“I want to take you out to dinner,” I said.

“No, impossible,” said Dickens. “I have to…” He paused then and looked at me again. “But then again, why not?”

We rode in silence the rest of the way into London.

WE DINED AT VéREY’S, where we had enjoyed so many celebratory repasts in years gone by. This was not to be one of the more amiable times spent there.

In my planning for this confrontation I had intended to begin the meal and negotiations directly with I need to see Drood again. I need to go with you tonight when you go into Undertown.

If Dickens pressed me for a reason, I would describe to him the agony and terror I had suffered from the scarab. (I had reason to believe that he knew something about such agony and terror from that source.) If he did not ask for my reasons, I would simply go along with him that night.

I did not plan to tell him that I intended to put two bullets into the monster Drood’s body and one into his ugly head. Dickens might have pointed out that Drood’s subterranean minions—the Lascars and Magyars and Chinamen and Negroes and even young Edmond Dickenson with his head shaved—would tear us apart. So be it was my response, although I did not expect it to come to that.

But because of what I had overheard in Peckham between the Inimitable and the actress (former actress), I realised that a more subtle and roundabout approach might better serve my cause of going with him to see Drood. (Inspector Field and his agents had never been able to track Dickens into Undertown during the writer’s various sojourns there, although they had witnessed him entering various cellars and crypts in central London. The actual secret doorways, passages, and access points remained a mystery known only to Dickens and Drood.)

We discussed the menu with Henry, the maître d’hôtel, and the conversation entered that foreign language (which I so loved) of sauces, gravies, and preparations. Then we took our time ordering wines and a cordial before the wines. Then we talked.

We did not have a fully private room—Vérey’s now reserved those only for larger parties—but we might as well have: our table was a banquette set within flocked red walls, partitions, and heavy drapes in a raised area away from the main room. Even the noise of the other diners was shielded from us.

“Well,” I said at last when Henry, other waiters, and the sommelier were gone and the red velvet drapes closed, “congratulations on the successful premiere of L’Abîme!”

We drank to that. Dickens, rousing himself from his thoughts, said, “Yes, it was a great success. Parisian audiences appreciated the revised tale in a way that London audiences did not.”

As if you were here since January to see and hear the reaction of London audiences, I thought. I said, “The London production continues still, yet all honours to the new blood of the Parisian version.”

“It is much improved,” grunted Dickens.

I could put up with such arrogance because, thanks to secret letters from Fechter, I knew that for all of Dickens’s illusion that the Parisian premiere had been a triumph, the French critics and enlightened audiences understood it to have been a mere succès d’estime. One Parisian critic had written—“Only the sympathetic respect of the French prevented this Abîme from engulfing its authors.”

In other words, Dickens’s and Fechter’s beloved Abyss had been precisely that.

But I could not let Dickens know that I knew this. If he became aware that I was in secret communication with Fechter, he would also realise that I had known that he had left Paris the night of the premiere and had been hiding with his mistress this past week. It would have shown my feigned surprise at seeing him on the train as the lie it was.

“To more such successes,” I said, and we touched glasses and drank again.

After a moment or two, I said, “The Moonstone is finished. I have completed the proofreading of the final number.”

“Yes,” said Dickens with no hint of interest. “Wills has sent me the galleys.”

“Have you seen the commotion at Wellington Street?” I was referring to the crowds at the door each Friday as mobs pressed in to buy the newest instalment of The Moonstone.

“Indeed,” Dickens said drily. “I had to use my stick as a sort of machete-knife to hack my way through the crush to get to my office towards the end of May before I left for France. Very inconvenient.”

“I dare say,” I said. “When I have brought corrections or business papers to Wills in person, I have seen the delivery boys and porters standing in various corners, their packs still on their backs, reading instalments.”

“Hmmm,” said Dickens.

“I understand that bets are being made on the street—and in some of the better clubs around town, including my Athenaeum—about when the diamond shall finally be found and who shall be revealed as the thief.”

“Englishmen will bet on anything,” said Dickens. “I have seen gentlemen on a hunt wager a thousand pounds on which direction the next flight of geese shall pass over.”

Our sad history is buried in France was the phrase that kept going through my head in Ellen Ternan’s voice. Had it been a boy infant or a girl? I wondered. Weary of Dickens’s endless condescension, I smiled and said, “Wills reports to me that sales of The Moonstone have put both Our Mutual Friend and Great Expectations in the shade.”

Dickens raised his head and looked at me for the first time. Slowly—very slowly—a thin smile widened beneath his thinning moustache and greying beard. “Yes?” he said.

“Yes.” I studied the amber of my cordial for a moment and said, “Are you working on anything now, Charles?”

“No. I’ve found it impossible to begin a new novel, or even a story, although ideas and images flit and buzz in my head as always.”

“Of course.”

“I have been… distracted,” he said softly.

“Of course. The American reading tour alone would stop any writer from working.”

I had offered the American reading tour as an opening for Dickens to change the subject, since he had much enjoyed discussing his various triumphs there with all of his friends, including me, during the weeks after he came back and before he decamped to Paris. But he chose not to accept my offered segue.

“I have read the galleys of your last numbers,” he said.

“Oh?” I said. “Do you find them satisfactory?” It was a perfunctory question, for the first time in our relationship. He was not my editor—Wills had served that needless purpose during the months of Dickens’s absence—and although Dickens was nominally my publisher through his magazine, I had already found a real publisher, William Tinsley, for the first book edition of 1,500 copies and had received a promise of £7,500.

“I find the finished book extremely tiresome,” Dickens said mildly.

For a moment I could only hold my glass in both hands and stare at the older man. “I beg your pardon?” I said at last.

“You heard me, sir. I find The Moonstone tiresome in the extreme. Its construction is awkward beyond endurance; there is a vein of obstinate conceit that runs throughout the entire tale and makes enemies of readers.”

I could not believe that my friend of long years was saying this to me. I was embarrassed to feel the blood rising to my cheeks, temples, and ears. Eventually I said, “I am heartily sorry, Charles, if the novel disappoints you. It certainly has not disappointed its many thousands of eager readers.”

“So you have been telling me,” said Dickens.

“What exactly about the construction do you find tiresome? It follows the structure of your very own Bleak House… only with improvements.”

As I may have mentioned to you, Dear Reader, the construction of The Moonstone was nothing less than brilliant, consisting, as it did, of a series of epistles solicited by one of the offstage characters for most of the other central characters to tell their various stories in series via an assortment of diaries and notes and letters.