“Marvellous!” said Dickens. “You seem somewhat restless—perhaps even agitated—today, my dear Wilkie. Would you care to join me in a walk?”
“Can you walk, Charles?” I was eyeing his new cane, which was indeed a cane, of the long-handled type one saw being carried by lame old men, rather than the sort of dashing walking stick preferred by young men such as myself. (As you may remember, Dear Reader, I was 46 in this summer of 1870, while Dickens was 58 and showed every year and month and more of that advanced age. But then, several people had recently commented on the grey in my beard, my ever-increasing girth, my problems catching my breath, and a certain hunched-over quality my tired body had assumed of late, and some had been so impertinent as to suggest that I was looking much older than my years.)
“Yes, I can walk,” said Dickens, taking no offence at my comment. “And I try to every day. It is getting late, so I do not suggest a serious walk to Rochester or some other daunting destination, but we might manage a stroll through the fields.”
I nodded and Dickens led the way down, leaving—one presumes—the portfolio with his unfinished manuscript of The Mystery of Edwin Drood there on his chalet worktable where anyone might come in off the highway and filch it.
WE CROSSED THE ROAD towards his house but then went around the side yard, past the stables, through the rear yard where he had once consigned his correspondence to a bonfire, and out into the field where Sultan had died some autumns earlier. The grasses here that had been dead and brown then were green and high and stirring in the breeze today. A well-worn path led off towards the rolling hills and a scrim of trees that marked the path of a broad stream that ran towards the river that ran to the sea.
Neither of us was running this day, but if Dickens’s walking pace had been diminished, I could not discern it. I was huffing and puffing to keep up.
“Frank Beard tells me that you’ve had to add morphine to your pharmacopoeia in order to sleep,” said Dickens, the cane in his left hand (he had always carried his stick in his right hand before) quickly rising and falling. “And that, although you’ve told him you discontinued the practice, a syringe he lent you some time ago has gone missing.”
“Beard is a dear man,” I said, “who often lacks discretion. He was keeping the world informed as to your pulse rate during your final reading tour, Charles.”
My walking partner had nothing to say to that.
Finally I added, “The daughter of my servants, George and Besse—still servants of mine for the time-being at least—had been pilfering things. I had to send her away.”
“Little Agnes?” cried Dickens. “Stealing? Incredible!”
We crossed the brow of the first low hill so that Gad’s Hill Place, the highway, and its attending line of trees all fell behind. The path wound parallel to the tree line here for a way and then crossed a little bridge.
“Do you mind if we stop for a moment, Charles?”
“Not in the least, my dear Wilkie. Not in the least!”
I leaned on the little arched bridge’s railing and took three sips from my silver flask. “An uncomfortably warm day, today, is it not?”
“You think so? I find it close to perfect.”
We headed off again, but Dickens was either tiring or walking slowly for my benefit.
“How is your health, Charles? One hears so many things. As with our dear Frank Beard’s ominous rumblings, one doesn’t know what is true. Are you recovered from your tours?”
“I feel much better these days,” said Dickens. “At least some days I do. Yesterday I told a friend that I was certain I should be living and working deep into my eighties. And I felt as if this were true. Other days… well, you know about the hard days, my friend. Other days, one does what one must to honour commitments and to honour the work itself.”
“And how is Edwin Drood coming along?” I asked.
Dickens glanced at me before replying. With the terrible exception of Dickens’s savaging of The Moonstone, we rarely, either one of us, offered to discuss work in progress with the other. The ferruled base of his cane swung with a sweet, summery swish-swish against the tall grass to either side of the path.
“Drood is coming along slowly but well, I think,” he said at last. “It is a much more complicated book, in terms of plot and twists and revelations, than most I have attempted in the past, my dear Wilkie. But you know that! You are the master of the mystery form! I should have submitted all my novice’s problems to you for a Virgil’s guidance in the ways of mystery and suspense long before this! How goes your Man and Wife?”
“I look to finish it in the next two or three days.”
“Marvellous!” cried Dickens once again. We were out of sight of the brook now, but its soft sounds followed us as we passed through more trees and then came out into another open field. The path continued winding towards the distant sea.
“When I do finish it, I wonder if you would do me a great favour, Charles.”
“If it is within my poor and failing powers, I shall certainly attempt to do so.”
“I believe it is within our powers to solve two mysteries on the same night… if, that is, you’re willing to go on a secret outing with me on Wednesday or Thursday night.”
“A secret outing?” laughed Dickens.
“The mysteries would have a greater chance of being solved if neither you nor I told anyone—no one at all—that we were going anywhere that evening.”
“Now that does sound mysterious,” said Dickens as we came to the brow of a hill. There were large barrow stones—Druid stones, the children and farmers called them, although they were nothing of the sort—scattered and heaped there. “How could keeping our outing a secret improve the chances at success of that outing?”
“I promise that if you join me when I come to fetch you a half hour or so after sunset on Wednesday or Thursday night, odds are great that you will discover the answer to that question, Charles.”
“Very well, then,” said Dickens. “Wednesday or Thursday night, you say? Thursday is the ninth of June. I may have a commitment for that evening. Would Wednesday suit you?”
“Perfectly,” I said.
“Very good, then,” said Dickens. “Now I have something that I have been waiting to discuss with you, my dear Wilkie. Shall we find a relatively comfortable perch on one of these great fallen stones? It should only take a few moments, but it is the reason I asked you here today and it truly is of some importance.”
Charles Dickens stop and sit down during a walk? I thought. I never believed the day would come. But since I was soaked through with perspiration from our stroll and wheezing like a lung-shot warhorse, I welcomed it.
“I am your obedient servant, sir,” I said and gestured for him to lead on and choose our fallen stone.
FIRST OF ALL, Wilkie, I owe you a deep and sincere apology. Several apologies, actually, but one above all for a certain treatment of you that is so unfair and so wrong that I truly do not know where to begin.”
“Not at all, Charles. I cannot imagine anything that…”
Dickens stopped me with a raised palm. From where we sat on the high barrow stone, Kent stretched out and rolled away in all directions. I could see the haze of London in the pure light and the Channel to our left. The tower of Rochester Cathedral was like a grey tent spike in the distance.