Till daylight does appear…
“Those horrid, vulgar, vulgar knaves,” the woman observed loudly of the ragged choir. She had removed a pearl-handled switchblade to sharpen the lead of her pencil. Tom noticed that for a small knife it had a smart blade. “Not the sort that would ever appreciate, truly, a Charles Dickens. I heard some of those knaves and fools quoting pas-sages to each other-quite wrongly. One said he was quoting Nickelby, but it was most obviously Oliver Twist! ‘Surprises, like misfortunes, seldom come alone.’
Something about her tugged at Tom's memory as he looked upon her. “Have you attended a reading by Mr. Dickens before?” Tom asked.
“Have I? Come closer. What's your name, dear boy?”
Tom hesitated, then leaned in to the woman and told her. She had a manly demeanor but pretty features covered up by the wide black feathered hat that was in fashion. He guessed she was around her fortieth year but she had the self-assurance of a sixteen-year-old belle or a seventy-year-old matron.
“Indeed I have been to his readings!” she suddenly said in an even bigger shout. “He adapts them for me, you know!” She paused, pursing her lips. “He changes the books as he reads, doing all manner of wild improvising for me. Dickens, I mean,” she said after testing the length of Tom's silence. “I daresay you think me very odd.”
“Ma'am?”
“You do!” she shouted. “There's one of those horrid, vulgar Americans, you say to yourself. Well, yes, it's true, I'm not a nice girl. I am an incubus, really. I'm part English, too, you know. But you're-you're from the potato lands, aren't you? You dream of want and woe, with buttermilk in your blood.” Suddenly she jumped as if it startled by thunder. She pulled a watch from her carpetbag. “I'm horrid late! I've just missed two appointments in the time we've spoken. Good-bye, au revoir.”
Tom moved on, suddenly realizing what had struck him about her. It wasn't the woman exactly, though he had seen her before among the crowds that always formed around Dickens. It was the notebook he had noticed: the paper of which was the same peach color and size-just the same, Tom was certain-as the letter left in Dickens's hotel room that he still kept. He retrieved that letter from his coat. The writer had claimed to be Dickens's favorite reader in all of these vulgar American states, words similar to the ones the woman had spoken. Tom turned back and saw she was heading away from the line.
“Ma'am,” Tom called out, and she began to walk more quickly. “Hold there. Ma'am!”
Then Tom heard his own name being called from a distance. He tried to ignore it-if this woman was who he thought she was, this might be his chance to put to rest his questions about the incident at the hotel. Tom waded through the throng, keeping sight of the feathers of her hat swaying above the landscape of people.
“Branagan!” It was another shout, louder, and there was no ignoring it. “B-B-Branagan!”
Tom looked over his shoulder and found that the previously small bursts of commotion in the line had erupted into a brawl. Combatants were thrashing one another hard with sticks from the bonfire and trampling over the fallen. In the middle of it all was a party of Brooklyn police and speculators. The police were swinging their batons against the sticks. Mr. George Washington staggered, his nose dripping blood and yanked-out strands of his white wig hanging from his ear. As the combat spread, several enterprising ticket seekers, faces bloodied, dragged their mattresses behind them and rushed to the front of the line for better spots.
Tom leaped into the heart of the fight, tackling one of the offenders, and liberated a policeman. A man screaming wildly swung a burning stick at Tom's head-Tom caught the stick in the middle, breaking it with his hand and then shoved the attacker into the snowbank. By this point, more police charged by with batons drawn, dragging rowdies away. Many wanted more than anything else just to keep their places in line by gripping the iron railing of the church fence as if their lives depended on it. To his astonishment, Tom noticed that several plainclothes detectives, instead of helping, used the disturbance to take their own prime positions in line.
The George Washington speculator was crying out in an outraged scream as he was being pulled away by his belt, “Hand out honors to a Cockney foreigner for his trashy literary pamphlets that were never given to our own homegrown heroes-our own democrats like Washington himself! The literary war between the Old World and the New World has begun!”
“Branagan, all r-r-right over here?” Dolby rushed to his side, breathless, eyes wide at all the men knocked down around his porter. He studied Tom with a new respect.
Tom was inspecting his palm, which had been burned by the flaming stick and would need to be wrapped right away. “What happened?” he asked Dolby.
“Disaster!” Dolby cried. With his stutter heavy from the fright, he explained they had begun the ticket sales by enforcing their new policy against the speculators. When it was understood that the first portion of the line were to receive tickets in the rear galleries, the hotheaded speculators protested and cursed vociferously, while the levelheaded ones bribed the men behind them to trade places. Those who were not speculators protested, as well. The various disruptions escalated into general mayhem up and down the line.
“Where were you?” Dolby said to Tom accusingly. “They wanted to tear me to p-p-pieces!”
Tom looked over his shoulder but knew that the woman with the notebook would be gone. There would be no point now in getting his employer's dander up. “I apologize, Mr. Dolby. I was inspecting the bonfires.”
“You should have been at the ready.”
“I am sorry, sir.”
Dolby straightened out his suit and neckcloth, though he remained the model of dishevelment. “Well, let's get on with it. There's at least two thousand dollars to be taken from this crowd, if there's a dollar! Isn't that the American way?”
AFTER A SET of readings in New York, the schedule required Dickens, Dolby, and staff in Boston. Because the snow had closed the railroad, they waited around until Saturday in New York, where they were subjected to the papers’ columns condemning the events at the Brooklyn ticket sales and blaming a “hotheaded Irishman” employed by Dickens for starting the near riot. This fact was confirmed by an unimpeachable “bewigged, buckled, three corner hatted witness,” the George Washington speculator who urged the police to arrest Tom at once. Meanwhile, Dickens had entered the depths of a worsening cold-“English colds are nothing compared to those of this country,” he proclaimed gravely-but Dolby privately worried it was worse, perhaps influenza. Another long train ride now would not help. Dickens signaled Henry Scott to remove a flask from the traveling case as soon as they took their seats.
Henry, meanwhile, prayed for Dickens before each journey by rail.
“Is anything wrong, Henry?” Tom asked him once when he had first noticed this display.
“Staplehurst!” Henry replied gloomily.
“Staplehurst?”
“Yes, only that. If there were but no Staplehurst at all-no June the ninth-perhaps the Chief should not be such a sad man.”
“He still seems rather gay to me,” Tom noted, “for what you call a sad man.”
“Don't you read the papers? Don't you know anything at all, Tom Branagan?”
He described how approximately two years earlier, on June 9, 1865, Dickens had nearly been killed. A terrible train accident near the village of Staplehurst in Kent. The railway tracks covering a bridge had been removed for repair without alerting the oncoming trains. Dickens and his party were aboard the “tidal train” from France, which, reaching the portion of missing track, careened off the bridge.
Dickens had lifted Nelly Ternan and her mother from their dangling first-class car to safety, and then the novelist climbed to the ravine below where he pulled out as many victims as he could. Despite his brave efforts, ten people died that day as the novelist watched helplessly. Dickens climbed back into the dangling train compartment twice during the ordeal. First to retrieve brandy for the suffering patients below. Then he realized however dangerous it was he had to climb back in again. Inside his coat was a new installment of the novel he was writing, Our Mutual Friend, the pages of which were dirty but unharmed. Forever after, whenever the novelist stepped foot in a railway car, a steamer, even a hackney cab, he could not help but be reminded that here could be our final passage on this earth. Brandy helped nerve him on these occasions.