The Last Dickens

by Matthew Pearl

  “Miss Sand!” Osgood exhaled impatiently. “I've brought you here to help me, and to help you after Daniel's death. Perhaps this whole idea of your accompanying me was a mistake. To think I had designs on Mamie Dickens because of who she is-I'm not looking for a Dickens!” It seemed like there was another sentence waiting on his tongue but he swallowed it down.

  Osgood, consulting his watch, exited and his footsteps could be heard rushing down the stairs of the inn. Rebecca stood there scared. Scared of what had just passed between them, scared of what their failure might mean for her future in Boston, scared of what could be-fall Osgood in the dark corners of London.

  Chapter 21

  Bengal, India, July 1870

  THE OPIUM DACOIT HAD BEEN CAPTURED. NOW HE HAD TO BE interrogated for more information relating to the crime-including the whereabouts of the stolen opium. Outside the room where this was to take place, Mason and Turner, of the Bengal Mounted Police, tried to be patient.

  “I'm surprised he'd be found holed near his family village,” Mason said. “An obvious place for an escaped thief to hide!”

  Turner sneered. “Not obvious enough, was it, Mason? We wasted a whole afternoon encamped in the mountains waiting for him, while Dickens tripped over him like a lucky fool.”

  “Do you think the inspector from the Special Police will have some luck in there? Turner?”

  “A lucky fool. That's Frank Dickens!”

  “ARE YOU INNOCENT of that opium dacoity?”

  The thief nodded.

  “I understand that is what you have been explaining to our mounted officers,” said the special inspector. “Yet you are a registered dacoit. Lie down there, my son.”

  The thief lay on the chabutra, the inspector offering a gentle hand to position him so that his feet were on the higher edge of the platform, his head the lower. He trembled in fear at what he knew was coming.

  “The budna, please,” the inspector said to his assistant. Then he frowned at the prisoner as if apologizing for some minor personal rudeness.

  “I HEAR HE'S mute as an Egyptian Sphinx.”

  “Don't mumble,” Turner grunted in response, then added: “He's no mute.”

  “He's barely said a word since he was arrested,” Mason pointed out. “That's what I meant. Even when they flogged him something awful. You think he'd dare to, after seeing how we captured his friend, with your carbine and my sword? ‘Course he had to jump through the train window-lost his head, that one.”

  Turner grunted.

  “Dickens says.”

  “What?”

  “Superintendent Dickens says the thief's scared. That he's hiding more than the theft.”

  “Dickens doesn't-that damned stuttering scamp!” Turner replied. “He's the one who called in the inspector. I could have done the duty just fine-give me a whip and a rod on any dark-skinned heathen where you will, don't need no Special Police at all.” Turner pushed his chair away and paced down the hall.

  “Turner? Where are you going? We're still to collect the prisoner when the inspector's finished.”

  THE INSPECTOR HELD the budna, a copper vessel with an elongated spout, over the prisoner. He slowly poured water onto the upper lip of his subject. The water ran down the small cracks of his lips and collected in pools around his nostrils sending the man into spasms of drowning.

  MASON STOOD FROM his chair, trembling. “You hear him shouting, Turner? It chills your blood.”

  Turner wheeled back around and looked into the small square window on the door where the screams emerged-suddenly, he looked frightened. “What do you think he'll say, Mason?”

  THE THIEF'S EYES filled with tears and looked as if they might burst.

  “Sit up now,” said the still-smiling inspector, handing the copper vessel to his assistant.

  It took a few minutes for the thief to find his breath again. “Take me to the baboo! Please!” he said as soon as he could form the words. “I shall confess all, your honor, and tell of my other thefts, but no more, for God's sake! Take me to him!”

  “At once, my son.” Gently the inspector helped the prisoner to his feet. “And will you tell us where you've hidden the opium?” he added.

  “Yes! Yes!” said the thief.

  AS THE THIEF was interrogated, Frank Dickens was seeking different answers, answers he did not believe the thief could provide. For these, he needed to journey to the village where the thief's partner in the crime, the notorious Narain, had lived.

  This was no pleasant journey. The natives held two sets of poles, front and back, of the palanquin, or palki, on their shoulders as they ran. Inside the palki, tossed inside a thin blanket, was the wearied traveler. Frank tried to sleep as the natives chanted to the Kali goddess for their strength. When will they be rid of their gods and goddesses, wondered Frank as he swayed inside the rickety structure. It was not the night heat, nor the bearers’ primitive singing that kept him from sleeping as the journey continued through the night but the foul odor of the slow flame of dirty rags and rotten oil that lighted the way for the palki at the front of the vessel.

  A while later, they had stopped. Frank stirred, realizing he had fallen asleep and wondered what he had been dreaming. In India he never seemed to remember his dreams. It was morning and Superintendent Frank Dickens had reached the distant Bengalee village of his destination. There was no magistrate or native official to greet him, for he deliberately had not made his sojourn known in advance.

  On the road toward a crumbling temple in the distance, the fertile fields teemed with the reddish purple opium poppy. The poppy replaced most of the food crops, and left the surrounding land dry and brittle.

  Crossing the opium fields, his police uniform sparkling from its brass on this sunny morning, he saw the ryots, or peasant farmers, men, women, children. They were scraping residue from the opium poppies with an iron sittooha into an earthen pot. Later, the drug would be packed into balls for shipment by natives in long rows at British-controlled warehouses. Frank felt a wave of nausea run through him as he passed the pungent poppies. A ryot looked up from his hoe and suddenly dropped it and ran. Dickens found the patch of land he'd been working and saw that the crop here was in fact rice. He frowned. The opium was mandated, the rice illegal.

  The British government paid the ryots to grow the poppy instead of other crops, but they also ordered it, when they had to, by the point of bayonets.

  This was one of the poorest villages, Dickens knew, fraught constantly with the threat of famine because of the loss of their natural agriculture. Three years earlier, during the Orissa famine, starvation spread quickly across villages like this. Parents, it was said among the policemen and English officials, had eaten their own children. The government did not want the opium cultivation to get a bad reputation with the moralists back home in England, and so the army delivered as much food as they could to the poorest villages. Still, more than five hundred thousand acres in Bengal at any time were dedicated to the opium poppy, and no amount of rations could make up for the loss of agriculture.

  The adjacent river, once bustling with trade to and from Calcutta, trickled quietly now that the English had finished building the railroads for faster transport of opium and spices. Instead of the commerce of the past, men, women, and children now bathed and played there. Elders prayed and chatted as the children splashed about. Everyone in the village went outside at this early hour because later it would be even hotter.

  Asking for directions from a group of near naked natives, Frank, stopping to wipe his brow and take water, reached a mud hut in a narrow lane. On the side of the house was a pile of dried plants, dead animals, and rubbish. An even stronger odor attacked him from higher up. Stuck to the walls of the house, clumps of cow dung were being heated in the sun and dried for use as fuel. Under the veranda, a striking young woman, bareheaded and barefoot, was preparing food. She had not lit a fire-a sign she was in mourning. A naked toddler held onto both of her legs for balance. Flies were swarming around
the woman, the child, the grain, the ghee.

  “You are the widow Narain?” Frank Dickens asked, stepping forward.

  She nodded.

  “It was my officers, some weeks ago, in the Bagirhaut province, that had him in custody after he and some partners stole opium.”

  “We are a very poor village, sir,” the widow remarked, without any shade of apology in her strong voice. “He worked the fields until there were too many workers and no land left to work.”

  The hut was surprisingly clean. Frank saw the articles of farming, a rough plow, a broken sickle, hanging from the roof, long in disuse. In the bedroom there was the bed, made of string and wood, and a single book on Hindoo gods in an indentation in the wall that had room for several more volumes. Using the bed as a sofa, Frank sat down and skimmed through the pages of the Hindoo book.

  Returning to the widow, who was now nursing her child, he asked whether the book had belonged to her husband.

  She nodded.

  “He read often?”

  “He was never without his books.”

  After receiving directions to the bookseller where she had sold other books, Frank walked across the village and found the stall at the quiet end of the busy bazaar.

  “The widow Narain has sold you some of her husband's books, I believe. Tracts on Hindoo mythology and religion. Do you remember this?”

  The bookseller lowered his spectacles at the Englishman. “Indeed!”

  “And you still have these in your stall?”

  “I believe I do, good sir. But all the books are mixed together.”

  “I will purchase all of the books on these subjects that you have.”

  After his return journey in the wretched paiki, that evening Frank met the inspector who had questioned the captured fugitive.

  “Oh, yes, Superintendent, he has confessed it all to the magistrate of his village. Not as tolerant of physical discomfort as the Thuggees I used to interview in past years, these ordinary dacoits.”

  “You believe he has told the truth?” asked Dickens.

  “I do, yet…”

  “What is it, Inspector?”

  “Only that although he has told the truth, it seems to me there's more he's not saying, as though afraid, afraid in a different way than I can make him on the chabutra. The thief may have a secret he has yet kept from us. Your man Turner has been trying to find out what has happened all day. He is rather worked up over the affair.”

  Dickens ignored this. “The thief has told you where we will find the stolen opium?”

  “I warned him not to play games. He's drawn a map.”

  “Recovering the opium shall be our first order of business. Then I shall see to his secret and to Officer Turner's.”

  Chapter 22

  London, late at night, 1870

  DATCHERY” WAS AT THE ABBEY THAT NIGHT WAITING. MADMAN or not, he could be trusted to be where he said he would, thought Osgood. Punctually mad. Datchery-for Osgood had no other name for the man than that preposterous one-took the publisher by the arm and they began to walk the damp streets. A sharp afternoon rain had driven people indoors. But as the two men gradually plunged deeper into the eastern districts of London there was more life; if the rest of London quieted when darkness fell, this place was just waking up. Contrasted with the frail, sputtering lamps of the streets, the public houses and dram shops provided blazing illumination through their windows. Bright signs advertised telegraph services to India to reach family or sailors; posters offered new watches and hats. Sailors came to spend every penny to their names before shipping off again.

  It drizzled to a deviously slow rhythm as the two men continued on their journey. Murky liquid rushed through the gutter becoming something altogether different from water by the time the drain swallowed it. The men left wide streets for labyrinthine courts, lanes, byways, and alleys. There was Bloody Bridge, below which the water looked more like mud, named for the number of people who would regularly choose that spot to scuttle themselves.

  “Is this near where you live?” Osgood asked.

  “No, no,” said Datchery. “I live nowhere.”

  “Come!” Osgood objected to the absurdity.

  “I mean I'm as poor as Job's turkey, so I keep to rented rooms and lodging houses, mostly, so they will not find me.”

  “So who will not find you, Mr. Datchery?” Osgood demanded, but the topic was pushed aside by Datchery's impervious disposition and the vague and inhuman moans and cries circling around them. Osgood tried a different question: “How far will we go?”

  “When we are somewhere we should stop, we will,” said Datchery. “Though I am the guide, it is not I who guides us.”

  “Then who does?” Osgood asked, knowing there wouldn't be an answer forthcoming, probably because none existed.

  Sick men and women lay huddled in the corners. Agents from the charity homes picked up wanderers, mostly women with infants, some with three babies balanced in their arms. Osgood knew Dickens had taken this sort of walk-expeditions to every lost corner of London to observe and record its multitudes. Like the geologist, Dickens had built his books by digging up every layer of life underneath the city.

  There were times when Datchery's expression would flatten and become dull-or when his eyes seemed clearer, sharper tools than just a moment before.

  They were inside the roughest part of London Osgood had ever seen. In fact, the publisher's only comfort was in observing the fact that none of the cursing crowds of humanity-who, by all appearances, would have spent their daylight hours either on ships or as thieves-had approached them yet. Some offered sarcastic “good nights” from windows or open doorways. Then Osgood noticed that his guide was carrying a large club. In fact, it was more complex than a club. At the top, it had a spike and a hook coming out from the side.

  Datchery, noticing Osgood's interest, said, “Without this, we'd be stripped to our shirtsleeves by now, dear Ripley. Dearest Ripley! This is Tiger Bay, and we are coming to Palmer's Folly!” The names themselves sounded like warnings.

  THERE WAS A cul-de-sac at a narrow court, entered under a crumbling archway, that ended at a three-story building of blackened brick with a black door and sightless windows. On either side of it stood a public house and a thieves’ lodging house. As the two men walked, each step produced a brittle cracking. It took Osgood a few minutes to realize their path was littered with the bones of animals and fish. In front of the public house was a wretched column of people of both sexes and all races, trying to push past one another for a better view of the steps.

  The demonstration on the steps was being performed by a man called the Fire King. He offered, for the reward of small bills, to prove his power of resisting every species of heat. “Supernatural powers!” he promised the crowd.

  To the cheers and applause of his spellbound followers, Fire King swallowed as many spoonfuls of boiling oil as were matched by donations, and he immersed his hands in a pot of “molten lava.” Next, the King entered the open doors to the public house and-for a steeper fee, gladly supplied by the philanthropically minded crowd-he inserted himself into the public house's oven along with a piece of meat and came out only when the meat (a raw steak he'd held up for the crowd) was finished.

  The two pilgrims to this region did not remain outside long enough to see the cooking, however, for Datchery had walked up to the black door and knocked. A man stretched out on a crusty, ragged couch granted them admission into a corridor, after which they ascended a narrow stairs where every board groaned at their steps; perhaps out of disrepair, perhaps to warn the inhabitants. The building smelled of mold and what? It was an odor that was heavy, drowsy. They made a wrong turn into a room where there sat a piano and a small audience before it; everyone turned to look at them and would not move a muscle until they were gone. Barmaids and ballet girls sat next to or on top of sailors and clerks. One man in the audience seemed to be balancing a dagger in his teeth.

  Osgood could only imagine what demons
tration would happen after they left, as he never heard any piano music while in the building.

  They continued upward through the smoke and mist. “Here,” Datchery said with eerie finality. “Take care, Mr. Osgood, every door in life can lead into an undiscovered kingdom or an inescapable trap.”

  The door opened into darkness and smoke.

  “No weapons!” This was the greeting, in a gravely voice that seemed to belong to a woman.

  Datchery put his club down in the hall outside the door.

  Only after some slight, slow commotion was a candle lit. The small room showed itself crammed with people, most coiled together on a collapsed bed. Several were asleep and several more looked as though they could fall asleep at any moment. At the foot of the bed sat a gaunt, careworn woman with silver hair holding a long, thin piece of bamboo.

  “Remember, pay up, dearies, won't ye?” she greeted the newcomers. “Yahee from across the court is in quod for a month for begging. He don't mix well as me, anyhow!”

  Over a small flame she was mixing together a black treacly substance. Sprawled on the bed was a Chinese man in a deep trance, and a Lascar sailor with an open shirt mumbling to himself-both with glossy, vacant eyes. Across the Lascar's mouth, drool escaped from between rotten teeth and ran down the craterlike sores on his lips. Rags and bedclothes hung from a string to dry in the smoke. The smoke! As the woman held out the bamboo pipe, Osgood recognized the reeking smell as opium.

  Osgood thought about the narratives of Coleridge and De Quincey, both of whom, like almost everyone else including Osgood, had taken opiates from the pharmacist to quell rheumatism and other physical ailments. But the writers had indulged heavily enough to experience a swirl of ecstasy and fatigue that were opium's powerful effects on the brain. As De Quincey wrote in a series of published confessions, before it became the motto of thousands, “Happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket.” Osgood thought, too, about the accusation of the police against Daniel Sand that he had left so far away in Boston, that Daniel had given up everything for the thrill and ease of opiate entertainment.