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while passing down one of the steep inclines off Edinburgh’s High Street. In the version of Jekyll and Hyde , the victim’s attacker was Edward Hyde. But Hyde’s name had replaced another, scored through in ink until it was all but obliterated. Penciled marginalia, however, indicated that the name Stevenson had originally chosen for his monster was Edwin Hythe. Indeed, the margins of this particular page were filled with notes and comments in various hands—Stevenson’s, I felt sure, but maybe also his friend Henley’s—and Fanny’s, too? Was it she who had written in blunt capital letters “NOT HYTHE!”?
    I poured myself some more wine and began deciphering the scribbles, scrawls and amendments. I was still hard at work when I heard the door at the end of the hallway open and close, footsteps drawing close. Then Benjamin Turk was standing there in the doorway, coat draped over both shoulders. He was dressed to the nines, and had obviously enjoyed his evening, his face filled with color, eyes almost fiery.
    â€œAh, my dear young friend,” he said, shrugging off the coat and resting his walking-stick against a pile of books.
    â€œI hope you don’t mind,” I replied, indicating the decanter.
    He landed heavily in the chair opposite, his girth straining the buttons on his shirt. “Do you still imagine you’re in the presence of a cruel hoax?” he asked, exhaling noisily.
    â€œNot so much, perhaps.”
    This caused him to smile, albeit tiredly.
    â€œDo we know who wrote the notes in the margins?”
    â€œThe usual suspects.” He rose long enough to pour some wine. “Edwin Hythe,” he drawled.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œYou won’t know who he is?” Settling himself, he studied me over the rim of his glass.
    â€œHe’s Hyde.”
    But Turk shook his head slowly. “He was a friend of Stevenson’s, one of the students he drank with back in the day.”
    â€œThat was his real name? And Stevenson was going to use it in the book?” I sounded skeptical because I was.
    â€œI know.” Turk took a sip, savoring the wine. “Hythe had re-entered Stevenson’s life, visiting him in Bournemouth not long before work started on the story you’re holding. The two had fallen out at some point and not spoken for several years. There are a couple of portraits of Hythe—I’ve seen them but don’t have copies to hand. I do have this though …” He reached into his jacket and drew out a sheet of printed paper. I took it from him, unfolding it carefully. It was the front page of a newspaper of the time, the Edinburgh Evening Courant , from a February edition of 1870. The main story recounted the tale of a “young woman known to the city’s night-dwellers” who had been found “most grievously slaughtered” in an alley off Cowgate.
    â€œLike Stevenson,” Turk was saying, “Edwin Hythe was a member of the university’s Speculative Society—though whatever speculation they did was accompanied by copious amounts of drink. And don’t forget—this was at a time when Edinburgh was noted for scientific and medical experiments, meaning the students had access to pharmaceuticals of all kinds, most of them untested, a few probably lethal. Hythe had a larger appetite than most—for drink, and narcotics, and lively behavior. He was arrested several times, and charged once for ‘lewd and libidinous acts.’”
    â€œWhy are you telling me this?”
    â€œYou know why.”
    â€œHyde was Hythe? And the newspaper … ?”
    â€œI think you know that, too.”
    â€œHythe killed her, is that what you’re saying? And Stevenson knew?”
    â€œOur dear Louis was probably there , Ronald, the guilt gnawing at him until he deals with it by writing The Travelling Companion . That particular book gets spiked, but word of it reaches Hythe and he