“You are correct, Wilkie. I apologise for my jesting, although the jests have been made with familial affection. But some quiet voice tells me that there will be no grandchildren issued from the union of Katey Dickens and Charles Collins.”

Now what the deuce did he mean by that? Before we came to blows or resumed walking in silence again, I said, “It was Katey who told me about your weekly trips to the city. She and Georgina and your son Charles are worried about you. They know that the accident still haunts and afflicts you. Now they fear that I have introduced you to some foul abomination in the fleshpots of London to which you are, if you will pardon the expression, magnetically drawn at least one full night a week.”

Dickens threw his head back and laughed.

“Come, Wilkie. If you cannot stay for the delectable dinner Georgina has planned, at least you must stay long enough to enjoy a cigar with me as we look in on the stables and watch the children and John Forster at play on the lawn. Then I’ll have little Plorn take you by cart to the station for the early-evening express.”

THE DOGS RUSHED us as we came up the drive.

Dickens almost always kept dogs chained near the gate, since too many surly vagabonds and unkempt vagrants exercised the habit of wandering off Dover Road to ask for unmerited handouts at the back or front door of Gad’s Hill Place. First to welcome us this afternoon was Mrs Bouncer, Mary’s tiny little Pomeranian, for whom Dickens adopted a special, childish, almost squeaky voice for all his communications. A second later bounded up Linda, the ambling, bouncing, rolling Saint Bernard who always seemed to be in a perpetual tumbling match with the great mastiff named Turk. Now these three entered into an absolute ecstasy of leaping and licking and tail-wagging at the greeting of their master, who—I freely admit—did have an extraordinary way with animals. As with so many people, dogs and horses seemed to understand that Charles Dickens was the Inimitable and needed to be revered as such.

As I was trying to pat the Saint Bernard and pet the frolicking mastiff and avoid the leaping little Pomeranian, all of whom kept abandoning me to return to Dickens in their transports of delight, a new dog—one unknown to me, a large Irish bloodhound—came broiling around the curve of the hedge and ran at me, growling and snarling as if it were going to rip my throat out. I confess that I raised my stick and took several steps backwards down the drive.

“Stop, Sultan!” shouted Dickens, and the attacking dog first froze a mere six paces from me and then crouched in pure canine guilt and submission as his master chided him in his equally pure dog-chiding voice. Then Dickens scratched behind the miscreant’s ears.

I stepped closer, and the bloodhound growled and showed his fangs again. Dickens ceased scratching. Sultan showed guilt, shrank lower into the drive’s gravel, and set his muzzle against Dickens’s boots.

“I don’t know this dog,” I said.

Dickens shook his head. “Percy Fitzgerald made a gift of Sultan to me only a few weeks ago. I confess that at times the dog reminds me of you, Wilkie.”

“How is that?”

“First of all, he is absolutely fearless,” said Dickens. “Secondly, he is absolutely loyal… he obeys only me but he obeys me completely. Thirdly, he is contemptuous of all public opinion as regards his behaviour; he hates soldiers and attacks them on sight; he hates policemen and has been known to chase them down the highway; and he hates all others of his kind.”

“I do not hate all others of my kind,” I said softly. “And I have never attacked a soldier or chased a policeman.”

Dickens did not appear to be listening as he knelt to pat Sultan’s neck, the other three dogs leaping and roiling around him in spasms of jealousy. “Sultan has swallowed Mary’s Mrs Bouncer Pomeranian only once and did have the good grace to spit her out when commanded to, but all of the kittens in the neighbourhood—especially the new batch born to the pussy who lives in the shed behind the Falstaff Inn—have mysteriously gone missing since Sultan arrived.”

Sultan eyed me with an eager gaze clearly showing his willingness to eat me if the opportunity presented itself.

“And despite his loyalty, companionship, courage, and amusing traits,” concluded Dickens, “I fear that our friend Sultan may have to be put down someday and that I shall be the one who has to do it.”

I TOOK THE train back to London, but rather than walk home to Melcombe Place, I took a cab to 33 Bolsover Street. There Miss Martha R—, who was registered with the landlord there as Mrs Martha Dawson, met me at the rear and separate door to her small apartment that consisted of a tiny sleeping room and a slightly larger sitting room with rudimentary cooking facilities. I was arriving hours later than I had promised, but she had been listening for my step on the stairs.

“I made chops and kept the supper warm,” she said as she closed the door behind me. “If you want to eat now. Or I could re-warm them later.”

“Yes,” I said. “Re-warm them later.”

Now, Dear Reader from my distant future, I can almost—not quite, but almost—imagine a time such as yours when memoirists or even novelists do not draw a discreet curtain over the personal events that might follow here, the, let us say, intimate moments between a man and a woman. I hope your age is not so debauched that you speak and write without restraint about such totally private moments, but if you search for such shameless exposures here, you shall be disappointed.

I can say that if you were to somehow see a photograph of Miss Martha R—, you might not be kind enough to see the beauty I find in her every time I am near her. To the mere eye, or camera lens (and Martha told me that she had a photograph taken of her, paid for by her parents, when she turned nineteen more than a year ago), Martha R— is a short, somewhat stern-looking woman with a narrow face, almost Negroid lips, severely parted straight hair (to the point she seems bald along the crown of her head), deep-set eyes, and a nose and complexion that might have had her in the fields picking cotton in the American South.

There is nothing in a photograph of Martha R— that could show her energy and eagerness and sensuality and physical generosity and adventurousness. Many women—I live with one most of the time—can simulate and broadcast physical sensuality to men in public, can dress for it and paint themselves for it and bat their eyelashes for it, even while they feel little or none of it. I believe they do so out of sheer habit. A few women, such as young Martha R—, sincerely embody such a passionate nature. Finding a woman like that amidst the herd of half-feeling, half-caring, half-responding females in our society of 1860s England was not so much like finding a diamond in the rough as it was like finding a warm, responsive body amidst the cold, dead forms on slabs in the Paris Morgue that Dickens had so enjoyed taking me to.

SOME HOURS LATER, at the little table she cleared off for our meals, by candlelight, we ate the dried chops—Martha was not yet a good cook and would never become one—and moved the cold and desiccated vegetables around with our forks. Martha had somehow chosen and paid for a bottle of wine. It was quite as terrible as the food.

I took her hand.

“My dear,” I said, “tomorrow you must pack your clothes in the early morning and take the eleven fifteen train to Yarmouth. There you must get your old job at the hotel back or, failing that, obtain a similar one. No later than tomorrow night you must visit your parents and brother in Winterton and tell them you are well and happy—that you used your savings for a little holiday in Brighton.”