The Last Dickens

Soon after, Dickens's health had worsened and before long the sessions were suspended for Rogers and the other small circle of mesmerism patients who came to Gads. Upon learning of Dickens's death the first week in June, Rogers wired his employers back at Franklin Square in New York, presuming his mission complete. He was instead ordered by the Harpers to remain for a few weeks and to make himself a nuisance around Gadshill so that he might observe any dealings about Drood in that time. Because of the five-year wait since Dickens's last novel, Drood would mean hundreds of thousands of dollars of potential profits to whoever could publish it first in America. The Major would not take his eye off this goal.

Only days later, Rogers received an entirely new and unexpected order; he was advised of intelligence that Mr. J. R. Osgood was on his way to England in all likelihood with the aim of finding missing pieces of Dickens's final novel. Rogers was to stop Osgood from doing so, in order for Harpers’ pirating of the novel to proceed unhindered.

“I confess this heavily, wearily, Ripley. I have since come to know you are a decent and good man, who cares for employees under his charge, as I have seen you do with Miss Rebecca,” Rogers continued. “But do understand one thing, if only one thing about me, and I shall one day die content knowing you did not dismiss me wholeheartedly.”

“I wonder what you could possibly say for yourself,” Osgood replied sadly.

“Merely this: I am no artist. No genius like the people who occupy your life, perhaps like you yourself. Whether you think of yourself as one or not, you have the bravery of the artist inside you. But this is the worldly work I know and have practiced since trained as one of Harper's Police. I had tried to work in a bank before that, but I flattened out at it because I did not like how the other men looked at me. We were the first policemen in the city of New York, and we were hated-people stoned us. We had to be armed with a ‘hook and bill’ for each one of us-the peculiar club with the spiked top you saw when we went into the dark corner of London. The public thought we were there to serve as spies and, strangely, this fear made us into spies. Disguises, investigations, secret service, any dealings underhanded and scrubby-this has been my art, my lot. I meant to set you out on a wild goose chase by leading you into the opium room, knowing you would recognize it as the prototype for Dickens's book and be distracted. If I succeeded in this task, I could finally free myself from Major Harper's grip and return to the stage, where I was once happy and made others happy as your firm's books do. One day I shall have a houseful of children, and shall wish to be respected and loved by them. I did not intend any harm to come to you, dear Ripley!”

“But you did have every intention to mislead me, as you admit!”

“I ask not for forgiveness for the deception but do beg that you believe my purpose in owning it to you. I desire to help you.”

“Ha!” Osgood responded.

“Ripley, I, too, was attacked by those opium pushers!”

“Which was your own sorry fault, sir,” Tom said in reproach. “Your careless doing.”

“To a point, yes, Mr. Branagan. But the violence done to us was only the hint of some far larger sinister movement. Ripley, I believe you to be in grave danger even as we speak.”

“From you as much as from anyone else,” Osgood said.

“You have had more say than you deserve now. Have a chair and be comfortable while I send for a police coach,” Tom added.

Rogers shook his head. “No. You need my help, gentlemen-your survival may depend on it! Perhaps my own as well, though it may mean nothing to you now!” A glance passed between the two other men that showed no sign of wavering. Rogers, becoming more panicked, now pleaded shamelessly. “My dear Ripley, can't you trust me again? I promise to repay my debt to you for what I have done.”

Osgood directed a heated look at his former companion. “You have earned my trust and sympathy through a bundle of lies. You plotted to disrupt our American tour with Dickens, to lay blame on Mr. Branagan where there was none, to distract my mission here, all under the nefarious orders of those Harpy brothers. I have no doubt Major Harper holds the strings of your current plea, as well. Any minute he will pull you down and set up Judy, or the devil, or some other wooden grotesque to try to lead us astray. Remove yourself from our sight now, while you have your liberty, if Mr. Branagan will allow it.”

Tom took a step back and waved the man to the door. Rogers made no argument this time. “Thank heavens for you, Ripley,” he said. He quietly turned and, hat under his arm, scurried out of the room.

TOM BHANAGAN'S APPEARANCE-and the pistol he had brandished- had been as much a shock to Osgood as the revelation of Rogers's true identity. Once they confirmed that Rogers had left the premises of the hotel, and Rebecca had returned from the bank, Tom set out to tell them of his own winding path that had reunited them. Returning to England after Dickens's reading tour, Tom had continued to be employed in a domestic capacity in the town of Ross at George Dolby's estate. But he tired of the monotony of caring for the Dolby children's much-adored ponies and driving around Mrs. Dolby, who had taken full advantage of their greatly increased wealth since the American tour. Dolby, for his part, had been hardened by what he called the American bullying, and spent their money extravagantly and carelessly, especially after his second son died at only a few days old. Tom occasionally met with Dickens at Dolby's, including at George Dolby Jr.'s christening, but the novelist, though friendly to him, never spoke of the dangerous events of the late American tour.

Tom showed Osgood and Rebecca a pearl-handled switchblade he kept in his pocket. “This was her knife that I took out of her hand. I realized I still had it after we left the country and found it among my clothing. I think about her sometimes when I see it, and I think about what could have happened to the Chief.”

“You should be proud of what you did,” Osgood said.

“I was certain she would die, you know,” Tom said. “You would have been, too, Mr. Osgood, had you seen the blood. The Chief must have thought so, he seemed so sad when he saw her, he even whispered something in her ear to soothe her, though I could not hear what it was. But the truth is that few women attempting suicide in that fashion ever possess the strength to cut their own skin deep enough after they begin. Many survive, as she did, though forever diminished inside and out. Their images from that day will always be with me- Louisa Barton's as much as Charles Dickens's.”

Dulled by his time in Ross and haunted by what had happened in those last hours in Boston, Tom applied to the police at Scotland Yard and waited several months, when a vacancy opened for a night constable third class, the lowest and most endangered tier of the English police. He served his beats from 10 p.m. at night until 6 a.m. This was the only position usually open to an Irishman, though the fact that he could read and write well brought him quick promotion to the place of police constable first class.

Because the Irish were assigned divisional beats in the poorest sections of London, Tom had been one of the constables on patrol alerted to the commotion in the Palmer's Folly court on the night of Osgood's attack. He had been fixing a coalhole that had come dangerously loose in a nearby street. Upon reaching the scene of activity Tom witnessed Rogers fleeing, his head bloodied and injured, and recognized him.

“I knew him as the man who, in his Washington wig and old-fashioned three-cornered hat, started the riot at the ticket sale in Brooklyn that I was blamed for. His appearance in London was remarkable to me, as you'd imagine. I decided to shadow him so that I could discover more, and I found out that he was boarding under an assumed name in an out-of-the-way lodging house. I followed him for several more days, discovering that he had been wiring telegraphs and sending letters back to New York. When I saw him enter this hotel, I examined the guest ledger and was freshly amazed to find your name among the occupants here, Mr. Osgood. I suspected that he had been operating some design of nefarious nature ever since our time in America, but I didn't know if he was a confidence man of some kind, a thief, a brazen murderer.”

“That is why you brought your pistol,” Osgood said.

Tom nodded, putting his pistol aside with a relieved smile. “To be honest, it's lucky that I didn't have to use it. They have issued them to the department because of the Fenian attacks on the government and on the prisons. Because I'm of Irish blood, I have been assigned to infiltrate what's left of the Fenian groups. But the department has only held sporadic training with the pistols, and I have yet to be instructed in them.”

Osgood, in his turn, shared with Tom a full and detailed account of their adventures on the Samaria with Herman and their experiences in England.

Tom pulled the curtains around the room closed as he listened.

“Mr. Branagan, what's wrong?” Rebecca asked. “Do you think someone is watching us?”