Dickens had the effrontery to laugh in my face.

“Bleak House,” he said softly, “was told from a limited series of third-person viewpoints, always with an authorial eye above, with the single first-person narration by the dear Miss Esther Summerson. It was constructed as a form of symphony. The Moonstone strikes any reader’s ear as a contrived cacophony. The level of contrivance in the endless series of first-person written testaments is, as I say, unbelievable and tiresome beyond all words to convey it.”

I blinked several times and set my glass down. Henry and two waiters bustled in with the first course. The wine steward bustled in with the first bottle—Dickens tested it and nodded—and the flurry of black tails and starched white collars bustled back out. When they were gone, I said, “I’ll have you know that the testimony and character of Miss Clack are the talk of the town. Someone at my club said recently that he has not laughed so well since The Pickwick Papers.”

Dickens winced. “To compare Miss Clack to Sam Weller or any of the other characters in The Pickwick Papers, my dear Wilkie, would be the equivalent of comparing a spavined, swaybacked mule to a thoroughbred racehorse. The characters in Pickwick were—as generations of readers and audiences might tell you, should you bother to ask—drawn with a loving eye and a steady hand. Miss Clack is a mean-spirited caricature of a poorly rendered cartoon. There are no Miss Clacks on this world or on any Earth generated by any sane Creator.”

“Your Mrs Jellyby from Bleak House…” I began.

Dickens held up one hand. “Spare us comparisons with Mrs Jellyby. They simply won’t do, dear boy. They simply won’t do.”

I looked at my food.

“And your character of Ezra Jennings, who springs from nowhere to solve all outstanding questions in the final chapters,” continued Dickens, his voice as flat and steady and relentless as one of the tunnel-boring machines working along Fleet Street.

“What about Ezra Jennings? Readers believe him to be a most fascinating character.”

“Fascinating…” said Dickens with that terrible smile. “And familiar.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think I would not remember him?”

“I have no idea what you are talking about, Charles.”

“I am talking about the physician’s assistant we encountered during our northern walking tour in September 1857—dear me, almost eleven years ago—when we climbed Carrick Fell and you slipped and sprained your ankle and I had to carry you down the mountain and then take you by cart to the nearest village, where that physician bandaged your ankle and leg. His assistant had precisely that incredible piebald hair and skin which graces your monster called ‘Ezra Jennings.’ ”

“Do we not compose from real life?” I asked. My voice sounded plaintive in my own ears, and I hated that.

Dickens shook his head. “From real life, yes. But it cannot have escaped your attention that I had already created your Ezra Jennings in the form of Mr Lorn, the albino and piebald assistant to Dr Speddie in our collaborative Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices in the Christmas Issue that same year.”

“I fail to see the similarities,” I said stiffly.

“Do you really? How odd. The tale of Mr Lorn—the dead man in the bed who came back to life in the young Dr Speddie’s shared room in the overcrowded inn—took up the bulk of that rather forgettable short novel. The same tragic past. The same haunted expression and manner of speaking. The same albino complexion and piebald hair. I clearly remember writing those scenes.”

“Ezra Jennings and Mr Lorn are two quite different characters,” I said.

Dickens nodded. “They are certainly different in texture. Mr Lorn had a tragic past and character. Your Ezra Jennings, of all the diseased and unnatural characters you have created in your quest for the sensational, is the most repellent and disturbing.”

“Disturbing in what way, may I ask?”

“You may ask and I will tell you, my dear Wilkie. Ezra Jennings, besides being the worst sort of opium addict—a trait shared by so many of your characters, my dear boy—shows every sign of inversion.”

“Inversion?” I had lifted a forkful of something minutes earlier, but it had yet to reach my mouth.

“Not to mince words,” Dickens said softly, “it is obvious to everyone reading The Moonstone that Ezra Jennings is a sodomite.”

My fork stayed raised; my mouth remained open. “Nonsense!” I said at last. “I meant no such implication!”

Or had I? I realised that—as with the Miss Clack chapters—the Other Wilkie had written most of the Ezra Jennings numbers when I was attempting to dictate while in the deepest throes of my morphine and laudanum.

“And your so-called Quivering Sands…” began Dickens.

“Shivering Sands,” I corrected.

“As you wish. They do not exist, you must know.”

Here I had him. Here I had him! “They do indeed,” I said, voice rising. “As any yachtsman such as myself would know. There’s a shoal just like the Shivering Sands on the Thames Estuary, nine miles north of Herne Bay.”

“Your Quivering Sands do not exist along the coast of Yorkshire,” said Dickens. He was, I realised, calmly cutting and eating his meat. “Everyone who has ever visited Yorkshire knows that. Anyone who has ever read about Yorkshire knows that.”

I opened my mouth to speak—to speak bitingly—and could think of nothing to say. It was at this point that I remembered the loaded revolver in my valise sitting next to me on the banquette.

“And many believe, as I do, as Wills does, that the scene with your Quivering Sands shivering is also indecent,” said Dickens.

“For God’s sake, Dickens, how could a shoal, a strand, a beach stretch, of quicksand be considered indecent by any sane person?”

“Perhaps,” said Dickens, “through the author’s choice of language and insinuation. And I quote from memory—and from your poor, doomed Miss Spearman’s observation—‘The brown face of it heaved slowly, and then dimpled and quivered all over.’ The brown face, my dear Wilkie, the brown skin, dimpling and quivering all over and then, and I believe I quote, sucking one down—which is precisely what it does to poor Miss Spearman. An overt and clumsy description of what some might imagine a woman’s physical climax in the act of love to be like, no?”

Again, I could only stare with mouth agape.

“But it is the ending, your much-anticipated resolution to this much-admired mystery, that I find to be the apex and pinnacle of contrivance, my dear boy,” went on Dickens.

I realised that he might never stop talking. I imagined the dozens of diners in the other alcoves and in the larger room of Vérey’s all pausing in their meals, all listening, shocked but attentive.

“Do you really believe,” bored on Dickens, “or expect us, the readers, to believe that a man, motivated by a few drops of opium in a small glass of wine, would walk in his sleep, enter his fiancée’s sleeping room—a scene that was all but indecent for that impropriety alone—and go through her safe box and belongings, and then steal and secrete a diamond elsewhere, all with no memory of the event afterwards?”

“I am sure of it,” I said coldly, stiffly.

“Oh? How can you be sure of such a ridiculous thing, dear boy?”

“Every reference to behaviour under the ministrations of laudanum, pure opium, or other drugs in The Moonstone was carefully researched and experienced by me before I put pen to paper,” I said.

Dickens laughed then. It was a long, full, easy, and cruel laugh and it went on far too long.

I stood, threw down my linen napkin, lifted my valise, and opened it. The huge pistol was quite visible there beneath my curled galley sheets and the remnants of my lunch.