, so that her wrinkled and sagging breasts were visible.

And below them, below the sharp chevrons of her ribs pressing against the pale flesh, there was the red mark beneath her sternum.

It seemed the same width, the same lividity, the same shape.

Half-mad with fatigue and terror, I ripped my shirt open, the buttons popping and rolling on the wooden floor out of sight beneath the bed. I had to bend almost double to see the red mark there on my upper belly and was moving the candle quickly back and forth to compare my scarab wound to the mark beneath Mother’s chest.

They were the same.

There was a creak of boards and then a gasp behind me and I wheeled—my shirttails out and buttons open, Mother’s nightgown still pulled up to her collar—to find Mrs Wells staring at me with an expression of absolute wide-eyed horror.

I opened my mouth to explain but found no words. I pulled Mother’s nightgown down, threw the covers over her, set the candle on her bedside table, and turned back to the elderly housekeeper, who shrank away from me.

Suddenly there came a terrible pounding at the door.

“Stay here,” I said to Mrs Wells, but she only shrank back farther from me and bit her knuckles as I hurried past her.

I rushed to the door—in my confusion, I was thinking that Frank Beard had returned with some miraculously revised and hopeful prognosis—but as I reached it, I glanced back towards Mother’s room. Mrs Wells was not visible.

The pounding continued, grew more violent.

I flung the door open.

Four large men, strangers all, dressed almost identically in thick black overcoats and workmen’s caps, stood there in the post-midnight snow. A hearselike carriage waited, its lamps throwing wan light.

“Mr Wilkie Collins?” demanded the closest and largest of the men.

I nodded dumbly.

“It is time,” said the man. “The inspector awaits. By the time we get back to London, all will be in readiness. Come at once.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Undertown was burning.

Inspector Field had said that within twenty-four hours he would turn out a hundred men—ex-detectives, off-duty policemen, others—who would be eager to descend beneath the city to avenge the murdered Detective Hibbert Hatchery.

I had to think that he had understated the case. Even in the fragmentary glimpses I had over these ensuing hours, it was obvious that there were more than a hundred men involved.

There were more than a dozen men in the wide, flat-bottomed scow that Field had ordered me into. A bright lantern hung on a slanted pole rising over and beyond the long tiller at the stern. Near the bow, two men controlled a blinding carbide spotlight of the sort they used outside and within Welsh mines during emergencies such as cave-ins; that spotlight was on a pivot and now stabbed its bright white cone-circle of illumination ahead onto the broad, black waters of the Fleet Street Ditch subterranean river, now onto the arched brick ceiling, now against and across the curving walls and narrow walkways on either side.