Dickens stood in silence. I remained frozen at the back of the room, forgotten by both principals in this unique dialogue. Dolby went to put the tour list on his writing case, turning away as if sparing his Chief his injured countenance. When he turned back, he saw what I had been seeing.

Dickens was weeping silently.

Dolby froze and before he could move a muscle, Dickens had—inevitably, characteristically—moved forward to embrace the bigger man with what appeared to be absolute affection. “Forgive me, Dolby,” he choked out. “I did not mean it. I am tired. We are all tired. And I know you are right. We will discuss this calmly in the morning.”

But in the morning—I was there at breakfast—Dickens left the Murder in all three readings and added one.

By the time I returned to London, I had observed or heard all of the following facts:

Dickens had been discharging blood, blaming his old problem of piles, but Dolby was less certain that this was the only reason for constant bloody diarrhoea.

The Inimitable’s left foot and leg were swollen again to the point that he needed to be helped to the cab and then into the railway carriage. The only time he appeared to walk normally was when he was going onto or off the stage.

He was melancholy, he admitted, beyond all words to describe it.

In Chester, Dickens was dizzy and confessed that he was suffering a mild paralysis. When a doctor was summoned, he told the man that he was “giddy, with a tendency to go backwards and to turn around.” Dolby later told me that when Dickens had tried to place a small object on a table, he had ended up awkwardly pushing the entire small table forward, almost toppling it.

Dickens told of a strangeness in his left hand and arm and explained that to use that hand—say, to set down an object or to pick it up—he had to look at it carefully and actively will it to do as he wished.

Dickens told me that last morning in Edinburgh—laughing as he said it—that he no longer felt secure lifting his own hands to his head, especially his rebellious left hand, and soon might have to hire someone to comb his few remaining hairs before he went out in public.

After Chester, however, he went on to read in Blackburn and then at Bolton, Murdering Nancy as he went.

By 22 April, Dickens had broken down. But I get ahead of myself, Dear Reader.

IT WAS SOMETIME AFTER I RETURNED from Edinburgh that I received a letter. It was from Caroline. There was no pathos or bathos in her note—she wrote almost unemotionally, as if cataloguing the behaviour of sparrows in her garden—but she informed me that in the six months of their marriage, her husband, Joseph, was failing to earn a living for them, that they lived off crumbs from his mother (actually from his father’s small estate, doled out grudgingly), and that he beat her.

I read this with mixed emotions, the primary one being—I admit—some small satisfaction.

There was no request from her for money or help of any sort, not even for a return letter, but she signed it, “Yr Very Old and True Friend.”

I sat for a while in my study, contemplating what a false friend might be if Caroline G—, now Mrs Harriett Clow, were an example of a true friend.

That same day, a letter arrived for George and Besse, who had each been grieving in his or her own way—quietly, to be sure, but Besse had been hurt especially hard by Agnes’s departure (more so than by the death of her parents, who left them no money at all)—and I had not seen the envelope when it arrived or the handwriting (laborious printing, actually) would have certainly caught my eye.

But the next day, George appeared at my study door, cleared his throat, and entered with an apologetic expression.

“Excuse me, sir, but since you showed such a kind interest in the fate of our daughter, dear Agnes, I thought ye’d want to see this, sir.” He handed me a small piece of what turned out to be embossed hotel stationery.

DeaRe Mum an DaD—I Am welle and hop to Find you the Same in This Misiv. My Oportunyty has Turned out Very Well. Corpal MacdonalD, my Belovd, and I Plan to Marrye on Nin Jun. I Shall Write you agane After this Happye Event. W/ love and Afecton, yr. Dauter, AGNES

For a moment after reading this, my face, lips, and muscles were as numb and frozen as they had been on the very few occasions when I dosed myself with too much morphia or laudanum. I looked up at George but found that I could not speak.

“Yes, sir,” he said brightly. “It’s grand news, ain’t it?”

“This Corporal MacDonald is the chap she ran away with?” I eventually managed. My voice sounded, even to my shock-dulled ear, as if it had been poured through a strainer.

I had to have known that. George must have told me that. I was sure that he had. Hadn’t he?

“Aye, sir. And I may amend my ’arsh judgement of the lad if ’e makes an honest woman out o’ our sweet Agnes.”

“I certainly hope this will prove to be the case, George. This is very happy news. I am overjoyed to hear that Agnes is safe and well and happy.” I handed him back the note. The heading at the top of the cheap paper was from an Edinburgh hotel, but not the one I had stayed at while visiting Dickens.

Hadn’t we walked over to another hotel to dine that evening after Dickens complained of the beef in the hotel in which we were staying being inferior? I was sure we had. Was it this one whose stationery I was still staring at as George tucked it into his moleskin waistcoat? I was almost certain it was. Had I picked up some of the stationery in the lobby while I was there—perhaps so. Quite possibly so.

“Just thought you’d be interested in ’earing our good news, sir. Thank ye, sir.” George bowed awkwardly and backed out.

I looked down at the letter I had been writing to my brother, Charley. In my agitation, I had spilled a huge blob of ink across my last paragraph.

After the argument between Dickens and Dolby that night, I had used an unusually large amount of my laudanum. We went to dinner. I remembered little of the evening after our first drinks and glasses of wine. Did I return to my room and pen “Agnes’s” letter? Certainly I knew her patterns of misspellings from the note she had copied from my dictation in January. Had I then gone down in the night and posted the letter to George and Besse at the front counter?

Possibly.

I must have.

That was the only explanation and it was a simple one.

I had done other things under the influence of opium and laudanum which I had forgotten about the next day and in days after. Thus the solution to The Moonstone.

But had I known the d— ned Scottish corporal’s name?

Suddenly feeling dizzy, I walked quickly to the window and pulled up the sash. The early-spring air came in, carrying with it taints of coal and horse dung and the distant Thames and its tributaries already beginning to stink in the tentative spring sunlight. I gulped it in and leaned on the sill.

There was a man in an absurd opera cape on the sidewalk opposite the house. His skin was parchment white and his eyes seemed as sunken as a corpse’s. Even from this distance I could see him smile at me and could make out the strange darkness between teeth preternaturally sharpened to points.

Edmond Dickenson.

Or the walking-dead servant of Drood who had once been young Edmond Dickenson.

The figure tipped his tall, shiny, out-of-style top hat and moved on down the sidewalk, looking and smiling back at me only once before making the turn at Portman Square.