“Good,” I said. “My second condition also should not cause you any problems, since I am sure you will be carrying out the surveillance I wish access to whether or not I should be the one making the request for it.”

“What surveillance is that, sir?”

“I want to know everything that you and your operatives can learn about the actress Ellen Ternan. Her whereabouts. The location of her lodgings—hers and her mother’s—and whether Dickens is paying for them. The way she makes her money and whether those funds are sufficient to support her in the circumstances which she currently enjoys. Her comings and goings. Her relationship to Charles Dickens. Everything.”

Inspector Field continued to bathe me in the blank, flat, mildly accusatory gaze which—I was sure—he had levelled at a thousand felons. But I was not a felon—not yet—and I did not wilt under its power.

“An odd request, Mr Collins, if you do not mind me saying so, sir. Unless you were to have your own personal interest in Miss Ternan.”

“None whatsoever, Inspector. I can assure you of that. Rather, I am convinced that Miss Ternan connects to this… mystery… that you and I are attempting to unravel, even as I am convinced that the best interests of Charles Dickens may have been compromised by this woman. In order to protect my friend… and perhaps myself… I need to understand more about her life and their relationship.”

Field rubbed his lower lip with that curved and corpulent finger. “You think, Mr Collins, that Miss Ternan might actually be a co-conspirator with the monster Drood? An agent of his?”

I laughed. “Inspector, I don’t know enough about the woman even to speculate. Which is why further knowledge of her, her sisters, her mother, and her relationship with my friend Dickens is essential if we are to enter into this pact.”

Field continued to pat and press his lip.

“Then we understand each other, Inspector?” I said.

“I believe we do, Mr Collins. I believe that we understand each other very well indeed. I agree to your conditions and hope to provide you with all of the information you need.” Field extended his calloused hand.

I shook it.

A minute later, resuming my walk towards the British Museum, Field hurrying alongside me, I told him everything that Charles Dickens had told me the day before on our walk to Cooling Marsh and back.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Winter came in hard, stripping the leaves from all the trees near Gad’s Hill Place by November, sending Dickens from his summer chalet into his front-of-the-house study with its green porcelain fireplace and crackling fire, killing the scarlet geraniums in his garden, and sending low grey clouds scudding over the low grey stone of the buildings and streets of London where I resided.

With winter came deeper bouts of illness for both Dickens and myself. The more famous writer continued to wrestle with his terrors from the Staplehurst accident and with constant exhaustion, with kidney pain that had pursued him since childhood, and with the deadness in his left side from his “sunstroke” in France in September. Clearly there was something more seriously wrong than the author would admit. Dickens and I shared a doctor—our mutual friend Frank Beard—and though Beard would rarely discuss his other patient, I sensed a deep concern.

I had my own problems, which included the terrible rheumatical gout and its accompanying pain, fainting spells, aching joints, a growing obesity which left me disgusted with myself even as I failed to reduce the size of the meals I enjoyed, flatulence, cramps, an assortment of other digestive disorders, and terrible palpitations of the heart. No one seemed aware of Dickens’s physical disorders, but all the world seemed to know of mine. A Frenchman wrote me through my publisher to say that “he had betted ten bottles of champagne that I am alive, against everyone’s belief,” and if I were still breathing, he begged me to inform him of the fact.

I wrote to my mother that autumn—

Here is “forty” come upon me [I was, in truth, forty-one that previous January]—grey hairs shrinking fast… rheumatism and gout familiar enemies for some time past, my own horrid corpulence making me fat and unwieldy—all the worst signs of middle age sprouting out on me.

And yet, I confided to her, I didn’t feel old. I had no regular habits, no respectable prejudices.

Dear Reader, I have not yet told you anything about the most important woman in my life.

My mother, Harriet Geddes Collins, had met my father, the artist William Collins, when they were both in their mid-twenties. My mother was also descended from a long line of artists; she and both her sisters drew constantly and one of my mother’s sisters had entered the school of the Royal Academy in London. Harriet Geddes and my father had first crossed paths at a ball given by some artist acquaintances of my father’s for their girlfriends, subsequently seen each other several times in the London of their day, confirmed in 1821 that neither had cultivated other attachments, and were married in Edinburgh in 1822. I was born a little less than eighteen months later, on 8 January, 1824. My brother, Charles, was born in January of 1828.

One of my father’s friends was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and I clearly remember the day when I was a young boy and the poet came to our home, found my father gone, and stayed to weep to my mother about his increasing dependence upon opium. It was the first time I had seen or heard a fully grown man weep—Coleridge was sobbing so hard he could not catch his breath—and I shall never forget my mother’s words to him that day: “Mr Coleridge, do not cry; if the opium really does you any good, and you must have it, why do you not go out and get it?”

Many has been the time in recent years, as I wept my own bitter tears because of my growing need for the drug, that I have called back my mother’s voice on the subject.

My father had come home just after this advice was given to Coleridge, and I remember the poet’s cracked voice as he said, “Collins, your wife is an exceedingly sensible woman!”

My mother was a sensible woman, but my father was a great artist and a great man. I was given my Christian middle name—Wilkie— due to his relationship with the honourable Sir David Wilkie, an old friend of my father’s from their school days, who lifted me up shortly after my birth, looked into my eyes, and pronounced, “He sees.” (This seemed to have laid the mantle of succession, in artistic terms, from my father’s shoulders to mine, but—as we shall see—that was not to be. My younger brother, Charley, was to inherit the stronger artistic ability and to be chosen for that role.)

My father was a great man with great men as friends. When I was growing up—a wide-eyed, rather gentle, bulbous-foreheaded child—I took it for granted that the Wordsworths, Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Sir Walter Scott would be familiar acquaintances of our family and visitors to our home. My father had not only received commissions from, but had spent much time with, such estimables as Sir Francis Chantrey, the Duke of Newcastle, Sir Robert Peel, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Sir Thomas Heathcote, Sir Thomas Baring, Sir George Beaumont, and Lord Liverpool.

Of course, it is true that the vast majority of my father’s time spent with greatness was spent out of the sight of our mother. I am sure that my father was not ashamed of my mother, nor certainly of Charles or me, but he did prefer to spend his time amongst great men far from our hearth. But he wrote home faithfully and, often after listing the exciting events and personal encounters of his days and weeks away, might add such a codicil as this I found when arranging my mother’s papers recently—

I cannot help longing for home, although I am so pleasantly spending my time, as pleasantly as the kindest friends, sprightly young ladies, and all the gaieties of this life can make me. I flatter myself that the idle life I am leading will please you, and perhaps make me stronger and therefore, I am determined to make the most of it.