The Last Dickens

by Matthew Pearl

  “We are too late to do anything for ourselves, in any case,” Osgood said. “The Harpers will soon be able to publish all that was left of Edwin Drood. We will have to bear the loss and move on. Our rivals will see we are vulnerable. Fields will need us both in Boston to do what we can.”

  Tom stepped in front of Osgood and held up his hand. “Mr. Osgood, I give you my hand-I give you my word with it-that if you wish to try longer to investigate I shall be standing by your side.”

  Osgood, with a small smile, took Tom's hand in both of his, as Jack Rogers had done in their first encounter in the Gadshill chalet, but shook his head in a final refusal. “Thank you for all you have done to aid us, Tom. Godspeed to you.”

  “Godspeed, Mr. Osgood,” Tom said, sighing. “I am only sorry your time here has to end like this. Mr. Dickens-and you-deserved something more.”

  “To have gained your friendship has been worth all of it,” Osgood replied.

  Chapter 30

  New York City, July 16, 1870

  WHILE OSGOOD WAS HASTILY CLOSING THEIR BUSINESS IN London and preparing for departure, there was a conversation involving him inside one of the more luxurious coaches crammed into the thundering roar of Broadway in New York City. Out of its window, a tall hat and long muttonchops belonging to a grizzled head appeared, and the face between them inclined into a snarl at the tight traffic.

  “So tell me, where in hell is that gump now?” Fletcher Harper, ducking back into the carriage, removing his tall black hat from his curly brown head, bellowed as his span of horses clopped to an irritable stop behind an omnibus.

  “I'm sure I don't know, Uncle,” said his riding companion. “But father trusted him.”

  “Oh! I know he did,” the Major said with his usual tone of bemused bitterness. “It is a big mistake, Philip. Take the next right turn away from this mess!” He stretched his neck out the window, installing his hat once again for the moment, and yelled to the driver.

  “What mistake?” asked the companion, Philip Harper, son of Fletcher's late brother James, and now chief of the financial de partment, after his uncle had returned his neck and head inside the vehicle.

  “Come! Trusting a man not named Harper. You will learn to avoid the practice before long, Philip, as this world goes. Your father always put too much faith in his Harper's Police to solve our problems. And now because of it here we are, and Jack Rogers has ceased communication. For all we know, that blackguard may have changed allegiances to another publisher for a higher fee-if he learned any secrets in England about Dickens, he may be using them against us, perhaps with the help of Osgood, with an eye on tendering a greater profit.”

  The Major's counsel on trusting only individuals with the name Harper could have been noted as quite sustainable when entering the daunting fortressed offices at Franklin Square. There were multiple Fletchers, Josephs, Johns, this eager Philip, a lone Abner, sons of the original brothers, in varied roles managing the periodicals and production, with a line of grandsons already coming up as shop boys.

  Franklin Square was Harvard and Yale for them. “When my flame expires,” the Major would say to each of them as a kind of introductory address, “let true hands pass on an unextinguished torch from sire to son!” This saying was also roughly the translation of the publishing house's Latin motto on the insignia of a flaming torch.

  The Major, as he was entering, was told by a tremulous clerk that his expected visitors were waiting in the counting room.

  “They are… impatiently waiting, I should say, Major,” said the clerk.

  “Let them wait, it shall increase their hunger for my gold. And Mr. Leypoldt?” asked the Major.

  “He sent a message and is to come at three,” the clerk replied. “And Mr. Nast is waiting in your private office with a new Tweed drawing.”

  “Good!” the Major replied.

  “That's Mr. Leypoldt from the publishing journal, Uncle?” asked Philip.

  “Yes, and we shall pour into him as many bottles of champagne as it takes to persuade him to sing the praises of Harper and Brothers in his columns. First, we have a different type of business. A more precarious kind.”

  “Shall I leave you now?” Philip Harper asked his uncle discreetly.

  “Don't think of it! You are to learn everything connected to our business, Philip, just as Fletcher Junior will,” the Major said, clamping down on his arm and pulling him along. “Now, you see our friend up there?”

  Philip followed the Major's gaze to a bust poised above the doorway to the main offices.

  “Benjamin Franklin, isn't it, Uncle Fletcher?” asked Philip of the judgmental bust.

  “Correct. Not only one of our nation's founding geniuses but a printer and publisher, too. To this craft he applied his industry and thrift. You see, he knew that to form the soul of America, one must control the presses. The basis of our firm is character, not capital, just as it was with him. Remember that, and you shall truly be a part of Harper and Brothers.”

  In the great open office of the upper floor, the senior of the two Harpers guided them to a rectangular space closed in by a railing. Near the far wall was a circle of sofas and chairs meant for authors and other distinguished visitors to the firm, but on this day they hosted a different sort of occupant. In various positions of repose and sublime agitation, there were gathered four of the most striking and diverse individual human beings ever seen together in any publishing office.

  Philip stopped in midstride and gave an anxious, gawky smile. “Why, Uncle Fletcher! Are those-”

  “The Bookaneers!” the Major finished his exclamation in a hoary whisper. “The best of the lot, anyway, and all in one place this time.”

  There was the smooth, chocolate-colored Esquire, in his high-fashion silks and velvet and thick boots, looking an odd combination of actor and workman and balancing a walking stick on his lap; Molasses, with the particolored growth undulating down his jaw and chin and dirty neckcloth; the lone woman of the group, called Kitten, also known by other mysterious appellations, who was unaging and ageless-those blue eyes might have been through twenty or forty summers, depending on what angle and light flattered them; and breathing in heavy, labored contortions while sitting next to her, the seven-foot-tall man named Baby, a former circus giant, masticating a quid of tobacco between his monumental teeth.

  “Uncle Fletcher,” said the young apprentice, “those people are the scum of the land!”

  “Well!” the Major replied, smiling with genuine amusement at his green nephew. “If we cannot find Jack Rogers, it shall be near impossible to know what that James Osgood has been up to, and what he and Fields have in store for the last Dickens book. We are good Methodists, boy, but we cannot sit with our hands in our pockets waiting for our destiny. We must arm ourselves against the successes of our rivals, Philip. These scum, as you call them, might have been ordinary readers, writers, or publishers, but instead have become shadows of each, and as such can do what we cannot, can go where we cannot. You shall learn that you cannot count on a domestic cat, when the arts of a Bengal tiger are called for.”

  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 th
ere 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.

  Rogers removed a handkerchief and dried his nose and his eyes, both of which were leaking. His head throbbed. He wanted nothing more in the world than to relieve himself of the shooting pains. He wanted nothing more than to buy opium for himself. Not the watered-down, altered, and diluted stuff at the druggists but the pure raw crude poppy juice.

  Though it had been a load off his heart to reveal his identity to Os-good and Tom Branagan, he had not told them the entire truth. He did not lie about who he was: Jack Rogers was Jack Rogers. This was precisely the problem. To Rogers, deception came quickly and naturally to protect himself.

  It was not true, as Rogers had told Osgood, that he had not used narcotics for six months. In fact, the asylum in Pennsylvania where he had been sent by Harper had prescribed heavy doses of morphine-derived from opium-as a way to “cure” his habits. The morphine, while steering him away from crude opium, caused an entirely new state of dependence he indulged in every morning and night.

  Rogers thought about something he had seen during the Civil War, when he had been recruited by a general for a series of secret missions. He had seen a surgeon on the Union side, riding on his horse and pouring liquid morphine into his hand. He would then hold out his hand and the soldiers would line up and lick his glove. This way the surgeon did not have to step down from his horse. It was a disgusting sight to recall. Rogers questioned whether he himself would ever sink so low as the glove-licking soldiers des
perate for relief. He despised that proud expression of power he remembered on the face of the surgeon and felt himself its victim.

  When people discovered Rogers was an opium habitué, they would sometimes say, I have always wanted to try that. I should like to see what the visions of the opium eater are like.

  “You should not,” Rogers would tell them. “You shall not have the dreams of Coleridge and the pleasures of De Quincey and then stop at your convenience. We are not opium eaters; opiates are man-eaters. There is no stopping until the drug is willing to release you.”

  Then they would talk of their stronger wills.

  Rogers would shake his head ardently. “Do not talk to me of will, man! For will is what I have lost, what has shriveled and died inside of me! There are days when I cannot wind my watch, for my fingers feel as though they will fall off from their joints!”

  In going to England, Rogers had sought to fulfill a lucrative mission for Major Harper. He also had known that Edwin Drood was set among the opium trade and had half hoped that seeing it through Dickens's eyes, he might gain some insight into his own dark history. Maybe, in Rogers's attempt to trick Dickens, Dickens had indeed transferred something to him in their sessions at Gadshill that could serve him now-some small sliver of his genius.

  In any case, and for however impractical a reason, he could not now walk away from the mystery he'd been originally assigned to investigate. Since he could not remain in England safely, he'd determined that mixing among the opium traders on this side of the Atlantic might offer some clue to the connections he still hoped to make. This afternoon he finally recognized someone he saw out there. This person he recognized, strange to say, he had never seen before in his life.

  Among all the scum working the opium trade at the New York harbor, it was an old Turkish sailor with a blue turban and short, shaggy white whiskers. It was the Turk Seated Smoking Opium-the statue Rogers had seen so many times at Gadshill in Dickens's summer study, now come alive! The same statue that had disappeared from Christie's auction house in King Street. Only he was right here in the flesh. There was no denying the perfect verisimilitude of the statue, though the living man had grown older and more beautifully gaunt.