“Drood?” I said. “Agents? Do you believe that those three men were sent by Drood to kill me?” For some reason, this thought caused my bowels to go loose again. This Drood fantasy had all been a clever if somewhat tiring game up to this point.

“Them, sir? Oh, no, sir. I’m quite sure that those blackguards had nothing to do with this Drood the inspector is hunting for. Nothing at all, sir. You can be confident of that.”

“How?” I said as the hotel came into sight. “Why?”

Barris smiled thinly. “They were white, sir. Drood almost never uses white men in his service, although the occasional German or Irishman has been known. No, he would’ve sent Chinamen or Lascars or Hindoos or even some black just off a ship if he’d wanted you dead here or in Bristol, sir. Well, here is your and Mr Dickens’s hotel, Mr Collins. One of my colleagues is there and will look after your well-being once you’ve entered the lobby. I’ll stand here and watch until you reach the doors, sir.”

“Colleague?” I repeated. But Barris had stepped back into the shadows of an alley and now raised his hand to his forehead as if tipping an invisible bowler.

I turned and wobbled towards the lighted doorway of the hotel.

I HAD NO intention of attending Dickens’s performance after such a terrible experience, but after a warm bath and at least four cups of laudanum—I drained my flask and refilled it from the carefully wrapped bottle I’d brought in my luggage—I decided to dress approriately for the evening and go to the reading. This was, after all, the reason I had come to Birmingham.

I knew from Wills and Dolby that Dickens was all but unapproachable in the last hour or two before his nightly performance. He and his manager walked to the theatre and I took a cab over a bit later. I had no intention of walking alone, in the dark, on Birmingham streets again. (If Detective Barris or his colleagues were out there watching me, I did not see them as the hansom cab dropped me at the side door of the theatre.)

It was quarter to eight and the audience was just arriving. I stood at the back of the hall and watched as Dickens’s gas and lighting experts appeared, appraised the structure of dark pipes and unlit lamps from positions on both sides of the theatre, and then withdrew. A moment later the gas man appeared alone, made some adjustment to the overhead lamps hidden behind the maroon cloth—covered board, and withdrew again. Several minutes later the gas man appeared a third time and turned on the gas. The effect of the lighting against the dark background, dim at this point but clearly illuminating Dickens’s reading table, was quite striking. There were hundreds of people in their seats by this time, and all became quiet and strained to watch with a focused interest that was almost palpable.

George Dolby ambled onto the stage and peered up at the low lighting, down at the table, and out at the congregating audience with an air of self-importance. Dolby slightly repositioned the carafe of water on Dickens’s table, nodded as if satisfied by this important and essential adjustment, and slowly disappeared behind the high screen that extended from the curtained side of the stage to the central reading area. As I walked up the side of the platform to go backstage myself, Dolby coming in just behind me, I thought of Shakespeare’s most famous of stage instructions, from A Winter’s Tale—“Exit, pursued by a bear.”

In his dressing room, Dickens was in formal evening clothes. I was glad that I had decided to wear mine, although everyone who knew me also knew how little I cared for formal clothing or the proper appearance. But this night the white tie and tails seemed appropriate… perhaps even necessary.

“Ah, my dear Wilkie,” said the Inimitable as I entered. “It is so kind of you to attend the proceedings this night.” He appeared completely calm, but it was as if he had forgotten that I had spent the day travelling to Birmingham with him.

There was a bouquet of scarlet geraniums on his dressing table, and he now cut one for his buttonhole, adjusted it, and then cut another and set it in my lapel.

“Come,” he said as he adjusted his gold watch-chain and made a final check of buttons and beard and oiled curls in the mirror. “We shall peek out at the natives in the hope that they are becoming restless.”

We went out onto the stage itself, behind the shielding screen where Dolby was still hovering. Dickens showed me a small chink in the screen where—once a flap of fabric had been moved aside—we could look out at the now completely assembled and mildly fidgeting audience. He allowed me a glimpse. I felt anxious at that moment and wondered, for all my theatrical experience as an actor, if I should ever be able to carry out a reading without succumbing to nervousness, but Dickens himself showed no anxiety whatsoever. The gas man came up to him, Dickens nodded, leaned closer to the hole in the screen, and—as the gas man calmly walked out onto the stage to make the final adjustment to the lamps—the Inimitable whispered to me, “This is my favourite part of the evening, Wilkie.”

I leaned so close that I could smell the pomade on the author’s side curls as we both watched through the chink. Suddenly the lights went up dramatically and some two thousand faces were illuminated in reflected light as an “Aaahhhhh…” of expectation rose from the audience.

“You’d best take your seat, my friend,” whispered Dickens. “I wait another minute or so to whet their anticipation, then we shall begin.”

I had started to leave when he waved me back. Putting his mouth close to my ear, he whispered, “Keep your eye out for Drood. He might be anywhere.”

I could not tell if he was serious, so I nodded and moved away in the dark and then out, finding my way to the side stairs, then up against the flow of late arrivers to the rear of the hall, and then down towards the stage again to my reserved seat along the aisle about two-thirds of the way back. I had asked Wills to set aside this seat for me so that I might slip out to join Dickens in the dressing room more easily at the break about ninety minutes into the two-hour reading. The maroon carpet on the stage, simple table, and even the carafe of water—illuminated as they were by the bright lights—seemed pregnant with potential in that last minute before Dickens appeared.

Suddenly there erupted an explosion of applause as Dickens’s slim figure walked to his reading desk. The applause rose and continued at a deafening level, but Dickens ignored it completely, pouring some water for himself from the carafe and waiting silently for the ovation to abate much as one might wait for carriages to pass before crossing a street. Then, when silence finally descended, Dickens… did nothing. He merely stood there looking out at the audience, occasionally turning his head slightly so as to see everyone. It was as if he were meeting the gaze of every single man and woman there that night… and there now must have been more than two thousand of us crowded into the hall.

A few stragglers were finding their seats near the rear of the theatre and Dickens waited with that total and somehow unsettling calm until they did so. Then he seemed to fix them for a few seconds with his cool, serious, intense, yet mildly questioning gaze.

Then he began.

Several years after this night in Birmingham, Dolby was to say to me—“Watching the Chief read during those last years was not like attending a performance; it was more like being part of a spectacle. It was not at all a matter of being entertained; it was a case of being haunted.”

Haunted. Yes, perhaps. Or possessed, as the spirit rappers so in vogue in my day, Dear Reader, were supposedly possessed by their spirit guides to the Other Side. But it was not only Charles Dickens who seemed possessed during these readings; the entire audience joined him. As you will see, it was hard not to join him.