Matthew Pearl - The Last Dickens

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

“I beg your pardon,” Tom replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And kiss the lasses dear

For we won't go home till morning ,

Till daylight does appear…

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

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

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

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

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

“Ma'am?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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