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eight male guests and one woman there that night.) After that incident, I have kept the amount of medicine of which I partake a secret, but not the fact of my general use of the blessed drug.
    Please understand, Dear Reader of my posthumous future, that everyone in my day uses laudanum. Or almost everyone. My father, who distrusted all medicines, in his last days consumed huge quantities of Battley’s Drops, a powerful form of opium. (And I am certain that the pain from my rheumatoid gout has been at least the equal, if not worse, than his deathbed pains.) I remember the poet Coleridge, a close friend of my parents, weeping at our home because of his dependency upon opium and I remember my mother’s warnings to him. But also, as I have reminded the few friends who had the bad manners to become censorious about my own dependency on this important medicine, Sir Walter Scott used great quantities of laudanum while writing
The Bride of Lammermoor,
while such contemporaries of Dickens’s and mine as our close friend Bulwer-Lytton and De Quincey used far greater quantities than I.
    That afternoon I returned to my home—one of my two homes—at 9 Melcombe Place, off Dorset Square, knowing that Caroline and her daughter, Harriet, would be out, and secreted the new jug of laudanum, but not before drinking two full glasses of it.
    Within minutes I was my real self again… or as close to my real self as I could be while such pain from rheumatoid gout still battered at the windows and scratched at the door of my corporeal self. At least the background noise of pain was diminished enough by the opiate so that I could concentrate again.
    I took a carriage to Charing Cross.
    T
HE FROZEN DEEP had been a great success.
    The first act was set in Devon, where beautiful Clara Burnham—played by Dickens’s more attractive daughter, Mary (known as Mamie)—is haunted by fears for her dashing fiancé, Frank Aldersley (played by me, in the earliest days of my current beard). Aldersley has been away on a polar expedition, sent, as Sir John Franklin’s real-life expedition had been, to force the North-West Passage, and both ships—the HMS
Wanderer
and HMS
Sea-mew
—have not been sighted for more than two years. Clara knows that Frank’s commander on the expedition is Captain Richard Wardour, whose proposal Clara has rejected. Wardour does not know the identity of the rival who succeeded him in Clara’s love, but has sworn to kill the man on sight. My character, Frank Aldersley, is, in turn, totally ignorant of Richard Wardour’s love for his fiancée.
    Knowing that the two ships are almost certainly frozen in together somewhere in the Arctic ice, Clara is agonised at the thought that some accident will reveal her two lovers’ identities to one another. So poor Clara is not only in terror of what the Arctic, its weather, beasts, and savages, may do to her beloved, but is in even greater terror of what Richard Wardour might do to her darling Frank should he discover the truth.
    Clara’s anxieties are not allayed when her nurse, Esther, who has the Second Sight, shares her bloody vision in the crimson Devon sunset. (As I mentioned earlier, Dickens went to great pains to create lighting effects in his little schoolroom theatre at Tavistock House that realistically depicted sunlight at all hours of the day.)
    “I see the lamb in the grasp of the Lion…” gasps Nurse Esther in the trance of her Second Sight. “Your bonnie bird alone with the hawk—I see you and all around you crying… Bluid! The stain is on you—Oh, my bairn, my bairn—the stain of that bluid is on you!”
    T HE YOUNG MAN’S NAME was
Edmond
Dickenson.
    Dickens had said that he’d provided a room at Charing Cross Hotel for the injured man, but in truth it was a large suite. An older and not-very-attractive nurse had set up her station in the outer sitting room and showed me in to the invalid.
    From Dickens’s description of the difficult extrication of young