“Then I shall look in on her myself in her ninth month… and most probably attend the birth as well. Some midwives are wonderful. Many are murderesses. Give me the lady’s name and address.”

“I do not know such information offhand,” I’d replied. “But I shall ask my acquaintance and send her name and address to you in a letter.”

And so I had. And then forgotten about it.

But Frank Beard might not forget if he read a newspaper this week and…

“D— n!” I cried and threw the pillow across the room.

Martha was awake in an instant, levering herself upright in bed like some Leviathan rising from the surface of a sheeted sea. “Wilkie! What is it?”

“Nothing, my dear. Just the rheumatical gout and a terrible headache. I apologise for wakening you.”

The headache was real enough, as the scarab—furious for some reason—burrowed itself back into the deepest recesses of my brain.

“Oh, my darling boy,” cried Martha R— and hugged me to her bosom. Some time later, I fell asleep like that, with my head still on her swollen breast.

THE BOOK I WAS WRITING during this period was titled Man and Wife. The theme of it was how a man might be trapped into a terrible marriage.

I had recently read a report on marriage in our kingdom published the year before by the Royal Commission; astoundingly, the Commission sanctioned the Scottish law which legalised marriage by consent and then defended these marriages by pointing out that they were “wronged-women’s ways” of capturing men with dishonourable intentions towards them. I underlined and then wrote in the margins of the report—“That they act, on certain occasions, in the capacity of a trap to catch a profligate man!!!!”

The four exclamation marks may seem excessive to you, Dear Reader, but I assure you that they were a profound understatement of my emotion at this absurd and obscene twisting of the law to aid a man-hungry wench. The idea of being trapped into marriage—with the consent and help of the Crown! — was a Horror beyond imagining to me. It was a Horror beyond the Entity in the servants’ stairway at Number 90 Gloucester Place.

But I knew that I could never write the book from the point of view of a victimised man. The Reading Public in 1869—nay, the General Public—simply would never see the pathos and tragedy of such a trap inflicted on a man they hypocritically would call a “cad” (even while the majority of those male readers and that male public had a similar “profligate” history).

So I cleverly turned my victimised male into a frail but very high-class and highbred lady trapped—by a mere moment’s indiscretion—into a forced marriage to a brute.

I made the brute not only an Oxford man (oh, how I hated Oxford and everything it represented!!) but an Oxford athlete.

This last aspect of the brute’s character was a stroke of genius, if I do say so myself. You must understand, Dear Reader from the impossibly distant future, that at this time in England, the idiocy of exercise and the absurdity of sports had melded with the hypocrisies of religion to create a monstrosity called “Muscular Christianity.” The idea that good Christians should be “muscular” and throw themselves into any number of mindless, brutish sports was all the rage. More than the rage, Muscular Christianity was both an exercise in Mr Darwin’s insights and an explanation of why England’s Empire had the right to rule the world and all the weak little brown people in it. It was Superiority personified in barbells and track meets and fields of fools jumping and hopping and pushing themselves up and down. The proselytising for this Muscular Christianity belched out from the newspapers, the magazines, and the pulpits. And Oxford and Cambridge—those Grand Old English nurseries for pedantic dolts—embraced it with all their usual arrogant vigour.

So you see why I took such joy in tossing this fad right in the face of my unsuspecting readership. I might be the only one to know that my trapped and abused heroine was really the captured male, but my Oxford brute would create quite enough controversy.

Even in the early stages of writing Man and Wife, I made enemies through it. Frank Beard’s children and Fred Lehmann’s children—all of whom had loved me and whom I had entertained many a time by telling ripping yarns of classic prizefights and by describing the massive biceps of England’s champion, Tom Sayers—heard about my Oxford brute and were furious with me. It was a betrayal to them.

This made me laugh all the more as I pressed Frank Beard into taking me out to various pugilistic and team sport training camps where he served as attending physician from time to time. There I would press the trainers and others for stories of how unhealthy this muscular life truly was—how it turned the athletes into brutes as surely as a return to Darwin’s jungle would—and, through Beard, I hurled questions at the camp doctors about physical and mental breakdowns due to such training. Being out in the sunlight and taking such notes was difficult work for me, but I got through it by sipping from my laudanum flask at least hourly.

The secondary theme of Man and Wife (behind that of the injustice of marriage-by-capture) was that any morality is completely contingent upon a person’s capacity for remorse: a capacity totally lacking in any animal’s (or athlete’s) life.

Beard, a huge sports fan himself, said nothing about my theories as he took me with him to one unhealthy den of sweat after another. On 4 July, 1869, it was Frank who delivered a girl child to Martha at her lodgings on Bolsover Street. It was also Frank who handled the somewhat tricky formalities of registering in the parish records the mother’s name (Mrs Martha Dawson) and the infant’s name (Marian, after my most popular female character) and the father’s name (William Dawson, Esquire, travelling Barrister at Law).

Due to my heavy writing and research schedule, I was not present at the birth but looked in on the mother and squalling infant a week or two after the fact. As I had promised in January and on that October evening of my mistress’s wedding when I had proposed marriage to my dying brother’s wife, I now raised Martha R—’s monthly allowance from £20 to £25. The woman wept when she thanked me.

But I have galloped on too far in this tale and skipped a much more important detail, Dear Reader. For you to fully understand the ending of this story, you need to be with me on the night of Wednesday, 9 June, 1869—the fourth anniversary of Dickens’s accident at Staplehurst and of his first meeting with Drood. It was the last such anniversary that Charles Dickens would live to see.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

As serious as Dickens’s physical ailments were and as dire the predictions from his phalanx of doctors, he became a small boy again when good friends came from America to visit.

James and Annie Fields had been his friends since the time of the Inimitable’s first triumphant American reading tour in 1842. James once mentioned to me that even before he and Dickens were socially introduced, he had joined a group of literary enthusiasts who had followed the “strangely dressed Englishman” around Boston during those heady days of Dickens’s first trip there. The depths of Dickens’s affection for these two was partially shown by the fact that when, during his second American tour, he finally was forced to break his usually steadfast rule of never staying in private homes, it was the Fieldses’ lovely home in Boston that became his refuge.

With them on this visit to England came the Charles Eliot Nortons and Dickens’s old friend James Russell Lowell’s daughter Mabel. Also in the entourage was Dr Fordyce Barker and Sol Eytinge, who had illustrated the lovely “Diamond Back” American edition of Dickens’s work.