The Last Dickens

Chapter 27

London, England, July 16, 1870

FOR FIVE DAYS AFTER OSGOOD'S ASSAULT BY THE OPIUM FIENDS, Rebecca tended to her employer at the Falstaff Inn, where he slept almost continuously. There were frequent visitations by the local Rochester doctor. Datchery had come, too, looking distraught and weepy at the sight of Osgood's condition. In his waking moments, the publisher tried to breathe but mostly coughed.

“No blood expelled when coughing,” Dr. Steele observed to Rebecca a day after the attack. “The fractures are likely on the surface of the ribs, and the lungs unhindered. I do not like to apply physic or leeches in such cases if there isn't inflammation.”

“Thank God for that,” Rebecca said.

“He must be bathed with cold water regularly. You seem to have had some experience as a nurse before, Miss.”

“Will he recover fully, Doctor?” asked Rebecca urgently.

“The chloroform and brandy should cleanse his body, I assure you that, miss. If he's one of the lucky ones.”

When Osgood's mind felt clearer, he still could hardly describe what had happened in the early morning at the opium rooms that had ended with two of the opium fiends dead and mutilated. Rebecca was sitting at a writing desk composing a letter to Fields with the latest news, and Datchery was half asleep in an armchair when Osgood woke again.

“It was Herman!” Osgood groaned as he had done when found by the sewer hunter. His ribs were wrapped in a broad bandage that went twice around his body, constraining his movements and respiration. Bites from the sewer rats had swelled around his face and neck in giant red patches.

“Are you very certain it was him, Mr. Osgood?” Rebecca asked, coming over to his bedside.

Osgood gripped his forehead with both hands. “No. I'm not certain at all, Miss Sand. We know he couldn't have survived the ocean, after all! And who would have stopped him from doing worse to me, if he was there to see me dead? It must have been a vision from the opium, like the snakes and the voices. I had fallen under its spell.”

“We shall find out what it was that happened, I promise you that!” cried Datchery. “My dear Ripley, my dear Miss Rebecca, I certainly promise you that!” He took one of Osgood's hands and reached for Rebecca's, but Rebecca stepped away distrustfully. “They say you'll be sick as a horse for a while, old fellow. Only tell me you'll live a day longer and I'll be tripping on the light fantastic!”

Though his head remained bandaged, Datchery's own injuries were more superficial than Osgood's. He had not seen anything that had happened after his own attack and had not seen any sign of Herman before he was knocked out. As they had with Osgood, someone had dragged him unconscious into the streets. Rebecca wanted nothing to do with the man who had brought Osgood to a low point and had before that caused them to argue in what was now a shameful memory.

Datchery said, “Miss Rebecca, I wish to help. I can help, you know. Let the idea ripen in your mind.”

“I think you have helped enough,” she said. “And you may refer to my employer as Mr. Osgood, if you please.”

Datchery chewed his lip in frustration, then turned to the patient in bed and then back to Rebecca. “Perhaps there are some things I must say that shall help you trust me as your employer has so quickly learned to do.”

“Ah, Mr. ‘Datchery,’ is it?” This was Dr. Steele coming into the room. “May I have a private word with you?”

Datchery, looking over the drowsy face of Osgood above the blankets, nodded and left the room. To Rebecca's great relief, the visitor did not come back that afternoon.

The next time Osgood woke, he asked for the suit of clothes he had been wearing during the attack, now hanging in the wardrobe. Searching the pockets, he removed the green pamphlet he had taken from that filthy floor.

“Edwin Drood! Look.”

There it was. The cover was a kaleidoscope of illustrated scenes from Dickens's novel. The pamphlet was in fact the fifth installment published of the serial of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Dr. Steele, just arriving for another inspection, came over to the bed when he saw Osgood had stirred. This doctor, a lanky and studious man, had become a tyrant over Osgood's care. He commanded that light only be allowed through the window blinds at short intervals.

“I have asked that Mr. Datchery to leave Mr. Osgood in peace,” Dr. Steele explained to Rebecca. “He only seems to agitate him, I can assure you.”

“I think so too,” Rebecca said firmly.

The doctor now discouraged Osgood from studying the booklet that apparently also agitated him. Rebecca consented to remove the object from the patient, though she pondered the terrific coincidence of the item having appeared in such a place. Had Osgood's misfortunes in the low streets really been due to the region's usual dangers or somehow connected to their singular mission in England? She opened the booklet and noticed the pages looked like they had been read, perhaps multiple times. She placed the installment in a drawer.

“I do not understand,” Osgood sighed as the doctor unwrapped his dressings and applied fresh bandages. “I do not see how the opiates I breathed could have had such a strong effect on me.”

“Oh, you are quite right,” Dr. Steele said conclusively. “On their own, the fumes could not do such harm. I hope the lady present will not be too embarrassed,” he said as a caution, and waited for Rebecca to turn away. When she did not, he folded up Osgood's flannel sleeve and revealed what he had seen in his examination.

“I do not understand,” Rebecca protested.

“There,” Dr. Steele said, “a single puncture wound in Mr. Osgood's arm-from a hypodermic syringe. You see it?”

The doctor continued with detached interest. “Someone inserted into your tissue a very high dosage of the narcotic, sir. That is why it has required a long time to be ejected from your body.”

Rebecca felt herself shaking. Osgood sat bolt upright. They caught each other in a mutual moment of unreserved shock. They had come halfway around the world, in part in an effort to leave Daniel's tragedy behind and yet came round to face the same poisonous injection marking in Osgood's own skin as Daniel had suffered. Everything seemed to be brought into a single line of sinister action, though why and where it had all started was more of a mystery than ever.

Rebecca knew that if Dr. Steele believed any conversation overexcited the patient he would intervene to end it. So she waited, pretending to the best of her ability that the puncture wound was the least interesting sight ever witnessed. The doctor soon moved into the next room, giving long-winded instructions to a messenger boy to secure more vials of medicine from the town druggist.

“Mr. Osgood, is it the same as what you saw on… on Daniel's body?” Rebecca asked in as calm a whisper as she could manage, so the doctor could not hear them from outside the door. “You mustn't hold anything from me. It is, isn't it?”

“Yes,” Osgood whispered in return.

“What could it mean?”

“We have faced the same adversary since the morning of Daniel's death.”

“But who?”

“I don't know.” Then Osgood whispered half brokenhearted and half triumphant, “It wasn't Daniel who injected himself with opium. We know that now for certain. He was poisoned, Miss Sand, just as I was!”

“Do you believe that?”

“It must be! Dickens himself could not write such a discovery as coincidence! This knocks the wind out of the whole thing. We must seek a clearer view of everything: of Daniel, of the opium fiends, of Brood. Miss Sand,” he added with an abrupt urgency. “Miss Sand, some paper!”

Rebecca brought him hotel stationery and a lead pencil and a book to rest them on.

Osgood wrote on the stationery, crossing words out then trying again until he got it:

It is God's.

Itisgod's.

ItsOsgoods. It's Osgood's.

Daniel Sand didn't exclaim a sentiment of religious peace, but the words carried a beautiful meaning nonetheless. “Look,” he said. “Bendall was wrong. Daniel didn't leave out a final word before he died. Daniel didn't want me to be angry, even at the edge of life. He never failed the firm at all.”

When Dr. Steele came back to complete his examination, the darkness of the room hid the hot tears in Rebecca's eyes.

IT HAD NOT ONLY been Osgood's physical but his legal standing that had been in jeopardy the balmy morning of the attack. When he had first partially recovered his senses, he had found himself carried out of the sewer tunnels by two toshers, the sewer hunters, to a police station house. He could not explain to the constables how he had come to be there.

Moreover, Osgood's state at the time-his now-tattered and wet clothing, his slurred speech and senses, and the harsh smell of burned narcotics and rubbish-subjected him to reproach by the officials as if he were another bothersome tosher. When he described what had happened, other constables were dispatched and the dead bodies of a Lascar sailor and a Bengalee known as Booboo by local residents were found in the squalid rooms described by Osgood.

“That is not good for us,” the station sergeant said to Osgood. “Not good for you, sir. Your story is not complete.”

“Because I know not what has happened to me, sir!” Osgood protested.

“Then who would?” the sergeant demanded.

Only the arrival of a respected London man of business, Marcus Wakefield, had saved him from being charged as a public nuisance. Mr. Wakefield had been alerted about the presence of an unknown American brought to the station house because Osgood had had Wakefield's calling card on his suit when he was found.

“You know this poor soul, sir?” the sergeant asked skeptically. “Or perhaps he stole your card from your possession.”

Osgood was stretched out on a bench, mangled with pain and delirium.

Wakefield slammed his fist against the table. “This is outrageous! Release him straightaway, gentlemen. I crossed the ocean with him- his name is Osgood, James Osgood. He is no vagrant at all but a respected publisher from Boston who preferred a cabin on the sunny side of a steamship. You have a gentleman in your custody. It was my understanding he was to be residing in the country near Rochester conducting his business.”

The sergeant looked Osgood up and down. “I have never met a publisher that would choose to dress and, shall I mention, stink like that, sir! We shall have to write a report.”

“Write your report, then let him free.”

Wakefield used his influence to expedite Osgood's liberty and then sent a message to Rebecca summoning her to Higham station, where Wakefield met her with Osgood so the injured man could be transported back to the Falstaff Inn to recover. When they met at the station, Wakefield asked to speak with Rebecca alone.

“May I walk with you, my dear?” said Wakefield.

Rebecca held out her arm for their visitor as they walked through the station.

“My dear, I would continue with you to the Falstaff but I am afraid I must return to London at once on business,” he said apologetically.

“You have been very kind to bring him all the way back to Kent, Mr. Wakefield,” she replied.

He shrugged. “I confess that although I am horribly alarmed by Mr. Osgood's surprising state and these circumstances, I take solace in the pleasure I feel to be in your company again,” he said. “And are you well, my dear?”

“As well as I can be, thank you, Mr. Wakefield,” Rebecca said politely. “I only wish I had not permitted Mr. Osgood to go to such a place with that awful Mr. Datchery.”

“I am afraid the tender woman, though she must try, cannot prevent the less cautious sex from our imprudent pursuits, Miss Sand,” said Wakefield, smiling. “Mr. Osgood, it seems, has discovered, too late for his health, that all of London is not a picnic. Women's instincts are often right. Mr. Osgood had sent me a note about some matter with a plaster statue at Christie's auction house that he suspected had gone missing. I inquired about it with an associate-apparently this statue your employer was interested in was dropped by a careless workman at the auction house and, embarrassed, they did not want to reveal it. I hope you insist on him suspending these wild activities in such dark corners, whatever they may have been.”

Rebecca shook her head. “I do not know that anyone in the whole world could sway him now. Perhaps not even Mr. Fields.”

Wakefield sighed worriedly but with a note of admiration. “He is a man of inner resources, I can see that, and confess it is like looking in a mirror. I did not know being a publisher carried with it such adventures! I suggest you keep a most watchful eye on him from now on, my dear Miss Sand. I have friends up and down the city. Send for me at the slightest worry. As a businessman, I fear I know too well that whatever flame of ambition fires Mr. Osgood's heart, it will not soon be extinguished unless his goal is attained.”

“Our united thanks,” she said tentatively, as the interview seemed to be at its end.

Wakefield took Rebecca's hand and slowly pressed his lips against it. “I hope that is not too bold, my dear,” he said. “You are truly the pink of perfection, a rare type of woman not found enough among the conceited peacocks of London. Mr. Osgood is fortunate for your loyalty.”

Taken by a peculiar sensation of vulnerability and freedom, she found herself at a loss for words.

“Mr. Osgood told me about your having been married before,” Wakefield went on in a gentle tone. “But the laws are different in England. You need not give a thought to that ever again, if you wished.”

“Mr. Osgood told you of my being divorced?” Rebecca asked in surprise.

“Yes, when we were on board the Samaria,” he said. Sensing her confusion, he added, “He wished merely to protect you, Miss Sand. I believe he could see my instant and sincere affection for you and wanted to prevent any impropriety. Is my interest in your life so surprising, my dear, as the expression on your face makes it appear?”

The bells of the carriage readying to drive the patient to the Falstaff Inn jingled.

“I must go help him, Mr. Wakefield,” Rebecca said.

EACH DAY THE publisher awoke from his sleep with a little more physical stamina and more pronounced mental restlessness. The fractures in his ribs, though still painful, were healing at pace. Dr. Steele had given urgent orders to Osgood to keep his torso in bandages and restrict heavy breathing or exertion at risk to causing grave permanent injury to his lungs. One morning, as he cleared Osgood's breakfast, the landlord of the inn placed a fresh vase of flowers on the washstand.

“That is kind of you, Sir Falstaff,” said Rebecca, who sat by Osgood's side and bathed his forehead.

“Many apologies if I interject trivial business upon the patient's health,” the landlord said with a tentative air. “I am afraid I require your signature on some papers, Mr. Osgood, to extend your stay beyond our original arrangement, owing to the circumstances.”

“Of course,” Osgood said.

As Osgood was examining the bill of charges, which he rested on top of a pillow, he paused. Above the landlord's stationery was Sir John Falstaff's given name, William Stocker Trood. Trood: Osgood mouthed the word to himself.

“Anything wrong, my dear Mr. Osgood?” asked the landlord.

“I was only noting your surname's resemblance to the title of Mr. Dickens's last book.”

“Ah! Poor Mr. Dickens, how he is missed around here, I cannot say! I have to confess, Mr. Osgood, that this”-here the landlord stopped and pulled at his old-fashioned baggy coat and neck cloth- “I mean these costumes and my trying to be like the fat knight, Falstaff. This is because of him.”

“Because of Dickens?”

He nodded. “For many years people have come to Rochester from all over the world in order to get a glimpse of Mr. Dickens's home and perhaps even of the man himself! Americans would come round and leave their card hoping to be invited into Gadshill, in the meantime coming for bread and wine at our fireside. At other times, the Dickens family would have too many guests and they would use us for additional lodging. The location of our little place has meant that we could always command decent fees for our beds and meals. Now that he is gone and the family leaving, well, I have had to think of other ways to attract sightseers. As my sister says, God protect us if we must rest our small claims on my Falstaff impersonation! ‘The better part of valor is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life.’ I tried to memorize some lines, but you will notice I have nothing of the theater about me.”

After finishing with their business, the Falstaff landlord bowed and began to exit.

“Mr. Osgood? What is it? What's the matter?” Rebecca asked when she saw the color drain from his face all at once.

“His son, his son died…” Osgood murmured before trailing off.

“What?” Rebecca asked, confused and worried about his state of mind. “Whose son?”

Flashes of all the connections between the small town of Rochester and Dickens's books raced through Osgood's mind. Dickens had taken names, characters, and stories from the country life outside his study window. The novels of Rudge and Dorrit had intimations of their stories in the byways of Rochester, what about the story of poor Drood? Osgood spoke more to himself than Rebecca. “He became sad at seeing the opium poppy on the table downstairs and said opium had to do with his son's death… but I never thought of…”

Suddenly, the publisher jumped down from the bed, knees wobbling as his legs strove for balance. With one arm wrapped around himself, he struggled to drag his beaten body into the hallway.

“Mr. Trood! Your son!”

The landlord's face went snowy white, his self-appointed role of the jolly host vanishing again. “Perhaps we have had enough conversation today,” he said sharply. He saw Osgood was waiting for more. He looked up and down the stairs. “I cannot talk of it here. Are you well enough to come into town, Mr. Osgood? If you walk with me, I'll promise you a story.”

Osgood insisted. “Your son, sir, what was your son's name?”

The landlord took in a gulp of air to regain his voice. “It was Edward. Edward Trood,” he said. “He would have been around your age, had he never disappeared.”

Chapter 28

EDWARD TROOD'S FINAL DISAPPEARANCE BEFORE HIS MURDER did not arouse much concern because it was not the first time.

Edward had had a difficult early life. He was always small for his age and was born with a clubbed right foot. The other boys of the village showed no mercy in their torments. Then the stealing began. Small amounts of change at first, extra food from the cupboards, articles of clothing. Some of it, as far as his parents could determine, were offerings by the boy to his peers on threat of violent retribution. But sometimes they would find a missing object-a family candlestick, for instance-buried in the garden, as though in the crippled boy's gnawing imagination it would sprout and grow.

It was worse than all of this. Worse because the boy was by all outward appearances quite good. In the presence of strangers, even most times in the presence of his family, Eddie was polite, keen to keep his manners and his dress orderly. He was genuinely kind and amiable when in good spirits.

When William and his wife asked for counsel about their son from the town minister, they would be greeted by benevolent laughter. Edward? What trouble could be fancied in little, complying, polite, well-mannered Eddie Trood? The parents tried to force themselves into the same attitude. Our Eddie? Boyish mischief, that's all that plagued him. There would be long periods of quiet when Edward, a good scholar according to his teachers (some said exceptional), behaved at home and in his school and managed to avoid trouble from his tormentors.

Then he'd steal again-this time from the small hotel where William and his wife both worked doing cooking and housekeeping. Edward forced open the ancient landlord's locked drawer and removed a purse containing several pounds. And-the true horror-Edward had committed the theft in plain sight of his mother! He brushed right by her as though he didn't know her from a housemaid.

That evening, Eddie had appeared back at home with a sullen but guiltless demeanor.

“My poor wife could hardly utter a word,” William Trood said, taking in a very deep breath like a dying man as he retold the story. Os-good and Rebecca sat next to him on the pew of the empty but sublime Rochester Cathedral, which was filled with ancient light and atmosphere, where the landlord had insisted they go to speak. He had refused to say another word at the Falstaff, as though there were too many ghosts there eavesdropping. Here, the story could be told under God's protection.

“I said to him, ‘Edward, my son. Eddie. You have not done what your mother thought you did, you would not, would you?’ And he looked right at me, he looked into my eyes, Mr. Osgood, like this…”

It was another minute before Trood could finish his line of thought, saying Edward had admitted to the deed.

“I didn't see no harm in it,” added Edward. Then Edward's eyes filled up and he fell to the floor weeping and kicking. The tears had held William in check momentarily.

But William Trood knew he had no choice. He banished the fifteen-year-old from their house and from his family.

William's wife became utterly fragile with depression and soon dropped into the grave. She had been ill for years, but still William blamed her final turn on the dark influence of their son. William's spinster sister Elizabeth moved in with him to help him manage the Falstaff. Hearing of her nephew's actions, the very first thing Elizabeth said was, “Like Nathan!”

That was the last she said of it. Elizabeth forbade any mention of Nathan Trood under the roof of the Falstaff Inn.

NATHAN TROOD WAS William's older brother. Nathan, in his formative years, had displayed all the mischief of his future nephew, Eddie, without any of the sympathetic and sad aspects, without the excuse of being a cripple. Sullen, lazy, mocking, nasty: that was Nathan Trood from the time he was old enough to speak, and old enough to speak meant old enough to lie. William's father, who had taken his family from Scotland to Kent, used to say Nathan was a mere nasty shadow of a real boy, a coarse creature with a bright red nose from too much crying that could not be stopped even when he was dosed with the strongest powders. Edward had only met his uncle Nathan once while a boy. Nathan, who lived in London ever since he had run away as a youth, had appeared-without invitation-at Edward's sixth birthday celebration, a simple gathering with some townsfolk and two specially made puddings.

That very moment: Nathan flashing his rotted, yellow teeth while pinching the boy's cheeks and rustling his hair. That was the moment William blamed, deep down in his soul, for turning Eddie forever-as though some magic dust laced with death had passed from the man's breath into the child's heart. The long-estranged Nathan, by all accounts, had transformed into an even more nefarious man than he had been a boy. It was said he frequently visited dimly lit rooms in the darkest corners of London filled with opium smokers who hailed from China and other heathen lands. He consorted with scoundrels, prostitutes, smugglers, thieves, and derelicts-and in them he found his income and his avenues of pleasure.

After mourning his wife's death and his son's betrayals, William had tried his best to forget banished Edward. But how to forget a man's only son? The task was impossible; attempting it was itself too painful and left William feeling clouded by sentiment and self-recrimination. All Rochester whispered about the lost cripple. William knew it. Kentish townspeople shared stories of other people's failures like they were singing carols house-to-house at Christmastime. Then William, through the whispers, heard something new: Edward, after his banishment from home, had sought sanctuary with Nathan, who had happily taken in the errant nephew he had not seen for almost ten years. Nathan's revenge on a family that never accepted him had come to pass.

In time Nathan was said to have treated Edward as though he were his own son. He brought him to meet his friends and associates. The physical suffering caused by Edward's clubbed foot was soothed by the opium-eating habit taught by Nathan.

Not to say the relationship between uncle and nephew was purely harmonious. Edward (William would hear much later, when it was all done) actually behaved on the whole quite well with his uncle, forgoing any tendencies of rebellion he had cultivated in Rochester- perhaps because he knew consequences would be severe with Nathan. Yet Nathan's generous instincts toward his nephew only appeared in bursts, to be regularly replaced by scowls, threats, and demeaning insults. There were persistent rumors of a young lady in London that had set Edward's heart aflame, and Nathan's ire having been provoked by the younger man's prospects at happiness. Whatever caused the breach between the two, Edward soon disappeared. After much searching by a number of his new friends, it was discovered that he had gone abroad without telling a soul. It was said that in the course of these adventures, like so many other English boys his age, he sailed through Hong Kong and other exotic ports. When he returned to London eight months later he was welcomed home by his uncle.

Still, the young sailor and his uncle descended into a dangerous routine of perpetual indolence and indulgence in opium. Nathan seemed by his gaunt appearance and alternately drowsy and combustible manner to have become decidedly more dissatisfied in the last year. Even his wretched neighbors wanted nothing to do with Nathan. Then, Edward disappeared again.

“Who would think anything of it, less than a year after the last time he left voluntarily to go out to sea?” William asked. “I was told later that no one in their dingy quarter had any concerns. Not even his uncle Nathan. Especially not his uncle Nathan.”

In fact, new whispers had started (for they also exist in London, only with a harsher undertone than in Rochester). It was said that Nathan and Edward had an ugly row about an opium enterprise that involved friends of Nathan's. These whispers told that Nathan had murdered Edward, or had paid some other men to have Edward killed, and that with the aid of his villainous compatriots they disposed of the young man's body where it could never be found. Whatever had happened this time, the fact was Edward never came back.

Nathan, increasingly sickly, soon after died in debt and in misery. William was sent for as the nearest relation and was charged with disposing of the small house in a dingy quarter of London. The house was the picture of disorder-to William's surprise, Nathan, who had thrown away his whole family so long ago, had apparently never thrown away anything else. Rats and other vermin overran the place. In the hopes of selling the old house to liberate himself of the burden, William and a hired workman made some small structural renovations and repairs.

They were removing the rotting foundation of a wall when it happened. A sheet of canvas unraveled from above and a full skeleton of human bones fell on top of them. The skeleton, William knew instantly, was that of his son Edward Trood. The rumors were true.

“IMAGINE, IF YOU CAN, Mr. Osgood and Miss Sand, your child's bones raining down upon your head! There is no horror that could compare to that, my last embrace with my boy. Even though we had parted ways in red anger, I confess that as the years had passed, more and more I had imagined seeing my dear son, Eddie, at my fireside again. I had merely fancied him in my imagination away at sea- sometimes I do still, and surrender to my tears when nobody is watching.”

He tried to catch his breath again in spurts.

“Oh, Mr. Trood,” Rebecca said with sympathy, “it is your right to grieve. I lost my brother without saying good-bye, and now I must say good-bye to him every day.”

Giving up hope of a strong demeanor before his tenants, the grateful landlord began to weep on Rebecca's shoulder. When he had recovered himself, he led his guests outside behind the cathedral.

“What did the police say when you found his bones?” Osgood inquired.

Trood stopped in the burial yard, at his family plot. “Mr. Osgood, I never sent for them. Nor do I regret that decision.”

“But why?”

The landlord sat on the ground like a child, placing one trembling hand on the humble tablet for his wife and the other on his son's.

“I had lost my boy. Now was I to have my dead brother-however much I despised him-tossed around the columns of the newspapers as his murderer? I would not have been able to bear all of it. I would not have been able to live any longer with the Trood name. Perhaps that is why I have preferred to become of one form with my inn and the picture of the luckless Sir Falstaff. There are reasons murder is not always found out, and they are not always for cunning. The reason might be the fatigue among those who have been deadened on the inside. I buried Eddie quietly right here and told people he had suffered an accident at sea. The workman who had been with me in the excavation vowed to keep the circumstances of the discovery in his confidence, though I knew that would only go so far. Legends and fables sprouted-some told with more truth in them than others. I did not want to hear the stories, but I needed to. There was the story, as I say, that Eddie had stumbled on some kind of opium smuggling operation and was killed because of it. Eddie's terrible end at the hands of Nathan or other fiends became a topic for the Rochester busybodies to stir up.”

“And Mr. Dickens?” asked Osgood eagerly.

“What do you mean?” the landlord asked back blankly

“Why, his final, uncompleted book-surely you realized when you saw the story, even incomplete in serial form…” Osgood did not know how to finish his sentence.

“The name, you mean,” the landlord of the Falstaff interrupted.

“The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Yes, the name, the plot of the story-did it not strike you as remarkable?”

“Mr. Dickens was a man of genius. In his novels, he'd often employ names and stories he heard for his purposes. Why, just down the road is the old redbrick mansion where ‘Miss Havisham’ lived in her solitary gown as imagined inside his pages, and elsewhere you can ingest beef and beer where Richard Watts did the same courtesy of Mr. Dickens's imagination. I myself had been far too occupied with trying to save the inn to read more than a few installments published of his last work. I had thought to read it all when it was published in its entirety as a book, that is, before the great Mr. Dickens died last month. And when he died, and the state of our inn was put in jeopardy because of it, I could not spare the time. In truth, I have little desire for sensational stories about the tragedy of my son other than the one I own inside. I held his skull in my hands, Mr. Osgood. It was cracked on top. I need to read no more of his death than that story written into my boy's bones!”

AFTER RETURNING to the Falstaff, Osgood immediately arranged to depart for London with Rebecca in order to make further inquiries into the remarkable tale of Edward Trood. This was against the strident orders of Dr. Steele, who Osgood thought might try to place him in a straitjacket to prevent his leaving. Steele warned the publisher that the rheumatic bouts that had plagued him through his youth could return if he did not wait for a full recovery, but Osgood would not change his mind. Osgood also left word with the Falstaff to direct any letters to their new address at the St. James Hotel, Piccadilly, and to send Datchery there at once if he came to call on him.

Osgood, gathering some of his belongings into the hall of the inn, also found himself facing a looking glass for the first time he could remember since his assault. Seeing his reflection, both of his hands involuntarily moved to his face and then slid down his cheeks to his neck as though to hold his head in place. He blinked. Where had the boyish appearance gone, the innocent visage he had always cursed and cherished? In its place was a ghost-pale, almost gaunt countenance, with a complex web of tired lines, crevices, and dark shadows around his eyes. His hair was brittle and flat. He had either crossed toward a premature death mask or from a soft boyhood to a hardened manhood; he could not say which. There was an inspiriting element of his appearance, though. He no longer was inconspicuous or exchangeable with other young Boston Brahmin businessmen. This was James R. Osgood, however battered, there was no mistake about it.

Only then did he realize, confirming a suspicion by walking back into his room, that the looking glass previously there had been removed. He considered whether it could have been the dictatorial Dr. Steele or Rebecca-motivated by control if the former or affection if the latter. He reflected for a moment while standing at the threshold of his room and decided not to ask her about it.

“What about your gift, Mr. Osgood?” It was Rebecca, holding the pink glass tazza from the auction.

“Perhaps we ought to leave it with Mr. Trood to bring to Miss Dickens,” Osgood answered.

“It may be better presented in person. We have an hour before the next train leaves for London.”

“You would not…” Osgood said. “That is to say, you would have no objections to calling on Miss Dickens?”

Rebecca shook her head. “I'd think it a fine idea, Mr. Osgood.”

They went across the road to Gadshill but found it even more desolate than it had been. The front door was open and nobody was there to bring in visitors. Nearly every object was gone now since the Christie's auction. Piles of luggage filled the front corridor and the library. At first, Osgood and Rebecca did not even see Henry Scott, who was curled up in the corner of the library sandwiched between two trunks of clothing weeping. His fine white livery was streaked with tear stains.

“Oh, Mr. Scott, are you all right?” Rebecca asked, kneeling beside him and placing a hand on his shoulder.

Henry tried but failed to speak through his sobbing, communicating in broken syllables like an island savage that they were to leave Gadshill by the morning. Soon, a woman covered in a long black veil, and a flowing black dress with a short jacket with ruffled hem and a grand bustle in the back-mourning in the style of Queen Victoria for her Albert-descended the stairs.

“Other events have delayed my presentation of this, Miss Dickens,” Osgood said to her, holding out the tazza.

“We read in the Telegraph that this sold for seven pounds odd, but it did not say to whom!” Mamie Dickens answered, amazed.

“It did not seem fitting that anyone but you should have it.”

“It is uncommonly kind of you both!” She lifted her veil and wiped her eyes. “Oh, how my sister would laugh at me to see me cry over a little bowl! I shall leave Gadshill tomorrow but shall bring this with me wherever we go in the world.” Putting the tazza back on the mantelpiece, she took one of Osgood's hands and one of Rebecca's.

“I hold my father,” she said softly, “in my heart of hearts as a man apart from all other men, as one apart from all other human beings. I wish never to marry and have to change my name. So I can always be a Dickens. Do you think that so strange, Miss Sand?”

“How lucky you are to have been cherished by a man loved by all the world.”

“Good-bye and God bless you both,” Mamie said, squeezing her visitors’ hands once more.

Aunt Georgy walked in alongside an unexpected man, who bowed coldly at the visitors.

“Dr. Steele!” Osgood said. “I am afraid you shall not persuade me to remain in Rochester.”

“That is not why I am here,” said the doctor coldly.

“Nobody is sick, I hope, Aunt Georgy?” Osgood asked.

“I should have thought you would have been on your way to London already, Mr. Osgood,” Dr. Steele said disapprovingly.

“Dr. Steele has come to settle our bills before we leave,” Georgy said. “I am afraid we haven't had time since… since the good doctor tried everything to revive poor Charles.” With these words, the matron of the house glanced toward the dining room. “Unfortunately, we have not yet received the funds from the auction. I do appreciate Dr. Steele's patience.”

“Your servant,” the doctor said, bowing, though not exactly promising patience.

“You treated Mr. Dickens after he collapsed?”

“I can assure you I did, Mr. Osgood,” the doctor said. “I see that in addition to disobeying my directions for your own health, you have added to Miss Dickens's grief. Perhaps it is best for both of you to leave Gadshill.”

Mamie had gone to sit in a quiet corner with the tazza to hide the fact that she was crying.

“Dr. Steele, perhaps-” Georgy started to object to his command.

But the imperious medical man gave her a steely-eyed look that combined a doctor's strict prescription and a collector's reminder of an overdue bill. Even the strong-willed voice of Georgina Hogarth was silenced.

“Good-bye, then, Mr. Osgood,” Steele said, vengeful over his disobedience.

“Good-bye,” Osgood replied.

“Wait.” Here was Henry, upright and with dried eyes. “I have not seen Miss Dickens smile like that in some time. If she weeps, it is in the joy of the small swatch of memories you and Miss Sand returned to her. Come, Mr. Osgood, let me show you two something before you go, if you have a few moments.” These words of the servant's were meant squarely for Dr. Steele, but were spoken to Osgood.

As Dr. Steele glared at them, Osgood and Rebecca followed Henry out of the room. “There have been very few people allowed in here since June the ninth,” said Henry, stepping across the threshold of the dining room with his eyes closed. “That is the place where he died.” It was a green velvet sofa with a stylish curving back.

“Were you in the room, Mr. Scott?” asked Osgood.

Henry nodded. “Yes, and I shall not fear to speak of it. Grief pent up will burst the heart, as the saying is.” His eyes became wide as he described the scene of Dickens's death. “The Chief collapsed on the floor of the room when sitting down to eat after working all day on The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Messengers rushed to town to retrieve Dr. Steele, while I helped carry a sofa from upstairs into the dining room, and then assisted Aunt Georgy in lifting him. He was mumbling.”

“Mr. Scott,” Osgood interrupted. “Did you hear anything that Mr. Dickens said when he did speak?”

“No. It could not be made out at all. Well, except one word I could hear.”

“What was that?” Osgood asked.

“A name. Forster. The poor Chief was calling for John Forster to be by his side. I daresay that shall be Mr. Forster's proudest moment. I know it would be mine had it been my name on his lips.”

As Dickens had continued to worsen, Henry was asked by Georgy to begin heating bricks at the furnace. “When I returned to this room, the somber doctors had cut away the Chief's coat and shirt. To see it! The room was crowded now-Miss Dickens and Mrs. Collins had hurried here from a dinner in London. Hours passed, and still he remained in an unconscious sleep. How I wished for another instruction to heat bricks or any such errand! I looked in on the scarlet geraniums in the conservatory and swept the tiles around them. Those were Dickens's favorites and I wanted the area clear for when the Chief woke up. He could look out and smell the conservatory's sweet fragrance through the open window.”

Amidst it all, there arrived a fair-haired, pretty, and tightly cloaked young woman, a woman whom everyone knew about even if they were not meant to. But the master of the house did not stir under the frightened gaze of her bright blue eyes, either. Deep into the night, the same stillness persisted. An even more somber doctor from London joined the others in the dining room. Pale and rattled, the London doctor pronounced brain hemorrhage.

“The poor Chief, he would never be moved from this sofa again.”

Henry bowed with a regretful frown that he could say no more.

“Thank you, Mr. Scott,” said Osgood. “I know it must be a painful thing to recount.”

“On the contrary. It is my finest honor to have been here.”

THE TRAIN INTO London could not move fast enough for the two travelers. A few hours after their arrival in London, Datchery had received the message from the landlord of the Falstaff and met them at their Piccadilly hotel. Osgood could not go to Scotland Yard without betraying William Trood's trust, but the eccentric Datchery, mesmerized or not, could investigate unfettered. Osgood poured out all the information about Edward Trood and his connections to his uncle's opium merchant friends.

“Remarkable!” Datchery said, his long slender frame pacing the floor up and down. He looked as though he might break into a laugh. “Why, Ripley, I believe you have turned a corner in the investigation!”

Osgood snapped his fingers. “If it's true, it all fits together now, my dear Datchery, doesn't it? When Dickens said there was something ‘curious and new,’ this is what he meant-he was opening the case of a real murder mystery. It was different from anything he had done before, different from anything Wilkie Collins or other novelists had written. Think of how one of the first chapters of Drood begins.”

Osgood had read the installments so many times, he could recite it from memory, but he removed the first installment from his trunk to point it out to Datchery. “For sufficient reasons which this narrative will itself unfold,” he read from the first sentence of chapter 3, “as it advances, a fictitious name must be bestowed upon the old Cathedral town. Let it stand in these pages as Cloisterham.”

“Indeed!” Datchery called out.

“The reason for the alias Cloisterham to stand in for Rochester,” Osgood said, “is that a real crime was about to be revealed, and a real criminal unveiled.”

Datchery nodded vigorously. “And when The Mystery of Edwin Drood began to be published in serial, every eye was on it, and every eye in the world of these opium pushers and smugglers could see in it the story of poor Edward Trood. Think of it: Nathan Trood is dead, but if he had help in the murder of his nephew, someone would fear exposure.”

“Except that William never involved the police. Edward's murderer may have felt comfortable for these long years,” Osgood said.

“Indeed. But if Dickens's novel revealed new clues, it could lead the police to the discovery of the facts of the actual case and to the other killers of Edward Trood!” Datchery interrupted himself by putting up a hand for silence. He pointed toward the door, where there was a slight shuffling noise.

“Miss Rebecca?” Datchery whispered.

“No, I do not think it can be her… Miss Sand is out making arrangements for credit at the bank in London for our stay,” Osgood said in a quiet voice. “The money we brought with us has melted away. She will be out another hour at least.”

Datchery motioned for Osgood to move aside and indicated that someone was eavesdropping on them. Then he grabbed the iron poker from the hearth. He stealthily made his way across the length of the well-furnished room and opened the door slowly. A strong hand shot out and grabbed Datchery's wrist, twisting it until the poker fell to the floor.

“Good God!” Datchery cried out, tumbling backward. Struck with a quick fist in the jaw, he staggered and fell.

“Help! Call for help!” Datchery moaned while attempting to drag himself away.

“No need for that, Mr. Osgood,” said the attacker.

Osgood had reached for the bellpull but, being addressed by name, stopped and stared at the newcomer with amazement.

The young man stepping toward him removed his cape and cap to reveal the figure of Tom Branagan. Tom Branagan! A man whom Osgood had not seen in more than two years-since the end of Dickens's American tour-now plunging through Osgood's hotel door in a brazen assault!

Branagan, who no longer looked to be the lad he was in America, but a powerfully built man, retrieved some rope from the curtains and began tying Datchery's hands together

“Mr. Branagan!” Osgood exclaimed. “What is this about?”

“What do you want from me?” Datchery moaned pitiably.

Branagan, eyes dark with anger, stood over Datchery and held him down with the heel of his boot on the soft middle of his neck. “In the name of Charles Dickens, the time has come for answers.”

Chapter 29

OSGOOD LOWERED HIMSELF ONTO THE RUG NEXT TO DATCHERY. The publisher could not fathom the sudden upheaval. He turned over in his thoughts what had occurred to try to make sense of it: the near fatal visit to the opium rooms, the revelations of William Trood about his son, Tom Branagan's sudden appearance out of nowhere at the London hotel and senseless attack on his companion.

“Branagan!” Osgood cried. “What have you done? What are you doing here?” Taking Datchery's hand, Osgood attempted to restore his senses. He untied the curtain rope that Tom had used to bind him.

“I wouldn't do that, Mr. Osgood,” Tom said.

“Mr. Branagan, please soak a cloth with cold water from that nightstand. My good Datchery, this is some kind of preposterous misunderstanding. I knew this man briefly as a porter when Mr. Dickens had come to America.”

“It is not I who misunderstand, Mr. Osgood,” said Tom. “I am a porter no more.”

“Then explain yourself at once, if you dare!” Osgood shouted to the handsome younger man. He had tried to restrain his anger but could not once he saw Tom's unrepentant demeanor. “This is what you'd still call acting upon your instinct, I suppose?”

Tom closed the door to the hall. “This man is a fraud and a double dealer. He is not who he says he is.”

“I know he is not Dick Datchery, of course-Datchery is a character in a Dickens novel! I fear you are out of your depth. This man is unwell and under no fault of his own has fallen under a powerful magnetic spell initiated by Mr. Dickens before his death-one that has allowed us unique insights into an important case through his talents as investigator.”

By this time, Datchery had risen to his feet and was steadying himself along the wall until he could be lowered into a chair.

Tom said, “Why not ask him to explain for himself?”

“I don't know what you mean by browbeating me, laddie,” Datchery protested, rubbing his bloody jaw but trying to approximate a smile. “You mistake me.”

“If you will not divulge the truth, so be it. I will. Mr. Osgood, this wretch, disguised in George Washington costume, acted as a speculator and a rioter during the whole of Chief's tour of America-set on sabotage and ruin for the reading tour's financial success.”

The accused's eyes narrowed with anger and he lumbered toward Tom. “I shall not stand here and be insulted!”

Tom threw a long punch into Datchery's stomach. Then he drew a pistol from his pocket and pointed it at the man doubled over in pain.

Osgood stood immovable at the sight of the weapon.

“Datchery, clear out,” Osgood said with an attempt at calm. “Datchery! Go now before you're hurt more seriously,” he repeated. But the man wasn't moving, just looking between Tom and Osgood.

“I will put a ball through you if you lie one more time to him, sir,” Tom said, pistol pointed steady as a rock.

“Datchery, go!” Osgood cried. “Branagan, be still! This man has been a friend to me.” But when Osgood looked over his shoulder at the subject of his words, he saw a strange blank stare that contradicted him.

“Not… Datchery,” said the man, pronouncing the words between a confessional exhale, and his accent softening into a product more of the streets of New York than of the English countryside. He looked at them with a weary eye like the ancient mariner's. “It is Rogers. Jack Rogers. Now you know my name. Pocket your pistol and strike me no more, Mr. Branagan, so that I may have my say.”

JACK ROGERS LOOKED down at his feet for most of his account.

“I did not mean to harm either of you and have grown to respect you, Mr. Osgood, more than I ever expected of a man of bustle and business, for your perseverance, your genuineness. I daresay you've become so tall with accomplishment, you stand in your own light, and don't see how much more of you there is. I hope after hearing my position, you shall understand.”

In his early life, Rogers had been an actor in the second-rate theaters of New York. He came from a modest family of small means, with an unfriendly disposition to his choice of work. His skills on the stage tended mostly toward broadly comedic work and violent adventure. Once, while he rehearsed for a play involving a long sword duel, there was a fall from the stage and the blade of his sword struck the theater manager's son, whom no effort of the doctors over the subsequent hours could save. Rogers was devastated by the horrible accident and banished from the theater. After Rogers had spent irregular bouts of hard employment in the ailing American economy, in the year 1844 the mayor of New York, one James Harper, founder of the Harper & Brothers publishing house, initiated the first police force for that city. These posts were considered undesirable, and it was difficult to fill the rolls. Rogers, having no other work, volunteered.

Harper's Police became a powerful army inside a city that was combustible with political and ethnic rivalries and corruption. The following year the Republican mayor was defeated and the police put in other hands, but the Harpers quietly maintained close ties to the policemen. Soon ex-mayor Harper privately employed Rogers, who had become known for a certain forcefulness of character and alert cleverness and an ability to resolve the enigmatic. When James, still known as the Mayor, or one of the other brothers comprising their publishing enterprise-the Colonel (John), the Captain (Wesley) and the Major, the youngest (Fletcher)-needed assistance, particularly of a secretive nature, Rogers would be discreetly sent for.

One instance of this occurred when Charles Dickens announced in the summer of 1867 that Fields, Osgood & Co. were henceforth to be his exclusive publisher in America. The Harpers envied and feared the income that could be collected by their rivals in Boston. They sent Rogers and one or two other agents to cause disruptions in the ticket sales for the author's American tour, hoping that the newspapers would portray the Boston publisher as incompetent, cheap, and greedy. As part of this scheme of disruption, Rogers, in the guise of a speculator in memorable George Washington wig and hat, spread accusations to the newspapers of Tom Branagan's having sparked the violence at one of those sales. The Harpers, meanwhile, ordered their weekly magazine to print mean-spirited and inflammatory cartoons and columns about Dickens as quickly as they could be invented, just as Fletcher had done in attacks against the wretches, corrupt and immigrant-friendly, who controlled the Tammany political operation.

“You need not glare with moral judgment, gentlemen,” Rogers said, shaking his head in deep sadness. “I know my actions to be deceitful! Many years ago, after my accident on the stage, I suffered constantly from sleeplessness. I would not have survived without laudanum from my doctor. But soon I found I could not go a few days without the drug in my system, I would yield, vowing to myself it was the last. A mere hour without it and my insides would feel torn and shriveled, I would walk about in humiliation and melancholy. Laudanum no longer sufficed, I sought crude opium as if it were the most succulent meal, served by a voluptuous siren in the heart of a violent maelstrom. The opium was my panacea. I took a dose at ten o'clock and another at four and a half o'clock. For hours after taking a fresh dose, I felt invincible and energetic, with an intellectual and physical capacity beyond the mere human. I was Atlas with the world teetering on my shoulders. And so I remained the drug's perpetual slave, and to get more I would have crossed barefoot over hot coals or swam up to my neck in my own blood. Under its influence, my stomach and bowels felt twisted and my head screamed. I took more to try to harden myself, and I entered a dangerous overdose.

“The Major knew I was in turmoil. ‘Well!’ said he, removing his spectacles with his usual dramatic gesture. ‘You know me to be a blunt man, Rogers, and a good Methodist, so I ask directly: will you survive your own habits and continue to serve this firm?’

“‘To be equally blunt myself,’ said I, ‘I think I shall not, Major. Death would be a gift.’

“‘Well, then I shall help! Let us not surrender so easily to any enemy!’”

The Major arranged for Rogers to reside at an asylum for inebriates, headed by a doctor who insisted that opium was not a vice but a disease like other known diseases. The secluded life there cleared Rogers's blood of the poison.

“That was six months ago. Upon my word, I have never again brought opium into my flesh. But upon leaving that sanctum, free of the vile poppy, I found myself a slave to a new and imperious master: the Major. For the last few years, as the Major had gained control of the publishing house from his more reasonable brothers, I squinted at his methods and manipulations. Yet the asylum that saved my life had been expensive, and I could not sever my ties with the house of Harper until this debt was paid.”

After the completion of Dickens's American tour, upon hearing intelligence that Dickens was at work on a novel of mystery, the Major and the Mayor Harpers wished to uncover the details of the new novel's plot in advance.

“Because I could employ any accent under the sun from my days as an actor, they chose to send me here to England to perpetrate the ruse. I was to get inside Dickens's sanctum. I made inquiries around Kent and found that Dickens ministered to friends and strangers alike who fell ill, with techniques of mesmerism and animal magnetism. And I knew by reputation that he was particularly sensitive to those suffering in poverty, a friend and champion of the workingman.

“I determined to pose as a sick English farmer requiring Mr. Dickens's care to gain admission into his study and glean some hint as to the future of Drood before anyone else.”

“Did you find anything about it?” Osgood asked.

“The great man could keep his secrets!” Rogers threw up his hands. “Each time, Dickens would lay me down on his sofa, pass his hands and fingers in a pattern across my head, and then, when he had been convinced I was asleep, he chanted to suggest better healing to the inner places of my brain. Finally, he would blow softly on my forehead until he thought I had just awakened. I guessed that if I should seem to have been severely mesmerized into believing myself one of the figures in his novel, he would be more likely to unwittingly expose revelations concerning it.”

“So that is when you chose to play Dick Datchery?” asked Tom.

“Yes. Datchery is introduced in mysterious fashion in one of the later chapters of Edwin Drood. Before it had been printed, I overheard this chapter one afternoon while waiting in the library at Gadshill when Mr. Dickens was in the next room reading aloud to some of his family and friends, something he did as he composed each installment. I fancied from whatever poor science I have observed reading novels in my lifetime, that with the fate of that character of Datchery there resided the fate of the whole Mystery. And my ruse worked! To a limit.”

Rogers recounted the tricks he employed to play the role of Datchery at Gadshill, including writing down on slips of paper and on the inside of his hatband every word he heard put into the character's mouth by Dickens and employing that exact language whenever possible. This authenticity seemed to have aroused the novelist's interest, yet their mesmeric sessions still dealt exclusively with the treatment of the patient's health and the master could not be coaxed into holding forth on the topic of his novel.

Rogers naturally took every opportunity when he was alone-when Dickens would excuse himself from the study to attend to one of his pets or to greet a caller-to secretly examine the contents of any papers on the desk or in an open drawer. He found some evidence that the opium smokers appearing in Drood had been inspired by the occupants of a notorious room in a court called Palmer's Folly, which Dickens had visited on a police-guided tour of London.

Soon after, Dickens's health had worsened and before long the sessions were suspended for Rogers and the other small circle of mesmerism patients who came to Gads. Upon learning of Dickens's death the first week in June, Rogers wired his employers back at Franklin Square in New York, presuming his mission complete. He was instead ordered by the Harpers to remain for a few weeks and to make himself a nuisance around Gadshill so that he might observe any dealings about Drood in that time. Because of the five-year wait since Dickens's last novel, Drood would mean hundreds of thousands of dollars of potential profits to whoever could publish it first in America. The Major would not take his eye off this goal.

Only days later, Rogers received an entirely new and unexpected order; he was advised of intelligence that Mr. J. R. Osgood was on his way to England in all likelihood with the aim of finding missing pieces of Dickens's final novel. Rogers was to stop Osgood from doing so, in order for Harpers’ pirating of the novel to proceed unhindered.

“I confess this heavily, wearily, Ripley. I have since come to know you are a decent and good man, who cares for employees under his charge, as I have seen you do with Miss Rebecca,” Rogers continued. “But do understand one thing, if only one thing about me, and I shall one day die content knowing you did not dismiss me wholeheartedly.”

“I wonder what you could possibly say for yourself,” Osgood replied sadly.

“Merely this: I am no artist. No genius like the people who occupy your life, perhaps like you yourself. Whether you think of yourself as one or not, you have the bravery of the artist inside you. But this is the worldly work I know and have practiced since trained as one of Harper's Police. I had tried to work in a bank before that, but I flattened out at it because I did not like how the other men looked at me. We were the first policemen in the city of New York, and we were hated-people stoned us. We had to be armed with a ‘hook and bill’ for each one of us-the peculiar club with the spiked top you saw when we went into the dark corner of London. The public thought we were there to serve as spies and, strangely, this fear made us into spies. Disguises, investigations, secret service, any dealings underhanded and scrubby-this has been my art, my lot. I meant to set you out on a wild goose chase by leading you into the opium room, knowing you would recognize it as the prototype for Dickens's book and be distracted. If I succeeded in this task, I could finally free myself from Major Harper's grip and return to the stage, where I was once happy and made others happy as your firm's books do. One day I shall have a houseful of children, and shall wish to be respected and loved by them. I did not intend any harm to come to you, dear Ripley!”

“But you did have every intention to mislead me, as you admit!”

“I ask not for forgiveness for the deception but do beg that you believe my purpose in owning it to you. I desire to help you.”

“Ha!” Osgood responded.

“Ripley, I, too, was attacked by those opium pushers!”

“Which was your own sorry fault, sir,” Tom said in reproach. “Your careless doing.”

“To a point, yes, Mr. Branagan. But the violence done to us was only the hint of some far larger sinister movement. Ripley, I believe you to be in grave danger even as we speak.”

“From you as much as from anyone else,” Osgood said.

“You have had more say than you deserve now. Have a chair and be comfortable while I send for a police coach,” Tom added.

Rogers shook his head. “No. You need my help, gentlemen-your survival may depend on it! Perhaps my own as well, though it may mean nothing to you now!” A glance passed between the two other men that showed no sign of wavering. Rogers, becoming more panicked, now pleaded shamelessly. “My dear Ripley, can't you trust me again? I promise to repay my debt to you for what I have done.”

Osgood directed a heated look at his former companion. “You have earned my trust and sympathy through a bundle of lies. You plotted to disrupt our American tour with Dickens, to lay blame on Mr. Branagan where there was none, to distract my mission here, all under the nefarious orders of those Harpy brothers. I have no doubt Major Harper holds the strings of your current plea, as well. Any minute he will pull you down and set up Judy, or the devil, or some other wooden grotesque to try to lead us astray. Remove yourself from our sight now, while you have your liberty, if Mr. Branagan will allow it.”

Tom took a step back and waved the man to the door. Rogers made no argument this time. “Thank heavens for you, Ripley,” he said. He quietly turned and, hat under his arm, scurried out of the room.

TOM BHANAGAN'S APPEARANCE-and the pistol he had brandished- had been as much a shock to Osgood as the revelation of Rogers's true identity. Once they confirmed that Rogers had left the premises of the hotel, and Rebecca had returned from the bank, Tom set out to tell them of his own winding path that had reunited them. Returning to England after Dickens's reading tour, Tom had continued to be employed in a domestic capacity in the town of Ross at George Dolby's estate. But he tired of the monotony of caring for the Dolby children's much-adored ponies and driving around Mrs. Dolby, who had taken full advantage of their greatly increased wealth since the American tour. Dolby, for his part, had been hardened by what he called the American bullying, and spent their money extravagantly and carelessly, especially after his second son died at only a few days old. Tom occasionally met with Dickens at Dolby's, including at George Dolby Jr.'s christening, but the novelist, though friendly to him, never spoke of the dangerous events of the late American tour.

Tom showed Osgood and Rebecca a pearl-handled switchblade he kept in his pocket. “This was her knife that I took out of her hand. I realized I still had it after we left the country and found it among my clothing. I think about her sometimes when I see it, and I think about what could have happened to the Chief.”

“You should be proud of what you did,” Osgood said.

“I was certain she would die, you know,” Tom said. “You would have been, too, Mr. Osgood, had you seen the blood. The Chief must have thought so, he seemed so sad when he saw her, he even whispered something in her ear to soothe her, though I could not hear what it was. But the truth is that few women attempting suicide in that fashion ever possess the strength to cut their own skin deep enough after they begin. Many survive, as she did, though forever diminished inside and out. Their images from that day will always be with me- Louisa Barton's as much as Charles Dickens's.”

Dulled by his time in Ross and haunted by what had happened in those last hours in Boston, Tom applied to the police at Scotland Yard and waited several months, when a vacancy opened for a night constable third class, the lowest and most endangered tier of the English police. He served his beats from 10 p.m. at night until 6 a.m. This was the only position usually open to an Irishman, though the fact that he could read and write well brought him quick promotion to the place of police constable first class.

Because the Irish were assigned divisional beats in the poorest sections of London, Tom had been one of the constables on patrol alerted to the commotion in the Palmer's Folly court on the night of Osgood's attack. He had been fixing a coalhole that had come dangerously loose in a nearby street. Upon reaching the scene of activity Tom witnessed Rogers fleeing, his head bloodied and injured, and recognized him.

“I knew him as the man who, in his Washington wig and old-fashioned three-cornered hat, started the riot at the ticket sale in Brooklyn that I was blamed for. His appearance in London was remarkable to me, as you'd imagine. I decided to shadow him so that I could discover more, and I found out that he was boarding under an assumed name in an out-of-the-way lodging house. I followed him for several more days, discovering that he had been wiring telegraphs and sending letters back to New York. When I saw him enter this hotel, I examined the guest ledger and was freshly amazed to find your name among the occupants here, Mr. Osgood. I suspected that he had been operating some design of nefarious nature ever since our time in America, but I didn't know if he was a confidence man of some kind, a thief, a brazen murderer.”

“That is why you brought your pistol,” Osgood said.

Tom nodded, putting his pistol aside with a relieved smile. “To be honest, it's lucky that I didn't have to use it. They have issued them to the department because of the Fenian attacks on the government and on the prisons. Because I'm of Irish blood, I have been assigned to infiltrate what's left of the Fenian groups. But the department has only held sporadic training with the pistols, and I have yet to be instructed in them.”

Osgood, in his turn, shared with Tom a full and detailed account of their adventures on the Samaria with Herman and their experiences in England.

Tom pulled the curtains around the room closed as he listened.

“Mr. Branagan, what's wrong?” Rebecca asked. “Do you think someone is watching us?”

Tom leaned both arms on the mantelpiece. In the two years since the American tour, he had grown a full beard and his arms and chest had become more prominent. Any Renaissance sculptor would have been grateful for him as a model.

“The cane you described with the strange gold head that the man called Herman possessed-did you see it up close?” Tom asked.

Osgood nodded. “It was a sort of dragon.”

“Do you remember if it had teeth?”

“Yes,” said Osgood, “sharp as razor blades. How did you know?”

“Herman,” Tom repeated the name to himself. “We must move in secret from now on.”

“You know who that monster is then who attacked Mr. Osgood on the ship?” Rebecca asked.

“The marks on the necks and chests of the bodies of the dead opium fiends-they were almost like fang marks. The police did not know what to think of them.”

“Made by his cane!” Osgood cried. “The beast's head!”

“If you encountered the same man on your steamship, then this was no random attack,” said Tom.

“Then I did not imagine him at the opium room,” Osgood said with a gasp. Even as he said this, Herman's stony visage entered his mind. “He really was there, Miss Sand; you were right, he was never a mere pickpocket! If he was the one who injected me with opium, it must have been him who did the same to poor Daniel. It was Herman that intervened in the attack, killing the Lascar and the Bengalee. He is the devil we must confront to unravel all this! Can the police find him, Branagan?”

“Scotland Yard will not treat the death of two wretched opium eaters seriously. But I don't know if we will have to find him,” Tom said mysteriously.

“What do you mean, Mr. Branagan?” Rebecca asked.

“If I am correct, Miss Sand, the challenge will not be to find him. It will be to avoid him long enough to learn which way this fatal wind blows.”

YAHEE WAS AN opium dealer but not only that. He was said to be the first one of his craft in London, the one to show all the others how to mix and smoke the black ooze. Known by many East Londoners as Jack Chinaman, Yahee occasionally irritated the wrong member of the London police, and when he did, he would usually be put in the cage for begging or some other trifle, since opium itself was not illegal. He was pleasantly surprised when, after the latest incarceration, he was released from prison two weeks early; at first, he thought his internal sense of the calendar had been altered while he was locked away, but he was told the prison was too crowded to feed every ill-mannered Chinaman.

The newly liberated opium mixer walked on the night of his release through the long, narrow tar-stained streets toward the dismal slum region of the docks. The air smelled of rubbish mixed with the odors of coffee and tobacco from the big brick warehouses lining the streets. As he came closer to where he kept his rooms, Yahee was stopped by an unfamiliar man in a police cape and hat.

“Keep distance, bobbie,” Yahee mumbled, pushing him aside. “Free man here!”

“You're free because of me, Yahee,” the constable said, the words slowing Yahee's steps. The wind was dispersing the fog and revealed a clearer view of the policeman. “I was the one to arrange it and I can undo it. I suspect you heard about what happened at Opium Sal's rooms to two of her hirelings, a Lascar and Bengalee.”

“No,” Yahee said dumbly. “What?”

Tom took a step closer. “I think you probably know.”

“Yahee hear of it,” the man said, breaking quickly under Tom's knowing glare. “They murdered, yes, I hear of it in quod.”

“Correct. And I wonder if you could have been behind it,” said Tom.

“No chance, stupid bobbie! Yahee in prison when happened!” the Chinese man said angrily, spitting on Tom's boot. “They try to rob wrong man, I hear. You try to make Yahee guilty! Go chase pickpocket!”

“Sally is your competition. How can we be certain you didn't arrange for her men to be attacked while you were in prison?” Tom asked.

“Unfair! Unfair, you Charlie!”

Tom didn't argue the point. He knew what he was doing was unfair-he knew Yahee had nothing to do with what had happened in Palmer's Folly. But he also knew that the small number of Chinese in London were looked upon with ready suspicion, especially an opium pusher like Yahee. Tom's threat to him was credible, and that made Yahee the perfect candidate.

Yahee, understanding something more was at hand, said, “Why you want Yahee?”

Tom leaned in. “I want to know about Herman.” This last word he whispered.

Yahee opened and closed his mouth as though ridding himself of a sour taste, waved this idea into the air and spouted out an impressive line of curses in Chinese as he began to hurry away. “No, no! No Iron-head! I talk of Ironhead Herman, I die! You die!”

Tom drew his baton and blocked Yahee from moving. Yahee's fear of Herman was painted across his face and in that moment Tom knew he had him trapped. “You will tell me everything you know of the man you call Ironhead, and I will never breathe your name to anyone. Or I lock you up-and spread the word that you told me about Herman.”

“Nah, you just plain bobbie! No one believe you!”

Yahee turned and scurried the other away but his path was blocked by another man. Osgood, who had been waiting in the shadows, stepped forward.

“They might not believe a constable,” Osgood said, “but they will be ready to believe the American businessman who was attacked.”

Yahee looked around in fright. “Why do this to Yahee?”

“We won't talk in the open, Yahee,” Tom said. “We will go inside the jail. I am a constable, not a detective-nobody will notice anything but a beggar being taken in, and then taken out when we're done. Is it a bargain or not, Jack Chinaman?”

Yahee spit this time at Tom's shoulder. “Bargain no! No jail! Yahee not go back in there! Herman eyes everywhere inside the cage!”

“Very well,” Tom conceded. “We'll go to your rooms, then.”

“To the devil with you! Yahee sooner die than be seen there with you!”

“Then we'll go to a place where nobody can see.”

THE THAMES TUNNEL had been built with great ambition and fanfare and no thoughts of failure. The massive passage would, for a twopence fee, allow pedestrians and carriages a convenient and pleasant crossing under the city's main waterway. But this would be the third attempt to tunnel underneath the Thames, and though more ambitious, it had been no more successful than the first two.

The gigantic construction undertaking was fraught with problems. Accidents and escalating expenses plagued the eighteen years of work on the tunnel; ten lives, mostly miners, had been taken through mishaps and mismanagement, falls, floods, gas explosions; surviving miners had gone on strike; after a brief period of excitement upon its finally being opened to the public, the massive tunnel was soon abandoned by Londoners. Investors lost their shares. Even the prostitutes and cadgers who frequented it grew tired of the leaks, the dangerous disrepair, the long and treacherous walk down the dizzying staircase to the tunnel eighty feet below the ground. It waited in limbo as one of the railroad companies negotiated its purchase for a line to Brighton. Its entrance by now surrounded by dilapidated warehouses, the Thames Tunnel became a mercifully for gotten embarrassment.

It was here, underneath the metropolis, in these desolate trails to nowhere, that Yahee stood with Tom Branagan and Osgood. They had descended the winding stairs to the lowest level of the abandoned subterranean underworld.

“This is only what people say,” Yahee qualified himself before beginning, leaning against the cold, sweaty stone as the three listened to the harsh churning of water pumps. “No more than that.”

“Tell us,” ordered Tom, trying to refrain from breathing in too much of the putrid air.

Yahee looked around, his eyes following up on the slightest noise. He put up his nose and winced. “Do not like here. People die building. Devil here.”

Tom did not argue, simply nodded a promise of safety. “Tell us what you know, and you can go. Tell us about Herman.”

What people said, according to Yahee's broken English, was that a boy named Hormazd had been part of the Cama family of Parsee opium traders who carried the drug in shipments from India to the Chinese ports.

“Parsees best opium traders in world. Fast and most fierce. Hormazd whole family traders-whole family slaughtered by Ah'ling, pirate chieftain.”

This chieftain took Hormazd captive and put him with an assortment of European sailors taken from other merchant vessels. Young Hormazd had lived on an opium clipper since he was ten years old and was kept alive by the pirates to use his strength in labor. Hormazd prayed in his native Zend language toward the sun in the morning and evening. Living among the brutal Chinese pirates, Hormazd and the other captives were beaten with bamboo rods whenever they fatigued or failed to heed their superiors.

The captives were forced to aid the pirate lorcha, a swift and light vessel, in the attack of smaller Chinese ships. The pirates were brutal in their attacks. When the captain of a captured vessel refused to cooperate in telling them where opium or precious metals were hidden, the pirates would cut open the captain's skin and drink his blood to terrorize him further.

The captives had to chew tobacco to prevent nausea at the sight of the horrors the pirates perpetrated on their way to treasures. All except Hormazd. The boy seemed to absorb rather than repel the grotesque lessons of the pirates. Though he did not forget how he had come to be there and never wavered in his hatred for his captors, he did not seem to cherish any particular notions of right and wrong. This friendless Parsee, knowing nothing else but his own strength and misfortunes, operated like a dumb animal, with no consciousness of the master's moral demerits.

The pirates lived in a vile state of humanity. To them, a delicacy every bit equal to guavas or oysters was a boiled rat cut into slices or raw caterpillars over rice served with a foul-tasting bright blue liquor they mixed.

One muggy afternoon, which happened to fall on Hormazd Cama's fourteenth birthday, he and some of the European captives had been taken on the lorcha away from the rest of the pirate fleet to a far-off strait for target practice. A malicious member of the pirate crew was beating Hormazd on his back and arms for some real or imagined infraction. Something flickered in the boy's eye, and in a swift series of motions, Hormazd had broken the pirate's neck. Some of the European captives were witnesses.

“You must escape,” said a young Englishman who had taken a particular interest in the singular Parsee boy. “They will kill you and cut off your head if you don't! We will help if you take us with you, Herman.” The British and American prisoners had called him Herman, their best approximation of his Parsee name.

Realizing that there would be consequences for his murder of the pirate, Hormazd stiffened and nodded. “Please help,” he said.

“Nah, don't count me in,” said a Scotch prisoner. “I won't risk my hide because of this fire worshipper's heathen impulses! A fellow who refuses even to smoke, and with that Hindoo wrap on his head!”

Hormazd took a step toward the Scotchman. The English prisoner stepped between them. “Would you like to fight him?” he asked the Scotch sailor, who demurred. “The man you see is neither a Hindoo nor a Mohammedan,” the Englishman went on, “but a Parsee, a follower of Zoroaster and an ally of British power in India. Respect him, my friend, and we will help each other.”

Rolling the body of the murdered pirate into the water, Hormazd and the European captives were able to procure a small arsenal of weapons from the lorchas stores without being observed and then slipped into an open whaleboat. Before long, they had been spotted by the pirates’ lookout aboard the lorcha and were fired upon with grapeshot. Lying down flat in the boat, Hormazd used a rifle to kill more than half of the twenty pirates on the deck.

Hormazd insisted on turning back to reboard the lorcha.

“Insanity! We have a clear path to escape!” the Scotchman in the whaleboat protested. “We're almost out of ammunition.”

“We have enough,” Hormazd said flatly. “In ancient times, my people were driven from our land. In battle we scatter the heads of our foes-no Parsee ever turns his back though a millstone were dashed at his head.” Several of the pirates who'd escaped his fire because they were belowdeck, he said, had been responsible for the slaughter of his family and shipmates, and he would not leave them to prosper. Hormazd alone climbed up the netting on the side of the lorcha. After a quarter of an hour, Hormazd returned holding the head of one of the pirates. On the shore, he placed the head on a stake facing the water for Ah'ling to find. Then he strapped the body of a Chinese pirate to each yardarm, and Hormazd and the Englishman piloted the lorcha away.

When they reached Canton, they were congratulated by a chief mandarin on disabling one of the most nefarious pirate crews terrorizing innocent fishermen and traders. The men were showered by the mandarin with drink, jewels, and silver. On their way through the streets of Canton to the English settlement, a thief tried to take Hormazd's booty by smashing him across the head with a steel bar. Hormazd did not even flinch or turn around. Instead, he grasped the bar and flung the man to the ground, breaking the thief's arm in two places.

This was witnessed by many of the locals, who whispered of it, and from that day forward began to speak of a ghostly figure from foreign lands they called Ironhead.

The thief, who had fled by foot, dropped a bag filled with riches he'd plundered from other victims. Among these was a pure gold idol, a head of a Kylin with onyx for eyes-the Kylin, a mythological single-horned beast believed to bring good fortune and punish wicked men with fire and destruction. When it walked on land it left behind no footprints; when it walked on water it caused no ripple. Hormazd knew none of this then but, regardless, was drawn to it the empathetic way an ordinary man might be drawn to a starving dog. At the English settlement he paid to have the Kylin head to be attached to a walking stick and kept it with him when he sailed to London from Canton.

With his new riches and his great fortitude, Hormazd, it was said, began to build his own London-based opium-smuggling business. Ships would procure opium taken from India, away from the official channels of the colonial government, which was strictly controlled by the English, and smuggle the drug into English and American ports without the burden of tariffs and inspection for adulteration. However, the Englishman who had been a captive with Hormazd among the pirates and had helped him to escape soon unwittingly discovered some of the secrets of his operations.

“Who was this Englishman?” Osgood interrupted the teller urgently.

“A son of Han,” said Yahee. “Young man, name Edward Trood.”

“What do you mean, a son of Han?” Tom asked.

Yahee explained that Eddie Trood was a quick-witted though reserved young man who had learned Chinese so well in his travels that he had been kept alive by the pirates to do translations. He was called a son of Han, as if he were a Chinaman himself, by the natives, and a true rarity, for the Chinese government had banned the teaching of their language to foreigners, wishing to control Chinese merchants’ dealings with Europeans and to curb the sale of opium to the Chinese people.

Back in London, where Eddie had also returned, Herman soon discovered that Eddie possessed great knowledge of the workings of Herman's operation. Herman and Imam, a Turkish opium trader also involved in the worldwide scheme, sought out Eddie's uncle, a minor opium pusher in London, who quickly and cowardly gave up his nephew. Eddie had been doomed, Yahee said with a glum chuckle, “because he crossed Ironhead Herman.”

Opium eaters whispered to dealers who whispered to traders. The youth's body was rumored to be buried in a wall of the uncle's home, and when Yahee and all the others heard the whispers, nobody ever dared try to infiltrate Herman's operation again.

Yahee stopped his story in the middle of a thought. He craned his head back and looked into the gloom of the tunnel.

“What is it, Yahee?” Osgood asked.

Yahee shivered. There was a creak from somewhere in the tunnel, a series of loud bangs following after.

A fevered look passed over Yahee's face and he broke into a run to the stairs. “Herman! Herman here!” he shouted.

“No,” Tom said. “It's just a broken water pipe. Yahee, nobody's in here!”

Yahee darted up the steep, winding steps at full and reckless speed. Tom first and then Osgood chased after him, pleading with him as they went to slow down. The opium dealer screamed of Iron-head Herman coming to kill them all.

“Yahee, stop!” Tom cried.

A rusted section of the railing gave way, plummeting twenty feet down to the bottom of the tunnel. Yahee slipped and hung on only by his fingertips to the broken railing.

Tom cried out for Yahee to be still. He heaved and pulled him up to safety. As he secured him, the man fell limp and motionless in Tom's arms.

“Is he all right?” Osgood asked, holding his sides and panting as he reached the spot.

“He's fainted,” Tom said. “Help me lay him down.” They carried Yahee to the next landing as his body shook and he mumbled in Cantonese.

They sat on the landing and waited for Yahee to recover.

“Herman nearly killed him,” Osgood commented after getting his breath back, “and he wasn't even here. What are we up against, Branagan?”

DIVIDING UP AFTER leaving Yahee in a hired coach, Osgood hurried to the Piccadilly hotel and Tom went straight to the police station. When Tom returned to the hotel, where Osgood had shared their intelligence with Rebecca, he showed them a telegram cable. It was from Gadshill and composed of only five words:

Constable Tom Branagan. Yes. No.

“He still cannot simply address me as ‘Tom,’” he said, shaking his head. “This is from Henry Scott in Rochester.”

“What does this mean?” Osgood asked.

“If you are right to think that Herman assaulted Daniel in Boston,” Tom said, “and then went with you on your passage on the Samaria, I've wondered why Herman would have been following an American publisher to learn more about an English novel. I suspected that if Herman was trying to get information from you, and from Daniel before that, about The Mystery of Edwin Drood, he must have already tried other channels of information in England. These confirm my suspicion. See for yourself.”

Tom placed a pile of documents from the London police in front of Osgood on the table.

Osgood examined them. “A break-in at Chapman and Hall- Dickens's English publisher. Another break-in of the same sort at Clowes, the printer. Both the week of June ninth, the date of Dickens's death. In each instance, it appears nothing was stolen.”

“Nothing stolen,” Tom said, “because what Herman was looking for-information about Dickens's ending-wasn't there. As nothing was taken, the police quickly dropped any inquiry into the incidents. That's why I sent a cable to Henry Scott asking for an immediate reply to two questions: Was Gadshill broken into after the Chief's death? And was anything taken? You hold his answers in that cable: yes and no.”

“Why should Herman have been following me, then?” Osgood asked.

“That we do not know, Mr. Osgood. But I think Herman actually may have been protecting you at the opium rooms,” Tom said. “The fiends were likely merely trying to rob you, a foreigner in an expensive suit-a certain target. Herman needed you to continue your search, needed you alive and well enough to keep going. He even left you near the sewer drains, where there are always sewer hunters.”

“He thinks I know how to find the ending!” Osgood said. “And if it's all true, there's something worse…” He sat down to ponder this and put his head in both hands.

“What is it, Mr. Osgood?” Rebecca asked.

“Don't you see, Miss Sand? The Parsee, trained in his skills of terror and murder by the worst pirates in the world, has torn England to pieces with his bare hands looking for something, anything, on Drood. And he would not be following me if he'd had any success. What if…” Osgood stopped himself, then found the courage to admit: “What if it means there really is nothing to find?”

“Perhaps it's just a matter of our looking in the wrong places,” said Rebecca bravely.

“Yes,” Tom said with the spark of genuine insight, then slammed his hand on a table. “Yes, Miss Sand! But not only that. Not only the wrong place, but the wrong time.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Branagan?” Rebecca asked.

“I was just remembering. When we were in America with Mr. Dickens, our party was on the train to go to the Philadelphia readings, and the Chief began speaking rather wistfully of Edgar Poe. He said that when he saw Poe the last time he'd been to Philadelphia, they'd spoken of Caleb Williams. Who was the author of that novel?”

“William Godwin,” Osgood said.

“Thank you. Mr. Dickens said that he told Poe how Godwin wrote the last part of the book first and then started on the first part. And Poe said he, too, wrote his mystery tales backward. What if Mr. Dickens, when he set out to write his great mystery, didn't begin at the be-ginning?”

Osgood, lifting his head, sat back in his chair and considered this in silence. “When Mr. Dickens collapsed in Gadshill,” Osgood said abstractedly, “he had that afternoon reached precisely the end of the first half of the book. It was almost as if his body surrendered, knowing he was finished with his labor, although to us it hardly seemed so.”

Tom nodded and said, “What if he wrote the second half of The Mystery of Edwin Drood first, and then the first half once he was back here?”

“What if he wrote the book backward? What if he wrote the ending first?” Osgood asked rhetorically.

“Yet none of our efforts,” interrupted Rebecca, “have suggested where the rest of the book would be stored if he really did write it.”

“Perhaps he would have tried to leave a clue with someone, to tell someone before he died where it was,” Tom mused.

“Dickens's last words,” Osgood said excitedly. “He was calling for him!”

“Calling for whom?” Rebecca asked.

“Henry Scott told us, do you remember? The last thing Dickens was heard to say by the servants was ‘Forster’! Dickens had something left to tell his biographer!”

BUT TO THEIR great frustration, John Forster, whom Osgood and Tom found sitting in his office in the Lunacy Commission at Whitehall, shook his head with a baleful expression. He rolled his big black eyes coolly as they peppered him with their questions. He took out his gold watch, rubbed its face with his fingers, shook it as if shaking a bottle, and cringed busily.

“Friends, I am very busy-very very busy. My afternoon has been taken up by a visit from Arthur Grunwald, the actor-a damnder ass I never encountered in the course of my whole life! He wishes to change the entire play of Drood we've already prepared to open. I really must finish my day's work.”

“You are certain that Mr. Dickens did not try to tell you anything else related to Drood when you arrived at Gadshill?” Osgood asked, trying to return him to the more urgent topic.

Forster wrung his hands outstretched. “I wring my hands at this.”

“I see that you do,” said Osgood. “We must know what he told you.”

“Mr. Osgood,” Forster continued, “Mr. Dickens was insensible by the time I arrived. If he was saying anything, he could not be understood by human ears.”

“Like in a dream,” Tom added musingly.

The other two men looked at him quizzically.

“The Chief told me of a dream he had once,” Tom explained. “In it, he was given a manuscript filled with words and was told it would save his life, but when he looked down at it he could not read it.”

“He never told me about such a dream… Why is it you are so interested in the matter of his final mumblings, Mr. Branagan?” Forster demanded.

“Mr. Forster, if I may,” Tom began. “Why do you think Mr. Dickens called your name in his delirium?”

“Why did… Incredible question!” he roared back. The novelist's biographer began speechifying about his lifelong friendship and their unquestionable intimacy. “All of that, most certainly, occurred to him, as he still clutched this,” Forster continued, picking up the white goose-feather pen he had brought from Gadshill. “I suppose you will want this now.”

“Me?” Osgood asked, surprised at the offer.

Forster nodded his head. “Oh, didn't I say? I suppose it fled my mind. You see, Miss Hogarth was charged with giving away the objects of Mr. Dickens's writing table. She has decided to give this pen-on which is the ink dried from his very final written words-to you.”

“But why?” Osgood asked.

“I asked the same thing! She appears to admire your… what shall we call it? Your fortitude for looking for more about Drood, however foolish. I thought perhaps you would leave England before we could find you. But since you have come…” Forster held it out reluctantly.

Osgood took up the quill pen. “Thank you,” Osgood said, addressed more to the absent Georgy than to Forster. “I shall treasure it.”

“One more question, if you please, Mr. Forster,” said Tom. “When did you get new bolts on this door?”

“What?” Forster asked, for the first time since Osgood's arrival in England speaking in a quiet pitch. “How do you know they're-why do you think they're new at all, sir?”

“Mr. Branagan is a police constable, Mr. Forster,” Osgood answered for him. “He sees enough locks in his line to know the difference at a glance, I'd wager.”

“Very well, I suppose you think that is a great achievement. It was in the days after Mr. Dickens's decease, I believe,” Forster said. “I came here and found that someone had been inside and rifled through my papers related to Dickens. They were all in one place, you see, for I keep my belongings well organized.”

“Was anything taken?” Tom asked.

“No. It was probably some ruffian looking for something of value to sell for drink. But there was one document in particular that seemed to have been, well, wrestled with, shall we say. It was yours, in fact,” he said, nodding to Osgood.

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

“I mean the telegram from your publishing firm asking that all remaining pages of The Mystery of Edwin Drood be immediately sent to Boston.”

He removed a wrinkled telegram from a file. Urgent. Send on all there is of Drood to Boston at once.

“I have a very particular system of organization for my Dickens collection,” Forster continued. “This was placed back but in the wrong spot.”

Osgood and Tom exchanged a quick glance with each other. “That telegram is how Herman must have gotten the idea to go to Boston in the first place,” Osgood said. “He believed Forster might have sent us what he could not find here.”

“Monstrous whispering!” Forster called out. “What is that you're saying, gentlemen?”

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Forster,” Osgood said. “Only speaking to myself. A bad habit.”

“A wretched one,” Forster bettered him.

“Mr. Forster, besides you and Miss Hogarth, can you think of anyone else that Mr. Dickens may have given confidential business information to in his final months?” Tom asked.

This was the absolute wrong question to ask Forster, unless one's purpose was to evoke a litany of his usual curses and lamentations about the world's lack of understanding of Forster's special intimacy with Dickens. Forster even removed Dickens's will and pointed to a clause.

“Do you see what this line says about me, Mr. Branagan?” Forster asked. “Perhaps you need spectacles, sir, for it says ‘My dear and trusty friend.’ It was there that he left me this chronometer watch, which never fails to remind me of all the work that still must be done in this world to make it worthy of a man like Charles Dickens!” He then shook the instrument. “Not that I shall ever know what o'clock it is with this blasted timepiece.”

Osgood looked distracted as Forster lectured. The publisher's eye rested on the will. “I wonder, Mr. Forster,” said Osgood coolly, “if you would allow Mr. Branagan and myself a moment in private?”

The commissioner's face became red. “Leave my own office? Incredible!”

“Just for a moment, if you please. It is quite important,” Osgood said. “Then we shall leave you in peace.” Forster finally agreed, apparently in hopes of ridding himself of his visitors. Osgood's hand reached for Dickens's will. But before stepping outside, Forster swung around and pocketed the document.

Osgood looked up at Tom and said, “We cannot trust him about this.”

“What do you mean?” Tom asked.

“The will, I have my own copy from Aunt Georgy,” Osgood said, removing the document from his coat. “Dash the thought for having never occurred to me! You see, Miss Hogarth asked me to review it with her. The will bequeaths Forster ‘such manuscripts of my published works as may be in my possession at the time of my decease.’ But all that is unpublished at the time of Dickens's death, goes to Georgina Hogarth. If the last six installments of the novel do indeed exist, at the moment of Dickens's death they'd fall under her control by order of his will.”

“Control over Dickens is the one thing in the world I'd guess Mr. Forster won't relinquish,” Tom said. “Do you believe he is hiding something else from us?”

Forster began knocking insistently on his office door and declaring they were to have exactly half a minute more. Osgood fastened Forster's new door lock, leading to more severe exclamations.

“Not necessarily hiding,” Osgood said more quietly to Tom, “but if he knows more about the ending of the novel or who Dickens may have confided in, he will not tell us. Not if it means making it appear that Dickens trusted any person on earth more than himself to direct his legacy.”

“Stuff! Come out or I send for the police!” Forster boomed out.

Osgood frowned and unlocked the door.

Forster, exuding rage, blinked several times at Osgood and leaned in toward him. “Now, tell me, Mr. Osgood, did you really imagine you, commonplace publisher, and your little girl bookkeeper could find more of Drood that I couldn't? Did you really imagine you could have accomplished any such thing? What is it you wanted from it, anyway? To be the nine days’ talk of the trade? To be made as rich as a Jew, perhaps? You're not still caught in that fool's quest, are you?”

“I shall continue on, sir,” Osgood said without hesitation. “I recall Mr. Dickens's words. There is nothing to do but close up the ranks, march on, and fight it out.”

“Then you hadn't heard?” Forster asked.

“What do you mean?” Tom asked Forster.

“I mean this,” Forster said. He removed a wrinkled slip of paper. “Read for yourself.”

Osgood picked it up and examined it.

June 8, 1870. My dearest friend, I fear, with my illnesses worsening each day, I shall reach no further than the end of the sixth number of my Drood. What hopes I had for a unique ending, I need not tell you! Will this truly be my last? I fancy it would have been my best one, had I had the time to finish.

It was signed, Charles Dickens.

“This is the date he collapsed. Where did this come from?” Osgood asked. “Why did you never show this to me?”

“I received it only yesterday,” Forster explained. “It was found lodged in a box of watercolor paintings at Christie's auction house, carelessly put there by the auction house laborers. Clearly, he did not have time to post it before he collapsed.”

“This can't be,” Osgood said to himself, to the satisfaction of Forster.

“It does not say who it was addressed to,” Tom commented.

“Who else would it be?” Forster asked proudly. “‘My dearest friend,’ who else do you think it would be but me? We have not yet made this note public, but we will. I am sorry this was not discovered earlier, it would have saved you, Miss Sand, and Mr. Branagan valuable time pursuing nonsense. Now,” he said, with a greedy smack of his lips, “may I have my office?”

Osgood handed him the letter. “Of course, Mr. Forster.”

“Think of it like this,” said Forster. “You do not leave empty-handed, my dear Mr. Osgood. You have Mr. Dickens's last pen-and how many people can boast such a rare forget-me-not?”

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Osgood and Tom were back inside the rooms at the Piccadilly hotel. Osgood was already packing his things into his trunk. Tom had tried every form of argument to convince Os-good to continue their inquiries.

“Mr. Osgood,” Tom said, “you cannot yield now. There is still too much not understood. You may still be in danger from Herman!”

“We haven't any choice,” said Osgood, half resigned and half reluctant. “Once Forster makes his letter public, Herman will leave us alone, anyway. He'll know the truth by then, that he has no reason to fear, even as we have no reason to hope.”

“Perhaps the Chief had a motive to mislead Mr. Forster-knowing that Forster would try to manipulate the ending of the novel how he'd want it,” urged Tom.

Osgood shook his head. “I don't think so. Our search has been utter folly, as Forster warned us it would from the first hour. There is nothing lost or secret in what Dickens left behind-nothing waiting to rescue us from our troubles. The book is no more, it died with him. I made a mistake. I, James Osgood, was carried away on an error of judgment, and now I must eat my words! I wanted to believe it, I wanted to believe that a man who called himself Datchery could help. Because of my stubbornness, because I wanted there to be something to find, all I have done here is waste time and give a head start to the literary pirates who even now prepare their editions back in America.” He turned to his bookkeeper. “Miss Sand, make arrangements for our immediate passage back to Boston, and send a cable to Mr. Fields at the office informing him.”

“Yes, Mr. Osgood,” Rebecca said dutifully, each step taking her back to the normality and routine of daily life in Boston.

Osgood looked over the room and at his two companions as Rebecca prepared a cable and Tom continued to try to persuade him. Osgood knew that to yield and go home was the proper, rational, responsible decision-really, the only decision he, James Ripley Osgood, could possibly make without some countervailing mandate from the heavens.

“We are too late to do anything for ourselves, in any case,” Osgood said. “The Harpers will soon be able to publish all that was left of Edwin Drood. We will have to bear the loss and move on. Our rivals will see we are vulnerable. Fields will need us both in Boston to do what we can.”

Tom stepped in front of Osgood and held up his hand. “Mr. Osgood, I give you my hand-I give you my word with it-that if you wish to try longer to investigate I shall be standing by your side.”

Osgood, with a small smile, took Tom's hand in both of his, as Jack Rogers had done in their first encounter in the Gadshill chalet, but shook his head in a final refusal. “Thank you for all you have done to aid us, Tom. Godspeed to you.”

“Godspeed, Mr. Osgood,” Tom said, sighing. “I am only sorry your time here has to end like this. Mr. Dickens-and you-deserved something more.”

“To have gained your friendship has been worth all of it,” Osgood replied.

Chapter 30

New York City, July 16, 1870

WHILE OSGOOD WAS HASTILY CLOSING THEIR BUSINESS IN London and preparing for departure, there was a conversation involving him inside one of the more luxurious coaches crammed into the thundering roar of Broadway in New York City. Out of its window, a tall hat and long muttonchops belonging to a grizzled head appeared, and the face between them inclined into a snarl at the tight traffic.

“So tell me, where in hell is that gump now?” Fletcher Harper, ducking back into the carriage, removing his tall black hat from his curly brown head, bellowed as his span of horses clopped to an irritable stop behind an omnibus.

“I'm sure I don't know, Uncle,” said his riding companion. “But father trusted him.”

“Oh! I know he did,” the Major said with his usual tone of bemused bitterness. “It is a big mistake, Philip. Take the next right turn away from this mess!” He stretched his neck out the window, installing his hat once again for the moment, and yelled to the driver.

“What mistake?” asked the companion, Philip Harper, son of Fletcher's late brother James, and now chief of the financial de partment, after his uncle had returned his neck and head inside the vehicle.

“Come! Trusting a man not named Harper. You will learn to avoid the practice before long, Philip, as this world goes. Your father always put too much faith in his Harper's Police to solve our problems. And now because of it here we are, and Jack Rogers has ceased communication. For all we know, that blackguard may have changed allegiances to another publisher for a higher fee-if he learned any secrets in England about Dickens, he may be using them against us, perhaps with the help of Osgood, with an eye on tendering a greater profit.”

The Major's counsel on trusting only individuals with the name Harper could have been noted as quite sustainable when entering the daunting fortressed offices at Franklin Square. There were multiple Fletchers, Josephs, Johns, this eager Philip, a lone Abner, sons of the original brothers, in varied roles managing the periodicals and production, with a line of grandsons already coming up as shop boys.

Franklin Square was Harvard and Yale for them. “When my flame expires,” the Major would say to each of them as a kind of introductory address, “let true hands pass on an unextinguished torch from sire to son!” This saying was also roughly the translation of the publishing house's Latin motto on the insignia of a flaming torch.

The Major, as he was entering, was told by a tremulous clerk that his expected visitors were waiting in the counting room.

“They are… impatiently waiting, I should say, Major,” said the clerk.

“Let them wait, it shall increase their hunger for my gold. And Mr. Leypoldt?” asked the Major.

“He sent a message and is to come at three,” the clerk replied. “And Mr. Nast is waiting in your private office with a new Tweed drawing.”

“Good!” the Major replied.

“That's Mr. Leypoldt from the publishing journal, Uncle?” asked Philip.

“Yes, and we shall pour into him as many bottles of champagne as it takes to persuade him to sing the praises of Harper and Brothers in his columns. First, we have a different type of business. A more precarious kind.”

“Shall I leave you now?” Philip Harper asked his uncle discreetly.

“Don't think of it! You are to learn everything connected to our business, Philip, just as Fletcher Junior will,” the Major said, clamping down on his arm and pulling him along. “Now, you see our friend up there?”

Philip followed the Major's gaze to a bust poised above the doorway to the main offices.

“Benjamin Franklin, isn't it, Uncle Fletcher?” asked Philip of the judgmental bust.

“Correct. Not only one of our nation's founding geniuses but a printer and publisher, too. To this craft he applied his industry and thrift. You see, he knew that to form the soul of America, one must control the presses. The basis of our firm is character, not capital, just as it was with him. Remember that, and you shall truly be a part of Harper and Brothers.”

In the great open office of the upper floor, the senior of the two Harpers guided them to a rectangular space closed in by a railing. Near the far wall was a circle of sofas and chairs meant for authors and other distinguished visitors to the firm, but on this day they hosted a different sort of occupant. In various positions of repose and sublime agitation, there were gathered four of the most striking and diverse individual human beings ever seen together in any publishing office.

Philip stopped in midstride and gave an anxious, gawky smile. “Why, Uncle Fletcher! Are those-”

“The Bookaneers!” the Major finished his exclamation in a hoary whisper. “The best of the lot, anyway, and all in one place this time.”

There was the smooth, chocolate-colored Esquire, in his high-fashion silks and velvet and thick boots, looking an odd combination of actor and workman and balancing a walking stick on his lap; Molasses, with the particolored growth undulating down his jaw and chin and dirty neckcloth; the lone woman of the group, called Kitten, also known by other mysterious appellations, who was unaging and ageless-those blue eyes might have been through twenty or forty summers, depending on what angle and light flattered them; and breathing in heavy, labored contortions while sitting next to her, the seven-foot-tall man named Baby, a former circus giant, masticating a quid of tobacco between his monumental teeth.

“Uncle Fletcher,” said the young apprentice, “those people are the scum of the land!”

“Well!” the Major replied, smiling with genuine amusement at his green nephew. “If we cannot find Jack Rogers, it shall be near impossible to know what that James Osgood has been up to, and what he and Fields have in store for the last Dickens book. We are good Methodists, boy, but we cannot sit with our hands in our pockets waiting for our destiny. We must arm ourselves against the successes of our rivals, Philip. These scum, as you call them, might have been ordinary readers, writers, or publishers, but instead have become shadows of each, and as such can do what we cannot, can go where we cannot. You shall learn that you cannot count on a domestic cat, when the arts of a Bengal tiger are called for.”

When they had greeted the motley crew, the Major passed a slow glance over each of them before beginning.

“I hope you enjoyed the drinkables and eatables I asked one of our girls to provide for you.” The platter had been emptied already.

“I didn't get any,” Molasses grumbled.

“Sorry,” Kitten said to the others fanning herself with a napkin, “I arrived early and had missed breakfast.”

The publisher continued. “I wished to have this consultation with you, my friends, because we are in a period of great excitement in the book trade.”

“Why all four of us?” asked Baby.

“It's uncommon!” shouted Molasses, passing a hand through his rainbow-streaked beard.

“Come! You shall find I speak plainly, Mr. Molasses,” said the Major agreeably. “I am not unaware that the usual course of your profession renders yourselves rivals. Yet there is money enough here at Harper and Brothers to pay fine ransoms for all the latest literary treasures coming from the Old World, without wasting time scratching at each other's eyes.”

Esquire, the Negro dance master, bowed. “I, for one, voice my approbation, sir. Why not encourage cooperation, gentlemen? And Kitty. But who's on the list we're looking out for?”

Harper rattled off his current list: “George Eliot, Bulwer-Lytton, Tennyson, Trollope and-Esquire, you speak French, I presume?”

“Not only do I speak in French, Major, I dance and dream French,” replied the dark-skinned Bookaneer in his native tongue. Molasses rolled his eyes and knocked off Esquire's fashionable cap from his head as Harper continued.

“I'd wager there's not a language you know the name of that I don't speak, mister,” Kitten chimed in.

“Good,” said Harper. “Because the town talk is a new play from Paris is about to cause a sensation-one the New York theaters would shell out hard cash for us to translate in advance. Keep your spyglasses trained for it, all of you, at the ports of Boston, New York, Philadelphia.”

Then the Major took from his frock coat several silver coins and placed them on the table. “These are burning a hole in my pocket,” he said, his deep-set blue eyes blinking excitedly. “One for each of you, to whet your taste.”

Kitten rose and put her coin into her bosom with a decidedly unimpressed expression. “How much for a top manuscript, Major Harper?”

“My dear?” the Major asked. She didn't repeat her question, though he seemed to want to force her to do so; instead she stood stock-still like a ballerina whose music had stopped. “Oh! The bounty, my dear feminine Shylock? Double the usual rate if you get me the manuscript of an A-1 author. The traitors to our economy are out there pushing again for international copyright, led by that Brit lover James Lowell, and if they succeed we take the hit in what we are permitted by law to print.

“Take the late Charles Dickens, for instance,” he continued. “I have reason to know that for one reader in England, he has ten here. I will go further and say that for every copy of his works circulated in Great Britain, ten are printed and circulated here. We have made those copies affordable and widespread throughout the republic through what I call transmitting-what the ignorant call pirating- and have thus brought culture and learning into homes that would not otherwise be able to afford any. I may not live to see the day, but you will, when the best English classics will be sold in America for a dime. Never forget, we are the heirs to Benjamin Franklin, we are the true-blooded servants of this trade.”

This produced some nodding and general indifferent consensus from his audience as they stood to leave.

When the visitors passed as one body through the door in the railings to the stairwell on their way out, the clerks and accountants at their desks in the outer room stopped what they were doing and stared. Before Molasses crossed through the arched doorway, the Major took him by the arm.

“Aren't you through with us?” Molasses demanded.

“You're the best of your kind,” the Major said confidentially. “The most persistent, so to speak.”

Molasses asked, “How would you know?”

“Come, friend! You watch us. We watch you. It's said you had Thackeray's final novel before his own publisher in London.”

Molasses sneered with scampish pleasure at the memory.

“So. I have something special I want you to do.”

“I thought you wanted us to cooperate.”

The Major shrugged. “Courtesy is courtesy, but business is business, my dear man.”

“You had something else to say or didn't you, Major Harper?”

“Keep an eye out for Osgood,” the Major said, tapping one of Molasses's buttons on his coat and dropping an extra double-eagle coin in the man's breast pocket.

“Osgood?”

“You want your big boodle from this? Come! Then pay attention. Keep an eye out for James Ripley Osgood. I told him I'd be watching him and you will be my eyes. He has something we need. I don't know what, precisely, I don't know where, but I can feel it down in my bones.”

THE VERY SAME JACK Rogers that the Harpers had sought in vain was at this moment only a few city blocks away from Franklin Square. He'd recently disembarked from a ship out of Liverpool and two days before had arrived in New York.

Around the dilapidated docks at the lower portion of the island of Manhattan, looking out on the crowd of sails, steaming ferries and busy tugs, he wore a sackcloth suit and was notable for not being involved in the habitual occupations of the tired workmen and the wretched wharf rats. The flabby brim of his wideawake was pulled low, shading his face; when he lifted his face into the light, an observer could see a plaster on his right eye and crisscrossed columns of false wrinkles and crow's-feet.

They were the same wrinkles he had applied around his mouth and forehead when disguised as George Washington. If spotted by any of Major Harper's agents-even other former members of Harper's Police-they would not make out much about him at first. But time was growing short for how long the old disguise would conceal him, and so far, it had all been for naught.

Though Osgood had made it clear he wanted nothing to do with Rogers, and Rogers for his part wanted nothing more to do with the Harpers or their money, he still could not give up pursuing the Dickens mystery on his own steam. The shame he felt confessing his motives and his role as Datchery to Osgood and Tom Branagan could not be the end of his part in the story.

Tom had made it clear enough that he would have had him arrested if he had remained around London to investigate. But Jack Rogers knew there were lucrative opium deals that permeated the New York harbor. Many were carried out by legitimate merchants engaged primarily in outfitting ships to Turkey to retrieve opium (as the English largely possessed a monopoly on the supply from India), then taking it to ports in China and the scattered Oriental islands. Yet a smaller portion brought their wares back into the American ports, and it was these traders, Rogers suspected, that had to be engaged in some connection with the opium fiends that had nearly finished him and Osgood off that night in the East End. Clues were thin, though, as Rogers wandered through the wharves and engaged in idle chatter about trading and ships, poking with his bamboo walking stick through piles of garbage (animal carcasses, old boots, large amounts of rotted vegetables tossed from passing ships). Sometimes he would sit and go fishing in the broken-down boats abandoned at the piers with the wharf mice, hoping to learn something other than the fact that the boys could swear like troopers.

Rogers removed a handkerchief and dried his nose and his eyes, both of which were leaking. His head throbbed. He wanted nothing more in the world than to relieve himself of the shooting pains. He wanted nothing more than to buy opium for himself. Not the watered-down, altered, and diluted stuff at the druggists but the pure raw crude poppy juice.

Though it had been a load off his heart to reveal his identity to Os-good and Tom Branagan, he had not told them the entire truth. He did not lie about who he was: Jack Rogers was Jack Rogers. This was precisely the problem. To Rogers, deception came quickly and naturally to protect himself.

It was not true, as Rogers had told Osgood, that he had not used narcotics for six months. In fact, the asylum in Pennsylvania where he had been sent by Harper had prescribed heavy doses of morphine-derived from opium-as a way to “cure” his habits. The morphine, while steering him away from crude opium, caused an entirely new state of dependence he indulged in every morning and night.

Rogers thought about something he had seen during the Civil War, when he had been recruited by a general for a series of secret missions. He had seen a surgeon on the Union side, riding on his horse and pouring liquid morphine into his hand. He would then hold out his hand and the soldiers would line up and lick his glove. This way the surgeon did not have to step down from his horse. It was a disgusting sight to recall. Rogers questioned whether he himself would ever sink so low as the glove-licking soldiers desperate for relief. He despised that proud expression of power he remembered on the face of the surgeon and felt himself its victim.

When people discovered Rogers was an opium habitué, they would sometimes say, I have always wanted to try that. I should like to see what the visions of the opium eater are like.

“You should not,” Rogers would tell them. “You shall not have the dreams of Coleridge and the pleasures of De Quincey and then stop at your convenience. We are not opium eaters; opiates are man-eaters. There is no stopping until the drug is willing to release you.”

Then they would talk of their stronger wills.

Rogers would shake his head ardently. “Do not talk to me of will, man! For will is what I have lost, what has shriveled and died inside of me! There are days when I cannot wind my watch, for my fingers feel as though they will fall off from their joints!”

In going to England, Rogers had sought to fulfill a lucrative mission for Major Harper. He also had known that Edwin Drood was set among the opium trade and had half hoped that seeing it through Dickens's eyes, he might gain some insight into his own dark history. Maybe, in Rogers's attempt to trick Dickens, Dickens had indeed transferred something to him in their sessions at Gadshill that could serve him now-some small sliver of his genius.

In any case, and for however impractical a reason, he could not now walk away from the mystery he'd been originally assigned to investigate. Since he could not remain in England safely, he'd determined that mixing among the opium traders on this side of the Atlantic might offer some clue to the connections he still hoped to make. This afternoon he finally recognized someone he saw out there. This person he recognized, strange to say, he had never seen before in his life.

Among all the scum working the opium trade at the New York harbor, it was an old Turkish sailor with a blue turban and short, shaggy white whiskers. It was the Turk Seated Smoking Opium-the statue Rogers had seen so many times at Gadshill in Dickens's summer study, now come alive! The same statue that had disappeared from Christie's auction house in King Street. Only he was right here in the flesh. There was no denying the perfect verisimilitude of the statue, though the living man had grown older and more beautifully gaunt.

“If that wretched-looking creature is coming all the way from London to New York from that cesspool to this,” Rogers said to himself, “it's likely that he's not ponying up money for the trip himself. And it's too much to just call coincidence. He's someone's messenger, someone who doesn't want to communicate by wire that could be stolen or read by an operator.”

Rogers followed him to a fish shed, which the sailor entered. Rogers stopped at the window and pretended to adjust the plaster over his eye. The Turk passed an envelope into the hands of a slender man with heavy eyelids and a businesslike presence. The exchange was quick and silent and before long the two men had split up.

Rogers, waiting anxiously for a few seconds to pass, tucked his bamboo stick under his arm and followed the second man a few paces behind, even as he marked the direction of the Turk.

Chapter 31

Lower Provinces, India, the next day, 1870

THE RAINY SEASON HAD MADE ITSELF KNOWN. SUPERINTENDENT Frank Dickens decided to make a stop at an outpost with the small group he had personally selected from the Opium Detective Police. The English military officers welcomed them, and ordered their khansáman to arrange a light supper while they waited for the rain to quiet down.

“What brings you to these provinces, Superintendent?” asked their host, a young Englishman of strong build and amiable personality.

“An opium dacoity, to begin with,” said Frank. “Worth many thousand rupees.”

The host shook his head. “The blessings of civilization do not come easily for our dark-skinned friends, I should say. Their rude morals allow their own people to steal the source of their future wealth. Ah, here we have a pleasant change of subject. Let us eat to your health!”

The Bengal policemen stared at the bowls of lumpy orange-red liquid that were placed in front of them.

“What is it?” asked one of them.

The host laughed. “It is a type of liquid salad, my friend, a Spanish invention called guspácheo. Among the Spaniards, it is employed as a way of reducing thirst and preparing for a hearty meal in the warm climate. It will keep away fever in the hot, rainy weather.”

After indulging in the strange lunch, Frank and his band continued by horseback until reaching a dry riverbank by a jungle. Consulting his hand-drawn map given to him by the inspector who had interrogated the captured dacoit, Frank stopped and dismounted.

“Remove the shovels.”

Procuring an elephant from a nearby police outpost, Frank inspected the area as his men dug at several different spots, while the rain would come down hard and then at regular intervals give way to the blazing sun. Though the activity was wearying, Frank could not help admiring the image of himself as the conquering European atop the awesome beast. He thought dismissively about his time being trained to work at All the Year Round and the disappointment of his father later. It was not that Frank could not manage the writing, he simply could not manage the boredom of it the way his older brother Charley could.

When he had been a schoolboy, his father had announced to Frank one day that he would teach him shorthand because it was a salable skill, and that the great Boz himself had hung a shingle to do freelance shorthand as a reporter in his younger days. The system, called Gurney's after its inventor, was difficult enough to train in, but Dickens had even “improved” it with his own “arbitrary characters” (various marks, dots, circles, spirals, and lines) to represent words, making it more mysterious still. Frank would study carefully, certain he had made excellent progress, and then his father would test him by giving him dictation.

Charles Dickens would scream out a bombastic, ridiculous speech like he were sitting in the House of Commons, then interrupt himself in an entirely different voice arguing the opposite point of a more absurd and bombastic character. Frank would swear his father somehow talked over himself during these tests. Frank, trying his hardest to concentrate, would fall over laughing, and by the end of the parliamentary debate, both father and pupil were rolling on the rug in side-shaking hysteria. He resembled his father physically, more so than any of the other boys; but at those times he felt as though they were actual twins. Frank's page of shorthand, meanwhile, would end up like absurd, meaningless hieroglyphics.

Frank had heard that his diminutive younger brother, Sydney, who was in the Royal Navy, had been nicknamed by his mess mates “Little Expectations” after Great Expectations was published. Frank had never been meant to follow in his father's foot tracks, but he would not be seen to the world as a failure.

The first spot Frank had chosen in the sun-scorched ground yielded nothing, but after consulting the map again the squadron unearthed a mango wood chest sealed in pitch. After another two hours had passed, five more chests, the total promised by the thief, were discovered.

Frank climbed down from the elephant. The heavy chests were soon lined up in a row. Meanwhile, a small crowd had gathered from the nearby village to watch.

“Get the natives away from here. They have seen that the thieves will not beat us, that is enough.”

But Frank's order was not heeded fast enough. Several of the native women had begun to dance and this was sufficient to distract the opium policemen. In the meantime, more natives were slowly emerging from the edge of the jungle.

“Rifles,” Frank said, then louder: “Rifles up!”

At that moment, the band of natives charged with flaming torches and spears. Frank ordered his men to fire and, several volleys later, the raiders had fled back into the dense woods.

“They do not like white police in these districts,” offered a local policeman bemusedly.

Frank turned to his men, who were shamefaced at having been duped. “Open the chests. I want each one examined thoroughly.”

“Rocks!” one of the policemen cried. He had discovered that about one third of the lumps of opium in the chest had been replaced with stones of about equal weight. In the other chests it was the same.

Frank did not evince any surprise; he simply took one of the rocks and put it in his satchel.

Chapter 32

Liverpool, the docks the next morning

THE TRAVELERS, NOW RESIGNED TO GOING HOME, FELT FORTUNATE to push off aboard the Samaria once again. Booking passage at such short notice would have been nearly impossible, as Osgood's passport had been held since the suspicious situation in which he'd been found after the incident at the opium rooms. Marcus Wakefield was himself embarking on one of his frequent business trips between England and America. In a matter of hours, and with great expense billed to the publishing firm, he had passage arranged for Osgood and Rebecca on the same ship. In conjunction with Tom Branagan's urgings through the police department, Wakefield employed his influence to release Osgood's passport for travel.

On the way to the harbor, Osgood and Rebecca sat with Wakefield in the merchant's coach. Tom and another police constable walked on opposite sides of the street so they could watch for Herman. Each of the two pedestrians held up an umbrella and kept his hat pulled down low on his face. There was no sign of Herman and the two Americans boarded with the tea merchant quickly and quietly.

Aboard the steamship, Wakefield was as solicitous a friend as ever, though both Osgood and Rebecca noticed a certain petulant charge to his demeanor.

“I am afraid since we last traveled my business has entered a period of great dullness,” Wakefield explained with a touch of embarrassment in the saloon to Osgood over tea. “My partners are quite circumspect about general prospects. Enough of my gloominess, though. What about you, my friend? It seems you were rather burning the candle at both ends in England.”

“Indeed, I suppose I was,” said Osgood. “What did you say this was, Mr. Wakefield?”

“Ah, it's called oswego. It's believed to have curative properties-good for the stomach and to prevent nausea. Do you like it?”

“It makes me feel plucked up already, thank you.”

“Well, I should say you are in quite better form than when I saw you in the company of the police in London, covered in rat bites!” Wakefield said, laughing. “I pray this is at least a respite for dear Miss Sand. All she endured with her brother, Daniel. Awful, senseless tragedy, by the sound of it.”

“We shall always be grateful for your assistance, Mr. Wakefield. Even though it is now over.”

“Yes, yes, absolutely.” He raised his wineglass. “To the health of us all now that this is over!” After taking a drink, he added, “Now that what is over, Mr. Osgood?”

“A great disappointment,” Osgood answered.

Wakefield nodded regretfully, as if their business disappointments were the same.

Osgood smiled, appreciating the sympathy. “Sit with me at supper, Mr. Wakefield, and I shall unburden it all to you then, if you shall hear it. I owe you that. One day I hope to be able to do you as decent a service as you have done for us,” said Osgood.

“Your trust is quite enough reward for me, dear Mr. Osgood. Quite enough!” Then Wakefield paused and seemed to have a tickle in his throat as he spoke again. “Perhaps there is one thing you could do, if you're willing. But I hesitate to ask.” Wakefield fell silent, engaging in his habitual knee-tapping.

“I insist on it.”

“Pray, Mr. Osgood, a good word from you to Miss Sand about my character… Well, she respects you very much.”

“Why, Mr. Wakefield…” Osgood seemed lost deep in a troubled thought.

“I have grown to admire her a great deal, as I think you know. Will you do me this one favor?”

“I would not deny you any favor, my friend.” Osgood was about to say more when the bell rang from the dining saloon.

“Shall we continue this over our meal?” Wakefield suggested with a hearty smile.

INSTEAD OF GOING in to dinner with the others, Osgood stood on deck at the railing, looking out at the brilliant gleam of the sea. He closed his eyes as the mist sprayed his unshaven face.

“Mr. Osgood? Are you feeling unwell?”

Osgood turned to look over his shoulder, but quickly turned back. It was Rebecca. He had not prepared what he would say to her.

“No, no,” Osgood said. “I believe I am almost fully healed with London behind us, as a matter of fact.”

“Well, I suppose we should get to our tables for dinner.”

“Mr. Wakefield is a fine man. He has been a true friend to us, as you know.”

“What?”

Osgood said, “I just wished to say that.”

“Very well,” Rebecca said, a little confused.

He wished he could explain to Rebecca. He wished he could find a way to express the feelings that had been so clear to him the night of his opium stupor when everything else had been a blur. Now, there were the rules again-his, as her employer, hers, given by the courts. Wakefield, for his part, had practically asked Osgood's permission when they had first met on this same ship. Miss Sand is an excellent bookkeeper was all Osgood had managed to say. An excellent bookkeeper! Osgood sighed. “I suppose, because he is English, the courtship of such a man as Mr. Wakefield would hold great appeal.”

“To have a decent man express his dedication to me flatters any woman. But I hope you would not believe of me that I would ever pre-tend to be in love with an English citizen in order to free myself from a decree, and trade one prison for another. Do you think if I loved a man, I would allow paper constraints, words in some law book, to stop me, no matter the consequences?” In the passion of her speech, a curl of her raven hair had fallen from her bonnet and clung to her lip.

“Perhaps I,” Osgood said, then paused as though he had lost track of his tongue. “I know after you lost Daniel I thought too much of shielding you.”

Rebecca nodded her thanks for his honesty and held out her arm. “I'm famished, Mr. Osgood. Will you walk me inside?”

She had not told him what their failure meant for her, that her life in Boston, and her time at the firm, would have to come to an end. Osgood, grateful for her reply, took her arm under his, and could feel his heart beating against the soft leather of her gloved hand, believing they had all the time in the world.

Chapter 33

INSURANCE INSPECTORS AND WORKMEN WERE MOVING IN AND out of what still remained of the main auditorium of the Surrey Theatre on Blackfriar's Road. What had been London's grandest theater had been reduced to a gloomy shadow of itself in a few short hours. The floor and walls were still smoldering. Tom Branagan entered and crossed through a labyrinthine series of charred and dirt-begrimed halls until he reached the carpenter's room.

“This is where it started?” Tom asked.

“Who's there?” answered a workman, before he saw Tom's blue coat and bright buttons of the police uniform. “Oh, another bobbie? That's how it seems, yes, gov'n'r. We've already had the inspectors around investigating whether it's the work of an incendiary.”

“Did they tell you what they concluded?” Tom asked.

“There's always hazards around the theater-sparks everywhere, fabrics that could ignite with a fiery look at them. The police didn't tell me nothing. Shouldn't you already know, gov'n'r?”

“They don't tell me,” admitted Tom. “It's the constable's duty only to take out exposed property after a fire. To prevent robbery while the debris is cleared away.”

The workman, realizing Tom's lack of authority, turned his back on him.

Digging through the black piles of rubble and old props, Tom found a placard. On it, there was listed the upcoming season of plays.

“The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” Tom said. “That is being done at this theater?”

“Aye, was about to open. Not anymore, 'course. Not with the theater burned and Grunwald dead.”

Tom shivered, remembering the name from Forster's complaints. “Grunwald?”

“The actor. They found him trapped in the green room with his young assistant. The manager said he was practicing the new lines in front of the mirror every night this week. Well, good thing the fire was in the middle of the night instead of the middle of a performance, gov'n'r, or we'd all have been roasted alive like them.”

“New lines? Right before it was to open?” Tom asked.

“They had just changed the ending to suit Grunwald. Now who knows when anyone will get to see it! Grunwald-he threatened to quit if they didn't allow him, I mean Edwin Drood, to survive in the end. Finally, the manager agreed, and forced Mr. Stephens, the writer, to give them a new conclusion over the grousing of Mr. Forster. Oh, that Grunwald had been going about telling everyone he knew. Why, that was just a few days ago, though now it seems another life altogether.”

Tom stared at the poster, then at the mass of ruins all around him.

The workman, now that he had become more talkative, seemed reluctant to stop. “That Grunwald, he used to say nobody could understand his position who hasn't walked in the shoes of Edwin Drood, a man who only wanted to belong to a family. He said he was born for the role and would not permit Drood to die. He was a man obsessed, but then he was an actor. Rest his soul.”

“Good God,” Tom said to himself.

“What's that, gov'n'r?” the workman asked, cupping his ear.

Tom dashed out of the carpenter's room past a row of tired firemen.

Chapter 34

AT QUEENSTOWN, IN IRELAND, WHERE THE LIVERPOOL-TO-BOSTON-line made port, Osgood was surprised to be brought a lengthy cable by one of the Samaria's stewards. It was addressed from a police station house in London.

“It is from Tom Branagan,” Osgood said, showing it to Rebecca in the ship's library. “Arthur Grunwald was up to his neck in schemes. Look!”

Rebecca read the cable. Tom explained what the theater workman had revealed about Grunwald changing the ending of the play. Moreover, after his visit to the scene of the fire, Tom proceeded to search Grunwald's lodgings, where he found a pile of drafts and revisions of the very letter to “my dearest friend” in Forster's possession about not finishing Drood.

“You had said the day you went to the Dickens auction that Mr. Grunwald was there,” Rebecca said.

Osgood nodded. “It must have been Grunwald who left the letter in one of the boxes at the auction, so when it was found it would seem to have been overlooked in the crates and boxes of Dickens's belongings. He did not want any other ‘discoveries’ to distract from his own ending of Drood.”

“If that letter you saw was forged… then what we believed before we left London could have been right,” Rebecca exclaimed. “Dickens still may have written the second half first, after all!”

“Yes,” Osgood said excitedly.

“Then Mr. Branagan was right, too. We should have stayed in London to continue our hunt!” Rebecca exclaimed. “We must wait here in Queenstown for the next ship passing through to Liverpool and return at once.”

“Hold, Miss Sand. There may be something else.”

Osgood put aside the cable and picked up the quill pen given to him by Forster. He turned it over in his hand, studying the soft feather and the sharp blue-stained nib. He poked his own fingertip with the sharp point.

“Have you ever been to the Parker House, Miss Sand?”

“I had delivered some papers to Mr. Dickens and Mr. Dolby during their stay,” Rebecca said.

“Do you remember what ink was provided on the writing desks there?” Osgood asked.

Rebecca thought about it. “I took some notes written by Mr. Dickens back to the firm. They were written in iron gall ink, if I recall it.”

“Yes, iron gall, a black purple color,” Osgood said, nodding. “That is what they keep in all the Parker rooms for the guests. Dickens wrote his manuscripts in blue, as we saw of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. And the nib of this pen that he used for the book shows us, it is dried blue accordingly. Miss Hogarth told us that the Chief liked to use the same pen the entire way through the process of writing a novel.”

“Yes,” Rebecca replied, uncertain of Osgood's train of thought.

Knowing he was not yet being clear, Osgood put a hand up for her patience. He took up a magnifying lens from the shelf and lowered it onto the quill pen, squinting as he examined it. Then he stood, sat back down, and moved the moderator lamp to throw the light from a different angle.

“Do you have a knife?” Osgood asked.

“What?”

“A knife,” Osgood repeated.

“No.”

“No, I suppose you wouldn't. Can we find one?”

Rebecca exited the library. A few minutes later, she returned with a small pocketknife secured from the captain.

“Thank you.” Taking the requested tool, Osgood carefully put the blade to the end of the pen. “Hold the lens over this spot, please,” Osgood said.

Peeling the surface of the nib, layers of blue ink fell away.

“There!”

The blue began to give way to layers of brown.

“Look,” Osgood said excitedly. “Look what's underneath.”

“It's brown,” Rebecca replied with disappointment after examining the underlayers of the tip under the light.

“Just a moment, Miss Sand.” Osgood walked to a table at the other end of the library office and carried over a carafe of water and a stout glass. He poured a small amount of water into the glass, after which he swirled the tip of his finger until it was wet. He then removed that finger from the glass and rubbed the peeled nib of the pen. As it became wet, the dry brown slowly turned purple black.

“See!” Osgood said, displaying the evidence.

“It's black!”

“That's iron gall, the same ink supplied at Parker's! When iron gall dries and hardens, it turns to a brownish maroon color. I think he used this pen in Boston,” Osgood declared. “This may very well show Tom Branagan was right! Drood ended before it began! When Herman went to Gadshill and Forster's office, he was looking for the wrong type of clue-he shouldn't have been looking for a piece of paper that might tell him what Dickens had planned for the rest of the book, but the very pen itself with which he had written it. This ink points us not back to England but right where we're headed!”

“You think it possible he had written the second half first while still in Boston?” asked Rebecca.

“When I asked him if there was any place he hadn't seen in Boston, he said he wished to see the Harvard Medical College where the infamous murder of Parkman had occurred,” Osgood mused. “He had also mentioned to us that he was preparing a new reading about Bill Sikes murdering Nancy from Oliver Twist. Perhaps the Chief had such murder stories on his mind, not only as a matter of local curiosity, but because he was already writing one himself! That is what brought Poe to his mind to begin with in his conversation on the train with Mr. Branagan and Mr. Scott!”

“Mr. Osgood, You've done it!” Rebecca exclaimed. “Even if this is true, he didn't tell Mr. Forster or anyone else that we know of, where those pages are. We wouldn't know where to begin to look.”

“Who else might he have told?” Osgood wondered out loud.

“What about Mrs. Barton!” Rebecca cried out.

Osgood looked over at her with surprise and shook his head. “The deranged reader? I can't imagine a less likely candidate for him to entrust his secret with, truly.”

“I recall hearing at the office what Mrs. Barton had wanted that night. She was writing nonsense that she believed-in the disordered folds of her mind-was the next Dickens novel. She believed his next book had to be her next book: that they were one and the same, that the line between reader and writer had been erased. Mr. Branagan described Mr. Dickens having a gleam of sympathy in his eyes for the poor soul and he leaned in-after she had cut her own throat and it seemed every drop of her life was dancing out of her, she managed to ask about his next book-and he whispered to her.”

“But Mr. Branagan said he hadn't heard what it was Mr. Dickens whispered.”

“No, Mr. Osgood, but it might have been…” Rebecca said, bracing herself for the possibility, and willing herself the bravery to propose it. “If he was already writing Drood, it just might have been related to it, to put her at ease before she died. She may have received the answer we have been searching for-waiting for us back home in Boston!”

Chapter 35

Bengal, India

THE RAIN HAD BEGUN AGAIN. AT THE JAIL IN BENGAL, THIS WAS a particular annoyance for the sentries on their rounds on the roof. On this day, the sentries were Officers Mason and Turner, of the mounted police patrol. As they passed each other, Mason paused to gripe.

“Three days in a row to have guard duty! It's not right, Turner, when you're a mounted man! That superintendent Dickens is a damnable fool!” Mason cried, hanging on to his hat to keep it from blowing away with the wind. “I thought he was a good man, I vow I had, until now.”

Turner stared up at the sky. Though it was the middle of the afternoon, it could have been midnight it was so dark; the flash of lightning, and then a fast peal of thunder shook the rooftop. The storm was as bad as they had seen all season. “There aren't good men in the public service, Mason, I suppose,” he said with a bitter tongue.

“I'm going into the box until it stops. Won't you come?” Mason asked. “Turner, what's that?” Mason was looking at Turner's carbine, with its bayonet fixed. “You know you can't have the bayonet up here. It's in the rules. It can attract lightning.”

Turner screwed his eyes and looked away from Mason. “That damned dacoit is in this jail. The one who stole the opium.”

“So?”

“They blame us for having let him flee in the first place, but he's more dangerous than they know. I'd like to speak with him.”

“We're on duty! Now come on into the box!” Mason shouted to be heard over the sound of the storm.

Before Turner could reach the door down into the prison, it opened and a man stepped out. The crackling light from the sky showed it to be Frank Dickens.

“See here, Mr. Turner,” Frank said. “You will be glad to know we recovered the stolen opium chests from where they had been buried in the ground.”

Turner's eyes showed signs of relief.

“The case is not closed though, I'm afraid,” Frank continued. “You see, in the bungalow of Narain, the thief that leaped from the train window, I found several books-and annotations inside them. Records in the margins, actually, of transactions and bribes to officials, native and European. In another book was a record I have deciphered with great effort, of a recent bargain with you.”

Turner shook his head vigorously. “I don't know what you mean!” Mason, coming back out into the rain from the shelter of the guard box, moved closer and listened.

“You volunteered,” said Frank calmly, “after the opium convoy had been robbed, so that you could see to it that the thieves escaped. However, with Mason at your side, you had no choice but to arrest one of them. You told Narain, when you were alone with him on the train, that if he said your name to anyone in the police, you would kill him. You told him if he wanted a chance at survival, he could jump from the train. He had a one in ten chance to live, I'd say.”

Frank removed a stone from his pocket and placed it in Turner's trembling hand.

Frank went on. “Only the other thief, who goes by the name of Mogul, escaped. He had known nothing of Narain's arrangement with you until after the theft, and that was what their argument was about that detained them at the receiver's house. In fact, Mogul was so fearful of you that after I captured him, it was only when he saw you waiting outside the interrogation room that he confessed to the inspector. It was you that scared him far more than his trial on the chabutra. If you had caught him in the mountains, I have no doubt he would have met the same fate as his accomplice by your hand. I wish to know this. Was it Hurgoolal Maistree who was directing the scheme?”

Turner evaded Frank's glance.

“Ingenious,” said Frank admiringly. “Maistree, the receiver, had instructed the thieves to take only a few of the opium balls from each chest, replacing the others with rocks like this one. This way, if the chests were found, we could consider the case finished and perhaps not even notice the rocks until later examination, when we were occupied with new excitements. Meanwhile, he had paid you to pass along information about when the convoy would be at its most vulnerable, and to ensure that his thieves were not captured. With the total number of opium balls he had received, for which he paid the thieves perhaps less than a third of their value, he would have enough to make a substantial sale to a smuggler, and a big profit for himself.”

“What is this about?” young Mason demanded hoarsely. “Turner, tell Superintendent Dickens he's mistaken!”

By this point in the narrative, Turner's face had hardened and his hand stiffened on his bayonet, as if he would run his superior officer through the chest.

Frank clapped his hands. Two police officers rushed onto the roof from the stairway below. They surrounded Turner.

“He was a darkie dacoit!” Turner shouted, his teeth grinding, his voice hollow.

Frank Dickens nodded. “Yes, he was. This isn't about talking Narain into his jump-good riddance to him. You don't seem to recognize, Mr. Turner, that it is our responsibility to ensure that the opium trade moves freely and safely through Bengal and to China. In contributing to its disruption, you contribute to those who wish the European success around the world to fail. You leave room for smugglers and traders far less reputable than those our government chooses to make partners in these endeavors-harming not only the English, but the natives in India, in China, around the globe. It is Bengal's right to share in the prosperity of civilization.”

Frank bowed with satisfaction, leaving his inferior officer prisoner of the other policemen.

“Damn you!” Turner screamed over a peal of thunder. “Goddamn you and goddamn Charles Dickens for bringing you onto this earth!”

ALONG THE RIVER GANGA, in the region bordering Bengal, was Chandernagore, a territory seized by the French years before. There in a palace sat a solemn Chinese man, called Maistree, in robes that sparkled as did the walls in delicate gold and silver leaf. Indian and Parsee servants brought him food and wine.

One of the members of a Chandernagore criminal family entered and reported that the stolen opium balls had been repacked into sardine boxes and were ready for transport. He salaamed and left Baboo Maistree in peace. Maistree had lost two men, Narain and Mogul, through the course of this theft-Narain leaping to his death and Mogul sentenced to two years’ penal transportation. Plus a mounted policeman had been exposed. It was a large treasure, though, and there were always more men in wait for the next one. It required far more effort by the Bengal police to find one of his agents than it took Maistree to hire ten more.

A tinge of worry might have been seen in a dull gleam in Maistree's eye as he swatted his spoon in his soup like an oar. He had not heard yet from the purchaser-whose name he did not know, for Maistree dealt only with the Parsee headman of the rugged sailors who came to take the disguised opium away. This man, Hormazd, Maistree knew, did not work on his own. He had always been reliable, though. Much of the palace where Maistree now sat had been built with money given by the unknown buyer. And as long as Maistree did not step one foot outside of Chandernagore, the English police in Bengal could not arrest him and the smuggling could continue.

So what could be wrong?

In fact, last time Hormazd had expressed a directive for Maistree to secure even more opium than the season before. Markets were opening, namely the United States. The purchaser wanted as much pure Bengal opium as could be smuggled out immediately, and the receiver should await their message with instructions for when they would pick it up.

Yet here the next shipment was ready. Where was the purchaser?

Chapter 36

McLean Asylum, Boston, late at night

WALKING BRISKLY THROUGH THE CORRIDOR OF THE HOSPITAL, Rebecca Sand had already braced herself for the bleak sights she knew to expect. It was hard, though, to keep that in mind, for the place seemed more like an English country home than a hospital for the insane.

Osgood had not even stopped at his home at Pinckney Street first or to see Mr. Fields at the office-he was too eager and asked to go directly to the McLean Asylum in Somerville.

“Are you certain you would not like to go home, Miss Sand?” Osgood had asked her.

“I am no more tired than you must be, I'm sure, Mr. Osgood. Besides, I don't think you'd be permitted inside the women's wing.”

“Of course,” Osgood said, and then paused wistfully. “I am lucky to have you with me.”

The hospital was separated into its divisions for men and women, all of whom came from circumstances of great wealth and status except for the occasional pauper patient taken in charitably. No person of the opposite sex could enter a wing unless a medical professional. Rebecca could hear women screaming and crying, but others laughing and singing, and she did not know which set of noises most unnerved her soul. All the windows were barred, the walls inside the rooms muffled.

Reaching the privilege room, Rebecca was given a comfortable chair by a stout female attendant with a muslin cap and rosy face. Inside the dimly lit but lavishly furnished room there sat a woman looping a finger through her thinned, graying hair. Much of it had been pulled out, the rest tied on top and dripping with sad, multi colored ribbons. A wide scarf was wrapped around her neck. She did not look up.

The attendant nodded to the visitor for her to begin.

“Mrs. Barton?” Rebecca asked.

Finally, the patient twisted her head in her direction. It was only momentary. She quickly returned attention to the wall.

“Succubus,” said the patient in an embittered register.

“Mrs. Barton, what I have come to ask is quite important. Urgent, in fact. It is about Charles Dickens.”

The patient's eyes slid upward. “They told me he is dead.” Her voice was creaky and whispery, not the vigorous shout it had been in Tom Branagan's encounters with her. Perhaps her injury had changed the range of her voice. As the inmate-or “boarder,” as patients were called here-leaned toward her visitor, she asked, “Is it true?”

“Yes. I am afraid so,” said Rebecca.

Tears filled the patient's eyes. “They won't let me keep any of his books in here, did you know that? These ill-mannered physicians here say it excites me too much. They wouldn't even tell me how he died, my Chief. How did the poor Chief's mortal parts die?”

“We don't want to excite her, miss,” the attendant cautioned before Rebecca could answer.

Rebecca heard in Louisa's voice a promise of something in return, if she could give her something satisfactory. Rebecca tried to recall all the details she could from Georgina Hogarth and Henry Scott and relayed them: Dickens coming in from the chalet after a long day's work, collapsing at dinner, being moved by the servants onto the sofa, the heated bricks at his feet, the doctors coming one by one and shaking their heads hopelessly as the family gathered and stood by him in his final hours.

“Now, as for Mr. Dickens's last book…” Rebecca said after this.

“A New Book of Job by Charles John Huffam Dickens!” Louisa howled out in her old yell. Clearly getting this close to the heart of the matter had put her in a different state of mind. Rebecca decided it was the wrong approach to try to tell her anything about her purpose.

“He whispered,” Rebecca said confidentially. “Mr. Dickens did. The Chief whispered to you the night when you picked him up from the street in that coach, didn't he?”

After Rebecca had repeated the sentiment with slight variation several more times, Louisa nodded and said it was true.

“What was it he said to you?” Rebecca asked carefully.

She was nodding again and then she giggled. This was the satisfied giggle of a rich little girl of Beacon Hill at being given her first puppy. Rebecca, frustrated to her core, was about to shout. But it was not clear the other woman cared a fig about what anyone needed, even herself.

The patient pulled off the silk scarf from around her neck. There was visible a white, almost translucent scar across the neck, deepest on the right end, in the shape of an unfinished smile, which gave Rebecca the urge to run her hand across her own neck to check that it was in one piece. “He was right. He looked like a poem,” Louisa said suddenly.

“Who did?”

“He looked like a poem, can't remember which poem though,” replied Louisa. Suddenly, she seemed to have an Irish accent, eerily like Tom Branagan's. “Too many poets in America today!”

“Tom Branagan. What was Tom right about?” Rebecca asked gently.

“The Chief and that actress,” she muttered. “Nelly. He said the Chief loved her.”

“There have been many slanders about him in the press,” Rebecca said.

Louisa suddenly spoke as though the center of attention at a Beacon Hill dinner. “All well’ means to come. ‘Safe and well’ means not to come. While that nasty old widow was trying steal the Chief away for herself, I took it so nobody else would steal it and print it in one of the profligate papers!”

Rebecca waited for more, shaking her head. “I don't understand.”

“No, you don't! I'm sure you couldn't ever have understood, you're such a nice girl and dim-witted.”

Rebecca, frustrated, looked for help at the attendant, who was sitting patiently. In response, the attendant removed a pair of keys and silently motioned for Rebecca to follow her to a closet door on the other side of the room, away from Mrs. Barton.

“This is where we place the materials that have proven too combustible to her mind, Miss Sand,” said the woman quietly, bending down and pulling out a red calf-leather book, only a few inches tall and wide, that could fit in a small coat pocket. “She claims this was Charles Dickens's diary. Said she had taken it from a trunk in the Westminster Hotel in New York.”

Rebecca held out her hand to the attendant. “It did belong to Dickens, then?”

“We don't know,” the attendant answered. “After all, it's written all in some kind of cipher! This bird would stay up at all hours staring at the page to understand it.”

‘All well’ means to come! ‘Safe and well’ means not to come!” Louisa exclaimed vigorously from the other side of the room.

“What do you mean, Mrs. Barton?” Rebecca asked. When she could not extract any answer, she turned to the attendant and asked if she understood.

“I should think we would, miss! This little bird crowed the same thing every night for two weeks. She claims she found directions to decipher secret language that Charles Dickens would cable to England whether this ‘Nelly’ should come with him to America. If he cabled ‘all well,’ she would come. If ‘safe and well,’ she'd stay in Europe.”

“She didn't!” Louisa interrupted, her hands trembling and her chest heaving at the topic. “She didn't come! You see? The Chief told her safe and well, do not come. He didn't truly love her after all! He had come to finally find his great true love! As his Mr. Redlow would say to me, ‘Your voice and music are the same to me.’ That is why he found me. That is why he read to me all those nights at the Tremont Temple. Why he whispered to me after all those mean men had roped him into hating me!”

Rebecca knew she had to be careful if she wanted Louisa to say more and not exhaust herself to the point of being useless.

“Mr. Dickens-the Chief-wanted you to share with the world the message that he whispered to you the night that other man attacked you.”

Louisa seemed to consider this as she continued her steady nod. Suddenly, she stopped. “Yes, wanted all of it shared. He spoke the truth-he saw the future at last,” she said.

“Yes! What did he say?” Rebecca urged her.

She let out an exhale that seemed to have been stored up for years. “God help you, poor woman.”

Rebecca blinked. “That is what he said to you? That is everything he whispered?” That was all!

“God help you, poor woman!” Louisa repeated more vigorously, and in a voice that had the heft of Dickens's.

“Nothing else? You are certain, Mrs. Barton?”

“And God has. The Chief always spoke the truth. God has helped me!”

God help you, poor woman. Dickens, there to bless the unfortunate! Rebecca, dejected, thinking of all the time they had lost by coming here on her suggestion, signaled the attendant. She could not help lamenting how disappointed Osgood would be in the intelligence she would have to report, yet she also knew she had to tell him right away.

Louisa, her wasting spirits appearing lifted by all the talk of Dickens, did not seem to want the interview to end yet. “You were wrong, dear!” she said when the attendant began to escort Rebecca away. There were tears foaming in Louisa's eyes. “No street! No street!”

Rebecca told the attendant to wait.

“What do you mean, Mrs. Barton?” she asked, turning her attention with a fresh patience back to the boarder.

“You said I took him from the street. But that isn't true, not one whit. That carriage was stopped when I found it. That driver-trying to take the Chief away to who-knows-where!”

Rebecca considered this. They'd always thought Dickens had just hailed a cab to be taken for a late-night drive before returning to the hotel. The fact that the cab was sitting empty suggested that Dickens had hailed the cab with some place-some errand-in mind. Did Dickens have a particular destination the night before he would leave Boston forever? Rebecca was about to ask for more but Louisa was by this time determined to continue on her own.

“It was on North Grove Street,” said Louisa. “When he got back into the carriage, he didn't know I was driving it. Little did he know how our lives were destined to change forever from that point! Can the candle help it, my dear? Can the candle help it?”

“North Grove Street.”

THE WAITING DRIVER opened the carriage door for Rebecca. She climbed in and sat across from Osgood.

“It's the Medical College!” Rebecca cried.

“What-what do you mean? Was that what Mr. Dickens said to that woman?” Osgood asked.

“No, no.” Rebecca explained that Louisa Barton had tricked the driver as he was waiting for Dickens at North Grove Street. “He wasn't merely going out for another of his breathers,” Rebecca said. “He must have instructed the driver to go to the Medical College.”

Osgood thought back to the breakfast conversation between Dickens and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Anything in Boston you haven't yet seen that you'd like, Mr. Dickens? Osgood had asked.

There is one place. I believe it is at your very school, Dr. Holmes. The place where Dr. Webster, whom I met twenty-five years ago, murdered Mr. Parkman in such extraordinary fashion. I would have staked my head upon it even then, that Webster was a cruel man.

“There may be something to find there,” Osgood said to Rebecca. “He had seen it already. Knowing Dr. Holmes, he had probably given Dickens a very thorough examination of it. If he really went back to that dismal place before he left Boston, he must have had a reason.”

“Let us go at once then!” This excited utterance came from the lips of Marcus Wakefield. He sat in the seat next to Osgood.

Osgood turned to him. “Mr. Wakefield, are you certain it is no trouble for us to use your carriage?”

Wakefield shrugged. “Of course! I hired it for the afternoon, and I haven't any pressing business until late. It is a pleasure to be of small assistance to my two American friends. Let me send a runner with a note to my trading associate, and my chariot and my humble self will be at your disposal until you are entirely finished once and for all with your expedition.”

Chapter 37

OSGOOD, HOLDING A LANTERN, TOOK THE STAIRS SLOWLY DOWN into the vault of the medical college, following in the steps that Dickens had taken with Holmes that day in Boston. And steps he'd retraced that night before his assault by Mrs. Barton?

Osgood had left Rebecca in the idling carriage, though she had not wanted to stay.

“Mr. Osgood, please, surely I can help you search for any clues!” she had urged.

“We do not know where Herman is. I cannot in good conscience bring you into a place of potential danger,” said Osgood. “I should not forgive myself if anything happened.”

“I will stay with her, Mr. Osgood,” Wakefield had said, nodding meaningfully and smiling gently. “I will watch her, in case Herman is anywhere near.”

“Thank you, Mr. Wakefield. I shan't be long at all,” Osgood had replied. He had known that he had to fulfill this task, even though it would afford Wakefield the opportunity to confess his love to Rebecca. He had to find out what was inside for the sake of the firm's future, and he had to keep Rebecca safe, even if it all meant that in the process he would lose her affections to Wakefield before he could find a way to prove his own.

The publisher entered the building and reached the bottom of the wooden steps down into the vile-smelling dark vault filled with specimen jars and half-empty shelves. Why-if the lunatic in the asylum was right-had Dickens come back here alone, in the middle of the night, with only hours remaining in his stay in Boston? A line from the first installment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood chanted itself in the publisher's mind: “If I hide my watch when I am drunk,” it said, “I must be drunk again before I can remember where.” Carrying the lantern in one hand, Osgood groped the shelves with his other. He searched the old demonstration table and the holes in the wall, felt behind spouts and sinks. He reached the furnace, from which the dreadful stink that filled the room emerged. It was where chunks of Parkman's body had once burned. Osgood hesitated and chased the thoughts inside his head. This would be the perfect spot-the one place in Boston left behind, left untouched, while everything around it changed. Nobody wanted to remember such a hideous death. Boston left it a skeleton in our giant cabinet.

Steadily, Osgood reached inside the furnace. His fingers traced the ashen, chemical-laden surface. It felt like pushing a hand through a storm cloud-leaden and empty at once. Then he brushed up against something solid, something that felt like the wrinkled skin of a dying man. Slowly, careful not to lose his grip, he pulled out a cracked calf-leather case.

He opened it. Inside was a stack of pages.

Osgood couldn't believe his eyes. He recognized Dickens's hand in iron gall ink at once. He was frozen in place holding his treasure. The feeling was so enormous that for a moment he couldn't bring himself to perform the most natural action known to him since childhood-to read. He could not do anything else but sit there on the cold stone floor from some irrational fear the pages would vanish before his eyes once he looked at them. It was not only the triumphant relief of bringing his quest to a successful conclusion. It was his whole future that he felt at the tips of his fingers. It was Fields, Osgood & Co. in his hands; it was all the men and women who relied on him. It was Rebecca.

And it was as though he had, for a few more seconds, kept Charles Dickens alive. The moment was invigorating. He thought of Frederick Leypoldt's question to him about being a publisher. “Why are we not blacksmiths or politicians?” Here, here is why, Leypoldt. The truest act of the publisher was one of the discovery of what nobody else was looking for, one that would reawaken imaginations, ambitions, emotions. All of a sudden, he could not wait a second longer to know how Edwin Drood would turn out. Here, right here, all the answers in his hand! Dead or alive? Taken or in hiding? He turned up the light and shined it over the pages and began to examine them, struggling to see through the dust and thick darkness. But the brighter light of the lantern nearly blinded his darkness-adjusted eyes.

“Well, you've done it then!” Wakefield interrupted, appearing at the top of the stairs, carefully stepping down into the vault. He was covered by the darkness of the vault, and his usually friendly, airy mood seemed completely buried in the gloom. “Have you found any-thing yet, Mr. Osgood?”

Osgood stood up.

“But why here? Why would he leave it here, Mr. Osgood?” Wake-field asked.

“He was scared to lose it,” Osgood answered.

“Scared?”

“Yes, he was scared, don't you see? Think of it. Dickens was about to leave Boston forever the next morning. Every time he boarded a train, a ship, even a hackney, he grew cold with fear since the accident in Staplehurst where he almost perished. The passage back to England on the Russia, Dickens knew could be a dangerous voyage halfway across the world on the roughest waters in the ocean. Indeed, he would not forget that at the time of the dreadful train accident in Staplehurst, he had been composing Our Mutual Friend, the book before The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and had its latest pages with him. The newest installment of it was still in the train compartment that he escaped, and he risked his life to climb back inside to retrieve it.”

“That was daring.”

Osgood nodded. “That is not the only thing that would have been on his mind, though. There had been the woman Mrs. Barton, who had broken into the hotel room-leaving behind a note demanding to speak to Dickens about his next book. There had been his pocket diary, stolen by her. There were the tax agents threatening to do whatever they had to in order to retrieve the money he was owed-to confiscate tickets or his personal belongings and documents. Dickens knew that if he boarded the ship with this in hand, he might never see it again. Moreover, back in England, he knew when he would begin publishing his mystery, there would be fierce demand to know how it was to turn out. A servant he had once trusted had broken into his locked safe at his office while he was away. There were dangers for Dickens, yes, for this manuscript, waiting everywhere. This spot, this dingy lonely place, may have been the only safe place on earth for these pages. They would reside here undisturbed until he was ready to call for them to be retrieved-which he would do when he finished the first half. But when he died suddenly, it was too late for him to communicate it.”

Wakefield applauded.

Osgood thought about Rebecca. He wished he had agreed to her coming along into the building so she could be beside him to share this moment. Then he realized.

“Where's Miss Sand, Mr. Wakefield?”

“Oh, don't worry, Mr. Osgood! I have my colleague watching Rebecca.”

Osgood nodded gratefully, though tilting his head at the informality of his patron's use of her Christian name. It meant one thing-she had accepted his declaration of love. Despite the heartache of thinking about this, Osgood still wished she were with him. This was an accomplishment by her every bit as much as by him-by her and for her. For all she endured with Daniel.

Osgood realized those words passing through his thoughts were not his own words. All she endured with her brother, Daniel. Awful, senseless tragedy. That had been Wakefield's phrase, in their conversation on board the ship saloon. A question entered Osgood's mind, for that moment pushing out the astonishing document he held in his hands and the gloomy cellar where he stood: How had Wakefield known about Daniel? Had Rebecca become that intimate with him to tell him? Osgood could not decide whether it was protectiveness, or jealousy, or suspicion of Wakefield that suddenly took hold of him.

“Remarkable, Mr. Osgood!” Wakefield was saying, laughing as though they had reached the climax in a riotous joke. “And, lo, you've found these before anyone!”

A scene entered Osgood's mind from his first journey on the Samaria. Wakefield becoming his friend immediately. A rush of ideas, of facts. Wakefield had not just been on their steamer to London and back. Wakefield had followed them to London and back-just as Herman did. He and Herman had been in Boston at the same time, on the ship at the same time, and in London at the same time. Wakefield rushed to the police station after Herman's attack on him at the opium rooms.

“I think I should find Miss Sand now,” Osgood said quietly.

“Certainly, certainly,” Wakefield said.

“Will you be kind enough to stand guard over this for a moment?” Osgood asked, gesturing at the calf-leather case.

“I am your humble servant, sir,” Wakefield said. Just as Osgood had hurried halfway up the stairs, Wakefield added, “Oh, but hold on. I have a gift for you I brought from London! In all the excitement, I nearly forgot! To repay you for all the books aboard our passages.”

“That is generous,” Osgood murmured, judging in a sidelong glance the number of stairs remaining to the door.

“Watch out!” Wakefield called.

He tossed the heavy object through the air. Osgood caught it to his chest with one hand. Unwrapping the paper, he bathed the lumpy object in the light of the flaring lantern. It was a yellow plaster statue that had once been listed for auction under the title Turk Seated Smoking Opium. The statue from the home of Charles Dickens.

“You said,” Osgood commented offhandedly, “that the auction house had broken this.”

“Think of it as a farewell gift, of sorts, Mr. Osgood. Oh, and why should I guard a calf-leather case that I'd bet my best pair of kid gloves is empty? You did switch the pages into your own satchel already, didn't you?”

The loud echo of Wakefield snapping his fingers rang through the grim chamber. Two Chinese men appeared at the top of the stairs. One of the men scratched the back of his neck with his fingernail. Only it was no ordinary finger. The nail of the little finger on the left hand was between seven and eight inches long and perfectly clean and sharp, an appendage uniquely cultivated by the Chinese scharf for use in testing the counterfeit or genuine nature of specie used to pay for opium.

Rebecca, trembling, also appeared at the top of the stairs. Behind her, the silvery reflection of Osgood's lantern illuminated the jutting fangs of a Kylin's head.

OSGOOD BACKED DOWN the stairs to the bottom, where Rebecca joined him for protection. Wakefield joined Herman on the landing above them. Herman bowed his head at Wakefield, putting both hands on his forehead.

“I told you, Mr. Osgood,” pointed out Wakefield, “that Miss Sand was being carefully watched.”

“You arranged for Herman to assault me on the Samaria and for you to be the hero in the encounter, to ensure that I would trust and rely on you,” Osgood said. “You have been partners with him the whole time. You attempted to win Miss Sand's affections so that she would reveal to you our plans.”

“You are awarded the premium! You know, you have an earnest habit of thinking the world around you is as well meaning as you are, my friend,” Wakefield replied. “I admire that. Let us go somewhere more comfortable than this.”

“We shall go nowhere with you,” Osgood said. “You're no tea merchant, Mr. Wakefield.” As he spoke, Osgood casually slipped the Turkish statue into his satchel, and felt the increased weight of the bag on his shoulder.

“Oh, I am,” came the reply from Wakefield with a muted laugh shared by Herman. “Though not tea alone, of course. Tea, quite often, is how our friends in China pay for their opium shipments. Don't you see the larger picture yet, Mr. Osgood? No, you were always paying too close attention to sentences to understand the books-it has kept you insulated, worried over words that make no difference in the end, because the machinery of more powerful men overcome you. When I was a boy, I was sent away from home. I found refuge with a relative, but I gained a restless spirit that has never abandoned me.”

As Wakefield spoke, Osgood swung his satchel hard, striking the businessman in the leg. He did not flinch. There was a metallic clang and the statue shattered to pieces in the bag.

Osgood and Rebecca exchanged a startled glance. Wakefield lifted his trousers and revealed a mechanism on his foot consisting of straps, joints, and cogwheels.

“My God!” Osgood blurted out. “Edward Trood!”

HERMAN TOOK two menacing steps closer to him.

Wakefield waved his Parsee protector away and, standing erect, glared at Osgood. He spoke in sharp bursts of Chinese to the two scharfs, who nodded and left the building. Then he turned back to Osgood.

“No, Mr. Osgood, I am not he. That was my name once, yes-I was cowering little Eddie Trood with the club foot when I was sent away from Rochester by the cruel despotism of my father. But that part of me is dead, and so is Eddie Trood. I began to erase him when I escaped through opium ecstasies in the home of my uncle. But my body soon rebelled against it, placing me either in the agony of its power when I swallowed it, or in the depth of misery when I attempted to abstain from it. A physician advised me on the use of a syringe, a method that spread a greater sense of relaxation and deadening of the senses but did nothing to reduce my inner demand for it. It was a stimulation without satisfaction.

“Opium was an armor that kept me safe from the outside world but crushed my bones in the process. I was told that a sea voyage was the only way to force myself out of its control. After I sailed to China I was no longer enslaved. A new truth had come to me. An understanding of the unavoidable power of the drug-the need to oversee its arrangements not through the doctor or druggist but in the shadows and the cover of night. It was in Canton that a doctor fitted my foot with this. It corrected the position of deformity so that there is no noticeable deficiency in my step even under close scrutiny. That was when I knew I was ready to return to England a new man.”

Osgood's mind raced and his comprehension of their situation jumped three or four moves ahead. “Then Herman never tried to kill Eddie Trood-you-for knowing the secrets of his drug enterprise?”

“My drug enterprise, Mr. Osgood,” Wakefield said, smiling. “Herman has served as my agent ever since I helped him escape from the Chinese pirates. You see, in my travels, I determined that a smuggler, in order to survive long enough to prosper, would have to be an invisible man. On that basis, I started a new life when I came back, a life as Marcus Wakefield. Herman and Imam, our Turkish comrade, assisted in my scheme, but they were carpenters in its execution, and I, the lone architect. There was a young man who had at the time recently suffered the effects of an overdose of bad opium and died. We dressed the lad in some of my old clothes and Herman took a crowbar to the head so the body would not be recognized. One weekend, when my uncle was in the country, I went into hiding, while my collaborators tore down a wall in his home and hid the body of our false Edward Trood there.”

“Machiavellian to the last degree,” Osgood said, surmising his larger purpose. “Then Marcus Wakefield would be feared.”

“Well, yes, precisely, only not Wakefield exactly. I used that alias in my ordinary course of business. As an opium merchant, I have used as many names in as many places as would suit my purposes: Copeland, Hewes, Simonds, Tauka. But nobody would ever meet the keeper of any of the names. They would hear stories-legends of his remarkable and terrible deeds, stories of the dead, starting with Eddie Trood who had tried to infiltrate his opium lines. Otherwise, there was invisibility, and men like Herman and Imam served as my hands and feet out in the world.

“So, too, did my means of transport have to achieve invisibility. Though there were not many countries like China willing to fight wars to prevent the import of opium to its people, there are many governments, like your own, gleeful to extract tariffs and hold inspections on incoming supplies of the narcotics. My organization secured ownership of a line of steamships, the Samaria being the fastest, and specially fitted them not only so they could be converted to warships but with ample hidden storage space. Since ours is a passenger steamer, the customs officials would examine the luggage being brought on shore. But in the dark of the night, my crew would bring out the chests of opium, disguised in cheap vases or sardine boxes to deliver to the enterprising scoundrels in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. They would supply them to eager customers unable or unwilling to purchase their opium from doctors and pharmacists, who have in the last years been forced to record the names of every purchaser of ‘poisons.’”

“Why Daniel?” Rebecca asked, shocked and overwhelmed by the betrayal. “Why harm my little brother?”

Wakefield looked disapprovingly at Herman. “I'm afraid, my dear girl, that his death was incidental to our purpose. After Dickens died, Herman had found an urgent telegram from Fields and Osgood at the office of Dickens's executor requesting all that remained of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. We set out for Boston immediately to intercept the shipment, and bribing a willing employee of yours named Mr. Midges, it was discovered that Daniel Sand had been assigned the task of receiving the latest installments of any novels coming from England.”

They learned further from Midges-who was disgruntled at rumors of Daniel's having been a drunkard and even more disgruntled that women were taking too many positions at the firm-that Daniel was to be waiting at the harbor early in the morning for more pages of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The ship from England was already docked. But by the time Herman detained the young man in the too-heavy suit, Daniel had suspected he was being followed and had nothing in the canvas sack hung from his shoulder. And to their astonishment, he would take no money in exchange for telling them where he had hidden the pages.

“No, sir,” Daniel had said. “I am very sorry, I cannot.” They had led him into the second story of a warehouse on Long Wharf where they stored smuggled opium.

Wakefield had put a hand on the young clerk's shoulder. “Young man, we know you've had some troubles in the past with certain intoxicating agents. We surely wouldn't want your employer, who trusts you with such important errands, to know about that. We're not some cheap reprinters looking to steal copy. We just need to see what's in those Dickens pages, and then we'll give them back.”

Daniel had hesitated, studying his interrogators, then shook his head vigorously. “No, sir! I must not!” He was repeating, “It's Os-good's! It's Osgood's!”

Herman lunged forward, but Wakefield signaled him to stop.

“Now, think carefully, my dear lad,” Wakefield had urged, the friendly expression on his face flagging, and a fog of violence replacing it. “How disappointed Fields, Osgood and Company would be after putting their faith in you to find out who you really are beneath that youthful and charming face. An inveterate drunkard.”

“Mr. Osgood would be disappointed if I didn't do my job I'm paid for,” the boy had said bullheadedly. “I would rather account for my history to Mr. Osgood myself than to fail his instructions.”

Wakefield's full smile returned, almost breaking into a warm laugh, before he gave the slightest flick of his hand.

Herman tore open the clerk's shirt and cut shallow, straight slits into his chest with the Kylin cane's shimmering fangs. Daniel winced but did not cry. As the blood dripped, Herman let it fall into a cup and then drank it down in front of Daniel with a rising grin until his lips were bright. Daniel, recovering from the pain, shook hard but tried staring straight ahead.

“For God's sake,” Wakefield had said. He cracked Daniel over the head with a bludgeon. Daniel crumpled to the floor.

“Can't you see,” Wakefield had explained to Herman, “you could beat this boy until his head rolls off and scare him until his hair stands up on its ends and he wouldn't say a word this Osgood hadn't authorized? He is a lesson in loyalty, Herman.”

At this, Herman grunted irritably.

Wakefield instructed Herman to inject the lad with opium and re-lease him onto the wharf. If Wakefield's instinct was right, in his confused state the boy would go to retrieve the pages wherever they were hidden. But his senses would be impaired enough to allow Herman to easily overtake him; and, to make the affair even cleaner, if the boy reported the theft to the police they wouldn't listen because he'd be stuck in the aura of the drug.

But Daniel, upon retrieving the bundle from a stray barrel, lost Herman in the crowded piers of the wharf and the commotion of the waterfront. When Herman grabbed him at Dock Square, Daniel pulled away and was struck by the omnibus. There were too many people around for Herman to get the papers. But Wakefield joined the circle of observers around Daniel's body and heard the name of Sylvanus Bendall, the lawyer who would greedily confiscate the pages.

“YOU WERE THERE,” said Osgood to Wakefield with an unexpected tinge of envy. “You were there when poor Daniel died.”

“No,” Rebecca whispered, horrified by the thought and the new vividness of her brother's final moments.

Wakefield nodded. “Yes, I was among the many curious spectators as he expired. The poor boy still called your name, Osgood. By the time Herman retrieved the pages from Bendall-the two-penny lawyer carried them around with him on his person, leaving us little choice how to serve him-we learned even those later installments of the serial, the fourth, fifth, and sixth, had no reliable clues to the ending of the book. We were about to return to England. Then our stool pigeon in your firm told us that you were going to sail to Gadshill to find the end of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Why do you think it was so easy for Mr. Fields to get you passage at the last minute, my dear Osgood, when he decided to send you? The Samaria was the only liner with any room left-because I made certain of it. Because the Samaria and all its crew all belong to me.”

“When Herman disappeared in the middle of the ocean, where had you hidden him? The captain, the stewards, the ship detective all looked for him,” Osgood said.

“They work for me. Me, me, Osgood. Herman no more disappeared in the middle of the ocean than you did. It didn't occur to us that you'd pay a visit without escort days after the charade of locking him up. He was safely stored away in our secret rooms below the captain's quarters as he was on the passage back to Boston we've just completed. But by that point you trusted me, dare I say, with your life. As well you should have. Herman protected you in London from the opium fiends when those fools attacked you for your purse and left you where you were sure to be given help. He saved you.”

“So I could live long enough to find what you were after.”

Wakefield nodded. “In the meantime, my entire business began to suffer-payments gone unmade, opium managers avoiding my suppliers. Why do you think those opium fiends salivated at the sight of you? They'd kill any stranger for a shilling. The whole field of opium dealers had become dry as they all read The Mystery of Edwin Drood in its serial parts along with the rest of the world.”

“But why?” Osgood asked.

“Because my trade had very quickly recognized in Dickens's words what you've unearthed, the story of Edward Trood, and saw in those hints of Drood's survival a looming danger to our enterprise. Nor could we afford any further attention on the ‘murderers’ of Trood- that is why Herman stole the statue from the auction house. That Turk, in the statue, you see, was done by some interfering artist of the real man, Imam, one of the opium pushers who helped conceal ‘my’ body. We didn't need Imam's face on display at the biggest auction to be held at Christie's in the last hundred years! This attention to everything related to Dickens's final days and book was all nothing less than disaster!”

“If people believed Trood was alive,” said Rebecca, “your organization could collapse, be overtaken by doubts, because of your lie that started it. People began to believe that the supposedly murdered Trood was alive and knew your secrets.”

Wakefield waved his hand in the air. “You see, Mr. Osgood, your bookkeeper is a natural woman of business. Yes, it's true. If it was believed that Eddie Trood had not died, it meant he could be out there somewhere waiting to use his knowledge to bring us down. Yet that is not all that has haunted me since Dickens picked up his pen to retell my story. After the case of Webster and Parkman of your city became famous, the methods it also made famous spread. The skeleton of Parkman was identified by his teeth. Since then, death does not bring an end to all things. And if the police were to hear the tales that Trood might be alive and decide to dig up the grave of Edward Trood? Would they determine it was not Trood, and then what? If that was not Trood lying beneath the earth, where was he? You can imagine the entertainment Scotland Yard would have with that question. You can imagine how free I would be to move about London-my old self suddenly resurrected! Arthur Grunwald convinced the Surrey to perform just such an ending in their production of Mr. Dickens's book, so Herman burned it down early on the morning of our departure. A shame, though, that Grunwald had to be in the green room, I did enjoy him as Hamlet at the Princess. You see, even Herman and myself are not always perfect.

“Of course, I read Tom Branagan's wire when we made port at Queenstown. The captain directed it toward me upon my instructions before you saw it. What a dear soul your Constable Tom is, to find proof that the letter to Forster was Grunwald's forgery. That letter would have been a great interference to us.”

“These six installments,” Osgood said, gripping the satchel with the remainder of Dickens's novel tightly. “That's all you want, then, to destroy these?” Osgood folded his satchel into his chest.

Wakefield laughed. “If only there were happy music,” he mused suddenly. “Yes, that would put all our minds at ease. What do you say, Ironhead Herman?” Wakefield extended his hand and Herman took it, being swept around the room, dancing a brisk waltz around Osgood and Rebecca. “Are we graceful enough for you, Osgood?” Wakefield asked, laughing and bowing.

It was a chilling scene to watch the two killers waltz across the warehouse. Strangest in the tableau was this: Ironhead Herman was ready to look like a fool on command of Wakefield. If Herman were a killer who respected only brutality and force, what were the depths of Wakefield's own brutality to have that kind of hold over him? The meaning of it sunk into Osgood. The dance, step by step, made one thing clear as noontime. They would die there.

“Please, for mercy's sake, let Miss Sand go free,” Osgood said prayerfully.

Wakefield examined his captives, saying, “I am not the terrible man you must now imagine. My curse in life is to have the vision others do not. I can understand what your government and mine still cannot. People are beginning to make a devil out of opium and opium use; in their minds the opium eater is as unreal and unwanted as a human vampire. They have protested the morality of the trade with China. Before long the Americans and the English will hold opium accountable for all their own faults and pass more rules and regulations. China has finally surrendered their will against the drug and will grow the poppy themselves to feed their people's appetite. Besides, with the opening of the Suez Canal, every damned little parleyvou with a tugboat can get to China without any skills or knowledge of trading: the coasts will be positively overrun. It is your own people who clamor for supply, with scores of soldiers-Yankee and Rebel alike-returned to their homes under the spell of injury and the need for relief and ignored by a society that has moved on with commerce and progress while those brave souls wither. Now with the hypodermic, any man or woman who wishes will provide themselves with the medication and enjoyment they can no longer find in the devouring cities without artificial assistance. America is the land of experimentation-a new religion, a new medicine, a new invention-if there is something to transform, Americans will throw away all constraints with the freedom of self-indulgence. Alcohol makes man into beast, but opium makes him divine. The syringe will replace the flask and be an unfailing remedy in the pocket of the businessman, the bookkeeper, the mother, the teacher, and the lawyer who suffer the curse of modern cares. What do you think of it, Osgood? Oh, I know your trade is books, but it all comes down to this: to know your customers, to know how they wish to make their escapes from this bleak world, and to make sure they can't live without you. The modern brain will wither without finding a way to join excitement and numbness. We have sought the same thing through Dickens, you and I, to protect ourselves and the people we depend on. No, I seek nobody's death.”

“Daniel Sand depended on me,” Osgood said, “and I could not protect him.”

“But I could have,” Wakefield said, “if he had not been so set on your approval.” He turned solicitously to Rebecca. “My dear girl, I'm afraid you've gained too much intelligence today to live freely without causing me some degree of future consternation. You have fascinated me from the moment I saw you. We have both been made invisible by unjust forces. Damn the rules of your divorce, damn the little position Osgood has thrown at you for half pay, the peasant laborer he made your brother into: come with me back to England, you will have all you ever ask for, all you deserve. That is why I have unfolded every-thing for you now. I'd want you to understand all the reasons for what has happened, so that you could consider my offer honestly once and for all within your heart.”

Rebecca looked up from where she sat, first at Osgood, then at Wakefield. “You killed Daniel! You are nothing but a scoundrel and a liar! A woman could have loved Eddie Trood, with all his faults in the face of a hard world, but never a fraud like you!”

Wakefield's face turned red before his hand went flying out across her face. To his apparent surprise, she did not cry when he struck her. “I shall not give you the satisfaction, Mr. Trood,” she said bitterly, seeing in his raging eyes his anticipation. “I'll weep for my brother, not for anything you could do to me.”

“Ungrateful female,” Wakefield said, turning away from her and replacing his hat on his head. “You have done fine in training her in your species of high-handed failure, Mr. Osgood. Very well. You have made your bed, Rebecca; now you may both lie in it.”

Wakefield turned his back to them.

“Your father!” Osgood said.

Wakefield slowed his steps.

“Your father misses you, Edward,” Osgood continued.

Wakefield sighed longingly. Then, as he turned around again he laughed, harshly this time.

“Thank you. I shall have to see to it that my old man never tells another soul my story who may pick up on the clues as you have done. We'll be paying him a visit back in England, be sure, and Jack Chinaman, and your friend Branagan, too.”

Wakefield disappeared up the stairway

Herman stood grinning toothlessly and raised his walking stick. He swung it at Osgood's satchel, scattering the floor with the pages of the final six installments of Edwin Drood.

Chapter 38

PLEASE, HORMAZD, WE CAN WORK OUT A BARGAIN,” SAID OS-good pleadingly to Herman.

“This isn't a Jews’ marketplace,” replied Herman, momentarily pausing at his given name. “No bargains.” He seemed to contemplate the beastly animal head on his walking stick for a moment. Then he glowered at his prisoners. “The only thing I'd regret, Osgood, is that Mr. Wakefield insisted on trying to persuade her to come with us. Waiting makes me angry. I may even finish you off with my bare hands.”

“Why have you despised me?” Osgood demanded.

“Because, Os good, you think you can be friends with everybody by flashing your smile. You think everybody can be like you.” Herman's answer flew out of his mouth like a confession, showing his real mind more than he intended.

“It's Mr. Wakefield who has made you who you are, Herman!” Rebecca said persuasively. “He made you into a pirate.”

“I was born one, lassie.”

A torrent of footsteps on the stairs. When Herman turned to look over his shoulder for Wakefield, his smug smile dropped away. Osgood recognized a look of confusion in the face of his captor. In a flash, Osgood lunged at him, throwing himself onto Herman's back and putting his arm around his eyes to blind him. Herman growled out and pried Osgood's fingers with his iron grip. Osgood landed on his feet and put up his fists in a boxing pose. Just then, a club slammed against the back of Herman's turbaned head.

Behind Herman, gripping the hook and bill club, stood the man Osgood once knew as Dick Datchery: Jack Rogers.

There was a sickening sound as the club resounded against Herman's skull. But Herman didn't budge, blinking meditatively.

“Ironhead Herman,” Osgood whispered.

“Ironhead?” Rogers repeated in a worried tone.

Herman revolved around slowly to face Rogers, readying his walking stick. Realizing the man was still unhurt, Rogers thrust the spike at the tip of the club into Herman's sternum. This stunned Herman. He dropped his cane and fell to the floor on his knees. With a shout, Rogers swung the club again as hard as he could against Herman's head. It smashed into splinters and sent the hook and spike flying across the room in bits. Herman dropped onto all fours and, drained of strength, blinded by his own blood, he collapsed flat on top of his walking stick.

“Rogers!” Osgood cried, looking from Herman to the former Harper's policeman. “How did you know…?”

“I told you I would repay my debt to you, good Ripley,” said Rogers, breathing heavily. “I'm a man of my word.”

Osgood threw himself on the floor and began to gather the scattered pages of Drood.

“No time, Ripley! There's no time for any of that!” Rogers called out. “Where's Wakefield?”

“He's already gone-probably back to his ship,” Osgood said.

“Come along!”

Securing his treasure in his satchel, Osgood hesitated to take the hand Rogers held out to him.

Rogers seemed prepared for this. “Because it was my duty, I deceived you in England when my conscience told me otherwise. Now my duty is to follow my conscience above all else. You must trust me- your lives depend on it.”

Osgood nodded and stepped over the motionless Herman on the way to the door. Rebecca paused for a moment, tears in her eyes. She looked down at the man on the floor and she brought her heel down onto his back again and again.

“Rebecca!” Osgood took her in his arms. “Come along!”

Osgood's embrace returned her to the present situation and its dangers. She felt more grounded at once with his touch.

Rogers spoke rapidly as they made their way up the stairs. “Ripley, there is great danger about Wakefield-he makes frequent trips between Boston, New York, and England, but I believe the only tea he trades is in his own cup.”

“What did you find out?” Osgood asked.

“By following his men I have located a mountain of evidence, which we must take to the police, of a string of attacks and murders perpetrated by his agents to protect his enterprise.”

“Dickens's words were the only thing that he thought could bring him down,” Osgood said.

“He was right,” Rogers corrected him. “Now we shall do it. Thank heavens I found you in time, Ripley. Stand here with Miss Rebecca.”

As they reached the top of the stairs, Rogers motioned for Osgood and Rebecca to wait. He looked outside for any sign of Wakefield. Determining the way was clear, he waved them to advance. His hired carriage idled across the street in case anyone from Wakefield's gangs of hirelings had watch on the building. The way appearing clear, Rogers signaled for the rescued pair to get into the carriage. As Rogers and Osgood helped lift Rebecca into the carriage, there was a grunting sound from behind them and a shiny object gliding through the air. It was a furiously reappearing Herman, standing at the door to the building, his arm completing the arc of a throwing motion.

Rogers looked up just as the bowie knife pierced his neck. His body plummeted from the steps of the carriage onto the pavement. Rebecca tripped on the bottom of her dress and nearly tumbled down to the street.

“Rogers!” Osgood cried. He kneeled by his rescuer's side, but the man had bled to death in an instant. “No! Rogers!”

The driver cursed and took up his reins and threw back his whip.

Rebecca's ankle had twisted but she still hung on to the handle of the coach. Osgood pushed her back onto the steps and she pulled herself into the carriage just as the horses started into a trot, spinning Osgood away.

“No-Mr. Osgood!” Rebecca cried out, reaching out her hand.

Osgood shouted to the driver to go as fast as he could as the dust and gravel swirled around him in its wake. Herman would only be able to pursue one of them, and it was Osgood who had the satchel with the manuscript. At least Rebecca would be safe.

Osgood ran up Washington Street, grabbing his bandaged ribs as he went, while trying to ease his painful breathing. The Parsee was going to kill him and nothing would stop him; he would demolish anything in his path to do it. Osgood broke into a run with Herman on his heels.

Ahead was the Sears Building, which Osgood knew well as it was the location of his bank. Outside the front door, there was a janitor with a ring of keys locking the front door of the building. Osgood hoped he could make Herman lose his trail inside and escape. He pushed past the janitor and into the building.

Osgood had reached the other side of the main corridor where he could see another door to the street. Pray the janitor hadn't yet locked it! As Osgood moved closer, the door shook and slowly opened-to reveal the silhouette of a roguish figure with an uncombed beard and a cocked hat. Another opium pusher from the Samaria sent for by Wakefield? Osgood halted in midstep.

Echoes of Herman's running footsteps seemed everywhere, above, below, on every side. Osgood turned one way, then the other, not knowing which corridor to choose. Instead, he rushed to the center of the hall and pulled open the door to the elevator. Then Osgood realized: no elevator operator, not at this hour! The boys didn't sleep in these little rooms, however cushioned and decorated they were. He had been inside many times in the course of everyday business to be carried up to his bank on the seventh floor. Would he remember how he had seen the lads do it?

HIS HEAD TILTED to the side at the sound. The mounting whir of steam pumping; the loud clank clank of chains and metal. Herman slid to a stop in the hall. He surveyed his surroundings: stairs on either side of the building. He ran toward the far end, following the whistling sound of the steam rising up above him.

OSGOOD QUICKLY FORMED his plan. He would stop the elevator on a floor midway up the building, hurry out of the elevator and down the stairs, exiting the building while Herman was still searching inside.

The Sears elevator was what they called a moving parlor. The car had a domed ceiling with skylights and a chandelier elegantly suspended from it. The gas apparatus connected to the chandelier was concealed by a lightweight tube. The rest of the car could have been the corner of a Beacon Hill parlor. Underfoot was thick carpeting, and sofas lined each of the three sides of the car. Atop the French walnut paneling, gilded on its perimeter, were large polished mirrors.

The levers didn't look easy to operate and in actuality they were even more difficult than they appeared-Osgood manipulated them into a jerking, halting movement that immediately made him regret his plan. Stopping it was even harder, but Osgood managed to make the machine halt close enough to the fourth floor.

Osgood climbed out of the elevator and dashed to the stairway, where he began to descend before hearing footsteps rising up toward him. It was him! Osgood turned and tried to exit back to the fourth floor but he had lost ground, and Herman was close to grabbing his ankle. The publisher created enough distance to exit on the sixth floor instead. Heaving for breath, Osgood scrambled to the elevator door and pulled the platform lever to call for it from four. Blast that slow steam pump! Please, faster… The elevator arrived and Osgood threw himself bodily inside, smashing his torso hard against the floor.

As the door swung closed, Herman was bearing down on him. Extending his walking stick-the door slammed on it. Osgood, for a long second, found himself eye to eye with the golden face of the Kylin, the lusty horn bursting from its head and its empty onyx eyes. It had been so demonic and chilling. Closer up it lost its power. It seemed a silly gold trinket. Osgood yanked the cane with all his strength by the Kylin's prickly neck. He fell back in the car with it in his hands and the door shut. Osgood kicked at the lever with the toe of his shoe and started the car down.

Osgood hoped he would be far enough ahead (thirty seconds?) of the mercenary that he could get out of the building. But as he listened to the whirring steam below, he thought of the brave Jack Rogers, of foolish Sylvanus Bendall; he thought of poor Daniel on the coroner's cold table; he thought of Yahee's haunting terror; he thought of Wake -field's coldness as he had danced the waltz, of the threats to silence William Trood and Tom; and he thought, too, of Rebecca. Then he knew, without the slightest doubt, that he could not simply run from the building and leave Herman free to find them again. For a moment, Osgood was astonished by his own determination. Herman had to be stopped. He had to be stopped once and for all here.

Osgood passed the first floor. His skills with the lever having improved every moment, he softly brought the car to a stop in the basement. He stepped away from the car to the adjoining engine room where it was controlled and kicked hard without result at the steam pipe that powered the elevator. Then he took the walking stick and pounded it again and again until the valve dented and then broke-the walking stick cracked, decapitating the monstrous golden visage. Osgood returned to the elevator and crouched, waiting, his eyes on the stairwell, his breathing labored and shooting around his fractured ribs, where the dressings underneath his shirt had loosened and ripped and made him feel as though his body would crack in half at any moment. As Herman appeared at the basement door and hurled himself forward, Osgood pulled the door shut and adroitly shot the elevator up at the most reckless speed.

As the car launched into the air, a geyser of steam shot out of the broken engine and sprayed into the charging figure of Herman. Blinded, dazed, the mercenary shrieked and fumbled around in a circle, stumbling into the shaft.

Up above, Osgood panicked. The elevator car was swaying and groaning, its steam power compromised. He abruptly stopped it at the fifth floor, not quite even with the platform, but he tumbled out anyway, grunting in pain as he made contact with the wood floor. Just then, the chains unraveled and the empty car rushed down as though in a dead faint. Herman, curled up in a stupor in the shaft and trying to crawl away from the burning steam, looked above him just long enough to see the car before it smashed onto him. The force was so great that the hulking form of the mercenary's body broke through the floor of the elevator car, as the chandelier and the skylights shook free and rained a thousand shards into him.

BOTH DIZZY AND profoundly awake, Osgood rose to his feet, looking down the elevator's shaft. An explosion left a layer of flames at the bottom. He was tucking away his satchel, when he was grabbed by the shoulders.

“No!” Osgood screamed.

“Halloa! Are you well, man?”

It was the scraggly, messy-bearded man Osgood had seen at the bottom of the building, the beard now apparent as a rusted red color.

“You looked to be under some distress at the door,” the man continued, his hands groping at Osgood's shoulders, arms, and around the satchel as though to check for wounds.

“I must send for the police,” Osgood said. “There's a man injured down there-”

“Already done!” the man with the overgrown beard cried. “Already sent for, my dear man. Though not much of that fellow down there is left, by the looks of it. Elevators! Why, I won't get in one myself, not with those demonstrations at the fairs killing one or two passengers at a time, and on a good day. They should be abolished, says I. Now, how can I help you? I have a wagon out front. Where can I take you?”

Was the rust-colored bearded man another janitor? Then the publisher realized: This stranger matched the description of Molasses, he of the rainbow-colored beard who operated among the notorious Bookaneers and claimed the fame of having secured Thackery's The Adventures of Philip before the world.

“Hand it here,” said Molasses, a change passing over his face as he caught the glint of Osgood's recognition. “Don't know what you have there exactly, but the Major would probably pay triple for whatever it is. And you're in no shape for a tussle, not tonight.”

Little does he know what Harper would pay! thought Osgood. He knew there were no police coming, at least not by this man's doing.

There was a moan from far below them. Another explosion came from the engine room, and the flames shot another floor higher. Osgood realized from the dampness of his flesh that the heat was closer. Soon the gas line that had lighted the elevator car would burst open and the whole place and everything inside it would be roasted.

As Osgood backed away toward the elevator shaft, he noticed Molasses's face suddenly turn fearful. The literary pirate's hands raised slowly. Osgood whirled around and saw Wakefield coming from the stairwell. He was pulling Rebecca by her arm and had a pistol to her neck. Her arms and face were bruised, her dress torn in multiple places.

“Rebecca!” Osgood exclaimed in shock.

“I am afraid your dead hero's hired hackman went a little wild from all the commotion, Osgood,” Wakefield said. “The carriage tipped over, but don't fear-I was there to come to your damsel's aid, just as I have yours so many times now.”

“Let her be, Wakefield!” Osgood cried, then quickly added, as calmly as possible: “You can still get down there. There is still time to save him.”

Wakefield peered down at the flames lapping the darkness from six floors below, where the broken body of Herman struggled. “Doubtful he'd survive that, I'd say, Osgood. There are plenty of other fire worshippers that would serve me for a profit.”

“He is your friend,” Osgood said.

“He is a cog in my enterprise, as your search has been. Now, I shall tell you what I'd like. You drop that satchel down into those flames, and I'll allow your silly girl to live.”

“Don't, James!” Rebecca cried. “Not after all that has happened!”

Osgood mouthed to her that it was all right and smiled reassuringly. He held the satchel out over the shaft.

“Very good move, my boy. You can take orders after all.” Wakefield smiled. “Don't worry, Mr. Osgood, the world will not be deprived of Dickens's ending.”

Osgood looked at him with confusion. “What do you mean?”

“After we have destroyed this, I plan to find Dickens's ending myself, of course! At least, how I would like it-with Edwin Drood's body discovered to be quite dead and gone in a crypt in Rochester. Would it surprise you to learn I am acquainted with the greatest forgers and counterfeiters, Mr. Osgood? From samples of Dickens's handwriting I will have my men create six installments of the finest literary forgery ever attempted, a class beyond the amateur production of Mr. Grunwald. I am certain John Forster will be only too happy to have this, as it agrees with his own professions about the book's finale. There is only one problem. We must be rid of Dickens's real ending before I can forge my own. That is how you are about to help me.”

“Lower your pistol from her first, Wakefield,” said Osgood. “Then I will do as you ask.”

“You are not in command here!” Wakefield roared, shaking Rebecca's arm violently.

But Osgood waited until the pistol strayed slightly away from her neck. Osgood nodded to his adversary for the gesture, then let the bag drop but kept hold of the top of the strap so that it dangled precariously over the flaming pit of the elevator shaft.

“For me, this would have been my finest publication, Wakefield,” Osgood said meditatively, in the voice of a eulogy. “Only conceive of what a treasure it would have made! Not only to have rescued my firm from our rivals but to have done proper justice to Mr. Dickens's very last work and restore it to the reading public. But for you, the ending of Drood is even more. It's your life. Isn't it? These last six installments could destroy you, since all eyes around would have been on their every word.”

“And that's why you'll drop it!” Wakefield yelled, losing the remnants of his composure. “Let it go!”

Two more big explosions burst the air from below… the final moans from a roasting Herman… the flames exhaling up and licking at the ironworks of the shaft, turning it into a gigantic open chimney and reminding Osgood that all his choices were gone.

“Drood?” Molasses, said, gasping at the realization. “That's Drood in there?”

“Quiet!” Wakefield yelled. “Come, Osgood.”

Osgood nodded obediently to Wakefield. “I will let go, Wakefield. I promised, and I do as I promise.”

“I know it, Osgood.”

“But you must hope,” Osgood continued, “that whole way between the Medical College and here I didn't stop for a moment to switch it for some worthless papers, or stuff this with leaves or blank stationery. Are you confident enough that I would destroy what I've searched for all this time, even for the sake of a woman? Are you absolutely certain?”

“I am, Osgood. You love her.”

“Yes,” Osgood said, unhesitating. Rebecca for a moment lost all her terror. “But tell me, Mr. Wakefield,” Osgood continued, “would you find it anywhere inside of you to ever do that, to destroy every-thing you've wanted to protect someone you love?”

Wakefield's eyes widened, his brow poured sweat. Slowly, he stepped toward Osgood. Now he trained his gun on the publisher as he inched toward the satchel.

“Don't think of moving a muscle, Osgood,” said Wakefield, steadying the gun at Osgood's forehead. The publisher nodded his head in surrender. Osgood's gaze shifted to Rebecca, and in that moment he looked in her eyes she knew what to do.

Here Wakefield slipped his hand into the satchel and out came the thick bundle of papers covered in iron gall ink, with yellow shards of the plaster statue clinging to it. He held the gun steady in one hand while with the other he brought the pages to his face. After a moment of quiet suspense, a dark shadow passed over his expression. Awkwardly using two fingers of his gun-holding hand, he flipped the page back to see the next one, then the next one, then finally skipped ahead to the last one.

His face concentrated, contorted with a baffled entrancement. As everything but the manuscript seemed to drift from Wakefield's sight, Rebecca raced forward. She pushed Wakefield from behind with all her strength. Man and manuscript entangled. His instincts empowering him, Wakefield's hand gripped the the ironworks and he raised his pistol at Osgood's head with his other hand-but the fire below had sent the heat through the iron, and now steam rose from under Wakefield's ungloved hand. His hand yielding, Wakefield went plunging down the elevator shaft, all the way down in a screaming drop into the inferno. As he fell, the pages fluttered through the air around him. They fed the flame like fresh wood in a winter hearth. Wakefield crashed and shrieked inhumanly.

In his last moments, his eye seemed to fall on one of Dickens's final pages just as it curled into ashes. And all was devoured as one.

Osgood, ashen pale, hugging his rib cage with his arms, dropped limply to his knees in exhaustion, terror, and relief. He watched the pages below them in various states of demise and ashes. To breathe was utter agony.

“Mr. Osgood!” Rebecca called out. She pulled him out of the way just as Molasses lunged forward onto the edge of the elevator shaft. The Bookaneer was reaching for any stray pages.

“The Mystery of Edwin Drood!” the Bookaneer called out. “Even one page would be priceless!” His hat tumbled off and caught fire as another explosion from the engine room shot up toward them.

Osgood pushed himself to his feet and leaned into the red hot shaft, grabbing the back of the bookaneer's collar and coat, the bottom of which was already singeing.

“One page!” the man was repeating. “Just one!”

“Molasses! It's gone! It's already gone!”

Osgood pulled Molasses backward as the engine room exploded once more and this time filled the buckling elevator shaft with a solid column of fire. Osgood had taken Rebecca into his arms as they watched from the precipice of the fifth floor.

“Quickly!” urged a newly sensible Molasses as the fire and steam spread.

As the three survivors ran down the stairs, Molasses periodically cried out in lament for the lost pages. “You couldn't, could you? How could you allow him to destroy the end of The Mystery of Edwin Drood! The last Dickens, in a column of smoke!”

The poor Bookaneer, unwilling to accept the defeat, followed behind the firemen as they trooped into the building pulling their hoses from their nearby engines. In the meantime, Rebecca helped Osgood to a curb across from the building. He sat and coughed violently.

“I shall go for a doctor,” said Rebecca.

Osgood held up a hand to plead for her to wait. “I hope the lady shall not be offended,” he said at the first moment he could find his voice. He scraped the ash and grime off his hand, then inserted his hand under his torn shirt, into the bandages around his chest.

He took out a thin collection of papers flattened against his skin.

Rebecca gasped. “Is it…?”

“The final chapter-while I was in the elevator alone, I hid it. Just in case…”

“Mr. Osgood! Remarkable! Why, even without the rest of it, just to have the ending will change everything. What is Edwin Drood's fate?” She reached out her hand, then hesitated. “May I?”

“You have earned it as much as I, Miss Sand,” he said, passing the pages to her.

As she looked down, she passed her hand over the first page of the chapter as if its words could be touched. Her bright eyes glistened with curiosity and amazement.

“Well?” asked Osgood knowingly. “What do you think of it, my darling? Can you read it?”

“Not a word!” she said, then laughed. “Oh, it's beautiful!”

Chapter 39

CHARLES DICKENS HAD KNOWN HE HAD TO BE BETTER THAN ALL the others. He was not yet twenty years old and was trying to compete with the more experienced corps of London reporters. It had been their mission to provide verbatim reports of the speeches of the most important members of Parliament and the chief cases at chancery.

There were two primary questions surrounding them: who could write the most accurately, and who could write fastest. The Gurney system of brachygraphy, or shorthand, brought him under its magical, mysterious spell. Brachygraphy, or an easy and compendious System of Shorthand rested on and under his pillow. It permitted an ordinary human, after some close training and prayer, to condense the usual long-winded language of their fellow beings into mere scratches and dots on a page. The reporter would copy down an orator's speech in this cobweb of markings, then rush out the door. If outside the city, in Edinburgh or some country village, he would bend over his paper while being driven in a carriage, scribbling furiously under a small wax lamp as he transformed onto blank slips of paper the strange symbols into full words-occasionally sticking his head out the window to prevent sickness along the rocky passage.

The green reporter Dickens mastered the Gurney, just as his father had once done in brief employment as a shorthand writer, but that was not enough. Young Dickens altered and adjusted Gurney-he created his own shorthand-better and quicker than anyone else's. Soon, the most important English speeches were always certified at the bottom of the page by C. Dickens, Shorthand Writer, 5, Bell Yard, Doctors’ Commons.

That was how he could write so much, even half a book, in the small cracks of a full schedule while in America. That was the only way his pen could keep pace with his mind and reveal the fate of Edwin Drood.

The Gurney system had years ago been replaced by that of Taylor and then by Pitman's. Rebecca had been trained in Pitman's at the Bryant and Stratton Commercial School for women on Washington Street before applying to be a bookkeeper. Fields and Osgood, after depositing the pages from the satchel representing the last chapter of The Mystery of Edwin Drood in their fireproof safe at 124 Tremont Street, did consult some of the first-rate shorthand writers in Boston (several of whom, themselves the brainier Bookaneers, had been the ones attempting to copy down Dickens's improvisations at the Tremont Temple before Tom Branagan and Daniel Sand stopped them). They would only show them a page or two, for purposes of secrecy, and did not tell them the provenance of the document. No luck-it was useless. The system, even for those very familiar with Gurney, was too eccentric to decipher more than a few scattered words.

They sent confidential cables to Chapman & Hall seeking advice on the matter. Meanwhile, quietly, Fields and Osgood made preparations with their printer and illustrator for a special edition of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, complete with the exclusive final chapter.

The first week after the retrieval of the manuscript there were endless consultations and interviews with the chief of police, customs agents, the state attorney, and the British consulate. Montague Midges, denying all accusations, was immediately dismissed from his post and interrogated by the police about his conversations with Wakefield and Herman. The Samaria was boarded by customs and an eager tax collector named Simon Pennock, using the information gathered by Osgood and the late Jack Rogers, and every member of the crew was taken into custody. The Royal Navy had been alerted, and over a matter of months the majority of Marcus Wakefield's operation was dismantled.

One morning, Osgood was called into Fields's office where he was shocked to be staring straight into the mouth of a long rifle.

“Halloa, old boy!”

The double-barreled rifle was hanging loosely behind the shoulder of a burly, ruddy man in a tight-fitting sporting outfit with high leather gaiters, knee breeches, and a cartridge belt around his wide waist. Frederic Chapman.

“Mr. Chapman, forgive me if I wear a look of astonishment,” Os-good began. “We sent our cables to you in London not two days ago.”

Chapman gave his mighty laugh. “You see, Osgood, I was in New York on some dull business for the firm, and on my way in full force to a shooting party in the Adirondacks when the hotel messenger stopped me at the train station with a cable from my office in London passing along your intelligence. Naturally I boarded the next train into Boston. I always liked Boston-the streets are crooked and the New Englandism is down to a science. I say, these”-he delicately picked up the small sheaf of pages with care and awe-“are simply remarkable! Imagine!”

“Can you make sense of it, then?” Fields asked.

“Me? Not a single speck, not a single word, Mr. Fields!” Chapman declared without any diminished excitement. “Osgood, where did you go? There you are. Say, how is it you came upon this?”

Osgood exchanged a questioning look with Fields.

“Mr. Osgood is our most diligent man!” Fields exclaimed proudly.

“Well, I should think this proves it,” said Chapman, resting his hands on his cartridge belt. “I could use men like you, Osgood. My clerks, they're worthless and hopeless creatures. Now we must set in motion a plan to read these at once.”

Fields told him how the shorthand writers they'd consulted could not make it out, and they did not want to give them too much of it to see.

“No, we mustn't let anyone else get wind of this. Clerk!” Chapman leaned out the door and waited for anyone to appear. Though it was one of the financial men who presented himself, Chapman snapped his fingers and said, “Some champagne in here, won't you?” Chapman then closed the door on the confused man and insisted on shaking both men's hands again with his hunter's iron grip. “Gentlemen, I have it! This shall be historical! Long after we are all-pardon the morbidity-out of print permanently, our names will be honored for this. The end of the last Dickens, for all the world to see! That is a triumph.

“I happen to know several court reporters who worked alongside Dickens in the capacity of shorthand writers thirty years ago; in some cases, they competed with the younger rival, attempting to replicate his altered version of the shorthand technique. Some of them, though their heads have grown white with the creeping of age, still live retired lives in London and are known to me personally. I have no doubt that for the right price their success in ‘translating’ this text will be assured.”

“Upon my word, we shall contribute liberally to such a fund,” Fields said.

“Good. I'll book my passage back early to deal with this without delay,” Chapman said. “Say, you have made a copy of the chapter, haven't you?”

Fields shook his head. “The truth is, this shorthand is of such a strange design, I fear any copies could be worthless. Dashes and lines and curly symbols not replicated exactly would render a word or paragraph potentially indecipherable. It would be like an illiterate copying out a page from a Chinese scroll. Perhaps with two or three of the best copyists checking each other. The best copyists in Boston are also the greediest, and it would be a risk to entrust them.”

“You did not even make a copy for yourself?” Chapman asked, surprised.

“Mr. Fields cannot, with his hand,” Osgood said. “We didn't know you were coming, Mr. Chapman. I would have tried, but I am afraid even the attempt to could take weeks.”

“And tracing it is out of the question,” Chapman noted, “for these papers have not exactly been well kept, wherever it is you found them, and the chemicals of tracing paper could tamper with the ink. No matter, the original shall be safe”-here he stopped to caress the end of his rifle-“even from your so-called Bookaneers. Let them try me!”

Chapman put the chapter in his case. As soon as the transcription was complete, Chapman would send a private messenger in whom he had complete trust to deliver the fully transcribed pages back to Boston, so the Fields, Osgood & Co. edition could appear well before any pirated editions.

“Tell me-for a lark-before we finally know the truth, what do you think, Osgood?” asked Chapman as he prepared to depart from the office, his assistant handing him his overcoat and brown felt hat with its jaunty blue ribbon. “Tell us, do you think Drood lives or dies in the end?”

“I don't know whether he lives or dies,” answered Osgood. “But I know he is not dead.”

Chapman, shouldering his rifle, nodded but moved his mouth in a rehearsal of confusion at the enigmatic response.

Some minutes later, after their guest's departure, some impulse or feeling gripped Osgood. It made him get up from his desk. He stood looking down at the palms of his own hands and the scars from their adventures.

He could not have said why, but he was soon walking down the hall; hurrying down the stairs, dancing around the slower climbers; bursting through the reception hall, past the shining glass cases of Ticknor & Fields and Fields & Osgood books, out the front doors; pushing past the line at the peanut vendor and the Italian organ grinder, looking out, looking at the tourists to Boston in bright bonnets and light hats loitering under the shady elms of the Great Mall along the Common, looking over at squirrels scrambling for lost crumbs and pleading pitifully for donations of other scraps, looking for Fred Chapman in the dappled light of the summer scene. Osgood got as far as the tents pitched by the traveling circus, which were sheltering exhibitions of overheated animals and myriad humanity.

It is impossible to claim to know what James Osgood thought to have said had he caught up with him. It wouldn't have mattered, though, because the strapping visitor from London and the pages in his case were already gone.