It seemed that Dickens was still recovering from the discovery— this had been in the autumn, while I was briefly in Rome—that his personal servant and valet of the past twenty-four years, a dour and dyspeptic (I thought) but discreet shade of a man named John Thompson, had been regularly stealing from his master. Eight sovereigns had disappeared from these very offices at Wellington Street North, and when the theft was discovered, the sovereigns had quickly reappeared. But too late for Thompson, whose years of petty thefts from his employer had now come to light. Dickens sacked the man, of course, but could not bear to give the thief a “bad recommendation.” He sent Thompson off to future employment with a vague but not clearly negative letter. According to Percy Fitzgerald, Dickens had been almost distraught at this betrayal, although all the Inimitable had said to Percy about his emotions was “I have had to walk more than usual before I could walk myself into composure again.”

That composure seemed more and more rare if recent reports from Dolby to Wills were to be believed. Dickens was suffering more than ever from “nervous exhaustion,” brought on, no doubt, by the rail travel—his reaction to the Staplehurst accident seemed to grow more, rather than less, pronounced as the months went by—and early in the tour, on only his second night in Liverpool, Dickens became so faint by the end of the first part of his performance that he had to be physically helped to a sofa backstage, where he lay prostrate until it was time for him to put on a fresh boutonnière and go out for the final part of the strenuous reading.

During his reading in Wolverhampton (the first reports had this incident occurring in Birmingham proper rather than its smaller neighbour, so I had first pictured the old theatre there as I had seen it the night the illusion of Drood had threatened me), a wire holding one of the reflectors above Dickens’s head began to burn red-hot. The heavy bulb of this reflector projected out over the stalls and was suspended by a single, strong copper wire, but a new gas man only recently having joined the tour had mistakenly placed an open gas-jet beneath this supporting wire.

Dolby had seen the wire turning first red and then white and, shifting from foot to foot in his anxiety, had stage-whispered out to the reading Dickens, “How long shall you be?” while gesturing wildly at the heated wire. Dickens must have appreciated the danger: when the wire burned through, the heavy reflector would come crashing down to the stage, but not before careering through the maroon-cloth stalls and screens erected around the Inimitable. The result would be instant conflagration. The flammable screens themselves ran almost to the ancient cloth curtains above. Once the overheated wire parted, there was little doubt that the stage—and almost certainly the theatre—would go up in flames within minutes, if not seconds.

Dickens, still reading without missing a word or gesture, calmly showed Dolby two fingers behind his back.

The distraught stage manager did not know what this meant. Was the Chief telling him that he would be finished in two minutes or that the wire would be parting in two seconds? Dolby and Barton, the gas man, could do nothing but shuttle back and forth offstage, bringing sand and buckets of water and preparing for the worst.

Dickens, it turned out, had seen the wire heating in the middle of his reading and had coolly calculated how long it would take for the copper to burn through. Working from those quick mental calculations, the Inimitable had improvised instant alterations to the rest of his reading—editing and conflating as he went—and reached the end only seconds before the wire would have melted and parted. (Dickens had figured when Dolby signalled him that he had two minutes left before the reflector would have come crashing down.) The curtain closed, Barton ran out and turned off the misplaced flame, and Dolby—according to his later testimony to Wills—came close to fainting as Dickens patted him on his wide back, whispered, “There was never any real danger,” and calmly went out to take his curtain call.

All these breathless reports from Dickens’s tour were of little interest to me. None mentioned Drood, and I had my own literary work to do (more important, in my humble opinion, than reading one’s old work to audiences of bumpkins in the provinces).

As I’ve mentioned, I settled into doing my preliminary reading and researching at my club, the Athenaeum. The club was most helpful—moving my favourite wing chair to a place by the window where the weak winter and spring light would be at its best, providing a small table for my materials, and appointing several of the servants to seek out the volumes I needed from the club’s expansive libraries. I also appropriated Athenaeum stationery for my notes and kept these in a series of large white letter envelopes.

My first job was to gather information, and here my years as a journalist served me well (even as that profession had equally served Dickens, although I might remind you, Dear Reader, that I had been a true journalist and Dickens had written primarily as a mere court reporter).

For weeks I copied out pertinent entries on India, on various Hindoo cults, and on gems from Encyclopaedia Britannica, the eighth edition, copyright 1855. I also found a new book by a certain C. W. King, The Natural History of Gems, published in 1865, very helpful. For my specific India backgrounds that I thought might open The Serpent’s Eye (or possibly The Eye of the Serpent), I consulted J. Talboys Wheeler’s newly published The History of India from the Earliest Ages and both 1832 volumes of Theodore Hook’s The Life of General Sir David Baird. The diligent servants at the club also sought out and provided relevant articles in recent issues of Notes and Queries.

And thus the early outlines of my magnum opus began to take shape.

I had known for some time that the plot would revolve around the mysterious disappearance, in England, of a beautiful but cursed diamond brought from India—a diamond sacred to some Hindoo thuggee sort of cult—and that the mystery would unfold in a series of accounts from various viewpoints (rather as Dickens had done in Bleak House, but, more pertinently, as I had done to better effect in The Woman in White). Because of my preoccupation—“distraction” might be the better word—with the whole Drood issue at this time, the story would hinge upon such themes as Eastern mysticism, mesmerism, the power of mesmeric suggestion, and opium addiction. The solution to the theft (as I knew from an early point in my envisioning of the tale) would be so shocking, so unexpected, so clever, and so unprecedented in the nascent field of detection fiction that it would astonish all English and American readers, including such supposed practitioners of such sensationalist serial authorship as Charles Dickens himself.

As is true of all writers of Dickens’s and my level of accomplishment, I was never free to pursue just one writing project. (Dickens, while he prepared for and then travelled on tour, had written his usual Christmas novella, was editing All the Year Round, was completing elaborate forewords for the special edition of his works, and was generating ideas for novels even while writing actual stories such as his strange “George Silverman’s Explanations,” kindled, he told me later, by Dolby’s and his coming across the ruins of Hoghton Towers between Preston and Blackburn. That ruined old manse happened to crystallise all the disparate, floating fragments of ideas Dickens had been playing with for some time, but rather than support a novel—which he needed in order to offer something for serialisation in All the Year Round—it provoked this strange story of a neglected childhood so very similar to Dickens’s own. [Or at least to what he thought of as his childhood of neglect and want.]