“What do we do with him?” I asked, nodding towards Dickenson this time.

“What one must do with all serious somnambulists, my dear Wilkie. We shall lead him tenderly back to the house and you shall take him into his room to his bed.”

I looked in the direction of the slightly lighter rectangle that was the open stable door. “And Drood?” I asked.

Dickens shook his head. “Sultan often returns the day after his nighttime hunts with blood on his muzzle. We can only hope that he does so again in the morning.”

I was tempted to ask Dickens what he meant by this. (Inspector Field would value the information.) Had he and his Egyptian mesmerism mentor had a falling-out? Did he wish the phantom dead? Killed by Dickens’s own killer dog? Was he no longer a student of the underground mastermind who—according to the former head of the Scotland Yard Detective Bureau—had sent out his agents to kill more than three hundred men and women?

I said nothing. It was too cold to start a conversation. My gout was returning, sending tendrils of agony through my eyes and into my brain the way it was wont to do before a serious episode.

We took Mr Dickenson by his limp arms and led him slowly out of the stable and across the wide yard to the back door. I realised that I would have to towel off the sleepwalking idiot’s feet before I tucked him beneath his bedcovers.

As we reached the door, I looked back over the dark yard, half-expecting Sultan to come running into the circle of lantern light with a pale arm or albino ankle or dismembered head in his mouth. But nothing moved other than the cold wind.

“And so ends another Christmas Day at Gad’s Hill Place,” I said softly. My glasses fogged slightly as we stepped into the relative warmth of the house. I let go of Mr Dickenson long enough to remove and polish them on my coat sleeve.

When I had tucked the ends of the metal frames behind my ears and could see again, I noted that Dickens’s mouth had turned up in that boyish smile with which he had favoured me so many times in the past fourteen years of our acquaintance.

“God bless us, every one,” he said in a childish falsetto and we both laughed loud enough to wake the entire household.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

There was the glowing sphere… no, not quite a sphere, an elongated glowing blue-white oval… and there was the black streak against the dark background.

The streak was on the ceiling and was the result of so many years of smoke rising. The glowing blue-white oval was in front of me, closer, a part of me, an extension of my thoughts.

It was also a moon, a pale satellite in thrall to me. I turned to my left, rolled slightly to my left, and beheld the sun—a sun, orange and white rather than blue and white, flickering out rays into the black cosmos. As the glowing blue-white oval was moon to me, so was I satellite to this burning sun in the darkness of space and time.

Something eclipsed my sun. I felt rather than saw the blue-white oval and long pipe connecting it to me snatched away.

“Here, Hatchery, pluck him out of there. Get him on his feet and support him.”

“ ’Ere, ’ere, ’ere,” shrieked an utterly alien and totally familiar voice. “The gen’lmum paid for ’is night and product, all undisturbed-like-to-be. Don’t be presumin’ to…”

“Shut up, Sal,” bellowed another familiar voice. A lost giant’s voice. “One more peep out of you and the inspector here will have you in the blackest hole in Newgate before the sun comes up.”

There were no more peeps. I had been floating above the cloud tops of shifting colours even as I wheeled in space around the spitting, hissing star-sun, my blue-white satellite—now gone—wheeling about me in turn, but now I felt strong hands pulling me down from the cosmic aether to lumpy, muddy, straw-strewn earth.

“Keep him on his feet,” rasped the voice I associated with imperious forefingers. “Lift him when you have to.”

I was floating again, between dark cribs set into dark walls, the hissing sun receding behind me. A thin colossus rose before me.

“Sal, get Yahee out of the way or I’ll snap his smoke-clotted bones clean out of his rotted old flesh and sell them as three’a-penny flutes to the Wild Boys.”

“ ’Ere, ’ere,” I heard again. Shadows merged. One was laid back in his coffin. “That’s a good, Yahee. Rest easy. ’Ib, Your ’Ighness, this ’ere gen’lmum hasn’t paid in full yet. You’re pickin’ my pocket if you ’aul ’im out o’ ’ere.”

“You lie, crone,” said the dominant of the two men’s voices. “You just said he’d paid for the night and drug in full. There was enough in his pipe to keep him addled ’til dawn. But give her another two coins, Detective Hatchery. Anything small.”

Then we were out into the night. I noted on the coldness of the air—it smelt of snow not yet fallen—and I noted the absence of my topcoat and my missing top hat and cane and the small miracle of the fact that my feet did not touch the cobblestones as I floated above them towards a distant, rocking streetlamp. Then I realised that the larger of the two shapes still escorting me was carrying me under his arm as if I were a prize pig won at a country fair.

I was recovering from the pipe fumes sufficiently to protest, but the dark form leading the way—I never doubted for a second that it was my nemesis Inspector Field—said, “Hush, now, Mr Collins, there’s a public house nearby that will open for us despite the hour and we’ll order something for you that will set you right.”

A public house that would be open at this hour? As foggy as my sight might have been (and, I realised, as foggy as the cold air itself was this night), no such place could be open in this terrible hour just before dawn on such a harsh, wintry, early-spring morning.

I heard and half-saw Field pounding on a door under a dangling sign: Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters. I knew now, however much my middle hurt from being carried like a country fair pig by Detective Hatchery, that I was not really out here in the cold and dark with these two men at all. I had to be back in my crib-bunk at Opium Sal’s, enjoying the last of my blue-bottle smoke.

“Hold your horses!” came a female voice barely audible over the throwing open of various bolts and the creak of an ancient door. “Oh, it’s you, Inspector! And you, Detective Hatchery. Both out on so terrible a night? And is that a drowned man you have there, Hib?”

“No, Miss Abbey,” said the giant carrying me. “Just a gentleman in need of restoration.”

I was carried into the red-curtained tavern and appreciated the warmth—there were still embers in the fire here in the public space—even as I knew this was all a dream. The Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters and its proprietress, Miss Abbey Potterson, were fictions from Dickens’s d— ned Our Mutual Friend. No public house with that name existed down here near the docks, although there were many that Dickens could have used for reference.

“They burn sherry very well here,” said Inspector Field as Miss Abbey lighted various lamps and had a sleepy-eyed boy add more fuel to the small fire. “Perhaps the gentleman might like a bottle?”

I was sure that this dialogue was also straight from Our Mutual Friend. Who had said it that my opiated mind might structure this fantasy so? The “Mr Inspector,” I realised, was yet another Dickens interpretation of this very same Inspector Field who took his place in a cosy booth.

“The gentleman would like to be turned upright and put down,” I said in the dream. The blood was rushing to my head now and it was not a totally pleasant sensation.

Hatchery lifted me, righted me, and placed me gently on a bench opposite the inspector. I looked around as if fully expecting to see Mr Eugene Wrayburn and his friend Mortimer Lightwood, but with the exception of the seated inspector, the standing Hatchery, the hustling boy, and the hovering Miss Abbey, the public house was empty.