What could I say to that? For a moment I was speechless. I had never told Dickens about Hatchery’s death—the grey glistening cords in the crypt. Or about my night at Drood’s Temple. Or of Inspector Field’s invasion of Undertown and what I now understood of its dire consequences to Field and his men. Or of Reginald Barris—filthy, bearded, living in rags and on scraps, hiding in fear—or of the Overtown temple-hideouts Barris had shown me just four months earlier…

“If I had time this evening,” said Dickens, as if musing to himself, “I would cure you of that obsession. Release you from it.”

I got to my feet and began pacing impatiently back and forth in the small room. “You’ll release yourself from your life if you publish this book, Charles. You once told me that Drood had requested you write a biography of him… but this is a parody.”

“Not in the least,” laughed Dickens. “It shall be a very serious novel which explores the layers and levels and contradictions of the criminal’s mind—in this case, the mind of a murderer, but also an opium addict and both master and victim of mesmerism.”

“How can one be both a master and victim of mesermism, Charles?”

“Be so kind as to read my book when it is finished, my dear Wilkie, and you shall see. Much will be revealed… and not only of the mystery, but perhaps of some of your own dilemma.”

I ignored that, since it made no sense. “Charles,” I said earnestly, leaning on his table and looking down at him as he sat, “do you really believe that smoking opium causes one to dream of flashing scimitars, scores of dancing girls, and—what was it? — ‘countless elephants careering in various gorgeous colours’?”

“ ‘… white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in numbers and attendants,’ ” corrected Dickens.

“Very well,” I said and stepped back and removed my spectacles to clean them with my handkerchief. “But do you really believe that any number of caparisoned or careering elephants and flashing scimitars are the stuff of an actual opium dream?”

“I have taken opium, you know,” Dickens said quietly. He seemed almost amused.

I confess to having rolled my eyes at this news. “So Frank Beard told me, Charles. A tiny bit of laudanum, and that just a few times, when you could not sleep on one of your last reading tours.”

“Still, my dear Wilkie, laudanum is laudanum. Opium is opium.”

“How many minims did you use?” I asked as I still paced back and forth, from open window to open window. Perhaps it was my own increased laudanum use that morning that kept me so excitable.

“Minims?” said Dickens.

“Drops of the opiate distillate in your wine,” I said. “How many drops?”

“Oh, I have no idea. Dolby handled the ministrations the few evenings I tried that medicinal approach. I would say two.”

“Two minims… two drops?” I repeated.

“Yes.”

I said nothing for a minute. That very day, as a guest at Gad’s Hill Place and having brought only a flask and a small refill jug in my baggage for the long weekend, I had drunk at least six hundred minims and possibly twice that. Then I said, “But you cannot convince me—or anyone who has actually researched the drug as I have, my dear Charles—that you dreamt of elephants and scimitars and golden domes.”

Dickens laughed. “My dear Wilkie, just as you said you… ‘tested,’ I believe your word was… your Moonstone character Franklin Blake’s ability to enter his fiancée’s bedroom while she was sleeping…”

“Sitting room next to her bedroom,” I corrected. “My editor insisted on it for propriety’s sake.”

“Ah, yes,” said Dickens with a smile. He had been that editor, of course. “Enter into his fiancée’s bedroom’s sitting room to steal a diamond, all while he was asleep, merely under the influence of laudanum he hadn’t known he’d taken…”

“You’ve expressed your doubts as to the realism of that more than once,” I said sourly. “Even though I’ve told you that I did experiment with similar situations under the influence of the drug.”

“Exactly my point, my dear Wilkie. You stretched the point to serve your plot. And so my caparisoned pachyderms and flashing scimitars—to serve the greater story.”

“This is not the point, Charles.”

“What is, then?” Dickens looked sincerely curious. He also looked sincerely exhausted. Those days, when the Inimitable wasn’t reading to others or at play, he tended to look like the old man he had suddenly become.

“The point is that Drood will kill you if you publish this book,” I said. “You told me yourself that he wants a biography, not a sensationalist novel filled with opium, mesmerism, all things Egyptian, and a weak character named Drood…”

“Weak but important to the story,” interrupted Dickens.

I could only shake my head. “You won’t heed my warning. Perhaps if you had seen the face of poor Inspector Field the morning after he was murdered…”

“Murdered?” said Dickens, suddenly sitting up straight. He removed his spectacles and blinked. “Who said that Charles Frederick Field was murdered? You know very well that the Times said he had died in his sleep. And what is this talk of having seen his face? You certainly could not have, my dear Wilkie. I remember you were in bed ill for weeks at the time and didn’t even know that poor Field had died until I told you many months later.”

I hesitated, considering whether to tell Dickens then about Reginald Barris’s explanation of Inspector Field’s true demise. But then I would have to explain Barris and why and where I saw him and all about the Overtown temples.…

While I was hesitating, Dickens sighed and said, “Your belief in Drood is enjoyable in its own dark way, Wilkie, but perhaps it is time it drew to a close. Perhaps it was a mistake for it ever to have begun.”

“Belief in Drood?” I snapped. “Must I remind you, my dear Dickens, that it was your story of your meeting with him at Staplehurst and your later stories of meeting with the monster in Undertown that got me involved in all this in the first place? It’s a little late, I would say, for you to tell me to cease believing in him, as if he were the ghost of Marley or Christmas Yet to Come.”

I thought Dickens would laugh at this last broadside, but he only looked sadder and more weary than before and said, as if to himself, “Perhaps it is too late, my dear Wilkie. Or perhaps not. But it is definitely too late this particular Sunday. I must go in and prepare to enjoy one of the last meals I may ever share with dear James and Annie.…”

His voice had become so soft and sad by the end of that sentence that I had to strain to hear the words over the sound of the fox hunters riding away from the Falstaff Inn.

“We shall speak of this another time,” said Dickens as he rose. I noticed that his left leg seemed unable to support his weight for a moment and that he steadied himself with his right hand on the table, getting his balance and teetering there a moment with his left hand and leg flailing uselessly, like a toddling infant taking his first steps, before he smiled again—ruefully this time, I thought—and hobbled out the door and down the stairs as we headed back to the main house.

“We shall speak of this another time,” he said again.

And we did, Dear Reader. But too late, as you will see, to avoid the tragedies to come.