And that was only the beginning.

LATE THAT NIGHT of 14 June I paced back and forth in my empty house.

George and Besse had returned from their twenty-four-hour vacation on 9 June and I had promptly fired them, sending them packing that evening. I gave neither reason for terminating their employment nor any letters of recommendation. I had not yet gotten around to hiring their replacements. Carrie would be stopping by the next day—a Wednesday, one week from the day that Dickens and I had agreed to meet after dusk outside the Falstaff Inn—but that would be a brief interruption before she went off for her monthly visit to her mother in Joseph Clow’s home.

In the meantime, I had the huge house to myself. The only sounds coming through the windows flung high for spring were the occasional rumbles of late-night traffic going by and the rustle of foliage as gentle breezes stirred the branches. Beneath that, there came the occasional scrape and scratch—like dry twigs or thorns brushing against thick wood—of whatever remained of poor little Agnes, clawing at the boarded-up doorway to the servants’ stairs.

On the first two days after I’d heard of Dickens’s death, the rheumatical gout pain had diminished astonishingly. Even more astonishing—and exciting to me—was the absence of any movement in my skull. I became certain that when Dickenson, Barris-Field, and Drood himself had somehow rendered me unconscious amidst the scarlet geraniums in Dickens’s flower bed six days ago this night, Drood had removed the scarab from my brain.

But that day, during the carrying-in of the coffin to Poets’ Corner and later with Percy, the old pressure and pain and skittering behind my eyes and even the sound of the beetle-burrowing in my brain had all come back.

I had self-administered three healthy injections of morphia on top of my usual nightly allocation of laudanum, but still I could not sleep. Despite the warmth and open windows, I built a large fire in my study fireplace.

Something to read… something to read!

I paced before my high bookcases, now pulling down a book I had promised to read or finish, standing by the fireplace or near the candles on the shelves or by the lamp on my desk as I read a page or two, then thrusting the volume back in its place.

That night, and every day and night since, seeing a book spine missing from its allotted space on my shelves reminded me of the stone that I should have removed from the wall of Dradles’s crypt. How many bones and skulls and skeletons are thrust into the void of such missing or unwritten books?

Finally I took down the beautiful leather-bound copy of Bleak House that Dickens had inscribed and given to me two years after we had met.

I chose Bleak House without actively thinking about it because, I now believe, I both admired and hated that book as much as any writing in the dead man’s ouevre.

I had been inhibited from telling any but a very few confidants of how absurd I found Dickens’s much-lauded writing to be in that book. His occasional first-person narration by “Esther Summerson” was the height of this absurdity.

I mean, Dear Reader (if the unworthy book has survived until your time, which I very much doubt—although I truly believe that The Moonstone will and has), just look at Dickens’s chosen primary metaphor that opens the book—that fog! It appears, it becomes the central metaphor, and it creeps off, never to be used as such again.

What amateur writing! What a failure of theme and intention!

And just look, Dear Reader—as I was madly doing that night of Dickens’s funeral, flipping through the pages with the intensity of a lawyer seeking a precedent by which to save (or, in this case, condemn) his client—at how ridiculous the totally unbelievable coincidences are in that book… and how unbelievably cruel the character of the always-a-child Harold Skimpole was, since we all knew at the time that he had based Skimpole on our common acquaintance Leigh Hunt or… there is the abject failure of his late-in-the-book mystery element, so inferior in every way to that in The Moonstone or… the shifting and contradictory impressions of Esther’s looks after she has suffered the smallpox (I mean, was she disfigured or not!? Now yes! Now not at all! What a conspiracy of auctorial incompetence wrestling with narrative dishonesty) and then… but look here first!.. look, if you will, at that entire narration by Esther Summerson! What do you say to that? What can you—or any honest reader sitting in judgement—say to that!

Esther begins her narration with the poorly educated and naive child’s view we might expect for a poorly educated and unworldly child—she speaks in near-infant’s sentences such as (I riffled and tore at the pages to find this)—“My dear old doll! I was such a shy thing that I seldom dared to open my lips, and never dared open my heart, to anybody else.… O you dear faithful Dolly, I knew you would be expecting me!”

You are pardoned, Dear Reader, if you suddenly were required—as I was— to rush to the water closet to vomit at that line.

But Dickens forgot that Esther thinks and speaks in such a manner! Before long, “Esther” is describing simple scenes with pure Dickensian alliteration and effortless assonance—“the clock ticked, the fire clicked”—and not long after that the poorly educated girl is narrating entire pages, complete chapters, with the devastating incantatory eloquence of Charles Dickens and Charles Dickens alone. What a failure! What a sheer travesty!

And then, on that night of Dickens’s funeral—or most likely it was the next day now, for had I not heard, unnoticed hours earlier, the ticking clock toll midnight above the clicking fire? — I was paging madly through the now-torn book to find more ammunition in my skirmish (if not war) to convince you, Dear Reader, (and perhaps my exhausted self) of the newly dead man’s long-overlooked mediocrity, when I came upon the following passage. No, not a passage, actually, more of a fragment… no, a mere sliver of a fragment of a passage, the kind of thing that Dickens constantly dashed out without later revision or any serious conscious effort at the time.

Esther has travelled, you see, to the inn at the town near the harbour of Deal to see Richard, her dearest female friend’s future husband and a young man with Fate and Unhappiness and Obsession and self-inflicted Tragedy expectantly hanging about him like a flock of crows (or what the Americans call buzzards) on the branches in a leafless November tree—expectantly hanging about him, waiting for their inexorable time to come, as surely as they always have and continue to do about me.

Over Esther’s shoulder, Dickens allows us to catch a glimpse of the harbour. There are many boats there and more appear, as if by magic, as the fog begins to rise. Like Homer in the Iliad, Dickens briefly catalogues the ships becoming visible, including a great and noble Indiaman just back from India. And the author sees this—and makes us see this—just “when the sun shone through the clouds, making silvery pools in the dark sea.”

Silvery pools in the dark sea.

Pools in the sea.

My one exercise and indulgence, Dear Reader, is hiring a crew to do the work and taking a yacht up along the coast. It was on just such an outing that I met Martha R—. I have seen the sunlight on the sea thousands of times and have described it in my books and stories scores of times—perhaps hundreds of times. I have used words such as “azure” and “blue” and “sparkling” and “dancing” and “grey” and “white-topped” and “ominous” and “threatening” and even “ultramarine.”

And I had seen that phenomenon of the sun “making silvery pools in the dark sea” scores or hundreds of times but had never thought to record it in my fiction, with or without that swift and certain and slightly blurred sound of the sibilants Dickens had chosen for its description.