The Last Dickens

by Matthew Pearl

  “Wait. Very well, Branagan.”

  “Chief?” Tom asked. He turned around and saw Dickens wiping a tear from his eye.

  “Forgive me. I know you are right. Before I left England, you see, I received various letters warning me of danger by my coming to America. Anti-Dickens feeling, Anti-English feeling, New York rowdyism, and I don't know what else. As I had already decided to come here, upon my soul I resolved to say no word about it to anyone, not even Dolby, especially not that old beadle, Forster, who thought my soul would evaporate the moment he was Godspeeding me!”

  “Then you thought the measures I have urged on Mr. Dolby were needed?”

  “That was why I agreed that you watch my door that night. Imagine being a man who needs a bodyguard as though from phantom goblins and ghouls! I wonder was Milton visited by angels or by devils when he wrote-and who is it that appears to me?

  “I know you have taken pains to understand it, my good Branagan,” Dickens continued. “You have seen for yourself how I am beset, waylaid, mashed, bruised, and pounded by the crowds. Never have I known less of myself in all my life than in these United States of America. My boy, if I greeted you in poor spirits when you knocked at the door, I assure you I repent it. A character not under my own control takes over when I practice a reading. Now, what do you suggest we do? If I am to begin something, I begin it at once.”

  Tom had not yet concocted a plan. He thought quickly. “Chief, I would just as soon to catch this lady red-handed so she can never again bother you.”

  “Please God! What do you say we do, then?” the novelist asked impatiently. “Much better to die doing, Branagan, than to wait. I have always felt of myself that I must die in harness one day.”

  Tom's improvised proposition was this: Tom must take Dickens's place in his bed. Dickens would quietly slip into the adjoining suite of rooms usually occupied by George Dolby. If the intruder made her way inside as she had their first week in Boston, expecting the novelist, she would find Tom waiting instead. And if Mrs. Barton did not show up, they could toast the Chief's safety on their way out of the city.

  Dickens contemplated this plan and quickly assented. He first gathered up some personal belongings from the bureau and the desk drawers and placed them in a calf-leather case.

  “Do you believe in the wisdom of dreams, Branagan?” the writer asked as he did.

  Tom thought of his strange Staplehurst dream. “Do you mean whether I believe they tell us what is to come?”

  “Surely, surely. Or what has come to pass already. I dreamed once of my dear friend Jerrold, the dramatist. In the dream, he handed me something he wrote, though it was not in his own hand, and he was anxious that I should read it for my own safety. I looked but could not make out a word of it! I woke in great perplexity, with its strange character quite fresh in my sight. The next day, to my astonishment, I learned Jerrold had died.”

  Tom searched for a response. Dickens bowed his head slightly as though he had just finished another dramatic reading. Tom worried what Dickens's fascination with the dream meant for his own health and well-being.

  “I have come to be fond of you, Tom. Do not abandon saying your private prayers, as you likely do-I never have myself, and I know the comfort of it. If I should live to publish more, I'd want you to read my books, whether or not you can make out that they have anything to do with your own life. Will you do it?”

  “Yes,” Tom said.

  “Good, you will be a reader I am proud of.”

  When he was finished gathering his belongings, Dickens entered Dolby's rooms and closed the door behind him. Tom waited with a racing heart. At every creak or shuffle or murmur in the hotel walls, Tom imagined the intruder bursting inside and the ensuing capture. He could not help but also imagine the fury that Dolby would exhibit were the manager by some chance to return early to Boston. He imagined Dolby telling the overly proper Mr. Osgood about it, and predictable Osgood telling his partner, Mr. Fields, and furious Fields sending for the police to come back in force and this time to lock Tom up.

  As the night passed on uneventfully, Tom began to think he'd been wrong and that Louisa Barton was not to make an appearance. He had scared the tired novelist enough for one night. He knocked lightly on the door adjoining to Dolby's rooms where Dickens was sleeping.

  “Chief,” Tom whispered. He opened the door slightly. “Chief, I think we have given this a sufficient trial. Do you wish to reclaim your bed?”

  There was nobody inside. The bed had been slept in, but the bedclothes were only slightly disturbed. It was not unlikely he had gone out for another breather. Unless Louisa Barton had shown up as Tom had expected.

  Tom went into the hallway to question the waiter who had been guarding Dickens's door, but the waiter was nowhere to be seen either. Descending the stairs, he found a night clerk and sent for the fugitive waiter, who came from the barroom with a glass of brandy in his hand.

  “What are you doing in the bar?” Tom said to him.

  The waiter studied Tom with offense. “You a temperance man now?”

  “It's three in the morning. Why aren't you on guard at Mr. Dickens's room upstairs?”

  “There's nothing to guard, is why. Mr. Dickens left.”

  “When?” Tom asked.

  “Not a half hour ago. Said he wanted to get out for a little exercise. Went out the back stairs.”

  Tom knew at once how foolish he had been. He had never persuaded Dickens about the danger of the intruder at all! Dolby's enraged voice now shouted in Tom's mind and had one thing to say: You lost the Chief, you lost Charles Dickens!

  Outside, Tom found a hotel janitor who had seen Dickens leave through the back entrance, signal for a hackney cab and drive away. The janitor said that the coach drove north with Dickens inside. Tom began to walk toward the river looking for any signs of the novelist or his hired cab. The streets were nearly empty this early. A rickety wagon drove by hauling bread. Tom pulled himself onto the baker's open wagon, where he crouched so the stacks of rolls blocked him from the driver's view. After jumping back to the street and surveying his surroundings, Tom gave up his search as fruitless.

  Then he heard an unexpected sound in the morning stillness- a groan. The noises came a few paces down from the riverbank. Tom followed the sounds and found a red-haired man facedown in the rocky, icy bank. Likely a local drunkard who had lost his step. Tom pulled the man onto higher land and could see that he had been battered, his clothes shredded in spots in some kind of assault. His head was uncovered and there was no hat nearby.

  “What happened?” Tom asked, loosening the man's clothing around his chest.

  The man moaned more, trying to say a word. “Coach!”

  “I'll call for help.”

  Before Tom could move, the man grabbed his collar determined to make himself understood. Through his labored breathing and dizzy spells, the man was able to communicate that he had been driving his coach when he saw a woman gesturing for help. She was holding her ankle as though in great pain. When the man stepped down from the box and started for her, she ran past him, took his hat, and leaped onto the driver's box, grabbing the reins. He scrambled back toward the carriage, but she whipped the horses into a frenzy, trampling him. She then stepped down and pushed the staggering man tumbling over the embankment.

  Tom could see through the ice and black mud that the man was wearing the outfit of a hackney cabdriver. “Did you have a passenger in the carriage?” he asked.

  The driver nodded.

  “Who? Was it Charles Dickens?”

  Coughing overcame the driver, and he sprayed out blood.

  “Can you stand?” The attempt failing, Tom put one arm under the half-frozen man's neck and one under his legs and lifted him with a great heave. He carried him to the street.

  Just then, a brougham carriage came roaring back in the direction of the hotel. Tom tried to signal for help, but it careened wildly past at a breakneck speed, far faster than the legal limit of a slow tro
t. It passed too rapidly for Tom to see anything but the driver's hat and to observe that there were no passengers to be seen. But the cabman that Tom was holding stretched his hand out at the sight of the vehicle.

  “Stay calm, fellow,” Tom said.

  Bracing his legs to carry his load farther up the road, Tom found the driver of a truck watering his two blanketed horses at a hitching post.

  “This man needs help immediately. Take him to the hospital,” instructed Tom, laying his burden down gently. Then Tom began untying one of the truckman's horses, saying, “I need to borrow her.”

  The confused truckman was too startled to object, and Tom climbed up onto the horse without a saddle and kicked her into a launching gallop.

  Tom was soon in the immediate wake of the speeding carriage that had passed them. When he was even with the rear of the carriage, Tom breathed in deeply and leaped off the horse, grabbing the back of the chaise. With one hand hanging from the top of the chaise, Tom swung around, unlatched the door, and threw himself inside. The chaise was not empty. There was Dickens on the floor.

  The Chief was sprawled out, out of view of the window. His head rested on a pillow-the stolen hotel pillow from Parker's!

  This moment had been dreamed up all along.

  There was Louisa Barton's carpetbag full of bundles of ragged manuscript pages. Tom took up the title page. A New Book of Job by Charles John Huffam Dickens was scrawled out in a cramped hand. Also in the bag were slippers, curlers, a mirror, pomatum, and rope.

  “Chief, it's Tom Branagan. Are you hurt?” Tom whispered and shook him.

  “Slow, slow please,” Dickens mumbled in reply.

  Tom realized that Dickens was not bound or constrained physically. But Dickens's extreme torpor was the same that had come over him when in any fast conveyance.

  Just then, the horses came to an abrupt halt, the carriage lifting in the air.

  Dickens began to try to speak, but Tom signaled for quiet. The novelist was insensible and confused-plus Tom was not armed but knew Louisa Barton could be. If the kidnapper saw him there, she could become desperate.

  The brougham carriage had two rows of seats facing each other and space beneath each of the rows for luggage. Hearing the driver step down from her seat, Tom slid to the floor and rolled beneath one of the seats into the luggage space. He grabbed Dickens's walking stick and pulled it against his body where it couldn't be seen.

  “Here we are,” said Louisa theatrically, as she opened the door. Her abundant hair was half stuffed under the stolen driver's cap, which she now removed and threw aside. “Chief, you'll need to wake yourself now. You'll want to be spirited, spirited and energetic as always you are, to show what you're all about. This will beat the other readings for those groundlings hollow, hollow, hollow!”

  With considerable strength, the woman dragged Dickens under her arms and out of the side door. Tom, meanwhile, rolled over to the other side of the carriage and popped that door open so he could observe them. They were in the massive shadow of Tremont Temple.

  The assailant was walking Dickens gently toward the theater with one hand, carrying her pearl-handled switchblade in the other. She had on a pink sash and dazzling flame red gown, with dead geraniums dropping down from tousled hair.

  Tom waited until they had entered the theater and then he went up the stairs to the main hall. He knew the building inside and out from the readings and knew that inside he'd have the best chance of separating Dickens from her long enough to get him free. He considered going for a policeman, but they'd surely be resistant to his story: particularly the part about the attacker being a woman from the upper classes of the city named Louisa Parr Barton.

  Tom went through the side entrance where he had previously guarded against people trying to sneak into the readings. Now it was Tom doing the sneaking. He silently climbed the stairs to the balcony, peering over the railings to survey the scene. Louisa had placed Dickens, who had revived but was still in a state of confusion, on the platform in front of the podium. She sat at his feet on the platform with her wide gown flowing around her, like the ghostly image of a schoolgirl. The blade dangled in her hand.

  Her intention was clear as it was bizarre: Dickens was to do a reading of her manuscript. Poor Chief. The lines on his face looked like they had deepened since he had arrived in America; without George's lighting and Henry's choice of a fashionable hat, straggly hair hung from his bald head down over his cheeks. He was a shadow of himself.

  Dickens fumbled through her manuscript pages, and began to read. “They slain the servants with the edge of their swords-I only have escaped to tell the vulgar people that God is upon our city.” Louisa appeared to be enraptured with her words coming from her idol's mouth.

  Tom raised himself just above the iron railings. He caught Dickens's eye and Dickens, without betraying Tom's presence, nodded. Dickens raised his voice and began to read her strange and discordant text louder, allowing Tom to descend the stairs and make his way along the side of the auditorium unheard.

  But he reached a point where he could go no farther without risking detection. Dickens, recognizing Tom's dilemma, thrust aside the woman's pages and began to speak in an earthy growl. “Let it be! There's enough light for wot I've got to do…”

  It was Bill Sikes and the murder scene from Oliver Twist! Dickens's teeth were clenched with fury, completely transforming into the savage killer-he looked right at Louisa Barton. He held his hand down to her as though he would seize her by the wrist.

  She trembled with a thrill of fear. Her face flushed a fiery red.

  “You were watched to-night, you she-devil. Every word you said was heard!”

  The dramatic performance mesmerized Louisa, and Tom successfully crept to the side of the platform unseen. He could see her hand clenched the knife so tightly her knuckles were turning white. Tom could take her by surprise by coming through the dressing room onto the platform, but if he had to struggle, he feared Dickens's proximity to her weapon.

  As he debated his best chance, Louisa seemed to sense something wrong. Her head whipped around.

  “Why, you!” she screamed violently, as though infused with Bill Sikes's venom. She caught him with her hypnotic glare and cut the air with her blade. “You can't be here!”

  Before Tom could move, she jumped up and put her knife to the soft flesh of Dickens's throat. “Keep reading!” she commanded him.

  “Every word you said was heard…” Dickens tremulously repeated Sikes's warning.

  “Yes, that's it-keep going,” she said to Dickens, and then to Tom, said, “Now you leave!”

  Tom, eyes locked on the switchblade, backed away through the middle aisle. “I'm going, Mrs. Barton,” Tom said. “You see, I'm going.”

  Then a different idea came over him, and he dropped into a seat with a loud thump. Tom dug himself into the cushion and reclined.

  She looked back from Dickens to Tom but then, as though deciding she never wanted to leave the writer's side again, she said, “You're spiteful because we were never friends. Fine, stay! You wouldn't understand what you're about to see!”

  Tom put his boots up onto the chair in front of him. “I think I do.”

  Then understanding dawned and her mouth opened wide. “That's why, you're sitting-that seat's mine!”

  Tom was sinking deep into the seat from which she had watched the Christmas Eve reading, where she had carved a string of words about Dickens. Unloosed with rage, she ran through the aisle toward him, her knife held out.

  “Run, Chief! Quickly!” Tom called out to Dickens.

  “I won't!” Dickens cried.

  “Chief, run!” Tom repeated, but to his astonishment Dickens did not move. “Fetch the police!”

  To this urgency, Dickens thankfully seemed to assent. First, he threw up the pages of Louisa's manuscript in the air and then darted out of the theater.

  “No!” she cried, watching her book's pages flutter in all directions. Tom used her distraction to swi
ng the hook of Dickens's walking stick at her hand, the jutting-out screw landing right on her knuckles and creating a deep gash. Her switchblade went flying into the air. Tom staggered backward when she pulled up a pistol from her pocket, then pounced forward and knocked her down. They both rushed to where it landed and struggled over it. Tom drew his fist back but knew even in the rush of the moment that he could not strike a woman. She wrestled her hand free and threw her fist into his jaw again and again with surprising strength.

  “There is an actress,” Tom said to her, fending off her blow with his arm. Even as he spoke, he could not help feeling as though he were betraying the Chief. He unconsciously switched to a whisper. “There is a young actress back in England whom the Chief loves. That is why he and his wife separated, not because of you.”

  “No, you've invented it all!” Louisa wailed.

  “The Chief told me, he told me himself. He's come here to earn enough money to buy her anything she wants-to buy her the crown jewels and the Tower of London and Buckingham Palace if that's what she desires!”

  “No, he came for me!”

  But the poisonous words had worked. Her face contorted into confusion, she began to sob and her grasp loosened. Tom wrapped her in his arms. Within minutes, Dickens returned with several policemen and citizens who had heard his call.

  When she saw Dickens again, it was as though life returned to Louisa. She began softly singing to herself like a child. In a sudden movement, she pulled away from Tom's grip and drew a razor from inside the lining of her shoe.

  “No!” Tom cried. “Chief, watch out!” He jumped in front of Dickens.

  She stabbed the razor into her own neck and began to slice her flesh from right to left, dropping into a puddle of her own blood.

  One of the policemen ran for a doctor and another kneeled beside the woman and tried to staunch the terrible gash in her neck with her sash. Dickens, watching in shock, fell to her side and dislodged the razor from her hand. She was trying to speak again but gurgled blood instead. Her arms flailed wildly until her hand sat on top of Dickens's, at once growing calm and still.