“When?”

“Nine June. Not quite three weeks from now.”

The fifth anniversary, I thought. It made sense. I asked, “What do you mean they will take him? Kill him? Kidnap him? Take him down to Undertown?”

The filthy figure shrugged. He pulled his tattered hat brim lower so that his face went back to darkness.

I said, “What shall I do?”

“You can warn him,” rasped Barris. “But there iss no place he can hide—no country where he would be ssafe. Once Drood decidesss a thing, it is done. But perhapsss you can tell Dickensss to get his affairss in order.”

My pulse still raced. “Can I do anything for you?”

“No,” said Barris. “I am a dead man.”

Before I could ask anything else, the dark figure backed away and then seemed to be melting down into the filthy stones of the alley. There must have been a basement stairway there that I could not see, but to my eye the shadowy figure simply melted vertically out of sight in the dark alley until it was gone.

Nine June. But how to arrange things with Dickens myself before that date? He would be back at Gad’s Hill Place soon, and we were both working hard on our respective novels. How could I lure him away—especially to where I needed to take him—so that I could do what I had to? And before the ninth of June, that anniversary of Staplehurst that Dickens had always set aside in order to meet with Drood?

I had written a formal and rather cold letter to Wills demanding the reversion of copyrights for all of my stories and novels that had ever appeared in All the Year Round, and Dickens himself wrote me back in that last week of May 1870.

Even the business part of the letter was surprisingly friendly—he assured me that papers were being drawn up at that moment and that, even though we had not contractually arranged such returns of copyright, all such rights were to be returned to me at once. But it was his brief peroration that seemed wistful, almost lonely.

“My dear Wilkie,” he wrote, “I don’t come to see you because I don’t want to bother you. Perhaps you may be glad to see me by and by. Who knows?”

This was perfect.

I immediately wrote Dickens a friendly note asking if we could meet “at your earliest convenience, but preferably before the anniversary you honour each year at this time.” If Dickens did not burn this note, as was his habit, this wording might prove sufficiently cryptic to anyone who read it later.

When a warm and affirmative response came back from Dickens by the first of June, I completed the last of my preparations and set the Act III finale into motion.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Where am I?

Gad’s Hill. But not Gad’s Hill Place, merely Gad’s Hill, the site where Falstaff attempted to rob the coach but was set upon by “thirty ruffians”—actually just Prince Hal and a friend—and was all but robbed himself before he fled in panic.

My black coach is parked to one side of the Falstaff Inn. The hired coach looks rather like a hearse, which is fitting. It is almost invisible in the shadows under the tall trees as the last of the evening’s twilight begins to fade. The driver up on the box is no driver, but a Hindoo sailor I have hired for this one night, paying him the equal of six months’ salary for a real driver. He is a poor driver but he is also a foreigner. He speaks no English (I communicate with him through our mutual schoolboy bits of German and some sign language) and knows nothing of England or its famous people. He will be at sea again in ten days and may never return to English shores. He is curious about nothing. He is a terrible driver—the horses sense his lack of skill and show him no respect—but he is the perfect driver for this night.

When is it?

It is the gentle evening of 8 June, 1870, twenty minutes after the sun has set. Swallows and bats dart through the shadows and into the open, the wings of the bats and the forked tails of the swallows showing as flattened V’s against the flat, clear pane of paling water-colours that is the twilight.

I see Dickens trotting across the road—or trying to trot, since he is hobbling slightly. He is wearing the dark clothing that I had suggested he don for this outing and has some sort of soft slouch hat on. Despite his obviously sore foot and leg, he carries no cane with him this evening. I open the door and he hops up into the coach to sit next to me.

“I told no one where I was going,” he says breathlessly. “Just as you requested, my dear Wilkie.”

“Thank you. Such secrecy will be necessary this one time only.”

“This is all very mysterious,” he says as I rap the ceiling of the coach with my heavy cane.

“It is meant to be,” I say. “Tonight, my dear Charles, we shall each find the answer to a great mystery—yours being the greater.”

He says nothing to this and only comments once as the coach careers and wobbles and jolts and lurches its way east along the highway. The sailor-driver is working the horses far too hard, and his crashing into holes and wild swerves from the slightest oncoming object threaten to spill the coach and us into the watery ditch from moment to moment.

“Your driver appears to be in an unholy hurry,” says Dickens.

“He is foreign,” I explain.

Some time later, Dickens leans across me and looks out the left window at the approaching tower-spire of Rochester Cathedral rising like a black spike against the dimming sky. “Ah,” he says, but I believe I detect more confirmation than surprise in the syllable.

The coach grinds and squeals to a stop at the entrance to the churchyard and we climb out—me carrying a small unlighted lantern and both of us moving somewhat stiffly due to the jouncing and bouncing of the wild ride here—and then the driver applies his whip again and the black coach rumbles away into the deepening twilight.

“You don’t wish the coach to wait for us?” Dickens enquires.

“The driver will come back for me when it is time,” I say.

If he notices my use of “for me” rather than “for us,” he does not comment on it. We move into the graveyard. The church and this old part of the city and the cemetery are empty and silent. The tide has gone out and we can smell the decaying reek of the mudflats, but from somewhere beyond that there comes the fresh salt scent of the sea and the sound of slow breakers. The only illumination is from a waning crescent moon.

Dickens says softly, “What now, Wilkie?”

I pull the pistol from my jacket—fumbling a moment to get the protruding hammer and sight free of the pocket lining—and aim it at him.

“Ah,” he says again, and again there is no audible tone of surprise. To my ear, through the pounding of my pulse, the syllable sounds merely sad, perhaps even relieved.

We stand there like that for a moment, an odd and awkward tableau. The wind from the sea rustles the boughs of a pine tree close to where the graveyard wall hides us from the street. The hem and loose collars of Dickens’s long summer jacket swirl around him like black pennants. He raises a hand to hold on to the brim of his soft cap.

“It’s the lime pit, then?” asks Dickens.

“Yes.” I have to try twice before the word comes out properly. My mouth is very dry. I am dying for a drink from my laudanum flask, but I do not want to divert attention from Dickens for an instant.

I gesture with the pistol and Dickens begins walking towards the blackness that is the rear of the graveyard where the open pit waits. I follow several feet behind, taking care not to get too close in case the Inimitable were to make some lunge for the gun.

Suddenly he stops and I do as well, taking another two paces away from him and raising and aiming the pistol.

“My dear Wilkie, may I make one request?” His voice is so soft that the words are all but lost to me under the hiss of the wind in the few trees and many marsh grasses.