The Last Dickens

Chapter 11

Two and a half years earlier: Boston, November 19, 1867

WHEN IT WAS ANNOUNCED THAT TICKETS FOR THE FIRST OF the novelist's public readings would be sold the next morning, a queue started to form at the street door of the publishing firm. James Osgood ordered Daniel Sand to carry out straw mattresses and blankets for those spending the night in the cold, windy street. Fields had interjected that if they really wanted a happy crowd, the shop boy ought to bring down beer.

By dawn the morning of the sale, the mass of people outside stretched a mile and a half along Tremont Street. Some had brought their own armchairs to sleep in.

The two partners, Fields and Osgood, were watching from a window that had been hastily barred for fear people might climb in for the tickets. They were astounded to see that not only were aristocratic gentlemen shoulder to shoulder with Irish workmen but also that several Negroes could be seen amid the throng… and that three women had taken places in the rowdy line! This last fact was considered so touching by the men waiting in the arctic cold that after a vote, the first of the women was invited to take a position at the head. In honor of the rather English theme of the gathering, tea was brought out-though some of it was mixed with the contents of small black bottles.

In the line there were also the ticket speculators who would buy up seats and resell them at a profit. They had been expected, these enterprising vultures that populated America, but not so many. One speculator, among the most aggressive about obtaining and hoarding tickets, was dressed like George Washington, complete with the wig and hat.

As the sale progressed, big bald-headed George Dolby, shuttling back and forth along the crowd, was handed a telegram. “Sent from port at Halifax,” Mr. Dolby had said after first reading it silently. “Announcing the Cuba. Dickens en route to Boston right now! The Chief will be on American soil before nightfall!” The last words were drowned by cheers.

That was hours ago. It was pitch black by now at the harbor, bitterly cold, and no sign of the Cuba yet. What a crowd! Pressmen roamed the wharves in packs, ready to describe the novelist's first steps back on American soil for the morning editions. The customs officer lent Fields the steamer Hamblin to search the bay farther out. He and Osgood were joined on the steamer by Dolby, who had come from London early along with several assistants. The Englishmen wrapped their coats tightly against the frigid air.

“Cuba in sight!” the lookout man barked.

They steamed ahead until they were alongside the larger ship. As they got close, they could see that it had become grounded by a mud bank. The party signaled for the gangway plank to be lowered between the ships. Bright rockets were bursting through the dark sky behind them in a grand display of welcome for the novelist.

The lookout, squinting, grumbled at Dolby, “That don't look like no author at all. That looks like an old gentleman pirate!”

High above them, Charles Dickens himself stood on the deck of the steamer, his flashy vest and gold watch chains illuminated in the halo of the fiery display in the sky. Lithe and standing tall, looking taller from such a height than his five feet eight inches, he peered down with arms outstretched.

The Americans on the smaller ship could not help showing surprise to see that Dickens's head was uncovered. After shouting back and forth with the crew of the Cuba, they helped Dickens across the plank into the smaller boat where he grabbed two hands at a time in his greetings.

The author seemed equally pleased and discomfited to hear about the waiting crowd at the wharf. “I see,” Dickens said, scratching at his grizzled imperial beard. “So I'm to face the public right away?”

“Your ship's accident with the mud bank, my dear Dickens, may work to our advantage,” said Fields. “We have chartered two carriages now waiting at the Long Wharf to take us directly to the hotel. As long as all eyes remain waiting for signs of the Cuba, you will arrive unnoticed and in peace at your hotel, with ample time for a light supper.”

But-as it happens when enough people are interested in a secret-the public picked up the trick. At the Parker House, the arriving party had to struggle through a waiting throng that had them cornered. “Hats off in front!” yelled the ones in the back of the crowd.

It was not until the party had been brought inside the Parker House and sat down for supper that the atmosphere began to relax. Then Dickens noticed. He did not say anything, but his plate of mongrel goose scraped against the table as he pushed it away. The waiter had left the door to the private dining room open slightly in order to allow the public a peek at the famous man.

“Branagan!” Dolby whispered urgently to the young porter he'd brought from England, who got up, crossed the room, and slammed the door. He then gave a hard stare to the offending waiter and whispered to him. The waiter nodded nervously, in apology-or perhaps fear, for this Branagan was hale and strong.

Later that evening, Dickens was slouched in the sitting room of 338 as his bathtub filled. “These people have not in the least changed in the last five and twenty years,” he was saying, falling fast into a somber attitude. “They are doing already what they were doing all those years ago, making me some object of novelty to gaze upon! Dolby, I should have kept my word.”

“When have you ever not, Chief?” asked his manager, indignant on his behalf.

“I swore to myself never to return to America again. There can only be bad things from coming here.” The last time Dickens had come, in 1842, he had planted himself in the middle of a public row by calling for American publishers to adopt international copyright law to stop the free reproduction of British books. Dickens was called greedy and mercenary and accused of coming to the country only to increase his wealth.

His manager now tried to placate the Chief by speaking in generous detail of the first ticket sale and of their great prospects. “Line two miles away from the ticccket boox!” Dolby had long ago conquered a fussy stammer, but still there always seemed a rock in the path of his speech that he had to take care not to stumble over. To master it he had formed a strange habit: he would enunciate the most mundane word with the elaborateness of a regal pronouncement. Cash, telegraphic, and ticket box sounded Shakespearean coming out of Dolby's prominent jowls.

“Look at these,” Dolby said. He removed several bundles as big as sofa cushions.

Dickens sucked in his tongue. “Surely that must be the family wash,” he said.

“Our receipts, just from the first series! Mr. Kelly and I will begin wiring the money to Coutts in London in the morning.” Dickens weighed a pile in each hand as Dolby spoke. “Remember, Chief, seven dollars to the pound.”

Dickens said, “I knew you would see to it that the ticket sales were a slap-up success, good friend. Of that I never doubt.”

“You shall have plenty of peace. See that door over there? It's a private stairs in the rear of the hotel so you needn't be among the public when you don't wish it.”

“Surely, surely. Hot and cold bath, too,” Dickens commented as he wandered again, impressed at the well-appointed rooms and the brilliant flowers left there by Annie Fields that he now ran under his nose. “Now Dolby, be sure to convert those greenbacks directly into gold. Don't ever trust American currency.”

“Never would, Chief!”

After bathing, Dickens took his seat at his desk. He removed his writing case, which held a variety of pencils and quill pens. He had a small red leather diary that he opened to a page toward the back to study it. Plucking up one of the many feathered writing instruments, he then sought out the inkwell provided by the hotel. Wetting the tip of the pen until it soaked black, he proceeded to compose a brief message. “Dolby,” Dickens said, folding the paper when he was done, “have this brought to the telegraph office, won't you? It is important.” Dolby opened the door and snapped his fingers to call for Tom Branagan.

Chapter 12

TOM BRANAGAN FELT THE MANAGER'S EYES LINGER ON HIM AP-provingly as he exited room 338 on his latest mission. Downstairs in the Parker's office, the telegraph operator adjusted his eyeglasses and held up the piece of paper to the lamp.

“From Mr. Dickens. ‘Safe and well, expect good letter full of hope.’ Is that all?” the operator asked, squinting as he read the cramped writing. The operator seemed disappointed to find no more sensational message to transmit from the world's most famous writer. “I suppose you came all the way from dear old England to carry scraps of blotted paper up and down the stairs.”

“Thank you for your help. Good evening,” replied Branagan evenly.

As Branagan crossed through the loud barroom and climbed back to the third floor, he was thinking about quiet conversations he had overheard between Dickens and Dolby about Nelly Ternan, the young actress who resided back in England, and whether she would also join them in America. Branagan guessed that the seemingly trifling note was a secret way of instructing Miss Ternan, though he did not know whether it meant she should come or not. But Branagan could guess at that, too.

The crowds awaiting Dickens upon their arrival suggested there would be nothing quiet about a twenty-six-year-old actress joining Dickens, the married father of eight grown children whose mother had moved away from the family estate in England ten years earlier. Branagan did not believe Dickens would want the extra scrutiny. No, nothing ever seemed to stay quiet in America, and that had been the disappointment showing in Dickens's face at supper. Through the narrow gap of that open door Charles Dickens had seen the nation as if it were one enormous curious eyeball trained on him.

Tom Branagan was one of the four subordinates in Dickens's camp brought for the tour. The assistants shared two rooms on the same floor as Dickens, whose own spacious rooms adjoined George Dolby's. Tom shared his with Henry Scott, the novelist's dresser and tailor. Henry was the only person-with the exception of Dolby-allowed in Dickens's dressing rooms before and after public readings. Henry, a melancholy man, would dress the novelist and adjust his hair into the perfect image of the younger man seen in so many photos in the windows of so many bookstores: the dashing, carefree genius whose eyes seemed to penetrate through the world around him just like the novels that made him famous.

Henry liked to consider himself in a different class than the other assistants, and when not in Dickens's company would remain reserved. Henry always referred to the Irish porter as “Tom Branagan,” never using just his first or surname. There was also Richard Kelly, a ticket agent with much bluster but a delicate constitution who was still recovering from the rough passage aboard the Cuba. George, the gas man, adjusted the lighting at each theater to Dickens's exacting requirements. Conversation with George was doomed because every time he saw a lighting configuration-such as those in the glowing marble lobby of Parker's-he would stop and mutter to himself a long list of potential improvements.

Tom, at twenty years old, was the youngest of the group. His father, who had immigrated to England from Ireland, had worked for Dolby for ten years as a driver in the town of Ross. Tom's father died after being kicked in the chest by a horse and Dolby, in a fit of compassion, agreed to engage Tom, who needed to help support his elderly mother and two unmarried sisters.

The young fellow was well built, cool, and collected, the right traits for a decent porter. Tom had no mandate as specific as seeing to Dickens's dress, light, or profits. A whistle, a snap of the fingers, a tapped foot-all were signals for Tom to do anything that was needed.

NOT EVERYONE APPROVED of the decision to bring Tom to America.

For each of the trusted advisers in England originally consulted in planning Dickens's trip, there had been different notions about what might go wrong in America: Charles Dickens himself had been most worried about the Fenian Brotherhood, the radical Irishmen spread throughout the United States, particularly in Boston and New York, devoted to bringing down ruin upon England. They would relish the opportunity to assault a conspicuous Englishman like himself on American soil. George Dolby, meanwhile, worried about the American speculators ruining ticket sales by buying up excessive numbers of tickets. John Forster, who considered himself Dickens's closest friend and most selfless adviser… well, Mr. Forster worried. He worried that Dickens's presence could inspire anti-English riots like the ones against the Shakespearean actor William Macready in New York. Forster also thought, generally speaking, that it was unseemly for a man as great as Dickens-and in John Forster's eyes no man was greater-to be seen going to such lengths for no grander purpose than making a profit.

Dickens had not been shy swatting aside this point. “Expenses in my life are so enormous,” he'd say, “that I feel myself drawn toward America like the Loadstone rock, as Darnay in the Tale of Two Cities is to Paris. America is the golden campaigning ground.”

Forster knit his brow and kept it knit. What profits could be made in America, land of paupers and thieves? Even if there were money to be made, the Irish would find a way to steal the money right out of the American banks. If the bank managed to somehow keep the money, the bank would surely fail, like all American banks! “Dickens should not go to America!” said Forster in a half shout. “I am opposed to the alpha and omega of the idea as an unacceptable breach of dignity and wish to hear no more about it. In tol-er-able!”

When Forster was told about the subordinates chosen to travel with the novelist, he was further appalled an Irishman was among them. What if the seemingly harmless Paddy were a Fenian himself with a secret plan to attack? Neither Dickens nor Dolby could exactly prove Forster wrong about Tom Branagan but managed to convince him that Tom was more ordinary porter than revolutionary.

Tom, for his part, found it interesting to observe that it was the members of the public who loved Dickens that caused the most concern. Tom had helped keep the onlookers away when Dickens had arrived at the Parker House; he was not surprised by their presence but by their persistence. A young woman yanked out a piece of fringe from Dickens's heavy gray and black shawl; a man excited to touch the novelist took the opportunity to pull a clump of fur from his coat. A lady energetically jumped up and down and waved a few pages of her manuscript, which she pleaded with Dickens to read. Tom looked into their faces. Did each think that Dickens would turn around and walk home with them arm in arm?

Tom knew one thing. He had never before in his life met a man to whom women would offer their seats in a public vehicle or anteroom-until he had met Charles Dickens.

On the second morning after Dickens's arrival to the Parker House there was an uproar on the third floor of the hotel where Dickens and his staff had their rooms. At first, Tom had only noticed that Henry Scott, his roommate, was leaning his head against the wall and crying.

“All right, Mr. Scott?” Tom asked, concerned.

Henry looked right at Tom, thankful to find a witness. He dropped his usual reticence and slumped into one of the plush armchairs. “Baggage handlers? Baggage smashers!”

The trunks of Dickens's clothing from the Cuba had been delivered to the hotel crushed and dented. Tom sat down on the rug and helped Henry reorganize the clothes.

“Thank you, Tom Branagan,” Henry said, embarrassed. “It's more outrageous than a man could bear when one's work is treated like this. Beastly country!”

As soon as the two men had restored sufficient order to the wardrobe, there was another disturbance from across the hall. George Dolby was braying and shouting. He stood with Dickens and the others in the hallway of the hotel passing around a copy of Harper's Weekly. Tom asked if they were all right.

“See for yourself, Branagan,” said Dolby, pronouncing his name with a most stately explosion of the tongue that conveyed a measure of censure. “All right? Certainly not!”

In the magazine was a cartoon showing in grotesque caricature the figures of Dickens and Dolby barring the door of a room labeled “Parker House” against hordes of Americans on the other side. The cowardly Mr. Dickens was crying out, “Not at home!”

“I don't suppose this artist was actually present here,” Tom said after a moment of deliberation. “This drawing shows Mr. Dickens hiding in his room from the onlookers, which was not the case.”

“Of course he wasn't hiding!” said Dolby, aghast.

Dickens stroked the slight iron gray streak in his beard and, punching his cheek out with his tongue as he did at uncomfortable times, looked up wearily from the cartoon. “Weren't we? Didn't I come here to do just that: hide, then sneak out from my hole long enough to collect my profit?” The novelist sighed and limped into the room on his lame right leg, an old injury reawakened by the sea travel.

THAT NIGHT TOM woke up in the small hours. His eyes danced in the darkness of the hotel room to the mantel clock.

“Did you hear that, Scott?” he whispered across the room to Henry.

Henry Scott stirred in his bed.

“A noise,” Tom explained. “Did you hear a noise?”

Henry's face was in his pillow. “Go to sleep, Tom Branagan.”

Tom had been having trouble sleeping in the Parker House-there was something about its opulence that disoriented him. Tom was not certain he had actually heard a noise-or at least not a noise different from the usual ones from the busy streets of Boston outside-but he was glad to justify his uneasy wakefulness. The clock's ticking teased him out of bed.

He took a candle into the hallway, wearing a pilot coat over his long white flannels. Passing Dickens's rooms, he noticed that the door to the novelist's bedroom was open.

It looked like it had been kicked open. The inside latch broken.

“Mr. Dickens?” Tom knocked.

Tom went inside. For a moment, a strange thought flashed through him: how wrong it would be for anyone to ever see Charles Dickens sleeping. But the bed was in disarray and empty, and the novelist nowhere in sight.

Tom ran through the novelist's parlor glancing around for other signs of struggle and pounded with his fist on the door that adjoined with Dolby's rooms. As he entered, Dolby was pulling his dressing gown around himself. “What is it, Branagan? You'll wake the Chief!”

“Mr. Dolby,” Tom said, pointing. “Dickens is missing.”

“What? Heavens,” Dolby began to stammer, barely able to order to send for the “p-p-pol-l-lice!”

Just then Dickens himself strode in. “What is going on in here?” he asked, alarmed. He'd entered from the back staircase that connected by the private door to his room.

“Chief!” Dolby cried, rushing over to the novelist at full speed and embracing him. “Thank heavens! Is everything all right?”

“Surely, my good Dolby.” Dickens explained that thinking about the awful Harper's cartoon-and the shooting pain in his foot-had disrupted his sleep and he had decided to take a breather outside.

Dolby, tying the cord waist of his gown in a dignified fashion, turned to his assistant. “You see, Branagan, all is quite well in here. The Chief went down the back!”

“But it is the front door that was forced open, and the latch broken,” Tom said.

Dickens suddenly looked concerned as they confirmed this by examining the door. “Dolby, ring for a hotel clerk. No, don't! I don't want the whole staff to hear the bell. Fetch someone quietly.” Dickens hastily went to his desk and checked the center drawer. He appeared relieved at finding it locked.

“Do you think someone has been in here, Mr. Branagan?” Dickens asked.

“Sir, I feel it is very likely.” After a few moments of examining the room, Tom noticed a scrap of paper on the bed.

Dolby returned to the room. “I've sent Kelly downstairs. Is anything missing, Chief?”

Dickens had been surveying his belongings. “Nothing of consequence. Except…”

“What is it?” Dolby asked.

“Well, strange to say, isn't it, you'll likely laugh. But I notice there is a pillow taken from my bed, Dolby.”

“A pillow, Chief?” Dolby asked. “Branagan, what have you found?”

“A letter, sir. It is difficult to read the hand.”

I am your utmost favorite reader in all of these vulgar American states. I anticipate with delicious fervor holding your next book in my hands. Your next book will be your utmost best, I know without qualification, because you are…

Dolby and Dickens both burst into relieved laughter, interrupting Tom's reading.

“Mr. Dickens, Mr. Dolby. I hardly find this comical. Worrisome indeed,” Tom pleaded.

“Mr. Branagan, it wasn't a renegade soldier of the Fenian Brotherhood, at least!” Dickens said.

“Just some harmless fellow who worships at the feet of the Chief,” said Dolby. “We shall never exhaust them. Let's leave it at that,” added Dolby.

Tom persisted. “Someone forcibly entered the room and then stole from it. What if Mr. Dickens had been inside at the time? What if this ‘harmless fellow’ comes back when Mr. Dickens is alone?”

“Stole? Did you say ‘stole’? A nothing, a mere pillow!” said Dolby, now almost jolly about the incident. “Haven't you seen the hotel barroom? Why, you may liquor up with all creation. It is quite the place to give people the courage for such pranks.”

Henry Scott procured another pillow for the Chief and straightened his bedclothes. Tom relayed the story in truncated form to Richard Kelly, but the ticket agent, too, found the conclusion of the events a singular source of amusement. “All that for a stone hard pillow!” Richard raved. “The American republic!”

“Mr. Dolby, I would like to stay on watch outside of Mr. Dickens's door,” Tom said, turning to his employer.

“Out of the question! I'll tell you what you will do, Branagan,” Dolby replied grandiloquently with a wave of his hand. Dolby's hand traveled down to the end of his mustache as though yanking a bell -pull, but before he could finish he was interrupted.

It was Dickens: “If Mr. Branagan should like to wrestle with humanity outside my room, I give my blessing.”

“Thank you, sir,” Tom said, bowing to Dickens.

Tom kept the note, folding it into his pocket as he took his place of vigilance at the door.

Chapter 13

THE ENGLISH VISITORS QUICKLY EMBRACED THE ODDITY OF LIFE in America-everything had to be difficult in order to be worthwhile. Friday had been the incident in Dickens's rooms. By Saturday afternoon it was decided that either one of the staff or one of Parker's waiters would be in front of Dickens's room at all times, and someone would always walk with him on his daily breathers. Dolby informed Tom Branagan of this procedure at Sunday's breakfast with a proprietary air, but Tom suspected that Dickens himself had requested the change. The novelist outwardly took a light approach to his own safety, yet he had seen something more serious in Dickens's eye.

At one point, Tom thought he had his man. He caught a slender man with a craggy face sneaking around Dickens's door. It turned out to be a speculator from New York who had taken rooms near Dickens's hoping to overhear the time and location of the next ticket sale.

When Dolby was away for tour business and Mr. Fields and Mr. Osgood occupied, Tom would accompany Dickens on his long walks.

At a shop window, Dickens would have only a few moments before a crowd would surround him. He was pleased with the bookstores in Boston celebrating his visit by filling their window displays with his photographic portraits and towering stacks of his novels, often displacing Guardian Angel, the new novel by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the recently published literary sensation, Longfellow's Dante. The novelist also slowed down to see how enterprising cigar stores put Pickwick Snuff, Little Nell Cigars, and a Christmas Game of Dickens (for Old and Young) out front.

“The ingenuity of the Hub of the Universe! That's an Americanism, you see,” he'd explain. “The hub being the name in this country of the nave of a wheel. Little Nell cigars! Remember to tell Forster that for my biography.”

Dickens handed Tom his walking stick while he went in for a closer look. Tom, while waiting, nearly sliced his hand on a large screw that he had not noticed sticking out from the side of the handle.

When Dickens emerged happily smoking a Little Nell, Tom asked whether he should remove the screw so that Dickens would not accidentally injure himself.

“Heavens no, Branagan! Why, that is a most purposeful screw to strengthen it. You see, I sometimes find myself walking in the marshes,” he said as they crossed the street. “Nearby the convicts perform their labors. In case one escapes, the tip of this cane can be used as a weapon. Come,” he said suddenly in a high-pitched voice, grabbing Tom's arm. “Let us avoid Mr. Pumblechook, who is crossing the street to meet us.” Then, in a different voice, “No, down this alley. Mr. Micawber is coming, let us get out of his way.”

Tom was already used to this. Dickens would often act out the roles of Pip, Ralph Nickleby, or Dick Swiveller to practice his readings while on his walks. He'd sometimes take his after-breakfast constitutionals along Beacon Street, which was also called New Land, where there had still only been a bleak swamp on his last visit to Boston. With snowfalls alternating with rain, a thick, sloppy mud now coated the sidewalks. On this particular walk, as Dickens and Tom rounded the corner, a woman in a formal gown walking several paces behind paused, taking unusual care where she stepped. She leaned down gingerly, removing a piece of paper from a carpetbag. This she pressed against the gravel where the two men had stepped a few moments earlier. After allowing it to soak up the mud, she then lifted the paper. With a razor, she then sliced the paper around the edges of the novelist's boot print. A Dickens print. A perfect Dickens print.

All the while, the two men rushed ahead to find shelter from the rain, never noticing the woman or her ecstasy as she clutched her prized footprint.

THE DAY OF the first public reading was spent by the Dickens staff readying Tremont Temple. Dickens was testing the best place on the stage from which to read. Henry Scott was tiptoeing around him like a ballerina laying out Dickens's water and books on the reading table. George Allison was meticulously arranging gas burners that would throw just the right light onto just the right places on Dickens's face.

Dolby had chosen that hall over newer ones like the Boston Theater because the gradual rising floor meant all seats were good. Dickens had liked this idea. “Exact equality for my hearers!” he'd said. He hated the notion of the wealthier being able to buy a better view and refused to allow the cost of the tickets to be raised above a democratic one dollar, even if it might have inhibited speculation to have done so.

Tom, meanwhile, was assigned to inspect the hall's entrances.

“Does all seem well?” Dolby inquired.

“You say there will be hundreds of people here, Mr. Dolby?”

“The largest audience ever assembled in Boston since they threw the cargoes of our tea ships into the harbor!” Dolby seemed agitated when Tom did not smile.

“This will be the first public appearance of Mr. Dickens here. I am concerned, to be candid, Mr. Dolby, that whoever was after him at the hotel will look for him here.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Dolby, shaking his head vigorously. “That fellow? The Great Yankee Pillow Thief, you mean?”

Tom was amazed that the manager could have put the incident so far out of his mind. “It is only possible, sir, and I fear without knowing what his intention was that night and what the man even looks like-”

“Enough! You're quite candid enough!” Dolby cried out. He chewed at his lip while examining his porter. “It is a matter of pride for me, young Branagan, that I make a tour successful and, at the same time, pleasing to the Chief-not to rattle him and risk undermining his genius.”

Dickens, standing at his mahogany table at the platform to test the acoustics, glanced toward the spot of Dolby's outburst.

“Chief, you sound first rate from this spot!” said Dolby. “I'll move to the other gallery and listen from there.” Then, turning back to Tom, he said quietly, “Did you know when my predecessor died, it was the Chief himself who wrote the lines on his tombstone?”

“No,” returned Tom. Did Dolby plan on needing a tombstone soon?

Tom thought for a moment of walking right up to the platform and telling the Chief himself his concern. Perhaps Dolby sensed this, as he gave him new orders.

“Remember, Branagan, the special guest is to be seated before anyone else. If there is one thing you will learn from the Chief while in America, it is a consideration for others,” he said. The special guest Dolby referred to had earlier written a letter to Dickens saying she was paralyzed and asking whether the doors to Tremont Temple could be opened for her early. Dickens had complimentary tickets sent to her and had instructed Dolby to make arrangements to ensure her comfort.

When the paralyzed woman arrived, almost weeping with excitement, Tom lifted her inside. As he did, he could see the hundreds of people waiting outside the building for the doors to open. The tangle of carriages in the streets around the theater had in fact nearly stopped the whole business of Boston. Those who didn't have tickets loitered around the building staring with resentment at the theatergoers pushing their way inside where Tom and police officers finally directed them to seats. At one point, there was a sudden sound like an explosion from one of the galleries.

Tom raced to the spot. The sound had come from a man who had sat on his neighbor's opera hat that had been left on the wrong seat, popping it and sending the crown into the brim. An argument between the two blue bloods ensued over who was to blame, then over the price of the hat, then moving to how the hatless gentleman was ever to hail a hackney coach later with his head uncovered like a tramp.

Dickens finally climbed the platform at fifteen minutes after eight, a dark suit chosen by Henry set off by a white and red flower on the lapel. A roar of applause, shouts of welcome, a waving sea of handkerchiefs, and Dickens bowed left, right, ahead. The only sounds that could quiet the audience were the novelist's first words:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, I shall have the honor and pleasure of reading you this evening some selections from my work…”

And so began the tour. Dickens would choose extended scenes from two different novels for each reading and act out a condensed, dramatic rendition of each. The characters came alive as he gave each one their own voice, manner, and soul; he was author, character, actor. The performer never came to a full stop in the readings, making the next sentence always the most anticipated. Nor did he slow down or pause for emphasis on a moment of subtle wit or meaning, trusting instead in his audience. All the while, Tom guarded the doors. He kept Dolby's commands in his head, though he could not stop himself from wondering what the hotel intruder would look like and if he were present somewhere in the mass of faces.

At one reading, while Dickens performed Magwitch from Great Expectations running through the marsh, Tom was examining the rapt members of the audience at Tremont Temple when he heard a sound. Like an unintelligibly quick whisper-no, like a cat scratching on wood. He tried to identify the source, but it wasn't from a single place. It was on all sides. There were a few members of the audience scribbling rapidly with pencils-faster than he had ever seen anyone write.

Upon Tom's reporting his intelligence at breakfast the following morning to Dolby, the manager escorted him to the publishing office down the street and asked if they might see Mr. Fields.

“Scribbling, you say?” Fields asked, hands wide on his hips. “Men from the newspapers, perhaps?”

Tom said that he did not think so; the members of the press had been given seats by Dolby in the front rows, while these men and women were dispersed throughout the various galleries and in the standing-room area.

Osgood had walked into the Authors’ Room while Tom was explaining what he saw. Hearing Tom's description, he shook his head. “Why didn't we anticipate this? The Bookaneers!”

“Pray explain what you mean, Mr. Osgood,” said Dolby, who was sharing a sofa with Tom.

“As you know, for the purposes of these readings the Chief has condensed his novels, rather brilliantly so, to each fit one hour. You see, Mr. Dolby, other publishers no doubt hope to pirate ‘new editions,’ bagmen's editions, to erode our own authorized sales of his books. Harper, I am certain, is one of the culprits.”

“But a Bookaneer, Mr. Osgood?” asked Tom. “What is it?”

Osgood considered how to explain to the porter. “They are literary pickpockets, of a sort, Mr. Branagan. The piratical publishers hire them to perform such tasks as stalking around the harbor for advance sheets coming from England, to come by through bribes or even theft. Though they may appear to be common ruffians, they are by constitution cool in demeanor and highly intelligent. It is said from a brief glance at a single page of sheets, they can identify an author and the value of an unpublished manuscript.”

“I suppose that is not such an extraordinary feat,” Dolby offered.

“A brief glance, Mr. Dolby,” Osgood continued, “through a spyglass, from fifty feet away. Each are said to know three or four languages of the nations with the most popular authors today.”

“What draws them into such a shady line of work, if they possess such natural talents?” Dolby asked.

“They are well paid for their endeavors. Beyond that any guess of their motives is speculation. It is known that one of them, a woman called Kitten, served as a spy during the War of Rebellion and could signal entire paragraphs’ worth of information to collaborators through lanterns and flags. Another of their nefarious herd is said to have learned lip reading from a deaf mute. Several of them are also expert shorthand writers in order to record overheard conversations between publishers that would be paid for by rivals-and it is whispered that some of the Bookaneers are responsible for writing the more vicious examples in the field of book criticism. I would bet our rivals sent several Bookaneers to the theater in order to copy down what the Chief was improvising. Mayor Harper will stop at nothing to best us, and his brother Fletcher, whom they call the Major, counsels him into ever more conniving schemes.”

“I have noticed the Chief devise new lines-brilliant lines, I should say-in his reading from the trial of Pickwick,” Dolby added, nodding his head. “It is like he is writing a new book in front of our eyes, which these pirates can now steal out of the air and profit from! What can we do, Mr. Osgood?”

“Your associate,” Osgood said, indicating Tom Branagan, “could escort any of these pencil-wielding John Paul Joneses out to sea, to start.”

“Yes. But it is unlikely we can stop all of them, even with such a brawny young man on our side,” Fields pointed out. “They have already seized some of the ‘new’ text in their notebooks!”

“I have an idea.” This was spoken timidly from the back of the room. It was a lanky young lad who had been patching a crack in the wall from a fallen picture frame.

Fields frowned at the interruption, but Osgood waved the young man closer. “My new shop boy, gentlemen. Daniel Sand.”

“If you'd permit me,” said Daniel. “You gentlemen have what the pirates do not: I mean Mr. Dickens himself. With his personally condensed copies, you may publish special versions of the editions at once.”

“But we wish to sell our editions of his work already printed, my lad,” Fields objected. “That is where the money is.”

Osgood smiled broadly. “Mr. Fields, I believe Daniel has a good notion. We can sell both. New special editions, in paper covers, will be unique. Memorabilia for those who attend the readings, and inexpensive gifts to their family and friends who could not get tickets to see Dickens. While the standard editions will still be sold for personal library collections. Excellent idea, Daniel.”

Rebecca, who was bringing a box of cigars for them to the Authors’ Room, had paused at the door and glowed at Osgood's praise for her brother.

ON THE WAY OUT of the office building on that day, pleased at the resolution, Dolby purchased several papers from a newsboy. “That Osgood is a genial man, Branagan, though with an almost grim smile,” he was saying. “Don't you notice? He smiles as if he does not believe anything he beholds. Oh, God! That I were but dead!” Dolby exclaimed upon opening one of the papers.

The article called “Dickensiana” described a floral offering left for Dickens at his second Boston reading by a young woman. Dickens does not live with his wife, it is said. This fact adds spice to this little story. The nice parties he gives are usually to several people largely of the female persuasion, all of whom were captivated by the Bozzian soup and sentences. Oh, Charles, at your age and with that bald head and that gray goatee!

In a different paper, a cartoon showed a haughty Dickens on the streets of Boston with a young boy running up to him. The boy held a large letter H-the letter dropped from most words by the cockney accent-and was shouting, “Hello mister, look-a-here, you've dropped suthin’.” It was not the first paper to mock his modest cockney origins.

“‘At your age,’ dear heavens! That would put him in a red hot fury for three days. On penalty of your life, don't let the Chief see them, Branagan!” Dolby stopped the next newsboy he could find and bought up every copy of the papers in his possession.

AFTER A SERIES of successful readings in Boston, the entire party took a nine-hour express train to New York, where it had been snowing heavily. Within a few days of their arrival, eighteen inches covered the ground, walls of white lining the sides of the streets. Dolby hired a sleigh for the Dickens party to use since the carriages could no longer get around. Dickens, whenever he left the Westminster Hotel, would resemble some kind of Old World emperor as he was pulled on the red sleigh, his lap piled high with buffalo robes to keep out the cold.

The New York World, in an article about how Dickens desired privacy, included his room number at the hotel. The article also noted rather disapprovingly Dickens did not use the mustard on the table once during his first dinner there. The Herald suggested that the scum of New York surround this visiting Homer of the slums and back alleys so that he could not slip out unnoticed as he had tried to do in Boston.

Tom arrived at the hotel with some of the late baggage and found Dickens and Dolby comforting an old woman who was sobbing tears of humiliation. The hotel detective stood over them.

Tom joined Richard Kelly, their ticket agent. “What happened?” Tom whispered.

Kelly explained that she was a widow who was very dear to the hotel landlord and had brought flowers to Dickens's room. As she was exiting Dickens's room, another woman appeared in the hall and started pummeling the widow with her fists. By the time the victim's shouts brought Dickens and a hotel waiter running, the other woman was gone.

“Imagine a poor little white-haired widow-one of the Majesty's admirers-attacked!”

“Why would that other woman have done that?”

“Because she was a little off her head!” concluded Kelly.

Tom, preoccupied with what had happened, left Kelly's side and went back to the hall.

“I don't know,” he could hear the crying widow saying. “She said I had awful daring to go into the rooms of Charles Dickens without escort like I was your wife. She just kept hitting me, first with her carpetbag and then her fists. Oh, Mr. Dickens!”

Dickens replied, “I am sorry for this. Queer it is that I should be perpetually having things happen that nobody else in the world would be made to believe.”

FOR THE NEXT SERIES of sales, Dolby had a plan to combat the speculators. Each ticket would be stamped with a unique number before it was sold, defeating reported counterfeiting attempts. With ten thousand tickets for the next New York sale, and then eight thousand for Baltimore and six thousand for Washington, this required many days’ work for Tom, Richard, and Marshall Wild, an unassuming American ticket agent hired to help them. The labor of the stamping kept waking Dickens, so Dolby moved the group into the hallway where they had to sit on the floor. Next, Dolby instructed his staff that the first fifty men on line for the tickets-who were always mostly speculators or their agents-should be sold tickets only for the back rows of the theater so that the speculators could not grab the best seats.

The papers, of course, printed reports of Dolby bullying the innocent New York citizens in his search for speculators and gleefully remarked that no “Dolby ex machina” would solve the problem. “Surely it is time that the Pudding-Headed Dolby”-preached the World- “retired into the native gloom from which he has emerged!”

This time the sale was to be held in Brooklyn and on a bitter day, colder than any they experienced in Boston. At eight o'clock in the morning, their sleigh arrived after being conveyed by ferry across the river. Dolby stepped down to the street with his case of tickets, followed by Tom, Kelly, and Wild.

“Good Lord,” Dolby swore to himself in a low whisper looking over the spectacle.

The line was three quarters of a mile long. Later it would be reported by the newspapers, in the aftermath of the incident about to transpire, as three thousand people. They had chosen the Plymouth Church for the reading as the only building suitable for the expected size of the audience. The pulpit had to be taken down to make room for the gas lighting and the screen.

The ticket staff was hassled by the crowd as they went.

“We'll buy you right up, Dolby, sleigh and all!”

“So Charley has let you have the sleigh, has he, Dolby? How's he feeling this morning? Writing a new book for us?”

“Let me carry the ticket portmanteau for you, Pudding-Head! Tell Dickens to take my wife back with him to the mother island if he don't want his no more!”

There were policemen and detectives already present trying to hold back the crowd. One of the police officers made his way to Dolby and whispered to him. Dolby nodded and headed to the ticket office to prepare for the onslaught.

During the night the Réaumur thermometer had dropped below zero. The men who had lined up stretched out on straw mattresses, drank cheap whisky, sang rowdy songs, built fires. Pocket pistols had been displayed to ward off latecomers hoping to steal spots.

The policemen had identified a large number of known speculators not only from New York but from Philadelphia, New Haven, and Jersey City as well. The speculators’ aides toasted to Dickens's health with bourbon whiskey and ate bread and meat they had been supplied in little bags by their employers. Included in the group was the speculator seen before, old in appearance yet quite energetic, in the outfit of George Washington. He was babbling about how Charles Dickens's visit was the most important affair in all American history. Coming from George Washington, this seemed rare praise.

“For we won't go home till morning, till daylight does appear!” The song started somewhere in the middle of the line and spread through the motley crowd. One fellow proposed a toast to the two men who had put their stamps on the civilization of the nineteenth century, “William Dickens and Charles Shakespeare. Let anyone deny it who dares!” he boomed.

Another man stepped out of the line and tapped Tom on the arm with his bamboo walking stick. “You! What do you mean by this?”

“I beg your pardon,” Tom replied.

“You mean to fix me next to two God darned niggers?”

Tom looked at the line behind the man and saw two young men with the slightest tinge of brown in their faces.

“You will sit in the church, sir, exactly where your ticket indicates,” said Tom.

“You'd better promise to move me, boy, if I'm next to one of these two!”

“I am certain Mr. Dickens would not recognize that objection,” Tom said evenly, his muscles tensing in preparation to restrain the man if he had to. “You may leave now if you'd like.”

The man, fuming and looking ready to pull out his hair, turned and walked away shouting epithets directed at Charles Dickens for holding open readings and Abraham Lincoln for freeing blacks to attend them. The two men in line both touched their hats in thanks to Tom.

Meanwhile, the police were extinguishing bonfires too close to the wooden houses along either side of the narrow street, eliciting a bluster of threats from the mob. Tom continued inspecting the line, struck by the endless representation of humanity. As had happened in Boston, the higher classes had employees or servants to hold their places through the night; as a result, around nine o'clock in the morning the composition of the line metamorphosed from caps to hats, from mittens to kid gloves and walking sticks.

Tom shifted attention to a woman who was staring inquisitively in his direction. Eyes cold and clear but dim, she stood outside the queue of people, almost as though she were undertaking the same sort of inspection as Tom's. She had a notebook and was writing pensively with a pencil stump, frowning in a way that seemed to indicate the permanent expression of her face. Was she another shorthand writer sent by the pirate publishers? The gazer flipped some pages to find a fresh one. One of her pages had a splotch of mud, or some sort of muddy footprint pasted on top.

“Do you wish to wait for tickets, ma'am?” Tom asked, approaching her and lifting his hat. “We do permit women in the line, or you may ask someone to wait on your behalf.” Just then some rowdy men in the queue burst back into song.

We'll sing, we'll dance, and be merry,

And kiss the lasses dear

For we won't go home till morning,

Till daylight does appear…

“Those horrid, vulgar, vulgar knaves,” the woman observed loudly of the ragged choir. She had removed a pearl-handled switchblade to sharpen the lead of her pencil. Tom noticed that for a small knife it had a smart blade. “Not the sort that would ever appreciate, truly, a Charles Dickens. I heard some of those knaves and fools quoting pas-sages to each other-quite wrongly. One said he was quoting Nickelby, but it was most obviously Oliver Twist! ‘Surprises, like misfortunes, seldom come alone.’

Something about her tugged at Tom's memory as he looked upon her. “Have you attended a reading by Mr. Dickens before?” Tom asked.

“Have I? Come closer. What's your name, dear boy?”

Tom hesitated, then leaned in to the woman and told her. She had a manly demeanor but pretty features covered up by the wide black feathered hat that was in fashion. He guessed she was around her fortieth year but she had the self-assurance of a sixteen-year-old belle or a seventy-year-old matron.

“Indeed I have been to his readings!” she suddenly said in an even bigger shout. “He adapts them for me, you know!” She paused, pursing her lips. “He changes the books as he reads, doing all manner of wild improvising for me. Dickens, I mean,” she said after testing the length of Tom's silence. “I daresay you think me very odd.”

“Ma'am?”

“You do!” she shouted. “There's one of those horrid, vulgar Americans, you say to yourself. Well, yes, it's true, I'm not a nice girl. I am an incubus, really. I'm part English, too, you know. But you're-you're from the potato lands, aren't you? You dream of want and woe, with buttermilk in your blood.” Suddenly she jumped as if it startled by thunder. She pulled a watch from her carpetbag. “I'm horrid late! I've just missed two appointments in the time we've spoken. Good-bye, au revoir.”

Tom moved on, suddenly realizing what had struck him about her. It wasn't the woman exactly, though he had seen her before among the crowds that always formed around Dickens. It was the notebook he had noticed: the paper of which was the same peach color and size-just the same, Tom was certain-as the letter left in Dickens's hotel room that he still kept. He retrieved that letter from his coat. The writer had claimed to be Dickens's favorite reader in all of these vulgar American states, words similar to the ones the woman had spoken. Tom turned back and saw she was heading away from the line.

“Ma'am,” Tom called out, and she began to walk more quickly. “Hold there. Ma'am!”

Then Tom heard his own name being called from a distance. He tried to ignore it-if this woman was who he thought she was, this might be his chance to put to rest his questions about the incident at the hotel. Tom waded through the throng, keeping sight of the feathers of her hat swaying above the landscape of people.

“Branagan!” It was another shout, louder, and there was no ignoring it. “B-B-Branagan!”

Tom looked over his shoulder and found that the previously small bursts of commotion in the line had erupted into a brawl. Combatants were thrashing one another hard with sticks from the bonfire and trampling over the fallen. In the middle of it all was a party of Brooklyn police and speculators. The police were swinging their batons against the sticks. Mr. George Washington staggered, his nose dripping blood and yanked-out strands of his white wig hanging from his ear. As the combat spread, several enterprising ticket seekers, faces bloodied, dragged their mattresses behind them and rushed to the front of the line for better spots.

Tom leaped into the heart of the fight, tackling one of the offenders, and liberated a policeman. A man screaming wildly swung a burning stick at Tom's head-Tom caught the stick in the middle, breaking it with his hand and then shoved the attacker into the snowbank. By this point, more police charged by with batons drawn, dragging rowdies away. Many wanted more than anything else just to keep their places in line by gripping the iron railing of the church fence as if their lives depended on it. To his astonishment, Tom noticed that several plainclothes detectives, instead of helping, used the disturbance to take their own prime positions in line.

The George Washington speculator was crying out in an outraged scream as he was being pulled away by his belt, “Hand out honors to a Cockney foreigner for his trashy literary pamphlets that were never given to our own homegrown heroes-our own democrats like Washington himself! The literary war between the Old World and the New World has begun!”

“Branagan, all r-r-right over here?” Dolby rushed to his side, breathless, eyes wide at all the men knocked down around his porter. He studied Tom with a new respect.

Tom was inspecting his palm, which had been burned by the flaming stick and would need to be wrapped right away. “What happened?” he asked Dolby.

“Disaster!” Dolby cried. With his stutter heavy from the fright, he explained they had begun the ticket sales by enforcing their new policy against the speculators. When it was understood that the first portion of the line were to receive tickets in the rear galleries, the hotheaded speculators protested and cursed vociferously, while the levelheaded ones bribed the men behind them to trade places. Those who were not speculators protested, as well. The various disruptions escalated into general mayhem up and down the line.

“Where were you?” Dolby said to Tom accusingly. “They wanted to tear me to p-p-pieces!”

Tom looked over his shoulder but knew that the woman with the notebook would be gone. There would be no point now in getting his employer's dander up. “I apologize, Mr. Dolby. I was inspecting the bonfires.”

“You should have been at the ready.”

“I am sorry, sir.”

Dolby straightened out his suit and neckcloth, though he remained the model of dishevelment. “Well, let's get on with it. There's at least two thousand dollars to be taken from this crowd, if there's a dollar! Isn't that the American way?”

AFTER A SET of readings in New York, the schedule required Dickens, Dolby, and staff in Boston. Because the snow had closed the railroad, they waited around until Saturday in New York, where they were subjected to the papers’ columns condemning the events at the Brooklyn ticket sales and blaming a “hotheaded Irishman” employed by Dickens for starting the near riot. This fact was confirmed by an unimpeachable “bewigged, buckled, three corner hatted witness,” the George Washington speculator who urged the police to arrest Tom at once. Meanwhile, Dickens had entered the depths of a worsening cold-“English colds are nothing compared to those of this country,” he proclaimed gravely-but Dolby privately worried it was worse, perhaps influenza. Another long train ride now would not help. Dickens signaled Henry Scott to remove a flask from the traveling case as soon as they took their seats.

Henry, meanwhile, prayed for Dickens before each journey by rail.

“Is anything wrong, Henry?” Tom asked him once when he had first noticed this display.

“Staplehurst!” Henry replied gloomily.

“Staplehurst?”

“Yes, only that. If there were but no Staplehurst at all-no June the ninth-perhaps the Chief should not be such a sad man.”

“He still seems rather gay to me,” Tom noted, “for what you call a sad man.”

“Don't you read the papers? Don't you know anything at all, Tom Branagan?”

He described how approximately two years earlier, on June 9, 1865, Dickens had nearly been killed. A terrible train accident near the village of Staplehurst in Kent. The railway tracks covering a bridge had been removed for repair without alerting the oncoming trains. Dickens and his party were aboard the “tidal train” from France, which, reaching the portion of missing track, careened off the bridge.

Dickens had lifted Nelly Ternan and her mother from their dangling first-class car to safety, and then the novelist climbed to the ravine below where he pulled out as many victims as he could. Despite his brave efforts, ten people died that day as the novelist watched helplessly. Dickens climbed back into the dangling train compartment twice during the ordeal. First to retrieve brandy for the suffering patients below. Then he realized however dangerous it was he had to climb back in again. Inside his coat was a new installment of the novel he was writing, Our Mutual Friend, the pages of which were dirty but unharmed. Forever after, whenever the novelist stepped foot in a railway car, a steamer, even a hackney cab, he could not help but be reminded that here could be our final passage on this earth. Brandy helped nerve him on these occasions.

“Staplehurst,” Henry repeated, and finished his story with a silent prayer. “Amen,” he said softly.

“Amen,” Tom echoed.

A stove heated the car they sat in on the way back to Boston, but it could not be said whether it made the compartment more comfortable or miserable when combined with the number of passengers and the rough motion. The nine-hour express route was slowed considerably by the rivers in Stonington and New London, both on the way through Connecticut. At each of these places the train navigated onto a ferry to cross the river, the passengers free to stay aboard or to explore the ship and eat at its restaurant. Dickens stayed on the train during these ferry rides, even when a nearby American war vessel unfurled a British flag and struck up a rendition of “God Save the Queen” in his honor. Dickens merely watched from the window.

His spirits seemed especially restrained on this passage as he played a slow game of three-handed cribbage with Tom and Henry.

“I remember,” Dickens said with sudden excitement to nobody in particular, “it was my first visit to America when-yes, that was when!-when I first practiced the art of mesmerism! Strange to say the railways seem to have stood still while most other things in this country have been changing for the better. They were terrible then and terrible now.”

“Mesmerism, Chief?” Tom asked. “You've done it yourself?”

“Ah, Branagan, spiritualism is nothing but a humbug, but the un-fathomed ties between man and man are as real, and as dangerous, as this very train being planted on a rickety boat.” Dickens described how he used lessons from the famed English spiritualist John Elliot-son to mesmerize his wife when in Pittsburgh in 1842. “I admit to feeling some alarm when Catherine fell into a magnetic sleep in under six minutes, though I was excited enough by the slap-up success to repeat it the following evening. When I returned to England I tried it on Georgy-my children's auntie, my sister-in-law, and my best and truest friend. Georgy, the sweetest soul, became almost violent over it.” Dickens laughed luminously at this memory but then was silent and spiritless again, perhaps at the thought of Catherine. He never would talk about Catherine, the mother of his eight children, even as he never really could talk about Nelly Ternan, and certainly would not stand for anyone else talking about either.

“Well, perhaps Mr. Scott has heard all this before,” he went on. “What do you say to a trial of my mesmerism skills, Mr. Branagan?”

“On me?” Tom asked.

“Great fun, Chief!” Henry called out.

“Come, come,” said Dickens with a businesslike air. “I have magnetized unbelievers before. I have the perfect conviction that I could magnetize a frying pan! You won't remember any of it when you wake, anyway.”

Tom sighed and submitted as Dickens passed his hand in front of Tom's eyes until they closed, then began to move his thumbs in a transverse motion across his face. Suddenly, he stopped, looking into Tom's face with an odd twinkle in his eye. The train was rocking back and forth.

“Chief?” Henry asked.

Tom opened his eyes to find the novelist's nostrils were dilated and his eyes restless. Dickens was no longer trying to mesmerize him at all. The jolts of the train had pulled his mind somewhere else.

“Perhaps, Branagan, this isn't the time to-” Dickens clutched the arms of his seat and turned pale white. Beads of sweat formed across his forehead every time the train shook, and his lips were trembling as if he were the one under a spell. This state of suspended animation lasted several minutes before the novelist returned to life and took a long pull from his flask. The three dropped the project of mesmerism and returned to the cribbage game just where it had been left. Tom was baffled.

After getting out at their station, Henry Scott whispered to Tom, as his only explanation, “You see? Staplehurst!”

THIS WAS THE MOST anticipated event of the reading tour. Dickens was to give his reading of A Christmas Carol on Christmas Eve at Boston's Tremont Temple. More than three thousand dollars of tickets had been purchased for the performance in less than two hours. “It is,” Dolby boasted with grandeur, when counting out the money from the sale back at Parker's, “as though the Chief invented Christmas with the Carol.”

Tom had not told Dolby what he now believed about the hotel invader: that he had stood face to face with the culprit in Brooklyn, that it was a woman, and that he had spoken with her. That all but certainly it was the same woman who committed the bizarre assault in the hall of the Westminster Hotel on the poor widow. Not only that, but Tom now remembered where he had seen her before-it had been the night of Dickens's arrival to America, in the dense crowd in front of Parker's, waving some papers she was demanding the novelist read. Tom knew his evidence would hardly be convincing, and could imagine Dolby's response: You think this lady, a lady you never saw in your life but once, followed us all the way to New York from Boston and back, and you think it because of her notebook? Could there not be another woman interested in Dickens's readings with a notebook that size, could there not be hundreds of people with hundreds of notebooks?

The woman had been dressed like a gypsy the night of Dickens's arrival to the Parker House, with a bandanna handkerchief tied around her neck and a too-small blue jacket. In Brooklyn, she wore a fine silk dress, sash, and shawl like an aristocrat. But what stuck out most in Tom's mind was the word she had called herself. An incubus. He had heard the fairy tales when he was a child from the other servants’ children in the underground kitchen of Dolby's estate-incubus and succubus, the demon visitors and tormentors of unsuspecting mortals. But it was succubus that was the female class and incubus the male. What had she meant?

Plenty of speculators and reporters had been following them from city to city but with naked motivation. It was the element of the unknown about this woman that began to disturb and preoccupy Tom. That image: a line for tickets, people who wanted nothing more than to see Dickens, and a woman standing outside of it, looking on jealously at the people she did not feel were worthy to see the Master. There was a dazzling, enthralling, unwanted air about her.

TWO MINOR EMERGENCIES occurred for their party back in Boston. First, the Chief could not find his pocket diary. The staff looked everywhere and could not turn it up. Dickens thought the last time he saw it was in New York in his hotel room. He insisted it didn't matter, since it was a record for 1867 and the year was about to end. He burned them at the end of each year, and this saved him the trouble.

Can she have taken it? Tom thought. Is that what she was doing lurking around the halls at the Westminster?

George Allison was the second emergency. He had fallen ill twice in the course of several days. It was discovered by the doctor at the Parker House that both times were preceded by a meal of bad partridge, who were often poisoned in the winter by berries when the bird's usual food supply was buried by snow. The substitute gasman, a nervous Bostonian, spent the afternoon of December 24, alongside the regular staff preparing the theater for that evening. He had received elaborate instructions at George's bedside, as though George were conveying his dying wishes. The newcomer was so eager to please Dickens he sprained his leg running up the stairs of the theater.

This provided an illustration of Charles Dickens taking charge of an emergency, which he did in high spirits and with relish. He walked the injured man with Tom to a druggist, where he ordered a particular type of mountain tobacco.

“Why, Mr. Dickens, you are like a doctor yourself!” the gasman exclaimed his appreciation, his cheeks aglow that he had been blessed enough to sprain his leg in such company.

“When you travel as often as I do, my boy, with as many men, you haven't much choice. Why, you should see the variety of blue and black phials and liquids waiting in my medicine chest. Laudanum, ether, sal volatile, Dover's powders, Dr. Brinton's pills. Trust your Chief. We live among miracles. This will heal you, body and spirit.”

That evening, when doors opened for the Christmas Eve reading, the galleries seemed to fill all at once. The two thousand went after their places so voraciously that the attendants and police at the doors scarcely had a hat or coat in place, and the decorative hollies and festoons had their red berries shaken loose and squashed underfoot.

“That's something!” one of the policemen said to Tom as they tried to keep some order. “Has it been like this for all the readings, or is this special for Christmas?”

“I suppose both,” Tom said.

“You're a Dubliner, aren't you?”

“My family is of Irish blood,” Tom agreed. “But I am English.”

“I can tell by your accent you're a Dubliner. Not that I pay any mind to it, you know. We have nearly forty of them on our force, you know. Say,” said the officer knowingly, “you weren't that same Paddy who started the riot at Dickens's ticket sale in Brooklyn as I read about?”

“You've read the wrong papers,” Tom said.

“No hard feelings, friend. Making conversation. Now, my wife, she adores your Mr. Dickens. I say, ‘Spend hard-earned money on something useful, just what we need another book in the house to sit on the shelf and take up space and be feasted on by the rats.’ She don't listen, says what do I know, only book I've read is the Good Book. ‘Tis true. 'Tis the best book there is. You a married fellow?”

As Tom turned around to answer, his eyes passing over a group of people walking by, he blinked in surprise: the same woman he had chased in New York. The incubus, this time, garbed once again in the clothes of a beggar.

“Don't know if you're married or not, fellow?” the policeman demanded. Then he laughed to himself. “But I understand Mr. Dickens doesn't know if he is, either. The man should be ashamed, if you ask me-I read he carried on with his own wife's sister. Shame!”

“Did you see that lady just now?” Tom asked.

“Lady?” the policeman responded. “There are a thousand people that just rambled in!”

The man was right-Tom had lost her in the surging mass. But he also knew this-she was in the theater, and he would have an hour to find her before the doors opened at intermission.

TOM BEGAN TO STALK through the sloping aisles as the audience members climbed over one another into their seats. He was stopped by someone grabbing his arm-Dolby. The manager was standing with a short, well-dressed man surveying up and down the theater. Tom had to think quickly. He did not want to lie, but he knew Dolby would not accept the truth; he'd probably give Tom his walking papers on the spot.

“The police are watching the doors, Mr. Dolby. I thought I should look for some of the known pirates we've seen here before.”

Dolby nodded his encouragement. “Well-done, Branagan. After the New Year, Mr. Osgood says the new condensed editions will put the freebooters out of business.”

Tom wished to be free of the manager, but Dolby didn't move. Instead, he took Tom's arm with one hand and the other man's arm with the other.

“Why, gentlemen, Mr. Aldrich was telling Osgood and myself the other day, the great Mr. Dickens, he was saying, the great Dickens has eyes when he is on the stage that are unlike any before in his experience, swift and kind, seeing what the Lord has done and what he intends. Eyes like exclamation points. This, you see, Mr. Leypoldt,” he said to the other man, “this is why we work so hard. You may explain this to your readers who have admired the performances. Because of the advances in transportation over the last years, the reading public has been allowed to know Dickens not only as an author but as a man with a voice, mannerisms, facial expressions. They have been able to come to know him as a person as had never happened before in the history of literature. We do our work for this!”

Dolby, glowing with pride, continued with his soliloquy to the reporter, but Tom, no longer listening, was searching the rows for any clue to the location and intentions of the incubus. By the time Dolby had released his grip on Tom's arm, the lights flickered and then went out, except for a dramatic silver splash on the platform, where Dickens emerged in front of the plain screen amid a deafening welcome of cheers and several rounds of applause.

“Ladies and gentleman,” Dickens said, “I am to have the pleasure of reading to you first, tonight, A Christmas Carol in four staves. Stave One: Marley's Ghost. Marley was dead to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon exchange for anything he chose to put his hand to! Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.”

Tom felt his survey was hopeless in the dark galleries. His only chance was to wait until the lights were on again at intermission. If she were here to make some kind of trouble like she had done with the widow at the hotel, Tom would be on his toes. He would be ready. And if she tried to escape, Tom would call out to the policemen positioned at the doors to stop her. There was no way she could get out.

Tom's darting eyes caught a quick motion in one of the aisle seats. It was another blasted shorthand writer, a rapid-fire pencil blazing away in the hands of rakish Esquire, the Bookaneer. With no time for niceties, Tom reached in, grabbed the pencil, and cracked it in half. Esquire protested at the unlawful seizure of his property. Tom obliged, dropping the two halves into the man's hat on the floor. Another of the piratical species sitting across the way, the former substitute soldier Molasses, paused his own shorthand writing, putting his pencil between his jagged teeth to applaud his rival's misfortune. On his way past, Tom slapped Molasses on the back. The pencil broke between the Bookaneer's teeth and landed in his lap.

Dickens, meanwhile, continued.

The scene: Christmas eve. Dickens acting the part of Scrooge, turned in pantomime to his poor clerk, snarling, “You'll want all Christmas day tomorrow, I suppose?” Then all at once he was the simple clerk, a shining timid smile, saying, “If quite convenient, sir. It's only once a year, sir.”

“Branagan!”

“A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December!”

“Branagan!”

Tom heard the familiar urgent whisper and located Dolby at the front of the theater. He looked white, as white as one of the ghosts in the Chief's story. The manager mouthed some words that Tom could not follow and gestured. Tom moved closer to the foot of the stage and his jaw dropped.

Dickens was lighted twelve feet above the platform by a large iron batten with gaslights suspended by strong galvanized wire. This cast a dramatic shadow on the dark crimson screen that stood behind the reader. The replacement gasman had mistakenly arranged the copper wires directly over the gas jets, causing the wires to become red hot. If the gas were to burn through, the iron batten would fall and could not only land on Dickens but tumble down into the audience.

If the emergency were announced, the crowd would panic and rush away all at once, not only raising the risks of knocking against equipment that could induce the wires to snap but also trampling women and children along the way. Even if the iron batten tumbled down and somehow missed the audience members in the front stall of the theater, a fire could start and swallow up the whole place in a matter of minutes. There was no question about it: Dickens had to keep reading as though nothing were wrong.

Tom looked back at Dolby and nodded his understanding. With the new gasman in his hobbled condition, there was no hope of him helping. Tom went to the far wing of the stage and found the extra wire. As he readied this, there was a commotion at the stairs that led to one of the balconied galleries. Tom, looking at the iron batten and then back at the stairs, sprinted toward the disturbance. Could it be her about to charge at Dickens with her knife? But it was a man who came down, shaking both of his fists.

The man grabbed Tom's coat sleeve as though desperate for assistance. “Who the deuce is that man on the platform reading?”

“Charles Dickens,” Tom replied.

“But that ain't the real Charles Dickens, the man whose books I've been reading all these years?”

“Yes!”

“Well, all I've got to say about it then is, that he knows no more about Mister Scrooge than a cow does of pleatin’ a shirt, not my ideas of Scrooge, anyhow.”

“I know him! Marley's ghost!” Dickens bit his fingernails just as Scrooge did in the story. He rubbed his eyes and stared at the apparition. The muscles in his face tightened, his face seeming to contort into that of an old man.

Tom raced to the far wing, climbing up the back stairs until reaching the cupola above the ceiling of the hall. Around him were glass panels on the walls giving views of the entire city and all the way to the harbor islands. Rows of square ventilators lined the cupola to continually expel the heat and air from below. Tom lay on the floor and lowered his head and arms through a network of gas piping that separated the cupola from the hall. He could see Dolby standing all the way down below, urging on Tom's mission.

“Mercy! Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?” Scrooge was demanding.

A young woman with bright red hair and a bright red dress in the front row, her gaze roaming to the iron gas fixture, audibly gasped. Dickens, pausing, looked over to her and gestured for her with a slight movement of his hand to remain calm. So the Chief had seen! He, too, knew they must prevent a panic; and this pretty girl who probably went through great pains for months to claim a seat right at the foot of her favorite author in the world, suddenly had to trust this same author with her life.

From a seat in the middle, another woman shrieked. Tom shuddered at the helplessness of his position and the realization that they were about to witness a mass panic-but then saw it was a young woman in mourning crepe, who was grieved hearing about Tiny Tim. An usher escorted the sobbing young mother from her seat gently.

Tom, meanwhile, stretched his arm down over the batten to turn the gas flame lower. Next, looking down to signal Dolby to be in position in case anything dropped, Tom supported the batten with one hand while he meticulously wound the wire roll around another part of the iron structure and began fastening the other end to a hook in the ceiling left there from some earlier performance. Rounds of laughter came in waves from the audience. Dickens took a sip of water from the glass at the side of his reading desk. As Tom attached the wire, his head and arms just barely sticking out from the ceiling in view of the audience-they might have noticed him, had they not been enraptured by Dickens-he looked out into the crowd and immediately saw.

In the back of the second gallery of seats. The incubus he sought! She was rummaging inside her carpetbag. Was she looking at Tom? Had she seen him looking at her from high above?

Tom's heart raced.

“Go on! Finish!” Dolby called up in a throaty whisper of despair. “Hurry, Branagan! Hurry!”

Tom wanted to be done more than Dolby could have known. Tom had nearly finished his work above when he realized: Dickens was at the end of his Christmas Carol reading. That meant intermission. The doors would open: and the incubus, who possibly had already seen him spot her, would be free to escape.

“And to Tiny Tim, who did not die…” (a roll of cheers like thunder) “And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, every one!”

A large object flew onto the platform and tumbled toward the speaker. Tom flinched. A bouquet of roses in every color.

His repair complete, Tom moved to go back down and found that his arm was lodged between two pipes. It would not budge. Below, Dickens closed his book and the audience broke into rapturous applause. Dickens bowed and left the stage.

Grimacing, Tom yanked his arm hard, cutting it on both sides on the old pipes as it pulled out. Righting himself, he hurried to the narrow stairs and descended as quickly as he could. The men and women rose from the seats as one-some to applaud, others to start toward the doors to get air, smoke, or exercise their legs before the second hour of reading. There was a blur of color as a woman vaulted herself onto the platform-no, not one, but four or five women, reaching their hands out to grab the geranium petals that had drifted down from Dickens's buttonhole during the reading.

Dolby came over to the side of the platform with a congratulatory smile directed toward Tom and a warmly extended hand, but Tom would not stop. As soon as he reached the hall, he broke into a blinding run up the steep floor of the theater, past the first gallery, to the second, and nearly leaping over two rows of seats he grabbed the woman's shoulders in a near embrace.

“You were the one who came into Mr. Dickens's room at Parker's?” Tom demanded.

She met Tom's accusatory gaze with her powerful stare. Then she smiled, and in a loud, irreverent voice, said, “You do think me odd!”

Tom could see the woman's carpetbag was stuffed with papers. He removed a few sheets. They were identical in size and type to the note he had found at Dickens's bed.

“It was you.”

She surrendered a slim smile. “You can see what nobody else does. Not my husband. You understand it. He needs me, the Chief, the Chief needs me. These others aren't fit for the likes of him at all.”

Tom was startled most of all by that one casual word: Chief. Boz, the Great Enchanter, the Inimitable, all were Dickens's nicknames with the worshipful public. But no one outside their circle called Dickens the Chief. How close had she been?

Suddenly her eyes turned dark and she sneered at him as though he had just spat on her. “You are the meanest and most unkind man.” Now she actually did spit at his face, with a look of disgust. “I have so many lots of friends, they are all more than kind to me and nobody who meets me forgets me. The Prince of Wales is a great, great friend and protector! The Chief shall be beloved again.” This last phrase she chanted to herself in eerily perfect imitation of Tom's light Irish brogue.

Tom now noticed that on the wooden back of the seat in front of hers, there were carvings. They were deep and had to be done with a knife. Words and phrases, quotes from Dickens's novels, ran into one another in mostly illegible patterns. The word Tom could make out by moving his fingers over the chair was “beloved.”

A crowd of spectators had begun to surround them by this point. Tom was digging through her carpetbag for the pearl-handled blade he had seen her holding in Brooklyn but stopped when he found a small pistol instead.

“It's not easy to love a man with the fire of genius,” she said confidentially, nodding toward the pistol. “His voice stays in my ears even when I don't want to hear it. ‘You have no idea what it is to have anybody wonderful fond of you,’ says he, ‘unless you have been got down and rolled upon by the lonely feelings.’

“Branagan?” Dolby cried, swimming upstream through the crowd. “Branagan, what is the meaning of this? People are pointing. Who is this woman? What are you doing, put that away! You'll cause a riot!”

The policeman who had stood guard with Tom earlier at the door also fought through the crowd with two officers behind him. Suddenly, they pushed Tom away.

“Stand aside!” one of them said.

“Officer,” Tom replied, “this woman entered Mr. Dickens's hotel room at the Parker House, I'd be bound she's the one who assaulted a widow in New York. She means him harm-there is a gun in there!”

The pistol was pulled from her bag by one of the policemen.

She nodded. “That is mine, Officer. Protection. In case anyone had in mind to steal my tickets for the reading. Now this is a spiteful-looking bald man, isn't it?” she said looking at Dolby. “Who are you?”

“You must take this woman away from Dickens immediately, officers,” Tom said.

“Thunder!” the policeman said with an astounded gasp at the situation, for a moment not knowing how to react. “Very sorry, Mrs. Barton,” he finally said, taking off his hat. He turned back to Tom. “You are a saucy Dubliner after all. Just like the newspapers said about your actions in Brooklyn. Haven't you any notion who this lady is?” he said, placing his emphasis on the word as a correction to a mere woman. “I hope for your sake she does not allege an assault.”

“See here!” Tom said, charging back toward her. “What does her name matter?”

“Mind our orders, Paddy boy, or I'll have to write to your mother to take you back home to look after the pigs.” The officer stepped in front of her to block Tom. “Stay away from her or we shall have to lock you up!”

“No need for that, Officer, no need at all,” said Dolby, taking Tom by the hand and lowering his voice to a whisper to hide the scene from any reporters. “A mere mistake on the good man's part. He'll re-turn to the hotel for the remainder of the reading.”

“Mr. Dolby!” Tom began to protest.

“Branagan!” Dolby growled. “Be silent now!”

“Oh, dear, all of that fuss over me. My property, sir?” Mrs. Barton said calmly. The police officer gave her the pistol. She took it, smiling eerily, and stored it in her strange carpetbag. “That Thomas is a sweet, sweet boy. He reminds me of a poem by… well, I can't remember by who. One of the tragic ones. There are too many poets these days.”

Dolby dragged Tom Branagan away through the aisles and tried to pull the porter's gaze away from the woman.

“Au revoir, Thomas,” she said with a wave. “As Mr. Weller says, ‘I came to look after you, my darlin’!’

“Keep Dickens away from her!” Tom called back helplessly to the policemen. “Keep Dickens away!”