I DID NOT go directly back to London. At the station, I waited until Dickens’s man and his pony cart were out of sight and then I boarded the train to Rochester.

I had not brought any brandy so I waited until the cathedral graveyard seemed well and truly empty—the afternoon summer shadows creeping long from the headstones—and then I strolled briskly back to the lime pit. There was no sign of the puppy on the turgid grey surface. A moment’s searching in the grass brought up the branch I had used before. Three or four minutes of stirring and poking brought up the remnants—mostly bone and teeth and spine and gristle, but also some hair and hide left. I found it difficult to bring what was left of the little carcass to the surface with the stick.

“Dradles thinks this mi’ be the instrooment Mr Billy Wilkie Collins needs,” said a voice directly behind me.

I jumped so violently that I almost tumbled forward into the pit of quick-lime.

Dradles steadied me with a rock-hard hand on my forearm. In his other hand, he was carrying a barbed iron staff that looked to be about six feet long. It may have once been part of the cathedral’s iron fence in front, or a decoration on a steeple, or a lightning rod from one of the spires.

Dradles handed it to me. “Stirs easier wi’ this, sir.”

“Thank you,” I said. Indeed, with its length and barbs, it worked perfectly. I turned the puppy’s carcass over, decided that five or six days in the lime pit would be required for a larger form, and used the iron staff to press what was left of the little shape back under the surface again. For a second I had an image of myself as some sort of grisly cook, stirring my broth, and I had to suppress the urge to giggle.

I handed the iron staff back to Dradles. “Thank you,” I said again.

“Dradles urges the ge’mun to think nothing of it,” said the filthy mason. His face seemed as red this cool evening as it had during the heat of the daytime labour some days before.

“I forgot brandy today,” I said with a smile, “but I wanted to treat you to a few drinks at the Thatched and Twopenny the next time you go.” I handed him five shillings.

He clinked the coins in his begrimed and calloused palm and smiled broadly at me. I counted four teeth.

“Thank ’ee, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins, sir. Dradles’ll be sure to drink your health when I go.”

“Very good,” I said with a smile and a nod. “I need to be going.”

“Mr C. Dickens, the famous author, used that same iron instrooment a year ago when ’e was ’ere,” said Dradles.

I turned back. The fumes from the lime pit were causing tears to streak down my cheeks, but they did not seem to affect Dradles. “I beg your pardon?” I said.

Dradles smiled again. “’E used the same instrooment I give ’im as I give you, to stir the stew, as it were, sir,” he said. “But Mr C. Dickens, famous author, ’e brought a bigger dead dog, ’e did.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

On 29 October of that year, 1868, I dressed in my finest formal clothes and took a hired carriage to St Marylebone Parish Church to see Caroline G— be married to Joseph Charles Clow.

The bride looked every bit of her thirty-eight years, and more. The groom looked even younger than his twenty-seven years. Someone just dropping into the church and spying the wedding ceremony without knowing the Happy Couple might have been forgiven for thinking that Caroline was the mother of the bride or groom.

The mother of the groom was there—a fat, stupid little gnome of a woman in an absurd maroon dress ten seasons out of style. She wept through the entire ceremony and brief reception after and had to be helped to her carriage after the Happy Couple had ridden off, not to an elaborate honeymoon but back to the tiny home they would later share again with his mother.

There were few other guests on either side. Not surprisingly, Mrs G—, Caroline’s mother-in-law, did not attend (although the old woman had been pining for her daughter-in-law to marry again). Another reason that Caroline’s former mother-in-law chose not to attend (if the old woman was sufficiently aware of events in her current state of addlement to be able to choose) became clear when I glanced at the marriage book: Caroline had invented a false name for her father—a certain “John Courtenay, gentleman.” This was part of an entire reinvention of herself, her family, and her past, even her first marriage, which I had agreed to support in any particulars (as her “previous employer of record”) if ever pressed to do so.

The temptation to reinvent oneself seemed contagious. I noticed that young Carrie, signing as a witness, had signed herself as “Elisabeth Harriette G—” on the marriage certificate, which was a reinvention of the spelling of her names. But perhaps the largest lie on the marriage certificate belonged to the groom, who signed his occupation simply as “gentleman.”

Well, if a plumber with permanent ground-in filth behind his ears and eternal grime under his fingernails was now an English gentleman, England had reached that wonderful socialist state that so many medical reformers had agitated so diligently to bring about.

I have to admit that the only person to look happy at this wedding was Carrie, who, either through the obliviousness of youth or sheer dedication to her mother, not only looked beautiful but acted as if she and we were all attending a joyous occasion. But when I say “we,” I mean just the tiny handful of people. There were two people on Joseph Clow’s side of the aisle: the weeping, crepe-draped mother and an unintroduced, unshaven man who might have been Clow’s brother or perhaps merely another plumber who had come hoping that there would be food after the service.

On Caroline’s side, there was only Carrie and Frank Beard, and me. Our group was so small that Beard had to be the second person to sign alongside Carrie as one of the two required witnesses. (Beard suggested that I sign, but my taste for the ironic absurd was not quite that well developed.)

Joseph Clow looked paralysed with fear and tension throughout the ceremony. Caroline’s smile was so broad and her face so flushed that I felt certain she would burst into tears and hysterics any second. Even the rector seemed to sense something odd about the proceedings and glanced up frequently from his missal, peering myopically out at the tiny gathering as if waiting for some word that it had all been a joke.

Throughout the ceremony I felt an odd numbness spreading through my body and brain. It may have been the extra dose of laudanum I had ingested to help me through the day, but I believe it was more a sense of true detachment. As the bride and groom repeated their final vows, I admit to looking at Caroline, standing so tensely upright in her ill-fitted and rather cheap-looking bridal gown, and remembering the precise touch and texture of every soft— now too soft—curve and bulge under that fabric. I felt no emotion throughout the proceedings except for a strange, spreading emptiness that had first come over me the past weeks when I arrived at Number 90 Gloucester Place to find no Caroline, no Carrie, and even my three servants often missing (with permission) because of an illness in Besse’s family. It was a large house to be so empty of human voices and sounds.

When the wedding was over, there was no food or reception to speak of—merely a brief and uncomfortable milling-about in the chilly courtyard of the parish church. Then the new bride and groom left in an open carriage—it was too cold a day for an open carriage and it had begun to rain, but the couple had obviously been unable to spend the extra amount for a closed carriage. The image of the happy couple headed off to bliss was spoiled a bit when Frank Beard offered to use his carriage to drop Carrie and Joseph Clow’s mother at the same home for which the newlyweds had just left. (It had seemed important to Caroline that Carrie spend the first few weeks of her mother’s married life in that crowded, spartan little house, although the girl would still be working as a governess from time to time and soon would move back to live with me at Gloucester Place.)