“He is young,” said Ravi Vikram, who spoke with an elegant Oxbridge accent. “How old are you, Thatch?”
“Twenty-eight.” Finn was clearly accustomed to the question. “Before you ask, I read literature at Durham and got the master’s at Trinity, Cambridge.”
“So all my arrangements with Jarvis Dedlock—?”
“Terribly sorry about the confusion,” said Thatcher Finn. “One of those rather unexpected departures. He dropped by this morning to turn in his keys. You just missed him, in fact.”
“That’s what Mrs. Pierce said at reception,” said Henley.
Thatcher Finn lofted several sheets of paper. “I have printouts of your e-mail messages here, Mr. Henley. You’re interested in the plays, are you? Shall I show you the reading room? Ravi, might you pardon us?”
Ravi Vikram waved them away as Thatcher Finn led Henley back to the reception area and through a door into a large, well-equipped modern office.
“For security purposes, the only access to the reading room is through my workplace,” said Finn. He guided Henley to a door on the opposite wall.
They descended a steep staircase into a small room with a single table offering comfortable seating for four. Abutting the table was an old-fashioned card catalogue, and except for a desktop computer tucked away in a cubbyhole, the rest of the room was filled with bookshelves.
“If you can’t find what you need on your own,” said Finn, “Manette Marley will be happy to assist you.”
“Manette Marley?”
“Our curator. Here she comes now.”
They could hear footsteps on the stairway. A moment later she entered. Manette Marley had ebony skin, dreadlocks, and three small rings in each ear. She smiled and offered a firm handshake.
“Nigerian,” she said in a flawless British accent. “Everyone always asks eventually, so there you are. Lovely to have you here, Mr. Henley. You’re showing him round, Thatch?”
Her work station was the small cubbyhole attached to the reading room, and she tapped computer keys during Henley’s brief tour.
“We keep some of the collection upstairs,” Finn explained. “This catalogue will tell us where a particular item might be, including in the display cases. Manette or I can bring you manuscripts for anything that’s not published, but I have to ask you to use these when you handle primary materials.” He indicated a box of white cotton gloves, similar to what Henley had to wear when he was attending cotillion as a boy. “Even the oil from clean fingers can accelerate the deterioration of paper.” Henley began to gather that Thatcher Finn belonged in this job after all.
“I’m trying to learn why Dickens never became a major Victorian playwright. Do you have any ideas?”
“Easy,” said Thatcher Finn. “He wasn’t very good at drama, was he?”
“Yes, he was,” came the voice of the invisible Manette Marley. “He put on plays in his Tavistock Square house for years. And he acted.”
Thatcher Finn grinned. “There you are. The cutthroat world of Dickens scholarship, where the discovery of even a greengrocer’s bill can generate envy, acrimony, and knives in backs.”
Henley soon settled into a comfortable routine. He would read for an hour, then take a break by visiting one of the rooms in the museum overhead. The Dickens House was vertical, with only a couple of rooms on each of the four floors, and by two p.m. Henley had explored his way up to the two bedrooms at the top of the house. The larger one had belonged to Dickens and his wife, Catherine. The smaller bedroom, however, offered a more macabre history: Here young Mary Hogarth, Dickens’ sister-in-law, died at age seventeen. A half-dozen other visitors reverently milled about the cozy space, which, like all the other rooms, displayed Dickens artifacts under glass.
Between the bedrooms was a narrow dressing room where Henley suffered a scare. Behind a velvet rope was a square table covered with photographs of the Dickens family, a special exhibit in honor of the bicentennial of Dickens’ birth. The red satin tablecloth fell all the way to the floor, and as Henley leaned over the restraining rope to get a closer look at Mary Hogarth’s portrait, a hand came out from beneath the table and grabbed his ankle. He yelped. Then a small boy, surely no more than four years old, shouted, “Boo,” and poked his head from beneath the tablecloth. In a moment the child’s embarrassed mother had forcibly retrieved him and apologized, but it was enough to send Henley back to the quiet of the reading room, where he was working his way through a silly Dickens farce called Is She His Wife?
In his absence a petite woman in her early twenties had arrived. She wore slacks and a T-shirt and tiny reading glasses, and she quietly conferred with Manette before putting on a pair of white gloves and receiving from the archives five letters, still in their envelopes, each stored in a brown paper sleeve. She sat opposite Henley at the only table, and she nodded politely at him before she began her examination of the first document. In embarrassment he closed his open briefcase. The entire contents consisted of one red apple for snacking. Though Henley fully expected to accumulate abundant notes and papers by the end of the month, his briefcase for now served merely as a prop to distinguish him as a scholar, not a tourist.
Within ten minutes he heard loud footsteps clumping down the stairs. Then a young man in cowboy boots entered the room. His face was puffy and glistened with sweat. Henley guessed he was about twenty years old — a college student, and apparently a hungover one.
Manette Marley asked if she could help him.
“Bring me the Forster biography. Chop chop.” An American accent.
Henley was mortified by the kid’s rudeness. The woman working opposite Henley also glared at the newcomer until he finally responded.
“No breakfast,” he said. While Manette went off to find the book he’d requested, the young oaf stood, reeled for a moment, and then fainted. Collapsing onto the table, he sent Henley’s briefcase flying before he slid from tabletop to floor in a shower of the documents being examined by the young woman, who shouted and ran for Manette. By the time Henley could reach him, the kid had regained consciousness. “No breakfast,” he said again as he struggled to sit up. In a moment Manette Marley arrived. She helped Henley get the young man seated while the woman retrieved her belongings. Just when everything seemed to be returning to normal, Manette gasped.
“Where’s the Ternan letter?” she asked. Trembling, she held one of five paper sleeves in her right hand. Only four of the sleeves now contained their original contents. The fifth held a blank sheet of paper folded to duplicate the shape and thickness of a letter. The original Dickens correspondence was missing.
The woman who had been studying the letters was both horrified and defensive. “If that’s what’s in the sleeve now, then that’s what you delivered to me. I haven’t taken anything.”
“No one will leave this room,” said Manette Marley. She glared at all three of them and called for Thatcher Finn. “Clearly this entire scene was a ruse,” she said after Finn had arrived. “They were attempting a distraction. I don’t know whether all three are involved, or only these two.” She gestured at the young man, who was pale and perspiring, but she included Henley in her look.
“I beg your pardon,” said Henley. “I had nothing to do with this episode. Please search me immediately.”
“And me,” said the woman.
“Me too,” said the young man. “I haven’t got your letter.”
All three did, in fact, submit to a search, and no letter surfaced.
“It could have been stolen months ago,” said Henley.
“No,” said Thatcher Finn. “The lot from the British Library were just here two days ago to examine that letter. They want to do a special exhibit for the Dickens bicentennial. It’s the only surviving letter from Charles Dickens to Ellen Ternan, his mistress. Extremely rare. It never should have come out of the archives.”