“Now, I fear I must attend to many matters at the moment. Shall you and your companion do us the honor of being our guests in our nicest box?” asked Stephens.
Osgood and Rebecca sat in on the day's rehearsal. They were of course particularly interested to see Stephens's original ending for the story. Dickens, in his final installments, had introduced the mysterious Dick Datchery, a visitor to the fictional village of Cloisterham, who acts as investigator in the case of the young Drood's disappearance after others have pointed an accusing finger at Neville Landless, Edwin Drood's rival. Datchery has other suspicions. But in Stephens's rendition, Datchery-with his flowing white hair covering his face-was revealed to be the feisty young Neville himself in disguise. Neville was to use his disguise as Datchery to confront John Jasper, Drood's uncle, with evidence that would cause the guilt-ridden Jasper to take his own life with an overdose of opium.
Osgood and Rebecca prepared to leave during the fourth attempt at staging this scene when Grunwald interrupted the other players.
“Where is Stephens? Ah, Stephens, what is this? What of the revised version of this act?”
“This is the revised version, Grunwald. Now, if you'd please remember you are too dead and your body incinerated by this point in the story to have such a corporeal presence on stage.”
Grunwald threw his manuscript pages into the air. “The hell with it! Hang the whole lot of you and dash your brains out! Perhaps you ought to find a different damned Edwin Drood!”
Stephens screamed back. “There are ladies present, sir, and Americans, who should not appreciate the vulgarity of your tongue!”
“Vulgar?” This Grunwald asked before he flew at Stephens with his fists up. Stephens pulled the actor's thick hair.
The manager ushered off the playwright and actor and instructed them to finish murdering each other away from the stage.
Osgood noticed two workmen walking toward the stairs to smoke. “I see Mr. Grunwald and Mr. Stephens were having words,” Osgood said to them.
“Aye, gov'n'r?”
“Do you know the meaning of it?” asked the publisher.
One of the workmen laughed at the foolishness of the question. “We should. They have the same ticklish row every day. Art Grunwald thinks it as clear as the blue sky above that Charles Dickens meant Edwin Drood to survive and come back at the end of the story to seek revenge on the man what tried to kill him. Mister Stephens thinks it most obvious Drood is dead and rotting in the quicklime.”
“What do you think?” asked Osgood.
“I think Grunwald thinks he's too good an actor to stay out of sight in the scene docks for the final act. I wish Dickens didn't die, I vow it deeply ‘fore God-then we wouldn't have to hear their bickering.”
Chapter 18
OSGOOD WAS PACING BACK AND FORTH IN THE PARLOR AT THE Falstaff. Rebecca had just moments before read him a note from one of the queen's ministers informing them that Her Majesty had not pursued Dickens's offer to tell her the ending of Drood, thinking it more proper for her to be as surprised as her subjects by the installments.
“I half wish I could believe in the medium who keeps company with Dickens's ghost,” Osgood remarked.
“Perhaps Mr. Dickens himself may have believed,” Rebecca replied with a smile. “It seems he was taken with spiritualism. I wonder if we ought not study it for ourselves.”
“Surely you don't think highly of such practices, Miss Sand?”
“We might find a window into his private mind when writing the novel.”
Osgood sat in a chair and rested his head in his hands. “If a medium can inform us right now how to make a quarter of a million dollars in a quarter of a year, I shall become the most enthusiastic of her devotees. We cannot afford to waste any more time.”
“You are a born skeptic,” Rebecca said, dropping the topic but clearly hurt that Osgood dismissed her suggestion so quickly.
“I should think so. I have no fondness for phenomena, Miss Sand. I very much dislike the trouble of wondering. Forget the mesmerism, but think of the mesmerism patient. Do you remember what Henry Scott said about him?” he asked.
“Yes,” answered Rebecca. “That he was a farmer who sought Dickens's help.”
“Scott said that the man was a regular visitor to Gadshill during the last months of Dickens's life to receive those ‘spiritual’ sessions. If this poor fellow was such a frequent visitor to Dickens's study,” Os-good continued, “might he have heard clues as to the novelist's plan for the end of the book?”
“Mr. Osgood, you'd be placing credence in the words of a man with a shattered constitution,” Rebecca pointed out. “You saw how he behaved at the chalet.”
“I feel the paths before us narrowing, Miss Sand. With Forster having authorized the theater production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, it is in the interest of his reputation and his purse that if there are other clues waiting to be discovered, they be revealed only if they happened to match the ending written by Walter Stephens. Likewise, even if Wilkie Collins has no intention of finishing his friend's last novel, that rumor may give some member of the Dickens family the idea of finding someone else for the task. With every last floorboard and ornament from Gadshill to be auctioned any day, the family is eager for income. We are without any allies here in our search, Miss Sand.”
“But if you find the patient, how will you convince him to speak sensibly?”
“What is it Henry Scott said? A mad beast needs a sober driver.”
REBECCA INQUIRED WITH Henry Scott at Gadshill, who questioned the other servants and determined that the mesmerism patient had not been there since their encounter with him in the chalet. There were bets among the staff on whether the fellow had given up or died. But Rebecca suggested that if the patient had been at Westminster Abbey the day that she and Osgood visited, it might be one of his regular stops.
Osgood, agreeing, returned to the Poets’ Corner. When he visited Dickens's grave again, he found the same peculiar purple flower. From then on, Osgood went to the Abbey at intervals waiting for this other man to show. “It is only a matter of time, I'm certain,” he'd say to Rebecca.
On one visit in particular, Osgood and Rebecca passed through the gates together at the same time as Mamie Dickens, holding her little dog in her bag and linked to another young woman on her arm. Mamie wiped away her tears and smiled sweetly at the sight of Osgood and Rebecca.
The woman on Mamie's arm was small and perky, having a strong resemblance to Charles Dickens around her face. She wore an old-fashioned muslin kerchief on her head from which red ringlets dropped, decorated with distinctly nonmourning double hollyhocks. Her lace cape only barely kept her little shoulders concealed and her neck and throat were almost entirely exposed.
She was presented to Osgood and Rebecca as Katie Collins, the younger of the two Dickens girls.
“Oh, be proper, Katie!” Mamie scolded her sister, pulling her sister's cape over her shoulders. “In a church, too!”
“Proper! Now you sound like old Beadle Forster. Sometimes I wonder whether I got married to make dear father happy when our household had little other than sadness. Or did I marry because I knew father and his Beadle despised my husband?”
“Katie Collins!”
“Intolerable and stuff!” Katie imitated Forster's voice and then rubbed her hands together like he would.
“Tell me,” Osgood said. “Do you know who the man was who had come to him at Gadshill for treatment in the last few months, a tall man with a military air and long white hair?”