Iwas wakened in late morning by Caroline’s daughter, Carrie, even though—as I mentioned earlier—she was supposed to be travelling out of the city with the Wards, the family for whom she served as governess. She was weeping as she knocked repeatedly and then, when I did not answer, came into my bedroom.

Groggily, I sat up in bed and pulled the bedcovers up. All I could think of in my half-waking state was that somehow Carrie had come home early and gotten into the locked box in the locked lower dresser drawer where I kept her mother’s letters. Caroline’s most recent letter to me—received and read only three days earlier—reported that she had complained of one of her husband Joseph’s late-night drinking parties with his sports-loving friends and she had come to consciousness the next day locked in the cellar with one of her eyes swollen shut and with a sure sense of having been violated by more than one man.

But this was not the reason for Carrie’s weeping.

“Wilkie, Mr Dickens… Charles Dickens, your friend… he is dead!”

Through sobs, Carrie explained that her patrons, my friends Edward and Henrietta Ward, had been in transit to Bristol when they heard word of Dickens’s death from a friend they met at the station, and they had immediately turned around and come back to the city so that Carrie could be with me.

“To… to think… of how many times Mr Dickens… was a guest at our ta… table… when Mother lived here…” Carrie was sobbing.

I rubbed my aching eyes. “Go on downstairs like a good girl,” I said at last. “Have Besse put on coffee and prepare a late breakfast.…”

“George and Besse are gone,” she said. “I had to use the key we hide in the arbour to get in.”

“Ah, yes,” I said, still rubbing my face. “I gave them last night and today off… so that I could sleep. I finished my book last night, Carrie.”

She did not seem properly impressed by this fact and made no comment. She was weeping again, although why she felt such a personal loss at the reported death of an old gentleman who hadn’t visited the house in many months and who had called her “the Butler” for years, I had no idea. “Go around the block, then, and bring the cook back with you,” I said. “But be a good girl and put the coffee and tea on first, please. Oh, and Carrie, go to the tobacco shop beyond the square and bring back every newspaper you can find. Go on, now!”

When she was gone, I threw off the covers and looked down. Carrie hadn’t seemed to have noticed through her tears, but I was wearing a soiled white shirt and trousers rather than pyjamas. My boots were still laced, and the sheets were smeared with mud that looked—and smelled—far too much like excrement.

I rose and went off to bathe and change before Carrie returned.

AS THE DAY WENT ON, more and more pieces of reliable information clicked into place.

After starting his day on the eighth of June by chatting over breakfast with Georgina, Dickens had violated his usual rules and work habits by working in the chalet all day, only returning to the house at about one PM for lunch before heading back to his eyrie to write again late into the day.

I later saw the final page for The Mystery of Edwin Drood that he’d written that day. The lines showed fewer corrections and crossings-out than the normal Charles Dickens first-draft page to which I was accustomed. It included this passage and obviously was describing a beautiful morning in Rochester very similar to the lovely morning he had just experienced at Gad’s Hill. It began with “A brilliant morning shines on the old city…” and moved on to—

Changes of glorious light from moving boughs, songs of birds, scents from gardens, woods and fields—or, rather, from the one great garden of the whole cultivated island in its yielding time—penetrate the Cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and preach of the Resurrection and the Life. The cold stone tombs of centuries ago grow warm; and flecks of brightness dart into the sternest marble corners of the building, fluttering there like wings.

The last words he ever wrote of The Mystery of Edwin Drood that afternoon were—“… and then falls to with an appetite.”

Dickens left the chalet late and went to his study before dinner. There he wrote two letters (according to Katey, who much later told my brother about them, who later informed me)—one to Charles Kent in which he, Dickens, said that he would be in London the following day (9 June) and would like to meet Charles at three o’clock that afternoon. Although, he added, “If I can’t be—why, then I shan’t be.”

The other letter was to a clergyman, and it was in this letter that the Inimitable quoted Friar Laurence’s warning to Romeo—“These violent delights have violent ends.”

Then Dickens went in to dinner.

Georgina later told my brother that just as they sat down together to dine, she looked at him across the table and became very alarmed at the expression on the Inimitable’s face.

“Are you ill, Charles?” she asked.

“Yes, very ill. I have been… ill… for the last hour.”

Georgina wanted to send for a doctor at once, but Dickens waved her back to her seat and insisted that they go on with the meal. “We must dine,” he said as if distracted, “for I must leave immediately after dinner. I must go… to London… at once. After dinner. I have… an… appointment tomorrow, today, tonight.”

Suddenly he began to writhe as if in the midst of a violent fit. Georgina described it to Katey as if “there were some spirit trying to invade his body and poor Charles were trying to resist the possession.”

Dickens was saying words that made no sense to Georgina. Suddenly he cried, “I must go to London at once!” and pushed back his crimson-damasked chair.

He rose but would have fallen if Georgina had not rushed forward and caught him. “Come into the parlour,” she said, terrified by his ashen face and fixed expression. “Come and lie down.”

She tried to help him to a sofa, but he could not walk and his body quickly grew heavier and heavier in her arms. Never before, she later told Katey, had she truly understood the term “dead weight.”

Georgina gave up the attempt of getting him to a sofa and lowered him to the floor. There he placed both palms on the carpet, sank heavily on his left side, and murmured very faintly—“Yes. On the ground.” Then he fell unconscious.

At this time, I had been leaving the last of London traffic on the highway to Gad’s Hill and cursing the rain. But it was not raining there. Not yet.

Had I been there in the darkness under the trees where I would soon be waiting, I would have seen one of the young servants (perhaps Smythe or Gowen, the gardener-gondoliers according to Dickens) riding Newman Noggs, the pony who had so often trotted me from the station to the house, hell-bent for leather to summon the local doctor.

That physician, Mr Steele, arrived at 6.30 PM, still well before I had reached Gad’s Hill, to find Dickens “lying on the floor of the dining-room in a fit.”

Other servants carried a long sofa down to the dining room, and Mr Steele supervised placement of the unconscious but twitching author on it. Then Steele applied clysters and “other remedies” to the patient, but with no effect.

Georgina, meanwhile, had been firing off telegrams like a three-decker warship firing broadsides. One came to Frank Beard, who set off at once and arrived late that night, perhaps when I was being driven away—as unconscious as Dickens—in my own hired carriage.

I wondered then and wonder now who drove me into the city that night, rifled my pockets to find the key to my home, carried me to bed, and tucked me in. Not Drood, obviously. Dickenson? Reginald Barris-Field? Some other walking-dead lackey whom I had never even seen during the attack on me in the darkness?