carefully at the servant. “Why, is it you, dear Henry Scott? It is you, Scott!” He scrutinized the familiar face, so altered by the passage of two difficult years and the long, handlebar mustache carefully combed upward at either tip. A big difference in appearance was Gadshill livery, a loose-fitting white overall with cape and top boots.
“Yes, Mr. Osgood,” he said. “Perhaps you recall, Miss Sand, that I accompanied Mr. Dickens and Mr. Dolby on their travels through America, as the Chief's personal dresser-and I daresay his most trusted man. You'll remember it was the time when all that had happened with Tom Branagan! Well, just before we were away on the tour, the Chief's top house man here at Gad's, his servant-or ‘domestic,’ as your American help prefer to be called-was found by Scotland Yard to have been stealing money from the cash box. A man who had worked for the Chief for twenty- five years and was paid generously for it! I am glad to say the Chief came to have enough regard to give me the station with a post for my wife, after we returned from America. Five years to the day.”
“Pardon?”
“His death, Mr. Osgood. It was precisely five years after the railway accident at Staplehurst. When he fell ill, I wandered to his calendar and I could not help think to myself, an ill wind that blows nobody good.”
As Henry bowed to depart, Osgood pleaded that he stay. “Mr. Scott, what can you tell me about what happened in the chalet yesterday with that man?”
“I am mightily sorry again for that,” Henry said adding another and lower bow. “I suppose a mad beast must have a sober driver, as the saying is. Why, if the poor Chief were present in spirit
Rebecca had an unwavering air about her that made every man seek her approbation for their ideas.
“I was just looking at his reading into spiritual topics, in fact, Mr. Scott,” said Rebecca.
“I'm curious what troubled that man,” Osgood interrupted.
“Ah, you might name anything and that likely qualifies as troubling that beastly sun-scorched loafer!” Henry explained that Dickens sometimes ministered mesmerism as therapy to troubled or sick individuals. He would lie them down on the floor or the couch and place them in a magnetic slumber until he woke them trembling and cold. There was a blind lady who credited Dickens's use of a magnetic treatment on her with regaining her sight. “This man, though, he was a special case,” noted Henry.
The man, a poor farmer, had been told by London doctors months earlier that he had an incurable illness. Having heard about Dickens's special skills he begged at the novelist's doorstep for treatment through spiritual and moral mesmerism. Dickens had been less active with his mesmeric power in recent years but relented and began the magnetic therapy for the man.
“Had it worked, Mr. Scott?” Rebecca asked.
“Well, perhaps it did work on him, Miss Sand-but the wrong way,” said Henry.
“What do you mean?” asked Osgood.
“One of the cooks told me that the farmer's illness was better, but his mental condition had become feeble during those mesmerism sessions. Now the poor tramp still lurks around, just like those dumb dogs out in the stables, as if the Chief is hiding in the woods somewhere with Falstaff's thieves and Chaucer's pilgrims, waiting to come back.” This Henry said in a tone more unconsciously sympathetic to the tramp than he knew.
WITH EYES RED from reading and copying, Osgood and Rebecca decided to return to the inn at the end of the day. Forster was waiting on the Gad's porch.
“Will there be more of your expedition in the morning?” asked the executor, as if genuinely interested, instead of just groping for information.
“After three days, we can find little in the way of clues other than a list of titles, some scribbled notes on the book, and some rejected pages, Mr. Forster,” Osgood admitted. “I fear we've exhausted your materials here.”
Forster nodded with barely concealed satisfaction, then hastily forged an expression of disappointment. “I suppose you shall return to Boston.”
“Not yet,” Osgood answered.
“Oh?” Forster said.
“If there is nothing to find inside Dickens's rooms, perhaps there is some clue outside them-somewhere.”
Forster's pupils dilated with interest, and he picked up a pen and a slip of paper. “You are an enterprising American, and I well know enterprising Americans detest wasting their time. Your search, I am afraid, Mr. Osgood, can merely be that: a waste. This address is where you can find me when I'm back in London, where I serve as lunacy commissioner, should you need me. Mr. Dickens was too good a man to attempt to mislead readers who trusted him: The end of
Chapter 17
I
Osgood reviewed the will's language with Georgina Hogarth at the Falstaff Inn coffee room and offered opinions about her obligations in relation to Forster. The document created an admirably complicated distribution of responsibilities and burdens. Forster controlled all the manuscripts of Dickens's published works. But to Georgy, the document bequeathed all the private papers in the house as well as all decisions related to jewelry and the familiar objects from Dickens's writing desk, like the quill pen temporarily pocketed by Forster.
“Mr. Forster,” Georgy said to Osgood, “sees his duty as reminding the world that Charles should be worshipped. That is why Charles is buried in the Poets’ Corner rather than in our humble village, as he would have wished. If Mr. Forster could have moved Dickens's pen for him over the lines of this will, he would have.”
That afternoon, following the one-hour train ride from Higham to London, Osgood and Rebecca entered the most awe-inducing man-made spot in England, the Westminster Abbey. Both Osgood and his bookkeeper automatically leaned their heads back to the remarkable ceiling far above, where the expanse of pillars crossed like the tips of forest trees meeting each other in the morning sky. The light streaming into the Abbey was stained red from the ornamented rose-colored glass windows surrounding them.
In the south transept, the American visitors found the marble slab that covered the coffin of Charles Dickens. The grand monument at the Poets’ Corner inside the famous cathedral was surrounded by the tombs of the greatest writers. Dickens's itself was overlooked by statues of Addison and Shakespeare and a bust of Thackeray. Though little else from his instructions had been followed, the inlaid words on the tomb read as Dickens's will had requested.
Hordes of people filed in to leave verses and flowers over the novelist's slab, and the remains of yesterday's offerings had begun to wither in the warm air of the Abbey.
As they stood there, a flower was tossed past Osgood and Rebecca onto the Dickens grave. The bloom had
