“And you interpret the signature ‘D’ as ‘Drood’?” I said.

“It can be no one else,” hissed the inspector.

“It could stand for ‘Dickens,’ ” I said lightly, even as I thought, Or for “Dickenson” or “Dradles.”

“It stands for Drood,” the older man said.

“How can one be sure? Has the phantom ever written you a direct note in this fashion?”

“Never,” said Inspector Field.

“Then it could be from anyone or…”

The inspector had been carrying a rolled-up canvas-and-leather bundle, rather like a countryman’s portmanteau, under his left arm, and now he unrolled it and removed what looked to be a torn and befouled dark cloth. He handed the cloth to me as he said, “The note came wrapped in this.”

Holding the strips of cloth gingerly—the rags were not only begrimed, I realised, but absolutely soaked through with what appeared to be newly dried blood, and the already ragged material had been serrated into strips as with a razor—I began to ask him what the importance of a few foul rags might be, but stopped myself.

I suddenly recognised the bloody cloth.

The last time I had seen these rags, more than twelve hours earlier, they had been on the back of the boy named Gooseberry.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Iwent to stay at my mother’s home near Tunbridge Wells for most of December of 1866. I decided to remain there with her until I celebrated my forty-third birthday on 8 January. It is fine to spend time with one’s mistresses, but—please trust me on this fact, since almost all men feel this way but few are courageous or honest enough to admit it—at very difficult times or on one’s birthday, there is no place more welcome and comforting than at one’s mother’s side.

I recognise that I have said little to you about my mother in this document, Dear Reader, and I must confess to you that this was a deliberate omission. In this winter of 1866–67 and through most of the coming year, my beloved mother was quite well—indeed, most of her contemporaries and most of mine found her more active, energetic, and engaged with the world than many women of half her age—but as my story must soon relate, her health was to deteriorate quickly before the end of 1867, and she would greet the end in March of 1868, my own annus horribilus. It is still difficult for me to think about that time, much less write about it. The death of one’s mother must be the single most terrible day in the life of any man.

But, as I mentioned, her health was still good this winter of 1866–67, so I can write about this period with something less than full pain.

As I have also previously mentioned, my mother’s Christian name was Harriet and she had long been a favourite among my father’s circles of famous painters, poets, and up-and-coming artists. After my father’s death in February of 1847, my mother had truly come into her own as one of the preeminent hostesses among the higher circles of artistic and poetic society in London. Indeed, our home at Hanover Terrace (looking out at Regents Park) during the years my mother was hostess there is acknowledged as one of the centres of what some are now calling the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

At the time of my extended visit with her beginning in December of 1866, Mother had realised her long ambition of moving to the countryside and was dividing her time among various cottages she leased in Kent: her Bentham Hill Cottage near Tunbridge Wells, Elm Lodge in the town itself, and her most recent cottage at Prospect Hill, Southborough. I went down to Tunbridge Wells to spend some weeks with her, returning to London each Thursday in order to keep my late-night appointment with King Lazaree and my pipe. Then I would take the train back to Tunbridge Wells on Friday evening, in time to play a game of cribbage with Mother and her friends.

Caroline was not happy with my decision to be gone during all of what some were now calling “the holiday season,” but I reminded her that we never celebrated Christmas to any extent anyway—a man and his mistress obviously were not invited to his married male friends’ homes at any time of the year, but at Christmas-time these male friends accepted even fewer invitations to our home, so it was always the social low-point of our year—but, showing a woman’s resistance to simple reason, Caroline remained vexed that I would be gone all during December and into January. Martha R—, on the other hand, accepting with perfectly good grace my explanation that I wished to get away from London to spend a month and more with my mother, temporarily gave up the room rented to “Mrs Dawson” and returned to Yarmouth and Winterton and her own family.

More and more, I was finding life with Caroline G— tiresome and complicated and my time with Martha R— simple and satisfying.

But my time with Mother that Christmas was the most satisfying of all.

Mother’s cook, who travelled with her everywhere, knew all of my favourite foods from childhood, and often Mother would come into my room in the morning or evening when the tray was delivered and I would enjoy my repast in bed while we carried on our conversations.

When I had fled London I was filled with a terrible sense of guilt and foreboding concerning the presumed death of the boy named Gooseberry, but after a few days at Mother’s cottage, that dark cloud had moved away. What had the child’s unusual real name been? Guy Septimus Cecil. Well, what nonsense to think that young Guy Septimus Cecil had actually been murdered by the dark forces of Undertown as represented by the foreign sorcerer Drood!

This was an elaborate game, I reminded myself, with Charles Dickens playing one game on his side, the elderly Inspector Field playing his corresponding but not identical game on the other side, and poor William Wilkie Collins caught in the middle.

Gooseberry murdered, indeed! The Inspector shows me a few tattered cloths sprinkled with dried blood—dog’s blood for all I knew, or the vital fluid from one of the thousands of feral cats that roamed the slums from whence Gooseberry sprang—and now I was expected to fly all to pieces and to do Inspector Field’s bidding even more assiduously than I had to date.

Drood had moved beyond being a phantasm and had become more of a shuttlecock in this insane game of badminton between a disturbed author with an obsession for play-acting and an evil old gnome of an ex-policeman with too many secret motives to count.

Well, let them play their game without me for a while. The hospitality of Tunbridge Wells and my mother’s cottage served me well for December and early January. Along with recovering some of my health—my rheumatical gout was strangely better there in Kent, although I continued administering doses of the laudanum, albeit in lower quantities—my sleep came easier, my dreams grew less clouded, and I began to think more earnestly about the elegant plot and fascinating characters of The Serpent’s Eye (or possibly The Eye of the Serpent). Although the serious research would have to wait until I returned full-time to London and the library at my club, I could—and did—jot down preliminary notes and a rough outline, often writing from my bed.

Occasionally I thought of my duties as detective in discerning whether young Edmond Dickenson had been murdered by Charles Dickens, but my interview with Dickenson’s solicitor had been singularly unenlightening—except for the shock of learning that Charles Dickens himself had been appointed the youth’s guardian-executor in the last months of the young man’s need for such care—and even my keen novelist’s mind could find no next step to take in the investigation. I decided that when I returned to London life, I should discreetly ask around my club if anyone had heard of the comings and goings of a certain squire named Dickenson, but other than that, I could see no obvious direction to take in the investigation.