With one smooth motion, I wrung the puppy’s neck. The snap was audible but not loud. The small body went limp in my arms.

I glanced around again and then dropped the puppy’s carcass into the lime pit. There was no dramatic hiss or bubbling. The little black-and-white-spotted form just lay there, a bit more than half submerged in the thick grey gruel of quick-lime. Bending and using the branch, I carefully prodded the puppy’s ribs and head and hindquarters until the tiny form was just beneath the surface. Then I tossed the branch into the high grass and marked the spot where it landed.

Twenty-four hours? Forty-eight? I decided to give it seventy-two hours—and a little more, since I planned to wait until dusk—before coming back to use the same branch to poke out and analyse the results.

Softly whistling a tune that had become popular in the music halls that summer, I strolled back through the graveyard to the waiting carriage.

Three days later I received a pleasant note from Dickens thanking me for my letter, implicitly accepting my apologies, and inviting me out to Gad’s Hill Place at my earliest convenience. He also graciously suggested that I might want to visit my brother there, as Charley remained too ill to return to London.

I accepted the invitation and left for Gad’s Hill the same day. It was excellent timing, since I wanted to go to the Rochester graveyard lime pit that evening in any event.

Katey Dickens met me on the front lawn as she had some years earlier. The day was warm, but there was a pleasant breeze that brought the healthy smell of the surrounding fields. The carefully tended shrubs, trees, and red geraniums all stirred to that breeze, as did Kate’s long, gauzy summer dress. Her hair, I noticed, was pinned on the sides but down in the back: an unusual and not-unpleasant look for her.

“Charles is sleeping,” she said. “He had a terrible night and although I know you wish to see him, I think it better if he were not disturbed.”

I knew she was talking about my brother, not her father. I nodded. “I need to head back before supper, but perhaps Charley will wake before then.”

“Perhaps,” said Katey, but her expression suggested otherwise. She slipped her arm in mine. “Father is working in the chalet. I’ll walk you through the tunnel.”

My eyebrows rose. “Working in the chalet? I was under the impression that he was not writing fiction at the present time.”

“He’s not, Wilkie. He’s busy working on that terrible new murder-reading of his.”

“Ahh.” We strolled across the manicured lawn and down into the tunnel. As was almost always the case in summer, the cool air in the long, dark passageway was a relief from the humidity above.

“Wilkie, do you ever wonder about whether Father is right?”

No, I thought. Never. I said, “About what, my dear?”

“About your brother.”

I felt some alarm course through me. “About the seriousness of his illness, you mean?”

“About everything.”

I could not believe that she was asking me this. Rumours that Kate and Charley had never consummated their marriage continued, fueled by Charles Dickens’s malicious comments. If her father’s insinuations were to be believed, my brother was either a closet sodomite or impotent or both.

This line of questioning certainly would not do.

I patted her hand. “Your father hated losing you above all things, Katey. You have always been the closest to him. Any suitor or husband would have fallen under his wrath.”

“Yes,” agreed Katey. Modesty was never one of her more salient charms. “But Charley and I spend so much time here at Gad’s Hill Place that it is almost as if I never left home.”

I had nothing to say to that. Especially since everyone knew that it was her choice to live here when Charley was so ill—which was almost all of the time now.

“Do you ever wonder, Wilkie, what it would be like if you and I had married rather than your brother and me?”

I almost stopped walking. My heart, already accelerated by my mid-day liberal application of laudanum, began pounding against my ribs.

There was a time when I had considered courting the young Kate Dickens. During what everyone but the Dickenses thought of as “the divorce”—the terrible and permanent separation when Charles Dickens effectively sent his wife, Catherine, into permanent exile—young Kate, of all the children, seemed the most hurt and disoriented by the sudden dissolution of what most had thought of as the perfect English family. She was eighteen when all of the confusion and dislocation was going on—she became engaged to my brother when she was twenty—and I admitted to finding her attractive in some subtle way. Even then I sensed that she would not, as would her sister Mamie, put on the plumpness and matronly aspect of her mother.

But before I could even explore my interest in Katey, she had fallen in love—or at least become smitten—with Dickens’s and my friend Percy Fitzgerald. When Fitzgerald rather coldly rejected her maidenly advances, Katey had suddenly turned to my brother, Dickens’s illustrator and a frequent visitor to Gad’s Hill at the time.

I may have mentioned previously, Dear Reader, that this romantic interest on Kate’s part astounded all of us. Charley had only moved away from our mother’s home some weeks earlier and had never shown any serious interest in girls or courting.

Now this. It did not escape my awareness there in that concealing tunnel that Katey must have known, if only via her father’s love of gossip, that I had sent Caroline G— away from my home and was now (to their knowledge) a prosperous and somewhat famous bachelor living alone with my servants and sometimes “niece” Carrie.

I smiled to show that I knew Kate was jesting and said, “It would have been a most interesting partnership, I am sure, my dear. Between your inimitable will and my unceasing intransigence, our quarrels would have been legendary.”

Katey did not smile. The end of the tunnel was an arc of light when she stopped and looked at me. “I sometimes believe that we all end up with the wrong people in our lives—Father and Mother, Charles and me, you and… that woman—perhaps everyone but Percy Fitzgerald and that simpering lady of his.”

“And William Charles Macready,” I said in a pleasant, teasing tone. “We must not forget the ancient thespian’s second wife. It truly seems a marriage made in heaven.”

Katey laughed. “One woman who found happiness,” she said and took my arm and led me out into the light and let me go.

MY DEAR WILKIE! How wonderful of you to come!” cried Dickens as I came up into the chalet’s airy first storey. He leaped to his feet, came around his simple desk, and clasped my hand in both of his. I half-recoiled in terrible anticipation of a hug. It was as if our night at Vérey’s a month and some ago had never happened.

The Inimitable’s chalet summer workroom was as pleasant as ever, especially with this breeze blowing in from the distant sea and rustling all of the two cedar trees’ branches outside the open windows. Dickens had added a bent-back cane chair on the opposite side of his desk and now he waved me to it as he went back to his comfortable-looking heavy writing chair. He waved to boxes and a carafe on his desk. “Cigar? Some iced water?”

“No, thank you, Charles.”

“I cannot tell you how glad I am that all is forgiven and forgotten,” he said warmly. He did not specify who had had to do the forgiving and forgetting.

“I feel the same way.”

I glanced at the stacks of pages on his desktop. Dickens saw my glance and handed me several of them. I had seen this method before. He had torn pages out of one of his books—in this case, Oliver Twist—mounted the pages on stiff pasteboard, and was busy scrawling changes, additions, deletions, and marginal comments. He would then send these to his printers and have a final version printed up—three lines of white space between the oversized text, wide margins in which to add more stage and reading comments, and notes in very large script. This would be his reading text for the coming tour.