The changes to the text were interesting enough, turning a novel meant to be read into a script meant to be heard, but it was the stage directions jotted in the margins that caught my eye:

“Beckon down… Point… Shudder… Look Round with Terror… Murder coming…”

And on the next pasteboard sheet:

… he beat it twice upon the upturned face that almost touched his own… seized a heavy club, and struck her down!!.. the pool of gore that quivered and danced in the sunlight on the ceiling… but such flesh, and so much blood!!!.. The very feet of the dog were bloody!!!!.. dashed out his brains!!!!

I blinked at this. His brains. I had forgotten that Sikes killed both Nancy and the dog.

“Terror to the End!” was scrawled at least five times on the various page margins.

I set them back on the desk and smiled at Dickens. “Your Murder at last,” I said.

“At last,” agreed Dickens.

“And I thought that I was the novelist of sensation, Charles.”

“This Murder shall serve more than sensation, my dear Wilkie. I wish to leave behind in those who attend my final, farewell round of readings a sense of something very passionate and dramatic, something done with simple means yet to a complex emotional end.”

“I see,” I said. What I actually saw was that Dickens intended to shock the everlasting sensibilities out of his audience. “Is it truly then to be a farewell round of readings?”

“Hmmm,” grunted Dickens. “So our friend Beard tells me. So Dolby tells me. So the special physicians in London and even Paris tell me. So even does Wills tell me, although he never approved of the reading tours in the first place.”

“Well, Charles, we can somewhat discount dear Wills. His opinions these days are filtered through the constant sound of doors slamming in his skull.”

Dickens chuckled but then said, “Alas, poor Wills, I knew him, Horatio.”

“On a hunt,” I said, feigning sadness. As if on cue, a rider in fox hunt red, white breeches, and gleaming high boots sitting astride a huge grey-dappled high-prancer straining at the bit passed on Graves-end Road below. A dray waggon filled with manure rumbled past immediately after that noble image. Dickens and I glanced at each other and laughed at the same instant. It was like the old days.

Except for the fact that I now wished him dead.

When our laughter died, Dickens said, “I have been thinking more about your Moonstone, Wilkie.”

My entire body tensed. But I managed a wan smile.

Dickens held both his hands out and up, palms towards me. “No, no, my dear friend. I mean in totally admiring and professionally respectful ways.”

I held the smile in place.

“You may not have been aware of it, my dear Wilkie, but it is possible that with that sensationalist novel you may have created an entirely new genre of fiction.”

“Of course I am aware of it,” I said stiffly. I had no idea what he was talking about.

Dickens did not seem to have heard me. “The idea of an entire novel revolving around a single mystery, with an interesting and three-dimensional detective character—perhaps a private enquiry detective rather than a formal police detective—in a central position, and with all character development and nuance of daily verisimilitude flowing from the side-effects and after-effects of whatever crime was the mainspring for the novel’s central tale… why, it is revolutionary!”

I nodded humbly.

“I have decided to take a whack at it myself,” said Dickens, using one of the more execrable American expressions he had picked up on his last tour there.

At that moment I hated the man without reservation. “Do you have a title for this theoretical work yet?” I heard myself ask in a normal-enough voice.

Dickens smiled. “I was thinking of something straightforward, my dear Wilkie… something like The Mystery of Edmond Dickenson.”

I confess that I started in my chair. “Have you heard from young Edmond, then?”

“Not at all. But your questions about him last year made me think that the idea of a young man simply disappearing, with no clue as to his whereabouts or reasons for leaving, might lead to some interesting complications if murder were involved.”

I felt my heart pounding and wished that I could take a steadying drink of the laudanum from my flask in my jacket’s chest pocket. “And do you think that young Edmond Dickenson was murdered?” I asked.

I remembered Dickenson with his shaved head and sharp teeth and fanatic’s eyes, wearing a hooded robe and chanting at the ceremony in which Drood had loosed the scarab into my vitals. At the very memory of it, the scarab stirred and shifted in the back of my brain.

“Not a bit of it!” laughed Dickens. “I had every reason to believe young Edmond when he said that he was taking his money and travelling, perhaps relocating in Australia. And I certainly would change the character’s name and the title. It was merely to give an idea of the overall story.”

“Interesting,” I lied.

“And mesmerism,” said Dickens, steepling his fingers as he sat back and smiled at me.

“What about it, Charles?”

“I know you are interested in it, Wilkie. Your interest in it is almost as old as mine, although you have never practised it as I have. And you introduced it, subtly, into The Moonstone, although more as a metaphor than reality, but you failed to use it properly.”

“How so?”

“The solution to your so-called mystery,” said Dickens in that maddening, schoolmaster’s tone he used with me so frequently. “You have Mr Franklin Blake stealing the diamond in his opium-dream sleep but not knowing that he has stolen it.…”

“As I said before,” I said coolly, “this is most feasible and totally possible. I have researched it myself and…”

Dickens waved that away. “But, my dear Wilkie, the discerning reader—perhaps all readers—must ask, Why did Franklin Blake steal his beloved’s diamond?”

“And the answer is obvious, Charles. Because he was afraid that someone might steal it and therefore, under the dream-influence of opium he did not know he had ingested, he walked in his sleep and… stole it.” I heard the lameness in my own voice.

Dickens smiled. “Precisely. It strains credulity and endangers verisimilitude. But if you had one of your characters mesmerise Franklin Blake and order him to steal the diamond, and add to that the mischievous use of opium in his wine (although I would have had both the mesermism and the opium a deliberate part of the plot, a conspiracy rather than mere accident)… well, everything falls into place, doesn’t it, my dear Wilkie?”

I sat thinking about this for a moment. It was far too late to make changes. The last number of the serialised novel had already appeared in both All the Year Round and in the Harper brothers’ magazine in America and the complimentary leather-bound three-decker copies of the Tinsley edition were already completed and ready to be sent by messenger to Dickens and others.

I said, “But I still maintain that it violates the rules of mesmerism, Charles. You and I both know that Professor Elliotson and others taught that someone cannot do under the influence of the magnetic powers anything he or she would not do—in moral terms—when fully conscious.”

Dickens nodded. “Indeed, but Elliotson has shown—I have shown—that under the magnetic influence, the subject may alter his or her behaviour for extended periods of time because he or she has been told that something is true that is not.”

I did not understand this and said so.

“A woman might never carry her baby outside at night,” continued Dickens, “but if you were to mesmerise her and tell her that the house was on fire—or would be on fire, say, at nine PM—she would, either while in the mesmeric trance or much later under the influence of suggestion, seize up her baby and rush outside even when no flames were visible. In this way, your Hindoos in The Moonstone might have mesmerised Franklin Blake when he came upon them on the estate’s grounds, and your meddling doctor… Mr Sweets?”