“It hardly seems the time for requests, Charles.”
“Perhaps,” says Dickens, and I can see him smiling in the weak moonlight. I do not like him looking at me this way. I had hoped that he would keep his back turned until we reached the lime pit and the deed was done. “But I still have one,” he continues softly. Maddeningly, I cannot detect fear in his voice, which is far steadier than mine has been. “But only one.”
“What?”
“It may sound odd, Wilkie, but for some years now, I have had the strong premonition that I would die on the anniversary of the Staplehurst accident. May I reach in my waistcoat and look at my watch?”
To what purpose? I think dizzily. To prepare for the evening, I had drunk almost twice my usual allotment of laudanum and injected myself twice with the morphine, and now I feel the effects of these medicines not so much as reinforcment to my resolve but as a giddiness and odd light-headedness. “Yes, look, but quickly,” I manage to say.
Dickens calmly takes out his watch, peers at it in the moonlight, and winds it slowly and maddeningly before setting it back. “It is some minutes after ten,” he says. “The summer twilight lasts so late this time of year and we left late. It shan’t be long until midnight. I cannot explain why—since your goal is obviously for no one to know the means or location of my death or interment—but it would mean something to me if I were allowed to fulfil my various premonitions and leave this world on nine June rather than eight June.”
“You are hoping that someone comes along or that something arises to allow your escape,” I say in my new and shaky voice.
Dickens merely shrugs. “Should someone enter the graveyard, you can still shoot me and make your escape through the sea grasses and back to your carriage waiting nearby.”
“They would find your body,” I say in flat tones. “And you would be buried in Westminster Abbey.”
Dickens laughs then. It is that loud, unselfconscious, carefree, and infectious laugh that I have heard from him so many times before. “Is that what this is about, my dear Wilkie? Westminster Abbey? Does it calm your fears any that I have already stipulated in my will that I demand a simple, small funeral? No ceremonies at Westminster Abbey or anywhere else. I make clear that I want no more than three coaches in the final funeral procession and no more people at the burial than those three small coaches can carry.”
My pounding pulse—and now pounding headache—seem to be trying to synchronise with the distant pounding of surf on a sandbar somewhere to the east, but the irregular rhythm of the wind denies the syncopation.
I say, “There will be no funeral procession.”
“Obviously not,” says Dickens and infuriates me with another small smile. “All the more reason to grant me this one, last kindness before we part company forever.”
“To what purpose?” I ask at long last.
“You spoke of each of us solving a mystery tonight. Presumably my mystery to be solved is what—if anything—there might be after the instant of one’s death. But what is yours, Wilkie? What mystery did you wish to have solved this beautiful evening?”
I say nothing.
“Let me venture a guess,” says Dickens. “You would like to know how The Mystery of Edwin Drood was to have ended. And perhaps even learn how my Drood connects to your Drood.”
“Yes.”
He looks at his watch again. “It is only ninety minutes before midnight. I brought a flask of brandy—at your suggestion (although Frank Beard would be horrified to know this)—and I am sure you brought some refreshment for yourself. Why don’t we find a comfortable seat somewhere in this place and have one last conversation before the bells in that tower toll my appointed day?”
“You think that I will change my mind,” I say with a malicious smile.
“In truth, my dear Wilkie, I do not for a second believe that you will. Nor am I sure that I would want you to. I am very… weary. But I am not averse to a final conversation and taste of brandy in the night.”
With that Dickens turns on his heel and looks amidst the surrounding stones for some place to sit. My choice is either to follow his lead or shoot him there and drag his corpse the many yards to the waiting lime pit. I had hoped to avoid this last indignity for both of us. And, in truth, I do not mind the idea of sitting for a few minutes until this temporary light-headedness passes.
THE TWO FLAT GRAVESTONES he chooses for our chairs, separated by almost four feet of a longer, wider headstone that might be a low table, remind me of the day in this very churchyard when Dickens played waiter to Ellen Ternan, her mother, and me.
After receiving permission, Dickens removes his brandy flask from his jacket pocket and sets it on the table-stone in front of him and I do the same with my silver flask. I realise that I should have patted the Inimitable’s pockets when I first aimed my pistol at him. I know that Dickens keeps his own pistol in a drawer at Gad’s Hill Place, as well as the shotgun with which he murdered Sultan. Dickens’s apparent lack of surprise at the purpose of our “mystery outing” makes me think that he might have secreted a weapon on his person before coming out to the coach… and this might explain his otherwise inexplicable insouciance.
But it is too late now. I shall just keep a careful eye on him for the short time remaining.
We sit in silence for a while. Then the bells in the looming tower strike eleven, and my jagged nerves leap to the point that I almost accidentally pull the trigger on the pistol I am still aiming at Dickens’s heart.
He notes my reaction but says nothing as I lay the gun along my upper leg and knee, keeping it aimed at him but removing my finger from the inside of what Hatchery called, I believe, the “trigger guard.”
Dickens’s voice after the long silence makes me jump in my skin again. “That is the weapon that Detective Hatchery showed us once, is it not?”
“Yes.”
The wind rustles grasses for a moment. As if afraid of this silence, as if it is weakening my resolve, I force myself to say, “You know that Hatchery is dead?”
“Oh, yes.”
“And do you know how he died?”
“Yes,” says Dickens. “I do. Friends on the Metropolitan Police Force told me.”
We have nothing else to say on this topic. But it leads me to the questioning that is the only reason Charles Dickens remains alive this final, extra hour. “I was surprised that you used a character—obviously a detective in disguise with his huge head of false hair—named Datchery in Edwin Drood,” I say. “Such parody of poor Hatchery, especially given the… ah… lamentable details of his death, hardly seems sensitive.”
Dickens looks at me. As my eyes have adapted to the churchyard darkness, so far from the nearest streetlamps or the windows of inhabited homes, the headstones around us—and especially the flat one of light marble lying between Dickens and me like a games table upon which we have laid our final hands in poker—seem to be reflecting the moonlight into Dickens’s face like weak imitations of the focused gaslights he had rigged for his readings.
“Not a parody,” he says. “An affectionate remembrance.”
I sip from my flask and wave that away. It is not important. “But your Drood tale is less than half done—only the four monthly instalments have seen print and your entire manuscript to date is completed to only half the length of the full book—and yet you have already murdered young Edwin Drood. Asking as one professional to another—and as one with decidedly more experience and perhaps greater expertise in writing about mysteries—how can you possibly hope to sustain interest, Charles, when you have committed the murder so early in the tale yet have only one logical choice for the murderer… the very clear villain, John Jasper?”