The Last Dickens

by Matthew Pearl

  “What brings the two of you to England?” Stephens asked.

  “Actually, the same Mystery of Edwin Drood that has consumed your own attentions of late, Mr. Stephens.”

  “We were quite robbed of its progress by the death of Mr. Dickens.”

  “Then, I hope I may take the liberty of asking, how shall you convert it into a complete drama, without the ending?”

  Stephens smiled. “You see, I have written an ending myself, Mr. Osgood! Yes, the life of the drama writer is not as luxurious as that of the novelists you publish. We must work with what is before us with great respect, but never so much respect that we fail to fulfill our task of pleasing an audience. When we read, we use our brains, but when we watch a performance, we use our eyes-much more trivial organs.

  “Now, I fear I must attend to many matters at the moment. Shall you and your companion do us the honor of being our guests in our nicest box?” asked Stephens.

  Osgood and Rebecca sat in on the day's rehearsal. They were of course particularly interested to see Stephens's original ending for the story. Dickens, in his final installments, had introduced the mysterious Dick Datchery, a visitor to the fictional village of Cloisterham, who acts as investigator in the case of the young Drood's disappearance after others have pointed an accusing finger at Neville Landless, Edwin Drood's rival. Datchery has other suspicions. But in Stephens's rendition, Datchery-with his flowing white hair covering his face-was revealed to be the feisty young Neville himself in disguise. Neville was to use his disguise as Datchery to confront John Jasper, Drood's uncle, with evidence that would cause the guilt-ridden Jasper to take his own life with an overdose of opium.

  Osgood and Rebecca prepared to leave during the fourth attempt at staging this scene when Grunwald interrupted the other players.

  “Where is Stephens? Ah, Stephens, what is this? What of the revised version of this act?”

  “This is the revised version, Grunwald. Now, if you'd please remember you are too dead and your body incinerated by this point in the story to have such a corporeal presence on stage.”

  Grunwald threw his manuscript pages into the air. “The hell with it! Hang the whole lot of you and dash your brains out! Perhaps you ought to find a different damned Edwin Drood!”

  Stephens screamed back. “There are ladies present, sir, and Americans, who should not appreciate the vulgarity of your tongue!”

  “Vulgar?” This Grunwald asked before he flew at Stephens with his fists up. Stephens pulled the actor's thick hair.

  The manager ushered off the playwright and actor and instructed them to finish murdering each other away from the stage.

  Osgood noticed two workmen walking toward the stairs to smoke. “I see Mr. Grunwald and Mr. Stephens were having words,” Osgood said to them.

  “Aye, gov'n'r?”

  “Do you know the meaning of it?” asked the publisher.

  One of the workmen laughed at the foolishness of the question. “We should. They have the same ticklish row every day. Art Grunwald thinks it as clear as the blue sky above that Charles Dickens meant Edwin Drood to survive and come back at the end of the story to seek revenge on the man what tried to kill him. Mister Stephens thinks it most obvious Drood is dead and rotting in the quicklime.”

  “What do you think?” asked Osgood.

  “I think Grunwald thinks he's too good an actor to stay out of sight in the scene docks for the final act. I wish Dickens didn't die, I vow it deeply ‘fore God-then we wouldn't have to hear their bickering.”

  Chapter 18

  OSGOOD WAS PACING BACK AND FORTH IN THE PARLOR AT THE Falstaff. Rebecca had just moments before read him a note from one of the queen's ministers informing them that Her Majesty had not pursued Dickens's offer to tell her the ending of Drood, thinking it more proper for her to be as surprised as her subjects by the installments.

  “I half wish I could believe in the medium who keeps company with Dickens's ghost,” Osgood remarked.

  “Perhaps Mr. Dickens himself may have believed,” Rebecca replied with a smile. “It seems he was taken with spiritualism. I wonder if we ought not study it for ourselves.”

  “Surely you don't think highly of such practices, Miss Sand?”

  “We might find a window into his private mind when writing the novel.”

  Osgood sat in a chair and rested his head in his hands. “If a medium can inform us right now how to make a quarter of a million dollars in a quarter of a year, I shall become the most enthusiastic of her devotees. We cannot afford to waste any more time.”

  “You are a born skeptic,” Rebecca said, dropping the topic but clearly hurt that Osgood dismissed her suggestion so quickly.

  “I should think so. I have no fondness for phenomena, Miss Sand. I very much dislike the trouble of wondering. Forget the mesmerism, but think of the mesmerism patient. Do you remember what Henry Scott said about him?” he asked.

  “Yes,” answered Rebecca. “That he was a farmer who sought Dickens's help.”

  “Scott said that the man was a regular visitor to Gadshill during the last months of Dickens's life to receive those ‘spiritual’ sessions. If this poor fellow was such a frequent visitor to Dickens's study,” Os-good continued, “might he have heard clues as to the novelist's plan for the end of the book?”

  “Mr. Osgood, you'd be placing credence in the words of a man with a shattered constitution,” Rebecca pointed out. “You saw how he behaved at the chalet.”

  “I feel the paths before us narrowing, Miss Sand. With Forster having authorized the theater production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, it is in the interest of his reputation and his purse that if there are other clues waiting to be discovered, they be revealed only if they happened to match the ending written by Walter Stephens. Likewise, even if Wilkie Collins has no intention of finishing his friend's last novel, that rumor may give some member of the Dickens family the idea of finding someone else for the task. With every last floorboard and ornament from Gadshill to be auctioned any day, the family is eager for income. We are without any allies here in our search, Miss Sand.”

  “But if you find the patient, how will you convince him to speak sensibly?”

  “What is it Henry Scott said? A mad beast needs a sober driver.”

  REBECCA INQUIRED WITH Henry Scott at Gadshill, who questioned the other servants and determined that the mesmerism patient had not been there since their encounter with him in the chalet. There were bets among the staff on whether the fellow had given up or died. But Rebecca suggested that if the patient had been at Westminster Abbey the day that she and Osgood visited, it might be one of his regular stops.

  Osgood, agreeing, returned to the Poets’ Corner. When he visited Dickens's grave again, he found the same peculiar purple flower. From then on, Osgood went to the Abbey at intervals waiting for this other man to show. “It is only a matter of time, I'm certain,” he'd say to Rebecca.

  On one visit in particular, Osgood and Rebecca passed through the gates together at the same time as Mamie Dickens, holding her little dog in her bag and linked to another young woman on her arm. Mamie wiped away her tears and smiled sweetly at the sight of Osgood and Rebecca.

  The woman on Mamie's arm was small and perky, having a strong resemblance to Charles Dickens around her face. She wore an old-fashioned muslin kerchief on her head from which red ringlets dropped, decorated with distinctly nonmourning double hollyhocks. Her lace cape only barely kept her little shoulders concealed and her neck and throat were almost entirely exposed.

  She was presented to Osgood and Rebecca as Katie Collins, the younger of the two Dickens girls.

  “Oh, be proper, Katie!” Mamie scolded her sister, pulling her sister's cape over her shoulders. “In a church, too!”

  “Proper! Now you sound like old Beadle Forster. Sometimes I wonder whether I got married to make dear father happy when our household had little other than sadness. Or did I marry because I knew father and his Beadle despised my husband?”

/>   “Katie Collins!”

  “Intolerable and stuff!” Katie imitated Forster's voice and then rubbed her hands together like he would.

  “Tell me,” Osgood said. “Do you know who the man was who had come to him at Gadshill for treatment in the last few months, a tall man with a military air and long white hair?”

  Mamie nodded. “I think I have seen the man you mean at the house. He was a very persistent and dedicated follower of father's methods. Even when father was delayed for their appointments, he would sit outside the study for hours.”

  “Do you know his name?” Osgood asked.

  “I am afraid I don't,” Mamie said, with a sigh. “Father was a mesmerism fanatic of no mean order and believed it a remedy for any illness. I know of many cases, my own among the number, in which he used his power in this way with perfect success. He was always interested in the curious influence exercised by one personality over another.”

  “Now, Sir Osgood.” Katie, bored with the exchange, examined the publisher flirtatiously. “Where were you when a girl was to find a husband?”

  Rebecca seemed as embarrassed at the question as Osgood. Katie raised an eyebrow to show she had noticed this.

  “Miss Sand,” sharp-tongued Katie said, “do you not think Mamie should look just smashing in a bridal gown on the arm of a man like this?”

  “I suppose so, ma'am,” Rebecca replied demurely.

  “You are the sort of girl who thinks well of weddings, Miss Sand?” Katie pressed.

  “I don't think much of weddings at all,” Rebecca replied.

  Mamie interrupted the awkward moment. “Mr. Osgood and Miss Sand have come all the way here for business, Katie, and to find out more about The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”

  “What a bore business is,” said Katie, snapping her fingers. “Oh, very well. Do you really want to find your way through the tangled maze and arrive at the heart of the mystery? If you want to know about Drood's ending, simply buy me a new ribbon for my hair! We are auctioning all mine.”

  “Oh, don't always tease everyone, Katie!” Mamie cried.

  “I'll tell them then,” Katie said while coyly wrapping one of her red ringlets around her finger. “Drood will be dead or alive; Rosa will marry Tartar or become a nun; Dick Datchery will find Drood's body or find Drood playing cribbage in a cellar with Rosa's guardian, Grewgious. I don't know the first thing about it! And that is the answer to the riddle.”

  “What do you mean?” Osgood asked.

  “The old Beadle, faithful little Aunt Georgy, my wayward brothers, none of those dear creatures know how it was to end because Father didn't wish them to know-he didn't wish anyone in the universe to know except himself, Mr. Osgood. It was a game for him, you see. He always loved to surprise us and was completely thorough when he had set his mind on it.”

  BACK AT THE Falstaff Inn that same evening, “Sir Falstaff” brought tea to Osgood as he sat contemplatively by the fireplace downstairs. Rebecca had retired to her room to read. Sir Falstaff's mind seemed to wander and the tray slipped, shattering the pot and cup.

  “I apologize, Mr. Osgood,” the landlord said after the shards had been swept away and the spilled tea mopped by his sister. He seemed saddened by something other than the broken porcelain.

  Osgood followed the landlord's gaze and found its focal point. It was one of the leafy purple flowers left at the Abbey: Osgood had taken it with the intention of asking one of the street vendors that sold plants to identify it for him.

  “This is an ugly thing, isn't it, Sir Falstaff? I'm sorry for gracing your table with such a shockingly nasty weed,” he said. “Are you unwell? Shall I fetch some ice water?”

  The trembling man waved him away. “Mr. Osgood, did you not know? That… that is an opium poppy! It feels like I have been struck in the heart by a bludgeon.”

  “I did not know!” Osgood said apologetically, though he still could not comprehend the proprietor's reaction.

  The landlord gazed with a doomed expression into the small fire, and removed his cap and folded it over his lap. “You couldn't have known, Mr. Osgood. Many years ago, I learned to hate that vile plant. My son had only twenty summers to his name and his faculties of judgment, and it was to the evil seduction of that plant that we buried him. The house was so empty without him. That is why, after he was gone, I moved here with my sister from our home in town to manage this snug little inn: to give other people pleasure when you have lost all of your own is a small miracle.”

  Osgood crumpled the flower into the pocket of his vest as casually as possible. Poor Sir Falstaff did not move at all, his expressionless face hanging low.

  “But what's this? Enough of that solemn manner.” The landlord suddenly rose from his chair, putting his hat and cheer back on. “Yes, enough of that, how about some ale to pluck us up?”

  The next day, Osgood again took the noisy train to Charing Cross. Osgood planned to attend the auction at which the belongings from the Gadshill estate were to be sold to benefit the Dickens family.

  He had left himself enough time to reach the auction house on King Street well before the announced start at “one o'clock precisely.” Besides, thought Osgood, it was the day of the annual Eton and Harrow cricket match, which would clog the streets. His sense of frustration had seemed to mount by the hour. He had less and less faith that the mesmerism patient would show himself again, but the opium poppy had made him think of the Oriental statue of the opium smoker from Dickens's summer study. Was that what Dickens had gazed upon when writing the scenes of opium smoking in The Mystery of Edwin Drood? Was that object the source of his ideas? If so, Osgood wanted another chance to examine it carefully.

  The large auction room at Christie, Manson & Woods was a historic institution in London and dusty and grimy enough to prove it. To Osgood's surprise, the hot room was overfilled by noon. Nor was it only the usual lofty collectors, mercenary dealers and commission agents: shoulder to shoulder with men and women of society in fine summer linen, the room contained multitudes of people in the plainer garb of the working classes. Looking around, it seemed every character from every Dickens novel, aristocrat and common, pompous and inconspicuous, had come to life and come straight to Christie's with their purses open.

  Osgood saw that he could not swim upstream through the eager crowd to either of the green cloth-covered tables closest to the auctioneer. Instead, he found a vacant chair near the auction clerk's table.

  Osgood circled two items in his catalog. His neighbors in the chairs around him peered at one another jealously, certain each was there exclusively for whatever object among Dickens's personal effects they had already set their heart on. Osgood's eyes also met those of Arthur Grunwald, the actor from the Surrey, who nodded to him dramatically as though one of them were to die today or at least tomorrow. He wore a wide scarf even though it was hot and sticky.

  One of the first items brought between the two tables was the picture of the Britannia from Gadshill.

  “Depicting the vessel in which Mr. Dickens first went to America. Engraved in the popular edition of American Notes…” intoned Mr. Woods, the auctioneer, from his rostrum.

  Competition was fierce. “Eighty guineas!” “Ninety!” “Ninety-five guineas!” “One hundred guineas, one hundred and five!” “Going, going… . gone!”

  Mr. Woods's hammer came down. The first few dozen lots were portraits and paintings priced out of the range of the amateur bidder. Then Mr. Woods announced they would move to the “decorative objects late the property of the gentleman deceased.” In this class of object, the general Dickens fanatic could be far more competitive. Mr. Woods's well-bred face, in fact, seemed to betray his utter amazement at how high the numbers could go for worthless tidbits that simply had been touched by one man's fingers. Elaborately dressed women lifted their opera glasses and leaned side to side for better views.

  The assistant displayed a gong with a beater that Dickens had used to gather his family together at Gadshill.

&n
bsp; As a battle ensued up to thirty guineas, Osgood's neighbor behind him whispered squeakily, “He was always fond of gongs.” Osgood, not certain how to respond, smiled politely. “Oh, yes,” the squeaky man continued insistently, a handkerchief pressed to his right cheek, responding to an objection Osgood had not made. “Don't you remember the weak-eyed young man and the gong at Dr. Blimber's in Dombey and Son?”

  By this point, Grunwald had secured a pair of watercolors depicting Little Nell's house and grave from The Old Curiosity Shop. As the actor stood to go, he stopped at Osgood's row. He was followed step for step by the same young woman who was fixing his cravat at the Surrey.

  “There you are, Osgood, sitting with your hands in your pockets,” he said, shaking out his black mane. “Did you see what happened?”

  “Yes, congratulations on your purchase, Mr. Grunwald.”

  “Not a purchase. A victory. I knocked these down from the hands of those mischievous dealers through fortitude and decisiveness. I did not depict Hamlet at the Princess without learning something of courage. People have misunderstood Hamlet for centuries, you know-it is not he who is indecisive; he has perfectly fine resolve: it is the critics that cannot make up its mind about him! Good afternoon, Mr. Osgood.”

  Before leaving the room, Grunwald passed a look over the entire auction house as though he had outsmarted not just a few dealers but every person there.

  At last:

  “Lot seventy-nine, a tazza, pink, with ormolu foot, formerly upon Gadshill's drawing room mantel.”

  Osgood entered the fray, crossing over the actual value of three pounds and elevating each dealer and admirer's number until reaching seven pounds fifteen. That price won the day.

  He received his ticket from the clerk, who wrote down the sale price. The publisher proceeded down the aisle into the next room where, in return for his payment, he was handed the pretty glass bowl pulled from a box of other household items. Returning to his seat, Osgood found the sale at its highest pitch of excitement yet.