“What are we speaking of?” I said. “I encountered no sure-fire way of disposing of a body in our bizarre luncheon or more-bizarre tour with the drunken Dradles.”

“But of course you did!” cried Dickens. “First there is the quick-lime. Certainly you have not forgotten that Pit!”

“My eyes and nose have not.”

“Nor should they, my dear Wilkie! Imagine your readers in terror as they come to understand that your murderer—your casual, random murderer, like Iago, moved by a motiveless malignancy—has dissolved the body of some poor chap in a pit of quick-lime. Everything down to the last few bones and pearl buttons and perhaps a watch. Or a skull.”

“There would still be those remaining last bones. And the watch and skull,” I said sullenly. “And the pit would be right there in the open for Sergeant Cuff and the police to discover.”

“Not for a minute!” cried Dickens. “Did you not understand the gift I gave you in Dradles? Your villain shall enlist—knowingly or unknowingly shall be up to your novelistic judgement, of course—just such a character as Dradles to help him inter the poor, pitiful remnants of his murder victim in just such a tomb or vault as we saw, or heard, rather, this evening. The last bits of the murdered man—or woman, if you truly want a sensational novel, my friend—shall be interred alongside the old ’uns, and that will be an end to him—until your clever Sergeant Cuff works it all out through a series of clues that only Wilkie Collins could provide.”

We stood there for a moment in a silence broken only by the shifting of the two carriage horses and the more furtive shifting of the cold servant on the driver’s box. Finally I said, “All very wonderful… very Dickens-like, I am sure… but I believe I prefer my original idea of a fabled gem sacred to the Hindoos or other heathens, bringing bad luck to some illustrious English family.”

Dickens sighed. “Oh, very well. Have it the way you insist. Look a gift horse in the withers, if you must.” But I heard him say much more softly, “Even though the gem and the Hindoos were my idea, which I have now seen to be too weak to bear the tale.”

More loudly, he said, “May I drop you at the station?”

Dickens’s uncharacteristic omission of an invitation to Gad’s Hill for supper told me what I already knew—that he would be dining with Ellen Ternan and that he had no intention of returning to Gad’s Hill Place that night.

“That would be fine,” I said. “Caroline will be waiting for me.”

As he held the carriage door for me, Dickens said softly, presumably so the coachman would not hear, “Before you dine with the lovely Landlady or the delightful Butler tonight, my dear Wilkie, I would advise a change of raiments and perhaps a warm bath.”

I paused with one foot on the step, but before I could say something related to opium or to anything else, Dickens added innocently, “The crypts do leave an echo of the rising damp on one, you know… as our friend Dradles illustrated so wonderfully this evening.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Charles Dickens is going to murder Edmond Dickenson.”

It was the second time in eighteen months that I had sat straight up in bed out of a deep laudanum sleep and shouted those words.

“No,” I said into the dark, still half-claimed by dream but also imbued with the complete deductive certainty of my yet-to-be created Detective Sergeant Cuff, “Charles Dickens has already murdered Edmond Dickenson.”

“Wilkie, darling,” said Caroline, sitting up next to me and seizing my arm, “what are you going on about? You’ve been talking in your sleep, my dearest.”

“Leave me alone,” I said groggily, shaking off her hand. I rose, pulled on my dressing gown, and went to the window.

“Wilkie, my dear…”

“Silence!” My heart was pounding. I was trying not to lose the clarity of my dream-revelation.

I found my watch on the bureau and looked at it. It was a little before three in the morning. Outside, the paving stones were slick with a light sleet falling. I looked at the streetlamp and then searched the small porch on the abandoned house on the corner opposite that lamp until I saw the shadow huddled there. Inspector Field’s messenger—a boy with strange eyes whom the inspector called Gooseberry—was still there, more than a year after I had first spied him waiting.

I left the bedroom and started for my study but paused on the landing. It was night. The Other Wilkie would be in there, waiting, most probably sitting at my desk and watching the door with unblinking eyes. I went downstairs instead to the small secretary in the parlour, where Caroline and Carrie kept their writing materials. Setting my glasses firmly in place, I wrote—

Inspector Field:

I have good reason to believe that Charles Dickens has murdered a young man who survived the Staplehurst train wreck, a Mr Edmond Dickenson. Please meet me at ten AM at Waterloo Bridge so that we can discuss the evidence and prepare a way of trapping Dickens into admitting to the murder of young Dickenson.

Yr. Obedient Servant,

William Wilkie Collins

I looked at the missive for a long moment, nodded, folded it, set it in a thick envelope, used my father’s stamp to seal it, and placed it in an inner pocket of my dressing gown. Then I took some coins from my purse, found my overcoat in the hall closet, pulled on rubbers over my slippers, and went out into the night.

I had just reached the streetlamp on my side of the street when a shadow on the porch opposite separated itself from the deeper shadow of the porch overhang. In an instant the boy had crossed the street to meet me. He had no coat on and was shivering violently in the rain and cold.

“You are Gooseberry?” I asked.

“Yessir.”

I put my hand on the letter but for some reason did not draw it out. “Is Gooseberry your last name?” I asked.

“No, sir. Inspector Field calls me that, sir. Because of my eyes, you see.”

I did see. The boy’s eyes were distinguished not only by their absurd prominence but by the fact that they rolled to and fro like two bullets in an egg cup. My fingers tightened on the letter to his master, but still I hesitated.

“You’re a crossing sweeper, Gooseberry?”

“I was a crossing sweeper, sir. No longer.”

“What are you now, lad?”

“I’m in training with the great Inspector Field to be a detective, is what,” said Gooseberry with pride, but with no hint of boasting. Between shivers he coughed. It was a deep cough—the kind that had given my mother the horrors whenever any similar sound emerged from Charles or me when we were young—but the urchin had the manners to cover his mouth when he coughed.

“What is your real name, boy?” I asked.

“Guy Septimus Cecil,” said the boy through slightly chattering teeth.

I let go of the letter and brought five shillings out, dropping them into Guy Septimus Cecil’s hurriedly raised palm. I am not sure that I have ever seen another person quite so surprised, with the probable exception of the thugs Mr Reginald Barris had clubbed down in the alley in Birmingham.

“There’ll be no message from me to your master tonight or for the next three days and nights, Master Guy Septimus Cecil,” I said softly. “Go get a hot breakfast. Rent a room—a heated room. And with whatever you have left over, buy a coat… something made of good English wool to go over those rags. You’ll be no good to either Inspector Field or to me if you catch your death of cold out here.”

The boy’s gooseberry eyes wandered, although they never seemed to fix on me.

“Go on, now!” I said sternly. “Don’t let me see you back here until Tuesday next!”

“Yessir,” Gooseberry said dubiously. But he turned and trotted back across the street, hesitated by the porch, and ran on down the street towards the promise of warmth and food.