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eyes focused elsewhere. Then he turned, walked to the edge of the broken bridge, jumped with the easy agility of the distracted to the step of the dangling first-class carriage, crawled through a shattered window as easily as if it were a doorway, and clambered down through rows of seats that had become rungs on the now-vertical wall of the coach floor. The entire carriage, still dangling precariously high above the valley floor and connected by only one coupling to the second-class carriage on the rails above, swayed slightly like a vibrating pendulum in a broken hallway clock.
    Earlier, even before rescuing Ellen and Mrs Ternan, he had carried out his leather bag carrying most of the manuscript of the sixteenth number of
Our Mutual Friend,
which he had been working on in France, but now he had remembered that the last two chapters were in his overcoat, which still lay folded in the overhead above their former seats. Standing on the backs of this last row of seats in the swaying, creaking coach, the river thirty feet below reflecting darts of dancing light through the shattered windows, he retrieved the overcoat, pulled the manuscript out to make sure that all the pages were there—it had been slightly soiled but was otherwise intact—and then, still balancing on the seats, he tucked the papers back into his overcoat.
    Dickens then happened to look straight down, down through the shattered glass of the door at the end of the carriage. Far below, directly beneath the train car, some trick of the light making him appear to be standing
on
the river rather than
in
it, apparently totally unconcerned by so many tons of wood and iron swaying above him, the person who called himself Drood was tilting his head far back to stare straight up at Dickens. The man’s pale eyes in their sunken sockets seemed to have no eyelids.
    The figure’s lips parted, its mouth opened and moved, the fleshy tongue flickered out from behind and between the tiny teeth, and hissing sounds emerged, but Dickens could make out no distinct words over the metallic groaning of the dangling carriage and the continuous cries of the injured in the valley below. “Unintelligible,” murmured Dickens. “Unintelligible.”
    The first-class carriage suddenly swayed and sagged as if preparing to drop. Dickens casually caught the overhead with one hand to keep his balance. When the swaying ceased and he looked down again, Drood was gone. The writer tossed the coat with his manuscript in it over his shoulder and clambered up and out into the light.

CHAPTER TWO
    I was out of town on the day of my friend’s disaster at Staplehurst, so it was a full three days after the accident that I received a message from my younger brother, Charles, who had married Dickens’s oldest daughter, Kate, telling me of the novelist’s brush with death. I immediately hurried down to Gad’s Hill Place.
    I would presume, my Dear Reader who resides in my impossibly distant and posthumous future, that you remember Gad’s Hill from Shakespeare’s
Henry IV.
You do remember Shakespeare even if all the rest of us scribblers have been lost to the fogs of history, do you not? Gad’s Hill is where Falstaff plans a robbery but is foiled by Prince Hal and a friend who disguise themselves as robbers wishing to rob the robber; after the fat Sir John flees in terror, his retelling of the story has Hal and his accomplice become four brigands, then eight, then sixteen, and so forth. There is a Falstaff Inn very close to Dickens’s home, and I believe that the author enjoyed his home’s connection to Shakespeare as much as he enjoyed the ale that the inn served him at the end of his long walks.
    As I approached the home in a carriage, I was reminded that Gad’s Hill Place had yet another claim on Charles Dickens’s emotions, one that long predated his purchase of the place a decade earlier in 1855. Gad’s Hill was in Chatham, a village that blended into the cathedral town of Rochester about