At the close of the interview, the Queen presented him with an autographed copy of her Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands and asked for a set of his works. “We would prefer, if it is possible,” she said, “that we receive them this afternoon.”

Dickens had smiled and bowed slightly but said, “I ask once again for Your Majesty’s kind indulgence and for a bit more time in which I shall have my books more suitably bound for Your Majesty.”

He later sent her the complete set of his works bound in morocco leather and gold.

THE FINAL READING PERFORMANCE he had mentioned to the Queen occurred on 15 March.

On that last evening, he read from A Christmas Carol and from the Trial. They had always been the crowds’ favourites. His granddaughter, tiny Mekitty, was present for the first time that night, and Kent later told me that she had trembled when her grandfather— “Wenerables” she called him—had spoken in strange voices. She wailed beyond consolation when she saw her Wenerables crying.

I was there in the audience that night—in the back, unheralded, in the shadows. I could not stay away.

For the last time on this Earth, I realised, English audiences were hearing Charles Dickens give voice to Sam Weller and Ebenezer Scrooge and Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim.

The audience was huge and overflowing. Crowds had gathered outside the hall’s two entrances on Regent Street and Piccadilly hours before the event. Later, Dickens’s son Charley told my brother that “I thought I had never heard him read so well and with so little effort.”

But I was there and I could see the effort that Dickens was using to keep himself composed. Then the trial scene from The Pickwick Papers was over and—as he always did—Dickens simply walked off stage.

The huge audience went berserk. The standing ovation verged on sheer hysteria. Several times Dickens returned to the platform and then left again and each time he was called back. Finally he calmed the crowd and gave the short speech that he obviously had been labouring on for some time and which he now had to overcome his visible emotions to give—tears were pouring down his cheeks in the gaslights while his granddaughter wailed in the family’s box.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it would be worse than idle—for it would be hypocritical and unfeeling—if I were to disguise that I close this episode in my life with feelings of very considerable pain.”

He spoke briefly of those fifteen years during which he had been reading to the public—of how he had seen such readings as a duty to his readers and to the public—and he spoke of that readership’s and public’s sympathy in return. As if in recompense for his departure, he mentioned that The Mystery of Edwin Drood would soon appear (the audience was too rapt and silent and transfixed even to applaud this happy news).

“From these garish lights,” he concluded, stepping slightly closer to the gaslights and to his silent (except for the soft weeping) audience, “I now vanish forevermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, affectionate farewell.”

He limped from the stage then, but the relentless roars of applause brought him back one last time.

His cheeks wet with tears, Charles Dickens kissed his hand, waved, and then limped off the stage for the final time.

Walking back to Number 90 Gloucester Place through light showers that March night, a new unopened letter from Caroline Clow—more carefully detailed abuses, I was sure—in my pocket, I drank heavily from my silver flask.

Dickens’s public—that mob of public which I had seen and heard roar that very night—would, whenever that d— ned beloved writer of theirs finally chose to die, insist on having him buried in Westminster Abbey next to the great poets. I was now certain of that. They would get him there if they had to carry his corpse on their rough-wooled shoulders and dig the grave themselves.

I resolved to take a day off from my writing the next day—a Wednesday—and go to Rochester and visit the cathedral and seek out Mr Dradles and there make my final arrangements for Charles Dickens’s true demise and interment.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Ere is the block,” whispered Dradles, patting the face of a stone in the wall that looked like all the others in the gloom. “And ’ere the tool to ’andle ’er with.” In the weak lantern light, I saw him reach deep into his layers of flannel and moleskin and filthy canvas and bring out a pry bar as long as my forearm. “And ’ere on top, you see, the notch I chiselled in, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins, sir. Easy as the front door key to your very own ’ouse, you see.”

I could not really see the niche at the top of the block where it met the mortar, but the flat end of the pry bar found it. Dradles grunted rum fumes at me as he leaned all his weight on the upper part of the bar. The stone screamed.

I write “screamed,” Dear Reader, rather than “screeched” or “scraped” or “made a loud sound” because the noise this stone block made sliding back several inches out of its ancient place in the wall of the crypt was precisely that of a woman screaming.

I helped Dradles remove the surprisingly heavy block and set it on the dark, dank stones of the curving crypt stairs. The lantern showed a rectangular hole which I was sure was far too small for my purposes. When Dradles dropped the iron bar on the floor behind me, I confess I jumped several inches.

“Go on, lean ’n’ peer in, make your acquaintance wi’ the old ’uns there,” cackled the stonemason. He took another drink from his ever-present jug as I held the lantern to the aperture and attempted to peer inside.

From what I could see, it still looked too small for my purposes. Less than a foot of space separated this outer wall from the first inner wall of an old crypt, and although I could see that this narrow gap dropped a foot or two below the level of the outer walkway and floor where we crouched, much of this cavity stretching away on both sides of the hole we’d made was half-filled with broken stones, ancient bottles, and other rubbish.

I heard Dradles chuckle to my left. He must have seen my appalled expression in the lamplight.

“Y’er thinkin’ it’s too narrow, ain’t you, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins? But it ain’t. It’s perfect. Shove aside ’ere.”

I held the lantern as Dradles squat-walked forward. He patted his bulging pockets and suddenly there was an animal’s long leg bone in his right hand.

“Where did that come from?” I whispered.

“One of yer bigger test dogs in the lime pit, ’course. It’s me who does the rakin’ out there, now, in’t it? Now watch and learn.”

Dradles pushed the long canine femur or whatever it was sideways through the small aperture and tossed it in with a flick of his fingers. I heard it clatter on the rubbish below and several feet to one side.

“You could get a kennel ’o dogs’ skeletons in ’ere,” he said too loudly. “But it ain’t dogs we’re thinkin’ of to join the old ’uns with their crooks ’ere, is it?”

I said nothing.

Dradles patted at his layers of filthy, dusty garments again and suddenly he was holding a human skull missing only its jawbone.

“Who is… who was that?” I whispered. I hated it that my voice sounded like it was trembling in this narrow but echoing space.

“Oh, aye, names are important for the dead ’uns, though not for them, but for us quick ’uns, eh?” laughed Dradles. “Let us call ’im Yorick.”

Once again, the old man must have seen my expression in the lantern light, for he laughed loudly—the echo of that drunken bark coming back from groined vaults on the level above us and from the walls of the curved and descending staircase-corridor we were in and from unimagined rooms and tunnels and pits in the absolute darkness far below.