Matthew Pearl - The Last Dickens

When they had greeted the motley crew, the Major passed a slow glance over each of them before beginning.

“I hope you enjoyed the drinkables and eatables I asked one of our girls to provide for you.” The platter had been emptied already.

“I didn't get any,” Molasses grumbled.

“Sorry,” Kitten said to the others fanning herself with a napkin, “I arrived early and had missed breakfast.”

The publisher continued. “I wished to have this consultation with you, my friends, because we are in a period of great excitement in the book trade.”

“Why all four of us?” asked Baby.

“It's uncommon!” shouted Molasses, passing a hand through his rainbow-streaked beard.

“Come! You shall find I speak plainly, Mr. Molasses,” said the Major agreeably. “I am not unaware that the usual course of your profession renders yourselves rivals. Yet there is money enough here at Harper and Brothers to pay fine ransoms for all the latest literary treasures coming from the Old World, without wasting time scratching at each other's eyes.”

Esquire, the Negro dance master, bowed. “I, for one, voice my approbation, sir. Why not encourage cooperation, gentlemen? And Kitty. But who's on the list we're looking out for?”

Harper rattled off his current list: “George Eliot, Bulwer-Lytton, Tennyson, Trollope and-Esquire, you speak French, I presume?”

“Not only do I speak in French, Major, I dance and dream French,” replied the dark-skinned Bookaneer in his native tongue. Molasses rolled his eyes and knocked off Esquire's fashionable cap from his head as Harper continued.

“I'd wager there's not a language you know the name of that I don't speak, mister,” Kitten chimed in.

“Good,” said Harper. “Because the town talk is a new play from Paris is about to cause a sensation-one the New York theaters would shell out hard cash for us to translate in advance. Keep your spyglasses trained for it, all of you, at the ports of Boston, New York, Philadelphia.”

Then the Major took from his frock coat several silver coins and placed them on the table. “These are burning a hole in my pocket,” he said, his deep-set blue eyes blinking excitedly. “One for each of you, to whet your taste.”

Kitten rose and put her coin into her bosom with a decidedly unimpressed expression. “How much for a top manuscript, Major Harper?”

“My dear?” the Major asked. She didn't repeat her question, though he seemed to want to force her to do so; instead she stood stock-still like a ballerina whose music had stopped. “Oh! The bounty, my dear feminine Shylock? Double the usual rate if you get me the manuscript of an A-1 author. The traitors to our economy are out there pushing again for international copyright, led by that Brit lover James Lowell, and if they succeed we take the hit in what we are permitted by law to print.

“Take the late Charles Dickens, for instance,” he continued. “I have reason to know that for one reader in England, he has ten here. I will go further and say that for every copy of his works circulated in Great Britain, ten are printed and circulated here. We have made those copies affordable and widespread throughout the republic through what I call transmitting-what the ignorant call pirating- and have thus brought culture and learning into homes that would not otherwise be able to afford any. I may not live to see the day, but you will, when the best English classics will be sold in America for a dime. Never forget, we are the heirs to Benjamin Franklin, we are the true-blooded servants of this trade.”

This produced some nodding and general indifferent consensus from his audience as they stood to leave.

When the visitors passed as one body through the door in the railings to the stairwell on their way out, the clerks and accountants at their desks in the outer room stopped what they were doing and stared. Before Molasses crossed through the arched doorway, the Major took him by the arm.

“Aren't you through with us?” Molasses demanded.

“You're the best of your kind,” the Major said confidentially. “The most persistent, so to speak.”

Molasses asked, “How would you know?”

“Come, friend! You watch us. We watch you. It's said you had Thackeray's final novel before his own publisher in London.”

Molasses sneered with scampish pleasure at the memory.

“So. I have something special I want you to do.”

“I thought you wanted us to cooperate.”

The Major shrugged. “Courtesy is courtesy, but business is business, my dear man.”

“You had something else to say or didn't you, Major Harper?”

“Keep an eye out for Osgood,” the Major said, tapping one of Molasses's buttons on his coat and dropping an extra double-eagle coin in the man's breast pocket.

“Osgood?”

“You want your big boodle from this? Come! Then pay attention. Keep an eye out for James Ripley Osgood. I told him I'd be watching him and you will be my eyes. He has something we need. I don't know what, precisely, I don't know where, but I can feel it down in my bones.”

THE VERY SAME JACK Rogers that the Harpers had sought in vain was at this moment only a few city blocks away from Franklin Square. He'd recently disembarked from a ship out of Liverpool and two days before had arrived in New York.

Around the dilapidated docks at the lower portion of the island of Manhattan, looking out on the crowd of sails, steaming ferries and busy tugs, he wore a sackcloth suit and was notable for not being involved in the habitual occupations of the tired workmen and the wretched wharf rats. The flabby brim of his wideawake was pulled low, shading his face; when he lifted his face into the light, an observer could see a plaster on his right eye and crisscrossed columns of false wrinkles and crow's-feet.

They were the same wrinkles he had applied around his mouth and forehead when disguised as George Washington. If spotted by any of Major Harper's agents-even other former members of Harper's Police-they would not make out much about him at first. But time was growing short for how long the old disguise would conceal him, and so far, it had all been for naught.

Though Osgood had made it clear he wanted nothing to do with Rogers, and Rogers for his part wanted nothing more to do with the Harpers or their money, he still could not give up pursuing the Dickens mystery on his own steam. The shame he felt confessing his motives and his role as Datchery to Osgood and Tom Branagan could not be the end of his part in the story.

Tom had made it clear enough that he would have had him arrested if he had remained around London to investigate. But Jack Rogers knew there were lucrative opium deals that permeated the New York harbor. Many were carried out by legitimate merchants engaged primarily in outfitting ships to Turkey to retrieve opium (as the English largely possessed a monopoly on the supply from India), then taking it to ports in China and the scattered Oriental islands. Yet a smaller portion brought their wares back into the American ports, and it was these traders, Rogers suspected, that had to be engaged in some connection with the opium fiends that had nearly finished him and Osgood off that night in the East End. Clues were thin, though, as Rogers wandered through the wharves and engaged in idle chatter about trading and ships, poking with his bamboo walking stick through piles of garbage (animal carcasses, old boots, large amounts of rotted vegetables tossed from passing ships). Sometimes he would sit and go fishing in the broken-down boats abandoned at the piers with the wharf mice, hoping to learn something other than the fact that the boys could swear like troopers.