“Charles, are you asking me whether I think Drood was telling you the truth with this story or whether you are telling me the truth?”

“Either,” said Dickens. “Both.” His intense gaze never left my face.

“I have no idea whether this Drood spoke a word of truth,” I said. “But I trust that you are telling me the truth in your narration of what he said.”

I was lying, Dear Reader. The story was too absurd either for me to accept it or to believe that Dickens had accepted it. I remembered that Dickens had once told me that 1001 Arabian Nights had been his favourite book when he was a child. I wondered now if the accident at Staplehurst had released some childhood strain in his character.

Dickens nodded as if I had answered the schoolmaster correctly. “I don’t need to remind you, my dear old friend, that all of this information is told in confidence.”

“Of course not.”

He smiled almost boyishly. “Even if our Inspector Field friend threatens to tell the world about the Landlady and the Butler?”

I waved that away. “You did not tell the heart of Drood’s story,” I said.

“I did not?”

“No,” I said flatly. “You did not. Why was he there at Staplehurst? Where had he come from? What was he doing with the injured and dying?… I believe that you once said it looked as if the Drood creature were stealing the souls of the dying there. And what on earth is he doing in a cave beneath the catacombs beyond a river in a tunnel?”

“Rather than continue the narration…” said Dickens even as he began walking again, “… since we are rather close to home, I shall just answer your questions, my dear Wilkie. But first of all, Hatchery was correct in his detective work and assumptions about Drood’s presence at Staplehurst. The man was in a coffin in the baggage car.”

“Good God!” I said. “Why?”

“For precisely the reasons we surmised, Wilkie. Drood has enemies in London and England who attempt to locate and harm him. Our Inspector Field is one of those enemies. Nor is Drood either a citizen of our nation or a welcome foreign visitor. In fact, in the eyes and files of all official sources, he has been dead for more than twenty years. So he was returning in a coffin from a trip to France… a trip in which he met others of his religion and expertise in the Magnetic Arts.”

“Extraordinary,” I said. “But what about his odd behaviour at the accident site, lurking and leaning over victims who were dead when you visited them next? ‘Stealing souls,’ you said.”

Dickens smiled and beheaded a weed, swinging his blackthorn stick like a broadsword. “It shows how mistaken even the trained and intelligent observer can be when deprived of all context, my dear Wilkie. Drood was not stealing the souls of those poor dying wretches. On the contrary, he was mesmerising them to ease the pain of their passage and saying the words of the ancient Egyptian funeral ceremony to help them on their journey, using some of the very words I quoted to you a few minutes ago. Rather as if he were a Catholic giving the Last Rites to the dying. Only with mesmeric Sleep Temple rites, he was certain he really was sending their souls on to their judgement by whatever gods they worshipped.”

“Extraordinary,” I said again.

“And as for his history here in England and the reasons for his presence in Undertown,” continued Dickens, “Drood’s arrival in England and his altercation with a sailor, knife and all, are almost exactly as old Opium Sal related it. Except in reverse. Drood was sent to England more than twenty years ago to look up two cousins of his from Egypt—twins, a young man and young woman who had mastered another ancient Egyptian skill, the ability to read each other’s minds—and Drood arrived with thousands of pounds in English cash and more wealth in the form of gold in his luggage.

“He was robbed the second night he was here. Robbed on the docks by British sailors and slashed viciously with a blade—it is there that he lost his eyelids, ears, nose, and part of his tongue and fingers—and thrown into the Thames like the corpse he almost was. It was some of the residents of Undertown who found him floating in the river and brought him below to die. But Drood did not die, Wilkie. Or if he did, he resurrected himself. Even as he was being robbed and slashed and beaten and stabbed by the unnamed English thugs in the night, Drood had deeply mesmerised himself, balancing his soul—or at least his mental being—between life and death. The scavengers from Undertown did find a lifeless body, but his Magnetic-induced slumber was broken by the sound of concerned human voices, just as he had commanded himself under mesmeric self-control. Drood lived again. To repay those wretched souls who had saved him, Drood built his library—cum—Temple of Sleep in their underground warren. There, to this day, he heals those he can heal, helps those he can help through his ancient rites, and eases the pain and passing of those he cannot save.”

“You make him sound like a saint,” I said.

“In some ways, I believe he is.”

“Why did he not just go home to Egypt?” I asked.

“Oh, he does, Wilkie. He does. From time to time. To visit his students and colleagues there. To help with certain ancient ceremonies.”

“But he continues to return to England? After all these years?”

“He still has not found his cousins,” said Dickens. “And yes, he feels England is as much his home now as Egypt ever was. After all, he is half English.”

“Even after killing the goat that bore his English name?” I said.

Dickens did not answer.

I said, “Inspector Field tells me that your Mr Drood—healer, master of Magnetic science, Christ figure, and secret mystic—has killed more than three hundred people in the past twenty years.”

I waited for the laughter.

Dickens did not change expression. He was still studying me. He said, “Do you believe that the man I spoke to has killed three hundred people, Wilkie?”

I held his gaze and returned its noncommital blankness. “Perhaps he mesmerises his minions and sends them out to do the dirty work, Charles.”

Now he did smile. “I am certain that you are aware, my dear friend, through the teachings of Professor John Elliotson if not through my own occasional writings on the topic, that a subject under the influence of mesmeric slumber or mesmeric trance can do nothing that would violate his or her morals or principles if that subject were fully conscious.”

“Then perhaps Drood mesmerised killers and cutthroats to go out and do the killings that Inspector Field described,” I said.

“If they were already killers and cutthroats, my dear Wilkie,” Dickens said softly, “he would not have had to mesmerise them, would he? He simply could have paid them in gold.”

“Perhaps he did,” I said. The absurdity of our conversation had reached some point where it was now unsustainable. I looked around at the grassy field shimmering in the afternoon autumn light. I could actually see Dickens’s chalet and the mansard roof of his Gad’s Hill Place home through the trees.

I put my hand on the Inimitable’s shoulder before he could begin walking again. “Is increasing your knowledge and skill in mesmerism the reason you disappear into London at least one night a week?” I asked.

“Ah, so there is a spy in my family circle. One with frequent digestion problems, might I guess?”

“No, it is not my brother, Charles,” I said a trifle sharply. “Charles Collins is a man who keeps confidences and is fiercely loyal to you, Dickens. And he will someday be the father of your grandchildren. You should hold him in higher esteem.”

Something flickered across the writer’s face then. It was not quite a shadow—perhaps an instant of revulsion, although whether it was at the thought of my brother married to his daughter (a union of which he never approved) or another reminder of Dickens himself being old enough to be a grandfather, I will never know.