The Last Dickens

Chapter 14

Kent, England, June 30, 1870

JAMES R. OSGOOD AND HIS BOOKKEEPER REBECCA SAND FOUND no welcoming party or waving of handkerchiefs for them when the steamer reached the port in Liverpool. Osgood had expected that John Forster, Dickens's executor, or Frederic Chapman, Dickens's English publisher, might send a coach to meet them at the docks after receiving word from Fields of the visit. Instead, Mr. Wakefield, their business-minded companion from aboard the ship, seeing they were stranded and on their own, gallantly arranged their transportation to Higham station in the Kent countryside. He warned Osgood to receive a rate from their driver before hiring it or they'd face extortion. Before they boarded the carriage, Wakefield also recommended they find lodging at an inn called the Falstaff, “a fine little establishment- also the only one!”

In the ancient country town of Rochester, within the quaint and narrow streets Dickens seemed to be everywhere. On passing the church cemetery, the first tombstone one saw read DORRIT-there, Osgood surmised, Dickens might have first thought out Little Dorrit ‘s story of greed and imprisonment. A shingle above a store on High Street spelled out BARNABY-and somewhere to match perhaps, there was “Rudge.”

Osgood thought about Dickens's popularity. People had gone to church to pray for Little Nell, they had cried for Paul Dombey as though for their own son, they cheered-how they cheered at Tremont Temple-when Tiny Tim was saved. His books became real for everyone who read them, whether the humble laborer in the Strand or the patrician in Mayfair. That is why even those who never in their life read any novels, would read his.

Their carriage slowly mounted a steep green hill to the summit where there stood an inviting white building bathed in rustic summer charm. The faded sign of the house was painted with Shakespeare's obese character of jolly Falstaff with Prince Hal, and a scene of Falstaff stuck inside a laundry basket while the Merry Wives laughed. The inn was located on rolling meadows directly opposite from the wooden entrance gates to the grand Dickens estate, known by the name Gadshill Place.

They were greeted on the steps by the landlord of the inn, whose appearance made them stop in their tracks. Solidly built, though not quite fat, he was dressed in large, brightly colored Elizabethan garments padded for good measure. His puffed-up velvet cap carried a small bird's worth of wilted feathers. He said to call him either Falstaff or “Sir John” and held a goblet of beer ready to toast any trifle in his sights.

“You may eat us out of house and home and still be welcome,” he said. “That is the motto of the Falstaff Inn!”

“I wonder if all English landlords wear such costumes,” Rebecca whispered to Osgood as the landlord and a lad transported their trunks.

“Come, Sir Falstaff will show you to your rooms!” exclaimed the merry landlord.

The next morning, John Forster, having received word of their arrival, met them in the coffee room while they recovered from their Atlantic voyage over eggs, broiled ham, and coffee. Though wearing an expensively tailored suit of the London style, Forster was himself a more genuine Falstaffian figure, with a globular body, slow movements, and the face of a spoiled child. Unlike the innkeeper there was no gaiety about this Falstaff.

“And this would be Mrs. Osgood?” Forster asked, extending his hand.

Osgood rushed to correct him, explaining her position as bookkeeper.

“Ah, I see,” Forster replied gravely, removing his hand from hers hastily and then sitting at the table. “Then you are in mourning for a husband,” he declared oracularly of her dark outfit.

“For my brother, actually, sir. My brother Daniel.”

Forster knit his brow in consternation, not at the potential of embarrassing the young lady but at his being wrong twice. “Hail to America, I suppose, to have blushing young girls trail along at your side as bookkeepers! A fine thing, that.”

At this point, one of the waiters came over and whispered into Forster's ear, “That's against the rules in the coffee room, sir.”

Forster took the cigar he was half smoking and half chewing out of his mouth and looked at it as if he had never seen it before. Then he rose to his feet and shouted, “Leave the room, rascal! How dare you, sir, interfere with me! Clear out, and bring this gentleman and lady some cakes with their breakfasts!” With the waiter taking flight, the visitor resumed his place.

“No cakes for me, though, Mr. Osgood, as I have already breakfasted, thank you,” Forster said, without having been offered any. “I wake at five every morning before even my footboy for taking your morning meal at once aids the labors of digestion and staves off sickness. Now, on to the little matter of your business, shall we?”

After Osgood explained their wish to examine Dickens's private belongings, Forster curtly said he would return to Gadshill and discuss the matter with its residents. He returned across the road to the Dickens estate shortly thereafter. An hour later, Osgood and Rebecca received a note on black-bordered mourning paper that they were welcome to Gadshill at their convenience.

“Perhaps I should stay here at the inn,” Rebecca suggested as she finished writing a note back accepting the offer. “Mr. Forster seemed rather, well, ungenial toward me.”

Osgood did not want to make her self-conscious, though she was correct. “He is ungenial in general. Remember, he was one of Mr. Dickens's closest friends. His spirits cannot be whole, after such a loss,” he said. “Come, Miss Sand. With a bit of luck we may secure our information and have some leisure time to do something very English around London, too, before we leave.”

On the outside, the redbrick Dickens family home was austere but still welcoming-stone steps leading up to a spacious portico where the large clan would once have gathered. Towering oaks formed the boundaries around the property where boys used to run and play, which gave way to wilderness beyond the gardens and now-empty cricket fields that the master of the house had made available to the townspeople for matches.

Walking through the fields felt like a walk through the legends of the novelist's life. Charles Dickens had written about first seeing the house when he was a very young child but still old enough to be aware of how poor his own family was. Before his troubles with debt that brought him to prison, John Dickens would take his queer small boy to look at Gadshill from the street. If you were to be persevering and work hard, and mind the study of your books, you might some day come to live in it, he'd say to the boy, though the father himself was not persevering and never worked hard.

Two big Newfoundland dogs, a mastiff, and a St. Bernard raced around from the side of the house. A tinge of disappointment seemed to pass through each animal's body upon seeing Osgood and Rebecca. One canine in particular, the largest among them, tilted his handsome head slowly with a devastated air that was heartbreaking. The head gardener called out and the dogs bounded as a pack back to the stable yard, then listlessly tiptoed into a cool tunnel, which led to the other side of the road.

Considerably less life awaited them inside Gadshill. The house, in fact, was being drained of it before their eyes. Some workmen were removing paintings and sculptures from the walls and tables; other somber-faced intruders in silk vests and linen suits were examining the furniture and prodding each object and fixture. The atmosphere was completed by a melancholy rendition of Chopin on piano floating on the air.

A workman lifted an oval portrait of a little girl as Forster led Osgood and Rebecca through the entrance hall to the threshold of the drawing room.

“You cannot visit Gadshill,” he suddenly announced with a gouty frown that was even less friendly than his demeanor at breakfast.

“What do you mean, Mr. Forster?” Osgood asked.

“Do you not see it with your own eyes, Mr. Osgood? Gadshill is no more-not how it was. A blasted auction of his possessions takes place next week and they are dismantling everything in sight,” Forster said, angrily waving his arms. Then he turned and cast a hard gaze at the better dressed invaders. “These other men, who are arranging the remains of the place with artificial homeyness, are the representatives of a different auction firm that will sell the very house you stand in to the high bidder. In tol-er-able, every bit!” Whenever the executor spoke, it was as if he had memorized the words beforehand, and now were reciting them to an investigating commission set to put an old enemy out of public office.

“Must every single thing in the house be sold, Mr. Forster?” Rebecca asked with genuine sadness.

“Don't tell me, young lady! Absolutely everything to the last doornail, don't I know it!” Forster cried out accusingly, as if Rebecca herself had just decreed the destiny of the place. “The Dickens family is very large,” his voice dampened into a loud whisper, “and his many sons, like him in no aspect but his name, lead expensive, wasteful lives. Of his two daughters, one is married to an invalid painter who is Wilkie Collins's brother-which is worst, I don't know, to paint, or to be crippled, or have Wilkie Collins as a relative? The other girl, though passing comely, has never married. No, without the income of future books, Gadshill cannot stay as it was.” He looked out over the meadows outside and waited for Osgood and Rebecca to do the same before continuing. “The land out there shall be remembered for three things. First, for Sir Falstaff robbing travelers with Prince Harry and the local vagabonds. Second, for Chaucer's pilgrims who passed along the way to Canterbury. And, third, for the most popular novelist that ever lived. Of the first item, your buffoon of an inn keeper has made a mockery already for the sake of profit. I shall always say ‘William,’ the man's rightful Christian name, if only to gall him. Pray there not come a day where some cheap landlord dress like one of Mr. Dickens's characters, or I should as soon have my eyes torn out by the old raven Mr. Dickens used to keep as his pet.”

Osgood thought it an opportune time to interject with a question, but Forster put an imperial hand on his shoulder and steered him.

“There: that watercolor the workman is bringing through now from the dining room. That, Mr. Osgood and Miss Sand-is that the name, little dear?-that is a painting of the steame r Britannia that Mr. Dickens sailed on in his first trip to America, the fourth of January, 1842. That will be discussed in chapter nineteen of my Life of Dickens. Hold that up higher, you, men, don't let that frame's corner damage the wall!”

Osgood felt a sharpness, a recrimination in the word America.

“I hope you'd agree that Mr. Dickens's second tour of America,” Osgood said, “was a verifiable success.”

Forster laughed grimly and wrung his hands out as if squeezing wet laundry. “Monstrous thought! Your tour left Mr. Dickens ill, hobbled in his foot, drained of all life with which he parted from our shores! I fully opposed his going, as I said at the time to that gold-hungry gorilla Dolby. If American readers had not taken Mr. Dickens's books without paying any authors’ fees for so many years, if they had made us part of your copyright laws, he oughtn't ever needed the extra income. To think of everyone prancing around calling Mr. Dickens ‘Chief like he was an Indian savage-!”

“Charles liked to be called Chief, if I recall,” a female voice interrupted. “With the many things to make us sad, we can at least be happy he still had enough vigor for travel.”

The voice from above belonged to an elegant and slender woman a few steps past forty years old coming from upstairs.

“May I present to you, Miss Georgina Hogarth,” muttered Forster indifferently to their guests. “My fellow executor to the house and all its possessions.”

“Please call me Aunt Georgy. Everyone at Gadshill does,” she said in a soothing tone that overthrew Forster's shrillness.

Osgood knew her by name to be Dickens's sister-in-law. Even after Catherine, Charles Dickens's wife, moved away from Gadshill, Aunt Georgy was the novelist's confidante and housekeeper, and a mother to her two nieces and six nephews. The separation between Dickens and Catherine was never an official divorce-the novelist of domestic harmony could not afford so permanent a stain on the public record. Dickens's novels celebrated the family and the ideals of loyalty and forgiveness. The audience expected him to be an exemplar for the same.

Dickens and Georgy became so close that other members of the Hogarth family, furious that she had supported Charles, were even said to have repeated wicked slanders that he'd seduced her. It did not help allay the whispers that the lovely Georgy never married.

Osgood recalled that Harper's magazine had been only too pleased to sell copies by importing the rumors about Dickens and Georgy back to America. To make the affair still more notorious, a young lady, Mrs. Dickens's sister, has undertaken to “keep house” for Dickens, the magazine had commented when Catherine had moved away more than ten years before. The whole affair is very repugnant to our idea of matrimonial constancy.

“Thank you both. I can see well enough you are quite occupied without our intrusion,” said Osgood.

“In truth, Mr. Osgood, we only wish there were more guests who were not dreadful auctioneers or house seekers tramping up and down the stairs.” Aunt Georgy had a ready smile that brought to mind a picture of the lively household as it used to be. “Shall we?”

In the drawing room, a matronly and attractive young woman approximately of Osgood's age sat caressing the keys of the rosewood piano. She wore a fashionable mourning dress, weighed down by elaborate mourning jewels, and played with an abstracted air.

Osgood, momentarily distracted by the music and its performer, introduced their mission to his hosts. “Our firm is set to publish The Mystery of Edwin Drood in America. Yet back home we are surrounded by literary pirates, who will use the impunity that comes with Mr. Dickens's decease to plunder the text for themselves.”

“Typical Americans!” Forster intoned. “Greed comes in abundance in Yankee-doodle-dom.”

“There is plenty of it here, too, Mr. Forster,” Georgy chided Dickens's friend.

“Because of the peculiarity of our laws,” continued Osgood, “we will be in a rather bad way if the pirates issue their cheap copies. We had relied upon expectations of a success for our firm-and of course for royalties to Mr. Dickens, mandated by our morals though not by our laws. These would go to you and your family now,” he said, turning to Georgy. “That shall never be able come to pass if Dickens's wishes that we are his exclusive publisher vanish with his death.”

At this point in the interview, a small white blur, which turned out on closer inspection to be a Pomeranian dog, flew across the room and landed at Osgood's feet. She gave a sharp bark for Osgood, but when he reached down, she shook her muzzle and barked at him with recrimination. The piano-playing woman came to a discordant stop and lifted her wide skirts as she rushed over. The musician, throwing back her mourning veil to show her face, was presented as Mamie Dickens, the novelist's first daughter, the one Forster had dismissed as comely and unmarried.

“I am very sorry for her behavior, Mr. Osgood,” Mamie said shyly. “That is Mrs. Bouncer, she is a sweet creature but truly like Mephistopheles’ little dog when she is angry. Like a true well-mannered young woman of England, she does not ever tolerate a man reaching for her. She likes to be petted by a man's foot instead.”

Mrs. Bouncer went round and round Osgood with an asthmatic barking. Osgood exchanged a quick glance with Rebecca, who seemed to want to laugh but suppressed the urge. Osgood unfastened his shoe and, Mrs. Bouncer immediately flopping over, scratched the dog's stomach with his foot.

“Oh, isn't that lovely!” Mamie exclaimed as she bit her bottom lip with emotion. “That is everything she has been missing. Oh, no-must that go, too?” she said, spinning around, distracted. A workman was wrapping a pink tazza taken from the mantelpiece. “I did always admire it when I was a little girl. Can I stop that terrible work person, Auntie?” she whispered.

“I'm very sorry, Mamie, you know we can only afford to keep what is necessary.”

Osgood passed a look of sympathy at Mamie. Rebecca watched Osgood as he watched the piteous young Miss Dickens. For a few moments, the three were as captive and uncertain as figures in a sketch.

“We were hoping,” Osgood said, returning to their topic, “there might be more pages that have been found here for The Mystery of

Edwin Drood, beyond the six installments that Mr. Forster has sent us in Boston.”

Georgy shook her head sadly. “I am afraid there are not. The ink on the final slips of paper of the sixth installment was still drying at his desk when he had his collapse. I saw it myself.”

“Perhaps there are memorandums or fragments? Or private correspondences about his plan for the rest of the novel that could satisfy a reader's natural curiosity.”

“It might have been possible,” Georgy replied. “But Mr. Dickens burned his letters periodically and asked his friends to do the same. He had a great horror of the improper uses often made of the letters of celebrated people. I can recall years ago when he had a bonfire and the boys roasted onions on the ashes of letters of great men like Tennyson, Thackeray, Carlyle.”

“Tell me, Mr. Osgood,” Forster interrupted with a strange, contemptuous expression, “what good would notes on the book do you, even if there were any, without Charles Dickens to write the chapters themselves?”

“All the good in the world, Mr. Forster!” Osgood answered, adeptly bounding over Forster's negative tone. “If we could publish a special edition that exclusively reveals to American readers how Mr. Dickens's mystery was truly to be ended, we could overtake our swindling competition. But we have only a brief time to spend in England to find answers-or it shall be for naught. The pirates will have their hands on the rest of the known installments on the first of next month, and shall print the book to sell everywhere under the sun.”

“What do you mean, Osgood?” Forster leaned over with a distrustful scowl. He gripped the arms of the chair with his massive hands as though without such restraint he might fly at Osgood's throat. “Incredible! What do you mean when you said ‘how it was truly to be ended’?”

Osgood and Rebecca exchanged curious glances at the executor's heated reaction. “I mean, sir, how the mystery of the novel was to come out in the end.”

“Well, you don't have to tell me! That's clear enough, I think! John Jasper, the audacious villain of the book, leading his secret life of depravity, has cruelly killed his innocent nephew Edwin Drood. Isn't that most obvious to anyone with two eyes?”

“It certainly seems like it at the end of the sixth installment, yes,” Osgood agreed. “Yet our senior partner, Mr. Fields, has pointed out that Dickens might have had some other surprises behind the scenes for his reader in the subsequent six parts. Mr. Dickens did say in a letter to our offices that the book would be ‘curious and new.’

Forster shook his head. “Jasper was to confess his crime-this was the ‘curious and new’ notion of it. Why, Dickens told me himself.”

“Mr. Dickens told you?” asked Osgood.

Forster crossed his arms square over his chest and pushed out his thick lips in displeasure. “Perhaps I did not express my relationship with Mr. Dickens very clearly to you, Mr. Osgood. The annals of our friendship, perhaps, were not as celebrated across the ocean as they are here. I do not flatter myself to say that Mr. Dickens and I were on the closest terms, and though I am afraid he was not as open to counsel in regard to points of personal conduct, he confided nearly every detail of his books to me.”

“Well, he told me nothing about how the novel would end, even though I asked days before he died,” Georgina said, looking at Forster with suspicion.

“You asked him, too, Aunt Georgy?” Rebecca asked.

“Yes, dear. After I heard the installments read aloud to us as he wrote them, I said to him, ‘Charles, I hope you have not really killed poor Edwin Drood!’ He answered, ‘Georgy, I call my book the mystery, not the history, of Edwin Drood’-but he would not say more.”

“Monstrous!” Forster exclaimed, his broad brow now creased and snarled. “I wring my hands! Preposterous! That could mean anything, Miss Hogarth! Couldn't it?”

Georgy ignored the objection. “Mr. Osgood, Miss Sand. If you would like to look at the papers on his desks for yourselves, you are quite free to do so. In the summer months, he liked to write in our Swiss chalet. That is where he was working on his last day before coming inside the house and collapsing. A second desk stands in his library. I have not had the strength to do anything more than to keep his desks and drawers orderly.”

“Thank you, Aunt Georgy,” Osgood said.

“If you find anything that would help, we shall rejoice with you,” said Georgy.

Forster refolded his stumpy arms at the sentiment.

Osgood and Rebecca, led by an undergardener, crossed under the high road by the brick tunnel where the four big dogs lounged. A separate Swiss-style wooden chalet stood hidden by shrubbery and trees. In this small wooden sanctuary, they climbed a winding staircase to the top room.

THE REMOVED QUIET of Dickens's chalet was untouched by the auction preparations. On the walls of the summer study were five tall mirrors that reflected the trees and cornfields all the way down to the river in the distance and its faraway sails. The shadows of the clouds seemed to drift across the room.

“I can see why Mr. Dickens prized this place to write, away from everything else,” Rebecca commented when they entered.

At an open window stood an expensive telescope. Osgood pressed his eye against its lens. Deep in the meadows by the hop fields was a tall, hatless man with wild hair who somehow seemed to be looking up into their window. Osgood shifted the telescope to the hilltop and found the Falstaff Inn and could see its proprietor out by the stables. As he combed the mane of one of the horses, the landlord pinched his eyes as though in a fit of dreamy melancholy. It seemed every corner of the world around Gadshill had been made bleak by Dickens's death.

The register on the desk was still on June 8, the day Dickens had last sat and wrote. Also crowding the desk were several quill pens and inkwells, a memorandum slate, various trinkets including two bronze frogs, and a stack of slips of blue stationery covered with writing in blue ink.

“This is it,” Osgood said with awe of the latter object, sitting on the dusty chair. “The first six installments of The Mystery of Edwin Drood in his own hand, with corrections from the printer in the margins.” He gently fingered the edges of the pages. Dickens's handwriting, not always neat, was strong and dynamic. It did not seem to be written to be read by anyone other than the writer-printers and compositors be damned. Usually when Osgood saw the working space of one of his authors, the revelation was purely mechanical, like visiting the dusty floor of a factory. It had become too common, in fact, that when he finally met an author he had held in high esteem, the result was disappointment in the ordinariness of the person behind the words. But with Dickens there had always been a magical feeling, as though Osgood were not the seasoned publisher of Boston but once again a college lad from Maine or that shop boy on his first day in the Old Corner in an India rubber apron streaked with ink. To this day, even with Dickens now gone, he was still excited to be Dickens's publisher.

“Are you ready?” Osgood asked, inhaling it all. “Let us begin, Miss Sand.”

Time for the researchers over the next few days was broken up by short respites and occasional interruptions from the outside world. The most notable one came as they continued the next morning. They had by this point found a few small gems in the vast spread of materials. Osgood had discovered an early page of Dickens's notes that listed titles before the novelist had settled on The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Flight and Pursuit, One Object in Life, Dead? or Alive? He had been dictating these to Rebecca before he stopped in midsentence.

“Mr. Osgood?”

“My apology, Miss Sand. My eye was drawn away by that. Rather grotesque little thing, isn't it?” On the chimneypiece, there sat a light yellow plaster figure. It depicted an Oriental man with a jaunty fez smoking from a pipe, sitting cross-legged on a settee. Osgood picked it up and held it out at arm's length as he examined it. It was heavier than it looked.

Just then, a man rushed up the stairs of the chalet and into the study. The intruder wore a ragged suit and wild uncovered hair over a sunburned face. It was the same man the publisher had seen through the telescope walking through the hop fields the day before. His mouth was agape as though in some kind of sudden terror, and he grabbed Osgood's arm.

“Do you need some help, sir?” Osgood said.

The man studied the publisher with searching eyes. He held out his other hand to Osgood and kept it outstretched.

Cautiously, Osgood put his own hand up to shake. The stranger grabbed it with both hands and pressed hard. Rebecca gasped.

“Yes, I see it! You are. You are. You are ready for it!” the man sputtered out, when one of the Gadshill servants burst in.

“Come on now.” The mustachioed servant removed the invader by the ear like a misbehaving child. “Come on, old fellow. That's enough of that beastly behavior. They are at some important work. Very sorry, sir, miss. I'll see to it he won't bother you again.”

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Osgood took the one-hour train into London while Rebecca continued their research. Using the map from his guidebook, he reached the offices of Chapman & Hall, Dickens's English publisher. The day of their arrival, Osgood had sent a messenger with his card and a note asking for an interview but had yet to receive a reply. Osgood did not have the luxury of waiting if their stay in England was to succeed in time.

But there would be more waiting at the busy Piccadilly offices of the publishing firm. Today was Magazine Day, when every publisher, printer, binder, and bookseller in London scrambled to release the latest journals and periodicals to readers. In the case of Chapman & Hall, this meant the latest serial installment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Messenger boys stuffed their sacks with pale green-covered pamphlets of the installment to deliver all across the city and to the country towns to book stands and stalls, shouting instructions at each other. On the first of the next month, the next Magazine Day, the final installment in the London publisher's hands would be printed and sold to the hungry public-and the pirates back in America would have all they needed.

Osgood, as he watched the mayhem of clerks and messengers, noticed that the mere mention of the name Mr. Chapman, the head partner, caused bowed heads and darting eyes among the man's employees. He had been kept sitting in the anteroom for an hour when broad-shouldered Chapman appeared in a sporty outfit.

“Terribly sorry, old boy,” he said after Osgood presented himself. “Must run to the country to go shooting with some capital people-terrific bores, really, but capital-will you call another time?”

Osgood gave one more long look at Chapman's office and staff before starting back, with a rising feeling of futility, to Rochester. Taking a buggy from Higham station, Osgood found reliable Rebecca still hard at work in the Gadshill chalet.

After another two hours, the men from Christie's auction firm came in to finally break up the quiet of the chalet. The workers snatched up the Oriental statue and the other salable effects inside Dickens's sanctum. The men were accompanied dutifully by Aunt Georgy, who gave them instructions.

Georgy shook her head in dignified frustration as they did their work. “I suppose it is impossible to try to pretend things haven't changed forever. How empty the world feels now!”

“Where will you go once you sell Gadshill, Aunt Georgy?” Rebecca asked.

“Mamie and I must look for a small house in London, though my mind frets at the long, bitter winters in the city.”

“I believe you and Mr. Dickens will always be part of this land, no matter what,” Osgood said. “No matter where you go.”

Georgy looked hard at Osgood. “I must confess that my role as executrix is new for me-not in managing the children's careers, for that has been my life's devotion. But in reading documents and contracts.”

“I can imagine the strain,” Osgood replied.

“I've learned too quickly it is rare to meet a man of business who can wear an honest face. Forgive me, but I wonder if I might trouble you while you stay in Rochester. Would you consider looking over Mr. Dickens's will if I left a copy with the Falstaff?”

“It would be my honor and pleasure,” Osgood said, standing up and bowing, “to repay your kindness.”

“Thank you. It will put me at ease to have an hour of time to ask someone questions-someone other than Mr. Forster, to be perfectly candid. I feel, for one thing, such an infant around him! As if I had no power of free will of my own when he is near.”

They became quiet when a heavy tread ascended the stairs. Then came the burly form of Forster, who yelled after the departing auction men to remember the value of what they had in their unworthy hands.

“Superfluous creatures,” Forster concluded, turning to the desk, where his eyes landed on the stack of blue sheets. He rubbed his hands together. “Ah, there it is! All of the manuscripts of Mr. Dickens's books, you see, Mr. Osgood, were left by order of his will to be given into my care.”

Forster, with two careful, trembling hands, grasped both sides of the manuscript of Drood and picked it up. His reverence was touching, if excessive.

“This is the last of them in the house, I think?” Forster asked Aunt Georgy.

“It is the last of his manuscripts here,” Georgy said, sighing. “The last anywhere.”

With the manuscript safely lodged in his case, Forster's eye now darted across the desk to a particular quill pen. It was a long goose's feather, white and wavy, the nib stained in dried blue ink.

“That's it, isn't it?” he asked.

Georgy nodded.

Rebecca asked what it was.

“That is the pen with which he wrote The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Miss Sand,” answered Georgy. “Charles liked to use a single pen for a single book-there was a purity about it that way. He did not want the pen's spirit mixed up in trifling bills and sundry checks. With this, he finished the novel's sixth installment, just before coming into the house.”

Osgood asked if he could see the pen. He picked it up and turned it over in his hand, then gripped it as if on its own it might finish the final six parts of Drood.

“Shall I,” Forster began, licking his plump cracked lips, “keep it at my office?”

Georgy cleared her throat pointedly.

“Just for now,” Forster clarified, clearing his own throat as an answer to her gesture. “Until you decide what you shall do with it, Miss Hogarth. Then you may-well, you may throw the thing into the Thames if you wish!”

“Keep it for now,” Georgy agreed, at which point Forster eagerly plucked the Drood pen from Osgood's hand, deposited it into his case, and fled down the stairs without bidding any farewells.

Chapter 15

IN THE MORNING, OSGOOD AND REBECCA HAD PLANNED TO SEP-arate, Osgood to try again at Chapman & Hall in London and Rebecca to continue the labors at Gadshill. At the last moment, Osgood called Rebecca back to the Falstaff's wagon. He looked at her with a curious air. “I think you ought to come to London with me this morning, Miss Sand. If Mr. Chapman does concede to see me, I should like you to take down notes.”

Rebecca hesitated. “This shall be my first time in London!” she exclaimed, then held in her excitement with her typically neutral air. “I shall get my pencil case.”

“Good thing,” Osgood said. “Your eyes could use a respite from reading over Mr. Dickens's papers, I'm certain.”

After arriving at the Charing Cross station in the Strand, Osgood and Rebecca, in the shadows of theaters and shops, walked through the astounding number of street performers and merchant booths on every corner, which made Boston seem quiet by comparison. Rebecca's eyes danced at all the sights. The shouting peddlers held up repaired shoes, tools, fruit, puppies, birds-anything that could be offered for a few shillings. The variety of accents and dialects made every English peddler's vocal promotions seem yet another different language to the American ear.

“Do you notice something strange about the peddlers?” Osgood asked Rebecca.

“The sheer noise they create,” she replied. “It is quite an astonishing thing.”

As they spoke, they passed a Punch and Judy show. The wooden marionettes pranced across the small stage, Judy hitting Punch over the head with a cudgel. “I'll pay yer for a throwin’ the child out the winder!” shouted puppet Judy at her puppet spouse.

“Look again,” Osgood said. “There is something stranger than the noise, Miss Sand, and that is that London businessmen do not seem to notice the roar of the streets at all! To live in London, one must possess an iron concentration. That is how it remains the richest city in the world. Here we are,” Osgood said, pointing to a handsome brick building ahead displaying the CHAPMAN & HALL sign in the window.

This time when Chapman marched through the anteroom, he paused and took a few small steps backward upon seeing the guests on the sofa. The ruddy-skinned English publisher, with his strapping deportment and sleek dark hair combed into a flashy split across his wide head, looked the part of a sportsman and man of leisure, far more than that of a bookman.

“Say, visitors I see,” said Chapman, though his eyes were fixed not on both visitors, but on Rebecca's slender form. Finally, he resigned himself to also noticing the gentleman.

“Frederic Chapman,” Chapman announced himself, extending a hand.

“James Osgood. We met yesterday,” Osgood reminded him.

Chapman squinted at the visitor. “I remember your face vividly. The American publisher. Now, this little woman is…”

“My bookkeeper, Miss Sand,” Osgood presented her.

He took her hand gingerly in his. “You are most welcome into our humble firm, my dear. Say, you will come in with us to my office for my interview with Mr. Osgood, won't you?”

Osgood and Rebecca followed a clerk who followed Chapman in the procession into his private office. The room displayed some expensive books but a greater number of dead, stuffed animals: a rabbit, a fox, a deer. The frightful artifacts emitted a stale, bleak odor and each one seemed to stare in dumb loyalty only at Mr. Chapman wherever he moved. The office had a large bay window; however, instead of looking out onto London, it overlooked the offices and rooms of Chapman & Hall. Periodically, Chapman would turn his head to make sure his employees were hard at work. One of his harried clerks delivered a bottle of port to the meeting with a bow that was more like a spontaneous wobbling of the knees.

“Ah, excellent. I presume you and Mr. Fields have a wine cellar back in Boston,” Chapman commented as two glasses were filled.

“Subscription lists and packing supplies fill our cellar.”

“We have an extensive one. A game larder, too. Thinking of adding a billiard room-next time we'll play It is always a pleasure to see a colleague from the other side of the water.”

“Mr. Chapman, I suppose you have already thoroughly investigated what else might remain of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. We would benefit greatly if you'd share whatever intelligence you have gained.”

“Investigated? Why, Mr. Osgood, you speak like one of the detectives in all the new novels. You tickle my belly with your American notions.”

“I don't mean to,” Osgood returned seriously.

“No?” Chapman asked, disappointed. “But what would be investigated about it?”

Osgood, flabbergasted, said, “Whether Mr. Dickens left any clues, any indications about where his story was to go.”

Chapman interrupted with a satisfyingly hearty laugh, proving the alleged tickling. “See here, Osgood, old boy,” he said, “you are a laugh in the real American fashion, aren't you? Why, I'm perfectly content with what we have of Drood. Six excellent installments.”

“They are superb, I agree. But if I understand correctly, you paid quite a sum for the book,” Osgood said incredulously.

“Seventy-five hundred pounds! The highest sum ever paid to an author for a new book.” This he pointed out boastfully in Rebecca's direction.

“I would think your firm would wish to do whatever were possible to protect your investment,” Osgood said.

“I will tell you how I see it. Every reader who picks up the book, finding it unfinished, can spend their time guessing what the ending should be. And they'll tell their friends to buy a copy and do the same, so it can be argued.”

“In America, its unfinished state will bait all the freebooters, as they are called,” Osgood said.

“That scoundrel Major Harper and his ilk,” Chapman said, tipping his glass high and ingesting his port with a predatory swiftness as he glanced up at the congregation of animal heads. His hunting eyes, always roving, paused back on Osgood. “That's the thing you're worried about, isn't it?” he finally added. He leaned in toward Rebecca-not exactly unfriendly to Osgood's predicament but entirely lacking in interest relative to the pretty bookkeeper sitting across. “Say, I suppose your employer fought bravely in your War of Rebellion, didn't be? Lucky. Why, here we haven't any wars to speak of lately-small ones, but nothing worth suiting up for. Nothing to show oneself to the world as a man or to impress the ladies.”

“I see, Mr. Chapman,” Rebecca replied, refusing to shrink from the intensity of his attention.

“Remind me which battles you fought in, then, old boy?” Chapman asked, turning to Osgood.

“Actually,” Osgood said, “I had suffered the bad effects of rheumatism when I was younger, Mr. Chapman.”

“Shame!”

“I am all better now. However, it prevented any notion of being a soldier.”

“Still, sir, Mr. Osgood helped publish those books and poems,” Rebecca interjected, “that contributed to the enthusiasm and commitment of the Union to persevere in the cause.”

“What a pity not to have soldiered!” Chapman responded. “You have my sympathy, Osgood.”

“Thank you, Mr. Chapman. About Drood,” Osgood said pointedly, changing the path of his persuasion. “Think of the value of our being able to better understand Dickens's final work. For the sake of literature.”

It seemed by the twinkle in his eye and the draw of his mouth that Chapman might start another laughing fit. Instead, his impressive frame bounded to his window and he put a fingertip against the glass. “Why, you sound like some of the young clerks out there. I can't tell them apart most of the time, they're rather indistinct, don't you think, Miss Sand?”

“I suppose I do not know, Mr. Chapman,” Rebecca began. “They seem dedicated to their work.”

“You!” Chapman's strong brow curled up on itself and he leaned out the door where some clerks were packing up a shipment of books into boxes.

A clerk nervously stepped inside the office. The other clerks all stopped what they were doing and waited on their colleague's fate.

“Say, clerk, can't you go more quickly than that packing the books?” Chapman demanded.

“Sir,” answered the clerk, “quite sorry, it's the smell that slows us down.”

“The smell!” Chapman repeated with an indignation suggesting he had been accused of personally originating the odor. He unleashed a series of furious expletives describing the clerk's incompetence. When the publisher finished, the clerk meekly explained that Chapman's latest addition to the larder room, a haunch of venison, had become too malodorous in the summer heat.

Chapman, putting up his nose as a test, relented, nodding. “All right. Put the venison on a four-wheeler, and I'll take it home for dinner,” he ordered.

Chapman had punctuated his insults by lighting a cigar, while the clerk was waiting for dismissal. When Chapman turned back to the young man again he looked on him as though he did not know where he had come from.

“You don't look very well!” Chapman remarked to the young man.

“Sir?”

“Not at all well. Pale, even. Say, can you drink a glass of port?”

“I think so.”

“Good. Tell them to send you up a couple of bottles from the basement.” The clerk fled.

“This office runs like a clock,” Chapman said with impatient sarcasm to his visitors. “Now, you were-you were commenting about literature.” He picked up a bundle of papers. “You see this poetry book? Quite lovely. What they call literature. This, I will save in the closet to burn in my hearth in the winter. Why? Because poetry doesn't pay. Never has paid, never will. No use for it, you see, Miss Sand.”

“Why, Mr. Chapman, I quite adore novels,” Rebecca said, sitting more erect and looking right at their host. “But in our saddest or happiest time, when we are all alone, what would we do without poetry to speak to us?”

Chapman poured another glass of port for himself. “A fiver is plenty to give for any poem, especially as all poets are hard up. Five pounds would buy the best any of them could do. No, no, it's adventure, out-of-air expeditions, that people want to read these days, with the wretched state of the trade. Ouida, Edmund Yates, Hawley Smart, your American rye-and-Indian novels, that's the new literature that people will remember-God bless Dickens, with all his social causes and sympathies, but we must forget the past and move forward. Yes, we must not look back.”

OUTSIDE THE OFFICE, in the deep shadows of the back alley, the slight clerk who had been reprimanded by Chapman, his head buzzing with port, climbed onto the back of a wagon. He tried to drag the massive, smelly venison haunch up by a rope. He struggled and puffed until a stronger hand easily slid it up from the ground.

“Thanky, gov'n'r!” said the clerk. “Blast this venison. Blast venison, generally.”

The man who had helped him was cloaked in the shadows. He now tossed a coin in the air, which the clerk clumsily caught to his chest with both hands.

“Why, shouldn't I pay you, gov'n'r?”

“You hear what your boss was saying to Mr. Osgood?” asked the stranger.

“That American?” The clerk thought about it, then nodded.

“Then there's more of this for you. Come.” He held out his hand to help the clerk step down from the wagon, though as it emerged from the shadow, it was clear that it was not a hand at all. It was a gold beasty head at the top of a walking stick. Its glittering black eyes shined out like holes bored through the shadows.

“Come. It won't bite,” the dark stranger said.

“Why'd you want to know about Mr. Osgood, anyway?” the clerk asked as he took hold of the cane and stepped down from the wagon.

“Let's say I'm a-learning the book trade.”

Chapter 16

BACK AT THE DICKENS FAMILY HOME OF GADSHILL, OSGOOD and Rebecca had turned to the books and documents in the library. Osgood observed the library with a publisher's jealous interest in another man's books. There was a row of Wilkie Collins volumes and an English edition of Poe's poetry-as well as many editions from Fields, Osgood & Co.

The walls between the shelves danced with famous illustrations by Cruikshank, “Phiz,” Fildes, and other artists who had decorated Dickens's novels. Oliver Twist staggers as a bullet lands in his arm from the smoking pistol of Giles from around the corner… From the same novel Bill Sikes prepares to murder poor Nancy… In a cavernous cell from A Tale of Two Cities in the Bastille, death and doom lingers… True-hearted Rosa confides at a quiet table to her upright guardian, Mr. Grewgious, that she suspects Edwin Drood's uncle, John Jasper, of grave mischief…

Multiple books were found on the subject of mesmerism, and Rebecca noticed that Dickens had written notes in the margins of a few of them. One was titled, intriguingly, Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World.

“He read these books carefully,” said Rebecca, respecting the heavily used pages with a gentle touch.

“What is it about?” Osgood asked as he was walking along the columns of books.

“I am not certain,” Rebecca replied. “Inquiries into the supernatural.”

She read a passage. The inquirer may grope and stumble, seeing but as through a glass darkly. Death, that has delivered so many millions from misery, will dispel his doubts and resolve his difficulties. Death, the unriddler, will draw aside the curtain and let in the explaining light. That which is feebly commenced in this phase of existence will be far better prosecuted in another.

“That sounds like a humbug,” Osgood remarked. “Let us see what else he had.” At one of the other bookcases he tried to dislodge several books before realizing they were not actually books at all.

“Mr. Dickens had these imitation book backs produced,” said a servant who had just entered the room, the same mustachioed man who had firmly ejected the intruder in the chalet. He put a tray of cakes on the table with a bow, then went to Osgood's side. “This is a hidden door, you see, Mr. Osgood, so that Mr. Dickens could enter the library conveniently from the next room. As ingenious at home as in his writing!” The servant pushed the shelf lined with the false books out onto the billiards room, where games and cigars waited for Gadshill's male guests of years gone by.

“Ingenious!” Osgood agreed, enchanted by the device. He read with a smile some of the false book titles Dickens had concocted. His favorites were A History of a Short Chancery Suit in twenty-one volumes; Five Minutes in China in three volumes; four volumes of The Gunpowder Magazine; and Cat's Lives, a nine-volume set, which made him think of lazy Mr. Puss curled into a cozy lump on a seat cushion in Boston.

“I should like very much to publish some of these myself!” Osgood said.

“Mr. Osgood! I should think you have quite enough to occupy yourself at 124 Tremont,” said the servant knowingly.

“How did…” Osgood began to ask, at hearing the address of his firm back in Boston. He turned to look more carefully at the servant. “Why, is it you, dear Henry Scott? It is you, Scott!” He scrutinized the familiar face, so altered by the passage of two difficult years and the long, handlebar mustache carefully combed upward at either tip. A big difference in appearance was Gadshill livery, a loose-fitting white overall with cape and top boots.

“Yes, Mr. Osgood,” he said. “Perhaps you recall, Miss Sand, that I accompanied Mr. Dickens and Mr. Dolby on their travels through America, as the Chief's personal dresser-and I daresay his most trusted man. You'll remember it was the time when all that had happened with Tom Branagan! Well, just before we were away on the tour, the Chief's top house man here at Gad's, his servant-or ‘domestic,’ as your American help prefer to be called-was found by Scotland Yard to have been stealing money from the cash box. A man who had worked for the Chief for twenty-five years and was paid generously for it! I am glad to say the Chief came to have enough regard to give me the station with a post for my wife, after we returned from America. Five years to the day.”

“Pardon?”

“His death, Mr. Osgood. It was precisely five years after the railway accident at Staplehurst. When he fell ill, I wandered to his calendar and I could not help think to myself, an ill wind that blows nobody good.”

As Henry bowed to depart, Osgood pleaded that he stay. “Mr. Scott, what can you tell me about what happened in the chalet yesterday with that man?”

“I am mightily sorry again for that,” Henry said adding another and lower bow. “I suppose a mad beast must have a sober driver, as the saying is. Why, if the poor Chief were present in spirit or in body, or in some middle way, he would not have his guests so harassed. And if there is one man clever enough to come to us in spirit, it is the Chief! Don't you think so, Miss Sand?”

Rebecca had an unwavering air about her that made every man seek her approbation for their ideas.

“I was just looking at his reading into spiritual topics, in fact, Mr. Scott,” said Rebecca.

“I'm curious what troubled that man,” Osgood interrupted.

“Ah, you might name anything and that likely qualifies as troubling that beastly sun-scorched loafer!” Henry explained that Dickens sometimes ministered mesmerism as therapy to troubled or sick individuals. He would lie them down on the floor or the couch and place them in a magnetic slumber until he woke them trembling and cold. There was a blind lady who credited Dickens's use of a magnetic treatment on her with regaining her sight. “This man, though, he was a special case,” noted Henry.

The man, a poor farmer, had been told by London doctors months earlier that he had an incurable illness. Having heard about Dickens's special skills he begged at the novelist's doorstep for treatment through spiritual and moral mesmerism. Dickens had been less active with his mesmeric power in recent years but relented and began the magnetic therapy for the man.

“Had it worked, Mr. Scott?” Rebecca asked.

“Well, perhaps it did work on him, Miss Sand-but the wrong way,” said Henry.

“What do you mean?” asked Osgood.

“One of the cooks told me that the farmer's illness was better, but his mental condition had become feeble during those mesmerism sessions. Now the poor tramp still lurks around, just like those dumb dogs out in the stables, as if the Chief is hiding in the woods somewhere with Falstaff's thieves and Chaucer's pilgrims, waiting to come back.” This Henry said in a tone more unconsciously sympathetic to the tramp than he knew.

WITH EYES RED from reading and copying, Osgood and Rebecca decided to return to the inn at the end of the day. Forster was waiting on the Gad's porch.

“Will there be more of your expedition in the morning?” asked the executor, as if genuinely interested, instead of just groping for information.

“After three days, we can find little in the way of clues other than a list of titles, some scribbled notes on the book, and some rejected pages, Mr. Forster,” Osgood admitted. “I fear we've exhausted your materials here.”

Forster nodded with barely concealed satisfaction, then hastily forged an expression of disappointment. “I suppose you shall return to Boston.”

“Not yet,” Osgood answered.

“Oh?” Forster said.

“If there is nothing to find inside Dickens's rooms, perhaps there is some clue outside them-somewhere.”

Forster's pupils dilated with interest, and he picked up a pen and a slip of paper. “You are an enterprising American, and I well know enterprising Americans detest wasting their time. Your search, I am afraid, Mr. Osgood, can merely be that: a waste. This address is where you can find me when I'm back in London, where I serve as lunacy commissioner, should you need me. Mr. Dickens was too good a man to attempt to mislead readers who trusted him: The end of The Mystery of Edwin Drood would have been just as it appears-a devious, jealous man who meant to snuff out an innocent youth and did-there is nothing more. Any other idea on the matter is pure stuff!”

Chapter 17

I emphatically direct that I be buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner, that no public announcement be made of the time or place of my burial, that at the utmost not more than three plain mourning coaches be employed, and that those who attend my funeral wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hatband, or other such revolting absurdity. I direct that my name be inscribed in plain English letters on my tomb without the addition of “Mr.” or “Esquire.” I conjure my friends on no account to make me the subject of any monument, memorial, or testimonial whatever. I rest my claims to the remembrance of my country upon my published works, and to the remembrance of my friends upon their experience of me; in addition thereto I commit my soul to the mercy of God through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Osgood reviewed the will's language with Georgina Hogarth at the Falstaff Inn coffee room and offered opinions about her obligations in relation to Forster. The document created an admirably complicated distribution of responsibilities and burdens. Forster controlled all the manuscripts of Dickens's published works. But to Georgy, the document bequeathed all the private papers in the house as well as all decisions related to jewelry and the familiar objects from Dickens's writing desk, like the quill pen temporarily pocketed by Forster.

“Mr. Forster,” Georgy said to Osgood, “sees his duty as reminding the world that Charles should be worshipped. That is why Charles is buried in the Poets’ Corner rather than in our humble village, as he would have wished. If Mr. Forster could have moved Dickens's pen for him over the lines of this will, he would have.”

That afternoon, following the one-hour train ride from Higham to London, Osgood and Rebecca entered the most awe-inducing man-made spot in England, the Westminster Abbey. Both Osgood and his bookkeeper automatically leaned their heads back to the remarkable ceiling far above, where the expanse of pillars crossed like the tips of forest trees meeting each other in the morning sky. The light streaming into the Abbey was stained red from the ornamented rose-colored glass windows surrounding them.

In the south transept, the American visitors found the marble slab that covered the coffin of Charles Dickens. The grand monument at the Poets’ Corner inside the famous cathedral was surrounded by the tombs of the greatest writers. Dickens's itself was overlooked by statues of Addison and Shakespeare and a bust of Thackeray. Though little else from his instructions had been followed, the inlaid words on the tomb read as Dickens's will had requested.

Charles Dickens

Born 7 ^th February 1812,

Died 9 ^th June 1870

Hordes of people filed in to leave verses and flowers over the novelist's slab, and the remains of yesterday's offerings had begun to wither in the warm air of the Abbey.

As they stood there, a flower was tossed past Osgood and Rebecca onto the Dickens grave. The bloom had large, extensive petals of a wild purple hue. The publisher looked over his shoulder and saw a man in a wide-brimmed hat shading most of an angular, red face turning to leave.

“Did you see that man?” Osgood asked Rebecca.

“Who?” she replied.

Osgood had seen the face before. “I believe it was the man from the chalet-that queer mesmerism patient.”

Just then, a caravan of other Dickens mourners had appeared in the Abbey. They had come all the way from Dublin to see Dickens's final resting place, they explained to Osgood enthusiastically, as if he were the keeper. They crowded the Poets’ Corner, pushing Osgood to one side, and the mesmerism patient, in the meantime, had vanished.

Not sure where to turn next, Osgood and Rebecca walked the streets of London.

There was already a line of dead ends besides their search through Gadshill. They had heard there was a London resident named Emma James who claimed to have the entire manuscript of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. James turned out to be a spiritual medium who was dictating the final six installments of The Mystery of Edwin Drood from the “spirit-pen” of Charles Dickens and was soon to begin Dickens's next ghostly novel, titled The Life and Adventures of Bockley Wickleheap. Other rumors-for example, that Wilkie Collins, Dickens's fellow popular novelist and occasional collaborator, had been hired to complete his friend's work-quickly proved just as fruitless. They had also heard that at an audience with the royal court a few months before his death, Dickens had offered to tell Queen Victoria the ending.

“Mr. Osgood?” Rebecca said. “You seem ill at ease.”

“Perhaps I am somewhat overheated today. Let us pay a call on Mr. Forster at his office, he may know something about Dickens and the queen.”

Osgood did not want to be discouraging to Rebecca by saying more. He dreaded the possibility of returning to Boston to tell J. T Fields that The Mystery of Edwin Drood was never to be unraveled-that Drood was to remain lost in every way. That Fields, Osgood & Co., bearing the financial loss, could soon follow.

Protect our authors: Fields's mandate above all else. That is what Osgood thought about as they walked. His efforts in England were not only for the financial life of the company and all its employees, it was for the authors, too-Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Stowe, Emerson, and others. If the publishing house plummeted from its current financial precipice, how would the orphaned authors fare? Yes, those writers were beloved, but would the breed of publisher represented by Major Harper care about that? Without Fields and Osgood to protect them, would they be buried by obscurity, like Edgar Poe or the once promising Herman Melville? The true future of publishing was not publishers as manufacturers, as Harper foresaw, but publishers as the authors’ partners-the joining of the upper and lower half of the title page.

Osgood thought about all this responsibility that had landed on his shoulders. He actually had wanted to be a poet at one time: to think of it made him laugh inside! A young Osgood, top student, reciting the class poem at Standish Academy. He'd watched a dozen of his classmates leave to chase gold in California that October, but it was the quiet halls of college instead of the wild hills of California for him. Phi Beta Kappa at Bowdoin, class secretary, member of the Pecunian club, but friends with the rival Athenians. He had always been expected to be successful by everyone around him. It had been a worthy sacrifice of his own artistic ambitions to take up the cause of those artists and geniuses who otherwise might flounder.

With these thoughts pressing him down, they arrived at the government building that housed the Lunacy Commission, where Forster held a post. Osgood and Rebecca were greeted by a government assistant. Osgood explained that they wished to speak with Mr. Forster.

“Are you from America?” asked the assistant, brows raised with interest.

“Yes, we are,” Osgood said.

“Americans!” The assistant smiled. “Well,” he said with renewed seriousness, “I am afraid we do not have any spittoons in the anteroom.”

“That is well enough,” Osgood said politely, “as we do not have any tobacco.”

“No?” the assistant asked, surprised, then looked at Rebecca's mouth to confirm that she, too, was not currently masticating tobacco. “If you can wait for a moment?” The assistant returned with an address written down on a piece of paper. “Mr. Forster left the office some hours ago. I believe you can find him here. I have written detailed directions, for Americans never can find their way around London.”

“Thank you, we shall look there,” Osgood said.

The summer day had grown hotter and sloppier. London with its pavement and crowds of holiday strollers and industrious businessmen was less comfortable than Gadshill with its sloping fields and generous overhangs of vegetation.

After going in what seemed to be a few circles, Osgood looked at the street sign at the corner and compared it with the paper written by the assistant. “Blackfriar's Road, west side of St. George's Circus- this is where he told us to find Mr. Forster.” They were at a massive pentagon-shaped building that shaded the entire street. Osgood leaned against a stone pillar at the portico to pat his forehead and neck with his handkerchief. As he did, they could hear a loud exchange of words floating their way as if through a trumpet:

“It is quite a phenomenon in the history of friendships, that of this uncle and nephew.”

The man's voice was followed by a feminine one, which said, “Uncle and nephew?”

“Yes, that is the relationship,” answered the man. “But they never refer to it. Mr. Jasper will never hear of ‘uncle’ or ‘nephew.’ It is always Jack and Ned, I believe.”

Responded the woman, “Yes, and while nobody else in the world, I fancy, would dare to call Mr. Jasper ‘Jack,’ nobody but Mr. Jasper ever calls Edwin Drood ‘Ned.’

Osgood and Rebecca stood listening in disbelief.

“There,” Rebecca pointed excitedly.

Osgood wheeled around with a start. A placard along the side of the massive theater building heralded its upcoming productions for the Surrey Theatre season: Up in the World, The Ticket of Leave Man, and… The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Dickens's play adapted by Mr. Walter Stephens and boasting, on its poster, “New and Elaborate Scenery!” and “a Powerful and unprecedented cast of characters that will hold the audience in thrilling excitement!” with “Charles Dickens's last book! Now complete!”

“Now complete,” Osgood and Rebecca read out loud.

After entering the lobby and climbing an enormous staircase, they found themselves inside a more massive auditorium than ever seen in Boston or New York. It was constructed in the shape of a horseshoe. Fifty feet skyward, an astonishing gold dome ornamented with delicate designs covered the whole space. At the base of the dome were Venetian red panels with the names of the nation's great dramatists: Shakespeare, Jonson, Goldsmith, Byron, Jerrold…

A confusion of people on the stage pulled away Osgood's attentions. The actors and actresses of this production of Drood were now shifting from rehearsing Septimus Crisparkle's conversation with the newcomer to the village, Helena Landless, to a different scene occurring in an opium room. But apparently they could not locate the actor playing the part of the Chinese opium purveyor.

Behind the stage, Osgood found a man who was standing dramatically still while a young woman was adjusting a garish cravat around his neck. As she worked on him, he studied the inside of his mouth and shook out his long dark hair in an oversize mirror. He had a large head, something of a phrenological masterpiece, with a delicate body that seemed to strain to support its upper portion. When the man stopped mouthing as and os, Osgood presented himself and asked for the person in charge.

“You mean the executor of Mr. Dickens, do you?” said the man. “He was here to peep and eavesdrop at rehearsal but already flew away, I believe, like a giant very fat eagle.”

“John Forster authorized this play, then,” Osgood said softly. “And are you an actor, sir?”

The man opened and closed his strong jaw several times in an attempt to overcome his amazement at the question. “Am I an… Arthur Grunwald, sir,” he said, extending a proud hand. “Gr oon-woul-d, sir” he corrected him with a French enunciation before Osgood could say it.

“Armand Duval in Dumas’ Dame aux Camélias at the St. James last season,” the girl fixing his cravat said discreetly while Grunwald pretended he could not hear his list of accomplishments. “Falstaff at the Lyceum's Henry IV. And you must have seen Mr. Gr oon-woul-d's engagement as Hamlet at the Princess. Her Majesty attended four times.”

“I am afraid I am not in London quite as often as the queen,” Osgood said.

“Well, sir!” said Grunwald. “I see what you are thinking- Gr oon-woul-d is a sight too slender and handsome to play the goodly portly knight with any manner of realism. Not so! I was praised for my Falstaff to the sky. I possess the role of Edwin Drood in this drama. Your friend Forster thinks because he authorized our production, he may oversee me, too! Tell me, where is Stephens?”

“Who?”

“Our playwright! Walter Stephens! Did you not say you were his publisher, hardly a minute ago? Have you forgotten, is your mind even as dull as that? Or are you an impostor, a dealer seeking my autographs to sell?”

Osgood explained that he was the publisher of the late Charles Dickens rather than of the writer adapting the novel for the stage. Grunwald calmed himself again.

“All of Dickens's fame.” Grunwald lamented this into the mirror. On close examination, the actor was ten years too old to play Drood, though his skin had an aging artist's artificial glow of youth and romance to it. “So much fame, and it goes for nothing since he had not the most important thing.”

“What's that?” Osgood asked.

“To be happy in your children. Now, have you brought another wishful actress to us? I'm afraid she won't do. Next!”

“Beg your pardon,” said Osgood, “this is my bookkeeper, Miss Rebecca Sand.” Rebecca stepped forward and curtsied to the actor.

“Good thing. You would not get many roles, my dear, by walking around in all black as if you were in mourning, not without a more buxom upper form.”

“Thank you for the advice,” said Rebecca sharply, “but I am in mourning.”

“Grunwald, there you are,” said Walter Stephens, coming over from behind the stage in long strides. “I'm sorry, I do not think I've been acquainted with your friends,” he said indicating Osgood.

“Not my friend, Stephens. He was your publisher, until a moment ago.”

Stephens confusedly looked Osgood up and down, just as Grunwald was called to the stage to perform a scene. It was one in which he (as Edwin Drood) and Rosa, the beautiful young woman to whom he was betrothed, amicably discuss secretly abandoning their unwanted union. Jasper, the opium fiend who loves Rosa, meanwhile stands plotting on the other side of the stage the removal of his nephew Drood.

Osgood introduced himself to Stephens the playwright, who took the publisher's arm and led him toward the stage. Rebecca followed, staring excitedly at the complex machinery behind the scenes of the theater.

“What brings the two of you to England?” Stephens asked.

“Actually, the same Mystery of Edwin Drood that has consumed your own attentions of late, Mr. Stephens.”

“We were quite robbed of its progress by the death of Mr. Dickens.”

“Then, I hope I may take the liberty of asking, how shall you convert it into a complete drama, without the ending?”

Stephens smiled. “You see, I have written an ending myself, Mr. Osgood! Yes, the life of the drama writer is not as luxurious as that of the novelists you publish. We must work with what is before us with great respect, but never so much respect that we fail to fulfill our task of pleasing an audience. When we read, we use our brains, but when we watch a performance, we use our eyes-much more trivial organs.

“Now, I fear I must attend to many matters at the moment. Shall you and your companion do us the honor of being our guests in our nicest box?” asked Stephens.

Osgood and Rebecca sat in on the day's rehearsal. They were of course particularly interested to see Stephens's original ending for the story. Dickens, in his final installments, had introduced the mysterious Dick Datchery, a visitor to the fictional village of Cloisterham, who acts as investigator in the case of the young Drood's disappearance after others have pointed an accusing finger at Neville Landless, Edwin Drood's rival. Datchery has other suspicions. But in Stephens's rendition, Datchery-with his flowing white hair covering his face-was revealed to be the feisty young Neville himself in disguise. Neville was to use his disguise as Datchery to confront John Jasper, Drood's uncle, with evidence that would cause the guilt-ridden Jasper to take his own life with an overdose of opium.

Osgood and Rebecca prepared to leave during the fourth attempt at staging this scene when Grunwald interrupted the other players.

“Where is Stephens? Ah, Stephens, what is this? What of the revised version of this act?”

“This is the revised version, Grunwald. Now, if you'd please remember you are too dead and your body incinerated by this point in the story to have such a corporeal presence on stage.”

Grunwald threw his manuscript pages into the air. “The hell with it! Hang the whole lot of you and dash your brains out! Perhaps you ought to find a different damned Edwin Drood!”

Stephens screamed back. “There are ladies present, sir, and Americans, who should not appreciate the vulgarity of your tongue!”

“Vulgar?” This Grunwald asked before he flew at Stephens with his fists up. Stephens pulled the actor's thick hair.

The manager ushered off the playwright and actor and instructed them to finish murdering each other away from the stage.

Osgood noticed two workmen walking toward the stairs to smoke. “I see Mr. Grunwald and Mr. Stephens were having words,” Osgood said to them.

“Aye, gov'n'r?”

“Do you know the meaning of it?” asked the publisher.

One of the workmen laughed at the foolishness of the question. “We should. They have the same ticklish row every day. Art Grunwald thinks it as clear as the blue sky above that Charles Dickens meant Edwin Drood to survive and come back at the end of the story to seek revenge on the man what tried to kill him. Mister Stephens thinks it most obvious Drood is dead and rotting in the quicklime.”

“What do you think?” asked Osgood.

“I think Grunwald thinks he's too good an actor to stay out of sight in the scene docks for the final act. I wish Dickens didn't die, I vow it deeply ‘fore God-then we wouldn't have to hear their bickering.”

Chapter 18

OSGOOD WAS PACING BACK AND FORTH IN THE PARLOR AT THE Falstaff. Rebecca had just moments before read him a note from one of the queen's ministers informing them that Her Majesty had not pursued Dickens's offer to tell her the ending of Drood, thinking it more proper for her to be as surprised as her subjects by the installments.

“I half wish I could believe in the medium who keeps company with Dickens's ghost,” Osgood remarked.

“Perhaps Mr. Dickens himself may have believed,” Rebecca replied with a smile. “It seems he was taken with spiritualism. I wonder if we ought not study it for ourselves.”

“Surely you don't think highly of such practices, Miss Sand?”

“We might find a window into his private mind when writing the novel.”

Osgood sat in a chair and rested his head in his hands. “If a medium can inform us right now how to make a quarter of a million dollars in a quarter of a year, I shall become the most enthusiastic of her devotees. We cannot afford to waste any more time.”

“You are a born skeptic,” Rebecca said, dropping the topic but clearly hurt that Osgood dismissed her suggestion so quickly.

“I should think so. I have no fondness for phenomena, Miss Sand. I very much dislike the trouble of wondering. Forget the mesmerism, but think of the mesmerism patient. Do you remember what Henry Scott said about him?” he asked.

“Yes,” answered Rebecca. “That he was a farmer who sought Dickens's help.”

“Scott said that the man was a regular visitor to Gadshill during the last months of Dickens's life to receive those ‘spiritual’ sessions. If this poor fellow was such a frequent visitor to Dickens's study,” Os-good continued, “might he have heard clues as to the novelist's plan for the end of the book?”

“Mr. Osgood, you'd be placing credence in the words of a man with a shattered constitution,” Rebecca pointed out. “You saw how he behaved at the chalet.”

“I feel the paths before us narrowing, Miss Sand. With Forster having authorized the theater production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, it is in the interest of his reputation and his purse that if there are other clues waiting to be discovered, they be revealed only if they happened to match the ending written by Walter Stephens. Likewise, even if Wilkie Collins has no intention of finishing his friend's last novel, that rumor may give some member of the Dickens family the idea of finding someone else for the task. With every last floorboard and ornament from Gadshill to be auctioned any day, the family is eager for income. We are without any allies here in our search, Miss Sand.”

“But if you find the patient, how will you convince him to speak sensibly?”

“What is it Henry Scott said? A mad beast needs a sober driver.”

REBECCA INQUIRED WITH Henry Scott at Gadshill, who questioned the other servants and determined that the mesmerism patient had not been there since their encounter with him in the chalet. There were bets among the staff on whether the fellow had given up or died. But Rebecca suggested that if the patient had been at Westminster Abbey the day that she and Osgood visited, it might be one of his regular stops.

Osgood, agreeing, returned to the Poets’ Corner. When he visited Dickens's grave again, he found the same peculiar purple flower. From then on, Osgood went to the Abbey at intervals waiting for this other man to show. “It is only a matter of time, I'm certain,” he'd say to Rebecca.

On one visit in particular, Osgood and Rebecca passed through the gates together at the same time as Mamie Dickens, holding her little dog in her bag and linked to another young woman on her arm. Mamie wiped away her tears and smiled sweetly at the sight of Osgood and Rebecca.

The woman on Mamie's arm was small and perky, having a strong resemblance to Charles Dickens around her face. She wore an old-fashioned muslin kerchief on her head from which red ringlets dropped, decorated with distinctly nonmourning double hollyhocks. Her lace cape only barely kept her little shoulders concealed and her neck and throat were almost entirely exposed.

She was presented to Osgood and Rebecca as Katie Collins, the younger of the two Dickens girls.

“Oh, be proper, Katie!” Mamie scolded her sister, pulling her sister's cape over her shoulders. “In a church, too!”

“Proper! Now you sound like old Beadle Forster. Sometimes I wonder whether I got married to make dear father happy when our household had little other than sadness. Or did I marry because I knew father and his Beadle despised my husband?”

“Katie Collins!”

“Intolerable and stuff!” Katie imitated Forster's voice and then rubbed her hands together like he would.

“Tell me,” Osgood said. “Do you know who the man was who had come to him at Gadshill for treatment in the last few months, a tall man with a military air and long white hair?”

Mamie nodded. “I think I have seen the man you mean at the house. He was a very persistent and dedicated follower of father's methods. Even when father was delayed for their appointments, he would sit outside the study for hours.”

“Do you know his name?” Osgood asked.

“I am afraid I don't,” Mamie said, with a sigh. “Father was a mesmerism fanatic of no mean order and believed it a remedy for any illness. I know of many cases, my own among the number, in which he used his power in this way with perfect success. He was always interested in the curious influence exercised by one personality over another.”

“Now, Sir Osgood.” Katie, bored with the exchange, examined the publisher flirtatiously. “Where were you when a girl was to find a husband?”

Rebecca seemed as embarrassed at the question as Osgood. Katie raised an eyebrow to show she had noticed this.

“Miss Sand,” sharp-tongued Katie said, “do you not think Mamie should look just smashing in a bridal gown on the arm of a man like this?”

“I suppose so, ma'am,” Rebecca replied demurely.

“You are the sort of girl who thinks well of weddings, Miss Sand?” Katie pressed.

“I don't think much of weddings at all,” Rebecca replied.

Mamie interrupted the awkward moment. “Mr. Osgood and Miss Sand have come all the way here for business, Katie, and to find out more about The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”

“What a bore business is,” said Katie, snapping her fingers. “Oh, very well. Do you really want to find your way through the tangled maze and arrive at the heart of the mystery? If you want to know about Drood's ending, simply buy me a new ribbon for my hair! We are auctioning all mine.”

“Oh, don't always tease everyone, Katie!” Mamie cried.

“I'll tell them then,” Katie said while coyly wrapping one of her red ringlets around her finger. “Drood will be dead or alive; Rosa will marry Tartar or become a nun; Dick Datchery will find Drood's body or find Drood playing cribbage in a cellar with Rosa's guardian, Grewgious. I don't know the first thing about it! And that is the answer to the riddle.”

“What do you mean?” Osgood asked.

“The old Beadle, faithful little Aunt Georgy, my wayward brothers, none of those dear creatures know how it was to end because Father didn't wish them to know-he didn't wish anyone in the universe to know except himself, Mr. Osgood. It was a game for him, you see. He always loved to surprise us and was completely thorough when he had set his mind on it.”

BACK AT THE Falstaff Inn that same evening, “Sir Falstaff” brought tea to Osgood as he sat contemplatively by the fireplace downstairs. Rebecca had retired to her room to read. Sir Falstaff's mind seemed to wander and the tray slipped, shattering the pot and cup.

“I apologize, Mr. Osgood,” the landlord said after the shards had been swept away and the spilled tea mopped by his sister. He seemed saddened by something other than the broken porcelain.

Osgood followed the landlord's gaze and found its focal point. It was one of the leafy purple flowers left at the Abbey: Osgood had taken it with the intention of asking one of the street vendors that sold plants to identify it for him.

“This is an ugly thing, isn't it, Sir Falstaff? I'm sorry for gracing your table with such a shockingly nasty weed,” he said. “Are you unwell? Shall I fetch some ice water?”

The trembling man waved him away. “Mr. Osgood, did you not know? That… that is an opium poppy! It feels like I have been struck in the heart by a bludgeon.”

“I did not know!” Osgood said apologetically, though he still could not comprehend the proprietor's reaction.

The landlord gazed with a doomed expression into the small fire, and removed his cap and folded it over his lap. “You couldn't have known, Mr. Osgood. Many years ago, I learned to hate that vile plant. My son had only twenty summers to his name and his faculties of judgment, and it was to the evil seduction of that plant that we buried him. The house was so empty without him. That is why, after he was gone, I moved here with my sister from our home in town to manage this snug little inn: to give other people pleasure when you have lost all of your own is a small miracle.”

Osgood crumpled the flower into the pocket of his vest as casually as possible. Poor Sir Falstaff did not move at all, his expressionless face hanging low.

“But what's this? Enough of that solemn manner.” The landlord suddenly rose from his chair, putting his hat and cheer back on. “Yes, enough of that, how about some ale to pluck us up?”

The next day, Osgood again took the noisy train to Charing Cross. Osgood planned to attend the auction at which the belongings from the Gadshill estate were to be sold to benefit the Dickens family.

He had left himself enough time to reach the auction house on King Street well before the announced start at “one o'clock precisely.” Besides, thought Osgood, it was the day of the annual Eton and Harrow cricket match, which would clog the streets. His sense of frustration had seemed to mount by the hour. He had less and less faith that the mesmerism patient would show himself again, but the opium poppy had made him think of the Oriental statue of the opium smoker from Dickens's summer study. Was that what Dickens had gazed upon when writing the scenes of opium smoking in The Mystery of Edwin Drood? Was that object the source of his ideas? If so, Osgood wanted another chance to examine it carefully.

The large auction room at Christie, Manson & Woods was a historic institution in London and dusty and grimy enough to prove it. To Osgood's surprise, the hot room was overfilled by noon. Nor was it only the usual lofty collectors, mercenary dealers and commission agents: shoulder to shoulder with men and women of society in fine summer linen, the room contained multitudes of people in the plainer garb of the working classes. Looking around, it seemed every character from every Dickens novel, aristocrat and common, pompous and inconspicuous, had come to life and come straight to Christie's with their purses open.

Osgood saw that he could not swim upstream through the eager crowd to either of the green cloth-covered tables closest to the auctioneer. Instead, he found a vacant chair near the auction clerk's table.

Osgood circled two items in his catalog. His neighbors in the chairs around him peered at one another jealously, certain each was there exclusively for whatever object among Dickens's personal effects they had already set their heart on. Osgood's eyes also met those of Arthur Grunwald, the actor from the Surrey, who nodded to him dramatically as though one of them were to die today or at least tomorrow. He wore a wide scarf even though it was hot and sticky.

One of the first items brought between the two tables was the picture of the Britannia from Gadshill.

“Depicting the vessel in which Mr. Dickens first went to America. Engraved in the popular edition of American Notes…” intoned Mr. Woods, the auctioneer, from his rostrum.

Competition was fierce. “Eighty guineas!” “Ninety!” “Ninety-five guineas!” “One hundred guineas, one hundred and five!” “Going, going… . gone!”

Mr. Woods's hammer came down. The first few dozen lots were portraits and paintings priced out of the range of the amateur bidder. Then Mr. Woods announced they would move to the “decorative objects late the property of the gentleman deceased.” In this class of object, the general Dickens fanatic could be far more competitive. Mr. Woods's well-bred face, in fact, seemed to betray his utter amazement at how high the numbers could go for worthless tidbits that simply had been touched by one man's fingers. Elaborately dressed women lifted their opera glasses and leaned side to side for better views.

The assistant displayed a gong with a beater that Dickens had used to gather his family together at Gadshill.

As a battle ensued up to thirty guineas, Osgood's neighbor behind him whispered squeakily, “He was always fond of gongs.” Osgood, not certain how to respond, smiled politely. “Oh, yes,” the squeaky man continued insistently, a handkerchief pressed to his right cheek, responding to an objection Osgood had not made. “Don't you remember the weak-eyed young man and the gong at Dr. Blimber's in Dombey and Son?”

By this point, Grunwald had secured a pair of watercolors depicting Little Nell's house and grave from The Old Curiosity Shop. As the actor stood to go, he stopped at Osgood's row. He was followed step for step by the same young woman who was fixing his cravat at the Surrey.

“There you are, Osgood, sitting with your hands in your pockets,” he said, shaking out his black mane. “Did you see what happened?”

“Yes, congratulations on your purchase, Mr. Grunwald.”

“Not a purchase. A victory. I knocked these down from the hands of those mischievous dealers through fortitude and decisiveness. I did not depict Hamlet at the Princess without learning something of courage. People have misunderstood Hamlet for centuries, you know-it is not he who is indecisive; he has perfectly fine resolve: it is the critics that cannot make up its mind about him! Good afternoon, Mr. Osgood.”

Before leaving the room, Grunwald passed a look over the entire auction house as though he had outsmarted not just a few dealers but every person there.

At last:

“Lot seventy-nine, a tazza, pink, with ormolu foot, formerly upon Gadshill's drawing room mantel.”

Osgood entered the fray, crossing over the actual value of three pounds and elevating each dealer and admirer's number until reaching seven pounds fifteen. That price won the day.

He received his ticket from the clerk, who wrote down the sale price. The publisher proceeded down the aisle into the next room where, in return for his payment, he was handed the pretty glass bowl pulled from a box of other household items. Returning to his seat, Osgood found the sale at its highest pitch of excitement yet.

Grip! Grip! Grip! was called out from all sides. Front and center was a glass case holding a stuffed raven called Grip that had been Dickens's favorite pet and the prototype for a talkative bird of the same name in his novel Barnaby Rudge. The cacophony of spirited voices quoted their favorite Grip sayings from that novel. The bidding was ferocious, and the hammer did not fall before 120 pounds were pledged.

A wild round of applause followed, and “Name!” was called out for as a way of honoring the purchaser. “Mr. George Nottage, of Cheap-side!” the man complied heartily.

“What's the matter?” Osgood asked his confidant when the audience began to moan and hiss.

“Nottage,” his neighbor replied, “he's the owner of the Stereoscopic Company. Why, he'll simply use the bird to make stereoscopic photographs to sell for profit!”

Osgood realized what an oddity it was: at an auction house, a crowd of moralists who in the name of Charles Dickens sneered at profit. After a few more sets of lots, they had finally come to the next item circled in his catalog: the plaster statue of a Turk seated smoking opium. The grotesque he had seen in the Swiss chalet at Gadshill by Dickens's writing desk that could hold clues they'd be able to use. But the auctioneer skipped to the subsequent items. As Woods described them, Osgood stood up and raised his hand.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Woods, but I believe you have forgotten lot eighty-five. The Turk-”

“Lot eighty-six…”

“But, respectfully, sir,” Osgood continued, “eighty-five is supposed…”

Osgood's sweaty neighbor was pulling at his sleeve, his squeaky voice more high-pitched than ever. “If you don't be quiet…”

Down smashed the hammer. “Eighty-six!” Woods pronounced with divine authority, as though the number eighty-five had been generally eliminated from genteel arithmetic. “Night and Morning, a pair of reliefs after Thorwaldsen in gilt frames!”

Osgood sat back down defeated. The gatherers had begun to mutter inquisitively about the skipped lot but were soon placated by watching an entertaining squabble between two dealers over the framed reliefs. Osgood regretfully prepared to leave with the tazza in hand.

There was a stocky man with hands deep in his pockets inching his way through the mob of people. He was looking down at his feet, but at intervals, Osgood noticed, he would look directly at the publisher. It must have been Osgood's imagination, fueled by his displeasure at the auctioneer's omission. But then Osgood turned to look over his other shoulder. The exit was blocked by a larger, scowling man with a face like a whetstone, gazing right at Osgood. He began to move closer.

For a few more seconds, Osgood kept dismissing the idea that these two men were as threatening as they appeared. Telling himself to be rational, he decided to perform a test. As he rose to his feet slowly, they both paused, looked at each other, then resumed their paths toward him more aggressively, like two ends of a vise. The stocky onlooker was no longer hiding his gaze. Meanwhile, Osgood was penned in everywhere else by the immense population of Dickensites packed in the room.

Then a hand was on Osgood's shoulder.

“Beg pardon,” Osgood said in firm protest. “Is there something wrong, sir?”

“We'd like to take you upstairs,” the stocky man replied.

“Who are you?” asked Osgood. “I insist on knowing what you gentlemen want before I go with you.”

Giving no reply, the man pulled Osgood up by the arm and began to drag him toward the exit behind the auctioneer.

Osgood threw his hand up.

“Do you bid, sir?” Woods asked Osgood, clearing his throat nervously.

The auctioneer's assistant was holding up a sad little salt cellar that had thus far attracted little notice. “Ten shillings value, sir,” Woods said.

“What bid are we at?” Osgood asked loudly.

“Nine shillings, sir.”

“Ten guineas,” Osgood said, then raised his own bid: “Ten and a half!”

The crowd gasped at the remarkable amount for the salt dish. This suggested that the rest of the crowd had overlooked its worth, and other bids bounced around the auction hall until Osgood finished at eighteen and a half guineas. The spectators exploded into cheers to commemorate the extravagant purchase. Osgood threw his hat into the air. This sent the audience into paroxysms of excitement and everyone around the room stood and applauded. In the meantime, he used the attention and the confusion to slide from the man's grasp.

But the man was behind him in a flash and the crowd was still too thick to get around.

In a remarkable deliverance, before he knew what had happened, Osgood was hoisted on two men's shoulders. Wriggling off of them, he nearly tumbled right over the head of the other pursuer while desperately clutching his newly purchased glass tazza. Osgood balanced the tazza safely under his arm and ran, escaping the crowd only to lose his balance, tripping as he crossed over the threshold into the anteroom. The tazza went flying.

“No!” Osgood cried, caught in the helpless moment of waiting for it to shatter.

A man stepped out of the shadows and caught the tazza before it could hit the floor.

Osgood exhaled in relief. The tazza had survived. The man who looked up from underneath his wide-brimmed hat had intelligent, dashing eyes. A floppy purple flower leaned out from his buttonhole.

“They're still behind you!” he said. “Follow me.”

Chapter 19

HIS RESCUER LED OSGOOD THROUGH A BACK CORRIDOR OF Christie's into a basement and out the street door. The two men came out into a small lane that led them into the cover of the boisterous London crowds.

“Whatever did you do to make them so keenly interested in you?” asked the man, after they looked around and decided they had not been followed.

“I honestly don't know,” Osgood answered. “I inquired to the auctioneer about that item they had left out-item eighty-five. It's here in the catalog. I had noticed it at Gadshill that day you were there-I even saw it being wrapped up by the auction workers the next day.” Osgood handed him the catalog.

The man nodded as they walked across the busy square of brick and mortar buildings. Every passerby in London, even the poorest newsboy, had a flower in his coat, though no one else boasted an opium poppy. “If you saw this plaster statue taken out of the house, and it was printed in the catalog, we know it made it to the auction rooms. Why would they skip over it, then? There is only one strong likelihood to suspect. That it was stolen from Christie's rooms after the catalog was printed but without enough time to correct it-shortly before the one o'clock auction, then. That explains why they were after you.”

“Do you mean they thought I was the one who stole the statue?” Osgood exclaimed.

“Unlikely enough! But you were calling attention to the fact it was missing. Think of it through their eyes. If a theft from Christie's auction house were to be reported in the papers, all the finest dealers in London would hear of it. They'd note, too, that it occurred from a prize sale like Dickens's. How many customers would be lost to rival auction houses?”

Osgood thought it over. He recalled that Mr. Wakefield from the Samaria had mentioned using Christie's for his tea business and decided he would write to Wakefield asking him to inquire into what had happened to the statue. For now, Osgood studied the steady gait and bearing of the man who had acted so unaccountably strange in the chalet at Gadshill.

“I have wanted to speak to you, sir,” Osgood said cautiously.

“I know it,” said his walking companion without breaking stride.

“You do?”

“You have looked for me at the Abbey.”

“You saw us going back there then? You have been following us!” Osgood exclaimed.

“No, this is without making the least investigation. There is much to know by simply opening the eyes, though, my friend.”

“How then?” Osgood asked, genuinely curious but also as a test of the man's sanity.

“First, I saw you keenly interested in my flower when we were both at Poets’ Corner together.”

“The opium poppy.”

He nodded. “Then, on another day, I had seen that one of my flowers had been removed. I surmised it was likely the same person who observed it attentively on the first occasion: you.”

“I suppose that makes some sense.”

“Have you received any responses about me from your letters to the mesmerism experts?”

“What?” Osgood's jaw dropped. “But I left my bookkeeper at the inn writing those letters of inquiry as we speak! I instructed her to do this only this morning, thinking that without Mr. Dickens you may have sought those services elsewhere. How did you possibly know about that?”

“Oh, I didn't! I merely surmised it as well, which is a rather more convenient way of obtaining information than actually knowing it.”

Osgood was impressed. “Have you seen another mesmerist?”

“Mr. Dickens cured me quite thoroughly. I have no need.”

“Sir, I owe you my thanks today for what transpired at the auction house. My name is James Ripley Osgood.”

The man turned toward the publisher with a military air. His lank white hair was combed with perfect care this time, although his clothes were disheveled and loose. His sun-scarred features were handsome, large and chiseled. It did not surprise Osgood that Dickens would have accepted the farmer into his home-his pride in helping the working poor had been almost as strong as his pride in his writing, for he remembered his own humble childhood.

“I fancy you are ready, Ripley,” the man said with an enigmatic, crooked-toothed smile upon adopting an immediate nickname for the publisher.

“You said the same thing at the chalet. But ready for what?”

“Why, to find the truth about Edwin Drood.”

Osgood took care not to show excitement or even surprise at the startling pronouncement. “May I take the liberty of having your name, sir?” Osgood replied.

“I apologize-I was in one of my unnatural spells when you saw me at Gadshill and not acting right. I did not present myself. What you must think!” He shook his head in self-recrimination. “My name is Dick Datchery. Now that you know who I am, we may talk openly.”

Chapter 20

REBECCA HAD RECEIVED WORD FROM A MESSENGER WITH A NOTE to wait for Osgood in the coffee room of the Falstaff. When he arrived, she sat patiently as he hung his hat and his light coat on the peg and put his satchel and a paper-wrapped package carefully on the table. He looked to be in a state of quiet excitement and anticipation. He poured out the whole story of the auction, his escape, and what had been revealed by his meeting with the mesmerism patient.

“Then he is a madman,” Rebecca declared, throwing up her hands. “I suppose that decides it. He'll be no help in remembering anything he heard from Mr. Dickens.”

Osgood made a noncommittal gesture.

“Mr. Osgood,” she pursued, “is it not the case-did you not just explain to me for a quarter hour, that this poor farmer believes himself Dick Datchery, a character from an unfinished novel?”

Osgood crossed his arms over his chest. “What would the novel's state of completion matter in terms of his sanity, Miss Sand?”

Rebecca looked at her employer with a decidedly practical air, but her usually even voice wavered with emotion. “It would be somewhat more reasonable to believe oneself a character in a book that is finished. At least, one would know if one's fate is dire or grand.”

Osgood smiled at her chagrin. “Miss Sand, I admit your skepticism is well-founded, of course. This man calling himself Datchery has suffered a type of mental strain, as we saw with our own eyes at Gadshill. He does not seem to remember anything about a time before he began the sessions, or where he came from. But what if-just think of this-what if the mesmerism sessions performed by Dickens had some unintended effect on an already-shattered constitution, one that could prove to be to our benefit? What if in the process of mesmerism, Dickens transfered, by some profound exposure, the skills of investigation displayed by the fictional character of Datchery onto this man. The man even spoke like Dick Datchery! Look at these.”

Rebecca watched dubiously as Osgood removed from his satchel some books he said he had purchased in Paternoster Row on his way back to the hotel. Each tome examined an element of spiritualism or mesmerism. “These books speak of the fluid of life passing through us. The ability to chase away pain and repair nerves through magnetic forces-”

Rebecca, incredulous at hearing this terminology from her employer, put the cup she had just raised to her lips down with a bang.

“What's wrong, Miss Sand?”

“Some of these are the same titles from Gadshill's library.”

“Yes, they are!”

“Mr. Osgood, you didn't wish me to examine those books at the Gadshill library. You said then that you do not believe one whit in phenomena.”

“Nor have I changed my mind. But Mamie Dickens and her sister Katie confirmed at the Abbey how much Charles Dickens believed in it. Mamie even testified that the mesmerism worked on her. If Dickens, intentionally or accidentally, exposed this man to more information about the novel, even if he doesn't consciously know it, this may be our chance-the best chance to quit England with more knowledge than when we entered it. This man's mind-however disordered-may carry inside it the last strands of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”

“What do you propose?”

“To treat him as Datchery. Let him continue the investigation. He wishes to meet tonight at the Abbey. He promises to take me to a secret location he says will provide the answers we seek.”

Rebecca's eyes narrowed at the package on the table.

“Have a look,” Osgood said proudly. “This is what I purchased at the auction, before I was chased out for asking about the statue.”

She unwrapped the edge of the paper. “The glass tazza from the Gadshill mantelpiece!”

“I wanted Miss Dickens to have it back. I thought it would be a small token of our gratitude to the family.”

Rebecca's heart beat at the kindness of the gesture, but her feelings were conflicted and her mouth felt dry. “That is,” she swallowed, “very gentlemanly of you.”

“Thank you, Miss Sand. I must prepare for my outing. This sort of suit would be a phenomenon where we must go tonight, says Datchery.” He cited his new acquaintance approvingly. “I'm afraid I didn't bring anything quite appropriate. But you've been shaking your head so much your bonnet strings are coming loose.”

“Have I?” she returned innocently. “It is only the idea of not knowing where it is you will be going. With a man of an unstable, and potentially shattered mental state, as guide, in a city unfamiliar to you. Consider!”

Osgood nodded. “I thought of consulting with Scotland Yard to secure a police escort, yet it would likely drive away the very man who can guide me. I am a publisher, Miss Sand. I know what it means. It means I must find a way, very often, to believe in people who believe in something else-something I often may not be inclined toward in the least. A story, a philosophy-a reality different from one I have known or will ever know.”

As Osgood readied himself for his expedition, Rebecca sat and stared into the leaves of her tea as though they, too, were endowed with the spiritual or prophetic attributes her employer seemed to want to find in his new acquaintance. She could not help somehow feeling stranded by the decision and how he had come to it.

Osgood returned in a suit only a little less formal. “I am afraid I shall still stand out,” he said, smiling. “We have a letter from Fields today, by the way,” Osgood went on, branching away from the topic with a comfortable businesslike tone. He put a troubled hand at the back of his neck. “Houghton and his man Mifflin, they are like two halves of a scissor, you know. They have formed a journal to compete with our juvenile magazine and are pouring money into it. And the Major announces the Harper brothers will open an office in Boston, no doubt in order to try to drive us into deeper trouble! Harper is not wrong. I cannot shield myself from business realities, not if I want to continue what Mr. Fields has built. And to show that I can be a publisher of the same caliber, that I can find the next Dickens. Miss Sand, I must try everything I can think of.”

“You must,” she said.

“Yet you disagree,” Osgood said. Seeing her hesitate, he said, “Please, speak freely to me about this, Miss Sand.”

“Why did you ask me to come to Chapman and Hall with you the other day, Mr. Osgood?”

He pretended not to understand. “I thought we might need to copy documents-if he had given us any to see. What does that have to do with this?”

“Pardon my saying, but it seemed to me like I was present there only to be, well, womanly.”

Osgood looked like he wanted to move on, but Rebecca's strong gaze would not let the topic go away. “It was true,” he answered finally, “that I had noticed on my previous visit to their firm that there were no female employees there and thought Mr. Chapman just the type of strutting man to speak more easily in front of a pretty woman. You did say you wanted to help by coming to England.”

The color in Rebecca's cheeks flushed carelessly by his untimely compliment. “Not by being pretty.”

“You're right, I shouldn't have done that with Chapman, not without explaining myself to you, at least. Still, I must notice that you are upset all out of proportion about this.”

“Perhaps I am not as talented as Mrs. Collins at speaking bluntly, making suggestions of marriage upon first meetings,” Rebecca said, standing with hands on her hips.

“Miss Sand…” Osgood said, nervously flustered in a way that upset her even more. “This whole conversation is unfathomable to me.”

Rebecca knew that signaled the end of the exchange and that she should not speak to her employer in this manner. But her gaze kept shifting to the glass tazza, her distorted reflection urging her on like an inner demon.

“I can see why Mamie would be far more persuasive than I can be,” she added. “She would be a good match for any man. She is a Dickens.”

“Miss Sand!” Osgood exhaled impatiently. “I've brought you here to help me, and to help you after Daniel's death. Perhaps this whole idea of your accompanying me was a mistake. To think I had designs on Mamie Dickens because of who she is-I'm not looking for a Dickens!” It seemed like there was another sentence waiting on his tongue but he swallowed it down.

Osgood, consulting his watch, exited and his footsteps could be heard rushing down the stairs of the inn. Rebecca stood there scared. Scared of what had just passed between them, scared of what their failure might mean for her future in Boston, scared of what could be-fall Osgood in the dark corners of London.

Chapter 21

Bengal, India, July 1870

THE OPIUM DACOIT HAD BEEN CAPTURED. NOW HE HAD TO BE interrogated for more information relating to the crime-including the whereabouts of the stolen opium. Outside the room where this was to take place, Mason and Turner, of the Bengal Mounted Police, tried to be patient.

“I'm surprised he'd be found holed near his family village,” Mason said. “An obvious place for an escaped thief to hide!”

Turner sneered. “Not obvious enough, was it, Mason? We wasted a whole afternoon encamped in the mountains waiting for him, while Dickens tripped over him like a lucky fool.”

“Do you think the inspector from the Special Police will have some luck in there? Turner?”

“A lucky fool. That's Frank Dickens!”

“ARE YOU INNOCENT of that opium dacoity?”

The thief nodded.

“I understand that is what you have been explaining to our mounted officers,” said the special inspector. “Yet you are a registered dacoit. Lie down there, my son.”

The thief lay on the chabutra, the inspector offering a gentle hand to position him so that his feet were on the higher edge of the platform, his head the lower. He trembled in fear at what he knew was coming.

“The budna, please,” the inspector said to his assistant. Then he frowned at the prisoner as if apologizing for some minor personal rudeness.

“I HEAR HE'S mute as an Egyptian Sphinx.”

“Don't mumble,” Turner grunted in response, then added: “He's no mute.”

“He's barely said a word since he was arrested,” Mason pointed out. “That's what I meant. Even when they flogged him something awful. You think he'd dare to, after seeing how we captured his friend, with your carbine and my sword? ‘Course he had to jump through the train window-lost his head, that one.”

Turner grunted.

“Dickens says.”

“What?”

“Superintendent Dickens says the thief's scared. That he's hiding more than the theft.”

“Dickens doesn't-that damned stuttering scamp!” Turner replied. “He's the one who called in the inspector. I could have done the duty just fine-give me a whip and a rod on any dark-skinned heathen where you will, don't need no Special Police at all.” Turner pushed his chair away and paced down the hall.

“Turner? Where are you going? We're still to collect the prisoner when the inspector's finished.”

THE INSPECTOR HELD the budna, a copper vessel with an elongated spout, over the prisoner. He slowly poured water onto the upper lip of his subject. The water ran down the small cracks of his lips and collected in pools around his nostrils sending the man into spasms of drowning.

MASON STOOD FROM his chair, trembling. “You hear him shouting, Turner? It chills your blood.”

Turner wheeled back around and looked into the small square window on the door where the screams emerged-suddenly, he looked frightened. “What do you think he'll say, Mason?”

THE THIEF'S EYES filled with tears and looked as if they might burst.

“Sit up now,” said the still-smiling inspector, handing the copper vessel to his assistant.

It took a few minutes for the thief to find his breath again. “Take me to the baboo! Please!” he said as soon as he could form the words. “I shall confess all, your honor, and tell of my other thefts, but no more, for God's sake! Take me to him!”

“At once, my son.” Gently the inspector helped the prisoner to his feet. “And will you tell us where you've hidden the opium?” he added.

“Yes! Yes!” said the thief.

AS THE THIEF was interrogated, Frank Dickens was seeking different answers, answers he did not believe the thief could provide. For these, he needed to journey to the village where the thief's partner in the crime, the notorious Narain, had lived.

This was no pleasant journey. The natives held two sets of poles, front and back, of the palanquin, or palki, on their shoulders as they ran. Inside the palki, tossed inside a thin blanket, was the wearied traveler. Frank tried to sleep as the natives chanted to the Kali goddess for their strength. When will they be rid of their gods and goddesses, wondered Frank as he swayed inside the rickety structure. It was not the night heat, nor the bearers’ primitive singing that kept him from sleeping as the journey continued through the night but the foul odor of the slow flame of dirty rags and rotten oil that lighted the way for the palki at the front of the vessel.

A while later, they had stopped. Frank stirred, realizing he had fallen asleep and wondered what he had been dreaming. In India he never seemed to remember his dreams. It was morning and Superintendent Frank Dickens had reached the distant Bengalee village of his destination. There was no magistrate or native official to greet him, for he deliberately had not made his sojourn known in advance.

On the road toward a crumbling temple in the distance, the fertile fields teemed with the reddish purple opium poppy. The poppy replaced most of the food crops, and left the surrounding land dry and brittle.

Crossing the opium fields, his police uniform sparkling from its brass on this sunny morning, he saw the ryots, or peasant farmers, men, women, children. They were scraping residue from the opium poppies with an iron sittooha into an earthen pot. Later, the drug would be packed into balls for shipment by natives in long rows at British-controlled warehouses. Frank felt a wave of nausea run through him as he passed the pungent poppies. A ryot looked up from his hoe and suddenly dropped it and ran. Dickens found the patch of land he'd been working and saw that the crop here was in fact rice. He frowned. The opium was mandated, the rice illegal.

The British government paid the ryots to grow the poppy instead of other crops, but they also ordered it, when they had to, by the point of bayonets.

This was one of the poorest villages, Dickens knew, fraught constantly with the threat of famine because of the loss of their natural agriculture. Three years earlier, during the Orissa famine, starvation spread quickly across villages like this. Parents, it was said among the policemen and English officials, had eaten their own children. The government did not want the opium cultivation to get a bad reputation with the moralists back home in England, and so the army delivered as much food as they could to the poorest villages. Still, more than five hundred thousand acres in Bengal at any time were dedicated to the opium poppy, and no amount of rations could make up for the loss of agriculture.

The adjacent river, once bustling with trade to and from Calcutta, trickled quietly now that the English had finished building the railroads for faster transport of opium and spices. Instead of the commerce of the past, men, women, and children now bathed and played there. Elders prayed and chatted as the children splashed about. Everyone in the village went outside at this early hour because later it would be even hotter.

Asking for directions from a group of near naked natives, Frank, stopping to wipe his brow and take water, reached a mud hut in a narrow lane. On the side of the house was a pile of dried plants, dead animals, and rubbish. An even stronger odor attacked him from higher up. Stuck to the walls of the house, clumps of cow dung were being heated in the sun and dried for use as fuel. Under the veranda, a striking young woman, bareheaded and barefoot, was preparing food. She had not lit a fire-a sign she was in mourning. A naked toddler held onto both of her legs for balance. Flies were swarming around the woman, the child, the grain, the ghee.

“You are the widow Narain?” Frank Dickens asked, stepping forward.

She nodded.

“It was my officers, some weeks ago, in the Bagirhaut province, that had him in custody after he and some partners stole opium.”

“We are a very poor village, sir,” the widow remarked, without any shade of apology in her strong voice. “He worked the fields until there were too many workers and no land left to work.”

The hut was surprisingly clean. Frank saw the articles of farming, a rough plow, a broken sickle, hanging from the roof, long in disuse. In the bedroom there was the bed, made of string and wood, and a single book on Hindoo gods in an indentation in the wall that had room for several more volumes. Using the bed as a sofa, Frank sat down and skimmed through the pages of the Hindoo book.

Returning to the widow, who was now nursing her child, he asked whether the book had belonged to her husband.

She nodded.

“He read often?”

“He was never without his books.”

After receiving directions to the bookseller where she had sold other books, Frank walked across the village and found the stall at the quiet end of the busy bazaar.

“The widow Narain has sold you some of her husband's books, I believe. Tracts on Hindoo mythology and religion. Do you remember this?”

The bookseller lowered his spectacles at the Englishman. “Indeed!”

“And you still have these in your stall?”

“I believe I do, good sir. But all the books are mixed together.”

“I will purchase all of the books on these subjects that you have.”

After his return journey in the wretched paiki, that evening Frank met the inspector who had questioned the captured fugitive.

“Oh, yes, Superintendent, he has confessed it all to the magistrate of his village. Not as tolerant of physical discomfort as the Thuggees I used to interview in past years, these ordinary dacoits.”

“You believe he has told the truth?” asked Dickens.

“I do, yet…”

“What is it, Inspector?”

“Only that although he has told the truth, it seems to me there's more he's not saying, as though afraid, afraid in a different way than I can make him on the chabutra. The thief may have a secret he has yet kept from us. Your man Turner has been trying to find out what has happened all day. He is rather worked up over the affair.”

Dickens ignored this. “The thief has told you where we will find the stolen opium?”

“I warned him not to play games. He's drawn a map.”

“Recovering the opium shall be our first order of business. Then I shall see to his secret and to Officer Turner's.”

Chapter 22

London, late at night, 1870

DATCHERY” WAS AT THE ABBEY THAT NIGHT WAITING. MADMAN or not, he could be trusted to be where he said he would, thought Osgood. Punctually mad. Datchery-for Osgood had no other name for the man than that preposterous one-took the publisher by the arm and they began to walk the damp streets. A sharp afternoon rain had driven people indoors. But as the two men gradually plunged deeper into the eastern districts of London there was more life; if the rest of London quieted when darkness fell, this place was just waking up. Contrasted with the frail, sputtering lamps of the streets, the public houses and dram shops provided blazing illumination through their windows. Bright signs advertised telegraph services to India to reach family or sailors; posters offered new watches and hats. Sailors came to spend every penny to their names before shipping off again.

It drizzled to a deviously slow rhythm as the two men continued on their journey. Murky liquid rushed through the gutter becoming something altogether different from water by the time the drain swallowed it. The men left wide streets for labyrinthine courts, lanes, byways, and alleys. There was Bloody Bridge, below which the water looked more like mud, named for the number of people who would regularly choose that spot to scuttle themselves.

“Is this near where you live?” Osgood asked.

“No, no,” said Datchery. “I live nowhere.”

“Come!” Osgood objected to the absurdity.

“I mean I'm as poor as Job's turkey, so I keep to rented rooms and lodging houses, mostly, so they will not find me.”

“So who will not find you, Mr. Datchery?” Osgood demanded, but the topic was pushed aside by Datchery's impervious disposition and the vague and inhuman moans and cries circling around them. Osgood tried a different question: “How far will we go?”

“When we are somewhere we should stop, we will,” said Datchery. “Though I am the guide, it is not I who guides us.”

“Then who does?” Osgood asked, knowing there wouldn't be an answer forthcoming, probably because none existed.

Sick men and women lay huddled in the corners. Agents from the charity homes picked up wanderers, mostly women with infants, some with three babies balanced in their arms. Osgood knew Dickens had taken this sort of walk-expeditions to every lost corner of London to observe and record its multitudes. Like the geologist, Dickens had built his books by digging up every layer of life underneath the city.

There were times when Datchery's expression would flatten and become dull-or when his eyes seemed clearer, sharper tools than just a moment before.

They were inside the roughest part of London Osgood had ever seen. In fact, the publisher's only comfort was in observing the fact that none of the cursing crowds of humanity-who, by all appearances, would have spent their daylight hours either on ships or as thieves-had approached them yet. Some offered sarcastic “good nights” from windows or open doorways. Then Osgood noticed that his guide was carrying a large club. In fact, it was more complex than a club. At the top, it had a spike and a hook coming out from the side.

Datchery, noticing Osgood's interest, said, “Without this, we'd be stripped to our shirtsleeves by now, dear Ripley. Dearest Ripley! This is Tiger Bay, and we are coming to Palmer's Folly!” The names themselves sounded like warnings.

THERE WAS A cul-de-sac at a narrow court, entered under a crumbling archway, that ended at a three-story building of blackened brick with a black door and sightless windows. On either side of it stood a public house and a thieves’ lodging house. As the two men walked, each step produced a brittle cracking. It took Osgood a few minutes to realize their path was littered with the bones of animals and fish. In front of the public house was a wretched column of people of both sexes and all races, trying to push past one another for a better view of the steps.

The demonstration on the steps was being performed by a man called the Fire King. He offered, for the reward of small bills, to prove his power of resisting every species of heat. “Supernatural powers!” he promised the crowd.

To the cheers and applause of his spellbound followers, Fire King swallowed as many spoonfuls of boiling oil as were matched by donations, and he immersed his hands in a pot of “molten lava.” Next, the King entered the open doors to the public house and-for a steeper fee, gladly supplied by the philanthropically minded crowd-he inserted himself into the public house's oven along with a piece of meat and came out only when the meat (a raw steak he'd held up for the crowd) was finished.

The two pilgrims to this region did not remain outside long enough to see the cooking, however, for Datchery had walked up to the black door and knocked. A man stretched out on a crusty, ragged couch granted them admission into a corridor, after which they ascended a narrow stairs where every board groaned at their steps; perhaps out of disrepair, perhaps to warn the inhabitants. The building smelled of mold and what? It was an odor that was heavy, drowsy. They made a wrong turn into a room where there sat a piano and a small audience before it; everyone turned to look at them and would not move a muscle until they were gone. Barmaids and ballet girls sat next to or on top of sailors and clerks. One man in the audience seemed to be balancing a dagger in his teeth.

Osgood could only imagine what demonstration would happen after they left, as he never heard any piano music while in the building.

They continued upward through the smoke and mist. “Here,” Datchery said with eerie finality. “Take care, Mr. Osgood, every door in life can lead into an undiscovered kingdom or an inescapable trap.”

The door opened into darkness and smoke.

“No weapons!” This was the greeting, in a gravely voice that seemed to belong to a woman.

Datchery put his club down in the hall outside the door.

Only after some slight, slow commotion was a candle lit. The small room showed itself crammed with people, most coiled together on a collapsed bed. Several were asleep and several more looked as though they could fall asleep at any moment. At the foot of the bed sat a gaunt, careworn woman with silver hair holding a long, thin piece of bamboo.

“Remember, pay up, dearies, won't ye?” she greeted the newcomers. “Yahee from across the court is in quod for a month for begging. He don't mix well as me, anyhow!”

Over a small flame she was mixing together a black treacly substance. Sprawled on the bed was a Chinese man in a deep trance, and a Lascar sailor with an open shirt mumbling to himself-both with glossy, vacant eyes. Across the Lascar's mouth, drool escaped from between rotten teeth and ran down the craterlike sores on his lips. Rags and bedclothes hung from a string to dry in the smoke. The smoke! As the woman held out the bamboo pipe, Osgood recognized the reeking smell as opium.

Osgood thought about the narratives of Coleridge and De Quincey, both of whom, like almost everyone else including Osgood, had taken opiates from the pharmacist to quell rheumatism and other physical ailments. But the writers had indulged heavily enough to experience a swirl of ecstasy and fatigue that were opium's powerful effects on the brain. As De Quincey wrote in a series of published confessions, before it became the motto of thousands, “Happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket.” Osgood thought, too, about the accusation of the police against Daniel Sand that he had left so far away in Boston, that Daniel had given up everything for the thrill and ease of opiate entertainment.

“Sally's is better than Yahee's brand-you'll pay accordingly, won't ye, dearie?” the manager of the establishment repeated. “Have a whiff. After payment, of course.”

As she recited her slogans, a petite young woman on the other side of Sally's grisly bed slid to the floor with a moan.

“Is she unwell?” asked Osgood. Sally explained that the young woman was in a peaceful dream state and would be better than if she were in the terrible, unclean grog-house where the girl's mother used to take her.

Then Osgood realized. He could suddenly name the feeling he had experienced upon entering the building. It was a word he would have never guessed. Familiarity.

Witnessing this squalor was like seeing photographs of scenes from The Mystery of Edwin Drood! It recalled the very first scene of the book, where the devious John Jasper takes refuge in his opium dreams as he prepares to begin his villainous plans against his nephew Drood; and Princess Puffer, the old woman stirring the opium, questions her visitor. It was just as they performed the novel's scenes at the Surrey, too, but here given the actual stench of the drug and its hopelessness.

Here's another ready for ye, deary. Ye'll remember like a good soul, won't ye, that the market price is dreffle high just now?

Osgood's hope had been proven right! Datchery, consciously or not, must have absorbed something about the writing of the novel if he knew of this place. Then, a less settling feeling touched his nerves as he looked back at Datchery, standing behind him. Datchery and Sally were eyeing each other with the familiarity of a suitor and his former love.

A sudden and unexpected movement pulled away Osgood's attention: four white mice had scurried across a dirty shelf and over the occupants of the bed. Sally assured them they were very tame pets and, after a few clumsy attempts, managed to light another candle as if to demonstrate the highly civilized nature of a two-candle colony. The light revealed a ladder running up into a hole in the ceiling. In the time they had been standing there, a Malaysian sailor had left the room and a Chinese beggar had entered, left, and entered again. Sally spoke to the beggar-apparently her usual plea for advance purchase of her opium but now in Chinese. She also berated a ship's cook from

Bengal, whom she called Booboo, who was apparently not only a drug purchaser, but her lodger and servant.

THERE WAS REPETITION in the operation. After being given a shilling from a customer, the dealer would toast a thick black lump, which she had been mixing slowly with a pin, over the flame of a bro-ken lamp. When it was hot enough, the black mixture was inserted into the cup of the bamboo pipe, which was just an old glass ink bottle with a hole pierced in its side. The customer would then suck the end of the whistling pipe until the opium had been used up-usually after only a minute at the longest.

As Sally prepared the concoction, she gave a hard stare at Os-good-impatient with the lack of payment. Even one of the half-sleeping opium eaters now seemed to take a curious interest in the well-dressed publisher. Osgood, meanwhile, under the wet rags at his feet, noticed a small booklet or pamphlet among other soiled papers. Though the lighting was too dark to make out the details, the booklet's battered cover looked like he had seen it before.

“Well, dearies,” Sally the opium manager said, scowling a little, “is there something more ye want here, if it isn't any whiffs?” The Lascar meanwhile had now managed to stand and was also gazing at them.

Osgood felt a second wave of nausea from the newly thickened fumes. As he kneeled down to take a breath in the clearer air near the floor, he also slipped the booklet into his pocket. Datchery asked if he was all right.

“Some air,” Osgood responded, woozy from bending over. He found the door and climbed down one flight of stairs to an open window at the landing. Leaning his head out, he closed his eyes, still burning from the smoke. He realized when he opened them again that his vision was blurry from painful tears, and he tried to dry his eyes with a handkerchief. The air felt soothing on his face-though it was hot, it seemed like an ocean breeze compared with that cauldron upstairs.

He now removed the booklet from his pocket, and his suspicion was confirmed. He was holding the latest installment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the same installment he had seen shipped out of Chapman & Hall on Magazine Day.

“Drood!” he said to himself. How in the land had it come to be here, too? Charles Dickens truly was read in every corner of the earth.

Returning up the stairs, gripping the handrail very firmly, Osgood felt his vision blur again as he neared the dark opium room. The entrance now seemed to be one solid block of smoke. He felt blind as he took two steps inside and then stumbled over something. Looking down as he plunged forward, he realized he had just tripped over Datchery, sprawled out on the floor. Osgood was caught and pushed against the wall, where he was held erect by the Lascar sailor, who threw a fist into Osgood's stomach.

“Stop! Ripley!” This cry came from Datchery, who pulled himself up from the floor and stumbled toward Osgood's attacker. Datchery wrestled with the Lascar, but Booboo, the Bengalee, shook him away and threw him back to the floor, where Datchery landed on his head and was knocked out cold.

Osgood, blinded by tears and blood, tried to feel his way out of the room, but the Lascar grabbed him and pitched into him with his fists, again and again, left then right, crushing him against the wall. Then the Lascar ripped open Osgood's waistcoat and frisked his pockets. Osgood could hear Booboo squatting on the floor similarly ransacking the unconscious Datchery.

As his body slumped down, Osgood felt himself slam against the wall and his head hitting it hard. Then, suddenly, it all came to a halt. Screams. The Lascar collapsed, his head rolling limply on the side of his neck. Booboo seemed to fly across the room splattering blood as he did. Sally had scrambled to the ladder and scurried like one of her mice up its rungs out of sight. Then Osgood was grabbed by both of his arms by someone new.

Through the blur, Osgood thought he could see the figure who'd seized him.

“Impossible!”

He knew this assailant. How could he be here! The giant figure loomed over him, grasped the top of his arm roughly. Seconds later, Osgood hit the floor and everything around him went black.

The next thing Osgood could remember, he awoke covered by darkness. His clothes were dripping wet and tattered. Strangely, he felt a state of dreamy peacefulness, the call of sleep, the crash of oceans, still starry skies-these pulled at him. The air had turned thickly blue, and he reached out to touch it.

Then a vague thought pierced the peace. Danger: he had to reach for the word-although it should have been self-evident. He was in danger. A snake, black and yellow and then all yellow, slithered by, nearly touching him; it spoke, or someone else spoke, now ten, fifteen, fifty voices could be heard at once trying to drown him in an incoherent chorus.

He thought about Rebecca, who had warned him… Rebecca who had been loyal and believed he could succeed in their mission… Rebecca whom he knew now that he had loved from the first time he saw her. He felt like crying-he felt as though this would relieve some of his bleak frustration-to produce tears but he could not manage. Without rising-for that seemed beyond his means-he looked for any sign of Datchery.

His eyes wanted to close but he felt if he allowed them, he would not be able to open them again. Struggling, his eyes won and Osgood tumbled backward into the dark.

THE SEWER HUNTER STEPPED carefully into the lowest section of the tunnel. Unlike most sewer hunters, Steve Williams had been able to secure the expensive leather boots that went up to the knee. This gave him a giant help as he waded through the bubbling offal and mud that filled the two thousand miles of brick sewers under London.

Armed with a long iron pole, with a flat hoe at the end, Steve dug through a crevice where something was lodged. He opened the slide on his lantern, which hung from his belt, so he could see more clearly through the dim, noxious air.

“God bless!” he said to himself, reaching out his arm and pulling up two silver table knives. “God bless, silver!” he exclaimed, stuffing them in his pocket. This, along with the gold milk jug found a day be-fore, gave Steve an ancient air of heroic triumph. He noticed a bulge in the muddy floor near the drain out to the east end. Poking the lumpy mud with his pole, a flurry of rats the size of small cats rushed past him. Steve stepped forward two boots’ lengths and coughed. He did not cough at the awful air, punctuated by the waste of the butchers thrown into the drains, which he was used to after three years hunting in sewers, but at the sight of another dead body washed up in the tunnels. Though their treasure seeking was illegal, the police were permissive of the sewer hunters as long as they reported dead bodies and human remains. This one wore a nice suit.

But on closer inspection, he found that the prostrate man was not dead. He was even breathing.

“Now come along, fellow, how'd you get in this place?” Steve called out, pulling up the man's arm. “Get along, you beasts!” he said. There were massive rats clinging to the man's arms, legs, head, and body and chirping at a deafening volume. “Get along!” Steve used his pole to knock off the rats and fight off others trying to climb on his discovery. He removed a pouch and forced a powdery substance into the man's mouth.

“Take these Epsom salts-take some of this. It will draw the blood from your head.”

Rising to his feet, finally, hugging his sides in pain, the man stumbled forward and found himself falling down again into the filth.

“Rebecca! Tell her!” he cried out.

“What do you mean? What is all this choke-pear?” answered Steve.

“Stop him! I saw him! You must…!”

“Who? Who ever did you see, gov'n'r?”

“Herman,” Osgood groaned. “It was always Herman!”