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that the rapid but very careful and rolling elocution sometimes sounded pompous to those who did not know him.
    This voice was nothing like that. It was the reed-thin quaver of an old man.
    “It’s Mr Collins,” said Georgina to the oak of the doorway.
    “Tell him to go back to his sickroom,” rasped the old man’s voice from within.
    I blinked at this. Since my younger brother, Charles, had married Kate Dickens five years earlier, he had suffered bouts of serious indigestion and occasional ill health, but—I was certain at the time—it was nothing serious. Dickens thought otherwise. The writer had opposed the marriage, had felt that his favourite daughter had married Charles—a sometimes illustrator of Dickens’s books—just to spite him, and obviously had convinced himself that my brother was dying. I’d recently heard on good authority that Dickens had said to Wills that my dear brother’s health rendered him “totally unfit for any function of this life,” and even had it been true—which it absolutely was not—it was a remarkably callous thing to say.
    “No, Mr
Wilkie,
” Georgina said through the doors, glancing apprehensively over her shoulder as if in hopes that I had not heard.
    “Oh,” came some oldster’s quavering syllable. “Why the deuce didn’t you say so?”
    We heard vague scrambling and scrabbling sounds and then the turning of a key in the lock—which was extraordinary in itself, as Dickens had the odd habit of locking his study when he was
not
in it but never when he
was
—and then the doors were thrown open.
    “My dear Wilkie, my dear Wilkie,” said Dickens in that odd rasp, throwing his arms open wide, then clasping my right shoulder with his left hand briefly before removing it to join the other hand that was enthusiastically shaking mine. I noticed that he was glancing at his watch on its chain. “Thank you, Georgina,” he added absently as he closed the doors behind us, not locking them this time. He led the way into his dark study.
    Which was another oddity. As many times as I had visited Dickens in his sanctum sanctorum over the years, I had never seen the drapes drawn across the bow windows in the daytime. They were now. The only light came from the lamp on the table in the centre of the room; there was no lamp on the writing desk that faced those three windows and which was set into the small bay they created. Only a few of us had been privileged to see Dickens actually in the act of creation in this study, but all of us who had must have noted the mild irony that Dickens invariably faced the windows looking out into his garden and towards Gravesend Road but never
saw
anything of the scene before him when he looked up from his quill and paper. The writer was lost in the worlds of his own imaginings and effectively blind while working, except when glancing into a nearby mirror to see his own expressions while acting out the grimaces, grins, frowns, expressions of shock, and other caricature-like responses of his characters.
    Dickens pulled me deeper into the dark room and waved me to a chair near his desk and sat in his cushioned work chair. Except for the closed drapes, the room looked as it always had—everything neat and orderly in an almost compulsive manner (and without a hint of dust, even though Dickens never allowed the servants to dust or clean in his study). There was the desk with its tilted writing surface, the little array of his carefully arranged tools, never out of order, arrayed like talismans on the flat part of the desk—a date calendar, ink-bottle, quills, a pencil with a nearby India rubber eraser that looked to have never been used, a pincushion, a small bronze statuette of two toads duelling, a paper-knife aligned
just so,
a gilded leaf with a stylised rabbit on it. These were his good-luck symbols—his “appurtenances,” Dickens called them, something, he once said to me, “for my eye to rest on during the intervals between writing”—and