“Your driver appears to be in an unholy hurry,” says Dickens.
“He is foreign,” I explain.
Some time later, Dickens leans across me and looks out the left window at the approaching tower-spire of Rochester Cathedral rising like a black spike against the dimming sky. “Ah,” he says, but I believe I detect more confirmation than surprise in the syllable.
The coach grinds and squeals to a stop at the entrance to the churchyard and we climb out—me carrying a small unlighted lantern and both of us moving somewhat stiffly due to the jouncing and bouncing of the wild ride here—and then the driver applies his whip again and the black coach rumbles away into the deepening twilight.
“You don’t wish the coach to wait for us?” Dickens enquires.
“The driver will come back for me when it is time,” I say.
If he notices my use of “for me” rather than “for us,” he does not comment on it. We move into the graveyard. The church and this old part of the city and the cemetery are empty and silent. The tide has gone out and we can smell the decaying reek of the mudflats, but from somewhere beyond that there comes the fresh salt scent of the sea and the sound of slow breakers. The only illumination is from a waning crescent moon.
Dickens says softly, “What now, Wilkie?”
I pull the pistol from my jacket—fumbling a moment to get the protruding hammer and sight free of the pocket lining—and aim it at him.
“Ah,” he says again, and again there is no audible tone of surprise. To my ear, through the pounding of my pulse, the syllable sounds merely sad, perhaps even relieved.
We stand there like that for a moment, an odd and awkward tableau. The wind from the sea rustles the boughs of a pine tree close to where the graveyard wall hides us from the street. The hem and loose collars of Dickens’s long summer jacket swirl around him like black pennants. He raises a hand to hold on to the brim of his soft cap.
“It’s the lime pit, then?” asks Dickens.
“Yes.” I have to try twice before the word comes out properly. My mouth is very dry. I am dying for a drink from my laudanum flask, but I do not want to divert attention from Dickens for an instant.
I gesture with the pistol and Dickens begins walking towards the blackness that is the rear of the graveyard where the open pit waits. I follow several feet behind, taking care not to get too close in case the Inimitable were to make some lunge for the gun.
Suddenly he stops and I do as well, taking another two paces away from him and raising and aiming the pistol.
“My dear Wilkie, may I make one request?” His voice is so soft that the words are all but lost to me under the hiss of the wind in the few trees and many marsh grasses.
“It hardly seems the time for requests, Charles.”
“Perhaps,” says Dickens, and I can see him smiling in the weak moonlight. I do not like him looking at me this way. I had hoped that he would keep his back turned until we reached the lime pit and the deed was done. “But I still have one,” he continues softly. Maddeningly, I cannot detect fear in his voice, which is far steadier than mine has been. “But only one.”
“What?”
“It may sound odd, Wilkie, but for some years now, I have had the strong premonition that I would die on the anniversary of the Staplehurst accident. May I reach in my waistcoat and look at my watch?”
To what purpose? I think dizzily. To prepare for the evening, I had drunk almost twice my usual allotment of laudanum and injected myself twice with the morphine, and now I feel the effects of these medicines not so much as reinforcment to my resolve but as a giddiness and odd light-headedness. “Yes, look, but quickly,” I manage to say.
Dickens calmly takes out his watch, peers at it in the moonlight, and winds it slowly and maddeningly before setting it back. “It is some minutes after ten,” he says. “The summer twilight lasts so late this time of year and we left late. It shan’t be long until midnight. I cannot explain why—since your goal is obviously for no one to know the means or location of my death or interment—but it would mean something to me if I were allowed to fulfil my various premonitions and leave this world on nine June rather than eight June.”
“You are hoping that someone comes along or that something arises to allow your escape,” I say in my new and shaky voice.
Dickens merely shrugs. “Should someone enter the graveyard, you can still shoot me and make your escape through the sea grasses and back to your carriage waiting nearby.”
“They would find your body,” I say in flat tones. “And you would be buried in Westminster Abbey.”
Dickens laughs then. It is that loud, unselfconscious, carefree, and infectious laugh that I have heard from him so many times before. “Is that what this is about, my dear Wilkie? Westminster Abbey? Does it calm your fears any that I have already stipulated in my will that I demand a simple, small funeral? No ceremonies at Westminster Abbey or anywhere else. I make clear that I want no more than three coaches in the final funeral procession and no more people at the burial than those three small coaches can carry.”
My pounding pulse—and now pounding headache—seem to be trying to synchronise with the distant pounding of surf on a sandbar somewhere to the east, but the irregular rhythm of the wind denies the syncopation.
I say, “There will be no funeral procession.”
“Obviously not,” says Dickens and infuriates me with another small smile. “All the more reason to grant me this one, last kindness before we part company forever.”
“To what purpose?” I ask at long last.
“You spoke of each of us solving a mystery tonight. Presumably my mystery to be solved is what—if anything—there might be after the instant of one’s death. But what is yours, Wilkie? What mystery did you wish to have solved this beautiful evening?”
I say nothing.
“Let me venture a guess,” says Dickens. “You would like to know how The Mystery of Edwin Drood was to have ended. And perhaps even learn how my Drood connects to your Drood.”
“Yes.”
He looks at his watch again. “It is only ninety minutes before midnight. I brought a flask of brandy—at your suggestion (although Frank Beard would be horrified to know this)—and I am sure you brought some refreshment for yourself. Why don’t we find a comfortable seat somewhere in this place and have one last conversation before the bells in that tower toll my appointed day?”
“You think that I will change my mind,” I say with a malicious smile.
“In truth, my dear Wilkie, I do not for a second believe that you will. Nor am I sure that I would want you to. I am very… weary. But I am not averse to a final conversation and taste of brandy in the night.”
With that Dickens turns on his heel and looks amidst the surrounding stones for some place to sit. My choice is either to follow his lead or shoot him there and drag his corpse the many yards to the waiting lime pit. I had hoped to avoid this last indignity for both of us. And, in truth, I do not mind the idea of sitting for a few minutes until this temporary light-headedness passes.
THE TWO FLAT GRAVESTONES he chooses for our chairs, separated by almost four feet of a longer, wider headstone that might be a low table, remind me of the day in this very churchyard when Dickens played waiter to Ellen Ternan, her mother, and me.
After receiving permission, Dickens removes his brandy flask from his jacket pocket and sets it on the table-stone in front of him and I do the same with my silver flask. I realise that I should have patted the Inimitable’s pockets when I first aimed my pistol at him. I know that Dickens keeps his own pistol in a drawer at Gad’s Hill Place, as well as the shotgun with which he murdered Sultan. Dickens’s apparent lack of surprise at the purpose of our “mystery outing” makes me think that he might have secreted a weapon on his person before coming out to the coach… and this might explain his otherwise inexplicable insouciance.