“Through mere words?” asked my brother.

“And the judicious and carefully honed gesture,” said Dickens. “In the proper setting.”

“That setting being the st… st… stage,” said Dolby. “Yes, by Jove. That should be extraordinary!”

“Not merely the stage,” said Dickens, nodding slightly as if he were already prepared to take his bows. “But the darkened room. The precise and scientific use of gas lighting to illuminate my face and hands above all else, the careful seating of the audience so that no one is out of direct line of sight with my eyes…”

“We shall be bringing our own gas and lighting experts on the tour,” interrupted Dolby. “Wills has made it a central item to our negotiations.”

Macready pounded the table and laughed. “Little do audiences know that the—er—er—the—er—er—gaslights are a form of—er—intoxication. Intoxication, by God! They deprive the room, the theatre, the space, of oxygen!”

“Indeed they do,” said Dickens with a mischievous smile. “And we shall be using that to our advantage in putting these—I should modestly hope—very large audiences at the readings into the properly receptive state.”

“Into the properly receptive state for what?” I asked flatly.

Dickens pinned me upon the point of his mesmeric stare. His voice was soft. “That is what these readings—this new art form—shall determine.”

AFTER DINNER, WE men decamped with brandy and cigars to the billiards room behind Dickens’s study. This was a pleasant space, well-lighted, with one wall half-tiled to prevent any damage from our flailing cue-sticks, and I had spent many a pleasant hour in it. Dickens took his game of billiards seriously—he liked to say that billiards “brings out the mettle in a man” and then, often, glancing at my brother, would add, “or the lack of.” In either case I shall always remember the Inimitable leaning long over the green-baized table, his coat off and wearing those large double-glasses which gave him an odd, Pickwickian, earlier-era old-mannish look.

One of the reasons that Dickens enjoyed Percy Fitzgerald was that the younger man was serious about the game of billiards and quite good at it—at least good enough to give Dickens and me a game. I could more than hold my own at the game, as befits any serious bachelor, but I was surprised this night to find that our Resident Orphan, young Edmond Dickenson, played rather like someone who earned his living on the winnings. (And perhaps he did, for all I knew and for all of Dickens’s talk of the boy’s being independently wealthy.)

Macready played for a loud while before his wife trundled him off to bed after a glass of warm milk. But it was George Dolby—Dickens’s future business manager and reading-tour companion—who brought that night’s games to life: roaring with laughter, telling truly amusing stories with no hint of his earlier stammer, his great bald scalp and forehead gleaming with perspiration in the light from the overhead lamps, Dolby repeatedly dispatched Percy, then me, then Dickens, and finally the stubborn and oddly skilled young Dickenson, whose play showed both an appreciation of ballistics and a deviousness which one would never credit by looking at him.

Dickens, as was his usual habit, retired at midnight but urged us all to continue playing. Usually I did when there were interesting male guests still awake, often playing and enjoying our host’s brandy until dawn, but when Dolby set down his cue and retired soon after Dickens said his goodnights—perhaps not yet certain of his prerogatives as a guest at Gad’s Hill—the game broke up, Percy set off for the Falstaff Inn with a servant holding a lantern for him, and Dickenson and I went upstairs to our respective rooms.

Despite my earlier ministrations of my medicine, the rheumatical gout was racking me as I got ready for bed. Measuring the amount of laudanum remaining in my travel jug, I took two more glasses of the restorative and soporific.

I say “restorative and soporific” because laudanum, as you almost certainly know in your more medicinally enlightened future, Dear Reader, serves to quiet the nerves and allow sleep or to awaken the sensibilities and allow long bouts of hard work and provide a higher than usual level of attention. I did not know—perhaps no one knew—how the same drug served both opposing needs, but I knew beyond doubt that it did. This night I needed its ministrations as soporific.

My busy mind wanted to dwell on Dickens’s bizarre plans for a reading tour to serve as “an entirely new art form” and to connect the strands of nonsense he’d spoken about mesmerism and magnetism to the visits he purported to have been making to see the cellar-dweller named Drood, but the blessed laudanum relieved me of those turgid questionings.

My last thoughts before going to sleep that night were about a piece of information that Inspector Field had given me some weeks earlier.

It seemed that Ellen Ternan had been followed to this area and even to Gad’s Hill several times since autumn. Of course, reported Field, the former actress had relatives in Rochester which brought her to the area separate from any collusion with Dickens, but it was certain that she also came to visit at Gad’s Hill repeatedly and appeared to have spent at least five nights here since September.

How, I wondered, did Mamie and Katey react to this usurpation of their mother’s place? I could easily imagine Mamie following Georgina Hogarth’s lead in welcoming the intruder into their home, knowing—as they must have—that Charles Dickens was a man racked by loneliness and a need for the illusions of youth that only romance can bring to the ageing male mind and soul. But Katey? Kate Macready Dickens, as lonely as she appeared to be in her own right—her father had mentioned to me in October that my brother’s wife “was so discontented… so intensely eager to find other lovers, that she is burning away both character and health slowly but steadily, Wilkie”—still seemed to be loyal to the memory of her exiled mother. I could not imagine Katey, who was the same age as Ellen Ternan, opening her heart to her father’s probable mistress.

It is a hard thing to tell the brother of your daughter’s husband that she is so discontented with her husband that she is eagerly searching for other lovers, and I suspect that Dickens said those words so that I might repeat them to Charley. But, of course, I did not.

Yet Katey must not have vocally opposed Ellen’s visits or the former actress would not have kept returning to Gad’s Hill.

With these thoughts still in mind, I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

SOMEONE WAS SHAKING me violently and whispering my name.

I rolled over groggily. The room was dark except for a strange light that seemed to be coming from the floor at the side of the bed. A fire? There was a dark form looming over me, shaking me.

“Get up, Wilkie.”

I focused on that shape.

Charles Dickens in a nightshirt with a woollen coat thrown over his shoulders, carrying a two-barrelled shotgun in one hand and a crumpled shroud in the other.

The time has come, I thought.

“Get up, Wilkie,” he whispered again. “Quickly. Just put your shoes on. I brought your coat.”

The shape dropped the shroud on my legs and I realised it was my overcoat. “What…”

“Sshhh. You’ll wake the others. Get up. Quickly. Before he gets away. We have no time to waste. Just the coat and shoes. That’s a good man.…”

We went down the back stairs, Dickens with his gun and lantern ahead of me, both of us trying to make as little noise as possible.

Sultan, the ferocious Irish bloodhound, was tied up in the back hall, muzzled and leashed but straining to get out the door.

“What is this?” I whispered to Dickens. “What’s wrong?”

The Inimitable’s wisps of hair atop his head and long whiskers were curled this way and that in the tangle of sleep, some standing straight up, all of which would have been very amusing under different circumstances. But not tonight. There was something like real fear in Charles Dickens’s eyes—something I don’t believe I had ever seen before.