The audience were idiots. The play was being performed by idiots. Its script was sheer melodrama idiocy penned by an idiot.

In the lobby after the play— and after five hundred people had pressed close to shake Dickens’s hand or tell him how wonderful his play had been (I was all but forgotten, it seemed, as the true playwright, which—on this night of revelation—I did not mind a bit)—Dickens said to me, “Well, my dear Wilkie, the play is a triumph. There is no doubt of it. But, to use your Moonstone language, it remains a diamond in the rough. There are excellent things in it… excellent things!.. but it still drags a tad.”

I stared at him. Had Dickens just seen the same play I had?

“There are too many pieces of stagecraft missed as it is now being produced,” continued Dickens. “Too many opportunities to heighten both the drama and Obenreizer’s villainy have been missed in this version.”

I had to use all my strength not to laugh in the Inimitable’s face. More stagecraft, more drama, and more villainy were the last things on earth this giant, steaming pile of overacted, melodramatic heap of horse apples needed. What it needed, I thought, was a shovel and a deep hole in a distant place in which to bury it.

“You know, of course, that while Fechter soon may have to leave this performance for reasons of health,” continued Dickens, “we fully intend to put on a new version of No Thoroughfare at the Café Vaudeville in Paris early next month with, one hopes, Fechter, sooner or later, reprising his success as Obenreizer.”

Reprising this public pratfall onto our collective arse was my only thought.

“I shall personally oversee the revisions and perhaps act as stage manager at Vaudeville Théâtre until the play is on its feet,” said Dickens. “I do hope you shall be coming along with us, Wilkie. It should be great fun.”

“I am afraid that will not be possible, Charles,” I said. “My health simply will not permit it.”

“Ahh,” said Dickens. “I am heartily sorry for that.” I could detect no actual regret in his voice and almost certainly could hear an undertone of relief. “Well,” he said, “Fechter will be too exhausted to go out with us afterwards, so I shall drop in on him backstage and convey our congratulations at the excellence of what may be his last performance as Obenreizer… in this version of the play at least!”

And with that, Dickens bustled away, still being congratulated by the last of the passing theatre-goers.

Beard, who was going out with us later, was chatting with others so I stepped out into the street. The air smelled of horse manure, as the air outside all theatres did after the carriages and cabs had taken away the well-dressed members of the night’s audience. The stink seemed appropriate.

As it turned out, Dickens kept Beard and me waiting for more than half an hour. I later learned that he had loaned the weeping Fechter £2,000… a fact that was especially galling, since I had loaned the foolish actor £1,000 that I could scarce afford only two weeks earlier.

While I waited alone in the barnyard miasma, I drank deeply from my silver flask of laudanum and realised that for all of Dickens’s talk of theatrical triumph in France, he would not be staying there past the first week of June.

Drood and the scarab would bring him back to London on or before 9 June. It would be the third anniversary of the Staplehurst accident. Charles Dickens had a date for that night, I was certain, and this year I vowed that I would spend it with him.

I swallowed the last of the laudanum and smiled a smile much colder and more villainous than anything Fechter as Obenreizer could ever have managed.

By the end of May, I had learned (through Mrs G—, Caroline’s elderly mother-in-law, who now came to stay with us from time to time at Number 90 Gloucester Place, since it would have been inappropriate for Carrie to live in a bachelor’s home without at least an occasional chaperone for respectability’s sake) that Caroline was now living with Joseph Charles Clow’s mother, the widow of the distiller. They had set a wedding date for early October. The news did not discomfit me in the least; on the contrary, it seemed the proper step at the proper time for the proper people. And speaking of propriety, after I received a somewhat panicked letter from Caroline herself, I wrote to assure her that I would help her create and maintain to the death any fiction of her past or her family (much less of my own relationship with her) that she chose to present to the low-bourgeois and somewhat puritanical Clow clan.

In the meantime, I had found Carrie pleasant employment as a part-time governess with a good family I knew. She loved the work and enjoyed having some money of her own, but the best part was that the family often introduced her to society almost as if she were their daughter. Between her contact with the best people in the arts and literature at my table, and introductions to some of England’s most notorious nobility and denizens of the political and business class at her adopted home’s salon, young Carrie was doing an excellent job of preparing to come out.

Carrie was turning seventeen and Martha R— was not quite twenty-three. Martha was much happier now that I felt well enough to drop by and see her from time to time—as her returning travelling husband, “Mr Dawson,” of course—at her rooms on Bolsover Street. Martha had been aware of Caroline and probably aware that Caroline had been more than the housekeeper listed on my annual census forms, but Martha showed no emotion and offered no comments when I told her that “Mrs G—” had moved out and was planning to be married in the autumn.

Martha’s passion, always very strong, seemed to blossom that late spring and summer. She did say that she wanted a child, but I laughed that away for the time being by joking that “poor Mr Dawson” had to be on the road so frequently to earn a living for his darling wife that it would hardly be fair for him to have a family at home when he could not be there to enjoy it.

Come, Isis, Queen of Heaven! Order that this child shall be conceived in the flames of Nebt-Het, holy Nepthys, Goddess of that death which is not eternal. Hide thyself with the child of Osiris, God of our Fathers. Nourish and sustain this child as you nourished and sustained Horus, Lord of Things to Come, in the hidden place among the reeds. This infant’s limbs will grow strong, as will her body and mind, and she shall be placed upon the altar of her father and serve the Temple which carries the truth of the Two Lands. Hear us, O Osiris! You, whose breath is life! Hear us!

I awakened from my morphia dreams to find this and similar pages left on the table by my bedside. The hand was that of the Other Wilkie. I had no memory of dictating them. The words, without memory of the dreams, made little sense.

But my scarab seemed placated.

On the first day I found such pages, I made a fire in my bedroom fireplace and consigned the text to the flames. I was in bed screaming with pain for two days after that. From then on, each morning after the dreams from one of Frank Beard’s evening morphia injections, I would gather up the tight-writ pages and set them in a locked box on a high shelf in my study closet. Then I would lock the closet. Someday they would all be consigned to the flames, but perhaps after my death. I had no illusions that the scarab could hurt me then.

IT OCCURRED TO ME sometime in May of that year, 1868, that being out of touch with Inspector Charles Frederick Field was working more to my disadvantage than to his.

As terrible as that final night on the Undertown river had been—I still had nightmares about the Wild Boy pitching face forward into filthy waters, and there was a scar near my hairline where Reginald Barris had clubbed me with the barrel of his pistol—there remained the fact that when I had been in touch with Inspector Field, I received much more information from him (about Dickens, about Drood, about Ellen Ternan, about what was going on around us) than the inspector had ever received from me. Now that I was approaching what I was certain would be the final confrontation between Dickens and me (after which there would be no doubt to anyone that I was his equal or superior), I realised that I needed precisely the sort of information that Inspector Field had provided until January.