Note on setting: Dickens serialised The Mystery of Edwin Drood in 1870 but the book mentions at one point that it is set at an indefinite time in the near-ish past, namely before the railway reached Cloisterham. Rochester railway station opened in the 1850s, so I have gone along with the recent TV drama, which places events in December 1845.

The birth of a girl, at Kensington Palace, in the spring of 1819, the occasion of national rejoicing.

The birth of a boy in the late October of that same year, not thirty miles from the Princess's cot, the occasion only of sorrow to all concerned, including, if the indignant protest of his new-minted lungs could be considered, the child itself.

How the world looks different according to the vagaries of circumstance; the first face that greets the child's eyes can weep tears of joy or of despair. Is the baby's future given its direction there and then?

It is not known whether Queen Victoria's blurred infant eyes looked up into love or indifference, but the abovementioned boy found human response only from the fatigued old midwife who first held him aloft and declared him alive and of the male sex.

"Oh, put it away from me," weeps the white-faced girl in the bed. "I don't want to see it."

"If you wants a wet-nurse," says the midwife to the stooping woman beside her, "I've a cousin as charges low rates. She'll keep the babe for a year if you can give her fifteen shillings down payment."

The old woman mumbles something about writing to the grandparents, who have the funds she herself lacks.

"Mind," she says, looking dispassionately down at the squalling boy, "they already sends me a reg'lar remittance for clearing up of this mess for 'em."

"London folks, bain't they?"

"Aye, clergy, too."

"Well, I never. Goes to show, don't it? The best families and all. Still, you wants to get that wet-nurse by the looks of 'er. She's weak and she ain't going to have much milk for 'un, even if she wants to feed him herself."

"Maybe best for all if the little scrap starves," says the old woman bleakly.

"Well, that's up to His tender mercies, but meanwhiles we must do our best for'n. Who's the sire, do they think?"

If the newly-delivered mother minds having her affairs discussed before her in this manner, she doesn't show it. Perhaps she is lost to consciousness now, escaping her hated reality on a sweet sea of dreams.

"Young man from the choir at St Paul's, so they say. Of course, he won't put his name to it. But he was a favourite at the girl's house, gave her music lessons, he did. Her parents won't have music in the house now."

"Terrible shame." The midwife casts a compassionate eye, twitching a little from tiredness after a labour of almost two days, over mother and child.

"She came down to me in the spring, she did. They told everyone she was took ill and prescribed country air. Lovely girl, too, pretty little thing. Could have done well for herself if only…"

The women sigh in unison.

"You'd better take him," speaks the elder, her tone resigned. "I'll get your cousin the money. If she can keep him a year and bring him back once he's walking, I think that'll work best all round."

The midwife picks the boy up and wraps him in a shawl.

He has worn himself out with bawling and lies against her chest, gasping and trying to chew on a finger he can never quite get into his mouth.

"Famished, poor mite," she says. "Don't you fret, pickle. You won't go hungry long. Say bye bye to your mama. Bye bye. See you soon."

She picks up his little wrist and makes his hand wave at the sleeping girl on the bed.

He finds strength for another plaintive yell.

The elderly lady hands over a jingling purse and the midwife, after some cursory instructions relating to post-natal care, walks out into the autumn night with her bundle of profit.

(November 1820)

It was a little over a year before the boy returned to the place of his birth.

He would not have recognised it, of course, and even if he had been more than a day old on his departure, the place was so wreathed in mist and generally bowed down and depressed by the drab quality of the November daylight that his recollections might not have matched this reality.

It was a low, unassuming building, the red bricks bearing whitish patches all over where salt had blown in from the marshes close at hand. The windows wanted new frames, for the rot had set in and the leaded glass was slowly breaking loose of its moorings. The door must be opened with a kick and shut with a shove, and the chimney sat at an angle a casual observer might call jaunty, though to the cottage's occupants it was detestably awry.

Some scrappy looking fowls clucked pettishly at the building's margins, to the chagrin of a half-starved goat tethered to the fence post.

The little boy, set down by his nursemaid at his insistence, took three wobbly steps towards the horned bleater and then fell flat on his front. This, it seemed, was no startling occurrence, for he simply stood up again and made another run for the goat.

"Ba," he said, turning round and explaining his enthusiasm for this creature to his companion. "Go ba."

"Yes, it's a goat," she said, scooping him back up before his bonnet strings strayed between the teeth of the mangy beast.

As they picked their way through the high weeds, the door was yanked open and a sullen girl of thirteen or so came out on to the front step. She would have been pretty if she could have found some apples for her cheeks or brightness for her eyes, but no such accoutrements had been located and she had the same thin, pinched look as her surroundings, a famished girl in a famished land.

"Aunt Hetty's abed with her rheumatism," she said. "Come in."

She did not look at the child, who clung to his nurse and cried as they bent under the low lintel and entered the cottage beyond.

The house was two rooms only – one for living in and one for sleeping in, with a little cookhouse shed out the back.

The living room clung to pretensions of gentility – the furniture was good, but old and shabby, and the fabrics were all faded to a remarkable degree. But it was comfortable and clean, and a little cabinet piano, perhaps forty or fifty years old, took pride of place in the front corner.

The nursemaid took a seat, the child on her knee, while the girl offered refreshments, in a dull, dutiful way.

"No, my love, I'll not keep you. I've five babes to go home to, all hungry for everything I can give them. This one has passed his first birthday and now you must take him back, for I don't keep them beyond that age, no matter how attached I might become."

"Are you attached to him?" asked the girl, looking for the first time at the boy in his cheap but serviceable woollen gown and cap.

"He's surprised me, Miss. I didn't think he'd last, but he's got a spirit in him. I think he willed himself to live. Look at him now, healthy as anything. I did right by him, Miss, I hope you'll agree."

Indeed, the child had overcome an exceptionally adverse opening to his life, and not because his nursemaid had 'done right' by him. She was correct to attribute his thriving to a certain native life force, for many other babies of his exact weight and condition would scarcely have survived the daily neglect and indifference shown to this boy.

"We're obliged to you," said the girl, without meaning it.

"You'd best take him, then," said the nursemaid, standing up and proffering the child.

"Oh, set him down. He can walk, can't he?"

"Just. Took his first steps a fortnight since."

She put him down on the rug and watched him crawl towards a large marmalade cat asleep by the hearth.

"I'll…be off, then, Miss." The nursemaid, although no natural mother, seemed perplexed at the girl's low spirits on seeing the child again and unsure whether to leave him thus. "You'll take good care of my little soldier, won't you? He takes gruel twice a day, and bread and butter, but you mustn't give a child meat. Of course, you know that. He won't sleep without this."

She handed over a scrap of silky material, perhaps a torn-off piece of a scarf.

"Goodbye, my precious," she cooed at the boy, who ignored her, far too fascinated by the cat, and then she was gone.

The girl watched her through the window until the fog swallowed her up entirely, then she turned to look at the child. He was bunching up a fat little fist in the cat's ginger fur.

"She doesn't like that," said the girl.

The cat shot out a paw and scratched the boy, who screamed and burst into tears.

"See." The girl sighed and rolled her eyes. "What a noise. Stop it."

The cat shot, an orange streak, into the neighbouring room.

The girl stood for a while, watching the strange crumpling of the child's face, before reluctantly going to him and lifting him into her arms.

"Now don't cry," she said. "I am to be your sister. Your sister, Meg. And you are my little brother, Johnny. Oh, please don't cry. Do you like lullabies? Shall I sing you one?"

She is singing to him, rocking him on her knee by the fire, when the old woman comes out of her bedroom, stooping low over her walking stick.

He is no longer crying and his eyes are half-closed, his tiny hand closed around the scrap of silk the nursemaid brought with her.

"He's got big," commented the old lady, falling rather than sitting into an armchair. "He'll eat us out of house and home, I suppose."

"Ma and Pa can afford to feed him," said the girl fiercely, breaking off her lullaby. "They feed half the starving orphans round Ludgate Circus already. What would prevent them feeding their own grandson?"

"Shame," said Aunt Hetty, and then there was no more to be said.

He recalls walking through dandelions higher than his head while the chickens pecked at the seed he threw for them, down by his warm bare feet. It seemed as if those early days brought perpetual sunshine, though of course this could not truly be the case.

He was always looking for a place of his own, a place away from the old woman's walking stick that descended so frequently and painfully on his back and shoulders. A place away from Meg's sly pinches and wounding words and even more wounding silence. He liked Meg, pretty Meg – why would she not like him back?

He and his ally, the marmalade cat, spent their spring and summer days out of doors, finding hiding places and dens among the overgrown land around the cottage. It wasn't far to the river, though he was strictly forbidden to go near it. All the same, he sometimes drew thrillingly close to its fast-flowing waters and imagined sailing away beyond the place where his line of sight ended and the river disappeared into woodland and sky.

His pale skin grew brown in the sun and his hair thickened and got only blacker, instead of lighter as his aunt and Meg seemed to wish it would.

"Look at him. You could give him to the gypsies and they'd have him for their own," said aunt Hetty disdainfully. "You've caught that frock on a bramble again. Meg, get the needle and thread."

Conversation was scant in the cottage over meals or afterwards in the parlour where the clock tick-tocked all day long. What could a young girl and a very old (and almost completely deaf) woman have to discuss, after all? Fractured tales of aunt Hetty's youth were sometimes told, to which Meg pretended to listen whilst eyeing her book surreptitiously.

Johnny would sit under the table, making a snake out of a length of wool, or sorting the spare buttons into sizes and colours. He stared up at the clock on the mantel, feeling its ticking and tocking creeping into his body and soul. He counted the minute divisions, then grouped them, then put them in twos and threes and counted them again. Jess, the marmalade cat, lay beside him, trusting him now, his only friend.

Their only other visitor, apart from some tradesmen who ruffled his hair and clicked their tongues and winked at him, was the vicar's wife.

She came to visit aunt Hetty twice a week. Johnny liked her name – Mrs Crisparkle. Crystal. Sparkle. Christmas.

"Dear Lord," she said, one autumnal day near his fourth birthday, after he had been called in from the garden, where he had subsisted all day on windfall apples and blackberries. "Has the boy still not spoken yet? He is nearly four, is he not?"

These words were, of necessity, spoken very loud, for aunt Hetty caught only one word in every three these days.

"He understands all you say to him," said Meg, coming into the room with a tray of tea. "Ask him to fetch anything and he will. And if he does not like what you say, he is pitched into the most fearful fit of temper. He can scream all right. But he will not form the words. I think it wilfulness in him, for he evidently possesses the capability."

"The child's a devil," mumbled aunt Hetty. "Meg took him t'Cloisterham and he wouldn't come away from the sweet shop window, no, kicked and screamed, he did, and she had to drag him the length of the High Street afore he'd leave off."

Johnny's memory floated blissfully back to the window of the Lumps of Delight shop, a bow-windowed heaven of bright colours and striped sticks of candy and sugar-dusted jellied fruits and ribbon-wrapped boxes of Turkish Delight. Oh, why had not Meg let him go in?

"Come and sit by me, Johnny," invited Mrs Crisparkle, leaning forward. He liked Mrs Crisparkle, who was like a grown-up doll in her frilled dimity gown and pristine bonnet. Besides, she smelled of lavender. He went to her and sat down, twisting his old scrap of silk between his fingers. "What's this I hear about you never speaking, dear? Why, that will never do. A fine young man needs to speak to make his way in the world. Where do you think you shall go and what shall you do, Johnny?"

He twisted his silk over and over and kicked his heels against the claw foot of the chaise. It wasn't that he didn't want to speak. He could not explain it. It just seemed better not to.

"Johnny," reproached Meg. "Mrs Crisparkle is so kind to take notice of you. Is this how you repay her?"

"Oh, no matter," said Mrs Crisparkle. "I wish my Sept might be a few years younger. He could be a playmate for you. But he is gone away to school now. Should you like to go away to school?"

I know not whereof you speak. What is school?

But he did not pose the question aloud.

"He sings," said Meg, a little desperately. "He knows ever so many songs. So he has words. He simply elects not to use them."

"He sings?"

"Yes, he carries a tune well for a child of his age."

"Then, thank heavens, he has intellect. There was a mute boy in the village some years ago. Alas, nobody could make themselves understood to him and he was put away."

Johnny's skin prickled and he found himself unable to swallow suddenly. People who did not speak were 'put away'? Where? What could she mean?

"But that is not in question for you, dear Johnny. Will you sing me a song? I should so like to hear it, for I love music, you know."

"Sing O God Our Help In Ages Past," urged Meg. "You do it so beautifully. I mean, for a three year old. Please do not expect it to sound like the choir at Cloisterham, Mrs Crisparkle."

"Then shall you accompany him at the piano, Meg?"

"Oh." She hesitated. "I do not like to…I have not played it in some time."

"It would so oblige me to hear you."

Meg stood abruptly, as if the request had offended her in some way, and took the little key that unlocked the piano lid from the pot on the shelf beside it.

Johnny could not help following her. He had never seen the lid taken up before and was astonished to see the expanse of pale brown and black keys that lay underneath. He was yet more astonished when Meg drew up the stool, put her fingers on the keys and made sounds come out of them.

He was so wide-eyed and fascinated that Meg had to play the introduction, somewhat laboriously, twice over before he remembered to come in with the words.

He liked to sing and he liked the sound of the words in his mouth, though he hardly knew what they might mean. He especially liked the line 'Time like an ever-rolling stream/Bears all its sons away'. The grandeur and solemnity of it struck him always, making him feel a small but integral part of the world, rather than the useless adjunct to it he most often saw himself as.

"Wonderful, quite wonderful," applauded Mrs Crisparkle rapturously. "Did you teach him this, Meg?"

"Yes," she admitted. Idle Sunday afternoons when the weather was bad were always spent singing hymns and sewing.

"You must teach him his letters. I'm sure he will be quick to learn, if he can recall such verses so well. Perhaps if he can spell words, he will also be able to voice them. And, you know, it will be as well for you to have some experience of teaching." She dropped her voice low, giving the oblivious and half-asleep aunt Hetty a sidelong glance. "It may well be useful, when the time comes."

The grown of the world spoke in such riddles, Johnny thought. What time could she mean?

But his attention was only briefly captured by this thought, for he had an entire new world to discover and explore, a world composed of ivory and harmony, bounded by wooden ends of the cabinet piano, and he was impatient to savour its delights.