“You asked him, too, Aunt Georgy?” Rebecca asked.
“Yes, dear. After I heard the installments read aloud to us as he wrote them, I said to him, ‘Charles, I hope you have not really killed poor Edwin Drood!’ He answered, ‘Georgy, I call my book the mystery, not the history, of Edwin Drood’-but he would not say more.”
“Monstrous!” Forster exclaimed, his broad brow now creased and snarled. “I wring my hands! Preposterous! That could mean anything, Miss Hogarth! Couldn't it?”
Georgy ignored the objection. “Mr. Osgood, Miss Sand. If you would like to look at the papers on his desks for yourselves, you are quite free to do so. In the summer months, he liked to write in our Swiss chalet. That is where he was working on his last day before coming inside the house and collapsing. A second desk stands in his library. I have not had the strength to do anything more than to keep his desks and drawers orderly.”
“Thank you, Aunt Georgy,” Osgood said.
“If you find anything that would help, we shall rejoice with you,” said Georgy.
Forster refolded his stumpy arms at the sentiment.
Osgood and Rebecca, led by an undergardener, crossed under the high road by the brick tunnel where the four big dogs lounged. A separate Swiss-style wooden chalet stood hidden by shrubbery and trees. In this small wooden sanctuary, they climbed a winding staircase to the top room.
THE REMOVED QUIET of Dickens's chalet was untouched by the auction preparations. On the walls of the summer study were five tall mirrors that reflected the trees and cornfields all the way down to the river in the distance and its faraway sails. The shadows of the clouds seemed to drift across the room.
“I can see why Mr. Dickens prized this place to write, away from everything else,” Rebecca commented when they entered.
At an open window stood an expensive telescope. Osgood pressed his eye against its lens. Deep in the meadows by the hop fields was a tall, hatless man with wild hair who somehow seemed to be looking up into their window. Osgood shifted the telescope to the hilltop and found the Falstaff Inn and could see its proprietor out by the stables. As he combed the mane of one of the horses, the landlord pinched his eyes as though in a fit of dreamy melancholy. It seemed every corner of the world around Gadshill had been made bleak by Dickens's death.
The register on the desk was still on June 8, the day Dickens had last sat and wrote. Also crowding the desk were several quill pens and inkwells, a memorandum slate, various trinkets including two bronze frogs, and a stack of slips of blue stationery covered with writing in blue ink.
“This is it,” Osgood said with awe of the latter object, sitting on the dusty chair. “The first six installments of The Mystery of Edwin Drood in his own hand, with corrections from the printer in the margins.” He gently fingered the edges of the pages. Dickens's handwriting, not always neat, was strong and dynamic. It did not seem to be written to be read by anyone other than the writer-printers and compositors be damned. Usually when Osgood saw the working space of one of his authors, the revelation was purely mechanical, like visiting the dusty floor of a factory. It had become too common, in fact, that when he finally met an author he had held in high esteem, the result was disappointment in the ordinariness of the person behind the words. But with Dickens there had always been a magical feeling, as though Osgood were not the seasoned publisher of Boston but once again a college lad from Maine or that shop boy on his first day in the Old Corner in an India rubber apron streaked with ink. To this day, even with Dickens now gone, he was still excited to be Dickens's publisher.
“Are you ready?” Osgood asked, inhaling it all. “Let us begin, Miss Sand.”
Time for the researchers over the next few days was broken up by short respites and occasional interruptions from the outside world. The most notable one came as they continued the next morning. They had by this point found a few small gems in the vast spread of materials. Osgood had discovered an early page of Dickens's notes that listed titles before the novelist had settled on The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Flight and Pursuit, One Object in Life, Dead? or Alive? He had been dictating these to Rebecca before he stopped in midsentence.
“Mr. Osgood?”
“My apology, Miss Sand. My eye was drawn away by that. Rather grotesque little thing, isn't it?” On the chimneypiece, there sat a light yellow plaster figure. It depicted an Oriental man with a jaunty fez smoking from a pipe, sitting cross-legged on a settee. Osgood picked it up and held it out at arm's length as he examined it. It was heavier than it looked.
Just then, a man rushed up the stairs of the chalet and into the study. The intruder wore a ragged suit and wild uncovered hair over a sunburned face. It was the same man the publisher had seen through the telescope walking through the hop fields the day before. His mouth was agape as though in some kind of sudden terror, and he grabbed Osgood's arm.
“Do you need some help, sir?” Osgood said.
The man studied the publisher with searching eyes. He held out his other hand to Osgood and kept it outstretched.
Cautiously, Osgood put his own hand up to shake. The stranger grabbed it with both hands and pressed hard. Rebecca gasped.
“Yes, I see it! You are. You are. You are ready for it!” the man sputtered out, when one of the Gadshill servants burst in.
“Come on now.” The mustachioed servant removed the invader by the ear like a misbehaving child. “Come on, old fellow. That's enough of that beastly behavior. They are at some important work. Very sorry, sir, miss. I'll see to it he won't bother you again.”
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Osgood took the one-hour train into London while Rebecca continued their research. Using the map from his guidebook, he reached the offices of Chapman & Hall, Dickens's English publisher. The day of their arrival, Osgood had sent a messenger with his card and a note asking for an interview but had yet to receive a reply. Osgood did not have the luxury of waiting if their stay in England was to succeed in time.
But there would be more waiting at the busy Piccadilly offices of the publishing firm. Today was Magazine Day, when every publisher, printer, binder, and bookseller in London scrambled to release the latest journals and periodicals to readers. In the case of Chapman & Hall, this meant the latest serial installment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Messenger boys stuffed their sacks with pale green-covered pamphlets of the installment to deliver all across the city and to the country towns to book stands and stalls, shouting instructions at each other. On the first of the next month, the next Magazine Day, the final installment in the London publisher's hands would be printed and sold to the hungry public-and the pirates back in America would have all they needed.
Osgood, as he watched the mayhem of clerks and messengers, noticed that the mere mention of the name Mr. Chapman, the head partner, caused bowed heads and darting eyes among the man's employees. He had been kept sitting in the anteroom for an hour when broad-shouldered Chapman appeared in a sporty outfit.
“Terribly sorry, old boy,” he said after Osgood presented himself. “Must run to the country to go shooting with some capital people-terrific bores, really, but capital-will you call another time?”
Osgood gave one more long look at Chapman's office and staff before starting back, with a rising feeling of futility, to Rochester. Taking a buggy from Higham station, Osgood found reliable Rebecca still hard at work in the Gadshill chalet.
After another two hours, the men from Christie's auction firm came in to finally break up the quiet of the chalet. The workers snatched up the Oriental statue and the other salable effects inside Dickens's sanctum. The men were accompanied dutifully by Aunt Georgy, who gave them instructions.