Matthew Pearl - The Last Dickens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“William Godwin,” Osgood said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Calling for whom?” Rebecca asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like in a dream,” Tom added musingly.

The other two men looked at him quizzically.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But why?” Osgood asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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