And then Mrs Keeley took in a long, ragged breath, expelled it, and stood there as if speechless.

Dickens bowed low, took her hand, and kissed it.

Charley Dickens came up with an empty oyster shell in his hand.

“Well, Charley,” said Dickens, “and what do you think of it now?” (Charley had been among those closest to Dickens who had advised against it.)

“It is even finer than I expected, Father,” said Charley. “But I still say, don’t do it.”

Dickens blinked in what looked to be real surprise.

Edmund Yates came up carrying his second glass of champagne.

“What do you think of this, Edmund?” said Dickens. “Here is Charley, my own son, saying it is the finest thing he has ever heard but who also persists in telling me, without giving any reason, not to do it!”

Yates glanced at Charley and—in serious, almost funereal tones—said, “I agree with Charley, sir. Do not do it.”

“Dear heavens!” cried Dickens with a laugh. “I am surrounded by unbelievers. You… Charles!” he cried, pointing to Kent standing next to me. Neither of us had yet availed himself of refreshments. The crowd noise around us was growing louder and less restrained by the moment.

“And Wilkie,” added Dickens. “What do my two old friends and professional accomplices think? Do you agree with Edmund and Charley that I should never repeat this performance?”

“Not a bit of it,” said Kent. “My only objection is of a technical nature.”

“Oh?” said Dickens. His voice was level enough, but I knew how little he cared for “objections of a technical nature” when it came to his readings or theatrical work. Dickens considered himself a master of stagecraft and technical effects.

“You end the reading… performance… with Sikes dragging the dog from the murder room and locking the door behind him,” said Charles Kent. “I believe that the audience is ready for more.… Perhaps Sikes’s flight? Almost certainly Sikes’s fall from the rooftop on Jacob’s Island. The audience wants… it needs to see Sikes punished.”

Dickens frowned at this. I took his silence as an invitation.

“I agree with Kent,” I said. “What you have given us is astounding. But the ending is… truncated? Premature? I cannot speak for the women in the audience, but we men are left lusting for Sikes’s blood and death as much as he was lusting to kill poor Nancy. Adding ten minutes would move the ending from the current blank state of horror into a fierce and passionate rush for the end!”

Dickens clasped his arms across his chest and shook his head. I could see that his starched shirtfront had been soaked through with perspiration and that his hands were shaking.

“Trust me, Charles,” he said, addressing Kent, “no audience on earth could be held for ten minutes— or five! — after the girl’s death. Trust me to be right on this. I stand there…” He gestured to the lectern and low reading platform. “… and I know.”

Kent shrugged. Dickens’s tone of absolute certainty—the Master’s voice, often used by him to settle discussions of things literary or theatrical—had spoken. But I knew then, and was not surprised later to see, that Dickens would brood over this suggestion and later lengthen the reading, adding at least three pages of narrative to the performance, to do precisely as Kent had suggested.

I went to get oysters and champagne and joined George Dolby, Edmund Yates, Forster, Charley Dickens, Percy Fitzgerald, Charles Kent, Frank Beard, and others standing farther back on the stage, just out of the rectangle of brilliant light. Dickens was now surrounded by ladies whom he’d invited to the event, and they seemed as emotionally overwrought and positively eager about his Murdering Nancy in the future as the actresses had been. (Dickens had told me to bring the Butler—meaning Carrie—but I had not passed on the invitation and was glad that she’d not been there. Many of us, in crossing the stage with our drinks and oysters, unconsciously looked down to make sure that we were not placing our polished black pumps in the pools of Nancy’s blood.

“This is madness,” Forster was saying. “If he does this for any significant part of his remaining seventy-nine performances, he will kill himself.”

“I agree,” said Frank Beard. The usually jovial physician was glowering at the glass flute in his hand as if the champagne had gone bad. “This would be suicide for Dickens. He will not survive it.”

“He invited reporters,” said Kent. “I’ve heard them talking. They loved it. They will write it up wonderfully in the papers tomorrow. Every man, woman, and child in England, Ireland, and Scotland will be selling their teeth to get a ticket.”

“Most of them have already sold whatever teeth they had left,” I said. “They will have to find something else to bring to the Jews’ pawnshops.”

The men around me laughed politely, but most went back to frowns in the silence that followed.

“If the reporters praise it,” rumbled Dolby, that bear of a man, “then the Chief will do it. At least four times a week until next summer.”

“That will kill him,” Frank Beard said again.

“Many of you have known Father for much longer than I have,” said Charley Dickens. “Do you know of any way to dissuade him once he realises the sensation he has created and can create with this?”

“None, I fear,” said Percy Fitzgerald.

“Never,” said Forster. “He will not listen to sense. The next time we meet may be at Westminster Abbey for Dickens’s state funeral.”

I almost spilled my champagne at this.

For some months now, since Dickens had first declared his intention of performing Nancy’s Murder in the majority of his proposed winter and spring readings, I had considered such suicide a mere means to an end for which I already devoutly wished. But Forster had made me realise something that was almost certainly true—however Dickens died, either through suicide-by-readings or by being run over by a dray waggon tomorrow on the Strand, there would be a huge public demand for a state funeral. The London Times or some other rag that had been Charles Dickens’s political opponent and literary scold for so many years would lead the way in demanding that the Inimitable be interred in Westminster Abbey. The public—sentimental as always—would rally around the idea.

The crowds would be stupendous. Dickens would end up lying with the other most-loved bones of English literary genius.

The certainty of all this made me want to scream right there on the stage.

Dickens had to die, that was certain. But I realised now what my deeper, darker mind must already have known and begun advance planning for months earlier—Dickens not only had to die, he had to disappear.

There could be no state funeral, no burial in Westminster Abbey. That idea was simply intolerable to me.

“What do you think, Wilkie?” asked Yates.

Lost in the horror of my revelation, I had not been following their conversation closely, but I vaguely knew that they were still discussing ways and means of dissuading Dickens from murdering Nancy scores more times in public.

“I think that Charles will do what he believes he has to do,” I said softly. “But it is up to us—his dearest friends and family—to keep him from being buried in Westminster Abbey.”

“Soon, you mean,” said Fitzgerald. “Buried there soon, you mean.”

“Of course. That is precisely what I meant.” I excused myself to get more champagne. The crowd was growing a little thinner now, but also more boisterous. The corks continued to pop and the waiter continued to pour.

A movement backstage, where the crew had been moving the lectern and equipment, caught my eye and made me stop.

It was not the crew moving now. A single figure stood there, all but cloaked in darkness, his silly opera cape catching the slightest gleam of reflected light from the stage. He was wearing an old-fashioned top hat. His face was absolutely white, as were his strangely long-fingered hands.