The Last Dickens

Yahee darted up the steep, winding steps at full and reckless speed. Tom first and then Osgood chased after him, pleading with him as they went to slow down. The opium dealer screamed of Iron-head Herman coming to kill them all.

“Yahee, stop!” Tom cried.

A rusted section of the railing gave way, plummeting twenty feet down to the bottom of the tunnel. Yahee slipped and hung on only by his fingertips to the broken railing.

Tom cried out for Yahee to be still. He heaved and pulled him up to safety. As he secured him, the man fell limp and motionless in Tom's arms.

“Is he all right?” Osgood asked, holding his sides and panting as he reached the spot.

“He's fainted,” Tom said. “Help me lay him down.” They carried Yahee to the next landing as his body shook and he mumbled in Cantonese.

They sat on the landing and waited for Yahee to recover.

“Herman nearly killed him,” Osgood commented after getting his breath back, “and he wasn't even here. What are we up against, Branagan?”

DIVIDING UP AFTER leaving Yahee in a hired coach, Osgood hurried to the Piccadilly hotel and Tom went straight to the police station. When Tom returned to the hotel, where Osgood had shared their intelligence with Rebecca, he showed them a telegram cable. It was from Gadshill and composed of only five words:

Constable Tom Branagan. Yes. No.

“He still cannot simply address me as ‘Tom,’” he said, shaking his head. “This is from Henry Scott in Rochester.”

“What does this mean?” Osgood asked.

“If you are right to think that Herman assaulted Daniel in Boston,” Tom said, “and then went with you on your passage on the Samaria, I've wondered why Herman would have been following an American publisher to learn more about an English novel. I suspected that if Herman was trying to get information from you, and from Daniel before that, about The Mystery of Edwin Drood, he must have already tried other channels of information in England. These confirm my suspicion. See for yourself.”

Tom placed a pile of documents from the London police in front of Osgood on the table.

Osgood examined them. “A break-in at Chapman and Hall- Dickens's English publisher. Another break-in of the same sort at Clowes, the printer. Both the week of June ninth, the date of Dickens's death. In each instance, it appears nothing was stolen.”

“Nothing stolen,” Tom said, “because what Herman was looking for-information about Dickens's ending-wasn't there. As nothing was taken, the police quickly dropped any inquiry into the incidents. That's why I sent a cable to Henry Scott asking for an immediate reply to two questions: Was Gadshill broken into after the Chief's death? And was anything taken? You hold his answers in that cable: yes and no.”

“Why should Herman have been following me, then?” Osgood asked.

“That we do not know, Mr. Osgood. But I think Herman actually may have been protecting you at the opium rooms,” Tom said. “The fiends were likely merely trying to rob you, a foreigner in an expensive suit-a certain target. Herman needed you to continue your search, needed you alive and well enough to keep going. He even left you near the sewer drains, where there are always sewer hunters.”

“He thinks I know how to find the ending!” Osgood said. “And if it's all true, there's something worse…” He sat down to ponder this and put his head in both hands.

“What is it, Mr. Osgood?” Rebecca asked.

“Don't you see, Miss Sand? The Parsee, trained in his skills of terror and murder by the worst pirates in the world, has torn England to pieces with his bare hands looking for something, anything, on Drood. And he would not be following me if he'd had any success. What if…” Osgood stopped himself, then found the courage to admit: “What if it means there really is nothing to find?”

“Perhaps it's just a matter of our looking in the wrong places,” said Rebecca bravely.

“Yes,” Tom said with the spark of genuine insight, then slammed his hand on a table. “Yes, Miss Sand! But not only that. Not only the wrong place, but the wrong time.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Branagan?” Rebecca asked.

“I was just remembering. When we were in America with Mr. Dickens, our party was on the train to go to the Philadelphia readings, and the Chief began speaking rather wistfully of Edgar Poe. He said that when he saw Poe the last time he'd been to Philadelphia, they'd spoken of Caleb Williams. Who was the author of that novel?”

“William Godwin,” Osgood said.

“Thank you. Mr. Dickens said that he told Poe how Godwin wrote the last part of the book first and then started on the first part. And Poe said he, too, wrote his mystery tales backward. What if Mr. Dickens, when he set out to write his great mystery, didn't begin at the be-ginning?”

Osgood, lifting his head, sat back in his chair and considered this in silence. “When Mr. Dickens collapsed in Gadshill,” Osgood said abstractedly, “he had that afternoon reached precisely the end of the first half of the book. It was almost as if his body surrendered, knowing he was finished with his labor, although to us it hardly seemed so.”

Tom nodded and said, “What if he wrote the second half of The Mystery of Edwin Drood first, and then the first half once he was back here?”

“What if he wrote the book backward? What if he wrote the ending first?” Osgood asked rhetorically.

“Yet none of our efforts,” interrupted Rebecca, “have suggested where the rest of the book would be stored if he really did write it.”

“Perhaps he would have tried to leave a clue with someone, to tell someone before he died where it was,” Tom mused.

“Dickens's last words,” Osgood said excitedly. “He was calling for him!”

“Calling for whom?” Rebecca asked.

“Henry Scott told us, do you remember? The last thing Dickens was heard to say by the servants was ‘Forster’! Dickens had something left to tell his biographer!”

***

BUT TO THEIR great frustration, John Forster, whom Osgood and Tom found sitting in his office in the Lunacy Commission at Whitehall, shook his head with a baleful expression. He rolled his big black eyes coolly as they peppered him with their questions. He took out his gold watch, rubbed its face with his fingers, shook it as if shaking a bottle, and cringed busily.

“Friends, I am very busy-very very busy. My afternoon has been taken up by a visit from Arthur Grunwald, the actor-a damnder ass I never encountered in the course of my whole life! He wishes to change the entire play of Drood we've already prepared to open. I really must finish my day's work.”

“You are certain that Mr. Dickens did not try to tell you anything else related to Drood when you arrived at Gadshill?” Osgood asked, trying to return him to the more urgent topic.

Forster wrung his hands outstretched. “I wring my hands at this.”

“I see that you do,” said Osgood. “We must know what he told you.”

“Mr. Osgood,” Forster continued, “Mr. Dickens was insensible by the time I arrived. If he was saying anything, he could not be understood by human ears.”

“Like in a dream,” Tom added musingly.

The other two men looked at him quizzically.

“The Chief told me of a dream he had once,” Tom explained. “In it, he was given a manuscript filled with words and was told it would save his life, but when he looked down at it he could not read it.”

“He never told me about such a dream… Why is it you are so interested in the matter of his final mumblings, Mr. Branagan?” Forster demanded.