“Only what we have discussed. It is the only honourable course remaining to us.”

“But I cannot!” exploded Dickens. It sounded as if he was weeping. I could have leaned my face six inches closer to the hedge and seen him, but that was impossible. “I have not the will!” he added.

“Then have the courage,” said Ellen Ternan.

There came a rustling, the small sound of her small shoes slightly scuffing pavement, the heavier sound of his. I pictured Dickens leaning towards her, she taking an involuntary step back, and Dickens resuming his strained distance from her.

“Yes,” he said at last. “Courage. I can summon courage where will fails me. And summon will when courage flags. That has been my life.”

“You are my dear good boy,” she said softly. I imagined her touching his cheek with her gloved hand.

“Let us both be courageous,” she went on, her voice lilting with a forced lightness that ill-befitted a mature woman in her late twenties. “Let us change to brother and sister from this day forth.”

“Never to be… together… as we have?” said Dickens. His voice was the calm monotone of a man ordered to the guillotine repeating the judge’s sentence.

“Never,” said Ellen Ternan.

“Never to be man and wife?” said Dickens.

“Never!”

There was a silence then that stretched for such a length that I was again tempted to lean forward and peek through the hedge to see if Dickens and Ellen had somehow dematerialised. Then I heard the Inimitable sigh again. His voice was louder, stronger, but infinitely hollow when he spoke.

“So it shall be. Adieu, my love.”

“Adieu, Charles.”

I was sure they did not touch or kiss, although how I was sure, I could not tell you, Dear Reader. I sat motionless as I listened to Dickens’s footsteps pass around the curve in the hedge. They paused once at that curve—I was certain he was looking back at her—and then resumed.

I did lean forward then and set my face to the branches of the hedge to watch Ellen Ternan cross the street. The carriage driver saw her and drove forward. Her parasol was folded once again and both her hands were lifted to her face. She did not look towards the station as she got into the carriage—the bewhiskered old driver helping her as she climbed up and took her seat and then softly closing the door behind her—and she did not look towards the station as the old man retook his seat and as the carriage made a slow, broad turn on the empty boulevard and headed back towards Peckham proper.

It was then that I turned my head to the left and looked through the open trellis.

Dickens had passed right in front of the opening, gone up the four steps to the platform level, and now he paused.

I knew what would happen next. He would turn to look out over the park and over the hedge to catch one final glimpse of Ellen Ternan’s open carriage disappearing up the street. He had to turn. The imperative was written in the tense bunching of his shoulders under his summer linen suit and in the pain of his lowered head and in the half-step pause of his body itself on the platform.

And when he turned—in two seconds, perhaps less—he would see his former collaborator and presumed friend, Wilkie Collins, hunched over from staring through the hedge like the cowardly voyeur he was, his bloodless, guilty face staring back blindly at Dickens, his eyes mere blank ovals where the spectacles would be reflecting the paling sky.

But—incredibly, unbelievably, inevitably—Dickens did not turn. He strode around the curve of the station onto the platform proper without ever looking back at the single and greatest love of his sentiment-ridden and romance-driven life.

Seconds later the train to London arrived in the station with shocking exhalations of unseen steam and metallic grindings.

With wildly shaking hands, I pulled my watch from my waistcoat. The express was right on time. It would depart Peckham Station in four minutes and thirty seconds.

I stood, shakily, and retrieved my valise from the bench, but still waited a full four minutes for Dickens to board and take his seat.

Would he be sitting in a compartment on this side, staring out the window at the station as I went hurrying by?

So far this day, the gods had been kind to me. Knowing that they would continue to be for no reason that I could have explained then or now, I clutched the valise to my chest and ran to board before all my overly minded machinations were defeated by the departure of an unthinking but schedule-driven machine.

IT WAS NOT, of course, a long ride, this express suburban in from Peckham and New Cross to Charing Cross. And it took me most of the ride to work up my nerve to move forward from the rearward compartment of the carriage to which I had rushed. After so many trips with Dickens, I knew which carriage he would have boarded, of course, as well as which part of the almost-empty carriage he would have chosen for the ride.

And yet it was still a shock when, valise still clutched to my chest, I walked forward and found him alone in the compartment, staring at nothing but his own reflection in the window glass. He was a study in absolute sadness.

“Charles!” I cried, feigning pleasurable surprise. Without asking permission, I slipped in to sit opposite him “How uncanny but delightful to find you here! I thought you were in France!”

Dickens’s head snapped around and up as if I had slapped him with my glove. In the next few seconds readable emotions flashed across the usually inscrutable Inimitable visage in rapid succession: first absolute shock, then anger bordering on rage, then a pained sense of violation, then a return to the sadness I had glimpsed in his reflection, and finally… nothing.

“What are you doing here?” he asked flatly. There was no pretence of greeting, nor the slightest simulation of bonhomie.

“Why, I was visiting my elderly cousin. You remember me telling you about her, I am sure, Charles. She lives between New Cross and Peckham, and since Mother died I have found that…”

“Did you board at Peckham?” he asked. His eyes, usually warm and animated, were cold and searching and set in a prosecutor’s probing, basilisk stare.

“No,” I said, feeling the risky lie catch in my throat like a fish bone. “Farther out towards Gad’s Hill Place. My cousin lives between Peckham and New Cross. I took a cab to the Five Bells and boarded there.”

Dickens continued staring at me.

“My dear Charles,” I managed after a moment of this silence. “You wrote me that you were staying on in France. I am astonished to find you here. When did you get back?”

His silence continued for a terrible, interminable ten more seconds, and then he turned his face back to the glass and said, “Some days ago. I needed a rest.”

“Of course you did,” I said. “Of course you did. After America… after the premiere of your play in Paris! But how splendid that I have stumbled upon you on this important night.”

He slowly turned his face back in my direction. I realised that he looked ten years older than he had a month ago when I had greeted him upon his return from America. The right side of his face looked strangely dead, waxen, drawn down, and slumped. He said, “Important night?”

“The ninth of June,” I said softly. I could feel my heart accelerate its pace again. “The third anniversary of…”

“Of…” prompted Dickens.

“Of the terrible event at Staplehurst,” I finished. My mouth was very dry.

Dickens laughed then. It was a terrible sound.

“What better place to observe the anniversary of such carnage,” he said, “than here in a rattling, swaying carriage set precisely in the same sequence of carriages as on that deadly, fated afternoon. I wonder… how many old bridges shall we cross this evening before reaching Charing Cross, my dear Wilkie?” He looked at me very carefully. “What do you want, sir?”