The Last Dickens

Chapter 40

Boston, December 1870, five months later

CROSSING THE ORNATE LOBBY, THE MAN WITH THE FLOWING white beard made a graceful stop at the front desk.

“Is Mr. Clark in?”

He addressed this question to a definitively New England shop boy, whose dream was one day to turn thirteen years old and another day to write a book of his own like the ones in the shining glass cases. For now he was content to be sitting and reading one. “Guess he ain't,” was his reply, too absorbed to break his concentration.

“Can you say when he'll return?”

“Guess I can't.”

“Mr. Osgood or Mr. Fields, then?”

“Mr. Osgood's out on business, and Mr. Fields, he's not to be disturbed today, guess I don't know why.”

“Well,” the caller chuckled to himself. “I entrust these important papers with you, then, sir.”

The lad looked up at the documents and took the card that sat on top with a surprised and astonished expression.

“Mr. Longfellow,” he said, jumping to his feet from his stool. He stared at the visitor with the same intensity he had reserved for his book. “Say, old man! Do you mean to say you are really Long fellow?”

“I am, young man.”

“Wall! I wouldn't have thought it! Now, how old was you when you wrote Hiawatha? That's what I want to know.”

After satisfying this and the shop boy's other burning questions, the poet turned toward the front doors as he secured his heavy coat, lowered his hat, and braced himself for the wintry air.

“My dear Mr. Longfellow!”

Longfellow looked up and saw it was James Osgood coming in. He greeted the young publisher.

“Come upstairs and warm awhile by the fire in the Authors’ Room, Mr. Longfellow?” suggested Osgood.

“The Authors’ Room,” Longfellow repeated, smiling dreamily. “How long since I idled there with our friends! The world was a holiday planet then, and things were precisely what they seemed. I've just left some papers for Mr. Clark that needed my signature. But I ought to return to Cambridge to my girls.”

“I shall walk with you part of the way, if you'd allow it. I have my gloves on already.”

Osgood put his arm through the author's as they walked up Tremont Street through the blustery afternoon. Their talk, interrupted at intervals by the freezing gusts, soon turned to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The Fields, Osgood & Co. edition had just been published a few months earlier.

“I believe I interrupted your shop boy's enjoyment of Drood's tale,” Longfellow said.

“Oh, yes. That's little Rich-he hadn't seen a schoolroom before two years ago, and now reads a book a week. Drood is his favorite so far.”

“It is certainly one of Mr. Dickens's most beautiful works, if not the most beautiful of all. It is too sad to think the pen had fallen out of his hand to leave it incomplete,” Longfellow said.

“Some months ago I had in my possession the final pages,” said Osgood, without exactly intending to. What would Osgood tell him about it? That Fred Chapman had taken the manuscript back to England? That an accident had occurred on board the ship and destroyed several pieces of baggage including the trunk carrying. Drood? “Cruel misfortune intervened,” Osgood commented vaguely.

Longfellow paused before replying, pulling Osgood's arm closer as if to tell him a secret. “It is for the best.”

“What do you mean?”

“I sometimes think, dear Mr. Osgood, that all proper books are unfinished. They simply have to feign completion for the convenience of the public. If not for publishers, no authors would ever reach the end. We would have all writers and no readers. So you mustn't shed a tear for Drood. No, there is much to envy about it- I mean that each reader will imagine his or her ideal ending for it, and every reader will be happy with their own private finale in their mind. It is in a truer state, perhaps, than any other work of its kind, however large we print those words, The End. And you have made the best of it!”

Indeed, their edition of Drood had been a resounding success by any measure and beyond every expectation, sending the publishing firm scrambling to print enough editions to keep up with demand. It had seemed that stories had trickled out into the trade-apparently beginning with a Bookaneer who called himself Molasses-of Os-good's remarkable search for the book's ending. Pieces of the narrative of this quest, some entirely true and some wild rumor, were put together in a lengthy series of articles by Mr. Leypoldt in his newly titled magazine, the Publishers Weekly, as the first of his stories of the soul of publishing, which brought thousands of new eyes on Leypoldt's magazine and led to the narrative being retold by the major newspapers and journals in all the cities. This attracted enormous attention and interest in their edition of Drood, turning the name Osgood on the title page into a selling point-while the pirated editions by Harper hawked by the peddlers and bagmen gathered dust. The Fields & Osgood editions filled the front windows of bookstores, banishing the Indian prints and cigar boxes to the back.

The added attention by the trade journals not only helped sell copies of Drood. It brought in fresh new authors who wanted to be published by a man like Osgood-Louisa May Alcott, Bret Harte, Anna Leonowens, among others. Osgood was currently discussing arrangements for a novel with Mr. Samuel Clemens.

It was all a revelation in the trade. The firm was poised not only to survive but to flourish.

Returning to 124 Tremont after parting from Longfellow, as he hung his hat on a peg, Osgood was greeted by the reliable clerk who had replaced Mr. Midges. “Mr. Fields wants to see you at once,” he said.

Osgood thanked him and started to take his leave before the clerk called after him. “Oh, Mr. Osgood, the operator has stepped out. Do you require assistance with the car?”

Osgood glanced at the firm's newly installed elevator on the east wing of the building. “Thank you,” he said. “I'd just as soon take the stairs.”

On his way through the corridors, he looked for Rebecca, who had some weeks earlier been promoted by Fields from a bookkeeper to the position of reader. The usual reader had fallen ill for two weeks. Rebecca had impressed Fields examining the manuscripts submitted to the Atlantic.

Since their return from England, Osgood and Rebecca's contact had been the model of professional distance and propriety, all doors of communication between them open for anyone to see. But they had both marked their desk registers. May 15, 1871, approximately six months from the present: that would be the date the clock would wind down for her divorce to be as official as the gold dome of the State House. The wait proved to be a source of immense excitement. The secret was thrilling and increased their love for each other. Each day that passed brought them twenty-four hours closer to the reward of an open courtship.

When he entered the senior partner's office, Osgood sighed in spite of himself and their renewed successes.

“More extraordinary sales numbers for the last Dickens today,” Fields said. “Yet your thoughts seem far away.”

“Perhaps they are.”

“Well, where, then?”

“Lost at sea. Mr. Fields, I must speak my mind. I think it possible Frederic Chapman's baggage had no accident at all.”

“Oh?”

“I do not believe those pages were involved in an accident. I possess no evidence, only suspicion. Instinct, perhaps.”

Fields nodded contemplatively. The senior partner had the general mark of exhaustion on him. “I see.”

“You think me unjust to the gentleman,” Osgood said cautiously.

“Fred Chapman? I know him no better than you to judge him a gentleman or swindler.”

“Yet you don't seem the least bit surprised by my radical notion!” Osgood exclaimed.

Fields looked over Osgood calmly. “There were reports of a flood aboard that steamship in the wires.”

“I know. Yet you've suspected it, too,” Osgood said. “You've suspected something else from the beginning. Haven't you?”

“My dear Osgood. Have a chair. Have you read Forster's book on Dickens's life?”

“I have avoided it.”

“Yes, he hardly wastes any breath on our American tour. But he does print the text of Dickens's contract with Chapman.”

If the said Charles Dickens shall die during the composition of the said work of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, or shall otherwise become incapable of completing the said work for publication in twelve monthly numbers as agreed, or in the case of his death, incapacity, or refusal to act, it shall be referred to such person as shall be named by Her Majesty's Attorney-General to determine the amount which shall be repaid by the said Charles Dickens, his executors or administrators, to the said Frederic Chapman as a fair compensation for so much of the said work as shall not have been completed for publication.

Osgood put the book down. “It is as the Major said, that books would be mere lumber. Chapman gets paid twice!” he exclaimed.

“Correct,” Fields said. “He earns the money from the sale of the book and he gets paid from the Dickens estate in compensation for the book being unfinished. On the other hand, if he waved the final chapter around for the world to see, the executors-Forster, who likes Chapman not a bit, considering him another unworthy competitor for Dickens's attentions-would argue that even without the entire final six installments, the last chapter proves Dickens did finish and that the estate did not owe a farthing to Chapman. And that's not all. Think of it, won't you? A new Dickens novel is a new Dickens novel-as remarkable as that is. Yet an unfinished Dickens novel is a mystery in itself. You see the speculation, the sensation! The attention that gets for Mr. Chapman's publication is invaluable.”

“Nor does he contend with pirates, as we do without copyright for Mr. Dickens over here,” Osgood said.

“No, he doesn't,” Fields agreed.

“Do you think the pages we gave him, that last chapter, still exist, then?”

“Perhaps an accident did destroy them. We shall never know. Unless-well, you say he gets paid twice, very true. But he could get paid three times in the end. If a day should come, perhaps months, perhaps ten years from today, perhaps a century, when a firm of Mr. Chapman's or his heirs needs money, they could publish the ‘newly unriddled!’ ending to The Mystery of Edwin Drood and cause a roar among the reading public! The novel's villain would finally be convicted for good.”

Osgood thought about this. “There must be more we can do.”

“We have. We have made our own success out of this, thanks to you and Miss Sand.”

Osgood realized only now that Fields had been clutching a pen in his pinched hand. “My dear Fields, why, you must not strain yourself writing. You know Mrs. Fields ordered me to watch that you take care of your hand. I can call your bookkeeper in again, or I'll do it.”

“No, no. This one last thing I must write myself, thank you, if I write nothing else ever again! I am tired and will go home early today and sleep like your old tabby cat. Mind, I have a present for you first, that's why I called you in.”

Fields held up a pair of boxing gloves. Osgood, laughing under his breath, wondered what to say.

“You'd better take them, Osgood.”

Fields pushed a piece of paper across his desk. On it, painfully scrawled in his own hand, was a preliminary design for stationery. It read:

“This talented and charming young lady helped me with the design,” said Fields.

Rebecca came to the doorway smiling in a white cashmere dress and with a flower in her hair, which was in black ringlets coiled high on her head. Osgood, forgetting to restrain himself, took one of her hands in each of his.

“How do you feel, my dear Ripley?” she asked breathlessly.

“Yes, don't be shy,” Fields said, “what do you think of it? Honest now. Are you surprised, my dear Osgood?”

The shop boy knocked at the door struggling to hold up an awkwardly wrapped package almost as big as him.

“Ah, Rich,” said Fields. “Ask Simmons to send a note to Leypoldt telling him we have news for him to report. What is that?” he asked of the parcel. “We're very much occupied at present with some celebratory tidings.”

“Guess it's a parcel. See, it's addressed to…” the shop boy began, pausing uncertainly. “Wall, to ‘James R. Osgood and Company,’ sir.”

“What?” Fields exclaimed. “Impossible! What kind of modern-day Tiresias could know about that already? What kind of man with more eyes than Argus?”

Osgood slowly unwrapped the layers of paper, which were cold enough from the package's winter journey to be thin sheets of ice. Emerging from underneath it all, an iron bust of a distinguished Benjamin Franklin with his sidelong, wary, bespectacled gaze and pursed lips. “It's the statue from Harper's office,” Osgood said.

“That's the Major's prize possession!” Fields said with surprise and bewilderment.

“There's a note,” Osgood said, and then he read it aloud.

Congratulations on your ascendancy, Mr. Osgood. Take good care of this relic, for the time. I shall claim it back when I come to swallow your firm. Always watching, your friend, Fletcher Harper, the Major. At the top of the note was the emblem of the eternal Harper torch.

“Harper! How did he find out already? Get a hammer!” Fields declared. “Damn that Harper!”

Osgood shook his head calmly and gave an even smile. “No, my dear Fields. Let it stand here. I have a good feeling that it shall remain ours from this time onward.”