I had regained consciousness—such as it was—in my own bed on 22 January, five days after my final descent to King Lazaree’s den. For the rest of that week I was too ill to get out of bed, even though my need to visit Mother was almost absolute. In all my years of pain from rheumatical gout, I had never experienced anything like this. Beyond the usual aches of muscles and joints and bowels, it was as if some great, throbbing, burning source of pain had embedded itself deep behind my right eye.

Or as if some huge insect had burrowed into my brain.

It was during this time that I remembered something odd that Dickens had said to me years earlier.

We had been discussing modern surgery in general terms, and Dickens mentioned in passing “a certain simple medical procedure I had undergone years ago, not long before my trip to America…”

Dickens did not elaborate, but I knew through Katey Dickens and others what that surgery—hardly a “simple procedure”—had been. Dickens, while then working on Barnaby Rudge, had begun experiencing ever more severe rectal pains. (How these would have compared to my present excruciating headache, I cannot say.) The doctors diagnosed a “fistula”—literally a gap in the rectal wall through which tissue was being forced.

Dickens had no choice but to undergo immediate surgery and chose Dr Frederick Salmon—the author thirteen years before of A Practical Essay on the Structure of the Rectum—to perform it. The procedure consisted of the rectum being widened by a blade, then opened up by a series of clamps, then held even wider apart by some vicious surgical appliance, while the intruding tissue was slowly and carefully cut away and then the loose ends pressed back out of the rectal cavity, and finally the rectal wall sewn together.

And Dickens had undergone this with no morphia, no opium, nor any sort of what some are now calling “anaesthetic.” Katey reported (all this learned from her mother, of course) that her father had remained cheerful during the surgery and was active shortly afterwards. Within days he was writing Barnaby Rudge again, but, one must add, while lying on a sofa with extra cushions available. And his huge and exhausting First American Tour was looming.

But I digress from my point.

Dickens’s comments about this “certain simple medical procedure” were about our fortunately fallible human memory in regards to pain.

“It’s often struck me, my dear Wilkie,” he said that day as we were riding somewhere through Kent in a brougham, “that in a real sense, we have no true memory of pain. Oh, yes—we can recall we had it and remember quite vividly how terrible it was and how we wish never to experience it again—but we cannot truly recall it, can we? We remember the state, but not the true particulars the way one might remember… say… a fine meal. I suspect that this is the reason that women agree to go through the agonies of childbirth more than once—they have simply forgotten the specifics of their earlier agonies. And that, my dear Wilkie, is my point.”

“What is?” I had asked. “Childbirth?”

“Not at all,” Dickens said. “Rather, the contrast between pain and luxury. Pain we remember in a general (yet terrible) way but cannot really recall; luxury we recall in every detail. Ask yourself if this is not true! Once one has tasted the finest of wines, smoked the best cigars, dined in the most wonderful restaurants… even ridden in such luxury as this brougham in which we ride today… much less gained an acquaintance of a truly beautiful woman, all lesser experiences in each category continue to pale for years, decades… a lifetime! Pain we cannot truly recall; luxury—in all its Sybaritic details—we can never forget.”

Well, perhaps. But I assure you, Dear Reader, that the terrible pain I was suffering in January, February, March, and April of 1868 was of a nature and horrible specificity that I shall never forget.

IF A FARMER IS ILL, others till the fields in his place. If a soldier falls ill, he reports to the infirmary and is replaced on the field of battle. If a tradesman falls ill, others—perhaps his wife—must perform daily duties in his shop. If a queen falls ill, millions pray for her and voices and footsteps are muffled in her bedroom wing of the palace. But in all these cases, the work of the farm, army, shop, or nation goes on.

If a writer falls terribly ill, everything stops. If he dies, his “business” ends forever. In this sense, a popular writer’s career is most like that of a famous actor—but even the most famous actor has an understudy. A writer does not. No one can replace him. His distinctive voice is everything. This is especially true for a popular writer whose work is already in the process of being serialised in a major national magazine. The Moonstone had begun its serial run both in our English All the Year Round and the Americans’ Harper’s Weekly in January. Although I had several numbers written in advance of this initial publication, those were already being set in type; new instalments would be needed almost immediately. They existed only in rough note and outline form and were yet to be written.

This pressure brought on a terror on top of my terror, a pain of pressure on top of the pressure of pain crawling and digging its way through my screaming brain and body.

In that first week of my new misery, unable to sit up and hold a pen, racked in unspeakable pain and confined to bed, I attempted dictating the next chapter to Caroline and then to her daughter, Carrie. Neither could tolerate the screams and moans of agony that, unbidden, interrupted and punctuated my attempts at dictation. Both would rush to my side in an attempt to soothe me rather than sit and wait for dictation to resume.

By the weekend, Caroline had hired a male amanuensis to sit in a nearby chair and take my dictation. But this secretary, obviously of a sensitive nature, could also not bear my moans, expostulations, and involuntary writhings. He quit after the first hour. The second male amanuensis on Monday seemed to have little care or empathy for my pain, but he also seemed incapable of pulling the dictated sentences and punctuations out of the background of my cries and moans. He was fired after the second hour.

That Monday night, with the household asleep but the agony from hard-pincered scuttlings in my brain and then down along my spine keeping me from being able to sleep—or just to lie still—even after half a dozen self-ministrations of laudanum, I got out of bed and staggered to the window, pulling back the funereally heavy drapes and raising the blinds to look out at the slushy darkness towards Portman Square.

Somewhere out there, I was certain, however invisible to a layman’s eye, one or more of Inspector Field’s agents still stood watch. He would never abandon me now, not after what I had seen and learned of his operations.

For days I had begged Caroline for the newspaper and asked her for copies of the Times which I had missed while in my coma. But those newspapers had been thrown away and the few recent ones I was able to peruse made no mention of a former policeman’s eviscerated body being found in a slum cemetery. There was no account of fires breaking out in areas near the Thames or in the Fleet Ditch sewer system, and Caroline only looked at me oddly when I asked if she had heard of such fires.

I queried Frank Beard when he came and my brother, Charles, in his turn, but neither had noticed mention of any detective’s murder nor of any subterranean fires. Both Beard and Charley assumed that my queries were the result of nightmares I had been having—it was certainly true that my few scattered hours of sleep gained during this entire period were ruled by terrible nightmares—and I made no effort to disabuse them of that theory.