Glancing apprehensively over my shoulder at the black opening from whence I expected the wild boys to emerge again at any second, I crowded close to Dickens as he prepared to board the little boat. He paid the silent form in the bow two sovereigns, then paid the man at the sweep in the stern the same amount.

The two shook their heads and each handed one of the sovereigns back. They pointed at Dickens and nodded. Then they pointed at me and shook their heads again.

Clearly I was not invited.

“My friend must accompany me,” said Dickens to the silent pair. “I will not leave him.” He fumbled out more coins. The shadowy shape at the sweep and the one in the bow shook their heads almost in unison.

“Are you from Mr Drood?” asked the author. He repeated the question in French. The silent pair did not respond to either language. Finally the one at the stern pointed to Dickens again and motioned for him to board. The one in the bow pointed to me and then to the brick walkway I was on, telling me to stay. I felt that they were commanding me as if I were a dog.

“The blazes with this,” I said loudly. “Come back with me, Dickens. Now.”

The author looked at me, looked at the tunnel behind me—from which there were renewed scuttling sounds—looked at the boat, and craned to see up and down the underground river. “Wilkie…” he said at last. “After coming so far… after learning so much… I can’t… just… turn back.”

I could only stare. “Come back another night,” I said. “For now we must be away.”

He shook his head and handed me the bullseye lantern. “You have the pistol and… how many shots did Hatchery say?”

“Nine,” I said. Disbelief rose in me rather as one’s gorge might in a rough trailing sea. He was going to leave me behind.

“Nine shots and the lantern and the way back is clearly marked with three stripes the whole distance,” said Dickens. I noticed the lisp in his voice that others often had commented upon. I thought that perhaps it became more noticeable when he was carrying out an act of treachery.

“And if there are more than nine wild cannibal boys?” I said softly. I was amazed to hear how reasonable my voice sounded, although the echo in the large bricked space distorted it some. “Or legions of rats that come to dine after you are gone?”

“That boy was no cannibal,” said Dickens. “Only a lost child in rags so loose that they wouldn’t stay on his back. But if it comes to that, Wilkie… shoot one of them. The others will scatter.”

I laughed then. I really had no choice.

Dickens stepped aboard the little boat, bade the oarsman to wait a second, and consulted his watch by the lamp at the stern. “In another ninety minutes it will be too late to get back to Hatchery before the sun rises,” he said. “Wait for me here on this clean dock, Wilkie. Light the candle to give more light alongside the bullseye and wait for me. I shall insist that my interview with Mr Drood not exceed an hour. We shall go back up into the light together.”

I started to speak or laugh again, but no sound emerged. I realised that I was still holding the huge, heavy, idiotic pistol… and that it was aimed in the general direction of Dickens and his two boatmen. I did not need the grapeshot-shotgun barrel to send all three of them falling lifeless into the surging current of London’s sewage. All I had to do was pull the trigger thrice. That would leave six cartridges and balls for the Wild Boys.

As if reading my thoughts, Dickens said, “I would take you along if I could, Wilkie. But obviously Mr Drood has a private interview in mind. If you are here when I return—in less than ninety minutes, I assure you—we will go up and out together.”

I lowered the pistol. “And if I leave before you return—if you return,” I said hoarsely, “you will have a hard time of it finding your way to the surface without the bullseye.”

Dickens said nothing.

I lit the candle and sat between it and the lantern, my face to the tunnel opening, my back to Charles Dickens. I set the cocked pistol on my lap. I did not turn as the flat-bottomed boat slipped away from my tiny dock. The sweep and bow pole made such little noise that the sound of them was lost under the echoing rush of the underground river. To this day, I do not know if Dickens was carried upstream or down.

The rest of that summer of 1865 remained hot. By early September the unusually warm and frequently stormy weather receded and London enjoyed clear skies, pleasant days, and cool nights.

I rarely saw Dickens during those intervening two months. His children, during the summer and school holidays, put out their own little paper—the Gad’s Hill Gazette—and my brother, Charles, dropped off a packet of these in August. There were articles about picnics, outings to Rochester, cricket matches, and note of the first correspondence from Alfred, Dickens’s son who had left for Australia in May to become a sheep farmer. Mentions of the Inimitable, other than the expected observations that he had presided over the picnics, Rochester outings, and cricket matches, merely confirmed that he was working hard on Our Mutual Friend.

From our common friend Percy Fitzgerald I learned that Dickens had taken a relatively large party of friends and family up to Bulwer-Lytton’s estate, Knebworth, in order to celebrate the opening of the first homes for indigent artists and writers established by the Guild of Literature and Art. Dickens was in charge of the gathering and—according to Fitzgerald—“seemed to be his old, merry self.” The Inimitable had made an energetic and upbeat speech, at one point in conversation privately compared his too-pompous friend John Forster to Malvolio (in the company of several writers, knowing therefore that the comparison would get back to Forster), led a large group to drop in on a nearby tavern named Our Mutual Friend, and even took part in the open-air dancing before decamping back to London with his friends and family.

I was not invited.

It was also from my brother that I learned that Dickens was still suffering the after-effects of the Staplehurst disaster, including having to take the slow train whenever possible because rapid rail travel—and occasionally even travel by coach—would bring on the “shakes.” And Charles also informed me of the postscript that Dickens had added to Our Mutual Friend when he finished it in the first week of September—it was the first postscript that Dickens had ever added to one of his books—in which the author defended his rather unusual method of narration in the novel, then briefly described his experience at Staplehurst, expurgating the presence of the Ternans and Drood, of course, and ended with the mildly disturbing peroration—“I remember with devout thankfulness that I can never be much nearer parting company with my readers for ever, than I was then, until there shall be written against my life, the two words with which I have this day closed this book—THE END.”

It is perhaps not telling you too much, Dear Reader, since you do reside in our future, that Charles Dickens would not live to ever again pen those two words—THE END—at the close of another novel.

IT WAS ON A PLEASANT DAY in early September that Caroline came up to my study where I was working and presented me with the card of a gentleman waiting on the landing. The card read in its entirety—

INSPECTOR CHARLES FREDERICK FIELD

Private Enquiry Bureau

Caroline must have seen my reaction in my expression, for she said, “Is there anything wrong? Shall I tell him to go away?”

“No, no… show him in. Be sure to close the door behind you after you do show him in, my dear.”

A minute later and Field was in the study, bowing slightly, pumping my hand, and chatting away before I could say a word. As he spoke, I remembered an early description in one of Dickens’s essays in Household Words about the inspector—“… a middle-aged man of a portly presence, with a large, moist, knowing eye, a husky voice, and a habit of emphasising his conversation by the air of a corpulent fore-finger, which is constantly in juxta-position with his eyes or nose.”