“Staplehurst,” Henry repeated, and finished his story with a silent prayer. “Amen,” he said softly.
“Amen,” Tom echoed.
A stove heated the car they sat in on the way back to Boston, but it could not be said whether it made the compartment more comfortable or miserable when combined with the number of passengers and the rough motion. The nine-hour express route was slowed considerably by the rivers in Stonington and New London, both on the way through Connecticut. At each of these places the train navigated onto a ferry to cross the river, the passengers free to stay aboard or to explore the ship and eat at its restaurant. Dickens stayed on the train during these ferry rides, even when a nearby American war vessel unfurled a British flag and struck up a rendition of “God Save the Queen” in his honor. Dickens merely watched from the window.
His spirits seemed especially restrained on this passage as he played a slow game of three-handed cribbage with Tom and Henry.
“I remember,” Dickens said with sudden excitement to nobody in particular, “it was my first visit to America when-yes, that was when!-when I first practiced the art of mesmerism! Strange to say the railways seem to have stood still while most other things in this country have been changing for the better. They were terrible then and terrible now.”
“Mesmerism, Chief?” Tom asked. “You've done it yourself?”
“Ah, Branagan, spiritualism is nothing but a humbug, but the un-fathomed ties between man and man are as real, and as dangerous, as this very train being planted on a rickety boat.” Dickens described how he used lessons from the famed English spiritualist John Elliot-son to mesmerize his wife when in Pittsburgh in 1842. “I admit to feeling some alarm when Catherine fell into a magnetic sleep in under six minutes, though I was excited enough by the slap-up success to repeat it the following evening. When I returned to England I tried it on Georgy-my children's auntie, my sister-in-law, and my best and truest friend. Georgy, the sweetest soul, became almost violent over it.” Dickens laughed luminously at this memory but then was silent and spiritless again, perhaps at the thought of Catherine. He never would talk about Catherine, the mother of his eight children, even as he never really could talk about Nelly Ternan, and certainly would not stand for anyone else talking about either.
“Well, perhaps Mr. Scott has heard all this before,” he went on. “What do you say to a trial of my mesmerism skills, Mr. Branagan?”
“On me?” Tom asked.
“Great fun, Chief!” Henry called out.
“Come, come,” said Dickens with a businesslike air. “I have magnetized unbelievers before. I have the perfect conviction that I could magnetize a frying pan! You won't remember any of it when you wake, anyway.”
Tom sighed and submitted as Dickens passed his hand in front of Tom's eyes until they closed, then began to move his thumbs in a transverse motion across his face. Suddenly, he stopped, looking into Tom's face with an odd twinkle in his eye. The train was rocking back and forth.
“Chief?” Henry asked.
Tom opened his eyes to find the novelist's nostrils were dilated and his eyes restless. Dickens was no longer trying to mesmerize him at all. The jolts of the train had pulled his mind somewhere else.
“Perhaps, Branagan, this isn't the time to-” Dickens clutched the arms of his seat and turned pale white. Beads of sweat formed across his forehead every time the train shook, and his lips were trembling as if he were the one under a spell. This state of suspended animation lasted several minutes before the novelist returned to life and took a long pull from his flask. The three dropped the project of mesmerism and returned to the cribbage game just where it had been left. Tom was baffled.
After getting out at their station, Henry Scott whispered to Tom, as his only explanation, “You see? Staplehurst!”
THIS WAS THE MOST anticipated event of the reading tour. Dickens was to give his reading of A Christmas Carol on Christmas Eve at Boston's Tremont Temple. More than three thousand dollars of tickets had been purchased for the performance in less than two hours. “It is,” Dolby boasted with grandeur, when counting out the money from the sale back at Parker's, “as though the Chief invented Christmas with the Carol.”
Tom had not told Dolby what he now believed about the hotel invader: that he had stood face to face with the culprit in Brooklyn, that it was a woman, and that he had spoken with her. That all but certainly it was the same woman who committed the bizarre assault in the hall of the Westminster Hotel on the poor widow. Not only that, but Tom now remembered where he had seen her before-it had been the night of Dickens's arrival to America, in the dense crowd in front of Parker's, waving some papers she was demanding the novelist read. Tom knew his evidence would hardly be convincing, and could imagine Dolby's response: You think this lady, a lady you never saw in your life but once, followed us all the way to New York from Boston and back, and you think it because of her notebook? Could there not be another woman interested in Dickens's readings with a notebook that size, could there not be hundreds of people with hundreds of notebooks?
The woman had been dressed like a gypsy the night of Dickens's arrival to the Parker House, with a bandanna handkerchief tied around her neck and a too-small blue jacket. In Brooklyn, she wore a fine silk dress, sash, and shawl like an aristocrat. But what stuck out most in Tom's mind was the word she had called herself. An incubus. He had heard the fairy tales when he was a child from the other servants’ children in the underground kitchen of Dolby's estate-incubus and succubus, the demon visitors and tormentors of unsuspecting mortals. But it was succubus that was the female class and incubus the male. What had she meant?
Plenty of speculators and reporters had been following them from city to city but with naked motivation. It was the element of the unknown about this woman that began to disturb and preoccupy Tom. That image: a line for tickets, people who wanted nothing more than to see Dickens, and a woman standing outside of it, looking on jealously at the people she did not feel were worthy to see the Master. There was a dazzling, enthralling, unwanted air about her.
TWO MINOR EMERGENCIES occurred for their party back in Boston. First, the Chief could not find his pocket diary. The staff looked everywhere and could not turn it up. Dickens thought the last time he saw it was in New York in his hotel room. He insisted it didn't matter, since it was a record for 1867 and the year was about to end. He burned them at the end of each year, and this saved him the trouble.
Can she have taken it? Tom thought. Is that what she was doing lurking around the halls at the Westminster?
George Allison was the second emergency. He had fallen ill twice in the course of several days. It was discovered by the doctor at the Parker House that both times were preceded by a meal of bad partridge, who were often poisoned in the winter by berries when the bird's usual food supply was buried by snow. The substitute gasman, a nervous Bostonian, spent the afternoon of December 24, alongside the regular staff preparing the theater for that evening. He had received elaborate instructions at George's bedside, as though George were conveying his dying wishes. The newcomer was so eager to please Dickens he sprained his leg running up the stairs of the theater.
This provided an illustration of Charles Dickens taking charge of an emergency, which he did in high spirits and with relish. He walked the injured man with Tom to a druggist, where he ordered a particular type of mountain tobacco.
“Why, Mr. Dickens, you are like a doctor yourself!” the gasman exclaimed his appreciation, his cheeks aglow that he had been blessed enough to sprain his leg in such company.
“When you travel as often as I do, my boy, with as many men, you haven't much choice. Why, you should see the variety of blue and black phials and liquids waiting in my medicine chest. Laudanum, ether, sal volatile, Dover's powders, Dr. Brinton's pills. Trust your Chief. We live among miracles. This will heal you, body and spirit.”
That evening, when doors opened for the Christmas Eve reading, the galleries seemed to fill all at once. The two th
ousand went after their places so voraciously that the attendants and police at the doors scarcely had a hat or coat in place, and the decorative hollies and festoons had their red berries shaken loose and squashed underfoot.
“That's something!” one of the policemen said to Tom as they tried to keep some order. “Has it been like this for all the readings, or is this special for Christmas?”
“I suppose both,” Tom said.
“You're a Dubliner, aren't you?”
“My family is of Irish blood,” Tom agreed. “But I am English.”
“I can tell by your accent you're a Dubliner. Not that I pay any mind to it, you know. We have nearly forty of them on our force, you know. Say,” said the officer knowingly, “you weren't that same Paddy who started the riot at Dickens's ticket sale in Brooklyn as I read about?”
“You've read the wrong papers,” Tom said.
“No hard feelings, friend. Making conversation. Now, my wife, she adores your Mr. Dickens. I say, ‘Spend hard-earned money on something useful, just what we need another book in the house to sit on the shelf and take up space and be feasted on by the rats.’ She don't listen, says what do I know, only book I've read is the Good Book. ‘Tis true. 'Tis the best book there is. You a married fellow?”
As Tom turned around to answer, his eyes passing over a group of people walking by, he blinked in surprise: the same woman he had chased in New York. The incubus, this time, garbed once again in the clothes of a beggar.
“Don't know if you're married or not, fellow?” the policeman demanded. Then he laughed to himself. “But I understand Mr. Dickens doesn't know if he is, either. The man should be ashamed, if you ask me-I read he carried on with his own wife's sister. Shame!”
“Did you see that lady just now?” Tom asked.
“Lady?” the policeman responded. “There are a thousand people that just rambled in!”
The man was right-Tom had lost her in the surging mass. But he also knew this-she was in the theater, and he would have an hour to find her before the doors opened at intermission.
TOM BEGAN TO STALK through the sloping aisles as the audience members climbed over one another into their seats. He was stopped by someone grabbing his arm-Dolby. The manager was standing with a short, well-dressed man surveying up and down the theater. Tom had to think quickly. He did not want to lie, but he knew Dolby would not accept the truth; he'd probably give Tom his walking papers on the spot.
“The police are watching the doors, Mr. Dolby. I thought I should look for some of the known pirates we've seen here before.”
Dolby nodded his encouragement. “Well-done, Branagan. After the New Year, Mr. Osgood says the new condensed editions will put the freebooters out of business.”
Tom wished to be free of the manager, but Dolby didn't move. Instead, he took Tom's arm with one hand and the other man's arm with the other.
“Why, gentlemen, Mr. Aldrich was telling Osgood and myself the other day, the great Mr. Dickens, he was saying, the great Dickens has eyes when he is on the stage that are unlike any before in his experience, swift and kind, seeing what the Lord has done and what he intends. Eyes like exclamation points. This, you see, Mr. Leypoldt,” he said to the other man, “this is why we work so hard. You may explain this to your readers who have admired the performances. Because of the advances in transportation over the last years, the reading public has been allowed to know Dickens not only as an author but as a man with a voice, mannerisms, facial expressions. They have been able to come to know him as a person as had never happened before in the history of literature. We do our work for this!”
Dolby, glowing with pride, continued with his soliloquy to the reporter, but Tom, no longer listening, was searching the rows for any clue to the location and intentions of the incubus. By the time Dolby had released his grip on Tom's arm, the lights flickered and then went out, except for a dramatic silver splash on the platform, where Dickens emerged in front of the plain screen amid a deafening welcome of cheers and several rounds of applause.
“Ladies and gentleman,” Dickens said, “I am to have the pleasure of reading to you first, tonight, A Christmas Carol in four staves. Stave One: Marley's Ghost. Marley was dead to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon exchange for anything he chose to put his hand to! Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.”
Tom felt his survey was hopeless in the dark galleries. His only chance was to wait until the lights were on again at intermission. If she were here to make some kind of trouble like she had done with the widow at the hotel, Tom would be on his toes. He would be ready. And if she tried to escape, Tom would call out to the policemen positioned at the doors to stop her. There was no way she could get out.
Tom's darting eyes caught a quick motion in one of the aisle seats. It was another blasted shorthand writer, a rapid-fire pencil blazing away in the hands of rakish Esquire, the Bookaneer. With no time for niceties, Tom reached in, grabbed the pencil, and cracked it in half. Esquire protested at the unlawful seizure of his property. Tom obliged, dropping the two halves into the man's hat on the floor. Another of the piratical species sitting across the way, the former substitute soldier Molasses, paused his own shorthand writing, putting his pencil between his jagged teeth to applaud his rival's misfortune. On his way past, Tom slapped Molasses on the back. The pencil broke between the Bookaneer's teeth and landed in his lap.
Dickens, meanwhile, continued.
The scene: Christmas eve. Dickens acting the part of Scrooge, turned in pantomime to his poor clerk, snarling, “You'll want all Christmas day tomorrow, I suppose?” Then all at once he was the simple clerk, a shining timid smile, saying, “If quite convenient, sir. It's only once a year, sir.”
“Branagan!”
“A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December!”
“Branagan!”
Tom heard the familiar urgent whisper and located Dolby at the front of the theater. He looked white, as white as one of the ghosts in the Chief's story. The manager mouthed some words that Tom could not follow and gestured. Tom moved closer to the foot of the stage and his jaw dropped.
Dickens was lighted twelve feet above the platform by a large iron batten with gaslights suspended by strong galvanized wire. This cast a dramatic shadow on the dark crimson screen that stood behind the reader. The replacement gasman had mistakenly arranged the copper wires directly over the gas jets, causing the wires to become red hot. If the gas were to burn through, the iron batten would fall and could not only land on Dickens but tumble down into the audience.
If the emergency were announced, the crowd would panic and rush away all at once, not only raising the risks of knocking against equipment that could induce the wires to snap but also trampling women and children along the way. Even if the iron batten tumbled down and somehow missed the audience members in the front stall of the theater, a fire could start and swallow up the whole place in a matter of minutes. There was no question about it: Dickens had to keep reading as though nothing were wrong.
Tom looked back at Dolby and nodded his understanding. With the new gasman in his hobbled condition, there was no hope of him helping. Tom went to the far wing of the stage and found the extra wire. As he readied this, there was a commotion at the stairs that led to one of the balconied galleries. Tom, looking at the iron batten and then back at the stairs, sprinted toward the disturbance. Could it be her about to charge at Dickens with her knife? But it was a man who came down, shaking both of his fists.
The man grabbed Tom's coat sleeve as though desperate for assistance. “Who the deuce is that man on the platform reading?”
“Charles Dickens,” Tom replied.
“But that ain't the real Charles Dickens, the man whose books I've been reading all these years?”
“Yes!”
“Well, all I've got to s
ay about it then is, that he knows no more about Mister Scrooge than a cow does of pleatin’ a shirt, not my ideas of Scrooge, anyhow.”
“I know him! Marley's ghost!” Dickens bit his fingernails just as Scrooge did in the story. He rubbed his eyes and stared at the apparition. The muscles in his face tightened, his face seeming to contort into that of an old man.
Tom raced to the far wing, climbing up the back stairs until reaching the cupola above the ceiling of the hall. Around him were glass panels on the walls giving views of the entire city and all the way to the harbor islands. Rows of square ventilators lined the cupola to continually expel the heat and air from below. Tom lay on the floor and lowered his head and arms through a network of gas piping that separated the cupola from the hall. He could see Dolby standing all the way down below, urging on Tom's mission.
“Mercy! Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?” Scrooge was demanding.
A young woman with bright red hair and a bright red dress in the front row, her gaze roaming to the iron gas fixture, audibly gasped. Dickens, pausing, looked over to her and gestured for her with a slight movement of his hand to remain calm. So the Chief had seen! He, too, knew they must prevent a panic; and this pretty girl who probably went through great pains for months to claim a seat right at the foot of her favorite author in the world, suddenly had to trust this same author with her life.
From a seat in the middle, another woman shrieked. Tom shuddered at the helplessness of his position and the realization that they were about to witness a mass panic-but then saw it was a young woman in mourning crepe, who was grieved hearing about Tiny Tim. An usher escorted the sobbing young mother from her seat gently.
Tom, meanwhile, stretched his arm down over the batten to turn the gas flame lower. Next, looking down to signal Dolby to be in position in case anything dropped, Tom supported the batten with one hand while he meticulously wound the wire roll around another part of the iron structure and began fastening the other end to a hook in the ceiling left there from some earlier performance. Rounds of laughter came in waves from the audience. Dickens took a sip of water from the glass at the side of his reading desk. As Tom attached the wire, his head and arms just barely sticking out from the ceiling in view of the audience-they might have noticed him, had they not been enraptured by Dickens-he looked out into the crowd and immediately saw.
The Last Dickens Page 13
