The Last Dickens

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