Forster laughed grimly and wrung his hands out as if squeezing wet laundry. “Monstrous thought! Your tour left Mr. Dickens ill, hobbled in his foot, drained of all life with which he parted from our shores! I fully opposed his going, as I said at the time to that gold-hungry gorilla Dolby. If American readers had not taken Mr. Dickens's books without paying any authors’ fees for so many years, if they had made us part of your copyright laws, he oughtn't ever needed the extra income. To think of everyone prancing around calling Mr. Dickens ‘Chief like he was an Indian savage-!”
“Charles liked to be called Chief, if I recall,” a female voice interrupted. “With the many things to make us sad, we can at least be happy he still had enough vigor for travel.”
The voice from above belonged to an elegant and slender woman a few steps past forty years old coming from upstairs.
“May I present to you, Miss Georgina Hogarth,” muttered Forster indifferently to their guests. “My fellow executor to the house and all its possessions.”
“Please call me Aunt Georgy. Everyone at Gadshill does,” she said in a soothing tone that overthrew Forster's shrillness.
Osgood knew her by name to be Dickens's sister-in-law. Even after Catherine, Charles Dickens's wife, moved away from Gadshill, Aunt Georgy was the novelist's confidante and housekeeper, and a mother to her two nieces and six nephews. The separation between Dickens and Catherine was never an official divorce-the novelist of domestic harmony could not afford so permanent a stain on the public record. Dickens's novels celebrated the family and the ideals of loyalty and forgiveness. The audience expected him to be an exemplar for the same.
Dickens and Georgy became so close that other members of the Hogarth family, furious that she had supported Charles, were even said to have repeated wicked slanders that he'd seduced her. It did not help allay the whispers that the lovely Georgy never married.
Osgood recalled that Harper's magazine had been only too pleased to sell copies by importing the rumors about Dickens and Georgy back to America. To make the affair still more notorious, a young lady, Mrs. Dickens's sister, has undertaken to “keep house” for Dickens, the magazine had commented when Catherine had moved away more than ten years before. The whole affair is very repugnant to our idea of matrimonial constancy.
“Thank you both. I can see well enough you are quite occupied without our intrusion,” said Osgood.
“In truth, Mr. Osgood, we only wish there were more guests who were not dreadful auctioneers or house seekers tramping up and down the stairs.” Aunt Georgy had a ready smile that brought to mind a picture of the lively household as it used to be. “Shall we?”
In the drawing room, a matronly and attractive young woman approximately of Osgood's age sat caressing the keys of the rosewood piano. She wore a fashionable mourning dress, weighed down by elaborate mourning jewels, and played with an abstracted air.
Osgood, momentarily distracted by the music and its performer, introduced their mission to his hosts. “Our firm is set to publish The Mystery of Edwin Drood in America. Yet back home we are surrounded by literary pirates, who will use the impunity that comes with Mr. Dickens's decease to plunder the text for themselves.”
“Typical Americans!” Forster intoned. “Greed comes in abundance in Yankee-doodle-dom.”
“There is plenty of it here, too, Mr. Forster,” Georgy chided Dickens's friend.
“Because of the peculiarity of our laws,” continued Osgood, “we will be in a rather bad way if the pirates issue their cheap copies. We had relied upon expectations of a success for our firm-and of course for royalties to Mr. Dickens, mandated by our morals though not by our laws. These would go to you and your family now,” he said, turning to Georgy. “That shall never be able come to pass if Dickens's wishes that we are his exclusive publisher vanish with his death.”
At this point in the interview, a small white blur, which turned out on closer inspection to be a Pomeranian dog, flew across the room and landed at Osgood's feet. She gave a sharp bark for Osgood, but when he reached down, she shook her muzzle and barked at him with recrimination. The piano-playing woman came to a discordant stop and lifted her wide skirts as she rushed over. The musician, throwing back her mourning veil to show her face, was presented as Mamie Dickens, the novelist's first daughter, the one Forster had dismissed as comely and unmarried.
“I am very sorry for her behavior, Mr. Osgood,” Mamie said shyly. “That is Mrs. Bouncer, she is a sweet creature but truly like Mephistopheles’ little dog when she is angry. Like a true well-mannered young woman of England, she does not ever tolerate a man reaching for her. She likes to be petted by a man's foot instead.”
Mrs. Bouncer went round and round Osgood with an asthmatic barking. Osgood exchanged a quick glance with Rebecca, who seemed to want to laugh but suppressed the urge. Osgood unfastened his shoe and, Mrs. Bouncer immediately flopping over, scratched the dog's stomach with his foot.
“Oh, isn't that lovely!” Mamie exclaimed as she bit her bottom lip with emotion. “That is everything she has been missing. Oh, no-must that go, too?” she said, spinning around, distracted. A workman was wrapping a pink tazza taken from the mantelpiece. “I did always admire it when I was a little girl. Can I stop that terrible work person, Auntie?” she whispered.
“I'm very sorry, Mamie, you know we can only afford to keep what is necessary.”
Osgood passed a look of sympathy at Mamie. Rebecca watched Osgood as he watched the piteous young Miss Dickens. For a few moments, the three were as captive and uncertain as figures in a sketch.
“We were hoping,” Osgood said, returning to their topic, “there might be more pages that have been found here for The Mystery of
Edwin Drood, beyond the six installments that Mr. Forster has sent us in Boston.”
Georgy shook her head sadly. “I am afraid there are not. The ink on the final slips of paper of the sixth installment was still drying at his desk when he had his collapse. I saw it myself.”
“Perhaps there are memorandums or fragments? Or private correspondences about his plan for the rest of the novel that could satisfy a reader's natural curiosity.”
“It might have been possible,” Georgy replied. “But Mr. Dickens burned his letters periodically and asked his friends to do the same. He had a great horror of the improper uses often made of the letters of celebrated people. I can recall years ago when he had a bonfire and the boys roasted onions on the ashes of letters of great men like Tennyson, Thackeray, Carlyle.”
“Tell me, Mr. Osgood,” Forster interrupted with a strange, contemptuous expression, “what good would notes on the book do you, even if there were any, without Charles Dickens to write the chapters themselves?”
“All the good in the world, Mr. Forster!” Osgood answered, adeptly bounding over Forster's negative tone. “If we could publish a special edition that exclusively reveals to American readers how Mr. Dickens's mystery was truly to be ended, we could overtake our swindling competition. But we have only a brief time to spend in England to find answers-or it shall be for naught. The pirates will have their hands on the rest of the known installments on the first of next month, and shall print the book to sell everywhere under the sun.”
“What do you mean, Osgood?” Forster leaned over with a distrustful scowl. He gripped the arms of the chair with his massive hands as though without such restraint he might fly at Osgood's throat. “Incredible! What do you mean when you said ‘how it was truly to be ended’?”
Osgood and Rebecca exchanged curious glances at the executor's heated reaction. “I mean, sir, how the mystery of the novel was to come out in the end.”
“Well, you don't have to tell me! That's clear enough, I think! John Jasper, the audacious villain of the book, leading his secret life of depravity, has cruelly killed his innocent nephew Edwin Drood. Isn't that most obvious to anyone with two eyes?”
“It certainly seems like it at the end of the sixth installment, yes,” Osgood agreed. “Yet our senior
partner, Mr. Fields, has pointed out that Dickens might have had some other surprises behind the scenes for his reader in the subsequent six parts. Mr. Dickens did say in a letter to our offices that the book would be ‘curious and new.’
Forster shook his head. “Jasper was to confess his crime-this was the ‘curious and new’ notion of it. Why, Dickens told me himself.”
“Mr. Dickens told you?” asked Osgood.
Forster crossed his arms square over his chest and pushed out his thick lips in displeasure. “Perhaps I did not express my relationship with Mr. Dickens very clearly to you, Mr. Osgood. The annals of our friendship, perhaps, were not as celebrated across the ocean as they are here. I do not flatter myself to say that Mr. Dickens and I were on the closest terms, and though I am afraid he was not as open to counsel in regard to points of personal conduct, he confided nearly every detail of his books to me.”
“Well, he told me nothing about how the novel would end, even though I asked days before he died,” Georgina said, looking at Forster with suspicion.
“You asked him, too, Aunt Georgy?” Rebecca asked.
“Yes, dear. After I heard the installments read aloud to us as he wrote them, I said to him, ‘Charles, I hope you have not really killed poor Edwin Drood!’ He answered, ‘Georgy, I call my book the mystery, not the history, of Edwin Drood’-but he would not say more.”
“Monstrous!” Forster exclaimed, his broad brow now creased and snarled. “I wring my hands! Preposterous! That could mean anything, Miss Hogarth! Couldn't it?”
Georgy ignored the objection. “Mr. Osgood, Miss Sand. If you would like to look at the papers on his desks for yourselves, you are quite free to do so. In the summer months, he liked to write in our Swiss chalet. That is where he was working on his last day before coming inside the house and collapsing. A second desk stands in his library. I have not had the strength to do anything more than to keep his desks and drawers orderly.”
“Thank you, Aunt Georgy,” Osgood said.
“If you find anything that would help, we shall rejoice with you,” said Georgy.
Forster refolded his stumpy arms at the sentiment.
Osgood and Rebecca, led by an undergardener, crossed under the high road by the brick tunnel where the four big dogs lounged. A separate Swiss-style wooden chalet stood hidden by shrubbery and trees. In this small wooden sanctuary, they climbed a winding staircase to the top room.
THE REMOVED QUIET of Dickens's chalet was untouched by the auction preparations. On the walls of the summer study were five tall mirrors that reflected the trees and cornfields all the way down to the river in the distance and its faraway sails. The shadows of the clouds seemed to drift across the room.
“I can see why Mr. Dickens prized this place to write, away from everything else,” Rebecca commented when they entered.
At an open window stood an expensive telescope. Osgood pressed his eye against its lens. Deep in the meadows by the hop fields was a tall, hatless man with wild hair who somehow seemed to be looking up into their window. Osgood shifted the telescope to the hilltop and found the Falstaff Inn and could see its proprietor out by the stables. As he combed the mane of one of the horses, the landlord pinched his eyes as though in a fit of dreamy melancholy. It seemed every corner of the world around Gadshill had been made bleak by Dickens's death.
The register on the desk was still on June 8, the day Dickens had last sat and wrote. Also crowding the desk were several quill pens and inkwells, a memorandum slate, various trinkets including two bronze frogs, and a stack of slips of blue stationery covered with writing in blue ink.
“This is it,” Osgood said with awe of the latter object, sitting on the dusty chair. “The first six installments of The Mystery of Edwin Drood in his own hand, with corrections from the printer in the margins.” He gently fingered the edges of the pages. Dickens's handwriting, not always neat, was strong and dynamic. It did not seem to be written to be read by anyone other than the writer-printers and compositors be damned. Usually when Osgood saw the working space of one of his authors, the revelation was purely mechanical, like visiting the dusty floor of a factory. It had become too common, in fact, that when he finally met an author he had held in high esteem, the result was disappointment in the ordinariness of the person behind the words. But with Dickens there had always been a magical feeling, as though Osgood were not the seasoned publisher of Boston but once again a college lad from Maine or that shop boy on his first day in the Old Corner in an India rubber apron streaked with ink. To this day, even with Dickens now gone, he was still excited to be Dickens's publisher.
“Are you ready?” Osgood asked, inhaling it all. “Let us begin, Miss Sand.”
Time for the researchers over the next few days was broken up by short respites and occasional interruptions from the outside world. The most notable one came as they continued the next morning. They had by this point found a few small gems in the vast spread of materials. Osgood had discovered an early page of Dickens's notes that listed titles before the novelist had settled on The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Flight and Pursuit, One Object in Life, Dead? or Alive? He had been dictating these to Rebecca before he stopped in midsentence.
“Mr. Osgood?”
“My apology, Miss Sand. My eye was drawn away by that. Rather grotesque little thing, isn't it?” On the chimneypiece, there sat a light yellow plaster figure. It depicted an Oriental man with a jaunty fez smoking from a pipe, sitting cross-legged on a settee. Osgood picked it up and held it out at arm's length as he examined it. It was heavier than it looked.
Just then, a man rushed up the stairs of the chalet and into the study. The intruder wore a ragged suit and wild uncovered hair over a sunburned face. It was the same man the publisher had seen through the telescope walking through the hop fields the day before. His mouth was agape as though in some kind of sudden terror, and he grabbed Osgood's arm.
“Do you need some help, sir?” Osgood said.
The man studied the publisher with searching eyes. He held out his other hand to Osgood and kept it outstretched.
Cautiously, Osgood put his own hand up to shake. The stranger grabbed it with both hands and pressed hard. Rebecca gasped.
“Yes, I see it! You are. You are. You are ready for it!” the man sputtered out, when one of the Gadshill servants burst in.
“Come on now.” The mustachioed servant removed the invader by the ear like a misbehaving child. “Come on, old fellow. That's enough of that beastly behavior. They are at some important work. Very sorry, sir, miss. I'll see to it he won't bother you again.”
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Osgood took the one-hour train into London while Rebecca continued their research. Using the map from his guidebook, he reached the offices of Chapman & Hall, Dickens's English publisher. The day of their arrival, Osgood had sent a messenger with his card and a note asking for an interview but had yet to receive a reply. Osgood did not have the luxury of waiting if their stay in England was to succeed in time.
But there would be more waiting at the busy Piccadilly offices of the publishing firm. Today was Magazine Day, when every publisher, printer, binder, and bookseller in London scrambled to release the latest journals and periodicals to readers. In the case of Chapman & Hall, this meant the latest serial installment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Messenger boys stuffed their sacks with pale green-covered pamphlets of the installment to deliver all across the city and to the country towns to book stands and stalls, shouting instructions at each other. On the first of the next month, the next Magazine Day, the final installment in the London publisher's hands would be printed and sold to the hungry public-and the pirates back in America would have all they needed.
Osgood, as he watched the mayhem of clerks and messengers, noticed that the mere mention of the name Mr. Chapman, the head partner, caused bowed heads and darting eyes among the man's employees. He had been kept sitting in the anteroom for an hour when broad-shouldered Chapman appeared in a sporty outfit.
�
��Terribly sorry, old boy,” he said after Osgood presented himself. “Must run to the country to go shooting with some capital people-terrific bores, really, but capital-will you call another time?”
Osgood gave one more long look at Chapman's office and staff before starting back, with a rising feeling of futility, to Rochester. Taking a buggy from Higham station, Osgood found reliable Rebecca still hard at work in the Gadshill chalet.
After another two hours, the men from Christie's auction firm came in to finally break up the quiet of the chalet. The workers snatched up the Oriental statue and the other salable effects inside Dickens's sanctum. The men were accompanied dutifully by Aunt Georgy, who gave them instructions.
Georgy shook her head in dignified frustration as they did their work. “I suppose it is impossible to try to pretend things haven't changed forever. How empty the world feels now!”
“Where will you go once you sell Gadshill, Aunt Georgy?” Rebecca asked.
“Mamie and I must look for a small house in London, though my mind frets at the long, bitter winters in the city.”
“I believe you and Mr. Dickens will always be part of this land, no matter what,” Osgood said. “No matter where you go.”
Georgy looked hard at Osgood. “I must confess that my role as executrix is new for me-not in managing the children's careers, for that has been my life's devotion. But in reading documents and contracts.”
“I can imagine the strain,” Osgood replied.
“I've learned too quickly it is rare to meet a man of business who can wear an honest face. Forgive me, but I wonder if I might trouble you while you stay in Rochester. Would you consider looking over Mr. Dickens's will if I left a copy with the Falstaff?”
“It would be my honor and pleasure,” Osgood said, standing up and bowing, “to repay your kindness.”
“Thank you. It will put me at ease to have an hour of time to ask someone questions-someone other than Mr. Forster, to be perfectly candid. I feel, for one thing, such an infant around him! As if I had no power of free will of my own when he is near.”
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