And so Dickens returned to London, living during the week— he was at Gad’s Hill most weekends—in his rooms above the offices of All the Year Round at Wellington Street, and threw himself full-tilt into the editing, refurbishing, writing, and planning of the magazine. When he had nothing else to do (I saw this myself during a visit to pick up a cheque), he went into Wills’s now frequently empty office and tidied and sorted and rearranged and dusted.

He also ordered his solicitor, Ouvry, to draw up and finalise his will, which was done quickly and signed and executed on 12 May.

But little of the melancholy he showed during the most exhausted days of his reading tour was visible during these late-spring and early-summer months. Dickens was anticipating the long visit by his old American friends James Fields and his wife, Annie, in that feverish way that only a boy eager to share his toys and games could evince.

And, with his will signed, his doctors predicting imminent apoplexy and death, and the warmest and most humid summer in memory settling over London like a Thames-stinking wet horse blanket, Dickens was beginning to think about another novel.

BY SUMMER I had already begun my new book and was researching and writing it with a will.

I had decided for certain the form and thrust of the book one weekend in late May, when I was visiting Martha R— (“Martha Dawson” to her landlady) in the persona of William Dawson, travelling Barrister at Law. It was one of those rare times when, in order to please Martha, I stayed two nights. I had brought my flask of laudanum, of course, but decided to leave the morphia with its attendant syringe at home. This led to two sleepless nights (not even extra laudanum allowed me to sleep more than a few anxious minutes). So it was on the second of these nights that I found myself sitting in a chair, watching Martha R— sleep. Because of the early-summer warmth I had opened a window and left the drapes wide, since this bedroom looked out only upon a private garden. Moonlight painted the floor, the bed, and Martha in a broad white stripe.

Now, some say that a woman with child becomes especially attractive. And it is true that there is—with all but the most sickly sort—a strange glow of joy and healthiness that tends to hover around a woman at least during part of her time in confinement. But many men, at least of my acquaintance, also subscribe to the odd theory that a woman with child is also erotically attractive (and I apologise for this candid and perhaps vulgar talk, Dear Reader of the Future—perhaps my time was a more direct and honest one), but I fail to see that.

In fact, Dear Reader, as I sat there in the deepest hours of the morning on that warm and sticky May night, turning the pillow over and over in my hands, I looked at Martha where she was sleeping and saw not the innocent young woman who had so enticed me just a few years earlier, but an ageing, ponderous, blue-veined, bosom-bloated, and bizarre figure that was, to my keen novelist’s eye, not quite human.

Caroline had never looked this way. Of course, Caroline had had the good manners—at least in my presence—never to be pregnant. But more than that, Caroline had always looked like the lady she purported to be and worked so hard to become. This snoring form painted by the wide stripe of moonlight looked… bovine.

I turned the pillow over in my hands and thought about all this with the clarity that only the proper dosage of laudanum can bring to a mind already sharpened by education and logic.

Mrs Wells, Martha’s landlady (not to be confused with the much cannier Mrs Wells who had been my mother’s final caretaker), had not seen me arrive. She had been, Martha told me, shut up in her tower room with the croup for more than a week. A neighbour boy brought her soup in the evening and toast and tea in the morning, but I hadn’t seen the boy when I’d arrived or during any of the time I was in Martha’s private rooms. Mrs Wells was a foolish old woman who read nothing, almost never went out, and knew nothing of the modern world. She knew me only as “Mr Dawson” and we had spoken only a few times in passing. She believed me to be a barrister. I was sure that she had never heard of the writer named Wilkie Collins.

I held the pillow tight, compressing it and then stretching it in my soft-looking but (I believe) powerful hands.

There was, of course, the land agent with whom I had arranged to rent these rooms from Mrs Wells years before. But he also had known me only as Mr Dawson, and I had given a false address for myself.

Martha almost never wrote her parents, and not just because of an estrangement arising from her association with me. Despite my patient lessons with Martha, neither she nor her mother was really literate—they could form letters and sign their names, but neither could read with any assurance and neither took the time to write letters. Her father could but never chose to. Occasionally Martha went home to visit—she had no real friends in her former home town or in nearby Yarmouth, only family—but she always assured me that she’d given no details of her life here: not her address, never her true situation, and especially not the fiction of her marriage to “Mr Dawson.” As far as her family knew, based on her last visit some time ago, Martha was single and working as a parlourmaid in some unspecified London hotel and living in a cheap tenement flat with three other good Christian working girls.

Could I trust that she had not told them the truth?

Yes, I was certain I could. Martha had never lied to me.

Had I ever seen anyone in the city—or, more important, had they seen us—when I went out in company with Martha R—?

I was all but certain that I had not. As small as London seems at times, as frequently as friends and acquaintances in the upper crust of society cross paths, I had never taken Martha anywhere—especially in the daylight—where those in my true circle might have stumbled across us. On those few occasions when Martha and I had strolled together, I had always taken her to odd corners of the city—distant parks, poorly lighted inns, or back-alley restaurants. I was sure that she had seen through my explanation of wanting to explore, of seeking out new parts of the city like a child playing hide-and-catch, but she had never complained.

No, no one knew—or if they had seen us, they had no idea who the young woman had been and would have thought little of it. Just another young actress on that rogue Wilkie Collins’s arm. I had spent time with so many. Just another young periwinkle. Even Caroline had known of the periwinkles.

I left my chair and went over to sit on the edge of the bed.

Martha stirred, half-rolled towards me, and ceased snoring for a moment, but she did not wake.

The pillow was still in my hands. Now the moonlight covered my long, sensitive fingers as if dabbing them with white paint. Each finger was whiter than the linen on the pillow and suddenly they all seemed to blend with that delicate linen, to sink into it, to melt and become one with the fabric. They became the hands of a corpse disappearing into chalk.

Or melting in a pit of lime.

I leaned forward and held the pillow over Martha’s sleeping face. The scarab behind my right eye scuttled forward for a better view.

Frank Beard!

Two months earlier, I had told the physician about a married but abandoned female friend of an acquaintance of mine—the woman being alone and with child at the moment and with little money. Could he recommend a midwife?

Beard had given me a partially amused, partially scolding look and said, “Do you know when this female friend of an acquaintance is due?”

“Late June, I think,” I said, feeling my ears burn. “Or perhaps early July.”