The Last Dickens Read online

  Osgood interrupted. “Daniel Sand was no tramp. And no opium fiend!”

  “Then explain the marks on his arm,” Barnicoat said. “No, the omnibus and its passengers, waylaid from their pressing travel, were more the victims than this lad. Now, you needn't feel any personal responsibility fall on yourself, Osgood,” Barnicoat said with a rude informality.

  “What happened to his chest?” Osgood asked, forcing himself to look more closely at the mangled remains of his clerk. There were two parallel cuts in Daniel's skin. “It is almost like a bite mark. And his suit. Over here, it looks as though someone tore it at the seam.”

  The coroner shrugged. “From the mechanisms beneath the bus, perhaps. Or perhaps the boy had injured himself while in the spell of his narcotic. Sad to reflect on, the shadows of this danger fall not uncommonly on young men of low station and more and more even women-if you can call them that still, for they are much degraded. I'm afraid this boy was one of the fallen.”

  “I cannot say it is a surprise,” Carlton said to Barnicoat, “after seeing the office today.”

  Osgood had begun to feel the heat of anger rising to his ears and lips against Daniel for what seemed an undeniable secret life. Now he could direct his emotion elsewhere. “Since I have entered, you have insulted the decent name of my clerk, and now you insult my business. Exactly what do you mean to say about our office?”

  Carlton raised an eyebrow, as though it were too plain. “Why, an office in which the men are mixed together with unmarried women-it is bound to corrupt young boys! Could awaken certain uncontrolled physical urges in the females, too, I dare fancy, that should make any gentleman color.” Though he himself did not.

  Osgood steadied himself to rebuke the policeman, when he realized something… in his astonishment at seeing Daniel lifeless on the slab, it had unaccountably fled his mind.

  “My God. Rebecca!” Osgood said softly.

  “Yes, Rebecca! That was the name of the little miss, Mr. Barnicoat, and a pretty one with blooming cheeks, sitting by Mr. Osgood's office door,” Carlton said with a lugubrious frown. “The place almost seemed all women, in truth. Before long the dear strong-willed creatures will have the ballot-mark my having said that Mr. Barnicoat!- and there will be no one left in all Boston for housekeeping.”

  “Rebecca,” Osgood whispered, gently clutching the stiffening hand of his clerk. “Rebecca is Daniel's sister.”

  Chapter 4

  THOUGH IT HAD BEEN THERE FOR THIRTEEN YEARS, GIVE OR take a month, “the New Land” was still new in the eyes of Bostonians. The area had been a wasted basin for many years before being filled in as hundreds of new acres, where streets and sidewalks were put down and gradually extended west. The region was widely pronounced as having even more potential than the South End for a luxurious and prestigious collection of houses. But though the old blue bloods liked to speculate in the markets, they did not like to gamble with the value of their neighborhoods and children's inheritances.

  Sylvanus Bendall was a different breed. He welcomed risk. He opened the door and invited risk in, taking its coat and brushing its boots and serving it tea in his living room. He was one of the first men to have purchased one of the tracts of land in Back Bay as far west as possible when the commonwealth announced it would sell them. He liked the idea that the street he lived on-Newbury Street-was so aptly named that it had not even existed a few years back. At times, at least twice a day, he boasted to himself that he was not unlike Sir William Braxton, the sturdy Englishman who had lived on this peninsula by himself for five years before 1630 when Governor Winthrop came and founded Boston. In the days of Braxton, Boston would have looked far more rugged and hearty, capped by its three potent hills that were now barely distinguishable, faintly remembered in the name of Tremont Street. To the lone pilgrim Braxton, they would have been like the Alps.

  Bendall enjoyed rushing into the unknown. Just as he had at the scene of the omnibus accident a few days earlier, sacrificing his good summer pants to the pavement to be nearer to the dying lad. It was Bendall who'd examined the papers the dead man clutched, while others stood by dumbfounded by what to do, and found them to be the latest episode of Mr. Dickens's current (and, alas, final) novel.

  The company present at the scene of the accident had been split between those most fascinated by a dead man and those most fascinated by the mysterious pages.

  Among the latter, each pleaded his and her case to Bendall-who held the papers like the auctioneer holds his hammer-as to who was most deserving of a sheet or two from the packet. A poetic brick-maker noted that he had attended all of Dickens's public readings at the Tremont Temple in Boston two and a half years earlier, waiting in line when it was so cold the mercury was clean out of sight. Another man, rosy and cheerful, had kept his own ticket stubs in his family Bible and vowed that if he did not truly love the genius of the great novelist more than anyone else did, then he would wish Dickens never born. A buxom lady listed a series of household pets-two cats, a yellow dog, a bird-that she had named for Dickens characters (Pip and Nell, Rose, Oliver); a mechanic perched near the corpse announced he had read Dickens's David Copperfield four times, but this was eclipsed by six! eight! and nine! from others. One old man began to cry and it seemed to be for the accident victim's sad fate, until he whispered, “Poor dear old Dickens, noble Dickens.”

  As the bystanders quibbled with one another over the pages, Bendall silently made a bold decision: he himself would be the treasure's custodian. Folding the pages up, he quietly made his exit, pausing only to leave his name with the driver of the “Alice Gray,” should he happen to be arrested for mowing down the lad.

  “Sylvanus Bendall,” he said to the nervous omnibus driver, “two words to remember, and you shall not have reason to fear Boston justice!”

  Sylvanus Bendall. His name itself sounded far more like the name of an adventurer than an attorney-at-law for the indigent and unfortunate classes of Boston. It was the name of one who had penetrated deep into the New Land. His friends from Beacon Hill may have put up their handkerchiefs at the smell of the nearby marshes and the dust of construction, but Bendall inflated his nostrils each morning like a war horse.

  Not to say that the Back Bay was an Eden; there were problems and he faced those with a manly demeanor. In fact, there was one waiting for him on this day when he returned to his house.

  The plate-glass window at the side of his porch was shattered into pieces. Bendall walked quietly to the street door and took the latch in his hand. Inside, he faced a mess: desks and secretaries overturned; up a flight of stairs, holding tightly to the oak balustrade, coming upon dishes and china shattered; up another flight, shelves emptied of books. He heard a shuffle and a sudden noise from another room. The thieves at large! He grabbed a walking stick and an umbrella and raised them together like a Japanese samurai. “I shall knock your head clear off!” he shouted as fair warning.

  A small, white-haired woman cried out, “Mr. Bendall!” His housekeeper, who had arrived to prepare supper shortly before him, now stood dead still with a look of terror.

  “Don't be afraid, my dear Mary, you will be safe now with me,” Bendall said.

  It did not seem that any objects of value were missing. His much-prized pages were undoubtedly safe, for he had been keeping them on his own person, in his waistcoat.

  “Should I send a boy for the police?” asked Mary.

  “No, no,” he said dismissively.

  “But they must be on alert!” the housemaid protested.

  “Pooh, Mary!” said Bendall. “You read too many sensation novels. Police are of an old mind-set and know nothing of the Back Bay. I shall root out the source of this evil myself.” There, once more, a bold and undoubtable decision by Sylvanus Bendall.

  Chapter 5

  DANIEL SAND'S DEATH WAS YET ANOTHER CRISIS AT THE BUSTLING 124, Tremont Street office building of Fields, Osgood & Co. It was the nature of the publishing trade to shift from crisis to optimism back to crisi
s, and the master of those rhythms was James Osgood. It had been back in March, three months before Daniel Sand fell lifelessly in the street, when the senior partner, J. T. Fields, stopped Osgood on the stairs. Fields's long, stiff, graying beard and a rumbling undercurrent in his voice lent him an inflated gravity at all times.

  “Mr. Osgood, a word please.”

  A word never failed to add a burden to Osgood's shoulders. He knew Fields's troubled expressions like he knew the halls of the publishing firm and could guess the sort of business emergency at a glance. Osgood had been in this man's employment for fifteen years since he had written him that first letter praising Walden with the vivid enthusiasm of a neophyte. It had been five years since Osgood introduced bright color binding to replace the drab maroon covers they had formerly favored. And it had been almost two years since his own name was added to the stationery-transforming Ticknor, Fields & Co. as though by magic fulfillment of his once dreamlike ambitions into Fields, Osgood & Co.

  But there was no shortage of problems. Their neighbors, the shrewdly evangelical Hurd & Houghton, with their young lieutenant George Mifflin, had transformed from their reliable printer into a competing publisher. And their chief rival in New York more than ever was Harper & Brothers.

  “It is Harper this time!” Fields cried out to Osgood when they were alone. He leaned his elbows over a pulpitlike standing desk in the corner of the room, where there always sat open his massive appointment book. “It's Harper, Osgood. He's plotting.”

  “Plotting what?”

  “Plotting. I don't know what yet,” Fields admitted, the last word coming with a stinging warning as though the chief partner of Harper & Brothers, Major Harper, was looking down from the chandelier. “He is filled with rancor and spite against our house.” Fields stabbed a pen in ink and wrote in an appointment. “Fletcher Harper is coming from New York soon to recruit more Boston authors-to poach more from us, let us be blunt-and has requested an interview here. You ought to be the one to meet with him. Blasted hand! I will have to call one of the girls in to write.” Fields opened and shut his hand, which suffered from painful cramps. “I daresay I haven't written a letter in my own hand in a year, except those to Mr. Dickens, of course. My other correspondents must think I have grown womanly with age.”

  Osgood was still surprised at Fields's instruction about Harper. With a casual downcast glare, as though checking the shine of his left boot, the younger man commented, “I would expect that Major Harper will prefer the interview be with you, my dear Mr. Fields.”

  Fields became silent. His recent tendency to fall entirely quiet had struck Osgood as worrisome. The senior publisher stepped out from behind the high desk and began a slow breathing exercise. Finally, he responded in a softer tone. “Everyone likes you, Osgood. It is an advantage I hope you keep long after I am quietly laid away in some uneditorial corner far from this business. Why, it is something to say of a publisher, that everyone likes him! We are like lawyers, except instead of being blamed for the loss of a mortgage, we are blamed for lost dreams.”

  When Osgood looked up he was startled to find Fields with his fists posed in a fighting position.

  “You've boxed, eh?” Fields asked.

  Osgood shook his head confusedly and replied, “At Bowdoin, I fenced.”

  “I had my first boxing lessons from an old pugilist when I lived in Suffolk Place as a lad running errands under Bill Ticknor. I paid the fellow in books Ticknor threw out! Could have been a prizefighter if I kept at it. Start with a jab. This,” Fields said as he pantomimed an exchange of severe blows and quick escapes, “is how you stand up to a Harper brother! There is only one thing worse than the coming war with the Harpers, Osgood: and that is being afraid of it.”

  OSGOOD HAD BEEN CORRECT in his prediction: when the appointed day came later in March for Fletcher Harper's interview and Osgood greeted him in his best suit and with the offer of a brandy, the New York visitor peered around impatiently through his wire-framed eyeglasses.

  “Mr. Fields sends his sincerest regrets, Major,” Osgood said. “I am afraid he has been drawn away suddenly by the press of business.”

  “Oh! Trying to stop one of your authors from drowning himself in the Frog Pond?”

  Osgood gave his most gentlemanly laugh, though Harper did not. How could a man scowl at his own joke?

  Harper was called the Major not to signify any service during the war but because of his battlefield style of command at his offices in New York. He scratched the line of his jaw under his wide mutton-chop running down his face. “Do you have authority here, James R. Osgood?”

  “Major,” Osgood said with equanimity, “I am a partner of the firm now.”

  “Well! Junior partner, yes,” he grumbled. “I must have read about it in Leypoldt's columns. And you are an honest man?”

  “I am.”

  “Good, Mr. Osgood! You did not hesitate in your answer; that means it is true.” Harper accepted the glass of brandy. He began to raise it to his lips, then paused and held it in a toast. “To we happy few, the publishers of the world! Individuals who kindly assist authors to obtain an immortality in which we do not ourselves participate.”

  Osgood raised his glass without comment.

  “Men in our line know me well for being direct,” Harper said, sacrificing his drink to a long gulp and putting the glass down, “and I am too old to change. So this is what I have come to say. Ticknor and Fields-I mean by that, of course, Fields and Osgood-this house cannot survive its present circumstances.”

  Osgood waited for Harper to continue.

  “Your magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, for all its merit, hardly turns a penny, does it? Now, take New York City.”

  “What about it, Major?”

  “Come! I like Boston, I do. Well, except for your priest-ridden Paddy camps, which are worse than ours in New York. But that can't be helped these days, we open our shores and soon we are corrupted. Still, I wander into the world of politics. We speak of the literary world. Writers by species are creatures more and more of the New York breed. We have the cheaper printing presses, the cheaper binders and the cheaper ideas at our fingertips. An author's fame will no longer last twenty-odd years in the fashion of your Mr. Longfellow-no, an author's name will survive one book, two perhaps, and then be replaced by something newer, bolder, bigger. You must produce quantity going ahead, Mr. Osgood.”

  Osgood knew how the Harper family treated their authors at their Franklin Square building in New York, where an iron bust of Benjamin Franklin, through a shrewd squint, looked down judgmentally on all comers to their kingdom as though to suggest he was the last author worth any fuss. There was the anecdote known throughout the trade about Fitz-James O'Brien's marching outside the massive Harper building holding a sign, I AM ONE OF HARPERS’ AUTHORS. I AM STARVING, until the Harpers would agree to pay him what he was owed. There were, besides, tales of great satisfaction in the Harpers’ offices when they collected back the pitiable $145.83 that they had paid in advance to Mr. Melville for his queer sea tale, Moby-Dick, or The Whale.

  To the Harper brothers, publishing was power. It was a power that had reached a crescendo in the 1840s when the eldest of the quartet, James Harper, became mayor of New York City as part of the anti-Catholic Native Party. James instituted what was known as Harper's Police, before dying in a bloody accident, when his carriage cracked and his horses dragged him bodily through Central Park. Fletcher, formerly their financial manager, had since ascended to the top of the publishing firm and earned the sobriquet of Major.

  Osgood felt an urge to scream bubbling up, a rare and uncomfortable feeling. Osgood was the oldest of five siblings, and growing up it had always been left to him to be the sturdy, sensible one who would preserve order at any cost to his own personal feelings. Others could be permitted to give way to their emotions but not him. That was how he was known in youth in Maine, that was how he had made his stamp at their firm and on the trade at large. These same traits, his workmanshi
p and steadiness, had attained his admission to college at only twelve years old-though his family waited until he was fourteen at the request of the Bowdoin administrators.

  “We like our local authors very much,” Osgood assured his guest as calmly as he could. “You might say we believe our house works for our authors, rather than the other way around.”

  “If you talk metaphysics, I can't follow you, Mr. Osgood.”

  “I shall be happy to try to speak more plainly.”

  “You can tell me, then, why Mr. Fields wished you to meet with me instead of him. Because,” he said without giving Osgood the chance to answer, “Fields knows he is in the after-dinner hour of life. You are the eager young man, you are the enfant terrible with a sharp eye and smart ideas, and can break with sleepy tradition.”

  Harper went on with only a slight pause for breath: “Books are to be mere lumber in the future. Articles of trade, you see, Mr. Osgood! The bookstores already are filled with empty space, cigar boxes, Indian prints, toys. Toys! Before long there will be more toys than books in this country, and it will matter not who is the author of the new book any more than who is the manufacturer of a new paper doll. The publisher's name will be far more important than any author's and our job will be to mix the ink of a book together like the pharmacist's chemicals.

  “Well, I come to you with a proposal: that Fields, Osgood and Company shutter its doors here in Boston, give up this dying hub, and move to New York-combining with us, under the Harper name, of course. Oh, we'd give you full swing for your own peculiar literary tastes. And you will forgo a slow demise of this great old house to be part of our publishing family. You will be to us as your own sons are to you-haven't you children, Mr. Osgood? Oh! You are a bachelor, I do recall. Childless Fields having been your prototype.”