The Medical College's janitor, Littlefield, had been present when Parkman came into the building. Littlefield had heard Parkman whisper sternly to Webster, “Something must be done,” as if there had been some argument between the two men. Littlefield climbed upstairs to Dr. Holmes's lab to help clean up after a lecture and did not give Parkman any further thought that afternoon.
“After days without any word of him, Parkman's family was in a state, as you can imagine, my dear Dickens. When it became known that he was last seen here, the janitor Littlefield, a stranger to most men of our society, found himself the object of suspicious eyes, including my own!”
It was a quiet Wednesday the week of Thanksgiving, when Little-field noticed Webster was in his lab, doors bolted. The janitor, determined to defend his good name, had his own suspicions and watched through the keyhole as the professor hurried around in urgent activity. When Littlefield brushed his hand on the brick wall, he almost cried out. It was scalding hot.
The janitor waited for Webster to go out for the evening. He then bored a hole from the basement up into the same vault where Holmes and Dickens now stood. When Littlefield pulled himself through to the vault, he saw it. A human body, or part of one, on a hook. Hours later, the police would search more of the lab and find the charred bones of a chopped-up body in the furnace.
“Nobody in the Medical School has ever used this laboratory again, even though we are sorely out of space and it has been fifteen years and more since the body smoked and burned. You see, superstitions run deep even in men of science-nay, especially in men of science.”
Dickens listened to the doctor's story intently. “Yet if there is a single place in Boston that has innocent reason to be awash in bones, this Medical College is it,” he commented.
“The defense attorney argued that! There are bones and bodies everywhere you step here. But it was the false teeth,” Holmes said. “That's what did in poor Webster. The dentist who had made them up for Parkman said he could recognize them anywhere. The broken jaw with the false teeth found by this furnace was the most unimpeachable witness ever seen in court.”
“The most clever criminals are constantly detected through some small defect in their calculations,” noted Dickens.
“Poor Webster. To see a man just before he is hanged is really to see a ghost!”
“Surely, surely,” Dickens mused. “I have often thought how restricted one's conversation must become with a man to be hanged in half an hour. You could not say, if it rains, ‘We shall have fine weather tomorrow!’ for what would that be to him? For my part, I think I should confine my remarks to the times of Julius Caesar and King Alfred!”
Dickens fell into a fit of coughing while the two men laughed and wrapped himself tighter in his mangy coat. After months of assault from the American worshippers acquiring souvenirs snatching at the fur covering, he looked like a poor shedding animal.
“Well enough now, Mr. Dickens?” Dr. Holmes said gently. Word had spread of Dickens's illnesses since the author landed in America and that weakness for Dickens was a private matter. Dickens had obviously become more exhausted every reading he performed, and his foot grew lamer every day.
“Yes, no doubt of it!” exclaimed Holmes. “Fields will become warm at me if I don't return you to the comfort of his hearth to rest for your next reading.”
“You can almost smell it,” muttered Dickens.
“My dear Dickens?”
“The burned flesh in the air. Let us stay just a few moments longer.”
Chapter 24
AS THE TOUR'S ORBIT PUSHED FARTHER FROM NEW YORK AND Boston, reaching Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Hartford, and Providence, George Dolby and his harried ticket agents frequently traveled ahead of the rest of the party to arrange sales and lay the way.
Tom, in the meantime, never protested Dolby's restrictions on his duties. He was more preoccupied with the fact that Louisa Parr Barton had been allowed to walk free without questioning or a proper search of her carpetbag. At least Dickens's traveling to small, outlying towns would make it hard for the phantom incubus to follow, for she seemed a creature of the city. During Tom's duties, carrying baggage between train stations and hotels, he would keep his eyes open, which was more than anyone else was doing. He had been taught by his father in Ross that it was not the duties one was given but how one performed them that mattered.
At Syracuse, the inn was a grim place that looked like it had been built the day before, as did the whole town, and they were served what seemed like an old pig for breakfast. Henry Scott sat down in the public room and wept while George attempted to recruit an emergency militia to clean the hallway on their floor.
Between Rochester and Albany, the whole country seemed to be underwater from a furious storm that had displaced the ice and snow overnight. They had to stay all night in a desolate region that went by the name Utica. Even the telegraph poles had been knocked over and were floating like the masts from shipwrecks, so no communication was possible with the next reading hall.
Once they were near enough to Albany, they took paddleboats through the flooded expanse to get to their next hotel. Broken bridges and fences drifted across their paths alongside blocks of floating ice.
Tom was worried about Dickens as the boat struggled through. As they had crossed the United States, Tom had seen on many occasions a repetition of Dickens's sudden fits of dread while in a railway car or a ferry, or anything that the novelist had no power to stop in case of emergency. In their familiarity the fits were no longer startling but still created a distressing picture of internal terror. It was not unusual for Dickens to call out “Slower, please” to a coach driver several times until they were proceeding at the pace of a walk.
As they floated along the seemingly endless expanse of water, Dickens took out his chronometer watch to see whether they would be able to keep to their schedule. It was possible that the audience of ticket holders would not be able to reach the theater, but to Dickens that was not what was important: punctuality to him was a matter of principle and self-mastery. He shook his watch.
“It is remarkable, men,” he said. “My watch always kept perfect time and could be entirely depended upon, but since the moment of my railway calamity three years ago it has not gone quite correctly. The Staplehurst experience tells more and more, instead of less and less. There is a vague sense of dread that I have no power to check that comes and passes, but I cannot prevent its coming. Hold, what is that?” Dickens asked their guide, a superintendent of works. There was an entire train floating in the water ahead of them.
“Freight train, caught in the flood. Cattle and sheep. Men got out of it, but the livestock will have to perish, s'pose. Start eating each other in a couple of days, s'pose.”
Dickens turned to him with a hard glare.
“That's what dumb animals do, Mr. Dickens, when starved,” the superintendent continued nervously.
Dickens stared over at the abandoned train bobbing up and down in the filthy rainwater. As they passed, they could hear cries and moans from inside; it sounded like human misery. “They won't perish,” he said quietly, then moved to the head of the tiny boat. “Not a single one of them. Paddle back. That way.”
“But, sir, my instructions are strictly to get you to Albany in time for…” the guide started to protest.
“You didn't say something, did you?” Dickens asked with fire in his eyes.
“S'pose I didn't, sir,” he replied after taking a hint from the expressions of the staff in their boat.
“The Albanians can wait for us,” Dickens said. “Everyone paddle to that freight train, and no half measures! We're going to emulate Noah today!” After the work of several hours, they released the sheep and cows to swim across to land, and pulled the weaker ones up the shore high enough for them to rest until they brought food. All along, though it began to snow and hail, Dickens cheered and spurred on the men and animals with such enthusiasm that even the guide added a bounce to his step in the rescue of an emaciated calf.