He took a candle into the hallway, wearing a pilot coat over his long white flannels. Passing Dickens's rooms, he noticed that the door to the novelist's bedroom was open.
It looked like it had been kicked open. The inside latch broken.
“Mr. Dickens?” Tom knocked.
Tom went inside. For a moment, a strange thought flashed through him: how wrong it would be for anyone to ever see Charles Dickens sleeping. But the bed was in disarray and empty, and the novelist nowhere in sight.
Tom ran through the novelist's parlor glancing around for other signs of struggle and pounded with his fist on the door that adjoined with Dolby's rooms. As he entered, Dolby was pulling his dressing gown around himself. “What is it, Branagan? You'll wake the Chief!”
“Mr. Dolby,” Tom said, pointing. “Dickens is missing.”
“What? Heavens,” Dolby began to stammer, barely able to order to send for the “p-p-pol-l-lice!”
Just then Dickens himself strode in. “What is going on in here?” he asked, alarmed. He'd entered from the back staircase that connected by the private door to his room.
“Chief!” Dolby cried, rushing over to the novelist at full speed and embracing him. “Thank heavens! Is everything all right?”
“Surely, my good Dolby.” Dickens explained that thinking about the awful Harper's cartoon-and the shooting pain in his foot-had disrupted his sleep and he had decided to take a breather outside.
Dolby, tying the cord waist of his gown in a dignified fashion, turned to his assistant. “You see, Branagan, all is quite well in here. The Chief went down the back!”
“But it is the front door that was forced open, and the latch broken,” Tom said.
Dickens suddenly looked concerned as they confirmed this by examining the door. “Dolby, ring for a hotel clerk. No, don't! I don't want the whole staff to hear the bell. Fetch someone quietly.” Dickens hastily went to his desk and checked the center drawer. He appeared relieved at finding it locked.
“Do you think someone has been in here, Mr. Branagan?” Dickens asked.
“Sir, I feel it is very likely.” After a few moments of examining the room, Tom noticed a scrap of paper on the bed.
Dolby returned to the room. “I've sent Kelly downstairs. Is anything missing, Chief?”
Dickens had been surveying his belongings. “Nothing of consequence. Except…”
“What is it?” Dolby asked.
“Well, strange to say, isn't it, you'll likely laugh. But I notice there is a pillow taken from my bed, Dolby.”
“A pillow, Chief?” Dolby asked. “Branagan, what have you found?”
“A letter, sir. It is difficult to read the hand.”
I am your utmost favorite reader in all of these vulgar American states. I anticipate with delicious fervor holding your next book in my hands. Your next book will be your utmost best, I know without qualification, because you are…
Dolby and Dickens both burst into relieved laughter, interrupting Tom's reading.
“Mr. Dickens, Mr. Dolby. I hardly find this comical. Worrisome indeed,” Tom pleaded.
“Mr. Branagan, it wasn't a renegade soldier of the Fenian Brotherhood, at least!” Dickens said.
“Just some harmless fellow who worships at the feet of the Chief,” said Dolby. “We shall never exhaust them. Let's leave it at that,” added Dolby.
Tom persisted. “Someone forcibly entered the room and then stole from it. What if Mr. Dickens had been inside at the time? What if this ‘harmless fellow’ comes back when Mr. Dickens is alone?”
“Stole? Did you say ‘stole’? A nothing, a mere pillow!” said Dolby, now almost jolly about the incident. “Haven't you seen the hotel barroom? Why, you may liquor up with all creation. It is quite the place to give people the courage for such pranks.”
Henry Scott procured another pillow for the Chief and straightened his bedclothes. Tom relayed the story in truncated form to Richard Kelly, but the ticket agent, too, found the conclusion of the events a singular source of amusement. “All that for a stone hard pillow!” Richard raved. “The American republic!”
“Mr. Dolby, I would like to stay on watch outside of Mr. Dickens's door,” Tom said, turning to his employer.
“Out of the question! I'll tell you what you will do, Branagan,” Dolby replied grandiloquently with a wave of his hand. Dolby's hand traveled down to the end of his mustache as though yanking a bell -pull, but before he could finish he was interrupted.
It was Dickens: “If Mr. Branagan should like to wrestle with humanity outside my room, I give my blessing.”
“Thank you, sir,” Tom said, bowing to Dickens.
Tom kept the note, folding it into his pocket as he took his place of vigilance at the door.
Chapter 13
THE ENGLISH VISITORS QUICKLY EMBRACED THE ODDITY OF LIFE in America-everything had to be difficult in order to be worthwhile. Friday had been the incident in Dickens's rooms. By Saturday afternoon it was decided that either one of the staff or one of Parker's waiters would be in front of Dickens's room at all times, and someone would always walk with him on his daily breathers. Dolby informed Tom Branagan of this procedure at Sunday's breakfast with a proprietary air, but Tom suspected that Dickens himself had requested the change. The novelist outwardly took a light approach to his own safety, yet he had seen something more serious in Dickens's eye.
At one point, Tom thought he had his man. He caught a slender man with a craggy face sneaking around Dickens's door. It turned out to be a speculator from New York who had taken rooms near Dickens's hoping to overhear the time and location of the next ticket sale.
When Dolby was away for tour business and Mr. Fields and Mr. Osgood occupied, Tom would accompany Dickens on his long walks.
At a shop window, Dickens would have only a few moments before a crowd would surround him. He was pleased with the bookstores in Boston celebrating his visit by filling their window displays with his photographic portraits and towering stacks of his novels, often displacing Guardian Angel, the new novel by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the recently published literary sensation, Longfellow's Dante. The novelist also slowed down to see how enterprising cigar stores put Pickwick Snuff, Little Nell Cigars, and a Christmas Game of Dickens (for Old and Young) out front.
“The ingenuity of the Hub of the Universe! That's an Americanism, you see,” he'd explain. “The hub being the name in this country of the nave of a wheel. Little Nell cigars! Remember to tell Forster that for my biography.”
Dickens handed Tom his walking stick while he went in for a closer look. Tom, while waiting, nearly sliced his hand on a large screw that he had not noticed sticking out from the side of the handle.
When Dickens emerged happily smoking a Little Nell, Tom asked whether he should remove the screw so that Dickens would not accidentally injure himself.
“Heavens no, Branagan! Why, that is a most purposeful screw to strengthen it. You see, I sometimes find myself walking in the marshes,” he said as they crossed the street. “Nearby the convicts perform their labors. In case one escapes, the tip of this cane can be used as a weapon. Come,” he said suddenly in a high-pitched voice, grabbing Tom's arm. “Let us avoid Mr. Pumblechook, who is crossing the street to meet us.” Then, in a different voice, “No, down this alley. Mr. Micawber is coming, let us get out of his way.”
Tom was already used to this. Dickens would often act out the roles of Pip, Ralph Nickleby, or Dick Swiveller to practice his readings while on his walks. He'd sometimes take his after-breakfast constitutionals along Beacon Street, which was also called New Land, where there had still only been a bleak swamp on his last visit to Boston. With snowfalls alternating with rain, a thick, sloppy mud now coated the sidewalks. On this particular walk, as Dickens and Tom rounded the corner, a woman in a formal gown walking several paces behind paused, taking unusual care where she stepped. She leaned down gingerly, removing a piece of paper from a carpetbag. This she pressed against the gravel where the two
men had stepped a few moments earlier. After allowing it to soak up the mud, she then lifted the paper. With a razor, she then sliced the paper around the edges of the novelist's boot print. A Dickens print. A perfect Dickens print.
All the while, the two men rushed ahead to find shelter from the rain, never noticing the woman or her ecstasy as she clutched her prized footprint.
***
THE DAY OF the first public reading was spent by the Dickens staff readying Tremont Temple. Dickens was testing the best place on the stage from which to read. Henry Scott was tiptoeing around him like a ballerina laying out Dickens's water and books on the reading table. George Allison was meticulously arranging gas burners that would throw just the right light onto just the right places on Dickens's face.
Dolby had chosen that hall over newer ones like the Boston Theater because the gradual rising floor meant all seats were good. Dickens had liked this idea. “Exact equality for my hearers!” he'd said. He hated the notion of the wealthier being able to buy a better view and refused to allow the cost of the tickets to be raised above a democratic one dollar, even if it might have inhibited speculation to have done so.
Tom, meanwhile, was assigned to inspect the hall's entrances.
“Does all seem well?” Dolby inquired.
“You say there will be hundreds of people here, Mr. Dolby?”
“The largest audience ever assembled in Boston since they threw the cargoes of our tea ships into the harbor!” Dolby seemed agitated when Tom did not smile.
“This will be the first public appearance of Mr. Dickens here. I am concerned, to be candid, Mr. Dolby, that whoever was after him at the hotel will look for him here.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Dolby, shaking his head vigorously. “That fellow? The Great Yankee Pillow Thief, you mean?”
Tom was amazed that the manager could have put the incident so far out of his mind. “It is only possible, sir, and I fear without knowing what his intention was that night and what the man even looks like-”
“Enough! You're quite candid enough!” Dolby cried out. He chewed at his lip while examining his porter. “It is a matter of pride for me, young Branagan, that I make a tour successful and, at the same time, pleasing to the Chief-not to rattle him and risk undermining his genius.”
Dickens, standing at his mahogany table at the platform to test the acoustics, glanced toward the spot of Dolby's outburst.
“Chief, you sound first rate from this spot!” said Dolby. “I'll move to the other gallery and listen from there.” Then, turning back to Tom, he said quietly, “Did you know when my predecessor died, it was the Chief himself who wrote the lines on his tombstone?”
“No,” returned Tom. Did Dolby plan on needing a tombstone soon?
Tom thought for a moment of walking right up to the platform and telling the Chief himself his concern. Perhaps Dolby sensed this, as he gave him new orders.
“Remember, Branagan, the special guest is to be seated before anyone else. If there is one thing you will learn from the Chief while in America, it is a consideration for others,” he said. The special guest Dolby referred to had earlier written a letter to Dickens saying she was paralyzed and asking whether the doors to Tremont Temple could be opened for her early. Dickens had complimentary tickets sent to her and had instructed Dolby to make arrangements to ensure her comfort.
When the paralyzed woman arrived, almost weeping with excitement, Tom lifted her inside. As he did, he could see the hundreds of people waiting outside the building for the doors to open. The tangle of carriages in the streets around the theater had in fact nearly stopped the whole business of Boston. Those who didn't have tickets loitered around the building staring with resentment at the theatergoers pushing their way inside where Tom and police officers finally directed them to seats. At one point, there was a sudden sound like an explosion from one of the galleries.
Tom raced to the spot. The sound had come from a man who had sat on his neighbor's opera hat that had been left on the wrong seat, popping it and sending the crown into the brim. An argument between the two blue bloods ensued over who was to blame, then over the price of the hat, then moving to how the hatless gentleman was ever to hail a hackney coach later with his head uncovered like a tramp.
Dickens finally climbed the platform at fifteen minutes after eight, a dark suit chosen by Henry set off by a white and red flower on the lapel. A roar of applause, shouts of welcome, a waving sea of handkerchiefs, and Dickens bowed left, right, ahead. The only sounds that could quiet the audience were the novelist's first words:
“Ladies and Gentlemen, I shall have the honor and pleasure of reading you this evening some selections from my work…”
And so began the tour. Dickens would choose extended scenes from two different novels for each reading and act out a condensed, dramatic rendition of each. The characters came alive as he gave each one their own voice, manner, and soul; he was author, character, actor. The performer never came to a full stop in the readings, making the next sentence always the most anticipated. Nor did he slow down or pause for emphasis on a moment of subtle wit or meaning, trusting instead in his audience. All the while, Tom guarded the doors. He kept Dolby's commands in his head, though he could not stop himself from wondering what the hotel intruder would look like and if he were present somewhere in the mass of faces.
At one reading, while Dickens performed Magwitch from Great Expectations running through the marsh, Tom was examining the rapt members of the audience at Tremont Temple when he heard a sound. Like an unintelligibly quick whisper-no, like a cat scratching on wood. He tried to identify the source, but it wasn't from a single place. It was on all sides. There were a few members of the audience scribbling rapidly with pencils-faster than he had ever seen anyone write.
Upon Tom's reporting his intelligence at breakfast the following morning to Dolby, the manager escorted him to the publishing office down the street and asked if they might see Mr. Fields.
“Scribbling, you say?” Fields asked, hands wide on his hips. “Men from the newspapers, perhaps?”
Tom said that he did not think so; the members of the press had been given seats by Dolby in the front rows, while these men and women were dispersed throughout the various galleries and in the standing-room area.
Osgood had walked into the Authors’ Room while Tom was explaining what he saw. Hearing Tom's description, he shook his head. “Why didn't we anticipate this? The Bookaneers!”
“Pray explain what you mean, Mr. Osgood,” said Dolby, who was sharing a sofa with Tom.
“As you know, for the purposes of these readings the Chief has condensed his novels, rather brilliantly so, to each fit one hour. You see, Mr. Dolby, other publishers no doubt hope to pirate ‘new editions,’ bagmen's editions, to erode our own authorized sales of his books. Harper, I am certain, is one of the culprits.”
“But a Bookaneer, Mr. Osgood?” asked Tom. “What is it?”
Osgood considered how to explain to the porter. “They are literary pickpockets, of a sort, Mr. Branagan. The piratical publishers hire them to perform such tasks as stalking around the harbor for advance sheets coming from England, to come by through bribes or even theft. Though they may appear to be common ruffians, they are by constitution cool in demeanor and highly intelligent. It is said from a brief glance at a single page of sheets, they can identify an author and the value of an unpublished manuscript.”
“I suppose that is not such an extraordinary feat,” Dolby offered.
“A brief glance, Mr. Dolby,” Osgood continued, “through a spyglass, from fifty feet away. Each are said to know three or four languages of the nations with the most popular authors today.”
“What draws them into such a shady line of work, if they possess such natural talents?” Dolby asked.
“They are well paid for their endeavors. Beyond that any guess of their motives is speculation. It is known that one of them, a woman called Kitten, served as a spy during the War of
Rebellion and could signal entire paragraphs’ worth of information to collaborators through lanterns and flags. Another of their nefarious herd is said to have learned lip reading from a deaf mute. Several of them are also expert shorthand writers in order to record overheard conversations between publishers that would be paid for by rivals-and it is whispered that some of the Bookaneers are responsible for writing the more vicious examples in the field of book criticism. I would bet our rivals sent several Bookaneers to the theater in order to copy down what the Chief was improvising. Mayor Harper will stop at nothing to best us, and his brother Fletcher, whom they call the Major, counsels him into ever more conniving schemes.”
“I have noticed the Chief devise new lines-brilliant lines, I should say-in his reading from the trial of Pickwick,” Dolby added, nodding his head. “It is like he is writing a new book in front of our eyes, which these pirates can now steal out of the air and profit from! What can we do, Mr. Osgood?”
“Your associate,” Osgood said, indicating Tom Branagan, “could escort any of these pencil-wielding John Paul Joneses out to sea, to start.”
“Yes. But it is unlikely we can stop all of them, even with such a brawny young man on our side,” Fields pointed out. “They have already seized some of the ‘new’ text in their notebooks!”
“I have an idea.” This was spoken timidly from the back of the room. It was a lanky young lad who had been patching a crack in the wall from a fallen picture frame.
Fields frowned at the interruption, but Osgood waved the young man closer. “My new shop boy, gentlemen. Daniel Sand.”
“If you'd permit me,” said Daniel. “You gentlemen have what the pirates do not: I mean Mr. Dickens himself. With his personally condensed copies, you may publish special versions of the editions at once.”
“But we wish to sell our editions of his work already printed, my lad,” Fields objected. “That is where the money is.”
Osgood smiled broadly. “Mr. Fields, I believe Daniel has a good notion. We can sell both. New special editions, in paper covers, will be unique. Memorabilia for those who attend the readings, and inexpensive gifts to their family and friends who could not get tickets to see Dickens. While the standard editions will still be sold for personal library collections. Excellent idea, Daniel.”
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