I would venture the guess, Dear Reader, that laudanum is still used in your future day (unless medical science has come up with a common remedy even more efficacious), but in case it is not, let me describe the drug to you.

Laudanum is simply tincture of opium distilled in alcohol. Before I began buying it in large quantities, I would—following my physician and friend Frank Beard’s advice—simply apply four drops of opium into a half- or full glass of red wine. Then it became eight drops. Then eight or ten drops twice a day with wine. Finally, I discovered that pre-mixed laudanum, as much opium as alcohol, it seems, was more effective on such unrelenting pain. In the past months I had begun what would become a lifelong habit of ingesting pure laudanum from a glass or from the jug itself. I confess that when I once drank such a full glass at home in front of the famous surgeon Sir William Fergusson—a person whom I certainly thought would understand the necessity for it—the doctor exclaimed that such an amount taken at once should have and could have killed everyone at the table. (I had eight male guests and one woman there that night.) After that incident, I have kept the amount of medicine of which I partake a secret, but not the fact of my general use of the blessed drug.

Please understand, Dear Reader of my posthumous future, that everyone in my day uses laudanum. Or almost everyone. My father, who distrusted all medicines, in his last days consumed huge quantities of Battley’s Drops, a powerful form of opium. (And I am certain that the pain from my rheumatoid gout has been at least the equal, if not worse, than his deathbed pains.) I remember the poet Coleridge, a close friend of my parents, weeping at our home because of his dependency upon opium and I remember my mother’s warnings to him. But also, as I have reminded the few friends who had the bad manners to become censorious about my own dependency on this important medicine, Sir Walter Scott used great quantities of laudanum while writing The Bride of Lammermoor, while such contemporaries of Dickens’s and mine as our close friend Bulwer-Lytton and De Quincey used far greater quantities than I.

That afternoon I returned to my home—one of my two homes—at 9 Melcombe Place, off Dorset Square, knowing that Caroline and her daughter, Harriet, would be out, and secreted the new jug of laudanum, but not before drinking two full glasses of it.

Within minutes I was my real self again… or as close to my real self as I could be while such pain from rheumatoid gout still battered at the windows and scratched at the door of my corporeal self. At least the background noise of pain was diminished enough by the opiate so that I could concentrate again.

I took a carriage to Charing Cross.

THE FROZEN DEEP had been a great success.

The first act was set in Devon, where beautiful Clara Burnham—played by Dickens’s more attractive daughter, Mary (known as Mamie)—is haunted by fears for her dashing fiancé, Frank Aldersley (played by me, in the earliest days of my current beard). Aldersley has been away on a polar expedition, sent, as Sir John Franklin’s real-life expedition had been, to force the North-West Passage, and both ships—the HMS Wanderer and HMS Sea-mew—have not been sighted for more than two years. Clara knows that Frank’s commander on the expedition is Captain Richard Wardour, whose proposal Clara has rejected. Wardour does not know the identity of the rival who succeeded him in Clara’s love, but has sworn to kill the man on sight. My character, Frank Aldersley, is, in turn, totally ignorant of Richard Wardour’s love for his fiancée.

Knowing that the two ships are almost certainly frozen in together somewhere in the Arctic ice, Clara is agonised at the thought that some accident will reveal her two lovers’ identities to one another. So poor Clara is not only in terror of what the Arctic, its weather, beasts, and savages, may do to her beloved, but is in even greater terror of what Richard Wardour might do to her darling Frank should he discover the truth.

Clara’s anxieties are not allayed when her nurse, Esther, who has the Second Sight, shares her bloody vision in the crimson Devon sunset. (As I mentioned earlier, Dickens went to great pains to create lighting effects in his little schoolroom theatre at Tavistock House that realistically depicted sunlight at all hours of the day.)

“I see the lamb in the grasp of the Lion…” gasps Nurse Esther in the trance of her Second Sight. “Your bonnie bird alone with the hawk—I see you and all around you crying… Bluid! The stain is on you—Oh, my bairn, my bairn—the stain of that bluid is on you!”

THE YOUNG MAN’S NAME was Edmond Dickenson.

Dickens had said that he’d provided a room at Charing Cross Hotel for the injured man, but in truth it was a large suite. An older and not-very-attractive nurse had set up her station in the outer sitting room and showed me in to the invalid.

From Dickens’s description of the difficult extrication of young Dickenson from the wreckage, not to mention the author’s melodramatic narration of blood, clothes torn away, and the young fellow’s need for medical assistance, I expected to find a near-corpse swathed in bandages and rigidified with splints and casts elevated by cables and counterweights. But young Dickenson, although in pyjamas and a dressing-gown, was sitting up and reading in bed when I was shown in. The room’s dresser and bedside tables were bedecked with flowers, including a vase of crimson geraniums that brought back some of the sense of panic I had felt in the yard at Gad’s Hill Place.

Dickenson was a soft young man, perhaps twenty or twenty-one, with a round face, pink cheeks, sparse sandy hair that was already receding from his pink forehead, blue eyes, and ears as delicate as tiny seashells. His pyjamas looked to be made of silk.

I introduced myself, explained that I was Mr Dickens’s envoy sent to enquire into the young gentleman’s state of health, and was quite surprised when Dickenson blurted out, “Oh, Mr Collins! I am deeply honoured to have such a famous writer visit me! I so greatly enjoyed your The Woman in White that was serialised in All the Year Round immediately after Mr Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities ended.”

“I thank you, sir,” I said, almost colouring at the compliment. It is true that The Woman in White had been a huge success, selling more copies of the magazine than most of Dickens’s serialised tales. “I am very pleased that you enjoyed my modest efforts,” I added.

“Oh, yes, it was wonderful,” said young Dickenson. “You are so fortunate to have someone like Mr Dickens as your mentor and editor.”

I stared at the young man for a long moment, but my stony silence went unnoticed as Dickenson babbled on about the Staplehurst crash, the awfulness of it all, and then about Charles Dickens’s incredible courage and generosity. “I would not, I am sure, be alive today if it had not been for Mr Dickens finding me in the wreckage—I was quite hanging upside down and found it all but impossible to breathe, Mr Collins! — and he never left me until he’d summoned guards to help pull me from the terrible wreckage and supervised their carrying me up to the railbed where the injured were being prepared for evacuation. Mr Dickens stayed by my side during the ride to London on the emergency train that afternoon and—as you see! — insisted on putting me up in this wonderful room and providing nursing until I shall be fully recovered.”

“You are not seriously injured?” I enquired in a perfectly flat tone.

“Oh, no, not at all! Merely bruised all black and blue around the legs and hips and left arm and chest and back. I could not walk three days ago after the accident, but today the nurse helped me to the toilet and back and it was a completely successful expedition!”