“Not at first, I believe,” said Dickens. “I later spoke to many of his colleagues and superiors in the Detective Bureau about this—as well as with the man who succeeded Field as Chief of Detectives when the inspector actually did break down.”

“Broke down because of Drood,” I said sarcastically. “Because of Field’s fantasy about an Egyptian occultist killer named Drood.”

“Yes. At first it was not a fantasy. There were a series of incredible murders about the time that Charles Frederick Field was becoming Chief of Detectives—all were unsolved. Some seemed to relate to cases that Inspector Field had been unable to solve in earlier years. Some of the Lascars and Malays and Chinamen and Hindoos that the police dragged in at the time tried to blame a spectral figure called Drood—the details were always hazy, but consistent at least on the basics that this monster was Egyptian, was a serial-murderer, could control other people by the powers of his mind and by the rituals of his ancient cult, and that he lived in some vast temple underground—or, according to some of the opium-eating villains, in a temple beneath the Thames itself.”

“Shall we walk back?” I said.

“Not yet, Wilkie,” said Dickens. He set his trembling hand upon my forearm for a moment but pulled it away when he saw my glare. “Do you see, though,” he went on, “how this became first an obsession with Field, then a fantasy? According to the many policemen and detectives I later spoke to, including Hatchery, it was when Lord Lucan was murdered so foully while under Charles Frederick Field’s personal protection, and the identity of the murderer never discovered that… what is funny, Wilkie?”

I simply could not stop laughing. This story, this plot, was so wonderfully baroque yet somehow so tidily logical. It was so, so… Dickensian.

“It was his fantasy about this make-believe master criminal, Drood, that eventually cost Field his job and then his pension,” said Dickens. “Inspector Charles Frederick Field simply could not believe that the terrible crimes which he saw and had reported to him every day of his working life could be so random… so meaningless. In his increasingly confused mind, there had to be a single master criminal behind all the terror and misery he saw and experienced. A single villain. A master criminal nemesis worthy of him, of the great Inspector Charles Frederick Field. And a nemesis who was not really human, but who—when caught (by Inspector Charles Frederick Field, of course)—would bring an end to the literally endless series of brutalities that he was spending his life observing.”

“So you are saying,” I said, “that the respected former Chief of Detectives whom we both knew, Charles Frederick Field, was insane by the end.”

“As mad as a hatter,” said Dickens. “For many years. His idée fixe had become an obsession, the obsession a fantasy, the fantasy a nightmare from which he could not awaken.”

“It’s all very neat, Charles,” I said softly. This was such nonsense that it had not even caused my pulse to speed up. “But you forget the others who have seen Drood.”

“Which others?” Dickens asked softly. “Besides those thugs from decades ago and your mesmeric hallucinations, my dear Wilkie, I can think of no other instances of persons who ever believed in the Drood phantom—with the possible exception of Field’s son.”

“His son?”

“He had a boy out of wedlock by a young West Indies woman he had been seeing for some years. She lived not far from Opium Sal’s den that you and I got to know so well—you better than I, I believe. The inspector’s wife never learned of the woman (who died, I learned, shortly after childbirth, probably from an opium overdose) nor of the boy, but Field did right by the lad, paying to have him raised by a good family far from the docks, then sending him to fine public schools, and finally to Cambridge, or so I hear.”

“What was the boy’s name?” I asked. My mouth was suddenly very dry. I wished that I had brought water rather than laudanum in my flask.

“Reginald, I believe,” said Dickens. “I did enquire about him in the past year, but the young man seems to have disappeared after his father died. Perhaps he went to Australia.”

“And how do you think Inspector Charles Frederick Field died, Charles?”

“A heart attack, my dear Wilkie. Just as the papers reported. We have discussed that.”

I slid down from the stone and stood on legs that were tingling from lack of circulation. Not caring if Dickens watched, I drank deeply from my flask. “I need to get back,” I said thickly.

“Surely you will stay for dinner. Your brother and Katey are down for the weekend. Percy Fitzgerald and his wife are coming by and…”

“No,” I interrupted. “I have to get back to town. I need to work. I need to finish Man and Wife.”

Dickens had to use his cane to get to his feet. I could tell that his left foot and leg were putting him through agony, although he refused to show it. He took his watch and chain from his waistcoat.

“Let me mesmerise you, Wilkie. Now. At this moment.”

I took a step away from him. My laugh sounded frightened even to my own ears. “You have to be joking.”

“I have never been more serious, my dear friend. I had no idea when I mesmerised you in June of eighteen sixty-five that the post-trance suggestions would—or could—go on for so long. I underestimated both the power of opium and the power of a novelist’s imagination.”

“I do not wish to be mesmerised,” I said.

“I should have done it years ago,” said Dickens. His voice was also thick, as if he were close to weeping. “If you remember, my dear Wilkie, I tried to mesmerise you again on more than one occasion—so that I could cancel the mesmeric suggestions and have you wake from this endlessly constructed dream you’re in. I even tried to teach Caroline how to mesmerise you, giving her the single command code word I had implanted in your unconsciousness. Upon hearing that key word when you are in a mesmeric trance, you will awaken at long last from this extended dream.”

“And what is the command… the code word?” I asked.

“ ‘Unintelligible,’ ” said Dickens. “I chose a distinctive word you would not hear every day. But for it to work, you must be in mesmeric sleep.”

“ ‘Unintelligible,’ ” I repeated. “A word you said you used on the day of the Staplehurst accident.”

“I did use it then,” said Dickens. “It was my response to the horror.”

“I believe it is you who is mad, Charles,” I said.

He shook his head. He was weeping. The Inimitable, weeping in a grassy field in the sunlight. “I do not expect you to forgive me, Wilkie, but for God’s sake—for your own sake—let me put you under magnetic influence now and release you from this accidental curse I put upon you. Before it is too late!”

He took a step towards me, both arms raised, the watch in his right hand glinting goldly in the sunlight, and I took two steps backwards. I could only guess what his real game was, and all those guesses were dark indeed. Inspector Field had once said that this was all a chess game between himself and Drood. I had once seen it as a three-way game with Dickens. Now I had taken the inspector’s place as a player in this very real game of life or death.

“You really want to mesmerise me, Charles?” I said in a friendly and reasonable voice.

“I must, my dear Wilkie. It is the only way I can begin to make amends to you for what is the cruelest joke I have ever—however inadvertently—played on anyone. Just stand there and relax and I shall…”

“Not now,” I said, taking another step back but holding both palms out towards him in a calm, placating manner. “I am too disturbed and agitated to be a successful subject now anyway. But Wednesday night…”

“Wednesday night?” said Dickens. He suddenly seemed confused, battered, like a prizefighter who has gone rounds beyond his stamina but who is still standing out of sheer reflex, yet unable to protect himself from further blows. I watched him hop, using the cane, unable to put any weight on his obviously swollen and throbbing left foot and leg. “What is Wednesday night, Wilkie?”