Dickens was having such fun playing waiter and wine steward that he had little time to eat. By the time he had produced the pound puddings—offering a rich sauce, which the ladies declined but which I accepted at once—his face was flushed and he was perspiring despite the November afternoon’s slow cooling into evening.

At rare times in one’s life, Dear Reader, even the most gentle person is given a tool—a weapon, actually—without wishing it, sometimes having it thrust into his hand, by which he can bring down an entire edifice with a single sentence. Such was my situation during our strange repast in the Rochester graveyard, for I had recognised much of the luncheon’s menu from a book popular some fifteen years earlier. The book was titled What Shall We Have for Dinner? and the recipes therein had been accumulated, according to the publishers, by a certain pseudonymous Lady Maria Clutterbuck.

Oh, how the Ternan ladies, miss and missus, now gay from the wine and champagne, would have sobered instantly to learn that their delightful (if ghoulish) graveyard luncheon menu had been planned by none other than Catherine Dickens, the rejected and exiled wife. Although Catherine had been completely abandoned (my brother, Charley, told me that she had written Dickens an imploring letter about their son only a month earlier, requesting a conversation in person about Plorn’s problems, to which Dickens refused even to pen a reply, instructing Georgina to send a cold, curt note in his stead), but quite obviously her incarnation as Lady Clutterbuck (Catherine had not yet become so heavy when she’d collected and published the menus in 1851) was still very welcome at Gad’s Hill. Or at least her recipes were.

During the meal and the inconsequential conversation, I studied Ellen Ternan even as she ignored me. It had been eight years since I had spent any time in her presence. The years had not enhanced her beauty. She had been youthfully attractive as an eighteen-year-old ingenue but now qualified only as “handsome.” She was the kind of woman with sad, soulful eyes (which did little for me, since such sad eyes usually hinted at a poetic character given to melancholy and a rigidly defended virginity), descending brows, a long nose, and a wide, thin-lipped mouth. (I prefer just the opposite in my young women—tiny noses and full lips, the latter preferably curved upward in an inviting smile.) Ellen had a strong chin, but where that edifice had suggested a certain perky strength in her youth, it now implied only the prideful stubbornness of a woman beyond her mid-twenties who had not yet married. Her hair was attractive, not terribly long and receding in artfully sculpted waves from a high, clear forehead, but the hairdo exposed ears that were much too large for my taste. Her earrings, which hung down like three bullseye lanterns, hinted of the underlying vulgarity of her former profession. Her carefully elocuted but somehow terminally empty sentences suggested stilted conversation arising from a simple lack of education. Her lovely vowels and precise, theatrically honed cadences could not conceal an underlying ignorance that should have instantly disqualified this ageing ingenue from being the consort of England’s most honoured writer. Nor did I perceive from her the slightest hint of a hidden passionate nature that could have made up for her obvious shortcomings… and my Wilkie-antennae were highly sensitive to any such subtle sub-rosa erotic transmissions from even the most proper and upstanding ladies.

Ellen Ternan was simply a bore. She was as dull as the proverbial ditch water and soon would be a matronly bore to boot.

We finished dining as the shadows of the afternoon were falling across us and as the chill from our gravestone chairs had begun to creep up through the cushions into our posterior regions. Tired of playing waiter, Dickens wolfed the last of his pudding, gulped the last of his champagne, and summoned his servant to tidy up. Plates, glasses, utensils, serving dishes, and finally the table cloth, napkins, and cushions all disappeared into hampers and then into the back of the carriage in a blur of liveried efficiency. Only crumbs remained as evidence of our graveyard feast.

We walked the Ternans to the carriage.

“Thank you for a lovely—if unusual—afternoon,” said Ellen Ternan, taking Dickens’s cold hand in her gloved one. “It was a great pleasure seeing you again, Mr Collins,” she said to me, her cool tone and curt nod belying the warm words. Mrs Ternan clucked similar sentiments while exerting even less effort to make them sound convincing. Then the servant was up on the box again, the whip was out, and the carriage clattered away into Rochester, presumably towards Ellen Ternan’s waiting uncle.

I could tell by the concupiscent gleam in Charles Dickens’s eyes that he knew he would be seeing Ellen that very evening, most probably in the privacy of his or her secret house in Slough.

“Well, my dear Wilkie,” he said in a tone of pure satisfaction, tugging his gloves back on, “what did you think of our luncheon?”

“I thought it delightful, in a terrifically morbid way,” I said.

“Mere prelude, my friend,” chuckled Dickens. “Mere prelude. Fortifying ourselves for the serious purpose of our day… or evening. Ah, here’s our man!”

THE MAN APPROACHING US there in the gathering gloom with his shapeless hat in hand was ragged, short, dirty, and drunk. He was clothed head to foot in layers of grimy grey flannel that seemed to have been liberally dusted with flakes of stone and a frosting of lime. At his feet he had dropped a heavy bundle tied in a grimy canvas cloth. I could smell the rum fumes flowing from him—from his pores, from his clothes, most probably from his very bones. At the same time I was sniffing him, he seemed to be sniffing me; perhaps he could smell the opium on me through his own reek. We stood and stared and sniffed each other like two dogs in an alley.

“Wilkie,” said Dickens, “I would like to introduce Mr Dradles, who goes by just Dradles, although I have heard folks in Rochester say that his first name is Granite, which I have to assume is a nickname. Dradles is a stonemason—chiefly in a gravestone, tomb, and monument way—but he is also hired by the Cathedral for rough repairs and thus is the holder of all the keys for the Cathedral tower, crypt, side doors, and other such obvious and forgotten entrances. Mr Dradles, it is my honour to introduce you in turn to Mr Wilkie Collins.”

The stooped, bewhiskered figure in the rough flannel and chipped horn buttons grunted something that might have been a greeting. I bowed and offered a more polite salutation in return.

“Dradles,” I then said brightly. “What a marvellous name! Is it real or a by-product of your profession in some way?”

“Dradles is Dradles’s name,” growled the little man. “And Dradles wonders—is Collins your real name or made up some way? And Dradles don’t remember Wilkie as being no Christian name.”

I blinked and straightened, gripping my walking stick more tightly in pure manly reflex to this hint of an insult. “I am named after Sir David Wilkie, the famous Scottish painter,” I said stiffly.

“If you say so, gov’ner,” grunted Dradles. “Although I never heard of a Scotsman who could paint a stables right, much less a church or house.”

“Wilkie’s given first name is actually William,” said Dickens. He was smiling as if amused.

“Billy Collins,” grunted Dradles. “Dradles knew a Billy Collins when Dradles was a lad. A troublesome Irish boy with no more brains nor common sense than a sheep.”

I gripped my stick harder and looked at Dickens, sending the clear message—Must I stay here and suffer this from the local village drunkard?

Before Dickens—who was still smiling—could answer, we were both distracted by a missile that flew between us, barely missing Dickens’s shoulder and my ear, and which then bounced off the russet-coloured cap that Dradles was holding in his filthy right hand. A second small stone zipped by my left shoulder and hit the stonemason squarely in the chest.