All the other members of the party that night, including the horrified and exhausted Catherine and Georgina (who had ridden up the mountainside), attested that Dickens came down the cinder cone “alight in half a dozen places and burnt from head to foot.” The author’s remaining rags of clothing smouldered during the long night’s descent—and the descent was also harrowing. On an endless and exposed ice slope where some of the party had to rope up for safety and guides had to chip footsteps in the ice, one guide slipped and fell screaming down into the darkness, followed a minute later by one of the Englishmen who had joined the party. Dickens and the others descended through the night without learning the fates of these men. The writer later told me that the Englishman had survived; he never learned the status of the guide.

Twelve years before this Drood-quest in London, Dickens had dragged Egg and me up Vesuvius, but, thank God and the volcano’s relative quiet, it was a far less taxing and dangerous outing. Dickens and Layard pressed ahead at high speed, which allowed Egg and me to rest, discreetly, whenever we felt the need. In truth, it was beautiful as we watched the sun setting towards Sorrento and Capri from our vantage point near the mouth of the crater, the sphere of the sun growing huge and blood red through the pall of smoke and vapour from Vesuvius. We descended easily by torchlight with a new moon rising above us and all of us singing English and Italian songs.

This was as to nothing compared to our near-fatal—to me—adventure on Carrick Fell shortly after our last performance of The Frozen Deep in Manchester in 1857.

Dickens was filled then, as he was this night in the Shadwell slums, with a terrible and unquenchable energy, arising, it seemed, from a soul-deep dissatisfaction. He told me some weeks after the play closed that he was going mad, that—if I remember his words correctly—“the scaling of all the mountains in Switzerland, or the doing of any wild thing until I dropped, would be but a slight relief.” In a note he sent me one morning after we had been dining, drinking, and discussing things both solemnly and with wild humour the night before, Dickens said, “I want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable—indescribable—my misery amazing.” And I could tell that besides being amazing, his misery was very real and very deep. I thought at the time that it had only to do with his failing marriage to Catherine; I know now that it had even more to do with his new love for the eighteen-year-old child-woman named Ellen Ternan.

In 1857, Dickens announced to me suddenly that we were leaving immediately for Cumberland to get inspiration for some jointly penned articles about the North of England for our magazine Household Words. He was to call the piece The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices. Even as co-author—in truth primary author, I may tell you, Dear Reader—I have to say that what resulted was an unoriginal and uninspired series of travel essays. It was only later that I realised that Dickens had little interest in Cumberland, other than climbing that damned Carrick Fell, and almost no interest at all in writing travel articles.

Ellen Ternan and her sisters and mother were appearing on stage in Doncaster, and that, I know now, was the real purpose for our wild travels north.

How ironic it would have been if I had died on Carrick Fell because of Charles Dickens’s covert passion for an eighteen-year-old actress who had absolutely no awareness of his feelings for her.

We took the train from London to Carlisle and the next day we rode to the village of Heske, at the base of this “Carrock or Carrick Mountain or Carrock or Carrick Fell I have read about, my dear Wilkie. The spellings are unreliable.”

So it was at Carrick Fell that I fell.

Dickens’s burning frustration and energy demanded a mountain, and for some reason known to no one—not even to himself, I am sure—Carrick or Carrock Fell was to be the mountain we were to throw ourselves against.

There were no guides in tiny Heske to lead us to or up this hill. The weather was terrible: cold, windy, rainy. Dickens finally convinced the landlord of the rather sad little inn where we were staying to be our guide, even though the older man confessed to “havin’ never bin oop or doon that partic’lar hill, sirrr.”

We managed to find Carrick Fell, its summit disappearing in the lowering evening clouds. We began to climb. The innkeeper hesitated frequently but Dickens usually pushed on, guessing at our course. A bone-chilling wind rose up around nightfall—more a mere dimming of the twilight into deeper darkness as mist and fog rolled in—yet still we climbed. We soon were lost. The landlord confessed to having no idea even of which side of the mountain we were on. As dramatically as when he played the wandering Richard Wardour on stage, Dickens produced a compass from his pocket, pointed the way, and we pressed on into the gloom.

Within thirty minutes, Dickens’s city-bought compass was broken. The rain poured harder and we were soon soaked through and shivering. Darker and darker came on the northern night while we wound our way round and round the rocky fell. We found what could have been its summit—a slippery, rocky ridge set amidst a plethora of identical slippery, rocky ridges all disappearing into the fog and night—and we started down, having not the slightest sense of which way lay our village, our inn, our dinner, our fire, or our beds.

For two hours we wandered so with the rain terrific, the fog thick, and the darkness now approaching some Stygian absolute. When we came to a roaring stream that blocked our path, Dickens greeted it as if it were a long-lost friend. “We follow it down to the river at the base of the peak,” Dickens explained to the shivering, miserable wretch of a landlord and to his equally miserable co-author. “The perfect guide!”

This guide may have been perfect, but it was treacherous. The sides of the gully became steeper and steeper, the rocks along the sides ever more treacherous with rain and incipient ice, the torrent beneath us wilder. I fell behind. My foot slipped, I fell heavily, and I felt something twist terribly in my ankle. Lying half in the stream, hurting and shivering, starving and weak, I had to call into the darkness for help, hoping that Dickens and the trembling innkeeper had not descended beyond earshot. If they had, I knew I was a dead man. I could not even put weight on the ankle while using my walking stick. I would have had to crawl down the streambed itself some miles to the river, then—if I somehow guessed the proper direction to the village—crawl miles more along the river’s bank that night. I am a city man, Dear Reader. Such exertions are not in my physical vocabulary.

Luckily, Dickens heard my calls. He came back and found me lying in the stream, my ankle already swollen to more than twice its normal size.

At first he merely assisted me as I hopped down the treacherous slope with him, but eventually he actually carried me. I knew without any doubt that Dickens was imagining himself as the hero Richard Wardour carrying his rival, Frank Aldersley, across the Arctic wastes to safety. As long as he did not drop me, I did not care what fantasies he indulged in.

Eventually, we found the inn. The landlord—shaking and muttering and cursing under his breath—woke his wife to cook us some late-night supper or early-morning breakfast. Servants stoked the fires in the public room and in our rooms. There was no doctor in Heske—there really was no Heske in Heske—so Dickens iced and bound my swollen ankle as best he could until we reached civilisation.

We went on to Wigton and then to Allonby and then to Lancaster and then to Leeds—continuing the charade that we were gathering material for a travel tale, even though I could not walk without the aid of two sticks and spent all my time in the hotels—and then finally went on to Doncaster, which had been our true and secret (or rather, Charles Dickens’s secret) destination all along.