“Precisely.”

“Oh, he was terribly boring,” said Georgina. “Hardly worth inviting to your wonderful party.”

“Possibly not,” I agreed, “but we thought he might enjoy it.”

“Well, I do remember sending out the Christmas invitations last year, so please follow me into the drawing room to the secretary where I keep my files.…”

Ahah! cried the successful ghost of the unborn Sergeant Cuff.

GEORGINA HOGARTH’S FEW NOTES from Dickens to Edmond Dickenson had all been mailed to (and presumably then fowarded by) a barrister by the name of Matthew B. Roffe of Gray’s Inn Square. I knew this area well, of course, since I had also studied for the law—indeed, I once described myself as “a barrister of some fifteen years’ standing, without ever having had a brief, or ever having even so much as donned a wig and gown.” My own studies had taken place at the nearby Lincoln’s Inn, although I confess that my “study” there consisted much more of attending to meals provided than to studying, although I do remember reading seriously for the Bar for six weeks or so. After that, my interest in law books waned even as my interest in the meals persisted. At that time, my friends were mostly painters and my own efforts mostly literary. But the Bar was more generous to gentlemen with vague legal aspirations then, and somehow, despite my lack of attendant effort, I became licensed as a barrister in 1851.

I had never heard of Mr Matthew B. Roffe and—based upon the dinginess of his small, cluttered, dusty, and remote third-storey office near Gray’s Inn—neither had any clients. There was no clerk present in the low-ceilinged little closet of an outer office and no bell to announce me. I could see an old man wearing clothing twenty years out of date, eating a chop at his desk piled high with folders, testaments, volumes, and bric-a-brac, and I cleared my throat loudly to gain his attention.

He pressed a pair of pince-nez into place on his hook of a nose and stared out of that papered cavern with much blinking of his small and watery eyes. “Eh? What’s that? Who’s there? Enter, sir! Advance and be recognised!”

I advanced, but when I was not recognised, I gave my name. Mr Roffe had been smiling through the encounter so far, but his expression showed no further recognition upon hearing my name.

“I received your name and business address through my friend Charles Dickens,” I said softly. It was not the full truth, but it certainly was not an outright lie. “Charles Dickens the novelist,” I added.

The wizened marionette of a man was galvanised into a response consisting mostly of twitches and jerks. “Oh, my, good heavens, oh, yes, I mean… how wonderful, yes, of course… The Charles Dickens gave me your, I mean, gave you my name.… Oh, where are my manners?… Do sit down, please, be seated please, Mr… ah?”

“Collins,” I said. The chair he had waved me towards probably had not been unburdened of its stack of opened volumes and scrolled documents in years, if not decades. I leaned back against a high stool instead. “This is quite comfortable,” I said, and, in a flourish perhaps not unworthy of Sergeant Cuff, added, “and better for my back.”

“Oh, yes… well, yes… Would you like some tea, Mr… ah… Mr… oh, dear.”

“Collins. And yes, I would love some tea.”

“Smalley!” cried Mr Roffe towards the empty outer office. “Smalley, I say!”

“I believe your clerk is absent, Mr Roffe.”

“Oh, yes… no, I mean…” The old man fumbled at his waistcoat, removed a watch, frowned at it, shook it next to his ear, and said, “Mr Collins, I trust it is not a little after nine in the morning or evening?”

“Indeed not,” I said, referring to my own watch. “It is a bit after four in the afternoon, Mr Roffe.”

“Ah, that explains Smalley’s absence!” cried the old man as if we had solved a great mystery. “He always goes home for his tea at around three, not returning until after five.”

“Your profession demands long hours of you,” I said drily. I would have liked to have had that promised tea.

“Oh, yes, yes… to serve the law is more like a… like a… well, perhaps ‘marriage’ is the term I am looking for. Are you married, Mr Collins?”

“No, sir. That happy domestic state has eluded me, Mr Roffe.”

“Myself as well, Mr Collins!” cried the old man, slapping the leather binding of a volume on his desk. “Myself as well. We are two fugitives from bliss, you and I, Mr Collins. But the law keeps me here from before the lamps are lighted in the morning—although, of course, that is Smalley’s job, the lighting of the lamps—until they are extinguished late in the night.”

I slowly withdrew from my jacket pocket a new leatherbound notebook which I had purchased precisely for this purpose—detective work. I then drew out a sharpened pencil and opened my notebook to the first blank page.

As if a gavel had been pounded, Mr Roffe sat more upright, clasped his hands together in front of him—thus quieting his long, twitching fingers for the first time—and generally looked as attentive as a man of his advanced years and character and obvious failing senses could look under the circumstances. “Yes, indeed,” he said. “Now to our business, Mr Collins. What is our business, Mr Collins?”

“Master Edmond Dickenson,” I said firmly, hearing the flinty yet sensitive Cuff overtones in the syllables as I spoke. I knew precisely how my creation would carry out such an interview.

“Ah, yes, of course… Do you bring word from Master Edmond, Mr Collins?”

“No, Mr Roffe, although I am acquainted with the young gentleman. I came to ask you about him, sir.”

“Me? Well… yes, of course… delighted to be of help, Mr Collins, and, through you, of course, of help to Mr Dickens, if Mr Dickens is desirous of my help.”

“I am sure he would be, Mr Roffe, but it is I who am interested in the present whereabouts of Mr Dickenson. Could you give me his address, sir?”

The old man’s face fell. “Alas, I cannot, Mr Collins.”

“It is confidential?”

“No, no, nothing of the sort. Young Master Edmond has always been as open and transparent as a… a… well, a summer shower, sir, if you do not mind me trespassing in Mr Dickens’s literary realm with the simile. Master Edmond would not mind my passing on to you his current address.”

I licked the carefully sharpened tip of the pencil and waited.

“But, alas,” said old Mr Roffe, “I cannot. I do not know where Master Edmond is living at present. He used to keep a suite of rooms here in London—a short walk only from Gray’s Inn Square here, to be precise—but I know he gave those up during the past year. I have no idea where Master Edmond resides now.”

“With his guardian, perhaps?” I prompted. Sergeant Cuff would never be stopped by an old man’s faulty memory.

“His guardian?” repeated Roffe. The old gentleman seemed slightly startled. “Well, that is… could be, I mean… might be… a possibility.”

I had searched my own memory and notes of my discussion with young Dickenson eighteen months earlier in his sick-room at the Charing Cross Hotel before beginning this investigation. “That would be a Mr Watson in Northamptonshire, Mr Roffe? A onetime liberal M.P., I believe?”

“Well, yes,” said Roffe, obviously impressed with my knowledge. “But, alas, no! Dear Mr Roland Everett Watson passed away some fourteen years ago. Young Master Edmond moved from place to place after that at the whim of the Court’s appointments of guardianship… you understand… an aunt in Kent, a travelling uncle with a town home in London—Mr Spicehead was in India most of the time Master Edmond was in his titular care… his grandmother’s failing cousin for a year or so after that. Edmond was raised mostly by servants, you understand.”

I waited as patiently as I could given the painfully impatient promptings of my rheumatical gout.