She can cook for you, Sir. (Agnes) After a fashion. And though that will not be up to Your Standards, she will keep the place Clean if you choose not to spend all the time at Your Club. At the very least, Mr Collins, she will let the Burglars, as she Recuperates and carries out her Humble Duties, know that the House is not Empty in your Absence.

Yours O’bdtly,

George

How had I not noticed the paper hours earlier when I had wrestled with the flue and lit the fire? I started to throw the note into the fire but then thought better of it. Careful not to wrinkle it, I set it back on the mantel where I had found it. What to do?

Too late for that now. I needed to deal with this first thing tomorrow. And for that I needed money.

I WOKE AT dawn on Saturday, the next morning, and thought about the situation. As the grey light grew stronger in the room—I’d left the heavy drapes pulled back the night before for just that purpose—I noticed that there was a tidy stack of the Other Wilkie’s notes on the straight-backed chair near the door. I hadn’t noticed them the day before, but they had probably been written that night, since Frank Beard had been kind enough, in the early morning hours after our New Year’s Eve dinner party, to inject my morphine before he’d left. Most of my Droodish dreaming and dictation occurred while under the influence of morphia.

There was no immediate urgency. I kept telling myself this. Whatever the dull-witted girl had overheard was safe within these walls until her parents returned—or at least until George came back.

It fascinated me, as I lay there in the big bed with the light coming up, how little attention I had paid to Agnes’s presence over the years. At first she had simply been the extra little mouth to feed (but not to pay)—a side condition to my hiring of George and Besse, who were themselves a compromise as servants: never terribly efficient, but always very cheap. With the money I had saved with George and Besse’s wee salary over the years, I had always been able to hire a fine cook when necessary. Actually, the rent I received from the stables behind the big house there at Number 90 Gloucester Place paid for Agnes’s parents’ salaries with a good bit left over.

Agnes—with her chewed fingernails, flat, round face, constant clumsiness, and slight stammer—had been so familiar a part of the background here (and at Melcombe Place before this) that I simply thought of her as part of the furniture. For years she had also existed for me less as a servant than as a counterpoint to Carrie’s intelligence and good looks, although the girls had played together when they were younger. (Agnes had been too dull and unimaginative a playmate to hold Carrie’s interest once both girls were out of their nursery years.)

But what to do now that the girl had seen the Other Wilkie and overheard me describing my plans to murder Dickens?

I needed money, that was certain. The sum of £300 came to mind. Lying there visible and tangible in bills and gold coins, it would be a staggering fortune to the simple-minded girl, but not so much as to seem abstract to her; £300 seemed about right for what I was to propose.

But where to get it?

I’d spent the last of my cash and written too many personal cheques over the past few days, obtaining tickets for the pantomime, purchasing gin and champagne for the party, and paying Nina Lehmann’s new cook for the feast. The banks were closed until Monday, and although I knew the manager of my bank, it simply would not do for me to show up at the door of his home on a weekend, asking to cash a personal cheque for £300.

Dickens would loan that amount to me, of course, but it would take half the day for me to get to Gad’s Hill Place and back. I did not want to leave Agnes alone here for that length of time. She had no one with whom to speak with her parents and Carrie gone, but there was no guarantee that she would not write and post a letter in the time I was absent. That would be disastrous.

And I also did not want to raise Dickens’s curiosity as to why I needed £300 that weekend.

The same applied to other people in London who might have loaned me that amount of cash on a moment’s notice—Fred or Nina Lehmann, Percy Fitzgerald, Frank Beard, William Holman Hunt. None would let me down, but all would wonder. Fechter would never ask me why I needed that particular sum and would never worry about where it went or if he would ever get it back, but Fechter was—as always—broke himself. Indeed, I had made so many personal loans to him in the past year and poured so much of my own money into “theatrical expenses” (as yet unrecouped), first for No Thoroughfare and now, already, for Black and White (even though the writing for it had just begun), that I was in some financial difficulty myself as the new year began.

After I had bathed and dressed especially well, I heard bustling coming from the kitchen downstairs.

Agnes had also dressed to the apex of her poor ability—the thought that she was in her best clothes to travel caused a flurry of panic in me—and was in the process of fixing a full breakfast for me as I came into the kitchen.

The girl actually flinched, pulling back into a corner.

I gave her my warmest and most avuncular smile, even as I held both hands up, palms towards her, and stopped in the doorway to show her that I held no aggressive intentions.

“Good morning, Agnes. You are looking especially lovely today.”

“G-g-g-g-good morning, M-m-m-m… Mr Collins. Thank ’ee, sir. Your eggs ’n’ beans ’n’ bacon ’n’ t-t-t-toast is almost r-r-ready, sir.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “May I sit here in the kitchen with you to eat it?”

The idea obviously horrified her.

“On second thought, I’ll have it in the dining room as always. Has the Times arrived?”

“Y-y-y-yess—yesss—sir,” she managed. “It’s on the dining room table, as always.” She omitted the second “sir” rather than get stuck on it again. Her face was a bright red. The bacon was burning. “D-do you want coffee this mornin’… Mr Collins… or tea?”

“Coffee, I think. Thank you, Agnes.”

I went in and read the paper and waited. Everything on every plate she brought was either burned or raw or—somehow—both at once. Even the coffee tasted scorched, and the girl slopped it into my saucer when she poured it. I ate and drank it all with every sign of relish.

When she came in to refill my cup, I smiled again and said, “Can you sit down and talk to me for a minute, Agnes?”

She looked at the empty chairs at the table and gave me another look of horror. Sit at the master’s table? Such things were not done.

“Or stand, if you’re more comfortable with that,” I added amiably. “But I think we should chat about…”

“I di’n’t hear nothing las’ noon,” she said in a tumble of rushed syllables. The main word came out as nothink. “N-n-nothing at all, Mr Collins, sir. And I saw nothing as well. I di’n’t see anyone else there with you in your study, Mr Collins, I swear I di’n’t. And I heard nothing…” Nothink. “… about Mr Dickens or nobody and nothing else.”

I forced a chuckle. “It’s all right, Agnes. It’s all right. My cousin was visiting…”

My cousin, yes. My identical-twin cousin. My Doppelgänger cousin. My perfectly identical cousin of whom I had never spoken, never mentioned to George or Besse. Identical down to the glasses and suit and waistcoat and belly and hint of grey beginning in the beard.

“… and I would have introduced you to him if you’d not left in such a hurry,” I finished. It was hard to hold such a wide and gentle smile in place for so long, especially while speaking.

The girl was shaking from head to foot. She had to set one hand on the back of a chair to help hold her upright. I noticed that the already-bitten nails were now bleeding.