The Last Dickens

Chapter 1

Bengal, India, June 1870

NEITHER OF THE YOUNG MOUNTED POLICEMEN FANCIED THESE subdivisions of the Bagirhaut province. Neither of them fancied jungles where all manner of things could happen unprovoked, unseen, as they had a few years before when a poor lieutenant was stripped, clubbed, and drowned in the river for trying to collect licensing taxes.

The officers clamped the heels of their boots tighter into their horses’ flanks. Not to say they were scared-only careful.

“You must be careful always,” said Turner to Mason as they ducked the low branches and vines. “Be assured, the natives in India do not value life. Not even as the poorest Englishman does.”

The younger of the two policemen, Mason, nodded thoughtfully at the words of his impressive partner, who was nearly twenty-five years old, who had two brothers also come from England to be in Indian Civil Service, and who had fought the Indian rebellion a few years before. He was an expert if ever one was.

“Perhaps we should have come with more men, sir.”

“Well, that's pretty! More men, Mason? We shan't need any more than our two heads between us to take in a few ragged dacoits. Remember, a high-mettled horse stands not for hedge nor ditch.”

When Mason had arrived in Bengal from Liverpool for his new post, he accepted Turner's offer to “chum,” pooling incomes and living expenses and passing their free time in billiards or croquet. Mason, at eighteen, was thankful for counsel from such an experienced man in the ranks of the Bengal police. Turner could list places a policeman ought never to ride alone because of the Coles, the Santhals, the Assamee, the Kookies, and the hill tribes in the frontiers. Some of the criminal gangs among the tribes were dacoits, thieves; others, warned Turner, carried axes and wanted English heads. “The natives of India value life only as far as they can kill when doing so,” was another Turner proverb.

Fortunately, they were not hunting out that sort of bloodthirsty gang in these wasting temperatures this morning. Instead they were investigating a plain, brazen robbery. The day before, a long train of twenty or thirty bullock carts had been hit with a shower of stones and rocks. In the chaos, dacoits holding torches tipped over the carts and fled with valuable chests from the convoy. When intelligence of the theft reached the police station, Turner had gone to their supervisor's desk to volunteer himself and Mason, and their commander had sent them to question a known receiver of stolen goods.

Now, as the terrain thinned, they neared the small thatched house on the creek. A dwindling column of smoke hovered above the mud chimney. Mason gripped the sword at his belt. Every two men in the Bengal police were assigned one sword and one light carbine rifle, and Turner had naturally claimed the rifle.

“Mason,” he said with a slight smile in his voice after noticing the anxious look on his partner's face. “You are green, aren't you? It is highly likely they have unloaded the goods and fled already. Perhaps for the mountains, where our elaka-that is like ‘jurisdiction,’ Mason-where our elaka does not extend. No matter, really, when captured, they lie and say they are innocent peasants until the corrupt darkie magistrates release them. What do you say to going tiger shooting upon some elephants?”

“Turner!” Mason whispered, just then, interrupting his partner.

They were coming upon the thatched-roof house where a bright red horse was tied to a post (the natives in these provinces often painted their horses unnatural colors). A slight rustle at the house drew their eyes to a pair of men fitting the description of two of the thieves. One of them held a torch. They were arguing.

Turner signaled Mason to stay quiet. “The one on the right, it's Narain,” he whispered and pointed. Narain was a known opium thief against whom several attempts at conviction had failed.

The opium poppy was cultivated in Bengal and refined there under English control, after which the colonial government sold the drug at auction to opium traders from England, America, and other nations. From there, the traders would transport the opium for sale to China, where it was illegal but still in great demand. The trade was enormously profitable for the British government.

Dismounting, Turner and Mason split up and approached the thieves from two sides. As Mason crept through the bushes from around the back, he could not help but think about their good fortune: not only that two of the thieves were still at the suspected confederate's house but also that their argument was serving as distraction.

As Mason made his way around the thick shrubbery he jumped out at Turner's signal and displayed his sword at the surprised Narain, who put up two trembling hands and lay flat on the ground. Meanwhile the other thief had pushed Turner down and dashed into the dense trees. Turner staggered to his feet, aimed his rifle, and shot. He fired a wild second shot into the jungle.

They tied the prisoner and traced the fugitive's path but soon lost the trail. While searching up and down the curve of the rough creek, Turner lunged at something on the ground. Upon reaching the spot, Mason saw with great pride in his chum that Turner had bludgeoned a cobra with his carbine. But the cobra was not dead and it rose up again as Mason approached and tried to strike. Such was the peril of the Bengalee jungle.

Abandoning the hunt for the other thief, they returned to the spot where they'd left Narain tied to a tree and freed him, leading him as they took the horses they'd borrowed back to the police outpost. There, they boarded the train with their prisoner in tow to bring Narain to the district of their station house.

“Get some sleep,” Turner said to Mason with a brotherly care. “You look worn out. I can guard the dacoit.”

“Thank you, Turner,” said Mason gratefully.

The eventful morning had been exhausting. Mason found an empty row of seats and covered his face with his hat. Before long he fell into a deep sleep beneath the rattling window, where a slow breeze made the compartment nearly tolerable. He woke to a horrible echoing scream-the kind that lived sometimes in his nightmares of Bengal's jungles.

When he shook himself into sensibility he saw Turner standing alone staring out the window.

“Where's the prisoner?” Mason cried.

“I don't know!” Turner shouted, a wild glint in his eyes. “I looked the other way for a moment, and Narain must have thrown himself out the window!”

They pulled the alarm for the train to stop. Mason and Turner, with the help of an Indian railway policeman, searched along the rocks and found Narain's crushed and bloody body. His head had been smashed open at impact. His hands were still tied together with wire.

Solemnly, Mason and Turner abandoned the body and reboarded the train. The young English officers were silent the remaining train ride to the station house, except for some unmusical humming by Turner. They had almost reached the terminal when Turner posed a question.

“Answer me this, Mason. Why did you enroll in the mounted police?”

Mason tried to think of a good answer but was too troubled. “To raise a little dust, I suppose. We all want to make some noise in the world.”

“Stuff!” said Turner. “Never lose sight of the true blessings of public service. Each one of us is here to turn out a better civilization in the end, and for that reason alone.”

“Turner, about what happened today…” The younger man's face was white.

“What's wrong?” Turner demanded. “Luck was with us. That cobra might have done us both in.”

“Narain… the suspected dacoit. Well, shouldn't we, I mean, to collect up the names and statements of the passengers for our diaries so that if there is any kind of inquiry…”

“Suspected? Guilty, you meant. Never mind, Mason. We'll send one of the native men.”

“But, won't we, if Dickens, I mean…”

“What mumbling! You oughtn't chew your words.”

“Sir,” the younger officer enunciated forcefully, “considering for a moment Dickens-”

“Mason, that's enough! Can't you see I'm tired?” Turner hissed.

“Sir,” Mason said, nodding.

Turner's neck had become stiff and veiny at the sound of that particular name: Dickens. As though the word had been rotting deep inside him and now crawled back up his throat.

Chapter 2

Boston, the same day, 1870

THE LABORERS CURSED THE MAYOR OF BOSTON AND THE SUM-mer heat and the governor of Massachusetts and the freed Negroes. And of course they cursed the ships. The freed Negroes cursed the same but substituted the Irish in their epithets.

In other months, some dockworkers sang. But in the summer they'd curse.

“Damn moss to hell!” said one laborer. He did not specify whether it was his own poor wages he was damning or the money lining the pockets of the cushion-faced rich folks whose goods they hauled.

A second laborer added: “Damn all moss! Straight to the devil!” At that, three cheers and another were called out in unison.

They didn't yet notice, walking across the pier, a large stranger dangling an ivory toothpick from his lips. His dark eyes darted ahead into the lanes of stevedores and express wagons. “Say!” he called out to the clique of Irish laborers, though he failed to attract their attention. Then he raised his gilded walking stick.

That did it.

At the top of the stick was an exotic and ugly golden idol, the head of a beast, a horn rising from the top, terrible mouth agape, sparks of fire shooting from its outstretched tongue. It was mesmerizing to behold. Not just because of its shining ugliness, but also because it was such a contrast to the stranger's own mouth, mostly hidden under an ear-to-ear mustache. The man's lips barely managed to pry open his mouth when he spoke.

“I need,” said the stranger, addressing the dockworkers, “to find a lad. Have you seen him? He wears a heavy suit and carries a bundle of papers.”

In fact, the dockworkers had seen a passerby fitting the description just a few minutes before. The young man had stopped at an overturned barrel outside the Salt House. Just to look at the fellow's thick suit added to the heat. Steadying himself with a self-conscious air, he had removed a bundle of papers tied up with black string from underneath the barrel and staggered through the pack of laborers. Naturally, they had cursed him.

“Well,” said the stranger when recognition came into their eyes. “Which way did he walk?”

The four dockworkers exchanged evasive glances. Not so much at his question, but at his decidedly English accent-and at his brown-parchment complexion. Under his hat, a chocolate-colored cotton turban stuck out. He wore a tunic-style garment that hung over the knees of his silk trousers, and a woolen cord was wrapped around the waist.

“You some kind of Hindoo?” a wiry laborer finally asked.

The swarthy stranger paused and took a momentous breath. He turned with only his eyes to the laborer who had proposed the question. With a sudden ferociousness, he thrust his stick against the laborer's neck and slammed his body down to the ground. His companions rushed in, but a single look from the attacker kept the would-be rescuers at bay.

That grotesque head had crooked, razor-sharp fangs. These were now biting into the soft flesh of the prostrate worker's jugular. A thin drop of blood trembled down his Adam's apple.

“Look at me. Look at me in the eye now,” the stranger said. “You'll tell me where you saw that lad go, or right here I rip your Dublin tongue out through your throat, God save us all.”

Fearing the fangs would dig deeper into his neck, the felled stevedore answered with a just perceptible motion. He raised his arm and pointed a shaky finger in the direction the young man had taken, his eyes closing in dread.

“Good boy, my young Paddy,” said the stranger.

No wonder the Irish laborer had closed his eyes. The stranger's teeth and lips, seen from that low vantage point, looked to be stained an unnaturally bright red. As though painted by blood. As if this man had just chewed up a rabid animal for breakfast.

Armed with the new information, the dark-eyed stranger soon regained the trail on the street leading away from Long Wharf and into Boston proper. There, straight ahead, weaving around the market carts of produce by Faneuil Hall, he spotted the one he was after. It was as though a strong wind were pushing the young man. His loco-motion was wild, his disoriented eyes urgent; if anyone had paid attention, it would seem that he was possessed of a mission-vital to Boston, vital to the world. He tossed back looks of concern as he hugged the water-stained packet tightly with both arms.

The pursuer pushed aside fish dealers and beggars through the aisles of Quincy Market.

“Beer by the glass!” cried a hawker before being jostled to the ground.

At the end of the market, as predator and prey crossed through the exit, the large hand had latched on to the other's sleeve.

“You'll be sorry you ran from me!” he growled, pulling him by the arm.

“No!” The earnest eyes of the young man lit up with defiance. “Os-good needs it!”

The lad's free arm rose as if to strike his assailant-at which gesture the enormous man did not even flinch. But instead of striking, the lad used the free hand to take hold of his own captured sleeve and pull down on the fabric, ripping his suit open at the shoulder. Freed from the stranger's clutches, he was sent pirouetting from the force across the street and almost to the safety of the other side.

An inhuman shriek combined with an awful cracking sound.

The stranger with the golden idol, panting at the bottom of his throat, pulled his rounded hat to shield his eyes from the clouds of dust as he stepped to the curb. For a moment he could not find the young man, but then he saw what had happened. When a large assortment of people had gathered, too many people, the watcher shuffled away as though he'd never had any interest.

THE SWARTHY STRANGER hadn't been the only one out hunting in the lusty traffic of the docks that morning. There were, at the moment, two or three others among the hives of workmen, wharf rats, and holiday-revelers. These were familiar faces on the docks, many mornings out before the stevedores. They were familiar most of all to each other, though odd as it sounded they didn't know one another's names.

Not their christened names, that is. There was Molasses, so titled humorously for his always harried pace. Esquire was a colored gentleman, a former cabman, who taught fencing and dancing in the Negro neighborhoods. Kitten was one of the females of this elite and grimy clique and could have charmed the drink right out of the hands of Whiskey Bill, another of their rivals.

It was Molasses, today, in a black neck cloth and moleskin jacket, who was a hair's breadth from sweet victory. Victory! During the War of the Rebellion, Molasses had been a professional bounty man, paid to take the place of rich lads in the draft who did not want to serve. Using various aliases to get his money and then vanishing as eagerly from each regiment, the powdery days of war helped Molasses pocket five thousand dollars in two and a half years. Since then he had taken to dying his hair and beard colors never known to grow on any man naturally. The beard was also overlong. He had sworn that he would not shave until a Democrat was president and those cheating Republicans out of business.

There. Right in front of Molasses's eyes was hidden what he wanted. He had been ordered by wire from Philadelphia to retrieve the treasure for a hefty reward. Stationing himself in one of the fish houses on the waterfront with his long spyglass, he had seen the young man in the suit hide it earlier that morning. Now it would be his.

A wharfinger was taking up an abandoned barrel.

“Beg pardon,” Molasses said, approaching and picking his tweed cap off his head as if in polite greeting. “I'll take that, sir.”

“Who are you?” asked the wharfinger in a firm German accent. “Go away from my barrels, wharf rat.”

Molasses kicked over the barrel with his unlaced boot. To his dismay, nothing but stray fish bones poured out. He couldn't believe it. He crouched down, rummaging through the mess. When he looked up, there was Esquire standing over him, gallantly chuckling. “Squire, you copper bottom rascal! Where are they?”

“They're not here! Calm down, ‘lasses, I didn't procure the papers neither. You didn't get them, I didn't get them, and I saw Kitten- I think she's working for C. today-at an old tug with a face like she'd been slapped on the back while eating a stick of butter. Why, they've likely vanished safely altogether by now to their rightful owner, I s'pose. Rotten luck.”

The German wharfinger became red in the face. “If you do not leave my wharf, I shall send for the police.”

Molasses kicked violently at the barrel until it was in pieces. Then he cried out a warning to the wharfinger in German. This time, the wharfinger backed away.

“Whiskey Bill? Was it him?” asked Molasses, turning back to Esquire.

“Nay, lasses,” Esquire answered grandly, raising himself onto the top of a bench, his feet dangling as he looked out at the water. “Bill didn't get sent on this mission.” A light breeze now played against the bay and the heavy sun illuminated the sailboats. In the distance, they could hear a bad snarl of traffic, the shouts of drivers, and whipping of horses, by Quincy Market.

Molasses, cleaning his reeking hands on his coat and pants, suddenly paused. “There was a whaler of a fellow following the young man-browned skin, lantern jaw, with a turbaned head. You think one of the bigwigs put him on the bounty, too, “squire?”

“Oh, I seen him earlier,” replied Esquire eerily. “His eyes big and black, like they were all hollow, and his mouth just like a skeleton's? No, he wasn't one of our kind, Molasses, that's sure. Not a man bent on dollars and dimes.”

JUST ABOUT THAT TIME in the middle of Dock Square, the omnibus called the “Alice Gray” rolled to a lumbering stop. Its driver and passengers dismounted to learn the source of the noise-that long blood-chilling crack they had all heard from below the vehicle a moment before.

“Good God!” “Why, he must've just been dragged!” “Crushed flat!” “Git the ladies away from here, will you?”

Below the back wheel, a pale young man in a torn wool suit. The first wheel had passed over his neck and the next over his leg, nearly severing it below the knee.

One of the gentlemen coming out of the bus was the first at the body. The young man's head jerked slightly. His pupils contracted and his mouth opened. “He's alive!” someone shouted. “Is there a doctor?”

“I am lawyer,” said the gentleman as if to improve on the question by answering a different one. “Sylvanus Bendall, attorney-at-law!” The dying man reached to grab this lawyer's collar with surprising insistence, as his mouth formed a word, then another. Bendall listened carefully, and then the lad's strength seemed to fail and he stopped.

After a few moments of sober examination befitting an actual doctor, the kneeling man who called himself Bendall removed his hat to signal the young man's death. A tall gentleman pointed to the bundle of papers in the dead man's hand. “What's he got? His will?” He chuckled at his own morbid joke.

“Pooh!” Bendall the lawyer said very seriously. Untying the string, he removed one sheet and put his eyeglass up to his face to examine it. “I have seen many wills before, and this is no will, sir! Wills do not tend to have engravings… See here,” he muttered, his lips opening silently as he read for a few moments. His expression slowly shifted. “I believe-yes! I believe this is… By heavens!”

“Well, man?” asked the tall bystander.

“Who could have told,” said Bendall, “whether he had ever known ambition or disappointment?”

The lawyer wasn't soliloquizing over the dead: he was reading the pages taken out of the man's hand. Sylvanus Bendall looked up from the page, his face flushed bright.

Chapter 3

JAMES R. OSGOOD HAD GREETED HIS VISITOR WITH, “MR. LEYPOLDT, a great pleasure,” which was the truth. Leypoldt was the editor of one of the principal journals for the book trade. The short-statured German immigrant was supremely well liked by those in publishing for his cordial manner and the fact that he reported with a fair, even hand.

“I hope to share with our readers the latest intelligence of your and Mr. Fields's firm, Mr. Osgood,” said Leypoldt.

“The firm is receiving A-1 notices lately on all sides,” Osgood remarked with an air of humble gratitude rather than pride.

The visitor cross-examined him. “Your publications upcoming? Very well, very good. Number of books published this year so far? I see, very good. Number of employees currently? Very well. I see you have many bookkeepers of the female sex.”

“Things have changed so quickly,” Osgood said.

“Indeed you're right, so many things in our field are changing, Mr. Osgood! I have even been weighing a change of title for our journal. So that it will reflect more a concentration on the trade.”

The visitor's journal was presently titled Trade Circular and Publishers’ Bulletin: A Special Medium of Inter-Communication for Publishers, Manufacturers, Importers, and Dealers in Books, Stationery, Music, Prints and Miscellaneous Goods Sold at the Book, Stationery, Music, and Print Stores.

“We wish something, in a word, that will stand out as memorable for a national readership. Here is what I am considering.” Leypoldt wrote: The Publishers’ Weekly Trade Circular.

Osgood said diplomatically, “Our firm should continue our subscription whatever the title you decide on.”

“Many thanks, Mr. Osgood.” A pause signified that Leypoldt turned now to the true subject of his interrogation. “Many in the trade who read our columns do wonder, Mr. Osgood, how you shall vie with so many of the larger publishers in New York. And with so many cheap republications of English editions threatening the ones published by your firm.”

“We shall choose the best-quality authors, print the best-quality books, and not yield to standards less than those that have brought us here, Mr. Leypoldt,” Osgood said earnestly. “I am confident we'll succeed if we uphold those principles.”

The visiting reporter hesitated. “Mr. Osgood, I would like our journal not only to report on publications of books but, in a word, the very story of publishing-its bloodstream, its soul, if you will. To encourage cooperation in the trade and to illustrate why those in our fraternity choose to elevate this calling. Why are we not blacksmiths, or politicians, for instance? If you should have such a story, I should like very much to tell it in this column.”

“It was when I read WaIden that I knew I wanted to be a publisher,” said Osgood, not a philosophical man but one who always wanted to be helpful. “Not that I wished to experiment as a hermit in the woods, mind! But I realized that behind the unusual insights of this strange spirit, Thoreau, there was yet another person, far from Thoreau's woods, who was going to great lengths to ensure that every person in America had a chance to read his writing if they so desired. Someone who did so not because it would instantly prove popular, but because it could be important. I wrote a letter to Mr. Fields, asking for the chance to learn from him as his shop boy.”

“And now, as a man, what is it that you hope to find?”

Osgood was considering this question quite seriously when he was interrupted with the entrance of his bookkeeper. The young woman, whose pretty face was tightly framed with raven hair, bowed her head to both men as if to acknowledge her interruption was bold. She walked over to the desk with a light but confident stride and whispered a few words.

Osgood listened attentively before turning apologetically to his guest. “Mr. Leypoldt, would you be kind enough to excuse me? I'm afraid something has arisen and I will need to continue this interview another time.” After the reporter had departed from the room, Osgood, twirling his pen between his forefinger and thumb, said to himself, “A policeman is here?”

His bookkeeper Rebecca Sand spoke quietly as if they might be overheard. “Yes, Mr. Osgood. The officer wishes a private word with a partner, and Mr. Fields is still out. He wouldn't say what it is about.”

Osgood nodded. “Show him in, then, Miss Sand.”

“Mr. Osgood, I wasn't clear,” Rebecca said. “The officer said that he'd wait outside.”

Osgood, gripping the back of his neck with one hand, thought that strange. He also saw a doubt in Rebecca's usually stoic face, but he could not stop to think about it now. James Osgood always was ready to move ahead to the next problem.

The policeman was standing outside the street entrance by the peanut vendor, who took the opportunity to complain about a band of street musicians who had been driving away his customers with solicitations for money. Osgood presented himself.

“Are you that one?” said the policeman.

“Pardon, Officer?” replied Osgood.

“That Osgood up there?” the officer asked, squinting at the shingle rising over the entrance to the three-story building at 124 Tremont Street: FIELDS, OSGOOD & CO.

“Yes, sir,” Osgood said. “James Ripley Osgood.”

“Never mind all that,” the policeman shook his head sternly. “Ripley and what-you-will. I suppose I expected a partner of your firm to be a somewhat, now then… a gentleman somewhat…” He was trying to find the most sensitive and yet deliberate word. “Somewhat older, perhaps!”

James Osgood, a trimly fitted man not yet thirty-five and not yet looking thirty, even with a well-shaped shadow mustache, was accustomed to this. He smiled generously and handed the officer a book. “Please accept this token, Officer Carlton. One of the finest from our presses last year.”

The firm's senior partner, J. T. Fields, had taught Osgood that no matter what the circumstances, presenting a book as a gift-a rather inexpensive gesture for a publisher-improved the mood of the gloomiest recipient. Regardless of the volume, the book was weighed, its title leaf examined with pleasant surprise, and the object finally fancied as precisely right for the recipient's interests. Accordingly, Carl-ton weighed the book that Osgood handed him and studied the title. A Journey in Brazil, by Professor and Mrs. Agassiz.

“I have spoken to my wife more than once on how I would enjoy Brazil!” the officer exclaimed. Then, with an astonished gaze, looked up and said, “Sir, how is it you know my name?”

“You called upon our firm some years ago for a minor problem.”

“Yes, yes. But do you say we met?”

“We did, Officer Carlton.”

“Well,” the policeman said definitively, “you must have changed how you wear your mustache.”

In fact, Osgood had not changed a hair since he was twenty, but he agreed wholeheartedly with the speculation before asking what had brought the officer to their firm.

“It is not my desire to startle anyone, Mr. Osgood,” the policeman said, reclaiming a grim demeanor. “I asked you to come down because I did not wish to frighten that girl-I mean the very young lady only steps from your office door.”

“I think you will find that Miss Rebecca Sand does not frighten easily,” Osgood said.

“That so? Bless her! I esteem that sort of fortitude of character, even in a woman. I only hope you prove just as strong hearted.”

THE YOUNG PUBLISHER climbed into the back of a carriage while the policeman ordered his driver to the dead house.

It was impossible not to feel possessed of heightened caution when entering the halls of the city coroner's chambers of Boston. Upon their arrival, the officer led Osgood through an anteroom with little air and a dusty half window. Ascending a narrow staircase to a dark room on the floor above, the police officer turned up a lamp and looked down impatiently at his shoes, as though it were Osgood's turn now to guide them.

“We don't have the entire day, I'm afraid, Mr. Osgood.”

Then he noticed. Officer Carlton was not looking at his shoes, but at the floor.

Osgood stumbled backward as though about to fall, for the floor below them was made entirely of glass. Below it was a tiny room, twenty feet square, containing four stone slabs. On one, a woman whose skin was shriveled and blackened by cholera. Another displayed an old man whose face was burned on one side, and a third, a bloated victim of drowning. Beside each stone was a hook with the clothing the dead had been in when found. Onto each body, a gentle stream of water flowed from a series of pipes.

“It's new. This is where dead bodies not yet identified are kept for viewing, at least for forty-eight hours before being placed in a pauper's grave if no one claims them,” Carlton explained. “The water keeps the bodies fresh.”

The fourth slab. The body was covered below the neck by a white sheet. A familiar heavy suit on the hook at its side was ripped at the left sleeve. Osgood took off his hat and clutched it against his heart when he saw the dulled eyes staring back up at him.

“You know the young man then?” Officer Carlton asked at the publisher's reaction.

He was so distorted by death Osgood had to force himself to recognize him. Checking the catch in his throat and looking up at the policeman with misty eyes, Osgood lowered himself on one knee and touched the cold glass below. “He is one of my employees. His name is Daniel; he's a junior clerk at our publishing firm. Seventeen years old.”

Osgood did not know how to maintain his usual poise. It was Osgood who had hired Daniel as a shop boy three years earlier. He had been determined to give him a chance in spite of his unpropitious circumstances. Daniel quickly proved himself honest and dedicated-and for longer than two weeks, the usual expiration. He had risen to the post of clerk, and even Mr. Fields had soon called him Daniel (instead of that one, short for “that poor country boy you wanted to hire).

“What happened?” Osgood asked the police officer when he was able to speak again.

“Run down by an omnibus in Dock Square.”

“Did he have anything with him?” Osgood asked, trying to piece it together, make sense of anything that he could. As he kneeled, Osgood was so close to the glass that the reflection of his own face was imposed over his clerk's lifeless form.

“No, he had nothing on his person. We connected him to you because one of our patrolmen had remembered seeing him coming and going from your building. Do you know where he was today?”

“Yes, of course. He was to be receiving important papers at the harbor and delivering them to our vaults.” Osgood hesitated but remembered he was speaking to a police officer, not a rival publisher. “They were the advance sheets of the next installments of The Mystery of Edwin Drood sent from London.”

The Dickens novel had been published in serialized installments at the beginning of each month. As with his other novels, the serial publication would gradually add readers who would then praise the story to friends and relatives who had not read it. The serial format made readers feel present at the very moments the story unfolded, as if they were among its characters. After the publication of the final monthly installment, the novel would be published in its entirety in book form.

“Hold!” said the officer. “I have been reading about young Mr. Drood's fortunes-misfortunes, I should say-with great interest in the magazines! I suppose this isn't the best time to ask. But pray tell me, Mr. Osgood, do you know how it will all end for Eddie Drood, now that Mr. Dickens has died?”

This very question had in fact been consuming Osgood's mind more than the officer could know-how it will all end, with Dickens dead-yet suddenly he had no response. Not now, not at the sight of good Daniel, motionless and broken on a cold board. The figure undulated strangely from the stream of water, as if he might still awaken.

“Daniel never failed his duties to me,” Osgood said. “To be lost to such a senseless accident!”

“Mr. Osgood, this was not merely an accident,” Carlton said as he delivered a long sigh.

“What do you mean?”

Carlton led Osgood down the stairs and into the room of the unknown dead. There was an entirely different feeling inside the little room with the glass ceiling than there had been in the viewing space above; it was like the difference between watching an exotic and dangerous animal through bars and entering the cage. The floor was white and black marble and cooled by the running water. Close up, the young clerk's stomach was grossly distended under its sheet.

Carlton explained. “Your clerk appears to have forfeited the responsibilities you assigned him and indulged in some variety of intoxicants. Before his death, he was deep out of his senses and wandering blindly through the streets, according to witnesses we interviewed. I'm afraid the young man's last act has been to fail you.”

Osgood knew he should restrain his anger, but he couldn't. “Officer, I'd suggest you mind your words. You are slandering the dead!”

“Ha!” clacked the old coroner, Mr. Charles Barnicoat, coming from around the corner and hunching his sweaty face and whiskers over the body. “Officer Carlton speaks only the truth, wouldn't know how to speak anything else.”

“I know Daniel,” Osgood insisted.

“Spine bent like a question mark, see?” said the coroner with confirming nod. “Common sign of the habitual opium eater.”

“He was run down by an omnibus!” cried Osgood.

Barnicoat yanked hard at the dead clerk's arm. The skin there had turned a horrible blue tint. “You need more?” he asked.

The sight revealed around Barnicoat's fingers instantly silenced Osgood. There were several small holes pierced into the arm.

“What is it?” the publisher asked.

Barnicoat licked his lips. “These are marks from a new sort of needle called a hypodermic treatment-it was used by our doctors in the war. It serves like a lancet but the dose can be precisely controlled. It is now employed by doctors to inject certain potent medicines through the skin and into the cellular tissue. But the kits are used without a doctor's consent by the opium eaters who are habituated to it, as your young clerk must have been by the looks of it. Some even inject these needles directly into their veins, a thing that would never be permitted by doctors! ‘Portable ecstasies,’ these young men call the drug.”

“God save the commonwealth,” Officer Carlton intoned morosely.

“They wish to be the heroes of their dreams, you see, rather than live their real lives,” Barnicoat lectured with his chin stuck out pompously. “They prefer to feel in their brains they are floating through fire in China or India instead of trudging Boston in the monotonous treadmill of life. It is a shame but somewhat less of a shame to remember a young tramp with these habits rarely will attain the age of forty, something you or I can do quite without fail.”

Osgood interrupted. “Daniel Sand was no tramp. And no opium fiend!”

“Then explain the marks on his arm,” Barnicoat said. “No, the omnibus and its passengers, waylaid from their pressing travel, were more the victims than this lad. Now, you needn't feel any personal responsibility fall on yourself, Osgood,” Barnicoat said with a rude informality.

“What happened to his chest?” Osgood asked, forcing himself to look more closely at the mangled remains of his clerk. There were two parallel cuts in Daniel's skin. “It is almost like a bite mark. And his suit. Over here, it looks as though someone tore it at the seam.”

The coroner shrugged. “From the mechanisms beneath the bus, perhaps. Or perhaps the boy had injured himself while in the spell of his narcotic. Sad to reflect on, the shadows of this danger fall not uncommonly on young men of low station and more and more even women-if you can call them that still, for they are much degraded. I'm afraid this boy was one of the fallen.”

“I cannot say it is a surprise,” Carlton said to Barnicoat, “after seeing the office today.”

Osgood had begun to feel the heat of anger rising to his ears and lips against Daniel for what seemed an undeniable secret life. Now he could direct his emotion elsewhere. “Since I have entered, you have insulted the decent name of my clerk, and now you insult my business. Exactly what do you mean to say about our office?”

Carlton raised an eyebrow, as though it were too plain. “Why, an office in which the men are mixed together with unmarried women-it is bound to corrupt young boys! Could awaken certain uncontrolled physical urges in the females, too, I dare fancy, that should make any gentleman color.” Though he himself did not.

Osgood steadied himself to rebuke the policeman, when he realized something… in his astonishment at seeing Daniel lifeless on the slab, it had unaccountably fled his mind.

“My God. Rebecca!” Osgood said softly.

“Yes, Rebecca! That was the name of the little miss, Mr. Barnicoat, and a pretty one with blooming cheeks, sitting by Mr. Osgood's office door,” Carlton said with a lugubrious frown. “The place almost seemed all women, in truth. Before long the dear strong-willed creatures will have the ballot-mark my having said that Mr. Barnicoat!- and there will be no one left in all Boston for housekeeping.”

“Rebecca,” Osgood whispered, gently clutching the stiffening hand of his clerk. “Rebecca is Daniel's sister.”

Chapter 4

THOUGH IT HAD BEEN THERE FOR THIRTEEN YEARS, GIVE OR take a month, “the New Land” was still new in the eyes of Bostonians. The area had been a wasted basin for many years before being filled in as hundreds of new acres, where streets and sidewalks were put down and gradually extended west. The region was widely pronounced as having even more potential than the South End for a luxurious and prestigious collection of houses. But though the old blue bloods liked to speculate in the markets, they did not like to gamble with the value of their neighborhoods and children's inheritances.

Sylvanus Bendall was a different breed. He welcomed risk. He opened the door and invited risk in, taking its coat and brushing its boots and serving it tea in his living room. He was one of the first men to have purchased one of the tracts of land in Back Bay as far west as possible when the commonwealth announced it would sell them. He liked the idea that the street he lived on-Newbury Street-was so aptly named that it had not even existed a few years back. At times, at least twice a day, he boasted to himself that he was not unlike Sir William Braxton, the sturdy Englishman who had lived on this peninsula by himself for five years before 1630 when Governor Winthrop came and founded Boston. In the days of Braxton, Boston would have looked far more rugged and hearty, capped by its three potent hills that were now barely distinguishable, faintly remembered in the name of Tremont Street. To the lone pilgrim Braxton, they would have been like the Alps.

Bendall enjoyed rushing into the unknown. Just as he had at the scene of the omnibus accident a few days earlier, sacrificing his good summer pants to the pavement to be nearer to the dying lad. It was Bendall who'd examined the papers the dead man clutched, while others stood by dumbfounded by what to do, and found them to be the latest episode of Mr. Dickens's current (and, alas, final) novel.

The company present at the scene of the accident had been split between those most fascinated by a dead man and those most fascinated by the mysterious pages.

Among the latter, each pleaded his and her case to Bendall-who held the papers like the auctioneer holds his hammer-as to who was most deserving of a sheet or two from the packet. A poetic brick-maker noted that he had attended all of Dickens's public readings at the Tremont Temple in Boston two and a half years earlier, waiting in line when it was so cold the mercury was clean out of sight. Another man, rosy and cheerful, had kept his own ticket stubs in his family Bible and vowed that if he did not truly love the genius of the great novelist more than anyone else did, then he would wish Dickens never born. A buxom lady listed a series of household pets-two cats, a yellow dog, a bird-that she had named for Dickens characters (Pip and Nell, Rose, Oliver); a mechanic perched near the corpse announced he had read Dickens's David Copperfield four times, but this was eclipsed by six! eight! and nine! from others. One old man began to cry and it seemed to be for the accident victim's sad fate, until he whispered, “Poor dear old Dickens, noble Dickens.”

As the bystanders quibbled with one another over the pages, Bendall silently made a bold decision: he himself would be the treasure's custodian. Folding the pages up, he quietly made his exit, pausing only to leave his name with the driver of the “Alice Gray,” should he happen to be arrested for mowing down the lad.

“Sylvanus Bendall,” he said to the nervous omnibus driver, “two words to remember, and you shall not have reason to fear Boston justice!”

Sylvanus Bendall. His name itself sounded far more like the name of an adventurer than an attorney-at-law for the indigent and unfortunate classes of Boston. It was the name of one who had penetrated deep into the New Land. His friends from Beacon Hill may have put up their handkerchiefs at the smell of the nearby marshes and the dust of construction, but Bendall inflated his nostrils each morning like a war horse.

Not to say that the Back Bay was an Eden; there were problems and he faced those with a manly demeanor. In fact, there was one waiting for him on this day when he returned to his house.

The plate-glass window at the side of his porch was shattered into pieces. Bendall walked quietly to the street door and took the latch in his hand. Inside, he faced a mess: desks and secretaries overturned; up a flight of stairs, holding tightly to the oak balustrade, coming upon dishes and china shattered; up another flight, shelves emptied of books. He heard a shuffle and a sudden noise from another room. The thieves at large! He grabbed a walking stick and an umbrella and raised them together like a Japanese samurai. “I shall knock your head clear off!” he shouted as fair warning.

A small, white-haired woman cried out, “Mr. Bendall!” His housekeeper, who had arrived to prepare supper shortly before him, now stood dead still with a look of terror.

“Don't be afraid, my dear Mary, you will be safe now with me,” Bendall said.

It did not seem that any objects of value were missing. His much-prized pages were undoubtedly safe, for he had been keeping them on his own person, in his waistcoat.

“Should I send a boy for the police?” asked Mary.

“No, no,” he said dismissively.

“But they must be on alert!” the housemaid protested.

“Pooh, Mary!” said Bendall. “You read too many sensation novels. Police are of an old mind-set and know nothing of the Back Bay. I shall root out the source of this evil myself.” There, once more, a bold and undoubtable decision by Sylvanus Bendall.

Chapter 5

DANIEL SAND'S DEATH WAS YET ANOTHER CRISIS AT THE BUSTLING 124, Tremont Street office building of Fields, Osgood & Co. It was the nature of the publishing trade to shift from crisis to optimism back to crisis, and the master of those rhythms was James Osgood. It had been back in March, three months before Daniel Sand fell lifelessly in the street, when the senior partner, J. T. Fields, stopped Osgood on the stairs. Fields's long, stiff, graying beard and a rumbling undercurrent in his voice lent him an inflated gravity at all times.

“Mr. Osgood, a word please.”

A word never failed to add a burden to Osgood's shoulders. He knew Fields's troubled expressions like he knew the halls of the publishing firm and could guess the sort of business emergency at a glance. Osgood had been in this man's employment for fifteen years since he had written him that first letter praising Walden with the vivid enthusiasm of a neophyte. It had been five years since Osgood introduced bright color binding to replace the drab maroon covers they had formerly favored. And it had been almost two years since his own name was added to the stationery-transforming Ticknor, Fields & Co. as though by magic fulfillment of his once dreamlike ambitions into Fields, Osgood & Co.

But there was no shortage of problems. Their neighbors, the shrewdly evangelical Hurd & Houghton, with their young lieutenant George Mifflin, had transformed from their reliable printer into a competing publisher. And their chief rival in New York more than ever was Harper & Brothers.

“It is Harper this time!” Fields cried out to Osgood when they were alone. He leaned his elbows over a pulpitlike standing desk in the corner of the room, where there always sat open his massive appointment book. “It's Harper, Osgood. He's plotting.”

“Plotting what?”

“Plotting. I don't know what yet,” Fields admitted, the last word coming with a stinging warning as though the chief partner of Harper & Brothers, Major Harper, was looking down from the chandelier. “He is filled with rancor and spite against our house.” Fields stabbed a pen in ink and wrote in an appointment. “Fletcher Harper is coming from New York soon to recruit more Boston authors-to poach more from us, let us be blunt-and has requested an interview here. You ought to be the one to meet with him. Blasted hand! I will have to call one of the girls in to write.” Fields opened and shut his hand, which suffered from painful cramps. “I daresay I haven't written a letter in my own hand in a year, except those to Mr. Dickens, of course. My other correspondents must think I have grown womanly with age.”

Osgood was still surprised at Fields's instruction about Harper. With a casual downcast glare, as though checking the shine of his left boot, the younger man commented, “I would expect that Major Harper will prefer the interview be with you, my dear Mr. Fields.”

Fields became silent. His recent tendency to fall entirely quiet had struck Osgood as worrisome. The senior publisher stepped out from behind the high desk and began a slow breathing exercise. Finally, he responded in a softer tone. “Everyone likes you, Osgood. It is an advantage I hope you keep long after I am quietly laid away in some uneditorial corner far from this business. Why, it is something to say of a publisher, that everyone likes him! We are like lawyers, except instead of being blamed for the loss of a mortgage, we are blamed for lost dreams.”

When Osgood looked up he was startled to find Fields with his fists posed in a fighting position.

“You've boxed, eh?” Fields asked.

Osgood shook his head confusedly and replied, “At Bowdoin, I fenced.”

“I had my first boxing lessons from an old pugilist when I lived in Suffolk Place as a lad running errands under Bill Ticknor. I paid the fellow in books Ticknor threw out! Could have been a prizefighter if I kept at it. Start with a jab. This,” Fields said as he pantomimed an exchange of severe blows and quick escapes, “is how you stand up to a Harper brother! There is only one thing worse than the coming war with the Harpers, Osgood: and that is being afraid of it.”

OSGOOD HAD BEEN CORRECT in his prediction: when the appointed day came later in March for Fletcher Harper's interview and Osgood greeted him in his best suit and with the offer of a brandy, the New York visitor peered around impatiently through his wire-framed eyeglasses.

“Mr. Fields sends his sincerest regrets, Major,” Osgood said. “I am afraid he has been drawn away suddenly by the press of business.”

“Oh! Trying to stop one of your authors from drowning himself in the Frog Pond?”

Osgood gave his most gentlemanly laugh, though Harper did not. How could a man scowl at his own joke?

Harper was called the Major not to signify any service during the war but because of his battlefield style of command at his offices in New York. He scratched the line of his jaw under his wide mutton-chop running down his face. “Do you have authority here, James R. Osgood?”

“Major,” Osgood said with equanimity, “I am a partner of the firm now.”

“Well! Junior partner, yes,” he grumbled. “I must have read about it in Leypoldt's columns. And you are an honest man?”

“I am.”

“Good, Mr. Osgood! You did not hesitate in your answer; that means it is true.” Harper accepted the glass of brandy. He began to raise it to his lips, then paused and held it in a toast. “To we happy few, the publishers of the world! Individuals who kindly assist authors to obtain an immortality in which we do not ourselves participate.”

Osgood raised his glass without comment.

“Men in our line know me well for being direct,” Harper said, sacrificing his drink to a long gulp and putting the glass down, “and I am too old to change. So this is what I have come to say. Ticknor and Fields-I mean by that, of course, Fields and Osgood-this house cannot survive its present circumstances.”

Osgood waited for Harper to continue.

“Your magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, for all its merit, hardly turns a penny, does it? Now, take New York City.”

“What about it, Major?”

“Come! I like Boston, I do. Well, except for your priest-ridden Paddy camps, which are worse than ours in New York. But that can't be helped these days, we open our shores and soon we are corrupted. Still, I wander into the world of politics. We speak of the literary world. Writers by species are creatures more and more of the New York breed. We have the cheaper printing presses, the cheaper binders and the cheaper ideas at our fingertips. An author's fame will no longer last twenty-odd years in the fashion of your Mr. Longfellow-no, an author's name will survive one book, two perhaps, and then be replaced by something newer, bolder, bigger. You must produce quantity going ahead, Mr. Osgood.”

Osgood knew how the Harper family treated their authors at their Franklin Square building in New York, where an iron bust of Benjamin Franklin, through a shrewd squint, looked down judgmentally on all comers to their kingdom as though to suggest he was the last author worth any fuss. There was the anecdote known throughout the trade about Fitz-James O'Brien's marching outside the massive Harper building holding a sign, I AM ONE OF HARPERS’ AUTHORS. I AM STARVING, until the Harpers would agree to pay him what he was owed. There were, besides, tales of great satisfaction in the Harpers’ offices when they collected back the pitiable $145.83 that they had paid in advance to Mr. Melville for his queer sea tale, Moby-Dick, or The Whale.

To the Harper brothers, publishing was power. It was a power that had reached a crescendo in the 1840s when the eldest of the quartet, James Harper, became mayor of New York City as part of the anti-Catholic Native Party. James instituted what was known as Harper's Police, before dying in a bloody accident, when his carriage cracked and his horses dragged him bodily through Central Park. Fletcher, formerly their financial manager, had since ascended to the top of the publishing firm and earned the sobriquet of Major.

Osgood felt an urge to scream bubbling up, a rare and uncomfortable feeling. Osgood was the oldest of five siblings, and growing up it had always been left to him to be the sturdy, sensible one who would preserve order at any cost to his own personal feelings. Others could be permitted to give way to their emotions but not him. That was how he was known in youth in Maine, that was how he had made his stamp at their firm and on the trade at large. These same traits, his workmanship and steadiness, had attained his admission to college at only twelve years old-though his family waited until he was fourteen at the request of the Bowdoin administrators.

“We like our local authors very much,” Osgood assured his guest as calmly as he could. “You might say we believe our house works for our authors, rather than the other way around.”

“If you talk metaphysics, I can't follow you, Mr. Osgood.”

“I shall be happy to try to speak more plainly.”

“You can tell me, then, why Mr. Fields wished you to meet with me instead of him. Because,” he said without giving Osgood the chance to answer, “Fields knows he is in the after-dinner hour of life. You are the eager young man, you are the enfant terrible with a sharp eye and smart ideas, and can break with sleepy tradition.”

Harper went on with only a slight pause for breath: “Books are to be mere lumber in the future. Articles of trade, you see, Mr. Osgood! The bookstores already are filled with empty space, cigar boxes, Indian prints, toys. Toys! Before long there will be more toys than books in this country, and it will matter not who is the author of the new book any more than who is the manufacturer of a new paper doll. The publisher's name will be far more important than any author's and our job will be to mix the ink of a book together like the pharmacist's chemicals.

“Well, I come to you with a proposal: that Fields, Osgood and Company shutter its doors here in Boston, give up this dying hub, and move to New York-combining with us, under the Harper name, of course. Oh, we'd give you full swing for your own peculiar literary tastes. And you will forgo a slow demise of this great old house to be part of our publishing family. You will be to us as your own sons are to you-haven't you children, Mr. Osgood? Oh! You are a bachelor, I do recall. Childless Fields having been your prototype.”

Osgood nodded away the last aside. “Your idea is simply not in our authors’ interests, Major. We shall always see our books as wiser and better than objects, and I think I speak for Mr. Fields in saying we would rather continue in that light even if it means we do not last. I'm afraid you cannot ever de-Bostonize this house.”

Osgood decided to swiftly end the meeting using one of Fields's techniques. He passed his foot down on a pedal hidden under the desk and Daniel Sand came to alert Osgood of an “emergency” that would forestall any further conversation. But Harper stood and signed his understanding.

“You needn't bother with the performance,” Harper called out before the clerk had the chance to speak.

Daniel, acting out his urgent entrance, looked to Osgood with sad eyes. Osgood nodded permission to go.

Harper continued, a dark cloud passing over his face. “I know every trick, every plan, every purpose in this trade, Mr. Osgood, and I know it ten times better than my dear brother the mayor did, God bless the proud man. Come! The old methods will not save you from the truth I have delivered to you today.”

They eyed each other, taking stock.

Harper suddenly laughed, but a laugh that said the joke was his and his alone. “Well, it is true what they say, I suppose. Courtesy is courtesy but business is business.”

“Who says that, Major?”

“Me. And you shouldn't believe Mr. Fields and yourself are so different from us, Mr. Osgood, shielded from the world by sunshiny talk and your high ambitions. We've watched you. Remember, the angel may write, but “tis the devil that must print. You should have gone into the ministry if you wanted to remain a believer.”

“Major, I wish you good afternoon.” Osgood waited silently until Harper had no choice but to gather his belongings.

“Oh! By the by, the new mystery that Dickens is writing, I hear, shall be enthralling,” Harper said offhandedly to Osgood as he brushed the rainwater from his hat. “Chapman in London, they say, is paying a fortune to publish it. The Murder of Edward Drory?” “The Mystery of Edwin Drood, I believe he has decided to call it.” “Yes, yes, that is it! I am on the very tiptoe of expectation to see where Dickens, the Great Enchanter, will take us this time.”

DICKENS!-THAT STRANGE WORD, that name of names, the man-meant the world to the firm of Fields, Osgood & Co. The Major knew it, which is why his mention of the new novel was also a threat.

Fields had a few years earlier made two big propositions to the world's most popular novelist, Charles Dickens: first, that Dickens come to America on a grand reading tour, and second, that their firm be the author's exclusive publisher in America. From his estate in the English countryside, Dickens agreed to both terms, which prompted the loud grousing of all the other American publishers-especially the Harper brothers.

There was no international copyright agreement between the United States and England. This meant that any American publisher could publish any British book without permission of the author. There did exist what was known as trade courtesy, however: when an American publisher made an agreement to be the publisher of a foreign book, other American publishers would respect it. The Harper brothers were notorious, though, for printing cheap, unauthorized editions (making their own changes to the text, sometimes carelessly and sometimes to suit an English topic better to an American audience). They'd leave the Harper torch off the title page and sell the spurious edition in railway cars or on the street or by subscription.

Thus, Major Harper's alluding to The Mystery of Edwin Drood was a reminder that Harper could undermine the enormous investment by Fields, Osgood & Co. in Drood by flooding their own cheap editions into the marketplace. The demand would be high for Dickens's new book, and what would the typical hardworking American reader choose? Spend two dollars for the book from Fields, Osgood & Co.- or seventy-five cents from one of Harper's hawkers or peddlers?

The Boston publisher would be powerless to stop it.

Charles Dickens's five-month-long reading tour of the United States arranged by Fields and Osgood in the winter of 1867-68 had proven an enormous success. It felt historic even as it was happening. Thousands heard him perform. Osgood worked industriously during the tour, charged with the duties of a treasurer and with meeting Dickens's sometimes fickle demands, in addition to smoothing over conflicts and troubles. At the end of the tour, there were a hundred thousand dollars in profits in the pockets of the “Chief”-as he was called by Dickens's manager, Dolby.

Fields, Osgood & Co. made money on the readings-5 percent of gross receipts-but their real reward for the faith they had shown in Charles Dickens was yet to come. That would come with the publication of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

The whole world awaited it, as had been true of each Dickens novel since The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist placed the former court reporter's name before the public thirty-five years before. Dickens alone, among all the writers of popular fiction of the day, could employ wit and discernment, excitement and sympathy, in equal parts in each one of his books. The characters were no mere paper dolls, nor were they thinly veiled extensions of Charles Dickens's own persona. No, the characters were utterly themselves. In a Dickens story, readers were not asked to aspire to a higher class or to hate other classes than their own but to find the humanity and the humane in all. That is what had made him the world's most famous author.

This time the wait for a new book had been nearly five years, longer than any other interval between books in the past. “The public is ripe for it!” Fields had said. Drood would tell the story of a young gentleman-Edwin Drood-an honest though ambling character who vanishes after provoking the jealousy of a devious uncle named John Jasper, a respectable citizen with a double life as a drug fiend. Dickens promised in his letters to Fields that the book would be “very curious and new” for his readers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson had been sitting in Fields's office when Fields and Osgood had read Dickens's letter about the novel.

“I am afraid Dickens has too much talent for his genius,” Emerson announced in his way of an old oracle bored by his own pronouncements.

“How do you mean, my dear Waldo?” asked Fields. A publisher in the trade as long as Fields would never be roused by one writer kicking another.

“His face daunts me!” Emerson exclaimed at the Dickens photograph on the wall showing a strong but weather-beaten profile, the far-off look in the strict military eye. “You and Mr. Osgood would persuade me that he is a genial creature. You would persuade me that he is a sympathetic man superior to his talents, but I believe he is harnessed to them. He is too consummate an artist to have a thread of nature left.”

Emerson did not realize how much his publishers needed Dickens and could no longer depend only on the likes of Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes-nor even their Concord Sage, Mr. Emerson-to keep them afloat. Years earlier, the mutual admiration society of Boston brought floods of readers to the publishing house for their novels and poems. Effortlessly, Longfellow's sensation, The Song of Hiawatha, had flowed from the presses and out the doors of bookshops in Os-good's first months of working at the firm! Now the best Osgood seemed able to do was to persuade Dr. Holmes to write a pale sequel of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table; smile at Mrs. Stowe over a well-intended morality novel half as courageous as Uncle Tom; or encourage Longfellow's slow labor on his long, somber poem about Jesus Christ, The Divine Tragedy, though republishing Longfellow's controversial Divine Comedy translation, yet again, would be more lucrative.

Osgood felt the Furies chasing him: each day, having to meet irritated authors’ demands for free copies or for solace when books passed into the dreaded land of the “out of print.” Drowning themselves in the Frog Pond in disappointment. Montague Midges, from two offices down the hall, would report the higher author payments needed to fill the pages of their magazine, the Atlantic Monthly. Osgood would look over his shoulder at sluggish, heavy literary productions always reported as “almost half finished!” like Bryant's translation of Homer and Taylor's Faust, neither of which could realistically sell enough, even once completed, to make up for their costs. Osgood was overseeing a ship rocking at sea, with the storms worsening.

Dickens's new book could change that.

Harper had a point, Osgood had thought the day of their meeting, though he would never admit it. Maybe a publisher had become little different from the toy maker, and maybe an author's name couldn't survive twenty years. “Except for Charles Dickens,” Osgood said to himself. “He transcends the rest. He makes literature into books, and books literature. Harper's toys be damned.”

Then, early that summer, the news arrived.

“JAMES!” FIELDS HAD rushed into Osgood's office breathlessly. “We received it over the cable wires! God grant it as some mistake!”

Osgood panicked before he knew what to panic about. It was so rare that Fields would address his young partner informally, or that he'd exhibit such a show of emotion in proximity to the female bookkeepers-who all looked up from their copying and probably blotted a dozen words in one instant-or that he would be running at all. Then Osgood noticed one of their employees crying into her bare hands before she could find a handkerchief. And Rebecca was looking over at Osgood as though she had a thousand words waiting on her lips. He had the sickening feeling of everyone else knowing something terrible had transpired.

The sympathetic look of her green eyes made Osgood want to take Rebecca's counsel-to have the news, whatever it was and however bad- delivered by her.

But Fields had already flown through his office door, gesticulating wildly as he pushed it shut. “Charles Dickens… dead!” he finally managed to blurt out.

The Boston newspapers had received the obituaries from that morning's London papers and had sent a wire on to their office. Fields read from it aloud, emphasizing the details as though the subject might still be saved by quick thinking: “The pupil of the right eye was much dilated, that of the left contracted, the breathing stertorous, the limbs flaccid until half an hour before death, when some convulsion occurred…”

Further details included that Dickens had spent his final day working on The Mystery of Edwin Drood when, pen in hand, he had begun to feel sick. He had just finished the final words of the sixth installment of the story-the halfway mark through the book, which was to be composed of twelve serialized parts. Soon after, he fell down and never recovered.

“Dickens dead!” Fields exclaimed, shaking bodily. “How is it…! I cannot believe it! A world without Dickens!”

Men and women wept or sat bewildered and silent in the offices as word spread. “Charles Dickens is dead,” was repeated by all who heard it, to whomever they saw next. Nearly everyone in the publishing house had met Mr. Dickens when he had come for his tour two years before. Though it was difficult to feel Charles Dickens to be your friend, it was instantaneous to feel oneself his. How much life was in him-not just his own but each of his characters whose lives he had performed in front of so many thrilled audiences during his visit! No one who had ever met Dickens could imagine him gone. A man who had-Osgood remembered someone saying-a man who had exclamation points for eyes. How could such a man die?

“Charles… Dickens… Forty miles…” Fields was mumbling still in a crestfallen fog after they had sat in silence almost an hour. “I must remain on watch at the wires in case it was a mistake.” Dickens had only been a few years older than Fields-whose own sick headaches and hand aches had grown worse. Fields turned back to Osgood on his way out, “Forty miles, you said so!”

“I did indeed,” Osgood replied with a patient kindness.

It had been March 1868, near the end of Dickens's visit to Boston, at dinner at the Fieldses on Charles Street. The talk had somehow turned, in the way such things happened at the Fields dinner table, to calculating how far all of Charles Dickens's manuscripts would extend in a single line if the pages were laid end to end.

“Forty miles,” Osgood had said after careful mental calculation of the number of novels and stories and a quick census of their average length.

“No, Osgood,” Fields had called out. “A hundred thousand miles!”

“Thank you, my dear Fields,” Charles Dickens had said, as though conferring knighthood on him, then turned to Osgood with a stern countenance, his large blue-gray eyes seeming to burrow deep into the young publisher's soul, and his eyebrows darting far up. “Mr. Fields, I am inclined to be down on your young associate here until he rather changes his calculation of how many words I have surrendered in my day. More than forty miles, surely!”

There were Fields and Osgood in a nutshell: the younger man sought the correct answer, the older gave the answer one wanted to hear.

“Does it not give you a weird sensation, Mr. Dickens?” said beautiful Annie Fields, laughing at her husband and his partner. “How could words with so much value cover so light a portion of the earth?”

The writer put up his large hands in an expressive gesture that pulled all attention to him. He had an ever-changing face that could not really be seen properly unless he was caught sleeping. “Mrs. Fields, you do understand my odd lot. Once I publish, my words are mangled, pounded, and robbed on both sides of the ocean. I have many readers and booksellers in league with me: and yet I stand alone. I suppose I am fated to be a Quixote without a Sancho. That is how my fellow authors fall as this life fight of ours progresses. There is nothing to do but close up the ranks, march on, and fight it out.”

Osgood felt a confusion and diminishment come over him at the memory now as he followed Fields into the corridor and his office. The senior officer sat and slumped over on his manuscript-filled window seat, pressing his forehead against the cool glass of the window until it fogged over from his breath.

Osgood felt if he could make a strategy for business instead of sinking into depression, Fields would be grateful. He would earn the faith placed in him with this partnership. He could hear Major Harper's voice in his ear from three months earlier speaking of junior partner, yes, and then Drood. I cannot wait to see for myself.

“Mr. Fields,” Osgood said, “I am concerned now more than ever about the Harpers.”

“Yes, yes,” Fields replied languidly. He was lost to grief. “What? I cannot understand it, Osgood. How could you think of Harper?”

“When the Major hears the new novel was only half finished-and Dickens dead-well, Mr. Fields, Harper will claim no trade courtesy even applies for anything unfinished. He will try to rush out and publish Drood right under our noses without hindrance or disguise.”

Fields snapped to attention. “Harpy Brothers, Lord! A deadly stab. Osgood, our house cannot survive it!” He moaned in a voice of surrender and rolled himself across the room in his desk chair. “No man can see the end of this. The business world now is depressed and wavering. Major Harper was right about what he told you of New York, you know. It will be over for us.”

“Do not say that, my friend,” said Osgood.

Fields's energy had seemed to expire as he sat with his limbs hanging flaccidly from the chair. “New England has been a brilliant school of literature. But it has the feature of a single generation, not destined to be succeeded by another. Edinburgh gave away its publishing over to London, and so we will be bought and swallowed by New York. Dash it all! We might as well just hawk books of quotations and law textbooks, like poor Little and Brown, God rest their souls. Why undergo the pain of literature?” Fields's mind suddenly wandered. “Say, you have a taste for salt at the moment, as I do, Osgood? I would run a mile for it. I want you to go to the stand on the corner and get a quart of peanuts. Yes, something salty.”

Osgood sighed, feeling suddenly like a junior clerk again-and feeling the solid forms around him were ready to disappear. Then he tossed his hat on the chair and turned back to his senior partner. “We must not sit by,” Osgood said. “Perhaps nothing can be done, but we must try. We will publish it and publish it well. Before Major Harper does. Half a Dickens novel is half more than any other novel on the shelves!”

“Bah! What good is a mystery novel without the ending? We become invested in the story of young Edwin Drood and then… nothing!” Fields cried out. But he started to pace up and down the room, with a reassuring clarity kindling in his eye. He blew out a long sigh as if expelling the old despair. Suddenly he was Osgood's Fields again, the invincible businessman. “You are in part right, Osgood. Half right, I should say. Yet we mustn't be content with half of the thing at all, Osgood!”

“What choice do we have? That is all he left.”

“The man just died-all is in disarray and grief in England, I am sure. We need to discover everything we can about how Dickens intended to finish the book. If we can reveal exclusively in our edition alone how it was meant to conclude, we shall defeat all the stealthy literary pirates.”

“How shall we do it, Mr. Fields?” asked Osgood, increasingly excited.

“Courage. I shall go to London and use my knowledge of its literary circles to investigate what was in Dickens's mind. Perhaps he even wrote more before his death that he did not have the chance to hand over to his publisher-it may be sitting in some locked drawer while his family is crying out their eyes and putting on mourning clothes. I must go about coolly until I find at least a hint of what he intended. Yes, yes. Take it quietly, tell no one outside these walls our plan.”

“Our plan,” Osgood echoed.

“Yes. I will find the end to Dickens's mystery!”

ON THAT DAY in June, Osgood went from quietly mourning the death of Charles Dickens to plunging neck and heels into spinning out their practical plans. He asked Rebecca to cable John Forster, Dickens's executor, with an important message: Urgent. Send on all there is of Drood to Boston at once. They had the first three installments and needed to receive the fourth, fifth, and that sixth installment that the news papers had reported he'd been finishing when he died. Osgood ordered the printer to begin setting the existing copy of The Mystery of Edwin Drood immediately from the advance sheets they already had. In this way they'd be ready to add in whatever could be gleaned of the end and go to press immediately.

Osgood busied himself over the next week helping draw up details for Fields's trip to London. The senior partner would leave as soon as he'd settled some pressing affairs of the firm.

Not long after Dickens's death, Officer Carlton had delivered the shocking news about Daniel. Osgood had sent him to the docks to retrieve those three latest installments sent from England in response to Osgood's cable. It was yet another test to prevent emotion from becoming paralyzing.

Daniel Sand's senseless accident caused Osgood to feel a sadness of heart more intimate and stranger than that brought on by Dickens's death. The loss of Dickens was shared by millions around the world as though a personal blow to every home and hearth. Stores were closed the day of the news, flags flown low. But poor Daniel? Who would mourn? Osgood, certainly, and naturally Daniel's sister, Rebecca, Osgood's bookkeeper. Otherwise, it was an invisible death. How much more real this seemed, in a way, than Dickens's apotheosis.

When Daniel died, Osgood expected Rebecca to stop coming to work for a period. But she did not. She was as stoic as ever in her black crepe and muslin, and she did not miss one workday.

The police had left it to Osgood to inform Rebecca about Daniel. As he told her, she began to tidy her surroundings, as if too busy, with no time to listen. Her teeth clenched as a struggle brewed behind her steady face. Wide eyes closed, her thin mouth cracked, and soon the battle was lost as she fell back into her chair, head in hands.

“Are there relatives I may send for?” Osgood had asked. “Your parents?”

She shook her head and accepted a handkerchief. “No one. Did Daniel suffer greatly?”

Osgood paused. He had not told her about the police suspicions of opium use, about the telltale puncture marks on Daniel's arm. He decided at that moment not to tell her. His sympathy for Rebecca was too strong, the details of Daniel's death too painful to utter. It would be a blessing for them both to hide it from her.

“I do not think he did,” Osgood said gently.

She looked up with red-rimmed eyes. “Would you tell me one thing more, please, Mr. Osgood? Where was he coming from?” she asked, and gave him her full attention.

“From the harbor, we believe, as it happened in Dock Square. He was to pick up some papers at the docks before… before the accident.”

Her lips pursed and her eyes filled before he could say more. Though he would not have judged any kind of reaction on her part, he admired how Rebecca had neither attempted to put her grief on display nor to hide it. Without thinking, he had taken her hand and held it in his. It was a touch of competence and comfort. It had been the first time he had touched his bookkeeper-any physical contact between men and women being against firm rules. He held her hand just until she had seemed calmer, then let go.

After a week passed and she had continued to come to work without any time off, Osgood invited her into his office, the door left open for decorum's sake. “You know it would be seen as acceptable if you'd take time to grieve for Daniel.”

“I will stop wearing mourning dress to the offices if I am a distraction, Mr. Osgood,” she said. “But I will not leave, if you please.”

“Upon my soul, Rebecca-do not always wear such a brave face,” said Osgood.

“I do not want to disappoint you or Mr. Fields by staying away, Mr. Osgood.”

Osgood knew Rebecca's work meant much more to her than many girls. Some who applied for positions with eager pronouncements counted the days on their desk registers until they could find a man to marry, though since the war women far outnumbered men in the city and the search for suitors could be protracted. He also knew Rebecca was concerned that she show no weakness to Fields, even under the circumstances. The idea of young working women in the office was one thing for the liberal-minded senior partner. Divorced women was another.

“I shall respect your wishes,” Osgood had said, upon which she returned to the tasks waiting at her desk.

The end of Rebecca's marriage had first brought her from the country to the city, with her younger brother accompanying her as both her ward and guardian. Osgood had needed two and a half days to persuade Fields how impressive and prepared she had been in their first meeting, though Osgood would never mention that private campaigning to Rebecca after she was hired. He did not see her divorce as a liability nor did he wish to suggest anyone would. “You say we need employees here willing to fight,” Osgood had told Fields at the time, “and Miss Sand has had to endure the meanest treatment imaginable for a young woman.”

Osgood thought about Daniel's mission that day at the harbor. He was to meet the ship from London, where a messenger would hand him-and only him-the advance sheets for the fourth, fifth, and sixth installments of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Fields, Osgood & Co. was publishing the only authorized American edition of the serial novel in one of its periodicals, Every Saturday. Readers would find the new parts of Drood there first, set from the “advance sheets furnished us by the author.” This fact they proudly announced in each issue, as well as the fact that their publication was the only one for which Charles Dickens received any compensation. Other American magazines-including Harper's-could obviously make no such claims; nor would theirs appear until several weeks later.

For this reason, because of this competition, Daniel Sand's missions to the harbor had been kept quiet. Sending a young clerk would be far less conspicuous than sending a well-known partner like Osgood. Pirates from other publishing houses would loiter at the piers to try to intercept popular manuscripts coming from England before they were claimed by the authorized publisher. This breed of fiend called themselves Bookaneers and had vulgar names: Kitten, Molasses, Esquire, Baby. They sold their services to publishers in New York and Philadelphia or local Boston firms, and Osgood himself had been approached by some of them over the years, though he'd adamantly refused to engage in such techniques.

Daniel had known how important it was to secure the next installments and deposit it into the Fields, Osgood & Co. vault. That is why Osgood had asked Officer Carlton whether any papers had been found on Daniel-and was astounded to learn none had.

Could Daniel have been deliberately forced into the street by one of those Bookaneers attempting to take the papers? Osgood dismissed the idea from his mind as soon as he had thought it. Publishing had known some shady practices in the art of procuring a manuscript-bribery, theft, spying-but not physical assault nor, even by the shadiest Bookaneer, murder! The installments lost to Daniel's accident could be replaced from London-that was not what kept Osgood awake. But he did not want to admit that the police and coroner were right about his clerk and the opium. This boy was one of the fallen, they'd said. Had he forsaken Osgood, the firm, his own sister?

A few days later, Rebecca paused before Osgood's office door before leaving for the day. She was still wearing black-even the little jewelry she wore had been dyed black, as was custom-but she no longer wore the crepe over her dress. “Mr. Osgood,” she said, her dark hair straying from under a bonnet. As she fixed it, a ragged scar from years before was visible on the back of her right ear. “I need to thank you,” she said, and nodded knowingly.

Osgood, caught off guard, nodded and smiled back. Only after she walked away did he realize he did not know what it was she thanked him for. Was she referring to some business matter that had occurred during the day, for having given Daniel a position there years before, for holding her hand when she had cried, even though it broke the rules? Of course, it was too late now to ask her. He could not stop her the next morning and say, suavely, after giving instructions for letters and memorandum for the day, Oh, and what was it you wished to thank me for yesterday, my dear? Osgood was kicking himself for his slow brain, when a less welcome face appeared in the same place in the doorway

“Ah, Mr. Osgood, still here? No rich dinner parties tonight with the literary sort? No ‘swarry,’ as they're called?” This was Montague Midges, the circulation clerk for their magazines, the Atlantic Monthly and Every Saturday. He was an unctuous and grimly talkative little man but efficient. He was there to deliver the latest accounting numbers for the Atlantic. “I see sturdy Miss Sand is still in mourning,” he added with a sidelong glance out the door.

“Midges?”

“Your girl-keeper.” This was Midges's name for the firm's female bookkeepers. “Oh, I won't cry when Miss Two Shoes finally folds the mourning garb back in her drawer. The black makes their ankles look big, don't you think?”

“Mr. Midges, I'd prefer…”

Midges broke into whistling, as he often did in the midst of another person's sentence. “Guess she'll be breaking down without her brother in Boston, poor wretch. Ten to one she wishes now she hadn't given that husband of hers the mitten. Good night, sir!”

At that, Osgood had sprung up from his chair, but he knew if he defended Rebecca in hearing of the other female bookkeepers in the office, whispers would fly. It would only make things worse for her at a bad time. Sitting back, Osgood wondered if Midges had recognized the reality of Rebecca's situation better than he had. The palms of his hands began to sweat. Did the terrible loss of Daniel for Rebecca also mean the loss of Rebecca for Osgood?

REBECCA DIDN'T WANT to move to a new room, but the landlady insisted. With Daniel gone, she was to take her belongings to a smaller one at the top of the narrow stairs of the second-class boardinghouse for which she'd pay an additional one dollar per month.

Rebecca didn't argue-she wouldn't dare. Many boardinghouses did not take single women not living with relatives, especially divorced women, or charged them much higher rates than men. Those houses with too many needle girls from the factories feared being mistaken for brothels, and the landladies always preferred newlywed couples and male clerks when they had a choice. Rebecca's landlady, Mrs. Lepsin, made it clear that she originally had taken Rebecca in for two reasons: because she was not a shiftless Irish girl and because she was sharing the room with her brother. Now, though still not Irish, the other reason was dead, and it was clear Lepsin would prefer Rebecca gone.

Rebecca packed her clothes and her belongings by the light of a solitary candle. There were no closets in the room, so some of her clothes were already folded and the rest hanging by rusted nails on the wall. As she did, she ate a small cake of chocolate she kept with some red and white peppermint sticks inside a glove box for what she called emergencies. Like when she was hungry before bed after a meal downstairs of cold vegetables and watery rice pudding at the crowded table. Or when having to suddenly dismantle one's whole room in a matter of hours, or be put on the street!

The five-dollar monthly rent for the smaller room was more than Rebecca could possibly pay without Daniel's help, even with whatever reductions she'd find to make in her expenses. Savings accounted for, she would be able to pay two more months. If the firm's partners achieved their plan to defeat the pirates and profit as they deserved from The Mystery of Edwin Drood, it was widely expected that they would raise the bookkeepers’ salaries by seventy-five cents. If the pirates triumphed, the financial worries in the back offices of their building would worsen; salaries might even be reduced by twenty-five cents. The raise in salary had been a given before Dickens's death, but now it-and Rebecca's prospects to remain in the city-hung in the balance. When Rebecca had lived out in the country, with her carpenter husband, his income had been sufficient to keep up with the needs of a comfortable home with room to spare for young Daniel. He'd come to live with her and Ambrose on the death of their mother.

Then the war came and Ambrose left with the army. In the brutal battle of Stones River, Ambrose had been captured by the Confederates and kept as a prisoner in Danville. By the time he returned two years later, he was a skeleton of himself, debilitated and withdrawn. His temper had grown worse; he beat her regularly on the head and arms and hit Daniel whenever he intervened. The triangle of beatings and retaliation became a pattern that seemed to be the only way to keep up Ambrose's spirits. Rebecca had done her best to steer Ambrose away from his violence, but when it proved impossible to protect herself and her brother she gathered her courage and left. She'd taken Daniel away to Boston, where she had heard there were new positions opening in offices for young women in what the newspapers proclaimed the postwar economy.

That had been more than three years ago now. When she was able to afford the fees, and after a long process in the courts, she had secured a divorce from her husband. Ambrose, once notified by a country lawyer, did not object, remarking through a letter to the Boston judge that Rebecca's slender body had refused him any sons, anyway, and that her meddling brother was a worthless pest.

Under the standards of Massachusetts law, it was two years before the divorce would be final and she could remarry. Until then she was legally barred from entering any romantic relationship with a man. During that waiting period-of which there was another year remaining-any violation, or even any appearance of violation, would nullify her divorce immediately and she would not be allowed to marry again.

Being a wife was not foremost on her mind as she readied for the move upstairs. The other bookkeepers could talk all they wanted about weddings and where they would meet the coming mythical husband and how the latest ladies’ magazine advised that shaving one's entire head would lead to more lustrous hair once it grew back. All that wasn't her. Rebecca, despite everything, felt fortunate about her present situation. She had experienced marriage, and it had brought her only distress. Her post at the firm was different. True, she and the other girls at the office were “bookkeepers,” not clerks, and were paid a quarter of that paid to most of the male workers at Fields, Osgood & Co.-just as at all the other companies. But she relished her work and it supported her in a city full of young women waiting to snap up both her job and room. For that, and for the trust Osgood put in her to take care of herself, she had spontaneously thanked him before leaving the office.

It may have been a strange thing to feel relief at trading a house and a husband for a shrinking boarding room and office work all day, but that's how she felt. She thought of the words of Mrs. Gamp, Dickens's garrulous character: “It is little she needs, and that little she don't get.” The little Rebecca needed, she got.

Books, especially. When she lived as a young girl with her family on the farm, the books were her companions, sustenance feeding her mind. They had received a boxed-up library from an elderly man a few houses away who had died without family. She would stay up late with her candle adventuring with Robinson Crusoe and Dr. Frankenstein, Jane Eyre and Oliver Twist. Living in the city, she found Bostonians particular and critical about their reading material, for she had never thought about books being judged rather than devoured. She felt that working in a publishing firm, she might learn to have a more discerning eye for books’ moral and literary merits. And if she were to be called a book keeper for the rest of her days, should she object?

It was when she had to pack Daniel's side of the room that she began to feel exhausted. Her momentum broke. Before their move to Boston, Daniel used to talk about going to sea. When Rebecca had escaped Ambrose and sought a divorce, Daniel never spoke of those seafaring dreams again, never used them as an excuse to abandon her after she ran from her husband. He quietly had taken to building model ships in small glass bottles. Sometimes she liked to watch him as he worked nimbly and think how one day in the future she would insist on Daniel's taking a two year's voyage before the mast on a merchant passage. He'd finally break out of their bottled lives. These objects she now carefully wrapped in paper, watching that not one tear would spot the glass.

A part of her tried to pretend that Daniel had not died, that he was only on that ship on some far-off commercial adventure to the Orient or Africa. As she closed her eyes and opened them again on his amazing creations, she saw herself on the ships inside those bottles, surviving his dreams. An uncommon thought for a young woman whose whole life was now about survival and isolation, the opposite dream of every other girl she knew, of every ribbon in their hair and feather in their hats.

When the Sand siblings had first arrived in Boston, Daniel had become companions with a distant cousin of theirs, an indolent and hypocritical older boy. Together Daniel and his cousin drank and it became a matter of chronic intoxication. At one point, he fell off a horse they had stolen from a stable and nearly broke his neck. She alone nursed him through it, and when fourteen-year-old Daniel vowed he was through with his vice, she believed him wholeheartedly and brought him to Fields, Osgood & Co. seeking a position as shop boy.

It was the first thing she had thought of when Osgood told her about Daniel's accident. Had he returned to his old state of habitual drunkenness? Had he been coming from one of the crumbling taverns that studded the wharfside? Then she thought about it and realized… Impossible. It was impossible! She would have known. She'd lived with this. She knew the signs-she would have known.

She had seen him working the very day before his death with a steady hand on the painstaking arrangements of the battlements with the tiny pliers inside the spout of the bottle. That was the pursuit of the very sober.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, J. T Fields appeared in Osgood's office to commiserate. He had been reading the remaining chapters of The Mystery of Edwin Drood that had arrived after being resent from London. Fields took Osgood's arm and led the way downstairs.

Sitting in the firm's employee dining room, Osgood studied the newly arrived packet of pages and listened to his partner's ideas. Fields ate cold tongue and a salad, wiping food from his chin whenever he paused to speak. “A mysterious and marvelous story. So the young man, Edwin Drood, disappears and his uncle John Jasper is suspected not only of having done some foul thing but also of desiring Drood's young fiancée. So an investigation begins, led by some mysterious newcomer called Dick Datchery. But we cannot know from these pages how Edwin Drood was meant to come back and enact his revenge.”

“Come back?” Osgood asked.

Fields held up a hand as he swallowed another bite of tongue. “Yes, why, you don't think Charles Dickens would leave the innocent young man missing? I think that Datchery fellow will find him and rescue him from whatever fate Jasper had planned.”

“It seems quite plain to me that Edwin Drood is dead, Mr. Fields. The mystery will turn instead on how John Jasper will be successfully exposed as the villain by Dick Datchery, Grewgious, Tartar, and the others in the book seeking justice for the deed against young Drood.”

“Really?” Fields exclaimed, not the least bit persuaded. “Well, I shall read it all again.”

The next days, Osgood went through his routine around the offices but was distracted by thoughts of poor Daniel. One memory especially kept coming back to him, from the time when Daniel learned he was to be promoted from shop boy to clerk. Osgood had taken Daniel to his own tailor for his first proper suit-and Daniel had insisted on purchasing one exactly like Osgood's.

“That may be more money than you should spend,” Osgood had said. “I did not wear this quality wool as a new clerk.”

“Surely I'll be able to afford more sometime, if I remain at the firm and devote myself to work?” Daniel asked.

“I should think,” said Osgood, stifling a smile at his big plans.

“Then I shall already have it, instead of needing to buy a better one later.”

“How do you feel in it, young sir?” asked the tailor.

“I feel an inch taller, sir!”

Osgood laughed at the lean young man, who was already taller than he. “Perhaps after it fits properly, you will feel like a giant.”

He offered to loan Daniel money for the purchase but Daniel was proud to buy the suit with money he had painstakingly saved and even prouder of the suit itself. When the summer arrived, Daniel still had only this same heavy wool suit and no money for another of serge or flannel. But he never complained and only removed his coat when carrying the heaviest boxes of books to the cellar to pack. He kept on hand a supply of cheap cotton handkerchiefs to scrub his forehead. The strain of overuse eventually loosened the seams at the shoulders, and a couple of times a week at their boardinghouse Rebecca would repair them as best she could.

Chapter 6

ONLY DAYS AFTER HIS HOME HAD BEEN RANSACKED, SYLVANUS Bendall had arrived to work one morning and found his office in similar condition. Just as at home, nothing had been removed. The lawyer no longer could attribute the original assault on his property to being a Back Bay pioneer since his office was in a more conventional district. No, the crimes were personal. Perhaps the petty revenge of a client Bendall had failed? There were enough names in that category.

Bendall had questioned a number of his more reliable underworld connections for clues. Then one day he came to his office to find two men waiting in the anteroom. One was a young riffraff, the likes of which often frequented his offices, and the other was a gentleman. The gentleman was dressed in fine clothes and had a fresh, brave face that was instantly admirable and thus suspect in its openness.

Sylvanus Bendall did not ask who had been waiting longer; he simply introduced himself to the young gentleman as attorney-at-law and invited him into his inner office.

“I wish we had set an appointment for our interview another day, Mr. Osgood, so that you would not have had to share the waiting room with such class of people.”

“I make no complaints about the company. It is important I obtain certain facts as soon as I can.”

“I see. Important to a court of law, I suppose.”

“Not exactly,” Osgood said. “Important for myself. I have come to ask about Daniel Sand, a man in my employ who died a few weeks ago.”

“I do not believe I had the opportunity to be acquainted with him,” said Bendall. “Though I am counsel for many a poor and ignorant young man.”

“He may have begun life poor, Mr. Bendall, but he worked industriously and was not ignorant in any field he was given the chance to learn. He was killed in an omnibus accident, and I believe you were present.”

“Oh?”

“The policeman told me the name of the omnibus, and the driver remembered that you announced your name and profession.”

“Did I?” Bendall asked, bewildered.

“Several times. They recalled that you stood close to Daniel's body.”

“I see.” Bendall nodded with a new stiffness to his expression. “I suppose I did, now that you remind me. That was a tragic scene, Mr. Osgood. I hope you have been able to fill the young man's vacancy well enough and, if not, that I might suggest a candidate or two needing work. You shall hardly guess they had ever been to prison.”

“Did you see the accident, Mr. Bendall?”

“I merely heard the whap! I mean,” Bendall said, “the sound as we struck the unfortunate young man.”

“The driver said he believed Daniel was holding something when the accident occurred, but that it was gone by the time the police arrived. Mr. Sand, I should explain, was to be delivering some papers belonging to our firm.”

Bendall involuntarily caressed his waistcoat where he still kept his treasured advance sheets of the Dickens story, then chewed at his thumb's nail. He had grown uncommonly fond of these pages; so fond, come to think of it, as of his thumbnail. The last story of Dickens! Of course, the publisher sitting across from him would no doubt already have sent for a duplicate of the advance sheets from England. So what harm was there in keeping his souvenir?

“No,” Bendall answered Osgood's query blandly. Then, after waiting a moment to see the reaction in Osgood's face, added, “He wasn't holding a piece of paper, Mr. Osgood. Not even, to speak between gentlemen, the smallest dirt-coated scrap of thin quality stationery.”

“The driver must have been mistaken,” Osgood said with disappointment. “I only wish there were more clues. The police believe that my clerk was suffering in a narcotic state, and I do not want to- I cannot believe it.”

“Pooh! I cannot say, really. He was speaking mumbo jumbo, certainly-”

“What?” Osgood interrupted with a revived attentiveness. “Do you mean Daniel Sand was alive when you reached him?”

“For a few seconds only,” Bendall replied.

“The police didn't say anything about it.”

“Well, they didn't-I mean, the police! They are often so negligent. I myself have suffered break-ins twice of late, you know!”

“Please. What did Daniel say?”

“Nonsense! Gibberish, that's what. He looked at me and said ‘God’-that's right, imagine my breathing very shallowly if you will, when I say that, and a hoarse whisper as suits a man fading from the mortal state of life-‘It is God's,’ said he. It was much like a sentimental novel.”

“That was all he said? ‘It is God's’ what?”

“He did not finish the statement, I fear. It is God's will. It is God's desire, perhaps. Intention? No, too long winded. To tell the truth, if he had said more, I think I would have chosen not to hear, for to eavesdrop on a man making his peace with his maker is to do a disservice to both those parties. At any rate, I took his hand after he spoke and held it there tightly as he expired.” Bendall had not in fact taken Sand's hand after Daniel spoke his final words, but this embellishment had appeared in his retelling and the lawyer by now believed in it more sincerely than if it had occurred.

SYLVANUS BENDALL could be seen toiling around the streets of Boston for several more hours that day after meeting James Osgood, hurrying distractedly between his office, the courthouse, the bleak expanse of the Charlestown prison, then running heroically through the rain to board the horsecars on his return home. As he read the evening newspaper in his seat, he began to feel the pungent breath of a tobacco-chewing man sitting behind him and, upon leaning back in the seat, feel the man's fingers pressing against his neck. “It is not polite,” said Bendall into the air, for he was determined not to turn around, “to infringe on another person, no matter how cramped the space.”

The fingers withdrew slowly from the back of his seat. Satisfied, Bendall read on, though through a filmy lens of distraction. Ever since his meeting with Osgood, a thought was growing inside Bendall's mind. Those final words of the clerk's-it is God's. Now that his mind returned to that moment, he could not avoid feeling a helpless sense of misunderstanding. Had the poor lad actually been trying to say something in particular, to convey some kind of warning to Bendall?

Black liquid showered down on the floor by his feet.

“It is not polite to spit tobacco inside the cars, either!” the lawyer exclaimed. He heard his voice shake with a lack of control and hated that it did.

But he would not give any satisfaction to the rude imp by turning around in his seat, even when the disgusting black ooze continued to spray his neck and the man's wet umbrella dripped on him. Were the slimy head of Medusa presented to the lawyer's view, he would still not divert his gaze. Instead, Bendall got out at the next stop-three stops early. The summer rain had given way to wind and a thick, hot mist that filled a man's mouth with bitterness.

This was an empty stretch of land. Bendall's plot was far west, almost approaching the corner of Exeter Street, beyond which there was not a soul.

Unseen by Bendall, the man who had been sitting behind him also had exited the cars, only a moment before the door closed again. The heavy, wet footfalls followed just behind him until there was no way to ignore them.

Bendall, realizing he was shivering, stopped. “What is your purpose, sir?” he said sternly, this time finally turning around to face the wretch.

The stranger's umbrella was open and along with a thick fur hat, it shadowed his face. He glared, allowing his eyes to rove across Bendall's suit and down to his rubber boots. The stranger laughed with a deep, discordant bass movement of his throat. The man's sheer bulk was imposing, and his skin was dusky without being quite Negro- perhaps a Bengalee or some sort? From under the shadow of the umbrella it could be seen that he dangled an ivory toothpick on the top of his lower lip.

Sylvanus Bendall froze. He came to an immediate and urgent conclusion: not only was he in danger, but this swarthy mustachioed man with the dark eyes and the baritone laugh-this very man-was his worst enemy. It is God's vengeance, that is what the lad had meant to imply!

Bendall said, his instinct outracing his logic, “It is you, isn't it? It was you who tore my home to pieces and then my office?”

The stranger shrugged his shoulders and continued to laugh.

Bendall demanded, “What do you want with me? Why do you trifle with a gentleman? Come, now. Speak, man!”

“What… do… I… want? Dickens!” The man repeated: “Dickens!” He pronounced his words like an Englishman-or perhaps a “dude,” that particular species of American that imitated English manners-though the rumbling gruffness sounded more exotic. “You didn't give those pages back to Mr. Osgood, did you?”

Bendall answered righteously, furrowing his brow, “Pooh! Did Osgood hire you to find those papers?”

“Did you tell him of the papers, sir?” asked the man.

“It is none of his concern, nor yours. This is a free country. I kept it to myself.”

“Good fellow. Yet they are not anywhere in your office or at your home, which means…” The stranger grabbed him by the arm as the attorney felt the blood drain from his head in terror. Methodically, the man patted Bendall's waistcoat until he located the paper bundle. “You try to order me? Give them here before I make you swallow them!” He yanked out the pages and pushed Bendall hard, sending the lawyer right into a puddle.

Bendall drew a first breath of relief to have suffered only scrapes, but only a moment later, grew incensed. He'd been assaulted and muddied in the middle of the street and by the man who had also ransacked his home and office. I shall root out the source of this evil myself, he had told his housemaid, and here he had done so! Now was the time to grab the moment by the throat. Bendall, recovering his courage, rose to his feet and chased after the thief.

“Wait!” Bendall cried.

The stranger kept walking.

Bendall caught up, waving his fist. “If you don't come back and give an account of yourself, I shall go directly to the police, and complain to Mr. Osgood at once. Tell me your name!”

The stranger slowed down. “Herman,” he responded in a compliant voice. “They call me Herman.” As he said it, in one unhesitating motion, he turned around and slashed Bendall across the throat with the fangs of his cane head. Bendall gasped for air before he fell. In the dreary landscape of the New Land, there was no one around to see Bendall take his last, struggling breath.

Herman bent down and lodged a knife into the neck several times. He kept the toothpick and umbrella in place even while the knife sawed through the lawyer's bone.

Chapter 7

Bengal, India, June 18, 1870

THESE LAST TWO WEEKS FOR OFFICERS TURNER AND MASON OF the Bengal Mounted Police could have been measured out in drills, parades, and treasure escorts. Since the bullock cart convoy had been robbed, they still had not traced the second fugitive that had escaped their raid in the jungle. Worse, they had yet to recover the chests that were each filled with one picul, or 133⅓ pounds, of valuable opium that had been stolen that day.

Their supervisor in the mounted patrol, Francis Dickens, was agitated. He called the two officers to his desk. “Gentlemen, headway?”

“We received intelligence from one of the native patrolmen on some of the thief's comrades,” said Mason excitedly. “In the hills. He could be hiding there, waiting for us to abandon our investigation.”

“I rarely trust information from the native men, Mr. Dickens,” Turner interjected, countering his junior's optimism.

“There is corruption to be found in native officials, Turner, I under stand that well enough,” said Frank Dickens, a light-complexioned and slender twenty-six-year-old man wearing a flaxen mustache. He spoke with an air of one too rapidly hardened by his own authority. “That dacoit is the only fellow we know of who can lead us to the stolen opium-which I daresay they have not been bold enough to try to sell on the illegal market. We've had guards at the border to the French colony watching for just that.”

“Yes, sir,” answered back Turner.

“You understand our interest, gentlemen,” Frank Dickens added sternly. “The peace of the district depends greatly on our police department's appearing effective. We mustn't tempt thieves into thinking they are free to operate in Bengal, in our jurisdictions. The railway police and the village police are on the alert. I have an appointment today with the magistrate of the village where the escaped thief lived. I daresay he will inquire into our progress, and I rely on your service.”

The officers saluted and were dismissed. Before they exited, Frank asked to speak privately with Turner.

“Officer Turner. This dacoit-should you find him-be certain he arrives here.”

“Sir?” Turner bristled.

Frank crossed his arms over his chest. “With Narain dead, that thief may be the only way we can trace those opium chests. I want you to ensure his physical safety. You take the seat by the window.”

“By all means, Superintendent Dickens.”

As the two mounted policemen rode on their mission, Turner could not stop curling his hands into fists. He knew, everyone knew, Francis Dickens was only superintendent because of his name. Why, Turner could hold a command every bit as well as Dickens! The bloke's father, dead this month, was a poor cockney from the back country who happened to know how to pick up a pen. And how respectable was the family, in any case, with a wife in banishment from her own home, and a pretty actress having taken her place, according to the gossip Turner had read in the London columns? The great genius himself was dead and buried. It galled Turner to be ordered about by the son of such a man. And for what reason? All because Charles Dickens could sketch out maudlin stories that made women cry and men laugh. Was that all there was to becoming a rich and popular author?

He'd said to Mason more than once, “I'd rather be a son of Charles Dickens than the heir of the Duke of Westminster when it's time for promotions.”

FRANK DICKENS, MEANWHILE, rode to the magistrate's bungalow. Finding the bungalow empty, he crossed the compound to enter the cutcherry, a building of mud walls and a thatched roof. The magistrate was only a year older and his study at Calcutta University had resulted in English that bore hardly a trace of his native accent. Frank and other English officials had become rather fond of him.

Passing across the compound, Frank noted with satisfaction the newest lamps and footpaths. The more signs of civilization spread around the native villages, the less trouble. Natives rose and salaamed to him as he walked, placing their hands to their faces and bowing low. Some were lying down across the grass in the shade. One, sitting with his elbows balanced on his knees, shuffled away at the sight of the visitor-perhaps it was because Frank was European, perhaps it was the uniform.

As the Englishman entered the court, the Indian attorneys and guards also salaamed. The magistrate was sitting at a table on a platform before a dimly lit room crowded in every corner with impatient natives. Dressed in ornamental costume with gold and silver patterns, the magistrate walked around the table and took the police supervisor's hand warmly.

“Don't let me interrupt your proceedings, baboo,” Frank insisted.

“You don't disturb me at all, Mr. Dickens,” replied the magistrate jovially. “I am not very busy today. Will you take a glass of wine?”

Frank ran his gaze over the anxious men and women filling the cutcherry. “Please, go on with your proceedings.”

Despite Frank's demurral, the magistrate ordered glasses and wine to be brought from his bungalow. He brought out a case of fine cigars while his servants yelled, “Og laoul” and built a fire. The crowd in the cutcherry began to murmur among themselves and then grew louder until one of the court officials demanded silence. After the two gentlemen drank wine and brandy pawnee before their restless audience, Frank again anxiously insisted, “Please, baboo, proceed.”

The cases were tedious, and included the matter of a stolen cow, then an attempted extortion of a European traveler by a Bengalee. At two o'clock, the cutcherry emptied and the magistrate invited the police superintendent to his home for tiffin in the English style. First, however, he insisted on bringing the visitor on a full tour of the village. They began at the schoolhouse, called the Anglo-Vernacular Academy, where the master was leading a circle of potbellied pupils, covered only with threadbare sheets of muslin, in chants of the English alphabet. One of the students was unsuccessfully trying to stammer out the letter R. Frank grew pale watching this and indicated to his guide that he was ready to go.

After leaving the schoolhouse, the two officials walked across a new bridge and then visited several drains that had been installed along the streets under the magistrate's guidance. Wherever they walked, the magistrate boasted of the absence of beggars.

Back in the magistrate's bungalow at last, tiffin was ready. Wine was poured by the servants as quickly as the officials could drink.

“So your department is still hunting our escaped thief,” the magistrate commented.

“We believe he may be in the mountains-I have two of my men searching for him even now.”

“You know, Mr. Dickens, that my own villagers wish for the thief's arrest every bit as much as the white police. As you saw in the cutcherry, when a cow is stolen, it is my countrymen who suffer.”

“This is no cow,” Frank said, raising one eyebrow. “This is opium, baboo. The inspector generals shall be around about it if it is not resolved.”

“Yes, yes, the opium-important!” He raised his glass in tribute. “Let us drink to those who are paid to grow it to sell to China but also to those natives weak enough to ingest it before it is sold abroad. Young Bengal is still but a child growing too large for its first proper garments. Until my people understand to accept a life like the English, they benefit from a dulled sense of reality, a sluggish frame of mind, if I may say. No one desires another revolt, Superintendent.”

After further conversation, Frank removed his watch chain.

“Ah, one moment more, Superintendent,” said the magistrate at his visitor's restlessness. “You see?”

The magistrate was looking up at a row of books over the policeman's head. It was an expensive collection of Charles Dickens's novels.

“Illustrated editions. I am as much an admirer of your father's books as any of your own countrymen, I can assure you. I was deeply saddened to imagine his chair empty upon hearing the tidings. When will you travel back to England to pay respects?”

“You know as well as I the amount of work at the police department. I shall take a holiday month in England when things are quieter. Perhaps next year.”

The magistrate, for the first time, regarded his guest as a foreigner. “I suppose some of the English fashion is rather too cool for us Bengalees to make out,” he murmured.

Frank put the glass down, glancing up with a defensive pout emboldened by the wine. “Do you know what my father said when I told him I wished to go abroad, baboo? I had asked him to supply only a horse, a rifle, and fifteen pounds. My father laughed and then assured me that I would be robbed of the fifteen pounds, be thrown from my horse, and shoot my own head off with the rifle.” Frank paused, then added, “Bengal, in time, has become my home, and I have earned respect for my work among the Europeans and natives alike, respect never offered in England.”

“You have siblings, sir?”

“Five brothers and two sisters, yes.”

“I have seven sons and daughters myself, Mr. Dickens, and I fear fathers sometimes wish too much for their children,” the magistrate replied solicitously. “Especially, I would fancy, for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Go to that looking glass over my dresser, Mr. Dickens! The resemblance about the eyes and mouth to your father is remarkable. Every time he saw you, he surely saw himself.”

“My f-f-father,” Frank stopped. He began again, this time mastering his emotion, “My father never saw himself in me. Though the groundlings fancy him to have been the most tolerant of men, they did not ever have occasion to come under his lash. Having the world at your feet for thirty years gives you the idea that your nature is perfect. He told us that his name was our best capital and to remember that.”

The discussion was interrupted by a sudden commotion outside the bungalow. The men hurried outside and found an Indian man struggling against the hold of several of the native policemen.

“What is happening here?” demanded Frank.

“Superintendent Dickens! This is the missing opium dacoit!” cried out one of the dark-skinned policemen. After some questioning, it was revealed that it was indeed the thief who had eluded Turner and Mason in the jungle. He had been hiding in a mud cellar several villages away in the jungle. When a compatriot had seen Frank walking through the streets, he'd run through the woods to warn the thief the police were near. The compatriot had been followed and the thief had been apprehended as he attempted to sneak away.

Frank ordered the native policemen to secure the prisoner and place him in a cart to be brought to the station house.

“You see, Superintendent, that even now, in our intellectual infancy, my countrymen would not mock justice,” the magistrate said with a face-devouring grin. “I look forward to hearing his case before my cutcherry.”

Frank, after he watered his thirsty horse, climbed into his saddle and lowered his gaze at the baboo.

“Our tour through the footpaths, the bridges, the school… You wanted me to be seen by everyone in the village to be certain someone would alert the thief so that he would be captured. And in order to delay my exit until your plan was executed, you introduced the topic of my father.”

His host retained his wide smile. “We have our mutually desired result.”

“That teaches me, baboo, that the people in your jurisdiction fear the British, but they do not fear you. What does that mean for your promise to keep order? Remember that though you may be a native of this soil, you are a representative of Her Majesty the Queen.”

“I never forget it, Superintendent,” the magistrate replied, salaaming.

“Officers, mount up with your prisoner!” Frank now spoke loudly enough for the surrounding speculators of the village to hear. “Baboo, you may be assured of my deepest gratitude-I suggest you inform any family and friends of this scoundrel that assisting a villain, even if one's own blood, shall not be looked upon kindly by the British authority. This will be their warning.”

Chapter 8

Boston, the next morning, 1870

“IMAGINE IT,” FIELDS SAID, SHAKING HIS BEARD INTO A WILD mess. “Taking up the newspaper this morning with my coffee, I read that this pettifogger lawyer with whom you consulted-Sylvanus Bendall-is dead on the street. His throat is cut ear to ear, his head hanging by a thread! The police are dizzy about it. The public who had our corrupt detective department abolished are calling for them reconvened. The mayor is blaming the railroad tracks for bringing strangers into the city!”

It was early in the morning and Fields was pacing the plush rug of his office, throwing his hands up as he spoke. It was as if he were pointing to the various illustrated portraits and photographs on the walls of the firm's past and present. These were the artists who had brought literature to the masses, who had changed minds about politics and prejudices, who had rebuilt bridges between England and America all through the pages of their novels and poems.

Osgood was sitting quietly in one chair beside another recently vacated by Officer Carlton.

“Bendall was not telling me the whole truth about Daniel Sand's death, Mr. Fields,” replied Osgood, after waiting to see if Fields would say more.

Fields stared at Osgood as though he had never seen him before in his life. “So you think that is why Bendall was killed?” he asked sarcastically. “I very much doubt the reason had to do with Daniel Sand, a seventeen-year-old lad, an ordinary clerk.”

Osgood did not want to overstep the limits of his position. In the requirement of their trade to be decisive, the younger man knew about himself that he could sometimes be too quick to accept an idea heartily before fully understanding it, and other times might disagree too readily. But he could not shake his opinion.

“Bendall was there when Daniel died. The advance sheets of the installments Daniel was to pick up, which we were to use to publish in serial, disappeared, although the driver believed he had seen him holding a bundle.”

“We already know young Sand was in a flight of opium, Osgood. He could have dropped the bundle into a gutter without even knowing it. As for Bendall, a man's throat can be sliced open for nothing more than a watch chain and one gold button! Even in this,” Fields paused theatrically, “the seventieth year of the nineteenth century!”

“What about the fact that Dickens writes of opium users in the very first pages of Drood, and that is how the police say Daniel died. Is it a coincidence?”

“How could it not be? Daniel was an opium eater, and so are many more every day. That is why Dickens turned to write of it in the first place, surely, because of the many who have lost themselves in the clouds of such drugs, here and in England! Dickens has always been conscious of social ills from his earliest novels. Do you think the omnibus driver wanted to stop Daniel from his charge? Hang Daniel Sand-he is not your concern anymore. Nobody expects anything more from you.”

“I know. And yet something is-”

“Osgood, pray consider…”

Osgood would not yield. “Something is not right about all this, Mr. Fields. The police explanation from the first seemed wanting. I trusted Daniel Sand as I would my own son!”

Fields frowned. “In our calling, our authors are our children, Osgood, and it is our duty and our only duty to protect them. Do you not think I could have imagined having my own children, if Annie were more disposed to it? But what time would I have, and what would be sacrificed?”

Osgood changed his tactic. “If I can devote a little of my time to make inquiries. For his sister Rebecca's sake, if for nothing else.”

“Think about it, Osgood! What if you had been with Sylvanus Bendall when this happened? You could have been left for the dogs and vultures, your head could be in the police station today, too, with that lobster-eyed coroner poking his fingers through your brain. Indulge me: what is the name of this place?”

Osgood assumed a contrite posture. He knew what Fields meant by the question, and even the eyes of the lofty portrait gallery seemed to wait for an answer. From the left, the face of Mr. Longfellow, their first truly national poet, patient and good in his remote gaze. From the right, the eyes of Emerson's strict ministerial countenance, with a hint of a smile in the pupils, knowing and demanding better from the world just like his famed essays. Straight ahead, the glare of manly Tennyson, holding in it private, dreamy confessions of epic verse. Above the standing desk, the eyes looking down from the sad Hawthorne's fantastically intellectual head.

Osgood answered Fields's question dutifully, “Fields, Osgood and Company.”

Fields lit a cigar and convulsively puffed out circles of smoke. “Now look around, my dear Osgood. Stop for a minute and look. We could lose all of this. Everything you see, everything Bill Ticknor and I built up, and that you, my dear old friend, you will be called on to command if our house can but survive this period.”

“You are right,” said Osgood.

“An unfortunate mystery, the human spirit. Why Daniel Sand chose the path he did, we cannot know; why he would leave his poor sister alone. But you must leave him behind. Remember that there are two things in this life that are never worth crying about: what can be cured and what cannot be cured.”

Then Fields paused, before saying, “I know precisely how you shall engage again in what's before you. You will sail for London to address the Dickens problem.”

Osgood was taken by surprise. “But who will take charge of things here if we are both away?”

Fields removed a packet from his desk and handed it to his junior partner while shaking his head. “Not we. I am to stay right where you see me. As for any appointments you have here, I shall entertain them for you.”

“You have been preparing for your trip, Mr. Fields! Gathering letters of introduction, sending word of your arrival…”

“You can use them in my stead, and besides, your honest face is your letter of introduction! To be perfectly candid, Annie has not wanted me to go ever since she heard of it. She wants me the rest of the summer to stay weekends in Manchester-by-the-sea-says it will be wholesome for me. Besides, you know what a dead-gone sailor I am. My last trip to England I won the favor of being the sickest on board-even worse than the cows. Come, no arguing. Remember what our dear Hawthorne used to say: America is a country to boast of, and to get out of!’

Perhaps The Mystery of Edwin Drood had exerted a wild influence over him, making him see spectres of ill doings where there were none. There was no mystery about poor Daniel Sand, no connection between that terrible accident-which all men and women risked stepping out into the busy Boston streets-and the vicious murder of Sylvanus Bendall! There was only sadness and loss in real life, not given boundaries and significance by serial installments.

A CASUAL VISITOR TO Boston could be forgiven for thinking that everyone in the so-called Hub of the Universe spent that afternoon hurriedly preparing for James Osgood's journey across the ocean. There was an avalanche of arrangements to be made by him and on his behalf both for the home front and for his travels. To see Osgood himself hurrying from destination to destination all a-fluster would have shocked those who knew the ever-composed publisher.

In the exclusive neighborhood of Beacon Hill, inside his three-story brick house at 71 Pinckney purchased with his earnings from the Dickens tour, Osgood gave detailed instructions to his help for the maintenance of his quiet abode and its second master, Mr. Puss, his rather self-satisfied and snobby orange and white longhair cat. Mr. Puss, who was usually content to lie among Osgood's books in the carpeted library, was almost startled out of his normal trance by the rush of the servants polishing boots and preparing suits for the publisher's luggage.

Osgood went to the Fieldses around the corner on Charles Street to procure Annie Fields's list of hotels and friends in London. Fields himself arrived home from the office as Annie finished copying out this list for the junior partner at her table.

“Here you are, dear Ripley,” said Annie to Osgood, handing him a slip of her stationery.

“Oh, good, Osgood, are you coming back to the office when this beautiful lady is through with you?” Fields asked. He crossed the light-filled parlor and leaned in to kiss his smiling young wife on the cheek.

“Indeed, my dear Fields,” Osgood said. “I will walk back with you. I honestly don't know how I will finish all that I must do if I am to sail tomorrow.”

“I find whichever of my tasks must be finished are finished, Mr. Osgood,” said Annie. “Won't you have some assistance in England?”

“I suppose I will not,” Osgood said.

“How about Mr. Midges? He wields a reliable pencil,” Fields suggested. “On second thought, the magazines might crumble to the ground without his arithmetic behind them.”

Osgood, cringing inwardly, agreed the magazines’ very survival really required Midges's staying in Boston.

“A bookkeeper, then,” Annie proposed. “Why, you mustn't send Mr. Osgood on such a chore without proper resources, Jamie,” she scolded her husband.

“A bookkeeper!” Fields said, puffing out his chest as though to protect any innocent parties from the idea. “How shall it look to all the world for our respectable Osgood here to be crossing the sea with a perfectly unmarried or, for that matter, married young woman?”

“It shall look perfectly modern,” Annie replied airily.

“What about Miss Sand?” Osgood heard himself saying.

“Miss Sand?” Fields repeated slowly, stopping to see if there was anything unspoken in Osgood's expression. He found nothing, so he continued. “She is rather an enigma. Is she not unmarried as well?”

“It's a fine idea,” said Annie, the words bestowing a queenly benediction on the junior partner.

“Why, how is it any different?” asked Fields, though merely for sport, as an argument with Annie was already lost when she had made up her mind.

“If I understand correctly, my dear,” said Annie, “the terms of Miss Sand's divorce set out that she can have no romantic relationship. She is neither married nor unmarried. Why, to take her has as chaste an appearance to the world as to take Mr. Midges.”

“She makes a mite more handsome travel companion than Midges, certainly,” concluded Fields with an ambivalent agreement. “Very well, I shall have my girl see about securing Miss Sand's passage in the third steerage straightaway.”

Osgood smiled and thanked Annie for the suggestion. He was more pleased with the surprise decision than he would have expected. For one thing, he wouldn't be all alone in the undertaking. He would have someone along who was both pleasant company and supremely competent. And if Osgood needed an escape from Daniel's death, certainly Rebecca of all people needed it more.

“HOW DOES IT SOUND?” Osgood asked Rebecca after explaining the idea when he had returned to the office and found her hauling a bundle of contracts to Mr. Clark in the financial department.

“I'm honored you would entrust me with this responsibility. I'll see to the rest of the preparations tonight,” she said.

It was hours later, and already several hours since Osgood had gone home for the night, before Rebecca found herself smiling at the amazing chance to travel, to contribute, and to preserve her future in Boston by helping Osgood's quest. She knew she could make a difference, even if it were just a small one. The publishing offices were almost completely empty, but Rebecca still remained in the office, energetically gathering stacks of papers and documents for their trip. She hurried down into the cellar, where rows of metal bins were arranged with periodicals and records, the different lanes of bins having been named for authors, like Holmes Hole. She was so excited, she began a little dance through Longfellow Avenue.

“Hope you haven't any swarrys you're missing being here tonight, Miss Sand.”

“Oh!” Rebecca jumped. “Why, Mr. Midges. I'm sorry. I didn't know anyone was down here so late.”

Midges, sweating profusely, was sitting on the floor attacking a ledger. His head uncovered, his thinning hair stuck straight up as though he had seen a ghost. “Late! Not for me, why, this firm would crumble into ruins if I weren't here half my life. I wish I weren't here in some nasty cellar, love. But these subscriber lists must be just so, and they've been a mess since we've been short a clerk.”

At the thoughtless reference to Daniel's death, Rebecca looked away. “Good evening, Mr. Midges.”

“Wait! Don't!” Midges stammered awkwardly, then piped out his arbitrary whistle to put her at ease. “I'm deeply sorry about what happened to your poor brother, upon my word. It's thunderously sad. I had a baby brother die right in my lap when I was four. Just stopped breathing, and I never stop thinking of that moment.”

“I'm sorry about your brother, Mr. Midges-and I appreciate your saying so. Now I must finish my work for Mr. Osgood.”

“Yes, yes, you are very industrious,” Midges mumbled with meek embarrassment, as though rejected the last dance at the soiree in favor of Osgood. “If I may say one more thing. I am especially sorry, being a man who respects a moral character, to hear of the terrible way Danny died. I had always thought highly of him.”

A fearful look crept over Rebecca's face, making it clear she didn't understand.

Midges went on, a spasm of pleasure in his words, “Why, I heard Mr. Osgood speaking about the opium with Mr. Fields as they sat together in the dining room. Well, it's downright sad, I say! He seemed such a forthright boy. Now, if I had a sister, love, and she were pretty and sensible as you, for instance…”

Rebecca lifted the bottom of her skirts and hurried up the stairs, away from Midges, as quickly as possible.

“Good evening, Miss Sand!” Midges called out after her with a heartbroken, confused stare. “Plucky, manlike creature!” he marveled to himself.

REBECCA WENT UPSTAIRS, her hands clenched in fists on her desk. She felt a great weight resting on her chest, and a tear fell down her red cheek. These were not tears of sadness; these were tears of anger, frustration, rage. These tears were difficult: they didn't want to come out and they didn't want to stay in. Hardly conscious of what she was doing, she found the handkerchief Osgood had given her when telling her the news, and looked at the pretty design of the JRO monogram. In his personal letters, he'd sign an informal “James” but would add “(R. Osgood).” The rest of the world would see him genial and prepared for anything, but she had appreciated the fact that she saw him in his moments of consternation-he would always sit with one or sometimes both hands on the back of his neck, as if to support the weight of the thoughts in his head. In the evenings when back home, she would sometimes think of him as James instead of Mr. Osgood. That he would say such things about her brother was devastating-and within earshot of everyone! She'd been a fool to believe him their advocate.

She waited for a horsecar that would take her close to Oxford Street, which would be a fast passage, but in the swirl of her emotions Rebecca could not stand the crowd of other homebound workers. The walk home seemed to be both instantaneous and cruelly tedious.

Back in her room at the second-class boardinghouse, the stillness and quiet after the hurry of her journey home felt suffocating. Were these blank walls all that was left of her life? No family, no Daniel, no husband, and now not even the trust she had always imagined she had earned specially from Mr. Osgood, a man she had admired more than anyone in Boston for giving her an honest and respectful vocation. The anger had burned up her tears and she was left with panic. Without knowing why, the orderliness of her tiny quarters newly befuddled her, and she pulled out her chest from under her bed and began to reorganize her belongings.

It crossed her mind not to go to the piers in the morning and, furthermore, not to ever return to the firm or Boston. If she chose, she would never see Mr. Osgood again. But this room, old Mrs. Lepsin and her family of sorrowful boarders, this could not be what remained of Rebecca Sand; this could not be what remained of her Boston; this minuscule life must have existed in some other universe. She needed the voyage held out to her. And she knew the one thing she needed right now, more than anything, was an explanation from Osgood's own lips.

Chapter 9

A BOARD THE OCEAN LINER TO ENGLAND, OSGOOD HANDED OUT books liberally in the grand saloon, instantly counting a dozen gentlemen and half that number of ladies whose names and tastes he knew by way of this introduction. This transatlantic ship, the Samaria, was an ideal place for Osgood's natural sociability. Away from normal occupations in the world, the passengers-at least in fine weather-were inclined to be polite, courteous, and open. Nothing could brighten up a publisher and an oldest sibling like James R. Osgood more than helping a shipful of people be happy. He was not the type of man to crack jokes, but he was usually the first to laugh at them. When he did tell jokes, he would remind himself not to later- for too often there would be someone to take what he meant in jest very soberly.

The men of commerce in the first steerage, with an eye toward a bargain despite their long purses, lined up to receive Osgood's gifts. The young publisher's most sociable traveling companion was an English tea merchant, Mr. Marcus Wakefield. Like Osgood, he was young given his significant achievements as a businessman-though the lines in Wakefield's face suggested one hardened beyond his years.

“What is this I see?” Wakefield asked after introducing himself. He was handsome and well groomed with an easy, self-confident, almost jaunty air when he spoke. He stepped closer to Osgood's case of books. “I've been in this ship's library many times, and I declare you have the better selection, sir.”

“Mr. Wakefield, pray take one to begin the journey.”

“Upon my word!”

“I am a publisher, you see. Partner of Fields, Osgood, and Company.”

“It is a trade of which I am entirely uneducated, although I could tell you every spice that makes up the strongest tea in twelve countries and whether the new season's tea is pekoe, congou, or imperial. Forgive the liberty of my question, but how can you give away the merchandise you own instead of selling it? I'd like to shake hands with the man who can succeed like that!”

“We do not own books. Only an author can own a book. It is the honorable position of the publisher to find people to buy stock in it. I like to say, Mr. Wakefield, that one good book will whet a reader's appetite enough that he shall take up ten more in the next year.”

“It is more than kind.”

“Besides, at customs in Liverpool they must look through every book carried off the ship for reprints of English books, so those could be confiscated. I say, Mr. Wakefield, that if I do not dispense with these as planned, I will be held up there for hours while they are examined.”

“I shall be a willing thief, then, if you insist, but I will pay you back ten times on our passage in friendship-and in pekoe.”

IT WAS NOT UNTIL the second morning, when the reality of being trapped at sea away from home and friends floated down upon each passenger, that Osgood questioned Rebecca Sand. Though she always tended to keep her own counsel, she had been unusually distant toward her employer since boarding. At first, Osgood had thought she only wished to ensure a professional demeanor in this new setting, surrounded by strangers, some of whom would disapprove of young women traveling for business.

“Miss Sand,” Osgood said as he met her on deck. “I hope you have escaped feeling seasick.”

“I have been so fortunate, Mr. Osgood,” she answered curtly.

Osgood knew he would need to be more direct. “I cannot help but observe a change in your demeanor since we have left Boston. Set me right if I am mistaken.”

“You are not, sir,” she replied steadily. “You are not.”

“Is this change toward me in particular?”

“It is,” she agreed.

Osgood, perceiving a steeper hill to climb in their terse catechism than he'd thought, found two deck chairs across from each other and asked if she would say more. Rebecca folded her gloves over her lap and then calmly explained what she'd heard from Midges in the office cellar.

“Midges, that ogre!” Osgood cried, his hand curling into a fist against the arm of his deck chair. He stood up and kicked an imaginary miniature Midges overboard with his boot. “How unthinking and cruel. I should have taken better care that he did not overhear my private conversations with Mr. Fields. I am very sorry about all of this.”

Osgood told her how the police officer, Carlton, and the coroner had concluded Daniel had become an opium eater. This time he did not spare any of the details. “I did not believe it,” he said. “Then they showed me marks on his arm, Miss Sand, that they say were from a ‘hypodermic’ kit to inject opium into his veins.”

Rebecca thought about all of this, staring out onto the water, then shook her head. “We shared our rooms. If Daniel was an opium eater, I would have recognized even the smallest sign, God knows that. When my husband returned from Danville after the war, he required phials of morphine or Indian hemp on hand at all times. He carried around a look of blankness, an emptiness that would not let him work or sleep or eat. He wanted nobody around him and no visitors except those he found in his solitude in our books and in dreams. He had survived the battlefields, but his soul was shattered by the evils of what his doctor called soldiers’ disease. Daniel had been bent on his own form of intemperance when we moved to Boston, and when I first heard of the accident I had to wonder whether he had renewed his habits of gin. No, I would have noticed the marks. I would have seen it in his face. There would have been no doubt, Mr. Osgood, I would have, and immediate action would have been taken.”

Osgood said sympathetically, “I couldn't fathom it either.”

“You couldn't fathom the police being right, or you couldn't fathom why Daniel would fail your trust?” Rebecca asked.

Osgood turned and met her glare. An intense bloom had risen on her soft cheeks and her eyes narrowed. Osgood, chastened, nodded in surrender. “You are right to be angry about my not telling you all this. You are angry? I wish you to speak freely of this.”

“I cannot believe you'd hide the details of the police report from me-whether or not they are correct. If I am to take care of myself like a man does and be dependent on no man, then I expect not to be treated like a helpless vessel. You deprived me of the chance to defend his name! I am grateful for my position, and my livelihood depends upon it, so I ought never demand much in my circumstances, I know. But I believe I deserve your respect.”

“You have that. I assure you,” said Osgood.

REBECCA RESIDED IN the drabbest class of cabins on the ship. No electric bells to call the stewards, no ornate chandeliers, painted panels, and domed ceilings like in the higher steerage filled with superior society. Rebecca used the time she spent in her small stateroom to read. Unlike most of the other girls she knew in Boston, she did not read for sensation but to understand her own life in a more direct way and to learn more about the publishing trade. Aboard the liner, she had brought a rather technical book on the history of sea travel.

She had also brought one of Daniel's bottled ship models. To think that it was her sailing across the ocean and not her brother who'd yearned for such a voyage. If there were an immortal part of Daniel, surely it was her companion here.

At night, she would sometimes stand outside by the rail and quietly watch the sea and stars and the horizon where they met.

“There is such romance to a sea voyage!” a young female traveler exclaimed one morning when she observed Rebecca in this attitude. Christie, a green-eyed girl covered head to toe in freckles, shared the compartment with Rebecca. “Don't you think, miss?”

“Romance,” repeated Rebecca, shaking her head. “I don't know.”

The freckled girl insisted on the point. “You're a goose, aren't you, miss? How could you not think so? Say you haven't noticed the number of handsome gentlemen on this ship! I do not wish to be a nurse living alongside lazy Irish housemaids for long, you know.”

“Do you not enjoy your charges, Miss Christie?”

“Those little devils! It is well enough, for I tell them there is a black man who swallows up little children who do not listen to their nurses. Oh, but those Irish girls-the Sallys and Marys and Bridgets- they just stir up the children's spirits again.”

“Unfortunate,” said Rebecca.

“I shall not weep for long for them when I find a husband. This ship is full of such possibility! Think of the bachelors, businessmen and club men, and the young men with rich fathers, and the possibilities of love from one of them. I suppose one might even try slipping off the side into the waves to wait to be rescued.”

“Yes,” Rebecca said quietly. Her raven black hair had been loosened by the breeze and fell pleasantly over her face. “One might also drown,” she said wryly.

“Oh, or being shipwrecked, just the two of you!” came the oblivious response. Christie chatted on, “You're spoken of as one of the four prettiest maidens aboard. Mind, that's in spite of a too-high brow and the fact that you haven't a bit of style to speak of with your mourning clothes, which make you look so pale and strong-willed. Why not put a flower in your belt sometimes as a starter for any lover's casual flirtation? And you always have a book at your hip like some kind of tomboy. What of that charming young man you're traveling with? There are plenty of women who have designs on him, if you are too selective for his hand.”

“I am here to work,” said Rebecca, looking away so the girl would not see her cheeks coloring, her body betraying her when she most needed it to submit. “I should like very much to prove myself capable of working as a self-supporting individual. That is all I seek from Mr. Osgood.”

“He dresses nicely and keeps his temper.”

“Well, yes, he does.”

“That is what matters.”

“He is much less ordinary and average than that,” Rebecca objected.

“What's your counsel?”

“What do you mean my counsel?”

“Yes, on impressing your Mr. Osgood!”

“He is not my… My counsel is that Mr. Osgood is occupied with his business affairs and not nonsense.”

“A pity!” replied her companion, disappointed by James Osgood's inverted priorities. “I would have invited you to the wedding, you know.”

During their voyage, Rebecca would often meet Osgood in the ship's library to help compose letters to Dickens's publishing representatives in London or draft other documents. Though she could not dine at his table or take part in first-class pastimes, one pleasant afternoon she was sitting out on a deck chair reading the pages of Drood, wearing a wrap to protect herself against the wind. She had been joined by some girls who were knitting. In a nearby porthole, she noticed a reflection of the parlor, where Osgood was playing chess, a game that Rebecca had taught Daniel to fill his evenings at the boardinghouse in Boston after he had stopped drinking.

At first, feeling she should not spy, she tried returning her attention to her reading but could not help herself. She became fascinated at the idea of watching her employer without him knowing. She had to remind herself that she'd remained a bit disappointed toward Osgood, and as though a sort of punishment of him, she decided she should withhold her interest. But before long, she was so enamored by the maneuvers of the game that she concocted her own silent strategies. Osgood reached a critical turn, his hand frozen above the table, and she urged him mentally to move the knight to the back left of his opponent's board.

That will do it, Mr. Osgood! she thought. She knew he would do nothing more than smile politely if he won, so as not to belittle the other player.

A moment later, after withdrawing his hand from several aborted moves, he chose the move she counseled. She clapped her hands in delight, and two of the girls peered over their knitting with shaking heads.

Even after only a few days at sea, she felt herself to be in an entirely different world from Boston. The voyage did not remove Daniel from her mind. In his absence, she realized how much of his resilience and buoyancy had passed into her own ambitions for herself. His voice had become part of her inner life in a way she could not de-scribe. The voyage made her feel temporarily at peace about his death, as though he were part of the endless expanse of sky and saltwater and warm breezes.

ONE WARM MORNING, Osgood was walking along the upper deck in a general abstraction. The winds were picking up and the ship was shakier than it had been. Nausea gradually spread to a few new people each day. The ship's doctor passed out small drafts of morphine to calm the nerves. Passengers who were not sick had grown bored of chess and cards and of talking politics over cigars. Soon, not even the dinner bell interested them; only a whale sighting could temporarily stir the general sluggishness. But not Osgood-Osgood had avoided ennui entirely.

He remained industrious, well dressed and engrossed in his coming mission. While other men were now regularly unshaven, his mustache was trim and his face clean. Osgood saw this not just as habit but necessity. His face, though composed of pleasant-enough features, was rather inconspicuous, not to say nondescript. In fact, it was not uncommon for a person who had met Osgood in one place-say, the Tremont Street office-to then, perhaps days later, meet with him in another setting-the bridge at the Public Garden-and evince not a shred of recognition. Sometimes a change of sunlight to gaslight, or a Saturday rather than a Tuesday, was known to produce the same confusion in those attempting to place a memory of the publisher's identity. This all would be made more problematic had Osgood ever changed the cut of a single hair, which the publisher did not dare to do. It might risk him waking up one morning and finding his home and position taken away from him.

Osgood had continued to study the pages of The Mystery of Edwin Drood he had brought with him. The book was different from the usual Dickens work and his most artistic endeavor since A Tale of Two Cities. It was the work of a ripe genius, restrained and taut, and would have been his masterpiece when finished, Osgood was convinced, and like any masterpiece equally beloved and misunderstood. Morbid and dark, it had a divided family of the fictionally named Cloisterham village and only a bleak hope for happiness for them. The characters were infused with such life that one could almost feel that they would step out of the pages and act out the remainder of the story without Dickens's pen to help. The looming question lurked at the end of the existing pages: Was Edwin Drood, the young hero, murdered? Or was he in hiding, waiting to return triumphantly?

Of course, there was no thinking of Drood's disappearance without thinking of Dickens's death. The two were welded together for all time now. Would learning more about one ease the sad reality of the other? This was the momentum of Osgood's thoughts as he roamed the deck when he lost his balance on a slippery board and, before he could grab the railing, fell down hard on his back.

After a moment of confusion, he realized he was being offered a hand. Or a head, to be precise-the gold head of a heavy walking cane. Osgood reached hesitantly for the ugly, fanged monster carving and started to pull himself to his feet. Osgood had seen this man, with the wide mustache and brown turban, who kept mostly to himself, grumbling occasional demands to a waiter or steward, waving this queer cane around. Osgood had heard him referred to as Herman, and thought he appeared to be Parsee, but knew nothing else of him.

“All right?” Herman asked in his gravelly voice.

Osgood lowered himself back down, feeling a pain run through his back.

“I'll send for the ship's surgeon,” Herman said, with a cold but polite tone.

By this point, a small circle of passengers from all steerages and several crew members had gathered at the spot of the fall. Rebecca saw the crowd forming and ran as fast as she could move her legs in her narrow dress. She had to squeeze through the other girls, who were making a show of their concern.

“Well, you are a goose!” said Christie. “We were here first, miss,” said another girl from their steerage, a gaudy redhead.

“Miss Sand,” Osgood called out with relief. “Very sorry for the spectacle. Will you help me?”

“Beg your pardon,” Rebecca said to the redhead and her freckled companion with more than a little pleasure as she pushed by them. The wind draped her plain black dress around her and showed in her simple form a beauty to rival any of the other more lavishly displayed and ribboned girls lined up behind her. She gave Osgood her arm. “Mr. Osgood, how very unlucky!” she said sympathetically. “Are you hurt?”

“Luck-which they say in business is dispersed at random-played no part in this fraud, my dear young lady,” came a voice from the perimeter of the circle of onlookers. It was the English businessman, Wakefield. The tea merchant was elegantly dressed in a traditional cape and checked trousers. He stopped to nod courteously to Rebecca, then continued making his way forward. “My friend Osgood, victim!”

“Mr. Wakefield, you are mistaken. The spray from the ocean has been quite rough, you see, and I slipped in a puddle,” Osgood insisted.

“No. That is what this man would like you to think.” Wakefield turned sharply at the large man who had helped Osgood to his feet.

“Beg pardon?” Herman asked the impudent accuser, his hands resting on the cord tied around his tunic and knotted in four places.

“The spray has become quite vicious, it's very true,” Wakefield explained, “which is why I was out walking instead of feeling sick in my stateroom. It was thus that I witnessed this man pouring water from a bucket into that corner. He appeared to be watching for someone to appear before doing it.”

“Do you mean he did this on purpose? Why would he do such a horrid thing?” asked Rebecca, turning to look at Herman. As she met the accused's eyes and innocent smile, a sudden, almost magnetic repulsion forced her to take a step back. The dark, malicious eyes gave her a rush of inexplicable fear and hatred.

Wakefield glanced at Rebecca. “My little woman, you are very innocent! I am embarrassed to say we have sharpers in England who would target any good-natured gentleman. I travel frequently on this and other liners and have been robbed two times myself. I believe this man is what the police call a floorer, or a tripper.”

“What?” Osgood asked.

“Never mind!” Herman's face grew bright. He stuck a toothpick in his mouth and chewed restlessly. “I know not what this bloke means by this, and I suggest he retreats.”

“Just a moment, please, my dear Mr. Wakefield,” said Osgood, the natural diplomat. “This man did help me after my fall.”

“Let us consider why he would do that, what opportunity that might afford him,” Wakefield mused, squaring the lower part of his face by placing one finger on each curve of his dusty-colored mustache.

Herman swatted his hand at Wakefield's head, knocking his hat high into the air. The breeze took the hat right down to Rebecca, who caught it.

“Search this man,” ordered the captain, a hairy, square-shaped man who had joined in the circle. He pointed at Herman, and the stewards seized him. They pulled out a watch and a calfskin pocket-book from Herman's tunic pocket.

“Are these yours, sir?” the captain asked Osgood.

“They are,” Osgood admitted with dismay.

“I will knock your damned guts out, and yours, too!” Herman growled to Osgood and then Wakefield.

“Threats will do nothing,” said Wakefield, though his hands trembled as he straightened the pin in his cravat. He accepted his hat back from Rebecca, bowing courteously again as a means of suppressing his trembling.

Two stewards rapidly wrestled Herman into submission and secured the thief. Most of the women covered their faces with their handkerchiefs or cried out, but Rebecca, standing next to Osgood, kept watching him in a mesmerized stare. Herman looked across at Osgood. “You louse! I'll feed your legs to the sharks, mark that!”

The voice was grating and deep, a baritone that made one wish one had never heard it.

“Go to the devil, villain!” He turned to a steward standing near him. “Take him below deck! The police in London will know how to deal with him.”

THE SHIP'S SURGEON concluded that Osgood's injuries were superficial. The captain offered him a special tour of the ship, including the brig, where Osgood was surprised to see an array of strong cells befitting a battleship.

“The construction of all the major English liners are subsidized by the Royal Navy, you see. In return they are built so they can be converted into warships,” the captain explained. “Cannons, prison cells, and what-you-will.”

Herman, slouched on the floor in the corner of one cell, praying to the red-hot furnace outside the cell, glanced up at his visitors, then looked back at the furnace. To the evident satisfaction of the captain, the man appeared worn out. Yet Herman retained a slippery grin of the strangest type, as though everyone else aboard were in prison, and he was the one completely free. His feet were bound together by a chain, and his wrist chained to the wall, and rats ran back and forth over his legs. His turban had been removed and his head was shaved clean, except for coarse patches of hair at the temples. Osgood found-from fear or humility-that he could not look into the eye of his assailant.

As Osgood and the captain climbed up the stairs again, the prisoner began singing a children's rhyme.

In works of labor or of skill,

I would be busy too:

For Satan finds some mischief still

For idle hands to do.

Then there was a sound, like a rat squealing.

THE DAYS AFTER THE attack saw Osgood feted at the captain's table at supper and given a hero's greeting every time he met his fellow passengers. Coming onto the deck for a morning walk now attracted a procession of the single women. Rebecca would sit on her deck chair and watch this grudgingly from under her hat.

Her roommate, Christie, sat down next to her. “What a picture of romance Mr. Osgood is!” She smiled at Rebecca, leaning in. “He is more admired now than ever!”

Rebecca did her best to appear occupied by the book in her lap. “I find nothing to smile about. He might have been hurt,” she said.

“Well, then just what is your idea of romance? Perhaps you haven't one, miss.”

Rebecca kept her eyes on her book and tried to ignore her. But, contrary to her own determination, she spoke. “Till the judgment that yourself arise, you live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.”

Christie listened to the verse from the Shakespeare sonnet, then said, “Beg pardon?”

“Romance is not an idea, Christie, but a moment. An unspoken glance when someone looks into your eyes and knows exactly who you are, what you need.”

The other girl sat up with a mischievous energy. “Well, ain't that nice! Let us get a gentleman's opinion on the same question.”

“What?” said Rebecca, taken aback.

She turned her head and saw to her horror that Osgood was standing behind the chairs. She wondered with a slight shiver how long he had been there.

“Now, Mr. Osgood,” said the loquacious Christie, “how does a real Boston gentleman like yourself define real romance?”

“Well,” Osgood said, blushing, “self-sacrifice for one's beloved, I suppose I'd say.”

“How very endearing!” replied Christie. “You mean such sentiment on behalf of the man, I guess, Mr. Osgood? Oh, it is much more charming. Don't you think, Miss Rebecca? Oh, how dreadfully you look, dear girl.”

Rebecca stood up and straightened her dress. “The ship is shaky this morning,” she said.

“I'll walk you to your cabin, Miss Sand.” Osgood offered his arm with concern.

“Thank you, but I'll find my way, Mr. Osgood. I wanted to visit the ship library.”

Rebecca left Osgood standing, while Christie continued to gaze at him, tossing her hair. “Miss didn't need to have such a conniption fit, did she, Mr. Osgood?” Osgood gave her an awkward nod before hurrying away.

“You have become more popular with the ladies than the captain himself!” Wakefield said later as he and Osgood shared cigars in the main saloon.

“I shall fall on my head tomorrow again then,” Osgood said. His companion seeming alarmed at this proposal, Osgood recited to himself his rule not to try jokes.

“Well, I suspect with a young lady as you have singing second in your duet, the feminine attention should not turn your head too much.”

The publisher raised his eyebrows, “You mean Miss Sand?”

“Do you have another beautiful girl in your trunk?” Wakefield laughed. “I apologize, Mr. Osgood. Am I wrong to presume you have designs on the young woman? Do not tell me: she comes from another class of society than you, she is just a career woman, and so on. I am a philosophical person, as you'll learn, my American friend. It is my conviction that we make ourselves who we want to be and not chain ourselves to the notions of busybodies who wish to judge us. Neglect your friends and family, neglect your dress, go to the devil generally, but do not neglect love! Do not lose that siren to the next Tom or Dick who is not as cautious and proper!”

Osgood had a rare feeling in his throat: he was at a loss to respond appropriately. “Miss Sand is an excellent bookkeeper, Mr. Wakefield. There is not another person in the firm whom I would trust as I do her.”

Wakefield nodded thoughtfully. He had a habit of caressing his own knee-sometimes kneading, sometimes tapping to an unheard but thoughtful rhythm. “My father used to say that I can let my imagination run away. And when I do, all manners disappear. I apologize, I do.”

“To place trust in your confidence, Mr. Wakefield, she is a divorcée only in the last several years. By the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, she may not have romantic ties for another full year, or her divorce grant will be revoked and she will lose privileges for future marriage.” Osgood paused. “I say this to point out that she is a most sensible person, by character and by necessity. She does not fancy excitement for its sake like many girls.”

After his time in the saloon, Osgood was surprised to notice Rebecca standing on deck looking out at the ocean.

“Is something wrong, Miss Sand?” Osgood asked, approaching her.

“Yes,” she said, turning to him with a forceful nod. “I think so, Mr. Osgood. If you were a pickpocket on a ship, would you not wait until the end of the voyage to steal?”

“What?” Osgood asked, unprepared for the subject.

“Otherwise,” Rebecca went on confidently, “yes, otherwise when someone reports the theft to the captain, the criminal would be trapped with the stolen goods.”

Osgood shrugged. “Well, I suppose so. Mr. Wakefield commented that this type of crime is not uncommon in England, nor on ships.”

“No. But this Parsee man, Herman, he hardly seems like the usual pickpocket, does he?” Rebecca asked. “Think of Charles Dickens's own descriptions of that breed of criminal. They are quite young rascals, desperate and set on quick profit, inconspicuous. Certainly not like him. I should wonder if he is any less than six feet tall!”

A FEW DAYS LATER, the weather was inclement, too soggy to be out on deck, while Osgood, despite his better instincts, sat in the ship's library brooding about Herman. He had found an English edition of Oliver Twist, published by Chapman & Hall, and had turned to the chapters describing Oliver's experiences with the circle of pickpockets. It was hard to return to the normal routine of shipboard life in the shadow of that strange assault and Rebecca's astute observations. Those burning orbs of the thief had remained seared in Osgood's mind.

Remembering the maze of halls from the captain's tour, he brought a candle from his stateroom and quietly retraced his steps through the dark halls to the brig. He did not fear for his safety, not with the prisoner chained and the iron bars between them. No, he feared more, perhaps, whatever it was Herman might reveal: some danger that Osgood could not yet anticipate. Prompted by Rebecca's questions, he had begun to wonder just what a man like Herman had been doing in Boston in the first place.

When he reached the lower level of the ship and found the row of jail cells, each one black with iron and metal, strewn with grime and dust, he stopped in front of Herman's. He raised the candle and gasped loudly. The cell was empty but for a dead rat, its head missing, and a set of dangling chains.

Chapter 10

OSGOOD STOOD IN PLACE FOR A MOMENT, PARALYZED BY FEAR and surprise, though he knew he must act quickly. Hesitation could put him in even greater peril-worse, it could endanger his friend Mr. Wakefield or even Rebecca! Herman might be anywhere on the ship, and if he could escape a prison cell built for war, he could also prove far more dangerous than a petty “floorer.”

Osgood dashed though the dark and climbed the stairs two at a time.

“What's the matter, sir?” asked a steward whom Osgood nearly knocked over.

Osgood rapidly conveyed the situation to the steward, and the captain and his staff soon gathered. They divided into groups to search the steamer in all quarters for Herman. Osgood and the rest of the passengers were left in the saloon with an armed sentry to ensure their safety. When the captain returned, hat in hand, rifle under his folded arm, wiping the sweat gathered from the expedition, he reported that Herman was nowhere on board.

“How is that possible, sir?” Rebecca demanded to know.

“We do not know, Miss Sand. He was seen yesterday morning when one of my stewards brought him his soup. He must have forced open the lock and escaped sometime during the night.”

“Escaped to where, Captain?” Wakefield cried, both of his hands engaging in a fierce kneading of his knees.

“I do not know, Mr. Wakefield. Perhaps he saw another ship and decided to swim for it. The winds were choppy yesterday, though: it is unlikely he would have survived if he tried such a mad flight. He has almost certainly perished in the depths, and will sleep soundly in Davy Jones's locker.”

Hearing this grim scenario, the passengers exhaled their excitement and by the time they returned to their staterooms were bored again. After a few days, thoughts of soon reaching England erased those of the escaped prisoner. Passengers packed up the contents of their staterooms into a few small valises and settled up surprisingly high wine bills with the stewards. Osgood likewise attempted to suppress the questions in his mind. Not Rebecca, though.

“It doesn't make sense, Mr. Osgood,” she insisted one afternoon in the library, tapping her fingers busily on the tabletop.

“What doesn't, Miss Sand?”

“The disappearance of the thief!”

Osgood, one hand locked behind his neck in his usual pose of concentration, looked up from his ledger abruptly but quickly resumed his preoccupied pose facing the window. “You mustn't think too much on that subject, Miss Sand. You heard the captain say that the man perished. If we believed otherwise, we might as well believe in sea serpents. And surely they would have devoured the thief, if we believed in them!”

“What kind of a man drowns himself to escape charges of petty theft? What if…?” Rebecca's voice trailed off there, replaced by her tapping fingers.

A few hours later, Osgood could be found pacing the deck alone as he had done the morning of Herman's trap. As they had sailed closer to England, he looked dreamily at the distant vessels with unknown destinies that sat high against the horizon. Osgood thought about the anxiety on Rebecca's face and knew what she had wanted to say earlier in the library: What if Herman were still alive, what if he comes back for you? He did his best to eject these thoughts by imagining what Fields would reply, holding his head erect and his beard thrust forward. Remember the reason for this trip. It is to end Dickens's mystery, not to create your own. Otherwise, our enterprises can become helter-skelter, our lives out of our control.