Word got back to Dickens, of course. It always did. Then a young journalist friend of Dickens’s, part of his “squad” as it was said then, a certain Edmund Yates (who, like Iago, always had a lean and hungry look, I thought), had written a truly unpleasant and dismissive profile of Thackeray in Town Talk. Deeply stung, the old gentleman-writer noted that both he and Yates were members of the Garrick and asked the club to expel the younger man on the grounds that his conduct in writing such a piece had been “intolerable in the society of gentlemen.”

In an astounding act of insensitivity towards his old friend Thackeray, Dickens had taken the young man’s part in the dispute and then resigned from the Garrick himself when the membership committee had agreed with Thackeray and expelled the journalist.

So it was here in the Athenaeum Club, years later, that the breach was finally healed. I had heard Dickens describe the reconciliation to Wills. “There I was hanging up my hat in the Athenaeum,” he said, “when I looked up and saw Thackeray’s haggard face. The man looked like a ghost, Wills. He looked as dead as Marley and lacked only the chains. So I said to him, ‘Thackeray, have you been ill?’ And we struck up a conversation after the years of silence and shook hands and all now is as it was before.”

This is very touching. It is also very false.

I happened to have been in the Athenaeum that night, and both Dickens and I saw Thackeray trying to struggle into his coat. The old gentleman was speaking to two other members. Dickens, coming in, passed close by the old writer without giving him a glance. I was putting away my stick and hat and Dickens had already passed Thackeray and had his foot on the stair when the older author chased after Dickens, catching him on the stairway. I heard Thackeray speak first and then hold out his hand to Dickens. They shook hands. Then Dickens went into the dining room and I watched Thackeray return to his interlocutor—I believe it was Sir Theodore Martin—and I heard him say, “I am glad I have done this.”

Charles Dickens was a kind and frequently sentimental man, but he was never the first to mend a quarrel. A fact that I would be reminded of soon enough.

AS I TOOK A CAB HOME, I thought about Dickens’s queer plan to seek out this phantom named Drood.

As I was listening to Dickens tell his story of the Staplehurst disaster that morning, I had gone through shifting opinions on the veracity of the “Mr Drood” commentary. Charles Dickens was not a liar. But Charles Dickens was also always convinced of the veracity and truth of whatever position he took on any subject and—through his telling, but especially through his own writing—he would always convince himself that something was true, simply because he said it was, even when it was not. His various public letters blaming his wife, Catherine, for the separation eight years earlier, a separation that was obviously his idea, his need, and his instigation, is a perfect example of this phenomenon.

But why invent this Drood character?

Then again, why tell everyone that he, Dickens, had taken the initiative to settle his long breach with Thackeray when it had been the older writer’s move to do so?

The difference is that Charles Dickens’s lies and exaggerations, while perhaps not told deliberately—speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call “the real world”—were almost always promulgated in order to make Charles Dickens look better.

By all objective accounts, including that of the pudgy little homunculus Edmond Dickenson—may his bruises fester and rot and turn to cankers—Dickens had been the hero of the Staplehurst railway disaster. Adding a phantasm such as Drood to the telling did nothing to increase the Inimitable’s heroism in the telling. Indeed, Dickens’s obvious anxiety in describing the odd, almost inhuman man detracted from the Dickensian aura of heroism.

So what was all this about?

I had to assume that there had been a very strange personage named Drood at the wreck site and that something very close to their brief conversation and bizarre interactions as Dickens had described them had occurred.

But why try to find the man? Agreed, there was a certain mystery in such an odd figure, but London and England and even our railways were full of odd figures. (Even that impertinent mayfly young Mr Dickenson seemed a character out of a Dickens novel—orphaned, with his rich Guardian and Chancery-endowed fortune, listless, aimless, given only to reading and lazing about. What extra stretch was there to believe in a “Mr Drood” with his leprous appearance, missing fingers and eyelids, and lisping utterances?)

But again, I wondered as I approached my street, why try to find this Drood?

Charles Dickens was a man given to much planning and careful premeditation, but he was also a creature of impulses. During his first tour of the United States, he had alienated the majority of his audiences and almost all of the American newspapers and journals with his insistence on the creation of an International Copyright. The fact that Dickens’s fiction—and most English authors’ fiction—was being blatantly stolen and published in America with no recompense whatsoever to its author evidently seemed only right and fair to the upstart Americans, so Dickens’s anger was justified. But, shortly after the tour—after the damage was done between Dickens and his original adoring audiences there—Dickens simply lost interest in the Copyright. He was, in other words, a careful man with careless impulses.

At Gad’s Hill Place or his earlier homes, or on any voyage or outing, it was invariably Charles Dickens who decided on the destinations for outings, who decided on the location of picnics, and who decided on the games to be played, who decided who the captains would be, and—most frequently—it was Dickens who kept score, announced the winners, and awarded the prizes. The occupants of the village nearest to Gad’s Hill Place even treated him rather like a squire, obviously honoured to have the famous author hand out awards at fairs and competitions.

Dickens had always been the boy who led the other boys in play. He never doubted that this was his role in life and he never relinquished that role as an adult.

But what game would we be pursuing if Dickens and I actually sought out this Mr Drood figure? What purpose would it serve other than to gratify yet another boyish impulse of Charles Dickens’s? And what dangers would be involved? The neighbourhoods that Drood had allegedly mentioned to Dickens as they descended the railway grade to the carnage below were anything but safe areas of London. They were indeed, as Dickens called them— the Great Oven.

I WAS IN great PAIN from the rheumatical gout as I arrived home.

The light from the street gas lamps hurt my eyes. My own footfalls struck my brain like chisel blows. The rumble of a passing waggon made my entire body twitch with pain. I was trembling. A sudden, bitter taste of coffee filled my mouth—not an echo of the coffee I had enjoyed with dessert, but something far more vile. There was a confusion in my mind and a nauseating sickness permeating my body.

Our new home was at Melcombe Place; we had moved from Harley Street a year earlier, partly because of the greater income and literary position that The Woman in White had afforded me. (For my next novel, No Name, I received more than £3,000 for book publication and a guaranteed £4,500 if British or American serialisation was included.)

When I say “our” or “we” I refer to the woman I had been living with for some years, a certain Caroline G— and her then fourteen-year-old daughter, Harriet, whom we often called Carrie. (There was a rumour that Caroline was my model for The Woman in White—and it is true that I had encountered her running away from a blackguard in the night outside a villa in Regents Park and, running after her, later rescued her from the streets much as was the case with the character in my novel—but I had conceived the idea for The Woman in White long before I met Caroline.)