The Last Dickens

by Matthew Pearl

  “Branagan!” Osgood cried. “What have you done? What are you doing here?” Taking Datchery's hand, Osgood attempted to restore his senses. He untied the curtain rope that Tom had used to bind him.

  “I wouldn't do that, Mr. Osgood,” Tom said.

  “Mr. Branagan, please soak a cloth with cold water from that nightstand. My good Datchery, this is some kind of preposterous misunderstanding. I knew this man briefly as a porter when Mr. Dickens had come to America.”

  “It is not I who misunderstand, Mr. Osgood,” said Tom. “I am a porter no more.”

  “Then explain yourself at once, if you dare!” Osgood shouted to the handsome younger man. He had tried to restrain his anger but could not once he saw Tom's unrepentant demeanor. “This is what you'd still call acting upon your instinct, I suppose?”

  Tom closed the door to the hall. “This man is a fraud and a double dealer. He is not who he says he is.”

  “I know he is not Dick Datchery, of course-Datchery is a character in a Dickens novel! I fear you are out of your depth. This man is unwell and under no fault of his own has fallen under a powerful magnetic spell initiated by Mr. Dickens before his death-one that has allowed us unique insights into an important case through his talents as investigator.”

  By this time, Datchery had risen to his feet and was steadying himself along the wall until he could be lowered into a chair.

  Tom said, “Why not ask him to explain for himself?”

  “I don't know what you mean by browbeating me, laddie,” Datchery protested, rubbing his bloody jaw but trying to approximate a smile. “You mistake me.”

  “If you will not divulge the truth, so be it. I will. Mr. Osgood, this wretch, disguised in George Washington costume, acted as a speculator and a rioter during the whole of Chief's tour of America-set on sabotage and ruin for the reading tour's financial success.”

  The accused's eyes narrowed with anger and he lumbered toward Tom. “I shall not stand here and be insulted!”

  Tom threw a long punch into Datchery's stomach. Then he drew a pistol from his pocket and pointed it at the man doubled over in pain.

  Osgood stood immovable at the sight of the weapon.

  “Datchery, clear out,” Osgood said with an attempt at calm. “Datchery! Go now before you're hurt more seriously,” he repeated. But the man wasn't moving, just looking between Tom and Osgood.

  “I will put a ball through you if you lie one more time to him, sir,” Tom said, pistol pointed steady as a rock.

  “Datchery, go!” Osgood cried. “Branagan, be still! This man has been a friend to me.” But when Osgood looked over his shoulder at the subject of his words, he saw a strange blank stare that contradicted him.

  “Not… Datchery,” said the man, pronouncing the words between a confessional exhale, and his accent softening into a product more of the streets of New York than of the English countryside. He looked at them with a weary eye like the ancient mariner's. “It is Rogers. Jack Rogers. Now you know my name. Pocket your pistol and strike me no more, Mr. Branagan, so that I may have my say.”

  JACK ROGERS LOOKED down at his feet for most of his account.

  “I did not mean to harm either of you and have grown to respect you, Mr. Osgood, more than I ever expected of a man of bustle and business, for your perseverance, your genuineness. I daresay you've become so tall with accomplishment, you stand in your own light, and don't see how much more of you there is. I hope after hearing my position, you shall understand.”

  In his early life, Rogers had been an actor in the second-rate theaters of New York. He came from a modest family of small means, with an unfriendly disposition to his choice of work. His skills on the stage tended mostly toward broadly comedic work and violent adventure. Once, while he rehearsed for a play involving a long sword duel, there was a fall from the stage and the blade of his sword struck the theater manager's son, whom no effort of the doctors over the subsequent hours could save. Rogers was devastated by the horrible accident and banished from the theater. After Rogers had spent irregular bouts of hard employment in the ailing American economy, in the year 1844 the mayor of New York, one James Harper, founder of the Harper & Brothers publishing house, initiated the first police force for that city. These posts were considered undesirable, and it was difficult to fill the rolls. Rogers, having no other work, volunteered.

  Harper's Police became a powerful army inside a city that was combustible with political and ethnic rivalries and corruption. The following year the Republican mayor was defeated and the police put in other hands, but the Harpers quietly maintained close ties to the policemen. Soon ex-mayor Harper privately employed Rogers, who had become known for a certain forcefulness of character and alert cleverness and an ability to resolve the enigmatic. When James, still known as the Mayor, or one of the other brothers comprising their publishing enterprise-the Colonel (John), the Captain (Wesley) and the Major, the youngest (Fletcher)-needed assistance, particularly of a secretive nature, Rogers would be discreetly sent for.

  One instance of this occurred when Charles Dickens announced in the summer of 1867 that Fields, Osgood & Co. were henceforth to be his exclusive publisher in America. The Harpers envied and feared the income that could be collected by their rivals in Boston. They sent Rogers and one or two other agents to cause disruptions in the ticket sales for the author's American tour, hoping that the newspapers would portray the Boston publisher as incompetent, cheap, and greedy. As part of this scheme of disruption, Rogers, in the guise of a speculator in memorable George Washington wig and hat, spread accusations to the newspapers of Tom Branagan's having sparked the violence at one of those sales. The Harpers, meanwhile, ordered their weekly magazine to print mean-spirited and inflammatory cartoons and columns about Dickens as quickly as they could be invented, just as Fletcher had done in attacks against the wretches, corrupt and immigrant-friendly, who controlled the Tammany political operation.

  “You need not glare with moral judgment, gentlemen,” Rogers said, shaking his head in deep sadness. “I know my actions to be deceitful! Many years ago, after my accident on the stage, I suffered constantly from sleeplessness. I would not have survived without laudanum from my doctor. But soon I found I could not go a few days without the drug in my system, I would yield, vowing to myself it was the last. A mere hour without it and my insides would feel torn and shriveled, I would walk about in humiliation and melancholy. Laudanum no longer sufficed, I sought crude opium as if it were the most succulent meal, served by a voluptuous siren in the heart of a violent maelstrom. The opium was my panacea. I took a dose at ten o'clock and another at four and a half o'clock. For hours after taking a fresh dose, I felt invincible and energetic, with an intellectual and physical capacity beyond the mere human. I was Atlas with the world teetering on my shoulders. And so I remained the drug's perpetual slave, and to get more I would have crossed barefoot over hot coals or swam up to my neck in my own blood. Under its influence, my stomach and bowels felt twisted and my head screamed. I took more to try to harden myself, and I entered a dangerous overdose.

  “The Major knew I was in turmoil. ‘Well!’ said he, removing his spectacles with his usual dramatic gesture. ‘You know me to be a blunt man, Rogers, and a good Methodist, so I ask directly: will you survive your own habits and continue to serve this firm?’

  “‘To be equally blunt myself,’ said I, ‘I think I shall not, Major. Death would be a gift.’

  “‘Well, then I shall help! Let us not surrender so easily to any enemy!’”

  The Major arranged for Rogers to reside at an asylum for inebriates, headed by a doctor who insisted that opium was not a vice but a disease like other known diseases. The secluded life there cleared Rogers's blood of the poison.

  “That was six months ago. Upon my word, I have never again brought opium into my flesh. But upon leaving that sanctum, free of the vile poppy, I found myself a slave to a new and imperious master: the Major. For the last few years, as the Major had gained contr
ol of the publishing house from his more reasonable brothers, I squinted at his methods and manipulations. Yet the asylum that saved my life had been expensive, and I could not sever my ties with the house of Harper until this debt was paid.”

  After the completion of Dickens's American tour, upon hearing intelligence that Dickens was at work on a novel of mystery, the Major and the Mayor Harpers wished to uncover the details of the new novel's plot in advance.

  “Because I could employ any accent under the sun from my days as an actor, they chose to send me here to England to perpetrate the ruse. I was to get inside Dickens's sanctum. I made inquiries around Kent and found that Dickens ministered to friends and strangers alike who fell ill, with techniques of mesmerism and animal magnetism. And I knew by reputation that he was particularly sensitive to those suffering in poverty, a friend and champion of the workingman.

  “I determined to pose as a sick English farmer requiring Mr. Dickens's care to gain admission into his study and glean some hint as to the future of Drood before anyone else.”

  “Did you find anything about it?” Osgood asked.

  “The great man could keep his secrets!” Rogers threw up his hands. “Each time, Dickens would lay me down on his sofa, pass his hands and fingers in a pattern across my head, and then, when he had been convinced I was asleep, he chanted to suggest better healing to the inner places of my brain. Finally, he would blow softly on my forehead until he thought I had just awakened. I guessed that if I should seem to have been severely mesmerized into believing myself one of the figures in his novel, he would be more likely to unwittingly expose revelations concerning it.”

  “So that is when you chose to play Dick Datchery?” asked Tom.

  “Yes. Datchery is introduced in mysterious fashion in one of the later chapters of Edwin Drood. Before it had been printed, I overheard this chapter one afternoon while waiting in the library at Gadshill when Mr. Dickens was in the next room reading aloud to some of his family and friends, something he did as he composed each installment. I fancied from whatever poor science I have observed reading novels in my lifetime, that with the fate of that character of Datchery there resided the fate of the whole Mystery. And my ruse worked! To a limit.”

  Rogers recounted the tricks he employed to play the role of Datchery at Gadshill, including writing down on slips of paper and on the inside of his hatband every word he heard put into the character's mouth by Dickens and employing that exact language whenever possible. This authenticity seemed to have aroused the novelist's interest, yet their mesmeric sessions still dealt exclusively with the treatment of the patient's health and the master could not be coaxed into holding forth on the topic of his novel.

  Rogers naturally took every opportunity when he was alone-when Dickens would excuse himself from the study to attend to one of his pets or to greet a caller-to secretly examine the contents of any papers on the desk or in an open drawer. He found some evidence that the opium smokers appearing in Drood had been inspired by the occupants of a notorious room in a court called Palmer's Folly, which Dickens had visited on a police-guided tour of London.

  Soon after, Dickens's health had worsened and before long the sessions were suspended for Rogers and the other small circle of mesmerism patients who came to Gads. Upon learning of Dickens's death the first week in June, Rogers wired his employers back at Franklin Square in New York, presuming his mission complete. He was instead ordered by the Harpers to remain for a few weeks and to make himself a nuisance around Gadshill so that he might observe any dealings about Drood in that time. Because of the five-year wait since Dickens's last novel, Drood would mean hundreds of thousands of dollars of potential profits to whoever could publish it first in America. The Major would not take his eye off this goal.

  Only days later, Rogers received an entirely new and unexpected order; he was advised of intelligence that Mr. J. R. Osgood was on his way to England in all likelihood with the aim of finding missing pieces of Dickens's final novel. Rogers was to stop Osgood from doing so, in order for Harpers’ pirating of the novel to proceed unhindered.

  “I confess this heavily, wearily, Ripley. I have since come to know you are a decent and good man, who cares for employees under his charge, as I have seen you do with Miss Rebecca,” Rogers continued. “But do understand one thing, if only one thing about me, and I shall one day die content knowing you did not dismiss me wholeheartedly.”

  “I wonder what you could possibly say for yourself,” Osgood replied sadly.

  “Merely this: I am no artist. No genius like the people who occupy your life, perhaps like you yourself. Whether you think of yourself as one or not, you have the bravery of the artist inside you. But this is the worldly work I know and have practiced since trained as one of Harper's Police. I had tried to work in a bank before that, but I flattened out at it because I did not like how the other men looked at me. We were the first policemen in the city of New York, and we were hated-people stoned us. We had to be armed with a ‘hook and bill’ for each one of us-the peculiar club with the spiked top you saw when we went into the dark corner of London. The public thought we were there to serve as spies and, strangely, this fear made us into spies. Disguises, investigations, secret service, any dealings underhanded and scrubby-this has been my art, my lot. I meant to set you out on a wild goose chase by leading you into the opium room, knowing you would recognize it as the prototype for Dickens's book and be distracted. If I succeeded in this task, I could finally free myself from Major Harper's grip and return to the stage, where I was once happy and made others happy as your firm's books do. One day I shall have a houseful of children, and shall wish to be respected and loved by them. I did not intend any harm to come to you, dear Ripley!”

  “But you did have every intention to mislead me, as you admit!”

  “I ask not for forgiveness for the deception but do beg that you believe my purpose in owning it to you. I desire to help you.”

  “Ha!” Osgood responded.

  “Ripley, I, too, was attacked by those opium pushers!”

  “Which was your own sorry fault, sir,” Tom said in reproach. “Your careless doing.”

  “To a point, yes, Mr. Branagan. But the violence done to us was only the hint of some far larger sinister movement. Ripley, I believe you to be in grave danger even as we speak.”

  “From you as much as from anyone else,” Osgood said.

  “You have had more say than you deserve now. Have a chair and be comfortable while I send for a police coach,” Tom added.

  Rogers shook his head. “No. You need my help, gentlemen-your survival may depend on it! Perhaps my own as well, though it may mean nothing to you now!” A glance passed between the two other men that showed no sign of wavering. Rogers, becoming more panicked, now pleaded shamelessly. “My dear Ripley, can't you trust me again? I promise to repay my debt to you for what I have done.”

  Osgood directed a heated look at his former companion. “You have earned my trust and sympathy through a bundle of lies. You plotted to disrupt our American tour with Dickens, to lay blame on Mr. Branagan where there was none, to distract my mission here, all under the nefarious orders of those Harpy brothers. I have no doubt Major Harper holds the strings of your current plea, as well. Any minute he will pull you down and set up Judy, or the devil, or some other wooden grotesque to try to lead us astray. Remove yourself from our sight now, while you have your liberty, if Mr. Branagan will allow it.”

  Tom took a step back and waved the man to the door. Rogers made no argument this time. “Thank heavens for you, Ripley,” he said. He quietly turned and, hat under his arm, scurried out of the room.

  TOM BHANAGAN'S APPEARANCE-and the pistol he had brandished- had been as much a shock to Osgood as the revelation of Rogers's true identity. Once they confirmed that Rogers had left the premises of the hotel, and Rebecca had returned from the bank, Tom set out to tell them of his own winding path that had reunited them. Returning to England after Dickens's reading tour
, Tom had continued to be employed in a domestic capacity in the town of Ross at George Dolby's estate. But he tired of the monotony of caring for the Dolby children's much-adored ponies and driving around Mrs. Dolby, who had taken full advantage of their greatly increased wealth since the American tour. Dolby, for his part, had been hardened by what he called the American bullying, and spent their money extravagantly and carelessly, especially after his second son died at only a few days old. Tom occasionally met with Dickens at Dolby's, including at George Dolby Jr.'s christening, but the novelist, though friendly to him, never spoke of the dangerous events of the late American tour.

  Tom showed Osgood and Rebecca a pearl-handled switchblade he kept in his pocket. “This was her knife that I took out of her hand. I realized I still had it after we left the country and found it among my clothing. I think about her sometimes when I see it, and I think about what could have happened to the Chief.”

  “You should be proud of what you did,” Osgood said.

  “I was certain she would die, you know,” Tom said. “You would have been, too, Mr. Osgood, had you seen the blood. The Chief must have thought so, he seemed so sad when he saw her, he even whispered something in her ear to soothe her, though I could not hear what it was. But the truth is that few women attempting suicide in that fashion ever possess the strength to cut their own skin deep enough after they begin. Many survive, as she did, though forever diminished inside and out. Their images from that day will always be with me- Louisa Barton's as much as Charles Dickens's.”

  Dulled by his time in Ross and haunted by what had happened in those last hours in Boston, Tom applied to the police at Scotland Yard and waited several months, when a vacancy opened for a night constable third class, the lowest and most endangered tier of the English police. He served his beats from 10 p.m. at night until 6 a.m. This was the only position usually open to an Irishman, though the fact that he could read and write well brought him quick promotion to the place of police constable first class.