“Hold!” said the officer. “I have been reading about young Mr. Drood's fortunes-misfortunes, I should say-with great interest in the magazines! I suppose this isn't the best time to ask. But pray tell me, Mr. Osgood, do you know how it will all end for Eddie Drood, now that Mr. Dickens has died?”
This very question had in fact been consuming Osgood's mind more than the officer could know-how it will all end, with Dickens dead-yet suddenly he had no response. Not now, not at the sight of good Daniel, motionless and broken on a cold board. The figure undulated strangely from the stream of water, as if he might still awaken.
“Daniel never failed his duties to me,” Osgood said. “To be lost to such a senseless accident!”
“Mr. Osgood, this was not merely an accident,” Carlton said as he delivered a long sigh.
“What do you mean?”
Carlton led Osgood down the stairs and into the room of the unknown dead. There was an entirely different feeling inside the little room with the glass ceiling than there had been in the viewing space above; it was like the difference between watching an exotic and dangerous animal through bars and entering the cage. The floor was white and black marble and cooled by the running water. Close up, the young clerk's stomach was grossly distended under its sheet.
Carlton explained. “Your clerk appears to have forfeited the responsibilities you assigned him and indulged in some variety of intoxicants. Before his death, he was deep out of his senses and wandering blindly through the streets, according to witnesses we interviewed. I'm afraid the young man's last act has been to fail you.”
Osgood knew he should restrain his anger, but he couldn't. “Officer, I'd suggest you mind your words. You are slandering the dead!”
“Ha!” clacked the old coroner, Mr. Charles Barnicoat, coming from around the corner and hunching his sweaty face and whiskers over the body. “Officer Carlton speaks only the truth, wouldn't know how to speak anything else.”
“I know Daniel,” Osgood insisted.
“Spine bent like a question mark, see?” said the coroner with confirming nod. “Common sign of the habitual opium eater.”
“He was run down by an omnibus!” cried Osgood.
Barnicoat yanked hard at the dead clerk's arm. The skin there had turned a horrible blue tint. “You need more?” he asked.
The sight revealed around Barnicoat's fingers instantly silenced Osgood. There were several small holes pierced into the arm.
“What is it?” the publisher asked.
Barnicoat licked his lips. “These are marks from a new sort of needle called a hypodermic treatment-it was used by our doctors in the war. It serves like a lancet but the dose can be precisely controlled. It is now employed by doctors to inject certain potent medicines through the skin and into the cellular tissue. But the kits are used without a doctor's consent by the opium eaters who are habituated to it, as your young clerk must have been by the looks of it. Some even inject these needles directly into their veins, a thing that would never be permitted by doctors! ‘Portable ecstasies,’ these young men call the drug.”
“God save the commonwealth,” Officer Carlton intoned morosely.
“They wish to be the heroes of their dreams, you see, rather than live their real lives,” Barnicoat lectured with his chin stuck out pompously. “They prefer to feel in their brains they are floating through fire in China or India instead of trudging Boston in the monotonous treadmill of life. It is a shame but somewhat less of a shame to remember a young tramp with these habits rarely will attain the age of forty, something you or I can do quite without fail.”
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.