Everything else whirling around me that late autumn of 1866 seemed too absurd to be of consequence: the ongoing nonsense of Drood or not-Drood; the endless chess game for power between Inspector Field, the Inimitable, and me; the sweet allurings and caterwaulings of the women in my life; my inability to find an entrance into the cave under the paper for my next book; my unspoken and definitely unsettled competition with Charles Dickens…

But all that was to change when, one Friday morning in late November, after a long, sweet night in King Lazaree’s tomb, I returned home with my suit still reeking of opium to find Dickens in the sitting room with Caroline. Her eyes were closed, her head was tilted back, and there was a look of something like uncommonly rare rapture on her face. Dickens was making mesmeric passes around and above her head, pausing only to touch her temples and to whisper to her.

Before I could speak, both heads turned in my direction, Caroline opened her eyes, and Dickens leapt to his feet and cried, “My dear Wilkie! Just the man I came to fetch. We must leave for the railway station this very minute. There is something astounding I have to show you in Rochester and someone there I want you to meet.”

Ineed to murder someone,” said Dickens.

I nodded but said nothing. The train to Rochester had passed Gad’s Hill already.

“I am quite sure I need to murder someone,” said Dickens. “It is the one thing missing from the readings. Every other emotion is included in the greater list of excerpts I have prepared for this upcoming tour. All but… murder.” He leaned on his stick and looked at me. “What do you think, my dear Wilkie? A modified and intensified version of Bill Sikes murdering Nancy perhaps?”

“Why not?” I said.

“Why not indeed,” chuckled Dickens, patting his jacket. “It is only a human life.”

He was garrulous in part because he had thrice imbibed of brandy during the ride. Each time the carriage shook or jolted, Dickens would either grasp the seat ahead of him with a death-grip or feel in the pocket of his coat for the small flask.

When I had confronted Dickens about the scene I had come upon of him mesmerising Caroline, he’d laughed and explained that my dearest had been upset and telling him of my pain from rheumatical gout, my increasing difficulty in getting to sleep, and what she saw as my growing dependency upon laudanum. Dickens had assured her that magnetic influence would whisk me off to slumber without any of the harmful side-effects of laudanum, and he had been in the process of teaching her the art when I’d entered.

“She was an adept pupil,” he said now as the train rumbled and jolted on towards Rochester, passing the marshes around which Dickens and I had walked more than a few times. “You must allow her to attempt the mesmeric influence tonight. I guarantee it will allow you to sleep without opiate dreams or morning fatigue.”

I made a noncommittal noise. In truth, I was close to falling asleep to the rocking of the railway carriage and the metronomic sound of its wheels on rails. It had been a long night in King Lazaree’s den and I could not say that I had actually slept. Luckily, although the November day was unusually pleasant, there had been a brisk wind and most of the telltale scent of the pipe had been removed from my clothing during our fast walk to the station.

“You say we’re meeting someone in Rochester?” I asked.

“Precisely,” said Dickens, clasping both hands on the brass head of his cane. “Two ladies. An old friend for me and a lady companion for you, my dear Wilkie. We are having a luncheon there in a splendid place. I understand that the service is exemplary.”

The splendid place with exemplary service, as it turned out, was the graveyard behind the huge old heap of grey stone that was Rochester Cathedral. The two ladies were Dickens’s not-very-secret love, Ellen Ternan, and Miss Ternan’s mother. Logic dictated that Mrs Ternan was to be my “lady companion” for this outing.

As I stood there amidst the headstones while nodding, bowing, and making small talk with the two women in the weak November afternoon sunlight, I seriously considered the possibility that Dickens had lost his mind.

But no, the answer to Charles Dickens’s behaviour was never that simple. I realised as the four of us strolled into the graveyard—Mrs Ternan and Ellen had explained that they were visiting Ellen’s uncle in Rochester and could only stay a short while—that this meeting made sense from Dickens’s tortured, twisted, self-exculpating way of looking at the world. His liaison with Ellen Ternan was something he was hiding from almost everyone in the world—my brother, Charles, had told me that Dickens had brought his daughters and Georgina somewhat further into the conspiracy after Mamie had stumbled across her father walking with Miss Ternan in London one Sunday, and Inspector Field had informed me that Ellen had visited Gad’s Hill Place on several occasions—but Dickens obviously felt that I was harmless to his intrigues. Whom would I tell? Not only did Dickens know from experience that I would keep the confidence, but he also knew that because of my own domestic arrangement (which had become even more complicated in the past week as Martha R— had returned to London for an extended visit), I was such a social outcast that I could never publicly look down on Dickens’s own arrangements, in print or through gossip.

Perhaps Mrs Ternan knew of my situation with Caroline G—, for the old lady seemed very cool during our picnic. The former actress (I understood that both she and Ellen were now giving elocution lessons from their new home in Slough that Dickens paid for) obviously had accumulated more pretensions of gentility since I had gotten to know the two women during and after the performances of The Frozen Deep. Mrs Ternan carried her acquired gentility with her like an ageing sloop with a hull heavy with barnacles.

The four of us walked slowly through the graveyard until Dickens had found a flat gravestone to his liking. This long marble block was surrounded on either side by lower flat stones. Dickens disappeared behind a nearby stone wall—one that was about five feet high and beyond which stood the rented carriage (with a liveried servant on the box)— we could see only the Inimitable’s head as he conferred with the driver and as both then repaired to the boot of the carriage. Then Dickens returned with four cushions, set them on the flat gravestones on either side of the longest one, and bade us to sit.

We did so. Ellen and Mrs Ternan were obviously disconcerted by this unusual—not to say ghoulish—introduction of cushioned comfort to such surroundings. A tall tree to the west of us drew the ink-scrabble shadows of its bare branches across us and our chosen gravestones. None of us could manage any small talk as Dickens hurried to the gate and trotted around behind the wall to confer with his servant again.

In a flash, Dickens was back, carrying one long chequered cloth— which he proceeded to drape across the longest gravestone, transforming it into a caricature of a domestic dinner table—and with another white napkin draped over his free arm in the manner of self-important waiters since Adam’s day. A few seconds later he was out of sight and—with little help from his man—had laid a row of plates atop the wall. I must say that it all felt very familiar—rather as if we were at a Parisian sidewalk dining establishment. Then Dickens bustled back into sight, napkin still in place, the very image of a first-class headwaiter, and one by one he served each of us, beginning, of course, with the ladies.

Out of a large hamper set atop the wall, Dickens magically produced fried sole and whiting with shrimp sauce, crackers and pâté, a brace of well-grilled birds which I first thought were squab but which I soon realised were delightful little pheasants (to which Waiter Dickens applied the sauce with a flourish), then ladles full of roast haunch of mutton with stewed onions and browned potatoes, all followed by pound puddings. Along with the food came a chilled white wine—which Dickens, now turned sommelier, uncorked and poured with much ado while awaiting our judgement with batting eyes and pursed lips—and then a large bottle of champagne still in its bucket of ice.