Matthew Pearl - The Last Dickens

“Sir?”

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

“I think so.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why, shouldn't I pay you , gov'n'r?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Pardon?”

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

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