“Really?” I said. I had never fired the huge two-barrelled pistol that Detective Hatchery had given me. After uncocking the massive thing, I had carried it up and out of the levels of sewers and catacombs with me and—in our tremendous relief in finding Hatchery waiting for us despite the late hour and obvious sunshine outside the crypt—given it back to the hulking detective. I wished now that I had kept the weapon.
“Yes,” said Inspector Field. “Rumour has it that the nineteen-year-old domestic servant from Winterton is currently staying in a rented room on Bolsover Street—the elderly landlady lives there as well, although I am told that lodgers have a separate entrance to their rooms. I think I am not mistaken in saying that Bolsover Street is not so great a walk from where we stand now, in Melcombe Place near Dorset Square.”
“You are not mistaken,” I said. If voices could be said to have colours, mine was absolutely colourless.
“And I believe I am not mistaken if I say that Mrs Caroline G—, with whom you have lived in a condition very similar to man and wife, if I may say so, although without society’s and God’s blessings as such, for a period of almost ten years now, nor her daughter, Miss Harriet G—, whom you treat very honourably and generously, as if she were your own child, know of the existence of Miss Martha R—, formerly a hotel maid-servant in Yarmouth and currently a lodger on Bolsover Street, much less the role Miss R— currently plays in your life.”
“Yes,” I said. “I mean, no.”
“And I also believe I am not mistaken, Mr Collins, if I were to say that it would not be in your interest or in the interest of the two ladies who live under this roof with you were this knowledge to become known… to them or to anyone else.”
“You are not mistaken.”
“Good, good,” said Inspector Field. He picked up his top hat but made no move to leave. “I dislike being mistaken about things, Mr Collins.”
I nodded. My legs suddenly felt too weak to support me.
“Would you by any chance be planning to go see Mr Dickens soon, sir?” asked the detective, spinning his top hat while tapping its brim with his accursed forefinger. “And, in the course of your visit, have an opportunity to speak with him about his possible meeting with the personage called Drood in the Undertown tunnels some two months ago?”
“Yes,” I said and sat down.
“And do we have an understanding, sir, that such information as you elicit from Mr Dickens will be shared with me as soon as is humanly possible?”
I nodded again.
“Very good, sir. There will be a boy waiting on your street, Mr Collins. Just a street urchin—a crossing sweeper named Gooseberry—although you needn’t hunt for him, sir. He has been directed to watch for you. If you tap the lamp post at the corner with your stick or an umbrella, the lad will make himself known to you. Day or night, sir. He will wait as long as needs be. The local constable has agreed not to ‘move him along,’ as we men on the beat tend to say. Send any message you might have for me, verbal or written, along with Gooseberry and I will be in touch with you immediately. I will consider such information a huge favour, Mr Collins. Ask anyone in London if Inspector Charles Frederick Field ever forgets a favour and you will hear that he does not. Is all that clear, sir?”
“Yes.”
When I looked up, Inspector Field was gone. I could hear Caroline closing the door behind him downstairs and I could hear her footsteps on the main stairs.
Nothing of the inspector remained behind except for the pall of blue smoke near the ceiling in my study.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Gad’s Hill Place gave the strong impression of a gay, relaxed family retreat when I arrived there in mid-afternoon on the crisp early-autumn day after Inspector Field’s visit to my home. It was a Saturday, so the children and visitors were outside playing. I had to admit to myself that Gad’s Hill was the very model of a happy family’s beloved country home. Of course, Charles Dickens wanted Gad’s Hill to be the very model of a happy family’s beloved country home. In fact, Charles Dickens insisted that everyone within his circle do his or her part to maintain the image, fiction, and—I am certain that he hoped, despite the absence of the family’s mother, now banished, and despite tensions from within and without the family—the reality of a happy family’s beloved country home: nothing more complicated than a gay early-autumn retreat for the hardworking author and his worshipful, loving, and appreciative family and their friends.
At times, I confess, I felt like Candide to Charles Dickens’s Dr Pangloss.
Dickens’s daughter Kate was in the yard and approached me as I walked up the lane, sweating and mopping my neck and forehead with my handkerchief. It was, as I said, a crisp autumn day, but I had walked from the train station and was not used to the exercise. Also, in preparation for the meeting with Dickens, I had taken two glasses of my laudanum medicine much earlier in the day than I was used to doing, and while there were no negative effects from the medicine, I admit that the yard, the grass, the trees, the playing children, and Kate Macready Dickens Collins herself appeared to have a corona of golden glow around them.
“Hello, Wilkie,” cried Kate as she came closer and took my hand. “We have seen too little of you in recent days.”
“Hello, Katey. Is my brother here with you this weekend?”
“No, no. He was not feeling well and decided to stay at Clarence Terrace. I will rejoin him this evening.”
I nodded. “The Inimitable?”
“In his chalet, finishing up a bit of work on this year’s Christmas tale.”
“I didn’t know the chalet was ready for habitation,” I said.
“It is. All furnished as of last month. Father has been working there every day since then. He should be stopping any minute so that he can get his afternoon walk in. I’m sure he won’t mind if you interrupt him. It is a Saturday, after all. Shall I walk you through the tunnel?”
“That is a lovely idea,” I said.
We strolled across the lawn towards the road.
The chalet to which Kate was referring had been a gift the previous Christmas from the actor Charles Fechter. According to my brother, who was one of the guests who stayed from Christmas Eve 1864 until the fifth of January, it wasn’t the happiest of Christmases, not the least reason being that Dickens somehow had convinced himself that my brother, Charles, was dying rather than merely indisposed due to his frequent digestive problems. Of course, this may have been more wish than honest diagnosis on Dickens’s part; Katey’s marriage to Charles in 1860 had upset the author beyond the point of tears and quite to the point of distraction. Dickens felt that he had been abandoned in his time of need by an impatient daughter, and—indeed—that was precisely the case. Even my brother understood that Kate was not in love with him. She simply needed to escape Charles Dickens’s household after the upset brought about by her father’s banishment of their mother.
Kate—“Katey,” as so many of us called her—was not a great beauty, but of all the Dickens children, she was the only one who had inherited her father’s quickness, his wit, a more sardonic version of his sense of humour, his impatience with others, his speech patterns, and even many of his mannerisms. She had let my brother know, even as she was more or less proposing to him, that it would be a marriage of escape and convenience for her rather than one of love. Charles agreed.
So the cold, claustrophobically indoor Christmas of 1864 had been somewhat dour at the Dickens home at Gad’s Hill, certainly compared to the great family-and-guest festivals of previous years at Tavistock House, at least until Christmas Day morning, when Charles Fechter presented to the Inimitable… an entire Swiss chalet.