“Do you mind if we stop for a moment, Charles?”

“Not in the least, my dear Wilkie. Not in the least!”

I leaned on the little arched bridge’s railing and took three sips from my silver flask. “An uncomfortably warm day, today, is it not?”

“You think so? I find it close to perfect.”

We headed off again, but Dickens was either tiring or walking slowly for my benefit.

“How is your health, Charles? One hears so many things. As with our dear Frank Beard’s ominous rumblings, one doesn’t know what is true. Are you recovered from your tours?”

“I feel much better these days,” said Dickens. “At least some days I do. Yesterday I told a friend that I was certain I should be living and working deep into my eighties. And I felt as if this were true. Other days… well, you know about the hard days, my friend. Other days, one does what one must to honour commitments and to honour the work itself.”

“And how is Edwin Drood coming along?” I asked.

Dickens glanced at me before replying. With the terrible exception of Dickens’s savaging of The Moonstone, we rarely, either one of us, offered to discuss work in progress with the other. The ferruled base of his cane swung with a sweet, summery swish-swish against the tall grass to either side of the path.

“Drood is coming along slowly but well, I think,” he said at last. “It is a much more complicated book, in terms of plot and twists and revelations, than most I have attempted in the past, my dear Wilkie. But you know that! You are the master of the mystery form! I should have submitted all my novice’s problems to you for a Virgil’s guidance in the ways of mystery and suspense long before this! How goes your Man and Wife?”

“I look to finish it in the next two or three days.”

“Marvellous!” cried Dickens once again. We were out of sight of the brook now, but its soft sounds followed us as we passed through more trees and then came out into another open field. The path continued winding towards the distant sea.

“When I do finish it, I wonder if you would do me a great favour, Charles.”

“If it is within my poor and failing powers, I shall certainly attempt to do so.”

“I believe it is within our powers to solve two mysteries on the same night… if, that is, you’re willing to go on a secret outing with me on Wednesday or Thursday night.”

“A secret outing?” laughed Dickens.

“The mysteries would have a greater chance of being solved if neither you nor I told anyone—no one at all—that we were going anywhere that evening.”

“Now that does sound mysterious,” said Dickens as we came to the brow of a hill. There were large barrow stones—Druid stones, the children and farmers called them, although they were nothing of the sort—scattered and heaped there. “How could keeping our outing a secret improve the chances at success of that outing?”

“I promise that if you join me when I come to fetch you a half hour or so after sunset on Wednesday or Thursday night, odds are great that you will discover the answer to that question, Charles.”

“Very well, then,” said Dickens. “Wednesday or Thursday night, you say? Thursday is the ninth of June. I may have a commitment for that evening. Would Wednesday suit you?”

“Perfectly,” I said.

“Very good, then,” said Dickens. “Now I have something that I have been waiting to discuss with you, my dear Wilkie. Shall we find a relatively comfortable perch on one of these great fallen stones? It should only take a few moments, but it is the reason I asked you here today and it truly is of some importance.”

Charles Dickens stop and sit down during a walk? I thought. I never believed the day would come. But since I was soaked through with perspiration from our stroll and wheezing like a lung-shot warhorse, I welcomed it.

“I am your obedient servant, sir,” I said and gestured for him to lead on and choose our fallen stone.

FIRST OF ALL, Wilkie, I owe you a deep and sincere apology. Several apologies, actually, but one above all for a certain treatment of you that is so unfair and so wrong that I truly do not know where to begin.”

“Not at all, Charles. I cannot imagine anything that…”

Dickens stopped me with a raised palm. From where we sat on the high barrow stone, Kent stretched out and rolled away in all directions. I could see the haze of London in the pure light and the Channel to our left. The tower of Rochester Cathedral was like a grey tent spike in the distance.

“You may not be able to forgive me, my dear Wilkie,” he continued. “I would not… could not… forgive you should the tables somehow be turned.”

“What on earth are you going on about, Charles?”

Dickens gestured towards the distant treetops of the highway and his home as if that explained something. “For almost five years now—five years this week—you and I have jested back and forth about a creature named Drood.…”

“Jested?” I said with some impatience. “Hardly ‘jested,’ I would say.”

“That is precisely the point of my apology, my dear friend. There is, of course, no Drood… no Egyptian Temple in Undertown…”

What was he up to? What game was Dickens playing with me now? I said, “So all your tales of Drood, going back to the accident, were lies, Charles?”

“Precisely,” said Dickens. “Lies for which I apologise abjectly and totally. And with a shame it is impossible even for me to express… and I have known shame.”

“You would not be human if you had not,” I said drily. Again I could but wonder what game he was at now. If I had been a simpleton depending upon Dickens’s tales for my knowledge that Drood was real—as real as that white sail we both could see at that moment as we looked towards the sea—then perhaps the Inimitable would have something to apologise for.

“You don’t believe me,” said Dickens, looking warily at me.

“I don’t understand you, Charles. You are not the only one who has seen Drood and suffered from his actions, you know. You forget that I have seen other living men and women who have become slaves of the Egyptian. What about the Undertown river gondola and the two masked men who piloted it that night we descended far below the crypts and catacombs? Are you trying to tell me that the gondola and those men who took you away were mere phantasms?”

“No,” said Dickens. “They were my gardeners, Gowen and Smythe. And the ‘gondola,’ as you call it, was a mere Thames river barque with the roughest wooden adornments painted and hammered on fore and aft. It would not have passed muster in the crudest amateur theatrical—or any place that had lights. As it was, Gowen and Smythe had the Devil’s own time carrying that leaking barque down endless flights of sewer-access stairs—they never did bring it back up, merely abandoned it there.”

“You went off to Drood’s Temple with them,” I said.

“I sat there as we paddled around the bend of that stinking sewer until we were out of sight and then spent hours finding my way back through adjoining tunnels,” said Dickens. “I almost became lost for good that night. It would have served me right if I had.”

I laughed at this. “Listen to yourself, Charles. Someone would have to be out of his mind to plan and carry out such an elaborate charade. It would be not only cruel, but actively mad.”

“Sometimes I agree with you on that point, Wilkie,” sighed Dickens. “But you must remember that the descent into Undertown and the gondola were meant to be the last scene of the last act of this particular pretence, at least as far as I was concerned. How was I to know that your novelist’s deeper consciousness and vast quantities of opium would keep the play going on in your head for years more?”

I shook my head. “Drood’s men on the gondola were not the only others involved in this. What about Detective Hatchery? Did you even know that poor Hatchery was dead?”