Then, without pausing even for a breath (and possibly not even to dip his pen), Dickens had gone on having the fog in the harbour lift over Esther’s shoulder by writing, “these ships brightened, and shadowed, and changed…,” and I knew in that instant, with my agitated, scarab-driven eyes merely passing over these few words in these short sentences, that I would never—not ever, should I live to be a hundred years of age and retain my faculties until the last moment of that life and career—that I would never be able to think and write like that.

The book was the style and the style was the man. And the man was—had been—Charles Dickens.

I threw the expensive, personally inscribed, moroccan-leather-bound and gold-leaf-edged copy of Bleak House into the ticking and clicking and crackling and cackling and f— ing fire.

Then I went upstairs to my room and tore my clothes off. They were sodden with sweat and I swear to this day that I could smell not just the overpoweringly sweet stench of the graveside flowers on them all, down to my clinging under-linens, but also the sweeter stink of the grave soil heaped nearby to make the hole—the final void—for the waiting (waiting for all of us) oak box.

Naked, laughing, and shouting loudly (although I forget what I shouted or why I laughed), I fumbled out the key and then fumbled open the requisite locks to get to Hatchery’s pistol.

The metal thing was heavier than usual. The cartridges were, as I have endlessly described to you, still there in their nest.

I thumbed back the happy hammer and set the round ring of muzzle to my sweaty temple. Then I remembered. The palate. The softest way to the brain.

I started to put the long steel phallus in my mouth, but then could not. Without even lowering the hammer, I threw the useless thing into my linen drawer. It did not discharge.

Then, before bathing or getting into my pyjamas and robe, I sat down at the small secretary in my bedroom (near where the Other Wilkie usually sits when he takes dictation on the Gods of the Black Lands) and wrote a brief but very clear and concise letter. Setting it aside for personal delivery—not for posting—the next day, I finally went in for my bath and then to bed and then to sleep, skittering scarab or no scarab.

I left the front door unlocked and the windows open wide for burglars—if there were any who would dare burgle a home that the Master Drood had honoured with his visit—and the candles and kerosene lamps and the fire in the fireplace all burning downstairs. I had not even replaced the fireplace screen after burning Bleak House.

Whatever else I knew that night of 14 June, 1870, I knew beyond any doubt that my fate was not to burn to death in a house fire.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

It was on the fourth day of July, 1870, my little daughter Marian’s first birthday, that I finished work early (I was adapting Man and Wife to the stage) and took the early-evening train to Rochester. I carried with me a small embroidered sofa pillow that Martha had made for me before she first came down to London. Some children in the carriage noticed the pillow I carried along with my leather portfolio and pointed and laughed—an old man of forty-six years and almost seven months, with balding head and greying beard and weakening eyes, carrying his own pillow probably for physical reasons too absurd for Youth even to enquire into—and I smiled and waggled my fingers at them in return.

In Rochester I walked the mile or so from the station to the Cathedral. Dickens’s most recent instalment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood was out, and this city and cathedral and adjoining churchyard—as poorly disguised as “Cloisterham” and “Cloisterham Cathedral” as Dick Datchery was within the same pages with the great wig he kept forgetting he was wearing—had already taken on literary and mystery resonances for the careful reader.

It was just after sunset and I waited with my pillow and my valise as the last visitors—two clergymen oddly holding hands (they had obviously come to trace headstone inscriptions with charcoal)—left through the open gate and disappeared towards the town centre and distant station.

I could hear two voices from the distant rear of the graveyard, but actual sight of the two people was obscured by the rise and fall of the cemetery fields, by the trees, by the thick hedges that shielded that poorer area near the marsh grasses, and even by the taller headstone monuments erected by such arrogant but insecure people as Mr Thomas Sapsea, still alive and walking and pontificating and enjoying his wife’s long headstone-monument epitaph (written by him and about him, of course, and carved into stone by the colourful stonemason, chiefly in the monumental line, named Durdles). Still alive and walking and pontificating, I should point out, only in the pages of the serialised novel now hurtling towards its premature discontinuance as surely as the 2.39 tidal train from Folkestone had hurtled unstoppably towards the breach in trestle rails at Staplehurst some five years and a little less than a month before.

“This is an idiot’s idea,” bellowed a man’s voice.

“I thought it might be gay,” came a woman’s voice. “A sort of evening picnic by the sea.”

I stopped less than twenty feet away from the bickering couple but remained hidden behind a tall, thick marble monolith—a sort of Sapsea-esque obelisk to some local functionary whose name, never much remembered anyway, had been all but erased by the salt and rain and sea breezes.

“A d— ned picnic in a d— ned boneyard!” shouted the man. It was obvious to even the most disinterested (and distant) overhearing ear that this was a man who was never embarrassed by his own shouting.

“See how nicely this—piece of stone—serves as a table,” came the weary woman’s voice. “Just sit and relax a moment while I open your beer.”

“My beer be d— ned!” bellowed the man. There came the sound of brittle china shattering after being thrown upon eternal—or at least monumental—stone. “Pack up these things. ’Ere, give me the glass and pail of beer first. You stupid cow. It’ll be hours before I’m fed now. And you’ll earn and pay back the railway fare or… Say, who are… what are you doing ’ere? What’s that in your hands? A pillow?”

I kept smiling until I got within two feet of the man, who’d barely had time to struggle to his feet while trying not to spill his pail and goblet of beer.

Still smiling, I pressed the pillow tight against the man’s sallow chest and pulled the trigger on the pistol I was holding behind that pillow. The gunshot was strangely muffled.

“What!?…” cried Joseph Clow. He staggered backwards a few steps. It appeared that he could not decide between looking at me, still holding the pillow—which was smoking slightly—or down at his own chest.

A single scarlet geranium flower had blossomed on his cheaply woven but immaculately white shirtfront. His grimy-nailed hands rose to his open waistcoat and he clawed weakly at that blossoming shirt, ripping buttons off.

I thrust the pillow against his now-bare and hairless flesh, just half a hand-span above his sternum, and fired twice more. Both cartridges fired true.

Clow stumbled backwards another few paces until his heels caught the edge of a low, horizontal stone similar to the one they had been prepared to dine at. He tumbled over backwards then, rolled once, and lay there on his back.

He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound emerged except for a sort of bubbling and gurgling which was coming—I realised—not from his throat but from his newly perforated lungs. His eyes rolled wide and white as he searched for help. His long legs were already twitching and spasming.

Caroline hurried over, crouched next to her husband, and took the small pillow from my steady hands. Kneeling, she used both hands to press the smoking pillow firmly down over Joseph Clow’s open, straining mouth and bulging eyes.