Drood.

My heart leapt to my throat and the scarab in my brain surged to its favourite viewing place behind my right eye.

But it was not Drood.

The figure bowed theatrically in my direction and swept off the top hat. I saw the blond, thinning hair that was growing back and recognised Edmond Dickenson.

Certainly Dickens did not invite Dickenson to this trial reading? How could he have found him? Why would he have…

The figure straightened up and smiled. It looked, even from this distance, that young Dickenson’s eyelids were missing. And that his teeth had been filed to sharp points.

I wheeled to see if Dickens or the others had seen this apparition. No one else appeared to have noticed.

When I turned back, the form in the black opera cape was gone.

CHAPTER FORTY

Islept until noon on New Year’s Day and awoke alone and in pain. The week before this first day of 1869 had been strangely warm, with no snow, no clouds, little sense of the season, and finally—for me—far too little human companionship. But this day was cold and dark.

My married servants, George and Besse, had asked my permission to go to Besse’s ancestral home in Wales for at least a week. It seemed that both her senile father and—until recently—healthy mother were choosing to die at the same time. It was unheard-of (and ridiculous) to release my entire staff at once for so long a time—I assumed that their dull-witted and homely seventeen-year-old daughter, Agnes, would be accompanying them—but I let them go out of the kindness of my heart (after informing them, of course, that they would not be paid during their Welsh vacation). Because of a party I had planned for Gloucester Place on New Year’s Eve, I made them delay their travels for a week; they finally left on New Year’s Day, two days after I returned from my week at Gad’s Hill Place.

Carrie had been staying with me for most of December (her time with her mother and new stepfather, who, she whispered to me, drank heavily, had lasted less than two weeks), but her employer family (who still treated her more like a guest than a governess) were going to the country on Christmas Eve for at least two weeks and I’d urged her to go along with them. There would be parties and masked balls and fireworks on New Year’s midnight, there would be sleigh excursions, there would be ice skating in the moonlight, there would be young gentlemen.… I could offer none of those things.

There was very little that I felt I could offer anyone that New Year’s Day of 1869.

After Caroline’s marriage, I had avoided the five-storey empty home at Number 90 Gloucester Place as much as I could, staying with the Lehmanns and the Beards in November as long as those kind people would have me. I had even spent time with Forster (who disliked me very much) at his ridiculous (but comfortable) mansion at Palace Gate. Forster had grown more pretentious and tiresome than ever after his marriage into wealth, and his dislike of me (or jealousy, I should say, since Forster had always competed angrily with anyone who was closer to Dickens than he) had grown apace with his wealth and girth, but he was still too much the presumed and assumed gentleman to turn me out or ask why I had chosen to come visit him at that time. (If he had asked, I could have answered honestly in three words—your wine cellar.)

But no one can visit friends forever, so for some of December it had been just Carrie and me in the large old place at Number 90 Gloucester Place, with George, Besse, and the shy Agnes all scuttling along busily in the background in an unsuccessful effort to avoid my surly moods.

When Dickens had sent word inviting me to come with Kate and Charley to spend yet another Christmas at Gad’s Hill Place, I hesitated—it had felt almost dishonest to accept such hospitality from someone you fully planned to murder as soon as the time was right—but in the end I acquiesced. When the house at Gloucester Place was empty, it was just too empty.

Dickens was home for the week resting up in preparation for the remainder of his reading tour—he’d planned his first Murder of Nancy in front of the paying public for 5 January, again in St James’s Hall—but was already exhausted and ailing from the limited readings he’d given in December. In a brief letter he’d written to me in December while travelling to Edinburgh on the “Flying Scotchman,” he’d penned—

My dear Wilkie,

Dolby is sleeping stentoriously nearby as we have just jolted over what felt to be several disaster-inducing gaps in the rails, causing not so much as the slightest pause in our ursine friend’s snores, so I have just taken a few minutes to calculate the amazing fact that travelling the distances required on a tour such as this involves more than thirty thousand distinct and separate shocks to the nerves. And my nerves, as you know, have not of recent been at their best. The memory of Staplehurst is never far from my mind, and when it does recede a bit, one of these shocks or jolts reminds me of it yet again. And even when I am stationary, there is no rest for the wicked. I said recently to our estimable American friend Mrs Fields that I spend most of the remaining and dwindling hours of my life travelling towards the tiring exposure to my special gas lamps on the platform and that the hour has almost come once more when I to sulphurous and tormenting gas must render up myself.

Dickens had found ways other than his tour and this convoluted syntax by which to exhaust himself. Although he had finally abolished the accursed “Christmas Issue” of All the Year Round (years after it should have been discontinued, to my way of thinking), he was still spending many hours a week at the Wellington Street offices, fiddling with the look and layout of the magazine, testing typography sizes on anyone who wandered by, and writing enthusiastic “Editor’s Notes” about the New Series he was launching, assuring any readers alarmed by the disappearance of the Christmas Issue that “… my fellow labourers and I will be at our old posts, in company with those younger comrades whom I have had the pleasure of enrolling from time to time and whose number it is always one of my pleasantest editorial duties to enlarge…”

I’m not sure who these “younger comrades” at the magazine were, since I had refused greater participation, his son Charley was allowed to do little but respond to letters and pursue the odd line of advertising, and, although Wills had returned to his post, he was capable of little more than sitting in his office and staring into middle space while doors kept slamming in his ruined skull. Wills would hardly have been counted as a “younger comrade” in any case.

All the Year Round was—as it had always been—an extension of the mind and personality of Charles Dickens.

As if all this office work and his readings in Scotland and continued rehearsals for the many Murders of Nancy yet to come were not enough, Dickens was spending many hours every day obeying the request in the will of his late friend Chauncey Hare Townshend, who’d asked in his dying delirium that the Inimitable collect his (Chauncey’s) various and scattered writings on the subject of religion. Dickens did this doggedly and to the point of even deeper exhaustion, but on Christmas Eve, over an indifferent brandy, I heard Percy Fitzgerald ask him, “Are they worth anything as religious views?”

“Nothing whatever, I should say,” said Dickens.

When Dickens was not in his study working during my week’s stay at Gad’s Hill Place, he was taking advantage of the clement weather to take walks of twenty miles and more per afternoon rather than his usual paltry twelve-mile winter outings. Percy and a few others attempted to keep up with him on these forced marches, but my rheumatical gout and Egyptian scarab would not allow me to take part. So I ate, drank brandy, wine, and whiskey, smoked the Inimitable’s rather disappointing cigars, increased my laudanum intake to make up for melancholy, read the books that Dickens and Georgina always set especially for their guests in each guest room (De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater had been left un-subtly on my night table, but I had already read it and, indeed, had grown up knowing De Quincey), and generally lazed away the days before New Year’s Eve, for which I had planned a dinner party at Gloucester Place for the Lehmanns and Charley and Kate and Frank Beard and a few others.