“You are so kind,” began the distraught young woman (although, at the advanced age of thirty-two, she was hardly still a young woman). “You have always been so kind to our family, Wilkie.”

“As I shall always be,” I muttered. “After having received unlimited kindness from the family over the years.” The driver above us in the rain was shouting and cracking his whip not at his own poor horse but at some dray waggon driver who had crossed in front of him.

Mamie did not seem to be listening to me. Handing back my now-sodden handkerchiefs, she sighed and said, “I went to the Queen’s Ball the other night, you know, and had ever so much fun! It was so gay! Father was to have been my escort, but at the last minute he was unable to go…”

“Not because of his health, I hope,” I said.

“Yes, sadly, yes. He says that his foot—and these are his words, so you must forgive me—is a mere bag of pain. He can barely hobble to his desk to write each day.”

“I am dismayed to hear that, Mamie.”

“Yes, yes, we all are. The day before the Queen’s Ball, Father had a visitor—a very young girl with literary aspirations, someone Lord Lytton had recommended visit Father and sent over—and while Father was explaining to her the enjoyment he was having in writing this Drood book for serialisation, this upstart of a girl had the temerity to ask, ‘But suppose you died before all the book was written?’ ”

“Outrageous,” I muttered.

“Yes, yes. Well, Father—you know sometimes in a conversation he smiles but how his gaze suddenly becomes focused on something very far away—he said, ‘Ah-h! That has occurred to me at times.’ And the girl became flustered.…”

“As well she should have been,” I said.

“Yes, yes… but when Father saw that he had embarrassed her, he spoke very softly in his kindest voice and said to her, ‘One can only work on, you know—work while it is day.’ ”

“Very true,” I said. “All of us writers feel the same on this issue.”

Mamie began fussing with her bonnet, setting her wet hair and sagging curls to rights, and I had a moment to contemplate the rather sad future for both of Dickens’s daughters. Katey was married to a very sick young man and was currently a social outcast both because of her father’s separation from her mother and because of Kate’s own flirtations and behaviour. Her tongue had always been too sharp for either Society’s ear or that of most men who might have been marriage partners. Mamie was less intelligent than Kate, but her sometimes frenzied efforts towards social acceptance were always carried out at the fringes of society, usually within a maelstrom of malicious gossip, again because of her father’s political attitudes, her sister’s behaviour, and her own spinsterhood. Mamie’s last serious marriage possibility had been Percy Fitzgerald, but—as Katey had said last New Year’s Eve—Percy had settled on that “simpering charmer” and forgone his last opportunity of marrying into the Dickens fold.

“We shall be so glad to be back in Gad’s Hill Place,” Mamie said suddenly as she finished flouncing her wilted skirts and setting damp bodice lace to a semblance of propriety.

“Oh, you’re leaving the Milner Gibson house so soon? I was under the impression that Charles had leased it for a longer period.”

“Only until the first of June. Father is very impatient to get back to Gad’s Hill for the summer. He wants us to be there with the house all opened up and happy and us all settled by the second or third of June. He shall have very little reason to come into town then, for the rest of the summer, you know. The rail travel is so hard on Father these days, Wilkie. Also, it will be easier for Ellen to visit there than it has been here in the city.”

I blinked at this and then took off my spectacles to wipe them on one of the soggy handkerchiefs in order to hide my reaction.

“Miss Ternan still visits there?” I said offhandedly.

“Oh, yes, Ellen has been a regular visitor over the past few years—certainly your brother or Katey has told you that, Wilkie! Come to think of it, it’s odd that you haven’t been a guest there during the periods that Ellen has come to stay. But then—you are so busy!”

“Yes,” I said.

So Ellen Ternan was still a frequent guest at Gad’s Hill. This was a surprise. I was sure that Dickens had sworn his daughters into secrecy on this—another reason for Society to shun all of them—but that light-headed Mamie had forgotten. (Or assumed that I was still such a close friend of her father’s that he would have told me.)

I realised at that moment that none of us—none of Dickens’s friends or family or even his biographers in some future era such as yours, Dear Reader—would ever know the real story of his strange relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan. Had they actually buried a child in France, as I had surmised after overhearing that one snippet of conversation between them at Peckham Station? Were they now living merely as brother and sister, their passion—should they ever have acted on it in the first place—put behind them forever? Or had that passion resumed in a new form, edging towards being made public—perhaps a very scandalous divorce and second marriage for the ageing novelist? Would Charles Dickens ever find that happiness with a woman that had seemed to elude him throughout his passionate, naive, romance-haunted life?

The novelist in me was curious. The rest of me did not give a d— n for the answers. The old friend in me vaguely wished that Dickens had found that happiness in his lifetime. The rest of me recognised that Dickens’s lifetime needed to be over and that he needed to be gone—missing, lost, expunged, eradicated, his corpse never found—so that the adulatory mobs could not bury him in Westminster Abbey or its churchyard. That was very important.

Mamie was babbling on about something—going on about someone she had danced and flirted with at the Queen’s Ball—but suddenly the coach stopped and I peered out through the rain-streaked window and saw the Marble Arch.

“I shall walk you to your door,” I said, stepping out and waiting to help the silly spinster down.

“Oh, Wilkie,” she said, taking my hand, “you truly are the kindest of men.”

I WAS WALKING home alone from the Adelphi Theatre several nights after this chance meeting when someone or something hissed at me from a darkened alley.

I stopped, turned, and lifted my bronze-headed walking stick as any gentleman would do when threatened by a ruffian in the night.

“Misster Collinssss,” hissed the figure in the narrow aperture.

Drood, I thought. My heartbeat raced and my pulse pounded in my temples. I felt frozen, unable to run. I grasped the stick in both hands.

The dark shape took two steps closer to the opening of the alley but did not emerge fully into the light. “Mister Collinsss… it’s I, Reginald Barrisss.” He gestured me closer.

I would not enter the alley, but from the opening to that stinking black crevice, I could see a trapezoid of light from the distant streetlamp falling on the dark form’s face. There was the same dirt, the same wild beard, the same hooded eyes of a hunted man always flicking one way then another. I saw only a glimpse of his teeth in the dim light, but they appeared to have decayed. The once handsome and confident and burly Detective Reginald Barris had become this shadowy, fearful form whispering at me from an alley.

“I thought you dead,” I whispered.

“I am not far from it,” said the shadow-figure. “They hunt me everywhere. They do not give me time to ssleep or eat. I musst move consstantly.”

“What news do you have?” I demanded. I still held my heavy stick at the ready.

“Drood and his minionss have set a date on which to take your friend Dickenss,” he hissed at me. His breath was foul, even from three feet away. I realised that his missing teeth must be causing this Droodish hiss.