Philip followed the Major's gaze to a bust poised above the doorway to the main offices.
“Benjamin Franklin, isn't it, Uncle Fletcher?” asked Philip of the judgmental bust.
“Correct. Not only one of our nation's founding geniuses but a printer and publisher, too. To this craft he applied his industry and thrift. You see, he knew that to form the soul of America, one must control the presses. The basis of our firm is character, not capital, just as it was with him. Remember that, and you shall truly be a part of Harper and Brothers.”
In the great open office of the upper floor, the senior of the two Harpers guided them to a rectangular space closed in by a railing. Near the far wall was a circle of sofas and chairs meant for authors and other distinguished visitors to the firm, but on this day they hosted a different sort of occupant. In various positions of repose and sublime agitation, there were gathered four of the most striking and diverse individual human beings ever seen together in any publishing office.
Philip stopped in midstride and gave an anxious, gawky smile. “Why, Uncle Fletcher! Are those-”
“The Bookaneers!” the Major finished his exclamation in a hoary whisper. “The best of the lot, anyway, and all in one place this time.”
There was the smooth, chocolate-colored Esquire, in his high-fashion silks and velvet and thick boots, looking an odd combination of actor and workman and balancing a walking stick on his lap; Molasses, with the particolored growth undulating down his jaw and chin and dirty neckcloth; the lone woman of the group, called Kitten, also known by other mysterious appellations, who was unaging and ageless-those blue eyes might have been through twenty or forty summers, depending on what angle and light flattered them; and breathing in heavy, labored contortions while sitting next to her, the seven-foot-tall man named Baby, a former circus giant, masticating a quid of tobacco between his monumental teeth.
“Uncle Fletcher,” said the young apprentice, “those people are the scum of the land!”
“Well!” the Major replied, smiling with genuine amusement at his green nephew. “If we cannot find Jack Rogers, it shall be near impossible to know what that James Osgood has been up to, and what he and Fields have in store for the last Dickens book. We are good Methodists, boy, but we cannot sit with our hands in our pockets waiting for our destiny. We must arm ourselves against the successes of our rivals, Philip. These scum, as you call them, might have been ordinary readers, writers, or publishers, but instead have become shadows of each, and as such can do what we cannot, can go where we cannot. You shall learn that you cannot count on a domestic cat, when the arts of a Bengal tiger are called for.”
When they had greeted the motley crew, the Major passed a slow glance over each of them before beginning.
“I hope you enjoyed the drinkables and eatables I asked one of our girls to provide for you.” The platter had been emptied already.
“I didn't get any,” Molasses grumbled.
“Sorry,” Kitten said to the others fanning herself with a napkin, “I arrived early and had missed breakfast.”
The publisher continued. “I wished to have this consultation with you, my friends, because we are in a period of great excitement in the book trade.”
“Why all four of us?” asked Baby.
“It's uncommon!” shouted Molasses, passing a hand through his rainbow-streaked beard.
“Come! You shall find I speak plainly, Mr. Molasses,” said the Major agreeably. “I am not unaware that the usual course of your profession renders yourselves rivals. Yet there is money enough here at Harper and Brothers to pay fine ransoms for all the latest literary treasures coming from the Old World, without wasting time scratching at each other's eyes.”
Esquire, the Negro dance master, bowed. “I, for one, voice my approbation, sir. Why not encourage cooperation, gentlemen? And Kitty. But who's on the list we're looking out for?”
Harper rattled off his current list: “George Eliot, Bulwer-Lytton, Tennyson, Trollope and-Esquire, you speak French, I presume?”
“Not only do I speak in French, Major, I dance and dream French,” replied the dark-skinned Bookaneer in his native tongue. Molasses rolled his eyes and knocked off Esquire's fashionable cap from his head as Harper continued.
“I'd wager there's not a language you know the name of that I don't speak, mister,” Kitten chimed in.
“Good,” said Harper. “Because the town talk is a new play from Paris is about to cause a sensation-one the New York theaters would shell out hard cash for us to translate in advance. Keep your spyglasses trained for it, all of you, at the ports of Boston, New York, Philadelphia.”
Then the Major took from his frock coat several silver coins and placed them on the table. “These are burning a hole in my pocket,” he said, his deep-set blue eyes blinking excitedly. “One for each of you, to whet your taste.”
Kitten rose and put her coin into her bosom with a decidedly unimpressed expression. “How much for a top manuscript, Major Harper?”
“My dear?” the Major asked. She didn't repeat her question, though he seemed to want to force her to do so; instead she stood stock-still like a ballerina whose music had stopped. “Oh! The bounty, my dear feminine Shylock? Double the usual rate if you get me the manuscript of an A-1 author. The traitors to our economy are out there pushing again for international copyright, led by that Brit lover James Lowell, and if they succeed we take the hit in what we are permitted by law to print.
“Take the late Charles Dickens, for instance,” he continued. “I have reason to know that for one reader in England, he has ten here. I will go further and say that for every copy of his works circulated in Great Britain, ten are printed and circulated here. We have made those copies affordable and widespread throughout the republic through what I call transmitting-what the ignorant call pirating- and have thus brought culture and learning into homes that would not otherwise be able to afford any. I may not live to see the day, but you will, when the best English classics will be sold in America for a dime. Never forget, we are the heirs to Benjamin Franklin, we are the true-blooded servants of this trade.”
This produced some nodding and general indifferent consensus from his audience as they stood to leave.
When the visitors passed as one body through the door in the railings to the stairwell on their way out, the clerks and accountants at their desks in the outer room stopped what they were doing and stared. Before Molasses crossed through the arched doorway, the Major took him by the arm.
“Aren't you through with us?” Molasses demanded.
“You're the best of your kind,” the Major said confidentially. “The most persistent, so to speak.”
Molasses asked, “How would you know?”
“Come, friend! You watch us. We watch you. It's said you had Thackeray's final novel before his own publisher in London.”
Molasses sneered with scampish pleasure at the memory.
“So. I have something special I want you to do.”
“I thought you wanted us to cooperate.”
The Major shrugged. “Courtesy is courtesy, but business is business, my dear man.”
“You had something else to say or didn't you, Major Harper?”
“Keep an eye out for Osgood,” the Major said, tapping one of Molasses's buttons on his coat and dropping an extra double-eagle coin in the man's breast pocket.
“Osgood?”
“You want your big boodle from this? Come! Then pay attention. Keep an eye out for James Ripley Osgood. I told him I'd be watching him and you will be my eyes. He has something we need. I don't know what, precisely, I don't know where, but I can feel it down in my bones.”
THE VERY SAME JACK Rogers that the Harpers had sought in vain was at this moment only a few city blocks away from Franklin Square. He'd recently disembarked from a ship out of Liverpool and two days before had arrived in New York.