In the low world of Boston, much was the same on the week the Reverend Talbot’s body was discovered. Unaltered was the triangle of streets where slums and public houses and brothels and cheap hotels had driven out those residents who could afford being driven out, where chalky steam gushed from pipes bending outward from glass– and ironworks, where sidewalks were littered with orange peels and filled with mirthful singing and dancing at odd hours. Hordes of black people were coming and going on the public horsecars: young ladies, laundresses and household servants, whose hair was caught up loudly in colored handkerchiefs, whose dangling jewelry made brash music; a black soldier or sailor in uniform might be seen, still a jarring sight. So too was a certain mulatto walking with notable poise along the streets, ignored by some, laughed at by others, glared at by the more wizened blacks, who in their wisdom knew that Rey was a policeman and thus unlike them in that regard as well as in his mixed race. Blacks had been safe in Boston, were even permitted schooling and public transportation alongside whites, and therefore they kept quiet. Rey, however, would stir up hatred if he made a wrong move or crossed the wrong person in his duties. The blacks had exiled him from their world for these reasons, and because these reasons were right, no explanation or regret was ever delivered to him.
Several chattering young women holding baskets on their heads paused to look sideways at him, his beautiful bronze skin seeming to absorb all the lamplight as he went and carry it away. On the other side of the street, Rey recognized a bulky man loitering at the corner, a Spanish Jew, a notorious thief sometimes brought in for questioning to the Central Station. Nicholas Rey mounted the narrow stairs of his rooming house. His door faced the second-floor landing, and although the lamp was broken, he could see from the shadows that someone was blocking the way to his room.
The week’s events had been unrelenting. When Rey first drove Chief Kurtz to see the Reverend Talbot’s body, the sexton had ushered Kurtz and some sergeants to the steps that led below. Kurtz had stopped and surprised Rey by turning back. “Patrolman.” He had motioned Rey to follow. Inside the burial vault, Patrolman Rey had required a moment of staring at the display, the body stuffed wrong side up into an uneven hole, before even noticing the protruding feet: inflamed, blistered, and distorted. The sexton told them what he had seen.
The toes were ready to break off and fall from the pink, skinless, and misshapen extremities, making it difficult to distinguish between the ends of the feet that held the toes and the ends that, anatomically, would have to be called the heels. This detail—the burned feet, revelatory to the Danteans mere blocks away—was to the policemen merely insane.
“Only the feet were set on fire?” Patrolman Rey asked, squinting, delicately touching, with just a fingertip, the charred, crumbling flesh. He pulled back at the smoldering heat still baking the flesh, half expecting his finger to be singed. He wondered how much heat the human body could conduct before losing its physical form entirely. After two sergeants carried away the body, Sexton Gregg, in his tearful daze, remembered something.
“The paper,” he said, grabbing Rey, who was the only policeman left below. “There’s bits of paper along the tombs. They ain’t supposed to be there. He shouldn’t have been there! I shouldn’t have let him in!” He wept uncontrollably. Rey lowered his lantern and saw the trail of letters like remorse left unspoken.
The newspapers would speak of both terrible murders—Healey’s and Talbot’s—so frequently that they became partners in the public mind—often referred to in street corner conversation as the Healey-Talbot murders. Had the public’s syndrome exposed itself in Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s queer remark at Longfellow’s house the night Talbot was discovered? Holmes had been offering his expertise to Rey as nervously as a medical student. “Perhaps what sounds like a useless Latin prognosis can help catch this killer running about our city.” The word pierced Rey: killer. Dr. Holmes was assuming that the murders were executed by the same party. Yet there was nothing obvious to tie them into one, besides their respective brutishness. There was also the nakedness of the bodies and the neatly folded clothes stripped from them—but that had not yet been reported in the papers when Rey heard Holmes speak. Perhaps it was a slip of the tongue on the part of the conceited little doctor. Perhaps.
The papers supplemented the headlining murders with healthy doses of other senseless violence: garrotings, hold-ups, safe blowing, a prostitute found half-strangled steps away from a police station, a child discovered beaten to a living pulp in a Fort Hill boardinghouse. And there was the strange incident of a vagrant brought for questioning to the Central Station, who was permitted by the police to throw himself to his death through the window, in plain sight of the helpless Chief Kurtz. The papers clamored: “Do the Police have any responsibility for the safety of citizens?”
In the dark well of his rooming house, Rey had come to a stop mid-stair and made sure nobody was behind him. Hand on his billy club underneath his coat, he proceeded. “Only a poor beggar, good sir.” The man from whom these words emerged at the top of the stairs was easily recognizable once the angle revealed a pair of stringy trousered legs growing out from iron-heeled shoes: Langdon Peaslee, safecracker, nonchalantly buffing his diamond breast-pin with the wide cuff of his shirt.
“Why, Lily White.” Peaslee grinned, showing a beautiful set of teeth sharp as stalagmites. “Have a shake.” He grabbed Rey’s hand. “Ain’t seen that prize phiz of yours since that show-up. Say, this wouldn’t be your room up here?” He pointed behind him innocently.
“Hello, Mr. Peaslee. I understand you robbed the Lexington bank two nights ago.” Nicholas Rey said this to demonstrate that he had just as much information as the thief.
Peaslee had left no evidence that would survive his lawyers in court and had thoroughly selected and fenced only untraceable valuables. “Why, tell me, who’s crack enough these days to heave a bank all alone?”
“You, I’m certain. Have you come to turn yourself in?” Rey said with a serious face.
Peaslee laughed sneeringly. “No, no, dear boy. But I do think these restrictions they put on you—what are they? No uniform, can’t arrest white men, so on—well, they are unfair, unfair indeed. But there are some conciliatory factors. You’ve become such close pals with Chief Kurtz, and that can go a ways to bringing someone to justice. Like the murderers of Judge Healey and Reverend Talbot, rest their souls. I hear the deacons of Talbot’s church are even now building up a subscription for a reward.”
Rey started for his room with an uninterested nod. “I’m tired,” he said quietly. “Unless you have someone specific who must be brought to justice at the moment, you’ll excuse me.”
Peaslee twirled a hand into Rey’s scarf and held him still. “Policemen cannot accept rewards, but a just citizen, like myself, most certainly would And if some finds its way to a deserving copper’s door…” There was no reaction in the mulatto’s face. Peaslee showed his irritation, turned off his charm. He pulled the scarf tight like a dropped noose. “This is how that dumb beggar at the show-up met Old Grim, now, isn’t it? Listen close. There’s a fool about our city who can be made very guilty for killing Talbot, my dear prigger-napper. I’ll jacket him easily. Help me see to it, half the boodle will be yours,” he said bluntly. “Thick enough to choke a hog, then you can go your own way as you please. The floodgates are opened: Everything’s going to change in Boston. The war lined this whole place with money. These times are too dusty to walk alone.”
“You’ll excuse me, Mr. Peaslee,” Rey repeated with stoic equanimity.
Peaslee waited a moment, then lapsed into a defeated laugh. He brushed some imaginary lint from Rey’s tweed coat. “Just as well, Lily White. I should’ve known by looking that you wear a Joseph’s coat. It’s only I feel sorry for you, my friend, very sorry. The darkies hate you for being white and everyone else hates you for being black. Me, I judge a bloke by whether this is up to snuff.” He pointed to the side of his head. “Once I found myself in a country town in Louisiana, Lily White, where you could see the white blood in half the Negro children. The streets were full of hybrids. I imagine you’ve wished you lived somewhere like that, haven’t you?”
Rey ignored him and reached for the latchkey in his pocket. Peaslee said he would do the honors. He pushed Rey’s door open with a single arachnid finger.
Rey looked up, alarmed for the first time in their encounter.
“Locks are my game, understand,” Peaslee said, cocking his hat boastfully. Then he pretended to surrender, turning up his wrists. “You can bag me for trespass, Patrolman. Oh, no, no, you can’t, can you?” A departing grin.
Nothing was missing from the apartment. That last trick had just been a show of power by the great safecracker, in case any unwise notions ever visited Nicholas Rey.
It was strange for Oliver Wendell Holmes being out with Longfellow like this, to see him pass among the common faces and sounds and wonderful, terrible scents of the streets, as though he were part of the same world as the man driving a horse team with a sprinkling machine to clean the street. Not that the poet had never left Craigie House the last few years, but his outside activities were concise, confined. Dropping off proof sheets at Riverside Press, dining with Fields at an unpopular hour at the Revere or Parker House. Holmes felt ashamed for having been the first one to stumble on something that could so inconceivably break Longfellow’s peaceful suspension. It should have been Lowell. He would never think to feel guilt at forcing Longfellow into the bricked-up, soul-confusing Babylon of the world. Holmes wondered whether Longfellow resented him for it—whether he was capable of resentment or whether he was, as he was with so many unsavory human emotions, immune.
Holmes thought of Edgar Allan Poe, who had written an article entitled “Longfellow and Other Plagiarists,” accusing Longfellow and all the Boston poets of copying every writer, living and dead, including Poe himself. This was at a time when Longfellow was helping keep Poe alive through loans. An infuriated Fields forever banned any of Poe’s writings from appearing in Ticknor & Fields publications. Lowell barraged newspapers with letters conclusively demonstrating the New York scribbler’s outrageous errors. Holmes became consumed with the idea that every word he wrote was indeed a theft from some better poet before him, and in his dreams it was not uncommon for the ghost of some old dead master to appear to demand his poetry back. Longfellow, for his part, said nothing publicly, privately attributing Poe’s acts to the irritation of a sensitive nature chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong. And remarkably enough to Holmes, Longfellow genuinely mourned Poe’s melancholy death.
Both men were carrying flower bouquets under their arms while they traveled into the part of Cambridge that was less a village, more a town. They walked around Elisha Talbot’s church, looking with each step for the location of the terrible demise of Talbot, stooping under trees and feeling the ground between grave markers. Several passersby asked for autographs on handkerchiefs or inside hats—often from Dr. Holmes, always from Longfellow. Though the nighttime would have granted welcome anonymity,
Longfellow had decided it would be best if they appeared as mourners visiting the churchyard rather than overdressed resurrection-men looking for a body to steal.
Holmes was thankful that Longfellow had assumed leadership in the days since they had agreed to… What had they agreed to do, with Ulysses’ fiery words singeing their tongues? Lowell said investigating (always with an outward-thrust chest). Holmes preferred calling it “making inquiries,” and did so pointedly when speaking to Lowell.
There were of course the few Danteans besides themselves who had to be accounted for. Several were spending time in Europe, on either a temporary or permanent basis, including Longfellow’s neighbor Charles Eliot Norton, another former student of the poet’s, and William Dean Howells, a young acolyte of Fields’s, appointed envoy to Venice. Then there was Professor Ticknor, seventy-four, holed up in his library for three decades of solitude; and Pietro Bachi, who had been an Italian tutor under both Longfellow and Lowell before being fired by Harvard; and all of the past students of Longfellow’s and Lowell’s Dante seminars (and a handful more from Ticknor’s time). Lists would be made and private meetings scheduled. But Holmes prayed they would uncover an explanation before they made fools of themselves in front of people whom they respected and who had, at least up to the present, respected them in return.
If there had been a death scene on the outside grounds of the Second Unitarian Church of Cambridge, it was not to be found today. Then again, if their speculations were accurate and there had been a hole in the yard where Talbot was buried, the church deacons would have covered it up with fresh grass hurriedly. A dead preacher set upside down out front would not provide the best advertisement for a congregation.
“Now, let us look inside,” Longfellow suggested, seemingly at peace with their complete lack of progress.
Holmes followed closely in Longfellow’s steps.
In the rear vestry, where the offices and changing rooms were located, there was an oversize slate door against one wall, but it did not connect to another room, and there was no other wing of the church.
Longfellow removed his gloves and ran a hand over the cold stone. A bitter chill was behind it.
“Yes!” Holmes whispered. The chill crept inside of him when he opened his mouth to speak. “The vault, Longfellow! The vault down below…”
Until three years ago, many of the area’s churches had maintained interments underground. There were lavish private vaults that could be purchased by families, as well as inferior public ones housing any member of the congregation for a minimal fee. For years, these burial vaults were considered a prudent use of space for crowded cities with spreading churchyards. But when Bostonians dropped dead by the hundreds from yellow fever, the Board of Public Health declared the cause the proximity of decaying flesh, and new vaults beneath church grounds were strictly prohibited. Families with enough money to do so relocated casketed loved ones to Mount Auburn and other newly fashioned bucolic resting places. But tucked away beneath the ground, the “public”—or poorer—portions of the vaults were teeming. Rows of unmarked coffins, decrepit tombs, subterranean potter’s fields.
“Dante finds the Simoniacs within the pietra livida, the livid stone,” said Longfellow.
A quivering voice interrupted. “Help you, gents?” The church sexton, who had first come upon Talbot roasting, was a tall, thin man in a long black robe, with white hair, or, more accurately, bristles, standing out in all directions like a brush. His eyes appeared to be staring wide, so that he looked permanently like the picture of a man seeing a ghost.
“Good morning, sir.” Holmes approached, flipping his hat up and down in his hands. Holmes wished Lowell were there, or Fields, both natural authority mongers. “Sir, my friend and I must request leave to enter your interment vault below if we can trouble you for admittance.”
The sexton made no indication of entertaining the idea.
Holmes looked back. Longfellow was standing with hands folded over walking stick, placid, as though he were an uninvited bystander.
“Now, as I was saying, my good sir, you see it is quite important that we… well, I’m Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. I have a chair in Anatomy and Physiology at the Medical College—really more a settee than a chair, for the breadth of its subjects. Probably you’ve read some of my poems in…”
“Sir!” The squeaky sting in the sexton’s voice approximated a shriek of pain when raised. “Do you not know, guvnor, that our minister was of late found…” he stammered in horror and then recoiled. “I tended the grounds, and not a soul came in-er-out! Upon the Eternal, if it happened on my watch, I own it was a demon spirit without the need of physical convey’nee, not a man!” He stopped himself. “The feet,” he said with a glazed stare, and looked as though he could not go on.
“His feet, sir,” Dr. Holmes said, wanting to hear it, though he knew precisely the destined lot of Talbot’s feet—knew of it firsthand. “What of them?”
The four members of the Dante Club sans Mr. Greene had collected all newspaper accounts available on Talbot’s death. Whereas the true circumstances of Healey’s death had been concealed for several weeks before their revelation, in the newspaper columns Elisha Talbot was slain in every conceivable manner, with a sloppiness that would have made Dante, for whom every punishment was ordained by divine love, wince. Sexton Gregg, for his part, did not need to know Dante. He was a witness to and a carrier of the truth. In this way, he had the strength and simplicity of an old prophet.
“The feet,” the sexton continued after a long pause, “were aflame, guvnor; they were chariots of fire in the dark vaults. Please, gents.” His head hung in dejection, and he gestured for them to leave.
“Good sir,” Longfellow said softly. “It is the Reverend Talbot’s passing which brings us here.”
The sexton’s eyes relaxed at once. It was not clear to Holmes whether the man recognized the silver-bearded visage of the beloved poet or whether he was calmed like the wild beast by the stirring quiet of Longfellow’s organ voice. Holmes realized that if the Dante Club were to make any progress with this endeavor, it would be because Longfellow had the same celestial ease over people through his presence that he had over the English language through his pen.
Longfellow went on: “Though we possess only our words of promise to prove ourselves to you, dear sir, we ask for assistance. I pray you have faith without further evidence on our part, for I fear we may be the only ones who can truly make sense from what has occurred. More than that we must not reveal.”
The vast, blank chasm stewed with mist. Dr. Holmes was fanning away the fetid air that stung his eyes and ears like pepper dust as they marched with small, cautious steps down to the narrow vault. Longfellow breathed more or less freely. His sense of smell was, advantageously limited: It allowed him the pleasure of spring flowers and other agreeable aromas but screened out anything noxious.
Sexton Gregg explained that the public vault extended underneath the streets for several city blocks in both directions.
Longfellow shone a lantern against the slate columns, then lowered the light to examine the plain stone coffins.
The sexton started to make a remark about the Reverend Talbot but hesitated. “You mustn’t think poorly of him, guvnors, if I tell you, but our dear reverend would walk along this vault passage for, well, not for church business, to be candid.”
“Why would he come here?” Holmes asked.
“A shorter route to get to home. Didn’t like it so much, m’self, say sooth.”
One of the scattered paper bits, with the letters a and h, missed by Rey, was trampled under Holmes’s boot and sank into the thick soil.
Longfellow asked whether someone else could have entered the vault from above the street, the place where the minister would have exited.
“No,” said the sexton definitively. “That door can only be opened from the inside. The police checked all the same, found no tamperin’. And there was no sign that the Reverend Talbot ever reached the door leading to the streets on that last evening he came through here.”
Holmes pulled Longfellow back, out of earshot of the sexton. He talked in hushed tones. “Do you not think it significant that Talbot would use this as a shortcut? We must question the sexton some more. We still do not know Talbot’s simony, and this could be an indication!” They had found nothing to suggest Talbot was anything but the good shepherd to his flock.
Longfellow said, “I think it is safe to say that walking through a burial vault does not qualify as a sin, inadvisable as it may be, don’t you? Besides, we know that simony must do with money—taking it or paying it. The sexton is as enamored of Talbot as the congregation, and too many questions about the minister’s habits would only dry up any information he has to volunteer. Remember, Sexton Gregg like all Boston, believes Talbot’s death to have been exclusively a product of someone else’s sin, not of his own.”
“So how did our Lucifer gain his entry here? If the vault exit to the street only opens from the inside… and the sexton says he was in the church and saw nobody come through the vestry…”
“Perhaps our rogue waited for Talbot to climb the stairs and exit the vault and then pushed him back underground from above the street,” Longfellow speculated.
“But to dig a hole deep enough in the ground for a man to fit in so quickly? It seems more likely that our villain ambushed Talbot—dug the hole, waited, and then grabbed him, pushed him in the hole, doused the kerosene on his feet…”
Ahead of them, the sexton came to a sudden stop. Half his muscles locked up and the other half shook violently. He tried to speak, but only a dry, mournful whimper emerged. By the extension of his chin he managed to indicate a thick slab sitting on the dirt carpeting the vault floor. The sexton ran back for the sanctuary of the church.
The place was at hand. It could be sensed and smelled.
Longfellow and Holmes together heaved with all their strength, to remove the slab. In the dirt was a round hole, big enough for a body of medium build. Stored by the slab and released by its removal, the smell of burning flesh attacked the air like the stench of rotted meat and fried onions. Holmes smothered his face with his neck cloth.
Longfellow knelt and cupped a handful of dirt from around the hole. “Yes, you are right, Holmes. This hole is deep and well formed. It must have been dug in advance. The killer must have been waiting when Talbot entered. He gains entry, somehow eluding our jittery friend the sexton, and knocks Talbot cold,” Longfellow theorized, “positions him headfirst in the hole, and then performs his horrible act.”
“Imagine the sheer torment! Talbot must have been conscious of what was happening before his heart gave in. The feeling of your flesh burning alive…” Holmes nearly swallowed his tongue. “I don’t mean, Longfellow…” He cursed his mouth for speaking so much and then for not taking a mistake quietly. “You know, I only meant…”
Longfellow did not seem to hear. He let the dirt slide through his fingers. He gingerly lowered the bright flower bouquet to a spot near the hole.” ‘Stay here, for thou art justly punished,’ “ Longfellow said, quoting a verse from Canto Nineteen as though he were reading it from the air in front of him. “That is what Dante cries to the Simoniac he speaks to in Hell, Nicholas the Third, my dear Holmes.”
Dr. Holmes was ready to leave. The thick air was nourishing a revolt in his lungs, and his misspoken words had broken his own heart.
Longfellow, however, directed the halo of his gas lantern above the hole, which had been left undisturbed. He was not through. “We must dig deeper, below what we can see of the hole. The police would never think of it.”
Holmes stared incredulously at him. “Nor would I! Talbot was put in the hole, not below it, my dear Longfellow!”
Longfellow said, “Recall what Dante says to Nicholas as the sinner thrashes around in the wretched hole of his punishment.”
Holmes whispered some verses to himself.” ‘Stay here, for thou art justly punished… and keep safe guard over your ill-gotten loot—’ “ He stopped short. “Keep safe guard over your loot. But isn’t Dante just displaying some of his not uncommon sarcasm, taunting the poor sinner for his money-grubbing actions in life?”
“Indeed, that is how I happen to read the line,” said Longfellow. “But Dante might be read to mean the statement literally. It could be argued that Dante’s phrase actually reveals that part of the contrapasso of the Simoniacs is that they are buried upside down with the money they immorally accumulated in life below their heads. Surely Dante could have been thinking of Peter Magus’s words to Simon in Acts: ‘May thy money go to destruction with thee.’ In this interpretation, the hole which holds Dante’s sinner becomes his eternal purse.”
Holmes offered a medley of guttural sounds at the interpretation.
“If we dig,” said Longfellow with a slight smile, “your doubts might be proven unnecessary.” He extended his walking stick to reach the bottom of the hole, but the pit was too deep. “I cannot fit, I suppose.” Longfellow gauged the size of the hole. Then he looked at the little doctor, who was wriggling with asthma.
Holmes stood stock-still. “Oh but, Longfellow…” He looked down the hole. “Why did nature not ask me my advice about my features?” There was no point in arguing. Longfellow could not be argued with properly; he was too invincibly tranquil. If Lowell were here, he would have been digging in the hole like a rabbit.
“Ten to one I crack a fingernail.”
Longfellow nodded appreciatively. The doctor pinched his eyes closed and slid feet first down the hole. “It is too narrow. I cannot bend down. I do not think I can squeeze myself in to dig.”
Longfellow helped Holmes climb out of the hole. The doctor reentered the narrow opening, this time headfirst, with Longfellow holding on to his gray trousers at the ankles. The poet had the easy grasp of a puppet master.
“Careful, Longfellow! Careful!”
“You can see well enough?” asked Longfellow.
Holmes barely heard him. He raked at the earth with his hands, the moist dirt rising under his fingernails, at once sickeningly warm and cold and hard as ice. The worst was the odor, the festering stench of burning flesh that had been preserved in the tight abyss. Holmes tried holding his breath, but this tactic, coupled with his heaving asthma, made his head feel light, as if it might drift off like a balloon.
He was where the Reverend Talbot had been; upside down, like him. But instead of punishing fire at his feet he felt the unflinching hands of Mr. Longfellow.
Longfellow’s muffled voice floated down, a concerned question. The doctor could not hear inside his vague sensation of faintness and wondered idly whether a loss of consciousness would cause Longfellow to release his ankles and if he, in the meantime, might send himself tumbling through the core of the earth. He suddenly felt the danger they had put themselves in by trying to fight a book. The floating pageant of thoughts seemed to go on endlessly before the doctor hit something with his hands.
With the feel of a material object, hard clarity returned. A piece of clothing of some sort. No: a bag. A glazed cloth bag.
Holmes shuddered. He tried to speak, but the stench and the dirt were terrible obstacles. For a moment he was frozen in panic, then sanity returned and he kicked his legs frantically.
Longfellow, understanding this was a signal, lifted his friend’s body from the cavity. Holmes gasped for air, spitting and sputtering as Longfellow tended to him solicitously.
Holmes wriggled to his knees. “See what it is, for God’s sake, Longfellow!” Holmes pulled the drawstring wrapped around the discovery and tore open the dirt-encrusted pouch.
Longfellow watched as Dr. Holmes released a thousand dollars of legal-tender notes over the hard burial-vault ground.
At grand Wide Oaks, the estate of the Healey family for three generations, Nell Ranney led two callers through the long entrance hall. They were strangely withdrawn, their bodies forcibly businesslike but their eyes rapid and mobile. Making them stand out even more in the maid’s mind were their fashions, for two such outlandishly conflicting styles were rarely seen.
James Russell Lowell, with a short beard and drooping mustache, wore a rather shabby double-breasted sack coat, an unbrushed silk hat made into a mockery by the casual suit, and in his necktie, done up in a sailor-knot, a type of pin that was no longer fashionable in Boston. The other man, whose massive russet beard cascaded in thick wiry rolls, removed his gloves, which were of a violent color, and pocketed them in his impeccably tailored Scottish tweed frock coat, below which was tightly strung, around his green-vested belly, like a Christmas ornament, a sparkling gold watch chain.
Nell was slow to leave the room even while Richard Sullivan Healey, the eldest son of the chief justice, greeted his two literary guests.
“Forgive my chambermaid’s behavior,” Healey said after ordering Nell Ranney away. “She was the one who found Father’s body and took him inside the house, and since then, I’m afraid she examines every person as though he could be responsible. We worry that she imagines almost as many demonish things as Mother does these days.”
“We were hoping to see dear Mrs. Healey this morning if you please, Richard,” said Lowell very politely. “Mr. Fields thought we might discuss with her a book of memorial tributes to the chief justice that could be made up by Ticknor and Fields.” It was customary for relatives, even distant cousins, to make personal calls to the family of the recently deceased, but the publisher required a pretense.
Richard Healey bunched his bulky mouth into an amiable curve. “I fear a visit with her won’t be possible, cousin Lowell. Today is one of her bad days. She is confined to bed.”
“Why, do not say she is ill.” Lowell leaned forward with a trace of morbid curiosity.
Richard Healey hesitated with a series of heavy blinks. “Not physically, or so according to the doctors. But she has developed a mania that I fear has worsened over the last weeks, so it may as well be physical. She feels a constant presence on her. Pardon me to speak vulgarly, gentlemen, but a crawling across her very flesh for which she insists she must scratch and dig into her skin, no matter how many diagnose imagination as the culprit.”
“Is there anything we might do to assist her, my dear Healey?” asked Fields.
“Find Father’s murderer.” Healey chuckled sadly. He noticed with some unease that the two men responded to this with steely looks.
Lowell wished to see where the body of Artemus Healey had been discovered. Richard Healey balked at this strange request, but attributing Lowell’s eccentricities to his poetic sensibilities, he escorted the two visitors outside. They went out the back doors of the mansion, past the flower gardens and into the meadows that led down to the riverbank. Healey noticed that James Russell Lowell walked with a surprisingly quick, athletic stride for a poet.
A strong wind blew particles of fine-grain sand into Lowell’s beard and mouth. With the rough taste on his tongue, a catch in his throat, and the image of Healey’s death in his mind, Lowell was transported by a vivid idea.
The Neutrals of Dante’s third canto choose neither good nor evil and thus are despised by Heaven and Hell alike. So they are placed in an antechamber, not even Hell proper, and here these cowardly shades float naked following a blank banner, for they had refused to follow a course of action in life. They are stung incessantly by gadflies and wasps, their blood mingles with the salt of their tears, and all this is mopped up at their feet by loathsome worms. This putrid flesh gives rise to more flies and worms. Flies, wasps, and maggots were the three types of insects found on Artemus Healey’s body.
To Lowell, it showed something about their killer that made him real.
“Our Lucifer knew how to transport these insects,” Lowell had said.
It had been a gathering at Craigie House the first morning of their investigation, the small study inundated with newspapers and their fingers spotted with ink and blood from turning too many pages. Fields, reviewing the notes Longfellow had been compiling in a journal, wanted to know why Lucifer, as Lowell had named their adversary, would choose Healey for the Neutrals.
Lowell pulled thoughtfully on one of his walrus tusks. He was in full pedagogical mode when his friends became his audience. “Well, Fields, the only shade Dante singles out in this group of the Lukewarm, or ‘Neutrals,’ is the one who made the great refusal, he says. This must be Pontius Pilate, for he made the greatest refusal—the most terrible act of neutrality in Christian history—when he neither authorized nor stopped the crucifixion of the Savior. Judge Healey, likewise, was asked to deal a grave blow to the Fugitive Slave Act but instead did nothing at all. He sent the escaped slave Thomas Sims, barely a boy, back to Savannah, where he was whipped until he bled and then paraded with his wounds before the town. And old Healey growled all the while that it was not his place to overturn Congress’s law. No! In the name of God, it was the place of us all.”
“There is no known solution to the puzzle of this gran rifuto, the great refusal. Dante does not give a name,” Longfellow chimed in, brushing away the thick smoke tail from Lowell’s cigar.
“Dante cannot give a name to the sinner,” insisted Lowell passionately. “These shades who ignored life, ‘who never were alive,’ as Virgil says, must be ignored in death, pestered without end by the most insignificant vile creatures. That is their contrapasso, their eternal punishment.”
“A Dutch scholar has suggested this figure is not Pontius Pilate, my dear Lowell, but rather the young man in Matthew 19:22 who is offered eternal life and refuses it,” said Longfellow. “Mr. Greene and I both favor reading the great refusal as having been made by Pope Celestine the Fifth, another man who took a neutral path by turning down the papal throne, giving way to the rise of the corrupt Pope Boniface, who led ultimately to Dante’s exile.”
“That is too much confining Dante’s poem to the borders of Italy!” protested Lowell. “Typical of our dear Greene. This is Pilate. I can almost see him before us scowling as Dante must have.”
Fields and Holmes had remained silent during this exchange. Now Fields said kindly but reproachfully that their work must not become a club session. They had to find a better way to understand these murders, and for that they would have to not merely read the cantos that gave rise to the deaths but cross into them.
At that moment, Lowell was scared for the first time of what might come of all this. “Well, what do you suggest?”
“We must see firsthand,” Fields said, “where Dante’s visions came to life.”
Now, making his way through the Healey estate, Lowell grabbed his publisher’s arm.” ‘Come la rena quando turbo spira,’ “ he whispered.
Fields did not understand. “Say again, Lowell?”
Lowell sped ahead and stopped where the dark dirt lining gave way to a circle of smooth, light sand. He bent down. “Here!” he said triumphantly.
Richard Healey, trailing slightly behind, said, “Why, yes.” When his mind caught up, he looked flabbergasted. “How did you know that, cousin? How did you know this is where my father’s body was found?”
“Oh,” Lowell said disingenuously. “It was a question. You seemed to be slowing your walk, so I asked, ‘Is it here?’ Was he not slowing?” He turned to Fields for help.
“I believe so, Mr. Healey.” Fields, puffing for breath, nodded eagerly.
Richard Healey did not think he had been slowing. “Ah well, the answer then is yes,” he said, making a point not to hide the fact that he was impressed with, and wary of, Lowell’s intuition. “This is precisely where it happened, cousin. At the most demonish ugly portion of our yard, too,” he said bitterly. It was the one patch in the meadow where nothing at all could grow.
Lowell traced his finger in the sand. “It was here,” he said as though caught in a trance. For the first time, Lowell began to feel real and quickening sympathy for Healey. Here he had been sprawled naked and left to be devoured. The worst part was that he had met an end he would never understand, even in the ever after, nor would his wife or his sons.
Richard Healey thought Lowell was on the verge of tears. “He always kept a soft place in his heart for you, cousin,” he said, and knelt beside Lowell.
“What?” Lowell demanded, his sympathy quickly broken.
Healey recoiled at the brusque response. “The chief justice. You were one of his favorite relations. Oh, he read your poetry with great praise and admiration. And whenever the new number of The North American Review would come, he would fill his pipe and read it from beginning to end. He said he felt you had a higher sense for things of truth.”
“He did?” Lowell asked with some bewilderment.
Lowell avoided his publisher’s smiling eyes and muttered a strained compliment about the chief justice’s fine judgment.
When they returned to the house, a hired man appeared with a bundle from the post office. Richard Healey excused himself.
Fields pulled Lowell aside quickly. “How the devil did you know where Healey was killed, Lowell? We had not discussed that in our meetings.”
“Well, any decent Dantean would savor the proximity of the Charles River to the Healeys’ yard. Remember, the Neutrals are found only a few rods from Acheron, the first river of Hell.”
“Yes. But the newspaper reports were not at all specific as to where in the yard he was found.”
“The newspapers were not fit to light a cigar on.” Lowell balked, delaying his answer to enjoy Fields’s anticipation. “It was the sand that led me.”
“The sand?”
“Yes, yes. ‘Come la rena quando turbo spira.’ Remember your Dante,” he rebuked Fields. “Imagine entering the circle of Neutrals. What do we see as we look upon the mass of sinners?”
Fields was a material reader and tended to recall quotes by page numbers, the weight of paper, the layout of the type, the smell of the calf leather. He could feel the gilded corners of his edition of Dante graze his fingers. “ ‘Accents of anger,’ “—Fields sounded out the poetry carefully as he translated in his mind—” ‘words of agony, and voices high and hoarse…’ “ He could not remember. What he would give to remember what was next, to understand whatever it was Lowell now knew that made the situation less uncontrollable. He had brought along a pocket edition of Dante in Italian and began thumbing through.
Lowell pulled this away. “Further along, Fields! ‘Facevano un tumulto, il qual s’aggira sempre in quell’ aura sanza tempo tinta, come la rena quando turbo spira’: ‘Made up a tumult that goes whirling on/Forever in that dark and timeless air, /Even as the sand doth, when the whirlwind breathes.’ “
“So…” Fields digested this.
Lowell exhaled impatiently. “The meadows behind the house are largely billowing grass, or of dirt and rock. But a very different, fine grain of loose sand was blowing in our faces, so I followed it. The punishment of the Neutrals occurs in Dante’s Hell accompanied by a tumult like sand when a whirlwind blows. That metaphor of loose sand is not idle language, Fields! It is the emblem of the shifting and unstable minds of these sinners, who chose to do nothing when they had the power to act and so in Hell lose that power!”
“Hang it, Jamey!” Fields said a little too loudly. The chambermaid was running a feather duster along an adjacent wall. Fields didn’t notice this. “Hang it all! Sand like a whirlwind! The three types of insects, the flag, the nearby river, that’s quite enough. But the sand? If our fiend can stage even such a minute metaphor of Dante’s into his acts…”
Lowell nodded somberly. “He truly is a Dantean,” he said with a tinge of admiration.
“Sirs?” Nell Ranney appeared next to the poets, and they both jumped back.
Lowell demanded ferociously to know whether she had been listening.
She shook her sturdy head in protest. “No, good sir, I vow it. But I wonder if…” She looked over one shoulder nervously, then the other. “You gentlemen are different than the others who come to pay their respects. The way you’ve looked over the house… and the yard where… Won’t you come back another time? I must…”
Richard Healey returned and, in mid-sentence, the chambermaid crossed over to the other side of the massive entrance hall, master of the household art of disappearance.
He sighed heavily, deflating half the bulk of his large barrel chest. “Since the posting of our reward, each morning I am taken in by the foolish revival of hope, leaping headfirst into the letters, truly thinking somewhere the truth waits to be shared.” He moved to the fireplace and tossed in the latest pile. “I can’t say whether people are cruel or merely crazy.”
“Pray, my dear cousin,” said Lowell. “Do not the police have any information that can assist you?”
“The venerated Boston police. Might I tell you, cousin Lowell. They brought in every demonish criminal they could find to the station house, and do you know what came of it?”
Richard was actually waiting for an answer. Lowell replied, hoarse with suspense, that he did not.
“Well, I’ll tell you then. One of them jumped out a window to his death. Can you imagine? The mulatto officer who supposedly tried to save him said something of him whispering words that could not be understood.”
Lowell sprang forward and grabbed Healey as though to shake more from him. Fields yanked Lowell’s coat. “A mulatto officer, you say?” Lowell demanded.
“The venerated Boston police,” Richard repeated with restrained bitterness. “We would hire a private detective,” Healey said, frowning, “but they are nearly as demonish corrupt as the city’s.”
Moans came from a room above, and Roland Healey ran halfway down the stairs. He told Richard that their mother was having another fit.
Richard broke away. Nell Ranney started toward Lowell and Fields, but Richard Healey noticed this on his way up. He leaned over the wide banister and commanded her. “Nell, finish the work in the basement, won’t you.” He waited until she had descended before continuing upstairs.
“So Patrolman Rey was investigating Healey’s murder when he heard the whisper,” Fields said when he and Lowell were alone.
“And now we know who it was that whispered—whoever died that day at the station house.” Lowell thought for a moment. “We must see what has frightened that chambermaid so.”
“Mind, Lowell. You’ll have her in hot water if the Healey boy sees you.” Fields’s concern held Lowell in place. “He said she’s been imagining things, in any case.”
Just then, there was a loud bang from the nearby kitchen. Lowell made sure they were still alone and then headed for the kitchen door. He knocked lightly. No answer. He pushed in the door and could hear a residual noise to the side of the stove: the vibration of the dumbwaiter. It had just bounced up from the basement. He opened the wood-paneled door to the dumbwaiter car. It was empty but for a piece of paper.
He hurried past Fields.
“What is it? What’s the matter?” Fields asked.
“We cannot call that a dumb waiter. I need to find the study. You stay and watch, make certain the Healey boy doesn’t return yet,” Lowell said.
“But, Lowell!” Fields said. “What shall I do if he comes?”
Lowell did not answer. He handed the publisher the note.
The poet rushed through the halls, peering into open doors until he saw one blocked by a settee. Pushing it out of the way, he stepped lightly inside. The room had been cleaned, but just barely, as though in the middle of the process it had become too painful a prospect for Nell Ranney, or one of the younger servants, to stay. And not just because this was where Healey had died but because of the memories of Judge Healey that lived on, sustained in the fragrance of old book leather.
From above, Lowell could hear Ednah Healey’s moaning climb to a terrible crescendo, and he tried to ignore that they were in a deadhouse all around.
Left standing in the hall, Fields read the note written by Nell Ranney: They tell me I must keep this to myself, but I cannot, and know not who to tell. When I took Judge Healey into his study, he groaned in my arms before dying. Won’t someone help?
“Oh good Lord!” Fields involuntarily crumbled the note. “He was still alive!”
In the study, Lowell knelt down and put his head close to the floor. “You were still alive,” he whispered. “The great refuser. That’s why you were done in.” He broke it to Artemus Healey gently. “What did Lucifer say to you? You were trying to tell your maid something when she found you. Or were you trying to ask something?” He saw specks of blood still on the floor. He saw something else along the edges of the rug: squashed wormlike maggots, strange insect parts Lowell did not recognize, the wings and trunks of a few of the fire-eyed insects Nell Ranney had torn to pieces over the body of Judge Healey. He rummaged through Healey’s overflowing desk until he found a pocket lens and passed it over the insects. They, too, were traced with his blood.
Suddenly, from underneath piles of paper behind the desk, four or five fire-eyed flies shot out and bolted in a line toward Lowell.
He gasped foolishly and stumbled over a heavy chair, banged his leg hard against a cast-iron umbrella stand and fell over.
Lowell, with a thirst for revenge, brought down a ponderous law book methodically against each of the flies. “Do not think you can scare off a Lowell.” Then he felt a slight tingle above his ankle. A fly had slipped inside, and when Lowell lifted his pants leg, the fly, disoriented, twisted out and tried to get away. Lowell smashed it into the rug with his boot heel with childish pleasure. That was when he noticed a red abrasion just above his ankle where he had hit the umbrella stand.
“Damn you,” he said to the dead infantry of flies. He stopped cold, noticing how the heads of the flies seemed to have the expressions of dead men.
Fields murmured from outside to hurry. Lowell, breathing in irregular spurts, ignored the warnings until footsteps and voices could be heard from above.
Lowell took out his handkerchief, embroidered with JRL by Fanny Lowell, and scooped up the insects he had just killed, as well as the other insect parts he could find. Stuffing the cargo into his coat, he ran out of the study. Fields helped him wheel the settee back into place as the voices of his beleaguered cousins grew closer.
The publisher was parched for knowledge. “Well? Well, Lowell? Did you find anything?”
Lowell patted the handkerchief in his pocket. “Witnesses, my dear Fields.”
The week after Elisha Talbot’s funeral, every minister in New England had preached an impassioned eulogy to his fallen peer. The following Sunday, the sermons focused on the commandment not to murder. When neither Talbot’s nor Healey’s murder seemed any closer to being resolved, Boston’s clergymen preached on every sin committed since before the war—culminating with the force of the Last Judgment in tirades against the police department’s futile work, with a mesmerizing spirit that would have made Talbot, the old tyrant of the Cambridge pulpit, tear up with pride.
Newspapermen asked how the murders of two leading citizens could happen without consequence. Where had the money gone that the aldermanic council had voted to improve police efficiency? To flashy silver numbers on the officers’ uniforms, said one newspaper sardonically. Why had the city approved Kurtz’s petition for policemen to be permitted to carry firearms if they could not find criminals on which to use them?
Nicholas Rey read with interest these and other critiques from his desk at the Central Station. In fact, the police department was making some real improvements. Fire-alarm bells were arranged so as to call the entire police force, or some part, to any section of the city. The chief had also ordered sentinels and scouts to deliver constant reports back to the Central Station, with all policemen ready for duty at the smallest sign of a potential problem.
Kurtz privately asked Patrolman Rey for his assessment of the murders. Rey considered the situation. He had the rare gift in a man of allowing himself to be silent before speaking, so that he said just what he meant. “When a soldier was caught trying to desert in the army, the whole division was ordered into a field, where there was an open grave and a coffin beside it. The deserter would be marched before us with a chaplain at his side and ordered to sit on the coffin, where he was blindfolded and his hands and feet bound. A firing squad of his own men would line up and wait for the command. Ready, aim… With fire, he would fall dead into the coffin and be buried on the spot, with no marker left in the ground. We would shoulder arms back to camp.”
“Healey and Talbot were done in as examples of some kind?” Kurtz seemed skeptical.
“The deserter could as easily have been shot in the brigadier general’s tent or in the woods, or been sent to a court-martial. The public performance was to show us that the deserter would be abandoned, just as he abandoned our ranks. Slave masters used similar tactics to make an example of slaves who tried to escape. The fact that Healey and Talbot were murdered might be secondary. First and foremost, we are dealing with punishments of these men. We are meant to fall in line and observe.”
Kurtz was fascinated but not won over. “Just so. Punishments by whom, Patrolman? And for what errors? If someone did want us to learn from these acts, wouldn’t it make sense they would do it in a way we could understand? The naked body left under a flag. The feet on fire. No sense in it at all!”
They must make sense to someone though, Rey thought. He and Kurtz might not be the ones being spoken to.
“What do you know of Oliver Wendell Holmes?” Rey asked Kurtz during another conversation as he was escorting the police chief down the steps of the State House to the waiting carriage.
“Holmes.” Kurtz shrugged, indifferent. “Poet and doctor. Social gadfly. He was a friend of old Professor Webster’s before Webster was hung. One of the last to accept Webster’s guilt. Wasn’t much help at the inquest of Talbot, though.”
“No, he wasn’t,” Rey said, thinking about Holmes’s nervousness at the sight of Talbot’s feet. “I believe he was not well, that he suffers from asthma.”
“Yes—asthma of the mind,” Kurtz said.
After Talbot’s body was discovered, Rey had shown Chief Kurtz the two dozen bits of paper he had picked up from the ground near Talbot’s vertical grave. They were tiny squares, each one no bigger than a carpet tack and each containing at least one typeset printed letter, with some showing barely discernible print on the reverse side. Some were smudged beyond recognition by the constant moisture in the vault. Kurtz wondered at Rey’s interest in the litter. This formed a general dent in his confidence in his mulatto patrolman.
But Rey laid them out carefully on a table. These scraps glowed with importance, and he was certain they signified something, as certain as he had been of the leaper’s whisper. He could identify the contents of twelve of the bits: e, di, ca,’t, I, vic, B, as, im, n, y, and another e. One of the smudged bits contained the letter g, although, in truth, it could just as easily have been q.
When Rey was not transporting Chief Kurtz to interviews with acquaintances of the deceased or to meetings with station captains, he would steal some free minutes to remove the bits from his trouser pocket and sprinkle the letters over a table. Sometimes he could make words, and he kept track in a memorandum book of the phrases that arose. He closed his gold-tinted eyes tight, opening them to double size with the unconscious expectation that the letters would string together on their own to explain what had happened or what should be done, like the dial-plates of the spiritualists, which, it was claimed, spelled out the words of the dead when operated by a sufficiently talented medium. One afternoon, Rey placed the station-house leaper’s final words, at least as the patrolman had transcribed them, amid the new jumble of letters, hoping that the two lost voices would in some way commune.
He had a favorite grouping for the loose bits of letters: I cant die as I’m… Rey always stalled at that point, but wasn’t there something to it? He tried one of the others: Be vice as I… What to do with that torn piece with g or q?
Central Station was flooded daily with letters of such spirited conviction that they might have been thought to clear up all questions had they shown the smallest trace of credibility. Chief Kurtz assigned Rey the task of reviewing this correspondence, in part to get him away from the “litter.”
Five people claimed to have seen Chief Justice Healey at the Music Hall a week after the discovery of his wasted body. Rey tracked down the thunderstruck fellow in question by his season-ticket seat number: He was a Roxbury carriage painter with a mass of untamable curls somewhat similar to the judge’s. An anonymous letter informed the police that Reverend Talbot’s murderer, an acquaintance and distant relative of the letter writer, had boarded a ship to Liverpool in a surtout borrowed without permission and, there, had been dealt with foully, never to be heard from again (with the coat, presumably, never to be reunited with the rightful wearer). Another note claimed that a woman had spontaneously confessed at a tailor’s shop to having committed the murder of Judge Healey in a jealous rage and had then escaped by train to New York, where she might be found in one of four listed hotels.
When Rey tore open an anonymous note comprising of two sentences, however, he felt the quickening sensation of discovery: It was a fine-grade stationery and the message was written in a blocky, broken penmanship—a mild disguise for the writer’s true hand:
Dig deeper under the Reverend’s hole. Something missed beneath his head.
The note was signed “Respectfully yours, a citizen of our city.”
“Something missed?” Kurtz responded mockingly.
“There’s nothing to prove here, no story to invent,” said Rey with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. “The writer simply has something to tell. And, remember: The newspaper accounts have varied widely as to what happened to Talbot. Now we must use that to our advantage. This person knows the true circumstances, or at least that Talbot was buried in a hole, and that he was upside down. Look here, Chief.” Rey read aloud and pointed: “ ‘Beneath his head.’ “
“Rey, the number of problems I have! The Transcript’s found someone at City Hall to confirm that Talbot was found with his clothes in a pile, just like Healey. They’re printing it tomorrow and the whole blasted city will know we’re dealing with a single killer. Then people won’t blame ‘crime’—they’ll want someone’s name.” Kurtz turned back to the letter. “Well, why would the letter not say what ‘something’ we might find in Talbot’s hole then? And why wouldn’t your citizen walk up to our station house and tell me to my face what he knows?”
Rey did not answer. “Do let me have a look in the vault, Chief Kurtz.”
Kurtz shook his head. “You’ve heard the heat we’ve taken from every cursed pulpit in the Commonwealth, Rey. We can’t go digging up the Second Church’s vault to pull out imagined mementos!”
“We left the hole intact in the event there was further observation required,” Rey argued.
“Just so. I don’t want to hear another word about it, Patrolman.”
Rey nodded, but his expression of certainty did not diminish. Chief Kurtz’s stubborn refusals could not compete with Rey’s unwavering silent disapproval. Later in the afternoon, Kurtz snatched his greatcoat. He walked by Rey’s desk and ordered, “Patrolman: Second Unitarian Church, in Cambridge.”
A new sexton, a merchantlike gentleman with red whiskers, ushered them inside. He explained that his predecessor, Sexton Gregg, had become increasingly distraught since his discovery of Talbot’s body and had resigned to look after his health. The sexton searched clumsily for the keys to the underground vaults.
“There’d better be something to this,” Kurtz warned Rey when the stench of the vault reached out to them.
There was.
After only a few strokes with a long-handled shovel, Rey unearthed the pouch of money exactly where Longfellow and Holmes had reburied it.
“One thousand. Exactly one thousand, Chief Kurtz.” Rey counted out the money under the glow of a gas lantern. “Chief,” Rey said, having realized something remarkable. “Chief Kurtz, the Cambridge station house—the night we found Talbot’s body. Do you remember what they told us? The reverend had reported his safe robbed the very day before the murder.”
“How much had been taken from his safe?”
Rey nodded to the money.
“One thousand.” Kurtz gasped in disbelief. “Well, I don’t know whether this helps us or confounds the matter even more. I’ll be damned if even Langdon W. Peaslee or Willard Burndy would blow a minister’s safe one night and butcher him the next and, if they did, leave the money behind for Talbot to enjoy from the grave!”
It was then that Rey almost stepped on a bouquet of flowers, the token left there by Longfellow. He picked them up and showed them to Kurtz.
“No, no, I haven’t let anyone else in these vaults,” the new sexton assured them back in the vestry. “Been closed off since the… occurrence.”
“Then maybe your predecessor did. Do you know where we can find Mr. Gregg?” Chief Kurtz asked.
“Right here. Every Sunday, faithful as could be,” the sexton replied.
“Well, when he’s here next, I want that you ask him to call on us immediately. Here’s my card. If he permitted someone inside there, we shall have to know.”
Back at the station house, there was much to be done. The Cambridge patrolman to whom Reverend Talbot had reported the robbery had to be interviewed again; they had to trace the legal-tender notes through the banks to confirm they originated from Talbot’s safe; Talbot’s Cambridge neighborhood would be scoured to find any information regarding the night his safe was broken into, and an expert in handwriting would analyze the note that provided the information.
Rey could see that Kurtz was feeling genuine optimism, probably for the first time since he’d been told of Healey’s death. He was almost giddy. “That’s what it takes to be a good policeman, Rey—a touch of instinct. It’s all we have sometimes. It fades with each disappointment in life and career, I’m afraid. I would have thrown that note out with the other rubbish, but not you. So tell me. What should we do that we haven’t?”
Rey smiled gratefully.
“There must be something. Come, come.”
“You won’t like what I say, Chief,” Rey responded.
Kurtz shrugged. “As long as it’s not more of your damned scraps of paper.”
Rey generally refused favors, but there was something for which he longed. He walked to the window framing the trees outside the station and looked out. “There’s a danger we can’t see out there, Chief, that someone who was brought into our station house felt more strongly than his own life. I want to know who died on our courtyard.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes was happy to have a task suited to him. He was neither entomologist nor naturalist and was interested in the scientific study of animals only insofar as it revealed more about humans’ inner workings, and more specifically his own. But within two days of Lowell’s dropping off the hodgepodge of crushed insects and maggots, Dr. Holmes had assembled every book on insects he could find from Boston’s best scientific libraries and began extensive studies.
In the meantime, Lowell arranged a meeting with the Healeys’ maid, Nell, at her sister’s home on the outskirts of Cambridge. She told him what it had been like to find Chief Justice Healey, how he had seemed to want to talk and could only gurgle before he died. She had fallen to her knees at the sound of Healey’s voice, as though touched by some divine power, and crawled away.
As for the discovery at Talbot’s church, the Dante Club had decided that the police must uncover for themselves the money buried in the vault. Holmes and Lowell were both against this: Holmes from fear and Lowell from a sense of possessiveness. Longfellow urged his friends not to view the police as rivals, even though knowledge of their activities by the police would be perilous. They were all working toward one end: stopping the murders. Only, the Dante Club was working primarily with what they could find literarily and the police with what they could find physically. So after reburying the pouch with its invaluable one thousand dollars, Longfellow had composed a simple note addressed to the office of the chief of police: Dig deeper… They hoped someone at the police station with a keen eye would see it and understand just enough, and perhaps discover something more of the murder.
When Holmes had finished his study of the insects, Longfellow, Fields, and Lowell met at his house. Though Holmes could see all guests to 21 Charles Street arrive through the window of his study, he liked the formality of having his Irish maid settle visitors in the little reception room and then carry up a name to him. Holmes would then scamper down the stairs.
“Longfellow? Fields? Lowell? Are you here? Come up, come up! Let me show you what I have been at work on.”
The exquisite study was more orderly than most authors’ rooms, with books stretching from floor to ceiling, many—considering Holmes’s height—accessible only by the sliding ladder he had built. Holmes showed them his latest contrivance—a reaching bookcase at the corner of his desk so that one did not have to stand to retrieve something.
“Very good, Holmes,” said Lowell, who was looking toward the microscopes.
Holmes prepared a slide. “Up to the time of the living generation, nature had kept over all her inner workshops the forbidding inscription NO ADMITTANCE. If any prying observer ventured to spy into the mysteries of her glands and canals and fluids, she covered up her work in blinding mists and bewildering halos, like the deities of old.”
He explained that the specimens were maggot-producing blowflies, just as Barnicoat, the city coroner, had pronounced the day the body was discovered. This type of fly lays its eggs on dead tissue. The eggs then became maggots that eat the decomposing flesh, nourishing themselves into flies and beginning the cycle again.
Fields, rocking in one of Holmes’s chairs, said, “But Healey cried out before he died, according to that maid. That means he was still alive! Though I suppose only barely hanging to a thread of life. Four days after he was attacked… and he was filled with maggots in every crevice of his body.”
Holmes would have been revolted at the thought of such suffering had the idea not been so fantastic. He shook his head. “Fortunately for Judge Healey and humanity, it can’t be. Either there were only a handful of maggots, four or five perhaps, on the surface of the head wound, where there would have been some dead tissue, or he was not alive. With the maggots feeding inside him in such mass quantities as has been reported, all the tissue would be dead. He would be dead.”
“Perhaps the maid is given to phantasms,” Longfellow suggested, seeing Lowell’s defeated expression.
“If you could see her, Longfellow,” Lowell said. “If you could see the flash in her eyes, Holmes. Fields, you were there!”
Fields nodded, though he was now less sure. “She saw something terrible, or thought she did.”
Lowell crossed his arms disapprovingly, “She is the only one who knows, for God’s sake. I believe her. We must believe her.”
Holmes spoke with authority. His findings at least provided some order—some reason—to their activities. “I’m sorry, Lowell. She certainly saw something horrible: Healey’s condition. But this—this is science.”
Later, Lowell took the horsecars back to Cambridge. He was strolling under a scarlet canopy of maples, frustrated with his inability to prevent the dismissal of the chambermaid’s story, when Phineas Jennison, Boston’s great merchant prince, glided by in his plush brougham coach. Lowell frowned. He was not in the frame of mind for company, though part of him craved the distraction.
“Hullo! Give me your hand!” Jennison extended his well-tailored sleeve out the window as his sleek bay horses slowed to a leisurely gait.
“My dear Jennison,” Lowell said.
“Oh, how good it feels! The hand of an old friend,” Jennison said with elaborate sincerity. Though not possessing Lowell’s viselike grip, Jennison shook hands in the rather avid way of the Boston businessman, something akin to shaking up a bottle. He stepped down and knocked on the green door of the silver-mounted chaise for his driver to stay put.
Jennison’s shining white overcoat was loosely buttoned, revealing a dark crimson frock coat over a green velvet waistcoat. He looped his arm through Lowell’s. “On your way to Elmwood?”
“Guilty, my lord,” replied Lowell.
“Tell me, has the accursed Corporation let you be already about that Dante class of yours?” Jennison asked, with serious concern slashing his strong brow.
“I suppose they have tapered off a bit, thankfully,” Lowell said, sighing. “I only hope they do not mistake the fact that I have suspended my Dante class as a victory for their side.”
Jennison stopped in the middle of the street, his face paling. He spoke in a small voice, holding his dimpled chin in the palm of his hand. “Lowell? Is this the Jemmy Lowell who was banished to Concord for disobedience when he was at Harvard? What of standing up to Manning and the Corporation, on behalf of the future geniuses of America? You must, or they shall…”
“It has nothing to do with the confounded fellows,” Lowell assured him. “I have something I must sort out at the moment that demands my complete attention, and I cannot be bothered with seminar classes. I am lecturing only.”
“A domestic cat will not answer when one wants a Bengal tiger!” Jennison made a fist. He was satisfied with the rather poetic image.
“ ‘Tis not my line, Jennison. I know not how you manage men like the fellows. You deal with idlers and dunces at every turn.”
“Is there any other kind in business?” Jennison flashed his enormous smile. “Here is the secret, Lowell. You call up a row until you get what you’re after—that’s the ticket. You know what’s important, what must be done, and everything else may go to the devil!” he added with zeal. “Now, if I could be of any help in your fight, any help at all…”
Lowell was tempted for a brief second to tell Jennison everything and plead for help, though he did not know why exactly. The poet was terrible with finances, always shuffling his money between unwise investments, so to him, successful businessmen seemed to possess supernal powers.
“No, no, I have recruited more help for my fights than good conscience should allow, but I thank you all the same.” Lowell patted the rich London broadcloth of the millionaire’s shoulder. “Besides, young Mead shall be grateful for the holiday from his Dante.”
“Every good battle needs a strong ally,” Jennison said, disappointed. Then it seemed as if he wanted to reveal something he could not. “I have observed Dr. Manning. He will not stop his campaign, and so you must never stop. Do not trust what they tell you. Remember that I said that.”
Lowell felt a black cloud of irony after speaking about the class he had fought to preserve for so many years. He felt the same awkward confusion later that day when he was passing through the white wooden gates of Elmwood, on his way to Longfellow’s.
“Professor!”
Lowell turned to see a young man, in the collegian’s standard black frock coat, running, fists up, elbows to his side, mouth stern. “Mr. Sheldon? What are you doing here?”
“I must speak with you at once.” The college freshman was panting from exertion.
Longfellow and Lowell had spent the last week compiling lists of all their former Dante students. They could not use the official Harvard records, since that would risk attracting attention. This was a particularly taxing development for Lowell, who kept loose records and remembered only a handful of names at any given time. Even a student from a few years earlier might receive the warmest greeting upon meeting Lowell on the streets. “My dear boy!” and then, “Your name again?”
Fortunately, his two current students, Edward Sheldon and Pliny Mead, were immediately removed from any possibility of suspicion, as Lowell had been teaching them in his Dante seminar at Elmwood at the very time (by their best calculations) of Reverend Talbot’s murder.
“Professor Lowell. I received this notice in my box!” Sheldon shoved a slip of paper into Lowell’s hand. “A mistake?”
Lowell glanced at it indifferently. “No mistake. I have some things to tend to which necessitate freeing my time, only for a week or so, I hope. I have no doubt you are occupied enough to put Dante out of your mind for a spell.”
Sheldon shook his head in dismay. “But what of all you always say to us? What of a new circle of admirers finally widening to relieve Dante’s wandering? You have not yielded to the Corporation? You have not tired of the study of Dante, Professor?” the student pressed.
Lowell felt himself shiver at the question. “I know not the thinking man who can tire of Dante, my young Sheldon! Few men have meaning enough in themselves to penetrate a life and work of such depth. I prize him more as man, poet, and teacher every day. He gives hope, in our darkest hour, of a second chance. And until I meet Dante himself in the first purgatorial terrace above, upon my honor I shall never give an inch to the blasted tyrants of the Corporation!”
Sheldon swallowed hard. “So you will keep in mind my eagerness to continue through the Comedy?”
Lowell put his arm on Sheldon’s shoulder and walked with him. “You know, my lad, there is a story that Boccaccio tells of a woman passing by a door in Verona, where Dante was staying during his exile. She saw Dante across the street and pointed him out to another woman, saying, ‘That is Alighieri, the man who goes to Hell whenever he pleases and brings back news of the dead.’ And the other replied, ‘Very likely. Don’t you see what a curly beard he has, and what a dark face? Owing, I daresay, to the heat and smoke!’ “
The student laughed loudly.
“This exchange, it is said,” Lowell continued, “made Dante smile. Do you know why I doubt the story’s veracity, my dear boy?”
Sheldon contemplated the question with the same serious expression he wore during their Dante classes. “Perhaps, Professor, because this woman of Verona would in all actuality not know of the contents of Dante’s poem,” he postulated, “as only a select number of people of his day, his protectors prime among them, would have seen the manuscript before the end of his life, and even then only in small installments.”
“I do not for a second believe that Dante smiled,” Lowell answered with relish.
Sheldon started to respond, but Lowell lifted his hat and continued on his way toward Craigie House.
“Remember my eagerness, do!” Sheldon shouted after him.
Dr. Holmes, sitting in Longfellow’s library, had noticed a striking engraving printed in the newspaper by the arrangement of Nicholas Rey. The illustration showed the man who had died in the courtyard of the Central Station. The notice in the newspaper referenced nothing of that incident. But it showed the straggly, sunken face of the leaper as he appeared shortly before the show-up, and asked that any information on the man’s family be reported to the office of the chief of police.
“When do you hope to find a man’s family rather than the man himself?” Holmes asked the others. “When he’s dead,” he answered himself.
Lowell examined the likeness. “A sadder-looking man I don’t believe I’ve ever seen. And this matter is important enough to involve the chief of police. Wendell, I believe you’re right. The Healey boy said the police have not yet identified the man who whispered to Patrolman Rey before throwing himself out the window. It makes perfect sense they would submit a notice to the newspapers.”
The newspaper publisher owed Fields a favor. So Fields stopped by its office downtown. He was told that a mulatto police officer had placed the notice.
“Nicholas Rey.” Fields found this strange. “With all that’s going on between Healey and Talbot, it seems a bit queer that any policeman would expend any energy on a dead loafer.” They were eating their supper at Longfellow’s. “Could they know there is some connection with the murders? Could that patrolman have some idea what it was the man whispered?”
“It’s doubtful,” Lowell said. “Once he does, he could well be led to us.”
Holmes was unnerved by this. “Then we must find this man’s identity before Patrolman Rey!”
“Well, six cheers for Richard Healey then. We now know how it came to pass that Rey came to us with that hieroglyphic,” Fields said. “This leaper was brought in to show himself to the police with a horde of other beggars and thieves. The officers would have questioned them about Healey’s murder. We can conclude that this poor fellow recognized Dante, grew fearful, poured into Rey’s ear some verses in Italian from the very canto that inspired the murder, and ran off—a chase that ended in his fall from the window.”
“What could he have been so afraid of?” Holmes wondered.
“We can be confident he was not the murderer himself, since he was dead two weeks before the Reverend Talbot’s murder,” Fields said.
Lowell tugged on his mustache thoughtfully. “Yes, but he could have known the murderer and feared their association. Probably knew him very well, if that was the case.”
“He was frightened of his knowledge, just as we were. So how do we find out before the police who he was?” Holmes asked.
Longfellow had been mostly silent through this exchange. Now he remarked, “We possess two natural advantages over the police in finding the man’s identity, my friends. We know the man recognized Dante’s inspiration in the terrible details of the murder and that, in his time of crisis, Dante’s verses came straightaway to his tongue. And so we can surmise that he was very likely an Italian beggar, well read in literature. And a Catholic.”
A man with a harsh three-days’ growth over his face and a hat pulled down over his eyes and ears was lying at the foot of Holy Cross, one of Boston’s oldest Catholic churches, posed as inertly as a sacred statue. He was stretched in the most leisurely posture human bones allow on a sidewalk and eating his dinner from an earthen pot. A pedestrian passing asked a question. He did not turn his head or respond.
“Sir.” Nicholas Rey knelt beside him, holding closer the newspaper likeness of the leaper. “Do you recognize this man, sir?”
Now the loafer rolled his eyes just enough to look.
Rey removed his badge from inside his coat. “Sir, my name is Nicholas Rey, I am a city police officer. It is important that I know this man’s name. He has passed on. He is in no trouble. Please, do you know him or someone who might?”
The man stuck his fingers into his pot and plucked a morsel between his thumb and forefinger, then released it to his mouth. Afterward, he rolled his head in a short, untroubled negation.
Patrolman Rey started down the street, where a row of noisy grocery and butcher carts lined the route.
Only ten minutes later, a horsecar expelled passengers at a nearby platform and two other men approached the immovable loafer. One of them held up the same newspaper folded to the same illustration.
“Good fellow, can you tell us whether you know this man?” asked Oliver Wendell Holmes affably.
The recurrence was almost enough to break the reverie of the loafer, though not quite.
Lowell bent forward. “Sir?”
Holmes pushed the newspaper at him again. “Pray, tell us whether he looks at all familiar and we’ll be happily on our way, dear fellow.”
Nothing.
Lowell shouted, “Do you require an ear trumpet?”
This did not get them very far. The man picked out a bit of unrecognizable food from his pot and slipped it down his throat, without, apparently, bothering to swallow.
“Wouldn’t you know,” Lowell said to Holmes, who stood to the side. “Three days of this, and nothing. This man did not have many friends.”
“We have already gone beyond the Pillar of Hercules of the fashionable quarter. Let us not yield here yet.” Holmes had seen something in the loafer’s eye when they held up the newspaper. He had also noticed a medal dangling from his neck: San Paolino, the patron saint of Lucca, Tuscany. Lowell followed Holmes’s stare.
“Where are you from, signore?” Lowell asked in Italian.
The interrogated party still stared implacably ahead, but his mouth dropped open. “Da Lucca, signore.”
Lowell complimented the beauties of the named land. The Italian showed no surprise at the language. This man, like all proud Italians, had been born with the full expectation that everyone should speak his tongue; he who did not was little worthy of conversation. Lowell then renewed the questions regarding the man in the newspaper engraving. It was important, explained the poet, to know his name so that they might find his family and arrange a proper burial. “We believe this poor fellow was from Lucca too,” he said sorrowfully in Italian. “He deserves burial in a Catholic churchyard—with his own people.”
The Luccan took some time to ponder this before painstakingly turning his elbow into a different position so he could point his morsel-plucking finger at the massive door to the church right behind him.
The Catholic prelate who listened to their questions was a dignified though portly figure.
“Lonza,” he said, handing back the newspaper. “Yes, he has been here. I believe Lonza was his name. Yes—Grifone Lonza.”
“You knew him personally then?” Lowell asked hopefully.
“He knew the church, Mr. Lowell,” the prelate responded with a benign air. “We have a fund entrusted to us from the Vatican for immigrants. We provide loans and some passage money for those who need to return to their homeland. Of course, we can only help a small number.” He had more to say but stymied himself. “What is your business in looking for him, gentlemen? Why has his likeness been printed in the newspaper?”
“I’m afraid he has passed on, Father. We believe the police have been trying to identify him,” said Dr. Holmes.
“Ah. I fear you won’t find the congregants of my church or those around these neighborhoods very eager to speak with the police on any matter. It was the police, recall, who did nothing to seek justice when the Ursuline convent burned to the ground. And when there is a crime, it is the poor, the Irish Catholics who are harassed,” he said with the firm-jawed anger of a clergyman. “The Irish were sent to war to die for Negroes who now steal their jobs, while the rich stayed home for a small fee.”
Holmes wanted to say: Not my Wendell Junior, my good Father. But, in fact, Holmes had tried to convince Junior to do just that.
“Did Mr. Lonza wish to return to Italy?” Lowell asked.
“What anyone wishes in his heart, I cannot say. This man came for food, which we give on a regular basis, and a few small loans to keep afloat if I recall correctly. If I were Italian, I might well wish to return to my people. Most of our members are Irish. I fear the Italians do not feel so welcome among them. In all Boston and its surrounding areas, there are fewer than three hundred Italians, by our approximation. They are a very ragged lot, and require our sympathy and charity. But the more immigrants from other countries, the fewer jobs for the ones already here—you understand the potential trouble.”
“Father, do you know if Mr. Lonza had family?” asked Holmes.
The prelate shook his head contemplatively, then said, “Say, there was one gentleman who was sometimes a companion to him. Lonza was something of a drunkard, I’m afraid, and needed watching. Yes, what was his name? A peculiarly Italian name it was.” The prelate moved to his desk. “We should have some papers on him, as he too received some loans. Ah, this is it—a language tutor. He received some fifty dollars from us over the last year and a half. I remember he claimed to have once worked at Harvard College, though I would tend to doubt that. Here.” He sounded out the name on the paper. “Pietro Bachi.”
Nicholas Rey, questioning some ragged children splashing at a horse trough, saw two high hats exit buoyantly from the Holy Cross Cathedral and disappear around the corner. Even from a distance, they looked out of place in the crowded dinginess of the area. Rey walked to the church and called for the prelate. The prelate, hearing that Rey was a police officer searching for an unidentified man, studied the newspaper illustration, looking over and then through his heavy gold-bowed spectacles before placidly apologizing.
“I’ve never seen this poor fellow in my life. I’m afraid, Officer.”
Rey, thinking of the two high-hatted figures, asked whether anyone else had been in the area to ask about the unidentified man. The prelate, replacing the file of Bachi in his drawer, smiled blandly and said no.
Next, Patrolman Rey went to Cambridge. A wire had been received at the Central Station detailing an attempt, in the middle of the night, to steal Artemus Healey’s remains from his coffin.
“I told them what would come from public knowledge,” Chief Kurtz said of the Healey family with unbecoming vindication. Mount Auburn Cemetery had now put the body into a steel coffin and hired another nighttime caretaker, this one armed with a shotgun. On a hillside not far from Healey’s gravestone was the portrait statue erected over the Reverend Talbot’s site, paid for by his congregation. The statue had a look of pure grace that improved on the minister’s actual face. In one hand the marble preacher held the Holy Book and in the other a pair of eyeglasses; this was a tribute to one of his pulpit mannerisms, a strange habit of removing his large eyeglasses when reading text from the lectern and replacing them when preaching freely, instructively suggesting that one needed sharper vision to read from the spirit of God.
On his way to look over Mount Auburn for Chief Kurtz, Rey was stopped by a small commotion. He was told that an old man, who roomed on the second floor of a nearby building, had been absent for more than a week, not an unexpected period of time, as he sometimes traveled. But the residents demanded something be done about an offensive smell emanating from his room. Rey knocked and considered breaking through the fastened door, then borrowed a ladder and placed it outside. Climbing up, he raised the window to the room, but the horrible smell from inside almost sent him tumbling down.
When the air had traveled out sufficiently to allow him inside, Rey had to hold himself against a wall. It took several seconds for him to accept that there was nothing to be done. A man stood erect, his feet dangling near the floor, with a rope around his neck that was hooked overhead. His features were stiffened and decayed beyond normal recognition, but Rey knew the man, from his clothes, and from the still bulging, panicked eyes, to be the former sexton of the nearby Unitarian church. A card was later found on the chair. It was the calling card Chief Kurtz had left at the church to be given to Gregg. On the back of this, the sexton had written a message to the police, insisting he would have seen any man who might have entered the vaults to kill Reverend Talbot. Somewhere in Boston, he warned, had arrived a demon soul, and he could not continue fearing its return for the rest of them.
Pietro Bachi, Italian gentleman and graduate of the University of Padua, grouchily nurtured all opportunities open to him in Boston as a private tutor, though they were scarce and disagreeable. He had tried to obtain another university position after his dismissal from Harvard. “There may be room for a plain teacher of French or German,” the dean of one new college in Philadelphia said, laughing, “but Italian! My friend, we do not expect our boys to turn out opera singers.” Colleges up and down the Atlantic anticipated as few opera singers. And governing academic boards were quite occupied enough (thank you, Mr. Bakey) managing Greek and Latin to consider instruction in an unnecessary, unseemly, papist, vulgar living language.
Fortunately, a moderate demand materialized in certain quarters of Boston by the end of the war. A few Yankee merchants were anxious to open ports with as many language skills as they could purchase. Also, a new class of prominent families, enriched by wartime profits and profiteering, desired above all else that their daughters be cultured. Some thought it wise that young ladies obtain basic Italian in addition to French in the event that it might seem worthwhile to send them to Rome when their time came to travel (a recent fashion among blossoming Boston beauties). So Pietro Bachi, his Harvard post unceremoniously stripped from him, remained on the lookout for enterprising merchants and pampered damsels. The latter required frequent replenishment, for the singing, drawing, and dancing masters held far too much appeal to them for Bachi to lay permanent claim to the young ladies’ hour-and-a-quarter pouches of time.
This life appalled Pietro Bachi.
It was not the lessons that tormented him so much as having to ask for his fees. The americani of Boston had built themselves a Carthage, a land stuffed with money but void of culture, destined to vanish without a trace of its existence. What had Plato said of the citizens of Argigentum? These people build as if they were immortal and eat as if they were to die instantly.
Some twenty-five years earlier, in the beautiful countryside of Sicily, Pietro Batalo, like many Italians before him, had fallen in love with a perilous woman. Her family was of opposite political entrenchment from the Batalos, who fought vigorously against papal control of the state. When the woman felt Pietro had wronged her, her family was only too happy to arrange for his excommunication and banishment. After a series of adventures with various armies, Pietro and his brother, a merchant, who desired freedom from the destructive political and religious landscape, changed their name to Bachi and fled across the ocean. In 1843, Pietro found a Boston that was a quaint town of friendly faces, different from what would emerge by 1865, when nativists were seeing their fear of foreigners’ rapid multiplication realized, and windows filled with the reminder FOREIGNERS NEED NOT APPLY. Bachi had been welcomed into Harvard College, and for a time he, like young Professor Henry Longfellow, had even boarded in a lovely section of Brattle Street. Then Pietro Bachi found passion unlike any he had known in the love of an Irish maiden. And she became his wife. But she found supplementary passions shortly after marrying the instructor. She left him, as Bachi’s students said, with only his shirtsleeves in his trunk and her hearty keenness for drink in his throat. There began the steep and steady decline in the heart of Pietro Bachi…
“I understand she is, well, shall we say…” His interlocutor dug for a delicate word as he hurried after Bachi:”… difficult.”
“She is difficult?” Bachi did not stop descending the stairs. “Ha! She does not believe I am Italian,” Bachi said. “She says I do not look like an Italian!”
The young girl appeared at the top of the stairs and sulkily watched her father wobble after the diminutive instructor.
“Oh, I’m sure the child does not mean what she says,” he was declaiming as gravely as possible.
“I did so mean it!” the little girl screeched from her mezzanine stage at the stair landing, leaning so far against the walnut banister that it looked as if she might fall onto Pietro Bachi’s knitted hat. “He does not look at all like one, Father! He is far too short!”
“Arabella!” the man shouted, then turned back with an earnest yellow-stained smile—as though he washed his mouth with gold—to the shimmering candlelit vestibule. “I say, wait a moment more, dear sir! Let us take this occasion to review your fee, shall we, Signor Bachi?” he suggested, eyebrow pulled back tight as a trembling arrow waiting on its bow.
Bachi turned to him for a moment, his face burning, his grip tightening on his satchel as he tried to subdue his temper. The webbed lines had multiplied across his face over the last few years, and each small setback made him doubt the worth of his existence. “Amari Cani!” was all Bachi said. Arabella stared down confusedly. He had not taught her enough to understand that his pun on americani–Italian for “Americans”—would translate into English as “bitter dogs.”
The horsecar at this hour, bound inward, packed people in like cattle headed for the abattoir. Serving Boston and its suburbs, the horsecars were enclosed two-ton compartments lined with enough places to hold around fifteen passengers. They were set with iron wheels on flat tracks and pulled by a pair of horses. Those who had managed to secure seats watched with detached interest as three dozen others, Bachi among them, struggled to fold into themselves, knuckling and bumping into one another as they reached for the leather straps hanging from the roof. By the time the conductor had pushed through to collect the fares, the platform outside was already filled with people waiting for the next car. Two drunkards in the middle of the overheated, unventilated compartment gave off a smell like an ash heap, and struggled to sing in harmony a song with words they did not know. Bachi curved his hand to his mouth and, seeing that nobody was watching, breathed into it and momentarily widened his nostrils.
After arriving at his street, Bachi plunged down from the sidewalk into a basement complex of shadows in a tenement called Half Moon Place, happily expectant of the solitude that awaited him. But sitting on the last step down were, out of place without armchairs, James Russell Lowell and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.
“A penny for your thoughts, signore.” Lowell wore a charming smile as he grabbed Bachi’s hand.
“That would be filching a copper from you, Professore,” Bachi said, his hand hanging limp as a wet rag in Lowell’s clutch. “Lost your way to Cambridge?”
He eyed Holmes suspiciously, but he sounded more surprised at their visit than he looked.
“Not at all,” said Lowell as he took off his hat, showing his high white forehead. “And aren’t you acquainted with Dr. Holmes? We’d both like to have a few words, if you would.”
Bachi frowned and pushed open his apartment door to the clanking welcome of pots hung on pegs directly behind the door. It was a subterranean room with a square of daylight dripping down from one half-window that found its way above the street. A musty odor rose up from clothes hanging at all corners that never quite dried in the dampness, imprinting Bachi’s suits with defeated wrinkles. As Lowell rearranged the pots on the door in order to hang his hat, Bachi casually slipped a pile of papers from his desk into his satchel. Holmes did his best to compliment the cracked decor.
Bachi then put up a kettle of water on the hob of the chimney grate. “Your business, gentlemen?” he asked curtly.
“We’ve come to request your help, Signer Bachi,” said Lowell.
Wry amusement crept across Bachi’s face as he poured out the tea, and he grew cheerier. “What will you take with this?” He motioned to his sideboard. There were a half-dozen dirty tumblers and three decanters. They were labeled RUM, GIN, and WHISKEY.
“Plain tea, thank you,” Holmes said. Lowell agreed.
“Oh, come now!” Bachi insisted, bringing Holmes one of the decanters. To placate the host, Holmes poured as few drops of whiskey into the teacup as possible, but Bachi lifted the doctor’s elbow. “I think the bitter New England climate would be the death of us all, Doctor,” he said, “were it not for a drop of something warm inside every now and then.”
Bachi pretended to consider tea for himself, then opted instead for a full glass of rum. The guests pulled up chairs, realizing simultaneously that they had sat in them before.
“From University Hall!” said Lowell.
“The College owed me at least that much, don’t you think?” Bachi said with stiff geniality. “Besides, where else could I find a seat so singularly uncomfortable, eh? Harvard men can talk as Unitarian as they wish, but they shall always be Calvinists up to the neck—they enjoy their own suffering, and that of others. Tell me, how is it you gentlemen found me here at Half Moon Place? I believe I am the only non-Dubliner for several square miles.”
Lowell unrolled a copy of the Daily Courier and opened it to a page with a row of advertisements. One was circled.
An Italian gentleman, a graduate of University of Padua, highly qualified by his manifold accomplishments, and by a long practice of tuition in Spanish and Italian, attends private pupils and classes at boys’ schools, ladies’ academies, etc. References: Hon. John Andrew, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell, Professor in Harvard University. Address: 2 Half Moon Place, Broad Street.
Bachi laughed to himself. “Merit, with us Italians, likes to hide its candle under a bushel. At home our proverb is A good wine needs no bush.’ But in America it must be ‘In bocca chiusa non entran mosche’: In a closed mouth, no flies enter. How can I expect people to come and buy if they do not know I have something to sell? So I open my mouth and blow my trumpet.”
Holmes flinched from a sip of the strong tea. “John Andrew is one of your references, signore?” he asked.
“Tell me, Dr. Holmes, what pupil looking for Italian lessons will call on the governor to ask after me? I suspect nobody has ever sent for Professor Lowell, in any case.”
Lowell conceded the point. He leaned in closer to the overlapping piles of Dante texts and commentaries blanketing Bachi’s desk, promiscuously open at all angles. Above the writing desk dangled a small portrait of Bachi’s estranged wife, a considerate softness from the painter’s brush obscuring her tough eyes.
“Now, how is it I could help you, even as I once needed your help, Professore?” Bachi asked.
Lowell brought out another newspaper from his coat, this one opened to the likeness of Lonza. “Do you know this man, Signor Bachi? Or should I say did you know him?”
Taking in the cadaverous face on the colorless page, Bachi sank into sadness. But when he looked up, he was angry. “Do you presume I would know every such ragged oaf of a man?”
“The bishop at Holy Cross Cathedral presumed,” Lowell said knowingly.
Bachi seemed startled and turned to Holmes as though surrounded.
“You’ve borrowed some not insignificant amounts of money there, I believe, signore,” Lowell said.
This shamed Bachi into candidness. He looked down with a sheepish smirk. “These are American priests—not like the ones in Italy. They have longer purses than the pope himself. If you were in my place, even priests’ money would not stink in your nostrils.” He drained his rum, threw his head back, and whistled. He looked again at the newspaper. “So you want to know something about Grifone Lonza.”
He paused and then pointed a thumb at the pile of Dante texts on his desk. “Like you literary gentlemen, I have always found my pleasantest companions among the dead rather than the living. There is this advantage, that when an author becomes flat or obscure or simply ceases to amuse, one can always bid him ‘Shut up.’ “ He belabored these last words pointedly.
Bachi rose to his feet and poured a gin. He took a large gulp, half gargling his words in the wash of liquor. “It is a lonely business in America. Most of my brethren who have been forced to come here can barely read a newspaper, much less La Commedia di Dante, which penetrates the very soul of man equally in all its despair and all its joy. There were a few of us here in Boston, years ago, men of letters, men of minds: Antonio Gallenga, Grifone Lonza, Pietro D’Alessandro.” He could not help but share a reminiscing smile, as though his current callers had been among them. “We would sit in our rooms and read Dante together aloud, first one and then the other, in this way progressing through the whole poem that records all secrets. Lonza and I were the last of the group who had not moved away or died. Now I am the only one.”
“Come now, don’t despise Boston,” Holmes said.
“Few are worthy to stay their whole lives in Boston,” Bachi said with a sardonic sincerity.
“Did you know, Signor Bachi, that Lonza died at the police station house?” Holmes asked gently.
Bachi nodded. “I’ve heard vaguely about it.”
Lowell said, eyeing the Dante books on the desk, “Signor Bachi, how would you respond if I were to tell you that Lonza spoke a line from the third canto of Inferno to a police officer before falling to his death?”
Bachi did not seem at all surprised. Instead, he laughed carelessly. Most political exiles from Italy grew more virulent in their rectitude and turned even their own sins into signs of sainthood; in their minds, on the other hand, the pope was a wretched dog. But Grifone Lonza had convinced himself he had somehow betrayed his faith and had to find a way to repent his sins in the eyes of God. Once settled in Boston, Lonza had helped expand a Catholic mission connected with the Ursuline convent, certain his faith would be reported to the pope and would win him return. Then rioters had burned the convent to the ground.
“Lonza, typically, rather than growing indignant, was shattered, certain he had done something deeply wrong sometime in his life to deserve these worst punishments from God. His place in America, in exile, became confused. He all but stopped speaking in English. It is my belief that part of him forgot how to speak it and knew only the true Italian language.”
“But why would Signer Lonza recite a verse from Dante before jumping from the window, signore?” Holmes asked.
“I had a friend back home, Dr. Holmes, a jovial fellow who operated a restaurant, who answered all questions about his food with quotes from Dante. Well, that was amusing. Lonza went mad. Dante became a way for him to live out the sins he imagined he had. He felt he was guilty of everything and anything proposed to him by the end. He never actually read Dante for the last few years, had no need. Every line and every word was fixed permanently in his mind, and to his terror. He had never memorized it intentionally, but it came to him as God’s warnings came to the prophets. The slightest image or word could make him slip into Dante’s poem—it could take days to pull him out sometimes, to hear him speak anything else.”
“It does not surprise you that he would commit suicide,” Lowell remarked.
“I do not know that that’s what it was, Professors,” Bachi snapped. “But it matters not what you call it. His life was a suicide. He gave up his soul for fear, little by little, until there was nowhere left in the universe but Hell. He stood on the precipice of eternal torment in his mind. It does not surprise me that he fell over.” He paused. “Is it so different from your friend Longfellow?”
Lowell shot to his feet. Holmes quietly tried to mother him back down.
Bachi persisted: “From what I understand, Professor Longfellow has drowned his suffering in Dante for—what is it?—three or four years now.”
“What can you know of a man like Henry Longfellow, Bachi?” Lowell demanded. “To judge from your desk, Dante seems to have consumed you of late as well, signore. What exactly are you looking for in here? Dante was searching for peace in his writing. I venture to say you are after something not so noble!” He flipped through the pages roughly.
Bachi swatted the book out of Lowell’s hand.
“Do not touch my Dante! I may be in a tenement, but I need not justify my reading to any man, rich or poor, Professore!”
Lowell flushed in embarrassment. “That is not… if you require a loan, Signor Bachi…”
Bachi cackled. “Oh, you amari cani! Do you think I should take charity from you, a man who stood idly by while Harvard fed me to the wolves?”
Lowell was aghast. “Now see here, Bachi! I fought hand over fist for your job!”
“You sent a note to Harvard requesting they pay me severance. Where were you when I had nowhere to turn? Where was the great Longfellow? You have never fought for anything in your life. You write poems and articles about slavery and the murder of Indians and hope something will change. You fight what does not come near your door, Professore.” He broadened his invective by turning to the flustered Dr. Holmes, as though it were the polite thing to do to include him. “You’ve inherited everything in your lives and do not know what it is to cry for your bread! Well, with what other expectations did I come to this country? What should I complain of? The greatest bard had no home but exile. One day to come, perhaps, I shall walk on my own shores again, once more with true friends, before I leave this earth.”
In another thirty seconds, Bachi drank two full glasses of whiskey and sank into his desk chair, trembling hard.
“It was the intervention of a foreigner, Charles of Valois, that caused Dante’s exile. He is our last property, the last ashes of the soul of Italy. I shall not applaud as you and your worshipped Mr. Longfellow rip Dante from his rightful place and make him an American! Just remember, he shall always return to MS! Dante is too powerful in his spirit of survival to succumb to any man!”
Holmes tried to ask about Bachi’s tutoring. Lowell inquired about the bowler-hatted, checkered-waistcoated man whom he had seen Bachi approach anxiously in Harvard Yard. But they had extracted all they could from Pietro Bachi for now. When they emerged from the cellar apartment, it had grown viciously cold. They ducked under the rickety outer staircase, known by the tenants as Jacob’s Ladder, because it led to the somewhat better appointed Humphrey’s Place tenement above.
A red-faced Bachi thrust his head from his half-window, so he seemed to be growing out from the ground. He wriggled out up to his neck and called out drunkenly.
“You want to talk of Dante, Professori? Keep an eye on your Dante class!”
Lowell shouted back, demanding to know his meaning.
But the sash of the window was immoderately slammed closed by two quivering hands.
Mr. Henry Oscar Houghton, a tall and pious man with a Quaker-style half-beard, reviewed his accounts in the orderly congestion of his counting-room desk, which glowed under a dim moderator lamp. Through his tireless devotion to small details, his enterprise, the Riverside Press, located on the Cambridge side of the Charles River, had become the leading printing firm for many prominent publishing companies, including the most prominent, Ticknor & Fields. One of Houghton’s messenger boys knocked on the open door.
Houghton did not budge until he finished inking and blotting a number into his cost book. He was worthy of his hardworking Puritan ancestors.
“Come in, boy,” Houghton finally said, looking up from his work.
The boy delivered a card into Oscar Houghton’s hand. Even before reading it, the printer was impressed by the heavy, inflexible paper. Reading the handwriting under the lamp, Houghton stiffened. His tightly guarded peace was now thoroughly interrupted.
Deputy Chief Savage’s police carriage rolled up and expelled Chief Kurtz. Rey met him on the steps of the Central Station.
“Well?” asked Kurtz.
“I’ve discovered that the leaper’s first name was Grifone, according to another vagrant, who claims to have seen him by the railroad sometimes,” said Rey.
“There’s one step,” said Kurtz. “You know, I’ve been thinking about what you said, Rey. About these murders as forms of punishment.” Rey expected this to be followed by something dismissive, but instead Kurtz let out a sigh. “I’ve been thinking of Chief Justice Healey.”
Rey nodded.
“Well, we all do things we live to regret, Rey. Our own police force battled back mobs with billy clubs during the Sims trial from the courthouse steps. We hunted down Tom Sims like a dog and after the trial transported him to the harbor to be sent back to his slave master. You follow me? This was one of our darkest moments, all from Judge Healey’s decision, or lack thereof, not to declare Congress’s law invalid.”
“Yes, Chief Kurtz.”
Kurtz seemed saddened by his thoughts. “Find the most respectable men in Boston society, Patrolman, and I should say you have a good chance they have not been saints, not in our times. They have wavered, have thrown their weight into the wrong war chest, have let caution overstep courage, and worse.”
Kurtz opened the door to his office, ready to continue. But three men in black greatcoats were standing over his desk.
“What goes on here?” Kurtz called to them, then looked around for his secretary.
The men parted, revealing Frederick Walker Lincoln sitting behind Kurtz’s desk.
Kurtz uncovered his head and bowed forward slightly. “Your Honor.”
Mayor Lincoln was completing a lazy, final stroke on a cigar behind the broad wings of John Kurtz’s mahogany desk. “Hope you don’t mind we made use of your rooms while waiting, Chief.” A cough mangled Lincoln’s words. Next to him sat Alderman Jonas Fitch. A sanctimonious grin seemed to have been carved on his face for some hours, at least. The alderman dismissed two of the greatcoats, members of the bureau of detectives. One remained.
“Stay in the anteroom please, Patrolman Rey,” Kurtz said.
Kurtz cautiously took a seat across from his desk. He waited for the door to close. “What is this about, then? Why have you congregated those scoundrels here?”
The one remaining scoundrel, Detective Henshaw, showed no particular offense.
Mayor Lincoln said, “I’m certain you have other police matters that have been neglected during these times, Chief Kurtz. We’ve decided that these murders shall be turned over to your detectives for resolution.”
“I won’t allow that!” Kurtz said.
“Welcome the detectives to do their jobs, Chief. They are equipped to solve such matters as this with speed and vigor,” Lincoln said.
“Particularly with such rewards on the table,” said Alderman Fitch.
Lincoln frowned at the alderman.
Kurtz squinted. “Rewards? Detectives can’t accept rewards, by your own law. What rewards, Mayor?”
The mayor snubbed out his cigar, pretending to think over Kurtz’s comment. “The aldermanic council of Boston, as we speak, will be passing a resolution authored by Alderman Fitch, eliminating the restriction on receiving rewards for members of the bureau of detectives. There will also be a slight increase in the rewards.”
“An increase of how much?” Kurtz asked.
“Chief Kurtz…” the mayor started.
“How much?”
Kurtz thought he saw Alderman Fitch smile before answering. “The reward will now be set at thirty-five thousand for the arrest of the murderer.”
“God save the mark!” Kurtz cried. “Men would commit murder themselves to get their hands on that! Especially our blasted Bureau of Detectives!”
“We do the job someone must, Chief Kurtz,” Detective Henshaw noted, “when nobody else will act.”
Mayor Lincoln exhaled, and his whole face deflated. Although the mayor didn’t exactly resemble his second cousin the late President Lincoln, he carried the same skeletal look of indefatigable frailness. “I want to retire after another term, John,” the mayor said softly. “And I want to know that my city will look back at me with honor. We need to string up this killer now or all hell will break loose, can’t you see that? Between the war and the assassination, goodness knows the papers have lived off the taste of blood for four years, and I swear they’re thirstier than ever. Healey was in my college class, Chief. I do believe I am half expected to go into the streets and find this madman myself or, if not, to be hanged in the Boston Common! I beg you, let the detectives solve this and leave the Negro out of this business. We can’t suffer another embarrassment.”
“I beg your pardon, Mayor.” Kurtz sat up straighter in his chair. “What does Patrolman Rey have to do with all this?”
“The near riot at your show-up for Justice Healey.” Alderman Fitch was pleased to elaborate. “That beggar who threw himself out your precinct window. Stop me when this sounds familiar, Chief.”
“Rey had nothing to do with that,” Kurtz said, balking.
Lincoln shook his head sympathetically. “The aldermen have commissioned an investigation to look into his role. We have received complaints from several police officers that it was your driver’s presence that provoked the commotion to begin with. We have been told the mulatto had custody of the beggar when it happened, Chief, and some think, well, speculate, he might have forced him out the window. Probably accidentally…”
“Blasted lies!” Kurtz reddened. “He was trying to calm things down, as we all were! That leaper was just some maniac! The detectives are trying to stop our investigation so they can get to your rewards! Henshaw, what do you know of this?”
“I know that Negro can’t save Boston from what’s at hand, Chief.”
“Perhaps when the governor hears that his prize appointment has disrupted the entire police department, he shall do what’s right and reconsider its wisdom,” the alderman said.
“Patrolman Rey is one of the finest policemen I have ever known.”
“Which brings up another matter while we’re here. We have also been made to understand that you are seen all over the city with him, Chief.” The mayor extended his frown. “Including the site of Talbot’s death. Not just as your driver but as an equal partner in your activities.”
“It’s a certified miracle that darky doesn’t have a lynch mob follow him with paving stones every time he walks out on the street!” Alderman Fitch laughed.
“We put in place every restriction on Nick Rey that the aldermanic council suggested and… I can’t see how his position has anything to do with this!”
“We have a crime of terror upon us,” Mayor Lincoln said, aiming a stern finger at Kurtz. “And the police department is falling apart—that’s why it has to do with it. I shan’t allow Nicholas Rey to remain involved in this matter in any capacity. One more mistake and he shall face his discharge. Some state senators came to me today, John. They’re appointing another committee to propose abolishing all city police departments statewide and replacing them with a state-run metropolitan police force if we can’t finish this. They’re dead set. I shan’t see that happen under my watch—understand that! I won’t see my city’s police department pulled apart.”
Alderman Jonas Fitch could see that Kurtz was too stunned to speak. The alderman leaned in and leveled his stare. “If you had enforced our temperance and anti-vice laws, Chief Kurtz, perhaps the thieves and scoundrels would have all fled to New York City by now!”
In the early morning, the offices of Ticknor & Fields pulsed with anonymous shop boys—some just barely boys and others with gray heads—as well as with junior clerks. Dr. Holmes was the first member of the Dante Club to arrive. Pacing the hall to whittle away his earliness, Holmes decided to sit in J. T. Fields’s private office.
“Oh sorry, my good sir,” he said as he detected someone in there, and began to close the door.
An angular, shadowed face was turned toward the window. It took Holmes a second to make him out.
“Why, my dear Emerson!” Holmes smiled widely.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, his profile aquiline and his body long in blue cloak and black shawls, broke from his reverie and greeted Holmes. It was a rarity to find Emerson, poet and lecturer, away from Concord, a small village that had for a time rivaled Boston in its collection of literary talents, especially after Harvard had banned him from speaking on campus for declaring the Unitarian Church dead during a divinity-school address. Emerson was the only writer in America who approached the renown of Longfellow, and even Holmes, a man at the center of all literary doings, was tickled when he was in the author’s company. “I’ve just returned from my annual Lyceum Express, arranged by our Maecenas of modern poets.” Emerson raised a hand over Fields’s desk as though giving a blessing, a vestigial gesture from his days as a reverend. “The guardian and protector of us all. I’ve just some papers to leave for him.”
“Well, it is about time you should come back to Boston. We have missed you at the Saturday Club. An indignation meeting was nearly convened to call for your company!” Holmes said.
“Thankfully, I shall never be so well liked.” Emerson smiled. “You know, we never make time to write to gods or friends, only to attorneys, who wish to collect debt, and the man who will slate our house.” Emerson then asked after Holmes.
He answered with long, winding anecdotes. “And I have been thinking of writing another novel.” He made his task prospective, because he was intimidated by the force and swiftness of Emerson’s opinions, which often made everyone else’s seem all wrong.
“Oh I wish you would, dear Holmes,” Emerson said sincerely. “Your voice cannot fail to please. And tell me about the dashing captain. Still a lawyer-to-be?”
Holmes laughed nervously at the mention of Junior, as if the subject of his son were inherently comical; this was not quite true, as Junior lacked any sense of humor altogether. “I tried my hand at the law once but found it was much like eating sawdust without butter. Junior wrote good verses, too—not as good as mine, but good verses. Now that he lives at home again, he is like a white Othello, sitting in our library rocker impressing the young lady Desdemonas about him with stories of his wounds. Sometimes, though, I believe he despises me. Do you ever feel this from your boy, Emerson?”
Emerson paused for a solid few seconds. “There is no peace for the sons of men, Holmes.”
Watching Emerson’s facial gestures while he spoke was like watching a grown man cross a brook on stepping-stones, and the cautious selfishness in this image distracted Holmes from his anxieties. He wanted the conversation to keep going but knew that meetings with Emerson could end without much warning.
“My dear Waldo, might I ask you a question?” Holmes really wanted to ask advice, but Emerson never gave any. “What did you think of us, Fields and Lowell and I, I mean, assisting Longfellow with his translation of Dante?”
Emerson raised a frosted eyebrow. “If Socrates were here, Holmes, we could go talk with him out in the streets. But our dear Longfellow, we cannot go and talk with. There is a palace and servants and a row of bottles of different-colored wines and wineglasses and fine coats.” Emerson bent his head in thought. “I think sometimes of the days I read Dante under Professor Ticknor’s direction, as you did, yet I cannot help but feel Dante is a curiosity, like a mastodon—a relic to put in a museum, not in one’s house.”
“But you once said to me that Dante’s introduction to America would be one of the most significant achievements of our century!” Holmes insisted.
“Yes.” Emerson considered this. He liked to take all sides of an issue whenever possible. “And that also is true. Still, you know, Wendell, I prefer the society of one faithful person to an association of rapid talkers, who more than anything else seek admiration from one another.”
“But what would literature be without associations?” Holmes smiled. He had the integrity of the Dante Club under his guard. “Who can tell what we owe to the mutual admiration society of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson with Beaumont and Fletcher? Or to that where Johnson and Goldsmith and Burke and Reynolds and Beauclerc and Boswell, most admiring of all admirers, met by the fireside of a parlor?”
Emerson straightened the papers he had brought to Fields in order to show that the purpose of his visit was completed. “Remember that only when past genius is transmitted into a present power shall we meet the first truly American poet. And somewhere, born to the streets rather than the athenaeum, we will come upon the first true reader. The spirit of the American is suspected to be timid, imitative, tame—the scholar decent, indolent, complaisant. The mind of our country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. Without action, the scholar is not yet man. Ideas must work through the bones and arms of good men or they are no better than dreams. When I read Longfellow, I feel utterly at ease—I am safe. This shall not yield us our future.”
When Emerson left, Holmes felt he had been entrusted with a sphinx’s riddle to which only he could provide an answer. He felt decidedly possessive about the conversation; he did not want to share it with the others when they arrived.
“Is it really possible?” Fields asked his friends after they had discussed Bachi. “Could this beggar Lonza have been so overcome that he would see the poem strung over all life?”
“It would not be the first or last time that literature mastered a weakened mind. Think of John Wilkes Booth,” Holmes said. “As he shot Lincoln, he cried out in Latin, ‘Thus always to tyrants.’ That’s what Brutus says while murdering Julius Caesar. Lincoln was the Roman emperor in Booth’s mind. Booth, recall, was a Shakespearean. Just as our Lucifer is a master Dantean. The reading, the comprehending, the analyzing that we do every day did what we secretly hope for in ourselves—worked through the bones and muscles of this man.”
Longfellow raised his eyebrows at this. “Only, it seemed to have done so involuntarily with Booth and Lonza.”
“Bachi must be hiding something he knows about Lonza!” Lowell said with frustration. “You saw how reluctant he was, Holmes. What do you say?”
“It was like stroking a hedgehog,” Holmes admitted. “After a man begins to attack Boston, when he gets bitter about the Frog Pond or the State House, you may be sure there is not much left of him. Poor Edgar Poe died in the hospital soon after he got into this way of talking, so sure as you find a fellow reduced to this, you had better stop lending him money—for he is on his last legs.”
“The jingle man,” Lowell muttered at the mention of Poe.
“There was always a dark spot in Bachi,” Longfellow said. “Poor Bachi. The loss of his job only made him more wretched, and no doubt he views our part in his desperation unkindly.”
Lowell did not meet Longfellow’s eyes. He had deliberately not related the specifics of Bachi’s tirade against Longfellow. “I think good gratitude a scarcer thing in this world than good verses, Longfellow. Bachi has no more feelings than a horseradish. It could be that Lonza was so afraid at the police station because he knew who killed Healey. He knew Bachi was the culprit—or perhaps he even helped Bachi kill Healey.”
“The mention of Longfellow’s work on Dante did touch him off like a lucifer match,” Holmes said, but he was skeptical. “The murderer must be a man of great strength to have carried Healey from the bedroom to the yard. Bachi can barely stumble straight with his regiment of liquors. Besides, we have come across no connection between Bachi and either of the victims.”
“We have no need of one!” Lowell said. “Remember, Dante places plenty of people in Hell whom he never met. Ser Bachi has two ingredients stronger than a personal connection with Healey or Talbot. First: a sterling knowledge of Dante. He is the only one outside our club, besides I suppose old Ticknor, with a level of understanding that rivals our own.”
“Granted,” said Holmes.
“Secondly, motivation,” Lowell continued. “He’s as poor as a rat. He finds himself abandoned by our city and finds solace only in drink. His occasional jobs as private tutor are all that keep him afloat. He resents us because he believes Longfellow and I sat on our hands when he was fired. And Bachi would rather see Dante ruined than rescued by treacherous Americans.”
“Why, my dear Lowell, would Bachi choose Healey and Talbot?” Fields asked.
“He could have chosen anyone he pleases, so long as they fit the sins he decides to punish and Dante could eventually be exposed as the source. So he could ruin the name of Dante in America before the poetry takes hold.”
“Could Bachi be our Lucifer?” Fields asked.
“Must he be our Lucifer?” Lowell said, wincing as he grabbed his ankle. Longfellow said, “Lowell?” He looked down at Lowell’s leg.
“Oh, no worries, I thank you. I might have smashed myself against an iron stand the other day at Wide Oaks, now that I remember it.”
Dr. Holmes leaned forward, motioning for Lowell to roll up his trouser leg. “Has this grown in size, Lowell?” The red abrasion had gone from the size of a penny to the size of a dollar coin.
“How should I know?” He never took his own injuries seriously.
“Perhaps you should pay as much attention to yourself as to Bachi,” Holmes scolded. “It doesn’t look like it’s a healing wound. Quite the contrary. You simply banged it, you say? It does not seem infected. Has it been bothering you at all, Lowell?”
Suddenly, his ankle felt much worse. “Now and again.” Then he thought of something. “It is possible that while I was at Healey’s, one of those blowflies made its way into my pants leg. Could that be it?”
Holmes said, “Not that I could imagine. I’ve never heard of a blowfly of that kind being able to sting. Perhaps it was some other kind of insect?”
“No, I should know. I flattened it like an oyster out of season.” Lowell grinned. “It was one of those I brought you, Holmes.”
Holmes considered this. “Longfellow, has Professor Agassiz returned from Brazil?”
Longfellow said, “Just this week, I believe.”
“I suggest that we send the insect samples you recovered to Agassiz’s museum,” Holmes said to Lowell. “There is nothing he doesn’t know about nature’s beasts.”
Lowell had had more than enough on the topic of his own well-being. “If you must. Now, I propose to follow Bachi for a few days—assuming he hasn’t already dropped dead from drinking. See if he leads us somewhere revealing. Two of us shall wait outside his apartment with a carriage while the others wait here. If there are no objections, I shall lead the team to watch Bachi. Who shall come with me?”
Nobody volunteered. Fields nonchalantly pulled out his watch chain.
“Oh, come now!” Lowell said. He clapped his publisher on the shoulder. “Fields, you’ll come.”
“I’m sorry, Lowell. I had to promise Oscar Houghton an afternoon dinner with Longfellow and myself for today. He received a note from Augustus Manning last evening warning him to cease printing Longfellow’s translation or risk the loss of Harvard’s business. We must do something quickly or Houghton shall bend.”
“And I have a speaking engagement at the Odeon on the latest developments in homeopathy and allopathy that could not be canceled without severe financial loss to the organizers,” Dr. Holmes said preemptively. “All are welcome to come, of course!”
“But we may have just turned a corner here!” Lowell said.
“Lowell,” said Fields. “If we allow Dr. Manning to overtake Dante while we are busy with this, then all our translation work, all that we have hoped for, shall be for naught. It shall only take an hour to assuage Houghton, and then we can do as you say.”
That afternoon, the deep smell of steaks and the muffled content sound of midday meals came to Longfellow as he stood in front of the stone Greek facade of the Revere House. A meal with Oscar Houghton would be an hour’s grace at least from talk of murder and insects. Fields, leaning on the driver’s box of his carriage, was instructing his driver to return to Charles Street—Annie Fields had to get to her Ladies’ Club in Cambridge. Fields was the only member of Longfellow’s circle to own a private carriage, not only because the publisher had the greatest abundance of wealth but also because he valued the luxury above the headaches caused by moody drivers and sickly horses.
Longfellow noticed a pensive lady veiled in black crossing Bowdoin Square. She held a book in her hand and ambled along slowly, deliberately, eyes downcast. He thought of the days when he would encounter Fanny Appleton on Beacon Street, how she would nod politely, never stopping to speak with him. He had met her in Europe while immersing himself in languages to prepare for his professorship, and she was pleasant enough to the professorial friend of her brother’s. But back in Boston, it was as if Virgil were whispering in her ear the advice he tendered to the pilgrim in the round of the Neutrals: “Let us not speak, but look, and pass.” Denied conversation with the beautiful young woman, Longfellow found himself crafting a character of a beautiful maiden in his book Hyperion that was modeled after her.
But months passed without the young woman replying to the gesture of the man she called Professor or Prof, though surely if she had read it she had seen herself in the character. When he finally did meet Fanny again, she made it quite clear that she did not enjoy being enslaved into the professor’s book for everyone to glare upon. He did not think to apologize, but over the next months did open his emotions to her in ways he had never done, not even with Mary Potter, the young bride who had died during a miscarriage only a few years after she and Longfellow married. Miss Appleton and Professor Longfellow began to come together regularly. In May 1843, Longfellow wrote a note, proposing marriage. The same day, he received her acceptance. Oh, Day forever blessed, that ushered in this Vita Nuova, this New Life of happiness! He repeated the words over and over again until they took on shape, had weight, could be embraced and sheltered like children.
“Where can Houghton be?” Fields asked as his carriage was driven away. “He had better not have forgotten our dinner.”
“Perhaps he was held up at Riverside. Madam.” Longfellow raised his hat to a corpulent woman passing them on the sidewalk, who smiled bashfully in return. Whenever Longfellow addressed a woman, however briefly, it was as if he were offering a bouquet of flowers.
“Who was that?” Fields crunched his eyebrows.
“That,” Longfellow answered, “is the lady who waited on us at supper at Copeland’s two winters ago.”
“Oh well, yes. At any rate, if he is held up at Riverside, he had better be at work on your plates for the Inferno that we have to send to Florence.”
“Fields,” Longfellow said with lips tightly pursed.
“I’m sorry, Longfellow,” Fields said. “Next time I see her, I promise I shall lift my hat.”
Longfellow shook his head. “No. Over there.” Fields followed the direction of Longfellow’s stare to an oddly bent man with a shiny oilskin satchel, who was walking a little too briskly along the sidewalk opposite.
“That’s Bachi.”
“He was once a Harvard instructor?” replied the publisher. “He’s as bloodshot as an autumn sunset.” They watched the Italian instructor’s walk crescendo into a trot and end with a sharp skip into a corner storefront with a low-shingled roof and shoddy window card that read WADE AND SON & CO.
“Do you know that store?” Longfellow asked.
Fields did not. “He seems to be in an important rush, doesn’t he.”
“Mr. Houghton shall not mind waiting a few moments.” Longfellow took Fields’s arm. “Come, we might learn something more from him by catching him unprepared.”
As they started toward the corner to cross the street, they both watched George Washington Greene gingerly step out of Metcalf’s Apothecary with an armful of goods; the man of many ills treated himself to new medicines as one would treat himself to ice cream. Longfellow’s friends often lamented that Metcalf’s potions against neuralgia, dysentery, and the like—sold under a sign depicting a wise figure with an exaggerated nose—contributed heavily to Greene’s frequent Rip Van Winkle spells at their translation sessions.
“Good Lord, it’s Greene,” Longfellow said to his publisher. “It is imperative, Fields, that we keep him from speaking with Bachi.”
“Why? “Fields asked.
But Greene’s approach proscribed further discussion. “My dear Fields. And Longfellow! What brings you gentlemen out today?”
“My dear friend,” Longfellow said, anxiously eyeing the canopy-shaded door of Wade and Son across the street for any sign of Bachi. “We have just come for dinner at the Revere House. But are you not meant to be in East Greenwich this time of week?”
Greene nodded and sighed at the same time. “Shelly wishes me under her care until my health takes an upturn. But I shan’t stay in bed all day, though her doctor insists! Pain never killed anyone, but it is a most uncomfortable bedfellow.” He went into great detail about his newest symptoms. Longfellow and Fields fixed their eyes across the street as Greene prattled on. “But I oughtn’t bore everyone with the doldrums of my ailments. All would be worth the frustration for another Dante session—and still I have received no word of one for weeks! I have begun to worry the project has been abandoned. Pray tell me, dear Longfellow, that this is not the case.”
“We have taken but a slight pause,” Longfellow said, craning his neck to look across the street, where Bachi could be seen through the store window. He was gesturing energetically.
“We shall resume shortly, though, no doubt,” Fields added. A carriage pulled up at the corner across the street, blocking their view of the storefront and of Bachi. “I’m afraid we must take our leave now, Mr. Greene,” Fields said urgently, squeezing Longfellow’s elbow and steering him ahead.
“But you are confused, gentlemen! You’ve passed the Revere House in the other direction!” Greene laughed.
“Yes, well…” Fields searched for a passable excuse as they waited for a pair of oncoming coaches to cross the busy intersection.
“Greene,” Longfellow interrupted. “We must make a brief stop first. Pray start for the restaurant and dine with us and Mr. Houghton?”
“I’m afraid my daughter shall be cross as a terrier if I am not back,” Greene worried. “Oh, look who comes now!” Greene stepped back and wobbled off the narrow sidewalk. “Mr. Houghton!”
“My most grave apologies, gentlemen.” An ungainly man in undertaker’s black appeared beside them and lowered his improbably long arm to the first taker, which happened to be George Washington Greene. “I was about to go into Revere House when I saw you three from the corner of my eye. I hope your wait was not long. Mr. Greene, dear sir, are you joining us? How have you been then, my good man?”
“Quite malnourished,” Greene answered, now clothed fully in pathos, “in a life when our Wednesday-evening Dante circles were my first and last sustenance.”
Longfellow and Fields alternated their surveillance in fifteen-second shifts. The entrance of Wade and Son was still blocked by the intrusive carriage, whose driver sat patiently as though his special commission were to frustrate the view of Messrs. Longfellow and Fields.
“Did you say were?” Houghton said to Greene in surprise. “Fields, has this something to do with Dr. Manning? But what of the celebration in Florence waiting for a special printing of the first volume? I must know if the publication dates have been pushed back. I shan’t be kept dark!”
“Of course not, Houghton,” Fields said. “We have just slackened the reins a bit.”
“And what is a man accustomed to the pleasures of that weekly bit of paradise to do with himself in their stead, I ask?” lamented Greene dramatically.
“I know not,” Houghton replied. “I worry, though, with the inflated prices printing a book such as this… I must ask, can your Dante overcome whatever Manning and Harvard plan to put in his way?”
Greene’s hands shook as he raised them in the air. “If it were possible to convey an accurate idea of Dante in a single word, Mr. Houghton, that word would be power. That landscape of his world ever after takes its place in your memory by the side of your real world. Even the sounds which he has described linger in the ear as the types of harshness, or loudness, or sweetness, instantly coming back to you whenever you listen to the roaring of the sea or the howling of the wind, or the carol of the birds.”
Bachi exited the store, and they could now see him perusing the contents of his satchel with an air of great excitement.
Greene stopped himself. “Fields? Why, whatever is the matter? You seem to be waiting for something to happen across the way.”
Longfellow signaled Fields with a flick of a wrist to occupy their interlocutor. As partners in a crisis in some way manage to communicate complex strategy with the slightest gesture, Fields enacted a diversion for their old friend, draping his arm loosely around his shoulders. “You see, Greene, there are several developments in the field of publishing since the end of the war…”
Longfellow pulled Houghton aside and spoke under his breath. “I’m afraid we shall have to postpone our dinner for another time. A horsecar should be leaving for Back Bay in ten minutes. I beg you to walk Mr. Greene there. Put him aboard, and don’t leave till the car starts. Watch that he doesn’t get off,” Longfellow said with a slight lifting of the eyebrows that adequately conveyed his urgency.
Houghton returned a soldierly nod without appeal for further explanation. Had Henry Longfellow ever asked a personal favor from him, or from anyone that he knew? The Riverside Press owner slipped his arm through Greene’s. “Mr. Greene, shall I accompany you to the horsecars? I believe the next one is leaving shortly, and one should not be standing so long in this November chill.”
With hasty farewells, Longfellow and Fields waited as two massive omnibuses rumbled down the street, ringing their bells as warning. The two poets started across the street only to notice in unison that the Italian instructor was no longer on the corner. They looked one block ahead and one block behind, but he was nowhere in sight.
“Where in the devil… ?” Fields asked.
Longfellow pointed and Fields looked in time to see Bachi seated comfortably in the backseat of that very carriage that had been blocking their surveillance. The cab’s horses clopped away, not seeming to share the impatience of their passenger.
“And not a cab in sight to be hired!” Longfellow said.
“We may be able to catch him,” said Fields. “Pike the cabman’s livery is a few blocks from here. The rascal asks a quarter for a seat in his carriage, a half-dollar when he feels particularly extortionate. Nobody on the block can suffer him but Holmes, and he suffers no one else but the doctor.”
Fields and Longfellow, walking briskly, found Pike not at his livery but stationed stubbornly in front of the brick mansion at 21 Charles Street. The duo made a plea for Pike’s services. Fields held up handfuls of cash.
“I cannot help you gents for all the money in the Commonwealth,” Pike said gruffly. “I’m engaged to drive Dr. Holmes.”
“Listen to us carefully, Pike.” Fields exaggerated the natural command of his voice. “We are very close associates of Dr. Holmes. He would tell you himself to take us.”
“You’re friends of the doctor’s?” Pike asked.
“Yes!” Fields cried with relief.
“Then as friends you ain’t likely to take his cab away. I’m engaged to Dr. Holmes,” Pike repeated blandly, and sat back to whittle the remains of an ivory toothpick with his teeth.
“Well!” Oliver Wendell Holmes beamed, strutting out onto his front step holding a handbag and dressed in a dark worsted suit with a white silk neck cloth done up nicely in a cravat, finished with a beautiful white rose in his buttonhole. “Fields. Longfellow. So you’ve come to hear about allopathy after all!”
Pike’s horses whirled down Charles Street into the knotted streets of downtown, grazing lampposts and cutting ahead of irate horsecar drivers. Pike’s was a dilapidated rockaway carriage, with a berth wide enough for four passengers to sit without smashing their knees together. Dr. Holmes had instructed the driver to arrive promptly at a quarter to one in order to drive to the Odeon, but now the destination had been changed, seemingly against the doctor’s will from the perspective of the driver, and the number of passengers had tripled. Pike had a good mind to drive them to the Odeon anyway.
“What of my lecture?” Holmes asked Fields in the back of the carriage. “It’s sold-out, you know!”
“Pike can have you there in no time as soon as we find Bachi and ask him a question or two,” Fields said. “And I’ll make certain the papers don’t report that you were late. If only I had not sent my carriage away for Annie, we would not have fallen behind!”
“But whatever do you imagine you’ll accomplish if we do find him?” Holmes asked.
Longfellow explained. “Clearly, Bachi is anxious today. If we speak to him away from his home—and his drink—he may be less resistant. If Greene had not happened upon us, we likely would have caught Ser Bachi without such haste. I half wish we could simply tell poor Greene all that has happened, but the truth would be a shock to such a weak constitution. He has had all calamities and believes the world is against him. Nothing remains for him but to be struck by lightning.”
“There it is!” Fields cried. He pointed to a carriage some fifty rods ahead of them. “Longfellow, isn’t that it?”
Longfellow extended his neck out the side, feeling the wind catch his beard, and signaled his assent.
“Cabby, steer right on!” Fields called out.
Pike snapped the reins, careening down the street at a pace far beyond the speed limit—which the Boston Board of Safety had recently set at a “moderate trot.”
“We’re going quite far east!” Pike shouted over the cobbled hoof-falls. “Quite a ways from the Odeon, you know, Dr. Holmes!”
Fields asked Longfellow, “Why did we have to hide Bachi from Greene? I didn’t think they’d be acquainted.”
“Long ago.” Longfellow nodded. “Mr. Greene met Bachi in Rome, before the worst of his maladies showed themselves. I was afraid that if we had approached Bachi with Greene present, Greene would have spoken too much of our Dante project—as he is wont to do with any who will suffer it!—and that would interfere with Bachi’s willingness to talk, making him feel only more wretched in his position.”
Pike lost sight of their object several times, but through quick turns, remarkably timed gallops, and patient slowdowns, he regained an advantage. The other cabdriver seemed in a hurry, too, but fully oblivious of the chase. Near the narrowing roads of the harbor area, their prey slipped away again. Then it reappeared, causing Pike to curse God’s name, then apologize for it, then stop short, sending Holmes flying across the carriage onto Longfellow’s lap.
“There she goes!” Pike called out as his counterpart drove his coach toward them, away from the harbor. But its passenger seat had been vacated.
“He must have gone to the harbor!” Fields said.
Pike picked up the pace once more and ousted his passengers. The trio pushed against the grain of cheerers and wavers, who were watching various ships disappear into the fog while Godspeeding with waving handkerchiefs.
“Most of the ships this time of day are toward Long Wharf,” said Longfellow. In earlier years, he had frequently walked to the wharves to see the grand vessels coming in from Germany or Spain and to hear the men and women speak their native tongues. There was in Boston no greater Babylon of languages and skin tones than the wharves.
Fields had trouble keeping up. “Wendell?”
“Up here, Fields!” Holmes cried from inside a throng of people.
Holmes found Longfellow describing Bachi to a black stevedore who was loading barrels.
Fields decided to question passengers in the other direction, but soon stopped to rest on the edge of a pier.
“You there in the fancy suit.” A bulky pier master with a greasy beard grabbed Fields’s arm roughly and pushed him away. “Stand aside from these comin’ on board if you hain’t got a ticket.”
“Good sir,” Fields said. “I am in need of immediate assistance. A small man in a rumpled blue frock coat, with bloodshot eyes—have you seen him?”
The pier master ignored him, occupied with organizing the line of passengers by class and compartment. Fields watched as the man removed his cap (too small for his mammoth head) and twirled a sharp hand through his tangled hair.
Fields closed his eyes as though entranced, listening to the man’s strange, excitable commands. Into his mind came a dim room with a little taper of restless energy burning on a mantel. “Hawthorne,” Fields gasped, almost involuntarily.
The pier master paused and turned to Fields. “What?”
“Hawthorne.” Fields smiled, knowing he was right. “You are an avid admirer of Mr. Hawthorne’s novels.”
“Well, I say…” The pier master prayed or swore under his breath. “How did you know that? Tell me at once!”
The passengers he was organizing into categories stopped to listen, too.
“No matter.” Fields felt a rush of elation that he had retained his skills of reading people that had profited him so many years earlier as a young bookseller’s clerk. “Write your address on this slip of paper and I shall send you the new Blue and Gold collection of all Hawthorne’s great works, authorized by his widow.” Fields held out the paper, then withdrew it into his palm. “If you assist me today, sir.”
The man, suddenly superstitious of Fields’s powers, complied.
Fields propped himself on his toes and spotted Longfellow and Holmes coming in his direction. He called out. “Check that pier!”
Holmes and Longfellow flagged down a harbormaster. They described Bachi.
“And who might you be?”
“We’re good friends of his,” Holmes cried. “Pray tell us, where has he gone to?” Fields now caught up with them.
“Well, I seen him coming into the harbor,” the man answered with a frustratingly meandering tempo. “I believe he ran aboard there, as anxious as could be,” he said, pointing to a small boat at sea that could not have held more than five passengers.
“Good, that little bark can’t be going very far. Where is it headed?” Fields asked.
“That? That’s just a water transport, sir. The Anonimo is too big to fit in this pier. So it’s waiting all the way out downstream. You see?”
Its outline was barely visible in the fog, disappearing and then reappearing, but it was as gigantic a steamer as they had ever seen.
“Oh, your friend was quite eager to get on, I guess. That little boat he’s on is just taking the last shipment of passengers who were late coming. Then it’s off.”
“Off to where?” Fields asked, his heart sinking.
“Why, across the Atlantic, sir.” The harbormaster glanced at his slate. “A stop at Marseilles, and, ah, here we are, then on to Italy!”
Dr. Holmes made it to the Odeon with more than enough time to deliver a roundly well-received lecture. His audience thought him all the more important a speaker for having been delayed. Longfellow and Fields sat attentively in the second row next to Dr. Holmes’s younger son, Neddie, the two Amelias, and Holmes’s brother, John. For the second of a three-part sold-out lecture series arranged by Fields, Holmes examined medical methods in relation to the war.
Healing is a living process, Holmes told his audience, greatly under the influence of mental conditions. He told them how it was often found that the same wound received in battle would heal well in the soldiers that have prevailed but would prove fatal in those who were just defeated. “Thus emerges that middle region between science and poetry that sensible men, as they are called, are very shy of meddling with.”
Holmes looked out at the row of family and friends and at the empty seat reserved in case Wendell Junior had shown up.
“My oldest boy received more than one of these wounds during the war, being sent home by Uncle Sam with a few new buttonholes in his congenial waistcoat.” Laughter. “There were a good many hearts pierced in this war, too, that have no bullet mark to show.”
After the lecture, and the necessary amount of praise bestowed on Dr. Holmes, Longfellow and Holmes accompanied their publisher back to the Authors’ Room at the Corner to wait for Lowell. There, it was decided that a meeting of their translation club should be arranged at Longfellow’s house for the following Wednesday.
The planned session would serve a dual purpose. First, it would allay any concerns of Greene’s as to the state of the translation and the odd behavior he and Houghton had witnessed, and so would minimize the risk of further interference of the kind that had cost them whatever information Bachi might have possessed. Second, and perhaps more important, it would allow further progress on Longfellow’s translation. Longfellow intended to keep his promise to have Inferno ready to send to the year’s final Dante Festival in Florence for the six-hundredth anniversary of the poet’s birth in 1265.
Longfellow had not wanted to admit that he was unlikely to finish before the close of 1865 unless their investigations came upon some miraculous advance. Still, he had begun to work on his translations at night, alone, entreating Dante privately for wisdom in seeing through the baffling ends of Healey and Talbot.
“Is Mr. Lowell about?” said a small voice, accompanied by a knock at the Authors’ Room door.
The poets were exhausted. “I’m afraid not,” Fields called back with undisguised annoyance to the invisible questioner.
“Excellent!”
Boston’s merchant prince, Phineas Jennison, dapper as always in white suit and hat, slid inside and slammed the door behind him without ruffling a feather. “One of your clerks said you could be found here, Mr. Fields. I wish to speak freely about Lowell and would just as soon the old boy not be present.” He tossed his long silk hat onto Fields’s iron rack, his shiny hair going off to the left in a superb sweep, like the handrail of a banister. “Mr. Lowell’s in trouble.”
The visitor gasped upon noticing the two poets. He nearly stooped down on one knee as he clasped the hands of Holmes and Longfellow, handling them like bottles of the rarest and most sensitive vintages.
Jennison enjoyed spreading his vast wealth by patronizing artists and by refining his appreciation of belles lettres; and had never ceased to be overwhelmed by the geniuses he knew only because of his riches. Jennison helped himself to a seat. “Mr. Fields. Mr. Longfellow. Dr. Holmes,” he said, naming them with exaggerated ceremony. “You are all dear friends of Lowell’s, dearer than is my own privilege of acquaintance, for only through genius is genius truly known.”
Holmes cut him off nervously. “Mr. Jennison, has something happened with Jamey?”
“I know, Doctor.” Jennison sighed heavily at having to elaborate. “I know of these accursed Dante happenings, and I’m here because I wish to assist you in doing what is required to reverse them.”
“Dante happenings?” Fields echoed in a broken voice.
Jennison nodded solemnly.
“The accursed Corporation and their hopes to rid themselves of that Dante course of Lowell’s. And their attempt to stop your translation, my dear gentlemen! Lowell told me all about it, though he’s too proud to ask for help.”
Three muffled sighs escaped from under the respective waistcoats at Jennison’s elaboration.
“Now, as surely you know, Lowell has temporarily canceled his class,” Jennison said, showing his frustration at their apparent obliviousness of their own business. “Well, it won’t do, I say. It does not befit a genius of James Russell Lowell’s caliber and must not be permitted without a fight. I fear Lowell is at imminent hazard of going to pieces if he starts down roads of conciliation! And over at the College, I hear Manning is gleeful.” He said this with grim concern.
“What do you wish us to do, my dear Mr. Jennison?” asked Fields with a play at deference.
“Urge him to screw up his courage.” Jennison demonstrated his point with a fist in his palm. “Save him from cowardice, or our city shall lose one of its strongest hearts. I have had another idea as well. Create a permanent organization devoted to the study of Dante—I myself would take up Italian to assist you!” Jennison’s flashy smile broke through, as did his leather money belt, from which he now counted out large bills. “A Dante association of some sort dedicated to protecting this literature so dear to you gentlemen What say you? No one shall have to know of my involvement, and you shall give the fellows a run for it.”
Before anyone could reply, the door to the Authors’ Room burst open. Lowell stood before them with a bleak look on his face.
“Why, Lowell, what’s wrong?” Fields asked.
Lowell began to speak but then saw him. “Phinny? What are you doing here?”
Jennison looked to Fields for help. “Mr. Jennison and I had some business to conclude,” said Fields, stuffing the money belt into the businessman’s hands and pushing him out the door. “But he was just on his way out.”
“I hope nothing’s wrong, Lowell. I shall call on you soon, my friend!”
Fields found Teal, the evening shop boy, down the hall and asked for Jennison to be escorted downstairs. Then he barred the Authors’ Room door.
Lowell poured a drink at the counter. “Oh, you won’t believe the luck, my friends. I almost twisted my head off looking for Bachi at Half Moon Place, and wouldn’t you know I come up with as little as I started! He was nowhere to be seen and nobody around knew where he could be found—I don’t think the local Dubliners would talk to an Italian if put in a sinking raft next to one and the Italian had a plug. I might as well have been off at leisure like all of you this afternoon.”
Fields, Holmes, and Longfellow were silent.
“What? What is it?” Lowell asked.
Longfellow suggested that they have supper at Craigie House, and on the way they explained to Lowell what had happened with Bachi. Over the meal, Fields told him how he had returned to the harbormaster and persuaded him, with the help of an American eagle gold piece, to check the register for information on Bachi’s trip. The entry for Bachi indicated that he had purchased a discounted round-trip ticket that would not allow a return prior to January 1867.
Back in Longfellow’s parlor, Lowell flopped into a chair, stunned. “He knew we had found him. Well of course—we let him find out that we knew about Lonza! Our Lucifer has slipped through our fingers like so much sand!”
“Then we should celebrate,” Holmes said with a laugh. “Don’t you see what this means, if you were right? Come, you have the small end of your opera glass pointed toward everything that looks encouraging.”
Fields leaned in. “Jamey, if Bachi was the murderer…”
Holmes completed the thought with a bright smile: “Then we are safe. And the city’s safe. And Dante! If we have driven him out by our knowledge, then we have defeated him, Lowell.”
Fields stood up, beaming. “Oh, gentlemen, I shall throw a Dante supper to put the Saturday Club to shame. May the mutton be as tender as Longfellow’s verse! And may the Moet sparkle like Holmes’s wit, and the carving knives be as sharp as Lowell’s satire!”
Three cheers were given to Fields.
All of this eased Lowell somewhat, as did the news of a Dante-translation session—the start of normal times again, a return to a pure enjoyment of their scholarship. He hoped they had not forfeited this pleasure by applying their knowledge of Dante to such repugnant affairs.
Longfellow seemed to know what troubled Lowell. “In Washington’s day,” he said, “they melted the pipes of the church organs for bullets, my dear Lowell. They hadn’t any choice. Now, Lowell, Holmes, would you accompany me down to the wine cellar while Fields sees how work goes along in the kitchen?” he asked as he lifted a candle from the table.
“Ah, the true foundation of any house!” Lowell jumped from the armchair. “Do you have a good vintage, Longfellow?”
“You know my rule of thumb, Mr. Lowell:
The company let out a collective peal of laughter, inflated by a consciousness of relief.
“But we have four thirsts to quench!” Holmes objected.
“Then let us not expect much, my dear doctor,” advised Longfellow. Holmes and Lowell followed him down to the basement by the light of the taper’s silver gleam. Lowell used the laughter and conversation to divert himself from the shooting pain radiating in his leg, pounding and traveling upward from the red disk covering his ankle.
Phineas Jennison, in white coat, yellow waistcoat, and insistent wide-brimmed white hat, came down the steps of his Back Bay mansion. He walked and whistled. He twirled his gold-trimmed walking staff. He laughed heartily, as if he just heard a fine joke in his head. Phineas Jennison often laughed to himself in this way while rambling through Boston, the city he had conquered, every evening. There was one world remaining to obtain, one where money had severe limits, where blood determined much of one’s status, and this conquest he was about to fulfill, in spite of recent hindrances.
From the other side of the street he was watched, watched step after step from the moment he left behind his mansion. The next shade needing punishment. Look how he walks and whistles and laughs, as though he knows no wrong and has known none. Step after step. The shame of a city that could no longer direct the course of the future. A city that had lost its soul. He who sacrified the one who could reunify them all. The watcher called out.
Jennison stopped, rubbing his famously indented chin. He squinted into the night. “Someone say my name there?”
No reply.
Jennison crossed the street and glanced ahead with faint recognition and ease at the person standing motionlessly beside the church. “Ah, you. I remember you. What is it you wanted?”
Jennison felt the man twist behind him, and then something pierced the merchant prince’s back.
“Take my money, sir, take it all! Please! You can have it and be on your way! How much do you want? Name it! What say you?”
“Through me the way is among the people lost. Through me.”
The last thing J. T. Fields expected to find when he set off the next morning in his carriage was a dead body.
“Just up ahead,” Fields said to his driver. Fields and Lowell stepped down and walked up the sidewalk to Wade and Son. “This is where Bachi went in before rushing to the harbor.” Fields showed Lowell.
They had found no listing of the store in any of the city directories.
“I’ll be hanged if Bachi wasn’t doing something shady here,” Lowell said.
They knocked quietly without producing a response. Then, after a while, the door swung open and a man in a long blue coat with bright buttons brushed past. He was holding an overfilled box of assorted cargo.
“Beg pardon,” Fields said. Two other policemen were approaching now, and they opened the doors to Wade and Son wider, pushing Lowell and Fields in. Inside was a lantern-jawed older man slumped on the counter, a pen still in his hand, as though he had been in mid-sentence. The walls and shelves were bare. Lowell inched closer. A telegraph wire was still wrapped around the dead man’s neck. The poet stared with fascination at how lifelike the man seemed.
Fields rushed to his side and pulled his arm toward the door. “He’s dead, Lowell!”
“Dead as one of Holmes’s carcasses at the medical college,” Lowell agreed. “No murder so mundane could be done by our Dantean, I’m afraid.”
“Lowell, come!” Fields panicked at the growing number of police busying themselves studying the room, not yet taking notice of the two intruders.
“Fields, there’s a suitcase beside him. He was getting ready to flee, just as Bachi did.” He looked again at the pen in the deceased’s hand. “He was trying to get done his unfinished business, I would rather think.”
“Lowell, please!” Fields cried.
“Very well, Fields.” But Lowell circled toward the corpse and stopped at the mail tray on the desk, slipping the top envelope into his coat pocket. “Come on then.” Lowell started to the door. Fields rushed ahead but stopped to look back when he did not feel Lowell’s presence behind him. Lowell had paused in the middle of the room with a frightening, pained expression on his face.
“What is it, Lowell?”
“My blasted ankle.”
When Fields turned back to the door, a policeman was waiting with a curious expression. “We’d just been looking for our friend, Mr. Officer, whom we last saw enter this store yesterday.”
After listening to their story, the policeman decided to write it down in his memorandum book. “That friend’s name was again, sir? The Eyetalian?”
“Bachi. B-a-c-h-i.”
When Lowell and Fields were permitted to leave, Detective Henshaw and two other men from the detective bureau had arrived with the coroner, Mr. Barnicoat, and dismissed most of the policemen. “Bury him in the paupers’ cemetery with the rest of the filth,” said Henshaw when he saw the body. “Ichabod Ross. Waste of my good time. Could still be having my breakfast.” Fields lingered until Henshaw met his eyes with a watchful glare.
The evening paper contained a small piece on the killing of Ichabod Ross, a minor merchant, during a robbery.
On the envelope that Lowell had pilfered was written VANE’S TIMEPIECES. It was a pawnshop on one of the less desirable streets of East Boston.
When Lowell and Fields entered the windowless storefront the next morning, they came upon a huge man, no less than three hundred pounds, with a face as red as the most seasonal tomato and a greenish beard filling out his chin. An enormous set of keys dangled from a rope around his neck and clanked whenever he moved. “Mr. Vane?”
“Dead to rights,” he replied, then his smile froze as he looked up and down the questioners’ clothing. “I’ve already told those New York detectives I didn’t pass those queer bills!”
“We’re not detectives,” said Lowell. “We believe this belongs to you.” He placed the envelope on the counter. “It’s from Ichabod Ross.”
An enormous smile slithered into place. “Well, ain’t that nice. Oh cow! Thought the old man would be jammed without settling with me!”
“Mr. Vane, we’re sorry for the loss of your friend. Do you know why Mr. Ross would be dealt with in such a manner?” Fields asked.
“Oh? Curiosity seekers, are you? Well, you have not brought your pigs to the wrong market. What can you pay?”
“We just brought you your payment from Mr. Ross,” Fields reminded him.
“Rightfully mine!” said Vane. “Do you deny it?”
“Must everything be done for the sake of money?” balked Lowell.
“Lowell, please,” Fields whispered.
Vane’s smile froze again as he stared ahead. His eyes doubled in size. “Lowell? Lowell the poet!”
“Why, yes…” Lowell confessed, a bit thrown off.
“ ‘And what is so rare as a day in June?’ “ the man said, then lapsed into laughter before continuing.
“The word in that fourth line is softly,” Lowell corrected him with some indignation. “You see, ‘softly her warm ear lays…’ ”
“Never tell me there is not a great American poet! Oh, the God and the Devil, I have your house, too!” Vane announced, producing from below his counter a leather-bound Homes and Haunts of Our Poets and digging through it to the chapter on Elmwood. “Oh, I even keep your autograph in my catalog. Next to Longfellow, Emerson, and Whittier, you are my top-priced seller. That rascal Oliver Holmes is right up there, too, and would be higher still if he didn’t put his name to so many things.”
The man, who had flushed a Bardolphian hue from the excitement, unlocked a drawer with one of the dangling keys and fished out a strip of paper on which was signed the name of James Russell Lowell.
“Why, that is not my signature at all!” Lowell said. “Whoever wrote this can’t put pen to paper! I demand you hand over all fraudulent autographs of all the authors in your possession at once, sir, or you shall hear from Mr. Hillard, my attorney, by the end of today!”
“Lowell!” Fields pulled him away from the counter.
“How well I shall sleep tonight knowing such a fine citizen has illustrations enough in that book to map out my home!” Lowell cried.
“We need this man’s help!”
“Yes.” Lowell straightened his sack coat. “In church with saints, in the tavern with sinners.”
“If you please, Mr. Vane.” Fields turned back to the proprietor and snapped open his wallet. “We want to know about Mr. Ross and then shall leave you be. How much will you accept to convey your knowledge?”
“I shall not part with it for one red cent!” Vane laughed heartily, his eyes seeming to go quite far back into his brain. “Must everything be done for the sake of money?”
Vane proposed forty of Lowell’s autographs as sufficient payment. Fields raised an advisory eyebrow at Lowell, who sourly agreed. As Lowell signed his name down two columns of a notepaper—”A superior piece of goods “ Vane declared with approval of Lowell’s writing—Vane told Fields that Ross was a former newspaper printer who had moved to pressing counterfeit money. Ross had made the mistake of passing the money to a gambling ring that used the queer bills to cheat the local gambling hells, and had even used some pawnshops as unwilling fences for goods purchased with the money won from that operation (the word unwilling was pronounced with the utmost twist in the gentleman’s mouth, the tongue reaching up and over his lips, almost wetting his nose). It was only a matter of time before the schemes caught up with him.
Back at the Corner, Fields and Lowell repeated all this to Longfellow and Holmes. “I suppose we can guess what was in Bachi’s satchel when he left Ross’s store,” said Fields. “A bag of queer bills as some sort of desperate arrangement. But what would he be doing mixed up in counterfeiting?”
“If you can’t earn money, I suppose you must make it,” said Holmes.
“Whatever brought him in,” said Longfellow, “it seems Signor Bachi found his way out just in time.”
When Wednesday evening came, Longfellow welcomed his guests from the Craigie House doorstep in the old manner. As they entered, they received a secondary welcome in the form of a yelp from Trap. George Washington Greene confessed how much heartier his health had been after receiving word of a meeting and that he hoped they would now resume their regular schedule. He was as diligently prepared for their assigned cantos as ever.
Longfellow called for the meeting to begin, and the scholars settled down into their places. The host passed out Dante’s canto in Italian and the corresponding proofs of his English translation. Trap watched the proceedings with keen interest. Satisfied with the accustomed orderly seating arrangements and his master’s comfort, the canine sentry settled down in the hollow under Greene’s cavernous armchair. Trap knew the old man harbored special affection for him that manifested itself in food from the supper table and, besides, Greene’s velveteen chair was positioned closest to the deep warmth of the study’s hearth.
“A devil is behind here, who doth cleave us.”
After taking his leave from the Central Station, Nicholas Rey tried to fight drifting off to sleep in the horsecar. It was only now that he felt how little rest he had been getting each night, though he had practically been chained to his desk by Mayor Lincoln’s orders with little to fill his day. Kurtz had found a new driver, a green patrolman from Watertown. In Rey’s brief dream set to the rough motions of the car, a bestial man approached him and whispered, “I can’t die as I’m here,” but even while dreaming, Rey knew that here was not a part of the puzzle left for him to solve on the grounds of Elisha Talbot’s demise. I can’t die as I’m. He was awakened by two men, hanging from the car’s straps, arguing about the merits of women’s suffrage, and then came drowsy decision—and a realization: that the beastly figure in his dream had the face of the leaper, though amplified in size three or four times. Soon the bell tinkled and the conductor shouted, “Mount Auburn! Mount Auburn!”
Having waited for Father to depart for his Dante Club meeting, Mabel Lowell, who had recently turned eighteen, stood over his French mahogany writing desk, which had been demoted to paper storage by Father, who preferred to write on an old pasteboard pad in his corner armchair.
She missed Father’s good spirits around Elmwood. Mabel Lowell had no interest in chasing after Harvard boys or sitting with little Amelia Holmes’s sewing circle and talking of whom they would accept or reject (except for foreign girls, whose rejection required no discussion) as if the whole civilized world were waiting to get into the sewing club. Mabel wanted to read and to travel the world to see in life what she had read about in books, her father’s and those of other visionary writers.
Father’s papers were in a customary disarray that, while decreasing the risk of future detection, necessitated special delicacy, as the unwieldy piles could tip over all at once. She found quills worn down to stumps and many half-completed poems, with frustrating blots of ink trailing off where she wished to read more. Her father often warned her never to write verses, as most turned out bad and the good ones were as unfinishable as a beautiful person.
There was a strange sketch—a pencil sketch on lined paper. It was drawn with the stilted care one devoted, she imagined, to diagramming a map when lost in the woods or, she also imagined, when tracing hieroglyphics—drawn solemnly in an attempt to decode some meaning or guidance. When she was a child and Father traveled, he had always illustrated the margins of letters home with crudely drawn figures of lyceum organizers or foreign dignitaries with whom he had supped. Now, thinking of how those humorous illustrations made her laugh, she at first concluded that the sketch depicted a man’s legs, oversize ice skates on his feet and a flat board of some kind where his waist would otherwise start. Unsatisfied with the interpretation, Mabel turned the paper sideways and then upside down. She noticed that the jagged lines on the feet might represent curls of fire rather than skates.
Longfellow read from his translation of Canto Twenty-eight, where they had left off at their last session. He would be glad to drop off the final proofs of this canto with Houghton and check it off the list kept at Riverside Press. It was physically the most unpleasant section of all Inferno. Here, Virgil has guided Dante into the ninth ditch of a wide section of Hell known as Malebolge, the Evil Pouch. Here were the Schismatics, those who had divided nations, religions, and families in life and now find themselves divided in Hell—bodily—maimed and cut asunder.
“ ‘I saw one,’ “ Longfellow read his version of Dante’s words,” ‘rent from his chin to where one breaketh wind.’ “
Longfellow took a long breath before moving on.
Dante had shown restraint before this. This canto demonstrated Dante’s true belief in God. Only one with the strongest faith in the immortal soul could conceive of such gross torment to the mortal body.
“The filthiness of some of these passages,” said Fields, “would disgrace the drunkenest horse dealer.”
And these were men whom Dante had known! This shade with nose and ear cut off, Pier da Medicina of Bologna, had not harmed Dante personally, though he had fed dissension among the citizens of Dante’s Florence. Dante had never been able to remove his thoughts from Florence as he wrote his journey into the afterworld. He needed to see his heroes redeemed in Purgatory and rewarded in Paradise; he longed to meet the wicked in the infernal circles below. The poet did not merely imagine Hell as a possibility, he felt its reality. Dante even saw an Alighieri relative there among the ones cut apart, pointing at him, demanding revenge for his death.
In the Craigie House basement kitchen, little Annie Allegra crept in from the hall, trying to rub the sleepiness from her eyes.
Peter was feeding a bucket of coal into the kitchen stove. “Miss Annie, didn’t Mistah Longfellow see you to sleep already?”
She struggled to keep her eyes open. “I wish to have a cup of milk, Peter.”
“I’ll bring you one shortly, Miss Annie,” one of the cooks said in a singsong voice as she peeked in on the bread baking. “Happily, dear, happily.”
A faint knock drifted in from the front of the house. Annie excitedly claimed the privilege of answering it, always warming to tasks meant for the help, especially greeting callers. The little girl scrambled up to the front hall and pulled open the massive door.
“Shhhhhh!” Annie Allegra Longfellow whispered before she could even see the handsome face of the caller. He bent down. “Today is Wednesday,” she explained confidentially, cupping her hands. “If you are here to see Papa, you must wait until he is through with Mr. Lowell and the others. Those are the rules, you know. You may stay out here or in the parlor if you like,” she added, pointing out his options.
“I do apologize for the intrusion, Miss Longfellow,” Nicholas Rey said.
Annie Allegra nodded prettily and, fighting back the renewed weight of her eyelids, slouched up the angled stairs, forgetting why she had made the long trip down.
Nicholas Rey stood in the front hall of Craigie House among Washington’s portraits. He removed the bits of paper from his pocket. He would plead their help once more, this time showing them the scraps he had picked up from the ground around Talbot’s death site in hopes that there was some connection they might see that he could not. He had found several foreigners around the wharves who had recognized the likeness of the leaper; this reinforced Rey’s conviction that the leaper was foreign, that it was some other language that had been whispered in his ear. And this conviction could not help but remind Rey that Dr. Holmes and the others knew something more than they could tell him.
Rey started toward the parlor but stopped before he made it out of the front hall. He turned in astonishment. Something had snagged him. What had he just heard? He retraced his steps, then moved nearer to the study door.
“ ‘Che le ferrite son richiuse prima ch’altri dinanzi li rivada…’ “
Rey shuddered. He counted out three more soundless steps to the door of the study. “ ‘Dinanzi li rivada.’ “ He tore out a notepaper from his vest and found the word: Deenanzee. The word had taunted him since the beggar crashed through the station house window, spelling itself out in his dreams and the pumping of his heart. Rey leaned against the study door and pressed his ear flush with the cool white wood.
“Here Betrand de Born, who severed a son’s ties with a father by instigating war between them, holds aloft his own dissevered head in his hand like a lantern, speaking to the Florentine pilgrim from his detached head and mouth.” That was the soothing voice of Longfellow.
“Like Irving’s Headless Horseman.” The unmistakable baritone laugh of Lowell.
Rey flipped over the paper and wrote what he heard.
Contrapasso? A soft nasal drone. Snoring. Rey became self-conscious and quieted his own breathing. He heard a scratchy symphony of scribbling nibs.
“Dante’s most perfect punishment,” said Lowell.
“Dante himself might agree,” replied another.
Rey’s thoughts were too snowed under for him to continue trying to distinguish the speakers, and the dialogue fell together into a chorus.
“…It is the one time Dante calls such explicit attention to the idea of contrapasso–a word for which we have no exact translation, no precise definition in English, because the word in itself is its definition… Well, my dear Longfellow, I would say countersuffering… the notion that each sinner must be punished by continuing the damage of his own sin against him… just as these Schismatics are cut apart…”
Rey stepped backward all the way to the front door.
“School is done, gentlemen.”
Books were snapped shut and papers rustled, and Trap began barking, unnoticed, out the window.
“And we have earned some supper for our labors…”
“What a very fat pheasant this is!” James Russell Lowell, with agitated zeal, was prodding a strange skeleton’s wide body and oversize flat head.
“There is no beast whose insides he hasn’t taken apart and put together again,” Dr. Holmes remarked laughingly, and, Lowell thought, a bit snidely.
It was early the morning after their Dante Club meeting, and Lowell and Holmes were in the laboratory of Professor Louis Agassiz at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. Agassiz had greeted them and glanced at Lowell’s wound before returning to his private office to finish some business.
“Agassiz’s note sounded interested in the insect samples, at least.” Lowell tried to appear nonchalant. He was certain now that the insect from Healey’s study had in fact bitten him, and he was deeply worried about what Agassiz would say of its terrible effects: “Ah, there’s no hope, poor Lowell, what a peety.” Lowell did not trust Holmes’s contention that this sort of insect could not sting. What kind of insect worth a dime does not sting? Lowell waited for the fatal prognosis; it would be almost a relief to hear it spoken. He had not told Holmes how much the wound had grown in size over the last few days, how often he felt it throb violently inside his leg, and how he could trace the pain hour by hour permeating all his nerves. He would not be so weak in front of Holmes.
“Ah, do you like that, Lowell?” Louis Agassiz came in with the insect samples in his meaty hands, which always smelled of oil, fish, and alcohol, even after extensive washing. Lowell had forgotten that he was standing next to the skeleton display, which looked like a hyperbolic hen.
Agassiz said proudly, “The consul at Mauritius brought me two skeletons of the dodo while I was traveling! Isn’t it a treasure?”
“Do you think it was good to eat, Agassiz?” Holmes asked.
“Oh yes. What a peety we could not have the dodo at our Saturday Club! A good dinner has always been humanity’s greatest blessing. What a peety. All right then, are we ready?”
Lowell and Holmes followed him to a table and sat down. Agassiz carefully removed the insects from vials of alcohol solution. “First business, tell me. Where you did find these special leetle critters, Dr. Holmes?”
“Lowell did, actually,” Holmes answered cautiously. “Near Beacon Hill.”
“Beacon Hill,” Agassiz echoed, though they sounded like entirely different words in his thick Swiss-German accent. “Tell me, Dr. Holmes, what do you think of these?”
Holmes did not like the practice of asking questions intended to produce wrong answers. “ ‘Tis not my line. But they are blowflies, right, Agassiz?”
“Ah yes. Genus?” Agassiz asked.
“ Cochliomyia,” Holmes said.
“Species?”
“Macellaria.”
“Ah-ha!” Agassiz laughed. “They do look like that if you listen to books, don’t they, dear Holmes?”
“So they’re not… that?” Lowell asked. It looked as though all blood had drained from his face. If Holmes was wrong, then the flies might not be harmless.
“The two flies are physically almost identical,” Agassiz said, then gasped in a way that cut off any response. “Almost.” Agassiz made his way over to his bookshelves. His broad features and plenteous figure made him seem more successful politician than biologist and botanist. The new Museum of Comparative Zoology was the culmination of his entire career, for finally he would have the resources to complete his classification of the world’s myriad unnamed species of animals and plants. “Let me show you something. There are about twenty-five hundred species of North American flies we know how to name. Yet from my estimation there are now ten thousand fly species living among us.”
He laid out some drawings. They were crude, rather grotesque depictions of men’s faces, their noses replaced by bizarre, darkly scribbled holes.
Agassiz explained. “A few years ago, a surgeon in the French Imperial Navy, Dr. Coquerel, was called to the colony on Devil’s Island in French Cuiana, South America, just north of Brazil. Five colonists were in the hosnital with severe and unidentifiable symptoms. One of the men died soon after Dr. Coquerel arrived. When he flushed the body’s sinuses with water, three hundred blowfly larvae were found inside.”
Holmes was baffled. “The maggots were inside a man—a living man?”
“Don’t interrupt, Holmes!” Lowell cried.
Agassiz assented to Holmes’s question with a heavy silence.
“But the Cochliomyia macellaria can only digest dead tissue,” Holmes protested. “There are no maggots capable of parasitism.”
“Remember the eight thousand undiscovered flies I’ve just spoken of, Holmes!” Agassiz rebuked him. “This was not the Cochliomyia macellaria. This was a different species altogether, my friends. One we had never seen before—or didn’t want to believe existed. A female fly of this species had laid eggs in the patient’s nostrils, where the eggs hatched and the larvae developed into maggots, eating right into his head. Two more of the men on Devil’s Island died of the same infestation. The doctor saved the others only by cutting out the maggots from the noses. Macellaria maggots can only live on dead tissue—they like corpses best. But the larvae of this species of fly, Holmes, survives only on living tissue.”
Agassiz waited for reactions to show on their faces. Then he went on.
“The female fly mates only once but can lay a massive number of eggs every three days, ten or eleven times in their monthlong life cycle. A single female fly can lay up to four hundred eggs in one sitting. They find warm wounds on animals or humans to nest in. The eggs hatch into maggots and crawl into the wound, tearing through the body. The more infested is the flesh with maggots, the more other adult flies are attracted. The maggots feed on the living tissue until they drop out and, some days later, become flies. My friend Coquerel named this species Cochliomyia hominivorax.”
“Homini… vorax,” Lowell repeated. He translated hoarsely, looking at Holmes: “Man-eater.”
“Exactly,” said Agassiz with the reluctant enthusiasm of a scientist with a terrible discovery to announce. “Coquerel reported this to the scientific journals, though few believed his evidence.”
“But you did?” Holmes asked.
“Most certainly,” Agassiz said sternly. “Since Coquerel sent me these drawings, I have studied medical histories and records of the last thirty years for mentions of similar experiences by people who did not know these details Isidore Sainte-Hilaire recorded a case of a larva found inside the skin of an infant. Dr. Livingston, according to Cobbold, found several diptera larvae in the shoulder of an injured Negro. In Brazil, I have discovered on my travels that these flies are called the Warega, known as pest of both man and animals. And in the Mexican war, it was recorded that what people called ‘meat flies’ would leave their eggs in the wounds of soldiers left on the field overnight. Sometimes the maggots would cause no harm, feeding only on dead tissue. These were common blowflies, common macellaria maggots such as you are familiar with, Dr. Holmes. But other times the body would be ravished with swellings and there would be no saving what was left of the soldiers’ lives. They’d be hollowed out from the inside. You see? These were the hominivomx. These flies must prey on the helpless, people and animals: That is the only means of their offspring surviving. Their life requires ingestion of the living. Research is only now beginning, my friends, and it is very exciting. Why, I collected my first specimens of the hominivorax on my tour of Brazil. Superficially, the two types of blowflies are very much the same. You must look at the deep coloring; you must measure with the most sensitive instruments. That is how I was able to recognize your samples yesterday.”
Agassiz dragged over another stool. “Now, Lowell, let us see your poor leg again, will you?”
Lowell tried to speak, but his lips were shaking too violently.
“Oh, don’t you worry now, Lowell!” Agassiz broke into a laugh. “So, Lowell, you felt the leetle insect on your leg, then you brushed it away?”
“And I killed it!” Lowell reminded him.
Agassiz retrieved a scalpel from a drawer. “Good. Dr. Holmes, I want you to slip that into the center of the wound, and then pull it out.”
“Are you sure, Agassiz?” Lowell asked nervously.
Holmes swallowed and knelt down. He positioned the scalpel at Lowell’s ankle, then looked up into his friend’s face. Lowell was staring, his jaw open. “You won’t even feel this, Jamey,” Holmes promised quietly, comfort just between them. Agassiz, though only inches away, kindly pretended not to hear.
Lowell nodded and gripped the sides of his stool. Holmes did as Agassiz said, inserting the point of the scalpel into the center of the swelling on Lowell’s ankle. When he removed the scalpel, there was a hard white maggot, four millimeters at most, wriggling on the tip: alive.
“There, that’s it! The beautiful hominivoraxl” Agassiz laughed triumphantly. He checked Lowell’s wound for more and then wrapped the ankle. He took the maggot lovingly on his hand. “You see, Lowell, the poor leetle blowfly you saw had only a few seconds before you killed it so it had time to lay only one egg. Your wound is not deep and shall heal fully, and you shall be perfectly fine. But notice how the lesion in your leg grew with one maggot crawling inside of you, how much you felt it as it tore through some tissue. Imagine hundreds. Now imagine hundreds of thousands—expanding inside of you every few minutes.”
Lowell smiled wide enough to send his mustache tusks to opposite ends of his face. “You hear that, Holmes? I’ll be fine!” He laughed and embraced Agassiz and then Holmes. Then he began to take in what it all meant—for Artemus Healey, for the Dante Club.
Agassiz grew serious, too, as he toweled off his hands. “There’s one other thing, dear fellows. The strangest thing, really. These leetle creatures—they don’t belong here, don’t belong in New England nor anywhere in our vicinity. They are native to this hemisphere, that seems certain. But only in hot, swampier climates. I have just seen swarms of them in Brazil, but never would we see them in Boston. Never have they been recorded, by their correct name or any other. How they got here, I cannot speculate. Perhaps accidentally on a shipment of cattle or…” Agassiz lapsed into detached humor about the situation. “No matter. It is our good fortune that these critters cannot live in a northern climate such as ours, not in this weather and surroundings. They are not good neighbors, these Waregas. Luckily, the ones that did come here have surely died out from the cold already.”
In the way that fear readily transfers itself, Lowell had entirely forgotten the certainty of his own doom, and his ordeal was now a source of pleasure that he had survived. But he could only think of one thing as he walked silently away from the museum alongside Holmes.
Holmes spoke first. “I was blind to listen to Barnicoat’s conclusions in the newspapers. Healey did not die from a blow to his head! The insects were not just a Dantesque tableau vivant, some decorative show, so that Dante’s punishment could be recognized by us. They were released in order to cause pain,” Holmes said in rapid fire. “The insects were not ornament, they were his weapon!”
“Our Lucifer wants his victims not merely to die but to suffer, as the shades do in Inferno. A state between life and death which contains both and is neither.” Lowell turned to Holmes and took his arm.
“To witness your own suffering. Wendell, I felt that creature eating away inside of me. Ingesting me. Even though it might have only snacked on a small amount of tissue, I felt it as though it was running straight through my blood into my very soul. The chambermaid was telling the truth.”
“By God, she was,” Holmes said, horrified. “Which means Healey…” Neither man could speak of the suffering they now knew Healey to have endured. The chief justice had been meant to leave for his country house on a Saturday morning and his body was not found until Tuesday. He had been alive for four days under the care of tens of thousands of hominivorax devouring his insides… his brains… inch after inch, hour after hour.
Holmes looked into the glass jar of insect samples they had taken back from Agassiz. “Lowell, there is something I must say. But I do not wish to call up a row with you.”
“Pietro Bachi.”
Holmes nodded tentatively.
“This does not seem to fit with what we know of him, does it?” Lowell asked. “This knocks all our theories into a cocked hat!”
“Think of it: Bachi was bitter; Bachi was hot-tempered; Bachi was drunk. But such methodical, profound cruelty. Could you see this in him? Honestly? Bachi might have tried to stage something to show the mistake of bringing him to America. But to re-create Dante’s punishments so utterly and completely? Our mistakes must be thick throughout, Lowell, like salamanders after the rain. And a new one creeps out from under every leaf we turn over.” Holmes waved his arms frantically.
“What are you doing?” Lowell asked. Longfellow’s house was only a short walk and they were due back.
“I see a free coach up ahead. I want a look at some of these samples again under my microscope. I wish Agassiz had not killed this maggot—nature will tell the truth all the better for its not being put to death. I do not believe his conclusion that these insects will have already died out. We may learn something more about the murder from these creatures. Agassiz will not listen to the Darwinian theory, and this obstructs his view.”
“Wendell, this is the man’s vocation.”
Holmes ignored Lowell’s lack of faith. “Great scientists can sometimes be an impediment in the path of science, Lowell. Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles, and the first whispers of a new truth are not caught by those in need of ear trumpets. Just last month, I was reading in a book on the Sandwich Islands about an old Fejee man who had been carried away among foreigners but who prayed he might be brought home so that his brains might be beaten out in peace by his son, according to the custom of those lands. Did not Dante’s son Pietro tell everyone after Dante’s death that the poet did not mean to say he really went to Hell and Heaven? Our sons beat out their fathers’ brains very regularly.”
Some fathers more than others, Lowell said to himself, thinking of Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior as he watched Holmes climb into the hackney cab.
Lowell started hurriedly for Craigie House, wishing he had his horse. Crossing a street, he staggered backward with sudden vigilance at what he saw.
The tall man with the worn face and bowler hat and checkered waistcoat—the same man Lowell had seen watching him intently while leaning against an elm tree on Harvard Yard, the very man he had witnessed approaching Bachi on campus—this man stood out at the busy marketplace. That might not have been enough to hold Lowell’s interest in the aftermath of Agassiz’s revelations, but the man was conversing with Edward Sheldon, Lowell’s student. In fact, Sheldon was not merely speaking but barking up at the man, as though he were ordering a recalcitrant domestic to perform some neglected chore.
Sheldon then took his leave in a huff, wrapping himself tightly in his black cloak. Lowell could not at first decide whom to follow. Sheldon? He could always be found at the College. Lowell decided he had to pursue the unknown man, who was making his way into a knot of pedestrians and carriage traffic along the roundabout.
Lowell ran through some market stands. A marketman pushed a lobster in Lowell’s face. Lowell swatted it away. A girl passing out handbills stuffed one into the pocket of Lowell’s coat skirt. “Flyer, sir?”
“Not now!” cried Lowell. In another moment, the poet spotted the phantom across the way. He was stepping into a crammed horsecar and waiting for change from the conductor.
Lowell ran for the back platform as the conductor rang his bell and as the vehicle started down the tracks toward the bridge. Lowell had no trouble catching up with the lumbering car by jogging along the tracks. He had just secured his hand on the stair railing of the rear platform when the conductor turned around.
“Leany Miller?”
“Sir, my name is Lowell. I must speak to one of your passengers.” Lowell edged one foot onto the raised back stairs as the horse team accelerated.
“Leany Miller? Are you back to your tricks already?” The conductor produced a walking stick and started to hammer at Lowell’s gloved hand. “You shan’t blot our fair cars again, Leany! Not under my watch!”
“No! Sir, my name is not Leany!” But the thrashing of the conductor made Lowell release his grip. This sent the poet feet first onto the tracks.
Lowell shouted over the hoof falls and ringing bells to persuade the irate conductor of his innocence. But then it dawned on him that the ringing bell was coming from behind, where another horsecar was approaching. As he turned to see, Lowell’s pace was slowed and the horsecar ahead of him gained distance. With no alternative but to find his heels trampled by the oncoming horses, Lowell jumped off the tracks.
At Craigie House at that moment, Longfellow led into his parlor one Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the late president and one of the three Dante students from Lowell’s 1864 term. Lowell had promised to meet them at the house after seeing Agassiz, but he was late, so Longfellow would start Lincoln’s interview himself.
“Oh dear Papa!” Annie Allegra said as she skipped in, interrupting. “We are almost finished with the latest number of The Secret, Papa! Wouldn’t you like to see it in advance?”
“Yes, darling, but I’m afraid I’m occupied at the moment.”
“Please, Mr. Longfellow,” said the young man. “I’m in no hurry.”
Longfellow took up the handwritten periodical “published” in installments by his three girls. “Oh, it seems one of the best you’ve ever done. Very fine, Panzie. I’ll read it from beginning to end this evening. Is this the page you drew up?”
“Yes!” Annie Allegra answered. “This column, and this one. And this riddle too. Can you guess what it is?”
“The lake in America as big as three states.” Longfellow smiled and ran down the rest of the page. A rebus and a featured article reviewing “My Eventful Yesterday (from breakfast to nighttime),” by A. A. Longfellow.
“Oh, it’s lovely, dear heart.” Longfellow paused doubtfully over one of the last items on the list. “Panzie, it says here that you let a caller in just before sleep last night.”
“Oh yes. I had come down for some milk, didn’t I. Did he say I made a good hostess, Papa?”
“When was that, Panzie?”
“During your club meeting, of course. You say you must not be disturbed during your club meeting.”
“Annie Allegra!” Edith called down from the stairwell. “Alice wishes to revise the table of contents. You must bring your copy back up right away!”
“She’s always the editor,” Annie Allegra complained, reclaiming the periodical from Longfellow. He trailed Annie into the hall and called up the staircase before she could reach the private office of The Secret–the bedroom of one of their older brothers. “Panzie dear, who was the caller last night that you mention?”
“What, Papa? I’ve never seen him before yesterday.”
“Could you remember what he looked like? Perhaps that should be added to The Secret. Perhaps you can interview him yourself to ask of his experience.”
“How pretty that would be! A tall Negro man, very splendid-looking, in a cloth cloak. I told him to wait for you, Papa—I did. Did he not do as I said? He must have gotten bored just standing there and left to go home. Do you know his name, Papa?”
Longfellow nodded.
“Do tell me, Papa! I shall be able to interview him as you say.”
“Patrolman Nicholas Rey, of the Boston police.”
Lowell burst through the front door. “Longfellow, I have much to tell…” he stopped when he saw the pall on his neighbor’s face. “Longfellow, what’s happened?”
Patrolman Rey had been shown into a severe sitting room earlier that day, left to stare out at groves of weather-beaten elms shading the Yard.
A congregation of hoary men began to file into the hall, their knee-length black dress-coats and tall hats as uniform as monasterial habits.
Rey entered the Corporation Room, from which the men were departing. When Rey introduced himself to President Reverend Thomas Hill, the president was in mid-conversation with a lingering member of the College government. This other man stopped cold at Rey’s mention of police.
“Does this concern one of our students, sir?” Dr. Manning dropped his conversation with Hill. He revolved so his marble-white beard faced the mulatto officer.
“I have a few questions for President Hill. Regarding Professor James Russell Lowell, actually.”
Manning’s yellow eyes widened, and he insisted on remaining. He closed the double doors and sat down beside President Hill at the round mahogany table across from the police officer. Rey could see at once that Hill reluctantly allowed the other man to dominate.
“I wonder how much you know about the project Mr. Lowell has been at work on, President Hill,” Rey began.
“Mr. Lowell? He’s one of the finest poets and satirists in all New England, of course,” Hill replied with a lightening laugh. “ ‘The Biglow Papers.’ ‘The Vision of Sir Launfal.’ A Fable for the Critics’—my favorite, I confess. Besides his North American Review duties. You know he was the first editor of the Atlantic? Why, I’m sure our troubadour is at work on any number of undertakings.”
Nicholas Rey removed a slip of notepaper from his waistcoat pocket and rolled it between his fingers. “I am referring in particular to a poem I believe he has been helping to translate from a foreign language.”
Manning steepled his crooked fingers together and stared, his eyes dropping to the folded paper in the patrolman’s hand. “My dear officer,” Manning said. “Has there been any sort of problem?” He looked remarkably as if he wanted the answer to be yes.
Dinanzi. Rey studied Manning’s face, the way the elastic ends of the old scholar’s mouth seemed to twitch with anticipation.
Manning passed a hand across the polished top of his scalp. Dinanzi a me.
“What I mean to ask…” Manning began, trying another tack—he was less anxious now. “Has there been some trouble? Some complaint of a sort?”
President Hill pinched the padding of his chin, wishing Manning had departed with the rest of the Corporation fellows. “I wonder if we should not send for Professor Lowell himself to talk this over.”
What did it mean? If Longfellow and his poets had recognized the words, why would they go to lengths to keep it from him?
“Nonsense, Reverend President,” Manning snapped. “Professor Lowell cannot be bothered over every trifle. Officer, I must insist that if there has been some trouble, you point it out to us at once, and we shall resolve it with all due speed and discretion. Understand, Patrolman,” Manning said, leaning forward genially. “There have begun attempts by Professor Lowell and several literary colleagues to bring certain literature into our city that does not belong. Its teachings will endanger the peace of millions of gentle souls. As a member of the Corporation, I am bound by duty to defend the good reputation of the university against any such blemishes. The motto of the College is ‘Christo et ecclesiae’ sir, and we are beholden to live up to the Christian spirit of that ideal.”
“The motto used to be ‘veritas,’ though,” President Hill said quietly. “Truth.”
Manning shot him a sharp look.
Patrolman Rey hesitated another moment, then returned the notepaper to his pocket. “I expressed some interest in the poetry Mr. Lowell has been translating. He thought you gentlemen might be able to direct me to a proper place for its study.”
Dr. Manning’s cheeks streaked with color. “Do you mean to say this is a purely literary call?” he asked with disgust. When Rey did not respond, Manning assured the officer that Lowell wanted to make a fool of him—and the College—for sport. If Rey wished to study the Devil’s poetry, he could do so at the Devil’s feet.
Rey passed through Harvard Yard, where cold winds were whistling around the old brick buildings. He felt foggy and confused about his purpose. Then a fire bell began to ring, ringing, it seemed, from every corner of the universe. And Rey ran.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, poet and doctor, lit his slides of the insects with a candle positioned near one of his microscopes.
He bent down and peered through the lens at a blowfly, adjusting the position of the subject. The insect was jumping and squirming as though filled with great anger at his watcher.
No. It was not the insect.
The microscope slide itself was trembling. Horse hooves thundered outside, exploding in an urgent stop. Holmes rushed to the window and pushed the drapes open. Amelia came in from the hall. With frightening gravity, Holmes ordered her to remain in place, but she followed him to the front door. The dark-blue figure of a burly policeman stood out against the sky as he pulled with all his strength to idle the stormy gray-flecked mares harnessed to a carriage.
“Dr. Holmes?” he called from the driver’s box. “You are to come with me at once.”
Amelia stepped forward. “Wendell? What’s this about?”
Holmes was wheezing already.” ‘Melia, send a note to Craigie House. Tell them something has arisen, and to meet me at the Corner in an hour. I’m sorry to leave like this—can’t be helped.”
Before she could protest, Holmes climbed into the police carriage and the horses broke into a stormy gallop, leaving a gust of dead leaves and dust. Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior peered down through the curtains of the third-floor sitting room and wondered what new nonsense his father was at now.
A gray chill seized the air. The skies were opening. A second carriage galloped to a stop right at the spot the other had just relinquished. It was Fields’s brougham. James Russell Lowell flung open the door and asked Mrs. Holmes in an eruption of words to retrieve Dr. Holmes. She leaned forward just enough to make out the profiles of Henry Longfellow and J. T. Fields. “I don’t know where he has gone, I am sure, Mr. Lowell. But he was taken by the police. He directed me to send a note to Craigie House for you to meet at the Corner. James Lowell, I wish to know what business this is about!”
Lowell looked around the carriage helplessly. On the corner of Charles Street, two boys were passing out handbills, crying out, “Missing! Missing! Take a flyer please. Sir. Ma’am.”
Lowell thrust his hand into his sack-coat pocket, a hollow dread drying out his throat. His hand emerged with the crumpled handbill that had been stuffed into his pocket at the marketplace in Cambridge after he had seen the phantom with Edward Sheldon. He smoothed it against his sleeve. “Oh good Lord.” Lowell’s mouth quivered.
“We’ve had patrolmen and sentinels all across the city since Reverend Talbot’s murder. But nothing was seen at all!” Sergeant Stoneweather cried out from the driver’s box as the twin flea-bitten horses careened away from Charles Street, muscles dancing. Every few minutes, he would hold out his rattle and twirl it.
Holmes’s mind was swimming upstream under the sounds of the solid trot and crashing gravel under their wheels. The only comprehensible fact the driver had told him, or at least the only one that the frightened passenger had digested, was that Patrolman Rey had sent him to retrieve Holmes. At the harbor, the carriage halted abruptly. From there a police boat took Holmes out to one of the sleepy harbor islands, where stood unused, in blocky Quincy granite, a windowless castle now ruled by rats; there were empty ramparts and prone guns alongside drooping Stars and Stripes. Into Fort Warren they went, the doctor trailing the officer past a row of ghost-white policemen already on the scene: through a maze of rooms; down into a cold, pitch-dark stone tunnel; and finally into a hollowed-out storage chamber.
The little doctor stumbled and nearly fell down. His mind jumped through time. When studying at the Ecole de Medecine in Paris, young Holmes had seen the combats des animaux, a barbaric exhibition of bulldogs fighting each other, then being turned loose on a wolf, a bear, a wild boar, a bull, and a jackass tied to a post. Holmes knew even during the audacity of youth that he could never quite get the iron of Calvinism out of his soul, no matter how much poetry he wrote. There was still the temptation to believe the world was a mere trap for human sin. But sin, the way he saw it, was only the failure of an imperfectly made being to keep a perfect law. For his forefathers, the great mystery of life was this sin; for Dr. Holmes, it was suffering. He would have never expected to find so much of it. The dark memory, the inhuman cheers and laughter, stampeded into Holmes’s dazed mind now as he looked ahead.
From the center of the room, hanging on a hook meant for storing bags of salt or some similarly pouched supplies, a face stared at him. Or, more accurately, it had been a face. The nose was sliced away cleanly, all the way from the bridge to the mustached lip, causing the skin to fold over. One of the man’s ears dangled deciduously from the side of the face, low enough, indeed, to brush against the rigidly arched shoulder. Both cheeks were sliced in such a manner that the jaw dropped to a permanent position of openness, as if speech might come at any moment; but instead, blood poured black from his mouth. A straight line of blood was drawn between the heavily indented chin and the reproductive organ of the man—and this organ, the only remaining confirmation of the monstrosity’s gender, was itself split horribly in half, a dissection inconceivable even to the doctor. Muscles, nerves, and blood vessels unfolded themselves in unvarying anatomical harmony and baffling disorder. The body’s arms hung helplessly at his sides, ending in dark pulps wrapped in flooded tourniquets. There were no hands.
It was a moment before Holmes realized he had seen the decimated face before and another moment still until he recognized the mangled victim, from the pronounced dimple doggedly remaining on his chin. Oh no. The interval between the two conscious moments was an annihilation.
Holmes took a step back, his shoe gliding through the vomit that had been deposited by the first discoverer of the scene, a vagrant looking for shelter. Holmes twisted himself into a nearby chair, positioned as though for the purpose of observing all this. He wheezed uncontrollably and did not notice that to the side of his feet was a vest of a distractingly bright color neatly folded atop hand-tailored white pants and, on the floor, scattered scraps of paper.
He heard his name spoken. Patrolman Rey stood nearby. Even the air in the room seemed to tremble, to push the whole arrangement upside down.
Holmes tumbled to his feet and shook his head dizzily at Rey.
A plainclothes detective, broad-shouldered and with a strong beard, marched over to Rey and began yelling that he did not belong there. Then Chief Kurtz intervened and pulled the detective away.
The doctor’s nauseated wheezing spell left him standing in a place closer to the twisted carnage than he would have wished, but before he could think to move away, he felt his arm brushed by something wet. It felt like a hand, but in fact it was a bloody, tourniqueted stump. Yet Holmes had not moved an inch—he was sure of that. He was too shocked to move. He felt as if he were in that type of nightmare where one can only pray to himself that he is dreaming.
“Heaven help us, it’s alive!” screamed the detective, running off, his voice strangled by his tight hold on a rising flood from his stomach. Chief Kurtz, too, disappeared, shouting.
As Holmes spun around, he looked directly into the blankly bulging eyes of the maimed, naked body of Phineas Jennison and watched the wretched limbs flail and jerk through the air. It was only a moment, really—only a fraction of a tithe of a hundredth of a second—until the body stopped cold, never to move again, yet Holmes never doubted what he had just witnessed. The doctor stood corpselike, his little mouth dry and twitching, his eyes blinking uncontrollably with unwanted moisture, and his fingers wriggling desperately. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes knew that Phineas Jennison’s movement had not been the voluntary motions of a living being, the willed actions of a sentient man. They were the delayed, mindless convulsions of unspeakable death. But this knowledge made it no better.
The dead touch having left his blood cold, Holmes was hardly conscious of drifting back over the harbor water or of the police carriage, called Black Maria, in which they rode alongside the body of Jennison to the medical college, where it was explained to him that Barnicoat, the medical examiner, had taken to bed with a terrible pneumonia in a fight for a higher salary and Professor Haywood could not at present be located. Holmes nodded as though he were listening. Haywood’s student assistant volunteered to assist Dr. Holmes in an autopsy. Holmes barely registered these urgent exchanges, he could barely feel his hands cut into the already impossibly shredded body in a dark upper chamber of the medical college.
“Observe in me the contrapasso.”
Holmes’s head snapped up as if a child had just cried for help. Reynolds, the student assistant, looked back, as did Rey and Kurtz and two other officers who had entered the room unnoticed by Holmes. Holmes looked again at Phineas Jennison, his mouth hanging open by the cut jaw.
“Dr. Holmes?” the student assistant said. “All right, are you?”
Just a burst of imagination, the voice he had heard, the whisper, the command. But Holmes’s hands trembled too much even to carve a turkey, and he had to leave the remainder of the operation to Haywood’s assistant as he excused himself. Holmes wandered into an alleyway off Grove Street, gathering his breath in bits and spurts. He heard someone approach him. Rey backed the doctor farther into the alleyway.
“Please, I can’t speak at the moment,” Holmes said, his eyes fixed down.
“Who butchered Phineas Jennison?”
“How should I know!” Holmes cried. He lost his balance, inebriated with the mangled visions in his head.
“Translate this for me, Dr. Holmes.” Rey pried open Holmes’s hand and placed a notepaper there.
“Please, Patrolman Rey. We’ve already…” Holmes’s hands shook violently as he fumbled with the paper.
“ ‘Because I parted persons so united,’ “ Rey recited from what he had heard the night before, “ ‘I now bear my brain parted. Thus observe in me the contrapasso.’ That is what we just saw, isn’t it? How do you translate contrapasso, Dr. Holmes? A countersuffering?”
“There’s no exact… how did you…” Holmes pulled off his silk cravat and tried to breathe into the neck cloth. “I don’t know anything.”
Rey continued: “You read of this murder in a poem. You saw it before it happened and did nothing to prevent it.”
“No! We did all we could. We tried. Please, Patrolman Rey, I can’t…”
“Do you know this man?” Rey removed the newspaper engraving of Grifone Lonza from his pocket and handed it to the doctor. “He jumped from the window at the police station.”
“Please!” Holmes was suffocating. “No more! Go away now!”
“Hey there!” Three medical college students, the rustic type Holmes referred to as his young barbarians, were passing the alleyway relishing cheap cigars. “You, moke! Get away from Professor Holmes!”
Holmes tried to call out to them, but nothing made it out of the clutter in his throat.
The swiftest barbarian collided into Rey with a fist aimed at the officer’s stomach. Rey grabbed the boy’s other arm and threw him down as softly as possible. The other two pounced on Rey just as Holmes’s voice returned. “No! No, boys! Be still! Get away from here at once! This is a friend! Scat!” They slid away meekly.
Holmes helped Rey up. He needed to make amends. He took the newspaper and held up the page with the likeness. “Grifone Lonza,” he revealed.
The glint in Rey’s eyes showed he was impressed and relieved. “Translate the note for me now, Dr. Holmes, please. Lonza spoke those words before he died. Tell me what they were.”
“Italian. The Tuscan dialect. Mind you, you’re missing some words, but for someone with no training in the language, it is a remarkable enough transcription. Deenan see am… ‘Dinanzi a me… Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create se non etterne, e io etterno duro’: Before me nothing was made if not eternal, and I will last eternally. ‘Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate’: 0 ye who enter, abandon all hope.”
“Abandon all hope. He was warning me,” Rey said.
“No… I don’t think so. He probably believed he was reading it over the gates to Hell, from what we know of his mental state.”
“You should have told the police you knew something,” Rey cried.
“It would have been a greater mess if we had!” Holmes shouted. “You don’t understand—you can’t, Patrolman. We’re the only ones who could ever find him! We thought we had—we thought he fled. Everything the police know is coal dust! This shall never stop without us!” Holmes tasted snow as he spoke. He dabbed his brow and neck, which were bathed in hot sweat from every pore. Holmes asked if Rey wouldn’t mind moving inside. He had a story to tell that Rey might not believe.
Oliver Wendell Holmes and Nicholas Rey sat in his empty lecture room.
“The year was 1300. Midway through the journey of his life, a poet named Dante awoke in a dark wood, finding that his life had taken a wrong path. James Russell Lowell likes to say, Patrolman, that we all enter the dark wood twice—sometime in the middle of our lives and again when we look back upon it…”
The heavy paneled door to the Authors’ Room opened an inch and the three men inside jumped from their seats. A black boot edged in probatively. Holmes could no longer think what he might find to shatter his safety behind closed doors. Gaunt and ashen, he shared the sofa with Longfellow, across from Lowell and Fields, hoping that a single nod would suffice to respond to each of their greetings.
“I stopped home first before coming here. ‘Melia nearly did not let me back out of the house, the way I look.” Holmes laughed nervously as a drop of moisture shimmied into the corner of his eye. “Did you gentlemen know that the muscles with which we laugh and cry lie side by side? My young barbarians are always so taken with that.”
They waited for Holmes to begin. Lowell handed him the crumpled handbill announcing that Phineas Jennison was missing, offering many thousands in reward for his return. “Then you know already,” Holmes said. “Jennison’sdead.”
He began an erratic, staccato narrative commencing with the police carriage’s surprise arrival at 21 Charles.
Lowell, pouring his third glass of port, said, “Fort Warren.”
“An ingenious choice on the part of our Lucifer,” said Longfellow. “I’m afraid the canto of the Schismatics could not be fresher to our minds. It hardly seems possible that it was only yesterday we translated it among our cantos. Malebolge is a wide field of stone—and described by Dante as a fortress.”
Lowell said, “Once again we see that we face a uniquely brilliant scholar’s mind, strikingly equipped to transmit choice atmospheric details of Dante. Our Lucifer appreciates the exactness of Dante’s poetry. All is wild in Milton’s Hell, but Dante’s is separated into circles, drawn with well-pointed compasses. As real as our own world.”
“Now it is,” Holmes said shakily.
Fields did not want to hear a literary argument at the moment. “Wendell, you say that the police were stationed all around the city when the murder occurred? How could Lucifer not be seen?”
“You would need the giant hands of Briareus and the hundred eyes of Argus to touch or see him,” Longfellow said quietly.
Holmes gave them more. “Jennison was found by a drunkard who sometimes sleeps in the fort since it has been out of use. The vagrant was there on Monday, and all was normal. Then he returned on Wednesday, and there was the horrible display. He was too frightened to report it until the next day—I mean until today. Jennison was last seen on Tuesday afternoon, and his bed was not slept in that night. The police interviewed everyone they could find. A prostitute who was at the harbor says she saw someone come out from the fog at the harbor Tuesday evening. She tried to follow him, I. suppose as obliged by her profession, but got only so far as the church, and she did not see which direction he took.”
“So Jennison was killed on Tuesday night. But the body was not discovered by the police until Thursday,” Fields said. “But, Holmes, you said that Jennison was still… is it possible that for such a time… ?”
“For it… him… to have been killed on Tuesday yet be alive when I arrived this morning? For the body to be thrown into such convulsions that were I to drink every drop of Lethe I shall never be able to forget the sight of it?” Holmes asked despairingly. “Poor Jennison had been mutilated without hope of survival—that is to be sure—but cut and bound just enough to slowly lose blood, and with it his life. It was a good deal like inspecting what remains of fireworks on the fifth of July, but I could see that no vital organs had been punctured. There was careful craftsmanship amid such wild massacre, done by one very familiar with internal wounds, perhaps a doctor,” he said thickly, “with a sharp and large knife. With Jennison, our Lucifer perfects his damnation through suffering, his most perfect contrapasso. The movements I witnessed were not life, my dear Fields, but simply the nerves dying out in a final spasm. It was a moment as grotesque as any Dante could have envisioned. Death would have been a gift.”
“But to survive for two days after the attack,” Fields insisted. “What I mean to say is… medically speaking… mercy, it’s not possible!”
“ ‘Survival’ here means simply an incomplete death, not a partial life—to be trapped in the gap between the living and the dead. If I had a thousand tongues, I would not try to begin to describe the agony!”
“Why punish Phineas as a Schismatic?” Lowell tried his best to sound detached, scientific. “Whom does Dante find punished in that infernal circle? Muhammad, Bertrand de Born—the malicious adviser who split apart king and prince, father and son, as once was done to Absalom and David—those who created internal rifts within religions, families. Why Phineas Jennison?”
“After all our efforts, we haven’t answered that question for Elisha Talbot, my dear Lowell,” said Longfellow. “His thousand-dollar simony—for what? Two contrapassos, with two invisible sins. Dante has the benefit of asking the sinners themselves what has brought them to Hell.”
“Were you not close with Jennison?” Fields asked Lowell. “And yet you can think of nothing?”
“He was a friend; I did not look for his misdeeds! He was an ear for me to complain about losses in stocks, about lecturing, about Dr. Manning and the blasted Corporation. He was a steam engine in trousers, and I admit sometimes he cocked his hat a bit too much—he had a hand in every flashy business enterprise over the years that I suppose had an underbelly of brine. Railroads, factories, steelworks—such business matters are hardly comprehensible to me, you know, Fields.” Lowell dropped his head.
Holmes sighed heavily. “Patrolman Rey is as sharp as a blade, and likely has suspected our knowledge all along. He recognized the manner of Jennison’s death from what he had overheard at our Dante Club session. The logic of the contrapasso, the Schismatics, he connected to Jennison, and when I explained more, he immediately understood Dante in the deaths of Chief Justice Healey and Reverend Talbot, too.”
“As did Grifone Lonza when he killed himself at the station house,” said Lowell. “The poor soul saw Dante in everything. This time he happened to be right. I have often thought, in like manner, of Dante’s own transformation. The mind of the poet, left homeless on earth by his enemies, making its home more and more in that awful otherworld. Is it not natural that exiled from all he loved in this life, he would brood exclusively on the next? We praise him lavishly for his skills, but Dante Alighieri had no choice but to write the poem he did, and to write in his heart’s blood. It is no wonder he died so soon after he finished.”
“What shall Officer Rey do with his knowledge of our involvement?” Longfellow asked.
Holmes shrugged. “We withheld information. We obstructed an investigation into the two most horrendous murders Boston has ever seen, which now have become three! Rey may very well be turning us and Dante in as we speak! What loyalty does he have to a book of poetry? How much should we have?”
Holmes pushed himself to his feet and, pulling at the waist of his baggy pantaloons, paced nervously. Fields raised his head from his hands when he realized Holmes was gathering his hat and coat.
“I wanted to share what I have learned,” Holmes said in a soft, dead voice. “I cannot continue.”
“You’ll rest now,” Fields began.
Holmes shook his head. “No, my dear Fields, not just tonight.”
“What?” Lowell cried.
“Holmes,” Longfellow said. “I know this seems unanswerable, but it behooves us to fight.”
“You can’t just walk away from this anyhow!” Lowell shouted. With his voice filling their space, he felt powerful again. “We’ve gone too far, Holmes!”
“We had gone too far from the beginning, too far from where we belong—yes, Jamey. I’m sorry,” Holmes said calmly. “I know not what Patrolman Rey shall decide, but I shall cooperate in any fashion he wishes and I expect the same from you. I only pray we are not taken in for obstruction—or worse—accessory. Isn’t that what we have been? Each one of us had a role in allowing the deaths to continue.”
“Then you shouldn’t have given us away to Rey!” Lowell jumped to his feet.
“What would you have done in my place, Professor?” Holmes demanded.
“Walking away is not an option here, Wendell! The milk is spilt. You swore to protect Dante, as did we all, right under Longfellow’s roof, though the heavens cave in!” But Holmes fitted his hat and buttoned his overcoat. “ ‘Qui a bu boira,’ “ Lowell said.” ‘He who has once been a drinker will drink again.’ “
“You didn’t see it!” Every emotion pent up inside Holmes erupted as he turned on Lowell. “Why has it been I who has seen two horribly shredded bodies instead of you brave scholars! It was I who went down into Talbot’s fiery hold with the scent of death in my nostrils! It is I who have had to go through it all while you can analyze from the comfort of your fireside, filtering it all through alphabets!”
“The comfort? I was assailed by rare man-eating insects within an inch of my life, you oughtn’t forget!” Lowell shouted.
Holmes laughed mockingly. “I’d take ten thousand blowflies for what I’ve seen!”
“Holmes,” Longfellow entreated. “Remember: Virgil tells the pilgrim that fear is the main impediment to his journey.”
“I do not give a copper for that! Not any longer, Longfellow! I yield my place! We are not the first to try to liberate Dante’s poetry and perhaps ours shall always be the losing end! Did you never once think that Voltaire was right—Dante was but a madman and his work a monster. Dante lost his life in Florence, so he avenged himself by creating a literature with which he dared make himself into God. And now we have unleashed it on the city we say we love, and we shall live to pay!”
“That’s enough for now, Wendell! Enough!” Lowell yelled, standing in front of Longfellow as though he could shield him from the words.
“Dante’s own son thought him delusional to believe that he had traveled through Hell, and spent a lifetime trying to disown his father’s words!” Holmes went on. “Why should we sacrifice our safety to save him? The Commedia was no love letter. Dante did not care about Beatrice, about Florence! He was venting the spleen of his exile, imagining his enemies writhe and beg for salvation! Do you ever hear him mention his wife, just once? This is how he got even for his disappointments! I only wish to protect us from losing everything we hold dear! That’s all I’ve wanted from the beginning!”
“You don’t want to find out that anyone is guilty,” Lowell said, “just as you didn’t ever want to think Bachi was culpable, just as you imagined Professor Webster blameless even as he dangled from the end of a rope!”
“Not so!” Holmes cried.
“Oh, this is a fine thing you’re doing for us, Holmes. A fine thing!” Lowell shouted. “You’ve stayed as steady as your most rambling lyrics! Perhaps we should’ve drafted Wendell Junior into our club all along instead of you. At least we’d have a chance of victory!” He was ready to say more, but Longfellow restrained him by the arm with a tender hand, unbreakable as an iron gauntlet.
“We could not have come this far along without you, my dear friend. Pray do get some rest and give our affection to Mrs. Holmes,” Longfellow said softly.
Holmes made his way out of the Authors’ Room. When Longfellow released his hold, Lowell stalked the doctor to the door. Holmes hurried into the hall, looking over his shoulder as his friend trailed behind with a cold stare. Reaching the corner, Holmes smashed into a cart of papers being pushed by Teal, the night shop boy assigned to Fields’s offices, whose mouth always worked in a grinding or chewing motion. Holmes went flying to the floor, the cart tipping over and spilling papers across the hall and on the toppled doctor. Teal kicked away some papers and with a look of great sympathy tried to help Oliver Wendell Holmes to his feet. Lowell rushed to Holmes’s side too, but stopped himself, renewed in anger because he was ashamed at his moment of softness.
“There, you’re happy, Holmes. Longfellow needed us! You’ve betrayed him finally! You’ve betrayed the Dante Club!”
Teal, staring with fright as Lowell repeated his charge, lifted Holmes to his feet. “Many apologies,” he whispered into Holmes’s ear. Though it was entirely the doctor’s fault, Holmes could barely reciprocate an apology. He was not experiencing his heaving, wheezing asthma any longer. It was the tight, cramping kind. Whereas the other felt like he needed more and more air to fill himself, this made all air poison.
Lowell burst back into the Authors’ Room, slamming the door behind him. He found himself facing an unreadable expression on Longfellow’s face. At the first sign of a thunderstorm, Longfellow would close all shutters in his house, explaining that he did not like such discordance. Now he wore the same look of retreat. Apparently Longfellow had said something to Fields, because the publisher was standing expectantly, leaning forward for more.
“Well,” Lowell pleaded, “tell me how he could do that to us, Longfellow. How could Holmes do that now?”
Fields shook his head. “Lowell, Longfellow thinks he has realized something,” he said, translating the poet’s expression. “You remember how we took on the canto of the Schismatics just last night?”
“Yes. What of it, Longfellow?” Lowell asked.
Longfellow had begun to collect his coat, and was staring out the window. “Fields, would Mr. Houghton still be at Riverside?”
“Houghton’s always at Riverside, at least when he’s not at church. What can he do for us, Longfellow?”
“We must leave for there at once,” said Longfellow.
“You’ve realized something that will help us, my dear Longfellow?” Lowell filled with hope.
He thought Longfellow was considering the question, but the poet made no answer on the ride over the river into Cambridge.
At the giant brick building housing the Riverside Press, Longfellow requested that H. 0. Houghton provide the full printing records for the translation of Dante’s Inferno. Despite its untested subject matter, the translation, breaking years of virtual silence by the most beloved poet in their country’s history, was anxiously awaited by the literary world. With the bells and trumpets Fields had in store for it, its first printing of five thousand would sell out within a month. Anticipating this, Oscar Houghton had been preparing plates from Longfellow’s proofs as the poet brought them in, maintaining a detailed, unimpeachably accurate log of dates.
The three scholars commandeered the printer’s private counting room.
“I’m at a loss,” Lowell said, not one to remain focused on the finer points of his own publishing projects, much less someone else’s.
Fields showed him the schedule. “Longfellow submits his proofs with revisions the week after our translation sessions. So whatever date we find here recording Houghton’s receipt of the proofs, the Wednesday of the week before that would be the meeting of our Dante circle.”
The translation of Canto Three, the Neutrals, had taken place three or four days after the murder of Justice Healey. Reverend Talbot’s murder had occurred three days before the Wednesday set aside for the translation of Cantos Seventeen, Eighteen, and Nineteen—the latter containing the punishment of the Simoniacs.
“But then we found out about the murder!” Lowell said.
“Yes, and I set our schedule ahead to the Ulysses canto at the last minute so that we might reinvigorate ourselves, and worked on the intermediate cantos myself. Now, the latest, the massacre of Phineas Jennison, has by all accounts occurred on this Tuesday—one day before yesterday’s translation of the very same verses which give rise to that gross deed.”
Lowell turned white and then steamy red.
“I see, Longfellow!” Fields cried.
“Each one—each crime—happens directly before our Dante Club translates the canto on which the murder has been based,” Longfellow said.
“How could we have not seen that before?” cried Fields.
“Somebody has been playing with us!” Lowell boomed. Then quickly he lowered his voice to a whisper. “Someone has been watching us all along, Longfellow! It has to be someone who knows our Dante Club! Whoever it is has timed each murder with our translation!”
“Wait a minute. This could only be a dreadful coincidence.” Fields looked at the chart again. “Look here. We have translated nearly two dozen Inferno cantos, yet there have been but three murders.”
“Three deadly coincidences,” said Longfellow.
“There’s no coincidence,” Lowell insisted. “Our Lucifer has been racing us to see what will come first—Dante translated into ink or into blood! We have been losing the race by two or three lengths each time!”
Fields protested. “But who could possibly know our schedule in advance? With enough time to plan such elaborate crimes? We write up no timetable. Sometimes we miss a week. Sometimes Longfellow skips a canto or two that he does not feel we are prepared for and goes out of order.”
“My own Fanny would not know which cantos we sit down with, much less would she care to know,” Lowell admitted.
“Who would possibly possess such particulars, Longfellow?” asked Fields.
“If this were all true,” Lowell interrupted, “it means we are somehow implicated firsthand with the murders having begun at all!”
They were silent. Fields looked at Longfellow protectively. “Humbug!” he said. “Humbug, Lowell!” That was all he could think to argue.
“I do not profess to understand this strange pattern,” Longfellow said as he rose from Houghton’s desk. “But we cannot escape its implication. Whatever course of action Patrolman Rey decides, we can no longer consider our involvement merely as our prerogative. Thirty years have passed since the day I first sat at my desk in happier times to translate the Commedia. I have laid my hands upon it with such great reverence that it has sometimes amounted to unwillingness. But the time has come to make haste, to complete this work, or risk more loss.”
After Fields started in his carriage for Boston, Lowell and Longfellow walked through the falling snow to their homes. Word of Phineas Jennison’s murder had burned through their society. The elmy quiet of the Cambridge street was deafening. Wreaths of ascending snow-white chimney smoke vanished like ghosts. The windows not covered by shutters were blocked from the inside with clothing, shirts and blouses hanging loosely, for it was too cold to dry them outside. The latch strings were lowered on all the doors. Houses that had newly installed iron locks and metal chains, on the advice of local patrolmen, were kept tightly shut; some residents had even concocted a type of alarm for their doors, using a system of currents sold by door-to-door Jeremy Didlers from the West. No children were playing in the plush snowbanks. With these three murders, there was no hiding the certainty that there was one hand at work. Newspaper stories soon included the information that each victim had had his suit of clothing folded neatly at the scene of death and suddenly the whole city felt naked. The terror that started with the demise of Artemus Healey had now descended over Beacon Hill, along Charles Street, across Back Bay, and over the bridge to Cambridge. All at once, there seemed irrational but palpable reasons to believe in a scourge, in apocalypse.
Longfellow paused a block from Craigie House. “Could we be responsible?” His voice sounded frighteningly weak to his own ears.
“Don’t let that maggot get into your brain. I wasn’t thinking when I said that, Longfellow.”
“You must be honest with me, Lowell. Do you think—”
Longfellow’s words were splintered. A little girl’s shout rose up from the air and shook the very foundations of Brattle Street.
Longfellow’s knees buckled as his mind traced the sound back to his own house. He knew he would have to make a mad dash down Brattle Street through the virgin blanket of snow. But for a moment his thoughts trapped him in place, snared him with the trembling of possibility as one who wakes from a terrible nightmare searches for signs of bloody calamities in the peaceful room around him. Memories flooded the air ahead. Why could I not save you, my love?
“Should I go for my rifle?” Lowell cried frantically.
Longfellow sprinted ahead.
The two men reached the front step of Craigie House at about the same time, a remarkable feat for Longfellow, who, unlike his neighbor, was not practiced in physical exertion. They rushed side by side into the front hall. In the parlor, they found Charley Longfellow kneeling down trying to calm the excited little Annie Allegra, who was shouting and squealing joyfully at the gifts her brother had brought for them. Trap was growling in delight and wagging his pudgy tail in circles, showing all his teeth in an expression comparable to a human smile. Alice Mary came into the hall to greet them.
“Oh, Papa,” she cried. “Charley has just come home for Thanksgiving! And he has brought us French jackets, striped red-and-black!” Alice posed in her jacket for Longfellow and Lowell.
“What a dasher!” Charley applauded. He embraced his father. “Why, Papa, you’re whiter than a sheet, aren’t you? Are you feeling unwell? I meant only to give you a small surprise! Perhaps you’ve gotten too old for us.” He laughed.
The color had returned to Longfellow’s fair skin by the time he pulled Lowell aside. “My Charley has come home,” he said confidentially, as if Lowell could not see for himself.
Later that evening, after the children were asleep upstairs and Lowell had departed, Longfellow felt profoundly calm. He leaned at his standing desk and passed his hand over the smooth wood on which most of his translation was written. When he had first read Dante’s poem, he had to confess to himself, he did not have faith in the great poet. He feared how it might end, beginning so gloriously. But throughout, Dante bore himself so valiantly that Longfellow could but wonder more and more, not only at his great but at his continuous power. The style rose with the theme, and swelled like tidewaters, and at length its flood lifted the reader, freighted with doubts and fears. Most often it had seemed that Longfellow was serving the Florentine, but sometimes Dante taunted, his meaning eluding all words, all language. Longfellow felt at these times as a sculptor who, unable to represent in cold marble the living beauty of the human eye, had recourse to such devices as sinking the eye deeper and making the brow above more prominent than it is in the living model.
But Dante resisted mechanical intrusions, and withheld himself, demanding patience. Whenever translator and poet came to this impasse, Longfellow would pause and think: Here Dante laid down his pen—all that follows was still a blank. How shall it be filled up? What new figures shall be brought in? What new names written? Then the poet resumed his pen—and, with an expression of joy or indignation upon his face, wrote further in his book—and Longfellow now followed without timidity.
A small scratching sound, like fingers on a chalkboard, caught the attention of Trap’s triangle ears while he was wound in a ball by Longfellow’s feet. It sounded like ice scraping against a window in the wind.
Longfellow was still translating at two o’clock in the morning. With furnace and fire in full blast, he could not make the mercury climb its little ladder higher than the sixtieth round, when it would go down, discouraged. He placed a candle at one window and looked out through another at the lovely trees, all feathered and plumed with snow. The air was motionless, and in their illumination they looked like one great aerial Christmas tree. As he was closing up shutters, he noticed some unusual marks in one window.
He pulled the shutters open again. The sound of scraping ice had been something else: a knife slicing into the glass. And he had been just a few feet from their rival. At first the words cut into the window were unintelligible:
Longfellow could decipher it almost immediately, but still he put on his hat, shawl, and coat and went outside, where the threat could be read clearly as he traced the sharp edges of the words with his fingers.
“MY TRANSLATION.”
Chief Kurtz announced on the Central slate that he was leaving by train in a few hours on a lyceum tour of all New England, to address city committees and lyceum groups on new methods of policing. Kurtz explained to Rey. “To salvage our city’s reputation, quoth the aldermen. Liars.”
“Then why?”
“To get me far away, far away from the detectives. By resolution I’m the only officer of the department with authority over the detective bureau. Those rogues shall have free rein. This investigation falls completely to them now. There will be no one here with the power to stop them.”
“But, Chief Kurtz, they are looking in the wrong place. They only want an arrest for show.”
Kurtz stared up at him. “And you, Patrolman, you must stay here as ordered. You know that. Until this is completely cleared up. That could be in many moons.”
Rey blinked. “But I have much to tell, Chief…”
“You know I must instruct you to share with Detective Henshaw and his men anything you know or think you know.”
“Chief Kurtz…”
“Anything, Rey! Should I take you to Henshaw myself?”
Rey hesitated, then shook his head.
Kurtz extended his hand to Rey’s arm. “Sometimes the only satisfaction is to know there’s nothing more you can do, Rey.”
When Rey walked home that evening, a cloaked figure stepped next to him. She brought her hood down, breathing fast, the vapor of her breath crashing through her dark veil. Mabel Lowell cast off her veil and glared at Patrolman Rey.
“Patrolman. You remember me from when you came looking for Professor Lowell? I have something I think you should look at,” she said, pulling out a thick package from under her cloak.
“How did you find me, Miss Lowell?”
“Mabel. Do you think it is so difficult to find the one mulatto police officer in Boston?” She closed her statement with a curled smirk.
Rey paused and looked at the package. He removed some sheets of paper, “I don’t think I’ll take this. Does it belong to your father?”
“Yes,” she said. These were the proofs of Longfellow’s Dante translation, which were overrun with Lowell’s marginal notes. “I think that Father has discovered some aspects of Dante’s poetry in those strange murders. I do not know the details that you must, and could never speak to him about this without him growing terribly warm, so please don’t say you’ve seen me. It took much work, Officer, sneaking around Father’s study hoping he would not notice.”
“Please, Miss Lowell.” Rey sighed.
“Mabel.” Faced with the honest glow in Rey’s eyes, she could not bring herself to show her desperation. “Please, Officer. Father tells Mrs. Lowell little, and me even less. But I know this: His Dante books are scattered at all times. When I hear him with his friends these days, it is all they speak about—and with such a tone of duress and anguish inappropriate to men in a translating society. Then I found a sketch of a man’s feet burning, with some newspaper clippings about Reverend Talbot: His feet, some say, were charred when he was found. Haven’t I heard Father review that canto of the nefarious clerics with Mead and Sheldon only a few months ago?”
Rey led her into the courtyard of a nearby building, where they found a vacant bench. “Mabel, you must tell nobody else that you know this,” the patrolman told her. “It shall only confuse the situation and cast a dangerous shadow on your father and his friends—and, I fear, on yourself. There are interests involved that would take advantage of this information.”
“You knew about this already, didn’t you? Well, you must be planning to do something to stop this madness.”
“I don’t know, to be honest.”
“You can’t stand by and watch, not while Father… please.” She placed the package of proof sheets in his hands again. Her eyes filled up, in spite of herself. “Take these. Read through them before he misses this. Your visit to Craigie House that day must have had something to do with all this, and I know you can help.”
Rey examined the package. He had not read a book since before the war. He had once consumed literature with alarming avidity, especially after the deaths of his adoptive parents and sisters: He had read histories and biographies and even romances. But now the very idea of a book struck him as offensively contained and arrogant. He preferred newspapers and broadsides, which had no chance to dominate this thoughts.
“Father is a hard man sometimes—I’m aware how he can seem,” Mabel continued. “But he has been through much strain in his life, inside and out. He lives in fear of losing his ability to write, but I never thought of him as a poet at all, only as my father.”
“You don’t have to worry about Mr. Lowell.”
“Then you are going to help him?” she asked, placing a hand on his arm. “Is there anything I can do to assist? Anything to make certain Father is safe, Patrolman?”
Rey remained silent. Passersby glared at the two of them, and he looked away.
Mabel smiled sadly and withdrew to the far side of the bench. “I understand. You are just like Father then. I must not be trusted with real matters, I suppose. On some fancy, I thought you’d feel differently.”
For a moment Rey felt too much empathy to answer. “Miss Lowell, this is a matter not to get involved in, if one can choose.”
“But I can’t choose,” she said, and returned her veil to its place as she headed toward the horsecar station.
Professor George Ticknor, an old man in decline, instructed his wife to send up his caller. His instructions were accompanied by an odd smile on his large and peculiar face. Ticknor’s once-black hair was grizzled down the back of his neck and along his muttonchops, and pitifully thin below his skullcap. Hawthorne had once called Ticknor’s nose the reverse of aquiline, not quite pug or snub.
The professor had never had much imagination and was thankful for the fact—it protected him from the vagaries that had beset fellow Bostonians, fellow writers especially, in times of reform thinking things would change.
Still, Ticknor could not help imagining now that the servant lifting him, helping him out of his chair, was a perfect grown image of George Junior, who had died at the age of five. Ticknor was still sad at George Junior’s death thirty years later, very sad, because he could no longer see his bright smile or hear his glad voice even in his mind; because he turned his head at some familiar sound and the boy was not there; because he listened for his son’s light step, which did not come.
Longfellow entered the library, bashfully bearing a gift. It was a clasped sack with gold fringe. “Please, stay seated, Professor Ticknor,” he urged.
Ticknor offered cigars, which from their cracked wrappers, seemed to have been offered and rejected through many years by infrequent guests. “My dear Mr. Longfellow, what have you here?”
Longfellow placed the sack on Ticknor’s desk. “Something I thought you, more than anyone, would like to see.”
Ticknor looked at him in anticipation. His black eyes were impassable.
“I received it this morning from Italy. Read the letter that came with it.” Longfellow handed it to Ticknor. It was from George Marsh, of the Dante Centennial Committee in Florence. Marsh was writing to assure Longfellow that there should be no concern over the acceptance of his translation of Inferno by the Florentine Committee.
Ticknor began to read: “ ‘The Duke of Caietani and the Committee shall gratefully receive the first American reproduction of the great poem as a contribution most fitting the solemnity of the Centenary, and at the same time as a worthy homage from the New World to one of the chief glories of the country of its discoverer Columbus.’ “
“Why would you not feel assured?” Ticknor asked bemusedly.
Longfellow smiled. “I suppose that in his kind way, Mr. Marsh is asking me to hurry. But is it not said Columbus was far from punctual?”
“ ‘Please accept from our Committee,’ “ Ticknor continued reading, “ ‘in appreciation of your upcoming contribution, one of the seven sacks containing Dante Alighieri’s ashes, taken lately from his tomb in Ravenna.’ “
This sent a faint crimson delight into Ticknor’s cheeks, and his eyes drifted toward the sack. His cheeks were no longer that hot red shade that, in collusion with dark hair, had led people to think him Spanish in his youth. Ticknor unfastened the clasp, opened the sack, and stared at what could have been coal dust. But Ticknor let some run through his fingers, like the tired pilgrim coming at last to holy water.
“For how many years did it seem I searched the wide earth for fellow scholars of Dante, with little success,” Ticknor said. He swallowed hard, thinking, For how many years? “I tried to teach so many members of my family how Dante made me a better man, with little understanding. Did you notice, Longfellow, that last year there was not a club or society in Boston that did not hold a celebration to honor the three-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birthday? Yet how many outside Italy think this year, the six-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s birth, worthy of note? Shakespeare brings us to know ourselves. Dante, with his dissection of all others, bids us know one another. Tell me of the fortunes of your translation.”
Longfellow took a deep breath. Then he narrated a story of murder; about Judge Healey punished as a Neutral, Elisha Talbot as a Simoniac, Phineas Jennison as a Schismatic. He explained how the Dante Club had traced Lucifer’s path through the city and had come to understand that he paced himself by the progress of their translation.
“You can help us,” Longfellow said. “Today begins a new phase for our fight.”
“Help.” Ticknor seemed to taste the word as he might a new wine and then dribble it back in disgust. “Help to do what, Longfellow?”
Longfellow leaned back, surprised.
“Foolish to try to stop something like this,” Ticknor said without sympathy. “Did you know, Longfellow, that I have begun to give away my books?” He pointed with his ebony cane at the bookshelves all around the room. “I’ve given nearly three thousand volumes already to the new public library, piece by piece.”
“A wonderful gesture, Professor,” Longfellow said sincerely.
“Piece by piece until I fear I shall have nothing left of myself.” He pushed down into his plush rug with his shiny black scepter. A wry part-smile, part-scowl stirred his tired mouth. “My very first memory of my life is the death of Washington. My father when he came home that day could not speak, so overcome was he with the news; I was terrified that he could be so stricken and I begged Mother to send for a doctor. For some weeks everyone, even the smallest children, wore black crepe on their sleeve. Did you ever pause to consider why it is that if you kill one person you are a murderer but if you kill a thousand you are a hero, as was Washington? I once thought to ensure the future of our literary arenas by study and instruction, by deference to tradition. Dante pleaded that his poetry carry on beyond him in a new home, and for forty years I toiled for him. The fate of literature prophesied by Mr. Emerson has come to life by the events you describe—literature that breathes life and death, that can punish, and can absolve.”
“I know you cannot sanction what has happened, Professor Ticknor,” Longfellow said thoughtfully. “Dante disfigured as a tool for murder and personal vengeance.”
Ticknor’s hands shook. “Here at last is a text of old, Longfellow, converted into a present power, a power of judgment before our eyes! No, if what you’ve discovered is true, when the world learns of what has happened in Boston—even if that is ten centuries from now—Dante shall not be disfigured, shall not be tainted or ruined. He will be revered as the first true creation of the American genius, the first poet to unleash the majestic power of all literature upon the unbelievers!”
“Dante wrote to remove us from times when death was incomprehensible. He wrote to give us hope for life, Professor, when we have none left, to know that our lives, our prayers, make a difference to God.”
Ticknor sighed helplessly and pushed the gold-fringed sack forward. “Remember your gift, Mr. Longfellow.”
Longfellow smiled. “You were the first to believe it all possible.” Longfellow placed the sack of ashes in Ticknor’s old hands, which grasped it greedily.
“I am too old to help anyone, Longfellow,” Ticknor apologized. “But shall I give you this advice? You are not after a Lucifer—that is not the culprit you describe. Lucifer is pure dumbness when Dante finally meets him in frozen Cocytus, sobbing and mute. You see, that is how Dante triumphs over Milton—we long for Lucifer to be astounding and clever so we may defeat him, but Dante makes it more difficult. No. You are after Dante—it is Dante who decides who should be punished and where they go, what torments they suffer. It is the poet who takes those measures, yet by making himself the journeyer, he tries to make us forget: We think he too is another innocent witness to God’s work.”
Meanwhile in Cambridge, James Russell Lowell saw ghosts.
When he was in his easy chair with winter light streaming through, he had a distinct vision of the face of Maria, his first love, and was drawn to her by the resemblance. “By and by,” he kept repeating. “By and by.” She was sitting with Walter on her knee, and she said reassuringly to Lowell, “See what a fine, strong boy he is grown into.”
Fanny Lowell told him that he seemed to be entranced, and she insisted that Lowell take to bed. She would fetch a doctor, or Dr. Holmes if he liked. But Lowell ignored her, because he felt so happy; he left Elmwood by the back way. He thought of how his poor mother, in the asylum, used to promise him that she was most content during her fits. Dante had said that the greatest sorrow was remembering past happiness, but Dante was wrong on that formulation—dead wrong, thought Lowell. There are no happinesses like our sad, regretful ones. Joy and sorrow were sisters, and very like each other too, as Holmes had said, or else both would not bring tears as they equally did. Lowell’s poor baby son, Walter, Maria’s last dead child, his rightful heir, seemed palpable to him as he walked the streets trying to think of anything, anything but sweet Maria, anything. But Walter’s ghostly presence was not so much an image now as a babbling feeling that shadowed him, that was in him, as a pregnant woman feels life pressing within her stomach. He also thought he saw Pietro Bachi passing him on the street, saluting, taunting as if to say, “I shall always be here to remind you of failure.” You’ve never fought for anything, Lowell.
“You’re not here!” Lowell muttered, and a thought rang in his head: If he had not initially been so certain of Bachi’s guilt, if he possessed a measure of Holmes’s nervous skepticism, they might have found the murderer and Phineas Jennison might be alive. And then, before he could ask for a glass of water from one of the street’s storekeepers, he saw ahead of him a shining white coat and tall white silk hat gliding joyfully away on the strength of a gold-trimmed walking stick.
Phineas Jennison.
Lowell rubbed his eyes, conscious enough of his state of mind to distrust his eyes, but he could see Jennison bumping shoulders with some passersby while others avoided him with strange looks. He was corporeal. Flesh and blood.
He was alive…
Jennison! Lowell tried to cry out but was too parched. The sight told him to run and at the same time tied his legs. “Oh, Jennison!” At the same time as he found his strong voice, his eyes began to pump tears. “Phinny, Phinny, I’m here, I’m here! Jemmy Lowell, you see? I haven’t lost you yet!”
Lowell rushed through pedestrians and spun Jennison around by the shoulder. But the hybrid that faced him was cruel. It was Phineas Jennison’s tailor-made hat and coat, his brilliant walking stick, but stuck inside them was an old man in tattered vests, face smeared with dirt, unshaven and misshapen. He was shaking in Lowell’s grasp.
“Jennison,” Lowell said.
“Don’t turn me in, sir. I needed to stay warm…” The man explained: He was the vagrant who had discovered Jennison’s body after swimming to the abandoned fort from a nearby island occupied by an almshouse. He had found some beautiful clothes folded neatly in a pile on the floor of the storage room where Jennison’s body hung and had helped himself to a few items.
Lowell remembered and felt sharply the solitary maggot now removed from him, alone on its steep, savage path, eating into his insides. He felt a hole had been left, releasing everything that was caught up in his gut.
Harvard Yard was gagged with snow. Fruitlessly, Lowell searched the campus for Edward Sheldon. Lowell had sent him a letter on Thursday evening, after seeing Sheldon with the phantom, demanding the student’s immediate presence at Elmwood. But Sheldon had not responded. Several students who knew Sheldon said they had not seen him in a few days. Some students passing Lowell reminded him of his lecture, for which he was late. When he entered his lecture room in University Hall, a spacious room formerly housing the College chapel, he gave his usual greeting. “Gentlemen and fellow students…” This was followed by the usual practiced laugh of students. Fellow sinners–that’s how the Congregationalist ministers from his childhood used to begin. His father, to a child the voice of God. Holmes’s father, too. Fellow sinners. Nothing could shake Lowell’s father’s sincere piety, his trust in a God who shared his strength.
“Am I the right sort of man to guide ingenuous youth? Not a bit of it!” Lowell heard himself speak these words a third of the way through a lecture on Don Quixote. “And then, on the other hand,” he speculated, “my being a professor isn’t good for me—dampens my gunpowder, as it were, so my mind, when it takes fire at all, crawls off in an unwilling fuse instead of leaping to meet the first spark.”
Two concerned students tried to take him by the arm when he almost fell over. Lowell wobbled to the window and extended his head outside, eyes closed. Instead of feeling the cool brush of air he hoped for, there was an unexpected stroke of heat, as though Hell were tickling his nose and cheeks. He rubbed his mustache tusks, and they felt warm and moist too. Opening his eyes, he saw a triangle of flames down below. Lowell scrambled out of the classroom and down the stone stairs of University Hall. Down in Harvard Yard, a bonfire crackled voraciously.
Surrounding it, a semicircle of august men stared down at the flames with great attention. They were feeding books from a large pile to the fire. There were local Unitarian and Congregationalist ministers, fellows from the Harvard Corporation, and a few representatives of the Harvard Board of Overseers. One picked up a pamphlet, crushed it, and flung it like a ball. Everyone cheered as it hit the flames. Rushing forward, Lowell got down on one knee and pulled it out. The cover was too charred to read, so he opened the seared title page: In Defense of Charles Darwin and His Evolutionary Theory.
Lowell couldn’t hold it any longer. Professor Louis Agassiz stood across from him on the other side of the fire, his face blurred and bent by fumes. The scientist waved amiably with both hands. “How fares your leg, Mr. Lowell? Ah, this—this is a must, Mr. Lowell, though a peety to waste good paper.”
From a steam-filled window of the grotesquely Gothic granite Gore Hall, the College library, Dr. Augustus Manning, treasurer of the Corporation, looked down over the scene. Lowell rushed toward the massive entrance and through the nave, thankful for the composure and reason that came with each giant tread. No candles or gaslights were permitted in Gore Hall because of the danger of fire, so the library alcoves and the books were dim as the winter.
“Manning!” Lowell bellowed, educing a reprimand from the librarian.
Manning lurked on the platform above the reading room, gathering several books. “You have a lecture now, Professor Lowell. Leaving the students unsupervised shan’t be deemed acceptable conduct by the Harvard Corporation.”
Lowell had to wipe his face with a handkerchief before climbing to the platform. “You dare burn books in an institution of learning!” The copper tubes of Gore Hall’s pioneering heating system always leaked steam, filling the library with billowing vapor that condensed into hot droplets on the windows, the books, and the students.
“The religious world owes us, and owes especially your friend Professor Agassiz, a debt of gratitude for triumphantly combating the monstrous teaching that we are descended from monkeys, Professor. Your father certainly would have agreed.”
“Agassiz is too smart,” Lowell said as he reached the top of the platform, breaking through the vapor. “He shall abandon you yet—count on it! Nothing that keeps thought out will ever be safe from thought!”
Manning smiled, and his smile seemed to cut inward into his head. “Do you know, I raised a hundred thousand dollars for Agassiz’s museum through the Corporation. I daresay Agassiz will go exactly where I tell him.”
“What is it, Manning? What makes you hate other men’s ideas?”
Manning looked at Lowell sideways. As he answered, he lost the tight control of his voice. “We have been a noble country, with a simplicity of morals and justice, the last orphan child of the great Roman republic. Our world is strangled and demolished by infiltrators, newfangled notions of immorality coming in with every foreigner and every new idea against all the principles America was built upon. You see it yourself, Professor. Do you think we could have warred against ourselves twenty years ago? We have been poisoned. The war, our war, is far from over. It is just beginning. We have released demons into the very air we breathe. Revolutions, murders, thievery begin in our souls and move into the streets and our houses.” This was the closest to being emotional that Lowell had ever seen Manning. “Chief Justice Healey was in my graduating class, Lowell—he was one of our finest overseers—and now he has been done in by some mere beast whose only knowledge is the knowledge of death! The minds in Boston are under constant assault. Harvard is the last fortress for the protection of our sublimity. And that is under my charge!”
Manning capped his sentiment: “You, Professor, have the luxury of rebellion only in absence of responsibility. You are truly a poet.”
Lowell felt himself standing erect for the first time since Phineas Jennison’s death. This gave him a rush of new strength. “We put a race of men in chains a hundred years ago, and there began the war. America will continue to grow no matter how many minds you chain up now, Manning. I know you threatened Oscar Houghton that if he published Longfellow’s Dante translation there would be consequences.”
Manning returned to the window and watched the orange fire. “And so there shall be, Professor Lowell. Italy is a world of the worst passions and loosest morals. And I welcome you to donate some copies of their Dante to Gore Hall, as some foolcap scientist did those Darwin books. That fire is where it will be swallowed up—an example to all who try to turn our institution into a shelter for ideas of filthy violence.”
“Never shall I allow you,” Lowell responded. “Dante is the first Christian poet, the first one whose whole system of thought is colored by a purely Christian theology. But the poem comes nearer to us than this. It is the real history of a brother man, of a tempted, purified, and at last triumphant human soul; it teaches the benign ministry of sorrow. His is the first keel that ever ventured into the silent sea of human consciousness to find a new world of poetry. He held heartbreak at bay for twenty years, and would not let himself die until he had done his task. Neither shall Longfellow. Neither shall I.”
Lowell turned and started to descend.
“Three cheers, Professor.” From the platform, Manning glared impassively. “But perhaps not everyone shares the same views. I received a peculiar visit from a policeman, a Patrolman Rey. He inquired after your work on Dante. Did not explain why, and he left abruptly. Can you tell me why your work attracts the police to our revered ‘institution of learning’?”
Lowell stopped and looked back toward Manning.
Manning steepled his long fingers above his breastbone. “Some sensible men will rise up from your circle to betray you, Lowell—I promise that. No congregation of insurgents can stand together for long. If Mr. Houghton shall not cooperate to stop you, someone else will. Dr. Holmes, for instance.”
Lowell wanted to leave, but he waited for more.
“I warned him many months ago to disassociate himself from your translation project or suffer severe damage to his reputation. What do you think he did?”
Lowell shook his head.
“He called on me at home and confided in me that he agreed with my assessment.”
“You lie, Manning!”
“Oh, so Dr. Holmes has remained dedicated to the cause?” he asked as though he knew much more than Lowell could imagine.
Lowell bit his quivering lip.
Manning shook his head and smiled. “The miserable little manikin is your Benedict Arnold awaiting instructions, Professor Lowell.”
“Believe that when I am once a man’s friend I am always so—nor is it so very hard to bring me to it. And though a man may enjoy himself in being my enemy, he cannot make me his for longer than I wish. Good afternoon.” Lowell had a way of leaving a conversation with the other person needing more from him.
Manning shadowed Lowell down to the reading room and caught him by the arm. “I do not understand how you can put your good name, everything you’ve worked for your whole life, on the line for something like this, Professor.” Lowell jerked away. “But don’t you wish to heaven you could, Manning?” He returned to his class in time to dismiss his students.
If the murderer had somehow been monitoring Longfellow’s translation and was racing them to completion, the Dante Club had little choice but to complete the thirteen remaining Inferno cantos with the utmost speed. They agreed to divide into two smaller camps: a company of investigators and a company of translators.
Lowell and Fields would labor in reviewing their evidence while Longfellow and George Washington Greene toiled over the translation in the study. Fields had informed Greene, to the old minister’s great delight, that the translation had been placed on a strict schedule, in view of its immediate completion: There were nine previously unreviewed cantos, one partially translated, and two with which Longfellow was not fully satisfied. Longfellow’s servant, Peter, would deliver the proofs to Riverside as Longfellow finished and take Trap for his constitutionals while doing so.
“It makes no sense!”
“Then move on from it, Lowell,” said Fields from his place in the library’s deep armchair, which had once belonged to Longfellow’s grandfather, a great Revolutionary War general. He watched Lowell carefully. “Sit down. Your face is bright red. Have you slept at all lately?”
Lowell ignored him. “What would qualify Jennison as a Schismatic? Particularly in that pouch of Hell, each of the shades Dante chooses to single out is unequivocally emblematic of the sin.”
“Until we find out why Lucifer would have chosen Jennison, we must cull what we can from the details of the murder,” said Fields.
“Well, it confirms Lucifer’s strength. Jennison had climbed with the Adirondack Club. He was a sportsman and a hunter, yet our Lucifer grabs him and chops him up with ease.”
“No doubt he took him at the point of a weapon,” said Fields. “The strongest man alive may fall to fear of a gun, Lowell. We know also that our killer is elusive. Patrolmen were stationed on every street in the area, at all hours, since the night Talbot was killed. And Lucifer’s great attention to the details of Dante’s canto—this too is certain.”
“Any moment as we speak,” said Lowell absently, “any moment as Longfellow translates a new verse in the next room, there could be another murder and we will have been powerless to stop it.”
“Three murders and not a single witness. Precisely timed with our translations. What shall we do, roam the streets and wait? If I were a less educated man, I might begin to think it’s a genuine evil spirit thrust upon us.”
“We must narrow our focus to the murders’ relationship with our club,” Lowell said. “Let us concentrate on tracking all those who might somehow know of the translation schedule.” As Lowell flipped through their investigative notebook, he absently stroked one of the library’s collectibles, a cannonball fired by the British onto Boston against General Washington’s troops.
They heard another knock at the front door but ignored it.
“I have sent a note to Houghton asking that he ensure that no proofs from Longfellow’s translation have been removed from Riverside,” Fields told Lowell. “We know all the killings were taken from cantos that at the time were not yet translated by our club. Longfellow must continue to hand in the proofs to the presses as if all were normal. In the meantime, what of young Sheldon?”
Lowell frowned. “He has not yet replied and has been seen nowhere on campus. He is the only one who can tell us about that phantom I saw him talking with, with Bachi gone.”
Fields stood up and leaned down next to Lowell. “You are very certain you saw this ‘phantom’ yesterday, Jamey?” he asked.
Lowell was surprised. “What do you mean, Fields? I told you already—I saw him watching me in Harvard Yard, and then another time waiting for Bachi. And then again in a heated exchange with Edward Sheldon.”
Fields couldn’t help but cringe. “It is only that we are all under much apprehension, much anxiety of the mind, my dear Lowell. My nights are passed in uneasy snatches of sleep as well.”
Lowell slammed down the notebook he was reviewing. “Are you saying I’ve imagined him?”
“You told me yourself that you thought you saw Jennison today, and Bachi, and your first wife, and then your dead son. For Heaven’s sake!” Fields shouted.
Lowell’s lips quivered. “Now look here, Fields. That is the last turn of the thumbscrew—”
“Pray calm yourself, Lowell. I didn’t mean to raise my voice. I didn’t mean that.”
“I suppose you should know better than us what we should be doing. We are merely poets after all! I suppose you should know precisely how someone has traced our translation schedule!”
“Now what could that imply, Mr. Lowell?”
“Simply this: Who besides us is intimately aware of the activities of our Dante Club? The printer’s devils, the plate makers, the binders—all of them aligned with Ticknor and Fields?”
“I say!” Fields was flabbergasted. “Don’t turn the tables on me!”
The door connecting the library to the study opened.
“Gentlemen, I’m afraid I must interrupt,” Longfellow said as he brought in Nicholas Rey.
A look of horror ran across the faces of Lowell and Fields. Lowell blurted out a litany of reasons why Rey could not turn them in.
Longfellow merely smiled.
“Professor Lowell,” Rey said. “Please, I’m here to ask you gentlemen for leave to assist you now.”
Immediately, Lowell and Fields forgot their argument and greeted Rey excitedly.
“Now, understand, I am doing this to stop the killing,” Rey made clear. “Nothing else.”
“That is not our only goal,” said Lowell after a long pause. “But we cannot complete this without some assistance, and neither can you. This scoundrel has left the sign of Dante on everything he touches, and it is downright deadly for you to take a step in his direction without a translator by your side.”
Leaving them in the library, Longfellow returned to the study. He and Greene were on their third canto of the day, having started at six in the morning and worked through the high hump of noontime. Longfellow had written Holmes a note asking that he aid in the translating, but received no response from 21 Charles. Longfellow had asked Fields whether Lowell could be convinced to reconcile with Holmes, but Fields recommended giving both time to calm themselves.
Throughout the day, Longfellow had to turn away an inordinate number of odd requests from the usual assortment of people who came to call. A Westerner brought an “order” for a poem that he wished Longfellow to write about birds, for which he would pay roundly. One woman, a regular caller, brought baggage to the door, explaining that she was Longfellow’s wife, who had returned home. A purportedly wounded soldier came to beg money; Longfellow felt sorry and gave him a small amount.
“Why, Longfellow, that man’s ‘stump’ was merely his arm tucked into his shirt!” Greene said after Longfellow had closed the door.
“Yes, I know,” Longfellow replied as he returned to his chair. “But, my dear Greene, who will be kind to him if I am not?”
Longfellow reopened his materials to Inferno, Canto Five, of which he had postponed completion for many months. This was the circle of the Lustful. There, unceasing winds toss the sinners aimlessly, just as their unrestrained wantonness tossed them about aimlessly in life. The pilgrim asks to speak with Francesca, a beautiful young woman who had been killed when her husband found her embracing his brother, Paolo. She, with the silent spirit of her illicit lover beside her, floats to Dante’s side.
“Francesca is not content to suggest that she and Paolo simply yielded themselves to their passions as she tells her story weeping to Dante,” Greene remarked.
“Right,” Longfellow said. “She tells Dante that they were reading of Guinevere and Lancelot’s kiss when their eyes met over the book, and she says coyly, That day we read no further.’ Paolo takes her in his arms and kisses her, yet Francesca places the blame for their transgression not on him but on the book that drew them together. The writer of the romance is their betrayer.”
Greene closed his eyes, but not because he was asleep, as he so often was during their meetings. Greene believed a translator should forget himself in the author, and this is what he did in trying to help Longfellow. “And so they receive their perfect punishment—to be together forever but never to kiss again or to feel the excitement of courtship, only to feel torment side by side.”
As they talked, Longfellow saw the golden locks and serious face of Edith leaning into the study. After her father’s glance, the girl stole into the hall.
Longfellow suggested to Greene that they pause. The men in the library had also stopped their discussions so that Rey could examine the investigative journal Longfellow had been keeping. Greene stretched his legs in the garden.
As Longfellow put some books away, his thoughts traveled to other times in the house, times before his own. In this study, General Nathanael Greene, grandfather of their own Greene, had discussed strategy with General George Washington when news came of the British arrival, sending all the generals in the room rushing to find their wigs. In this study, too, according to one of Greene’s histories, Benedict Arnold had lowered himself to one knee and sworn his allegiance. Putting this last episode of the history of his house out of his mind, Longfellow went into the parlor, where he found his daughter Edith curled up in a Louis XVI armchair. Her chair was pulled close to the marble bust of her mother, Fanny’s creamy countenance always there when the girl needed her. Longfellow could never look at a likeness of his wife without the thrill of pleasure that had come over him from the earliest days of their awkward courtship. Fanny had never left a room without leaving him with the feeling that something of the light went with her.
Edith’s neck curved like a swan’s to hide her face. “Well, dear heart.” Longfellow smiled gently. “How is my little darling this afternoon?”
“I’m sorry for spying, Papa. I wished to ask you something and could not help but listen. That poem,” she said, timid but probing, “speaks of the saddest things.”
“Yes. Sometimes the Muse calls for that. It is the poet’s duty to tell of our most difficult times with equal honesty as we tell of the gay times, Edie, for only in coming through the darkest moments, sometimes, is light found. Thus does Dante.”
“That man and woman in the poem, why must you punish them so for loving each other?” A tear blotted her sky-blue eyes.
Longfellow sat down on the chair, rested her on his knees, and made her a throne of his arms. “The poet of that work was a gentleman christened Durante but changed in childish playfulness to Dante. He lived some six hundred years ago. He was struck by love himself—that is why he writes so. You have noticed the marble statuette above my study mirror?”
Edith nodded.
“Well, that’s Signor Dante.”
“That man? He looks to have the whole world’s weight on his mind.”
“Yes.” Longfellow smiled. “And deeply in love with a girl he met long ago, when she was, oh, not much younger than you, my darling—about little Panzie’s age—Beatrice Portinari. She was nine when he first saw her, at a festival in Florence.”
“Beatrice,” Edith said, imagining the spelling of the word and considering the dolls for whom she had not yet found a name.
“Bice—that is what her friends called her. But never Dante. He only called her by her full name, Beatrice. When she came near, such modesty took possession of his heart that he could not raise his eyes or return her salutation. Other times, he would ready himself to speak and she would simply walk by, barely noticing him. He would hear the townspeople whisper of her, ‘This is no mortal. She is one of God’s blessed.’ “
“They said that of her?”
Longfellow laughed lightly. “Well, that is what Dante heard, for he was deeply in love, and when you are in love, you hear townspeople praising the one you praise.”
“Did Dante ask for her hand?” Edith inquired hopefully.
“No. She only spoke to him once, to say hello. Beatrice married another Florentine. Then she became sick with a fever and died. Dante married another woman and they started a family. But he never forgot his love. He even named his daughter Beatrice.”
“Wasn’t his wife angry?” the little girl asked indignantly.
Longfellow reached for one of Fanny’s soft brushes and ran it through Edith’s hair. “We don’t know much about Donna Gemma. But we do know that when the poet met with some troubles in the middle of his life, he had a vision that Beatrice, from her home in Heaven, sent a guide to help him pass through a very dark place to reach her again. When Dante trembles at the idea of this trial, his guide reminds him: ‘When you see her beauteous eyes again, you will know your life’s journey once more.’ You understand, dear?”
“But why did he love Beatrice so much if he never spoke with her?”
Longfellow continued brushing, surprised by the difficulty of the question. “He once said, dear, that she excited such feelings in him that he could not find any words to describe them. For Dante, the poet that he was, what could capture him more than a feeling that defied his rhymes?”
Then, he recited softly, caressing her hair with the brush, “ ‘You, my little girl, Are better than all the ballads / That ever were sung or said; / For ye are a living poem, /And all the rest are dead.’ “
The poem produced its usual smile from the recipient, who then left her father to his thoughts. Following the sound of Edith’s footsteps up the stairs, Longfellow remained in the warm shadow of the creamy marble bust, suffused with his daughter’s sadness.
“Ah, there you are.” Greene appeared in the parlor, his arms out wide either side. “I believe I dozed off on your garden bench. No matter, I’m quite ready to return to our cantos! Say, where have Lowell and Fields disappeared?”
“Out for a ramble, I believe.” Lowell had apologized to Fields for growing warm, and they had set off to get some air.
Longfellow realized how long he had been sitting. His joints clicked audibly when he stirred from his chair.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, looking at the watch he removed from his waistcoat, “they’ve been gone for some time.”
Fields tried keeping up with Lowell’s long strides on their way down Brattle Street.
“Perhaps we should return now, Lowell.”
Fields was thankful when Lowell came to an abrupt stop. But the poet was staring ahead with a frightful look. Without warning, he yanked Fields behind the trunk of an elm. He whispered to look ahead. Fields watched across the way as a tall figure in a bowler hat and checkered waistcoat turned a corner.
“Lowell, calm down! Who is he?” asked Fields.
“Merely the man I saw watching me in Harvard Yard! And then meeting Bachi! And then again in heated talk with Edward Sheldon!”
“Your phantom?”
Lowell nodded triumphantly.
They followed surreptitiously, Lowell directing his publisher to keep a distance from the stranger, who was turning onto a side street.
“Daughter of Eve! He’s heading for your house!” said Fields. The stranger started through the white fence of Elmwood. “Lowell, we must go speak with him.”
“And let him have the upper hand? I have a much better plan for this blackguard,” said Lowell, leading Fields around the carriage house and barn and through the back entrance into Elmwood. Lowell ordered his chambermaid to welcome the visitor who was about to ring at the front door. She was to bring him to a specified room on the third floor of the mansion, then to close the door. Lowell snatched his hunting rifle from the library, checked it, and brought Fields up the narrow servants’ stairs in the back.
“Jamey! What in God’s name do you think you’re going to do?”
“I’m going to see to it that this phantom does not slip away this time—not until I am satisfied with what we know,” said Lowell.
“Has your knot come loose? We’ll send for Rey instead.”
Lowell’s bright brown eyes flared gray. “Jennison was my friend. He supped in this very house—there, in my dining room, where he took my napkins to his lips and drank from my wineglasses. Now he’s cut to pieces! I refuse to float timidly around the truth any longer, Fields!”
The room at the top of the stairs, Lowell’s childhood bedroom, was unused and unheated. From the window of his boyhood garret, the view in winter was a wide one, taking in even a part of Boston. Now, Lowell looked out and could see the familiar long curve of the Charles and the wide fields between Elmwood and Cambridge, the flat marshes beyond the river smooth and silent with glittering snow.
“Lowell, you’ll kill someone with that! As your publisher, I order you to put that gun away at once!”
Lowell put his hand over Fields’s mouth and gestured at the closed door to watch for any movement. Several minutes of silence passed before the two scholars, squatting behind a sofa, heard the tread of the maid leading the guest up the front stairs. She did as instructed, showing the caller into the chamber and immediately closing the door behind him.
“Hullo?” said the man to the empty, morbidly cold room. “What kind of parlor is this? What’s the meaning of this?”
Lowell rose up from his place behind the sofa, aiming his rifle squarely at the man’s checkered waistcoat.
The stranger gasped. He thrust his hand into his frock coat and drew out a revolver, pointing it at the barrel of Lowell’s rifle.
The poet did not flinch.
The stranger’s right hand shook violently, the excess leather of his gloved finger rubbing the trigger of his revolver.
Lowell, across the room, raised the rifle above his walrus-tusk mustache, which showed itself a dark black in the insufficient light, and closed one eye, looking with the other straight down the nose of the rifle. He spoke through clenched teeth. “Try me, and whatever happens, you shall lose. Either you send us to Heaven,” he added as he cocked his gun, “or we shall send you to Hell.”
The stranger held out his revolver for another moment and then flung it down to the rug. “This job ain’t worth such bosh!”
“Collect his pistol please, Mr. Fields,” Lowell said to his publisher, as if this were their daily occupation. “Now, you rascal, you’ll tell us who you are and what you have come for. Tell us what you have to do with Pietro Bachi and why Mr. Sheldon was giving you orders on the street. And tell me why you’re in my house!”
Fields lifted the gun from the floor.
“Put up your weapon, Professor, or I say nothing,” the man said.
“Do listen to him, Lowell,” Fields whispered, to the satisfaction of the third party.
Lowell lowered his gun. “Very well, but I pray for your own sake that you are straight with us.” He carried over a chair for their hostage, who repeatedly pronounced the whole scene to be “bosh.”
“I don’t believe we had the chance to be presented before you put a rifle to my head,” the visitor said. “I’m Simon Camp, a detective from the Pinkerton Agency. I was hired by Dr. Augustus Manning of Harvard College.”
“Dr. Manning!” Lowell cried. “For what purpose?”
“He wished me to look into these courses taught on this Dante character, to see whether it could be demonstrated as likely to produce a ‘pernicious effect’ on the students. I am to look into the matter and report back my findings.”
“And what have you found?”
“Pinkerton assigns me the whole Boston area. This trifling case wasn’t my highest priority, Professor, but I’ve done my fair share of work. I did call on one of the old teachers, a Mr. Bakee, to meet me on campus,” said Camp. “I interviewed several students, too. That insolent young man Mr. Sheldon was not giving orders to me, Professor. He was telling me what to do with my questions, and his language was a sight too smart to repeat in the company of such fine velvet-collared coats.”
“What did the others say?” Lowell demanded.
Camp scoffed. “My work is confidential, Professor. But I did think it was time I speak to you face-to-face, ask your own opinion on this Dante. That is why I’ve come here today to your house. And what a welcome!”
Fields squinted in confusion. “Did Manning send you to speak to Lowell directly?”
“I am not under his wing, sir. This is my case. I make my own judgments,” Camp answered haughtily. “You’re just fortunate I’ve slowed up on my trigger finger, Professor Lowell.”
“Oh, what a row I shall call down on Manning!” Lowell jumped up and leaned over Simon Camp. “You came here to see what I say, did you, sir? You shall cease with this witch-hunt at once! That’s what I say!”
“I don’t care a brass farthing, Professor!” Camp laughed in his face. “This is the case I have been given, and I shall not stand down for anyone—not for that Harvard swell and not for an old cuss like you! You may shoot me down if you like, but I take my cases to the end!” He paused, then added, “I am a professional.”
With Camp’s careless inflection on this last word, Fields seemed to know at once what he had come for. “Perhaps we can work something else out,” the publisher said, removing some gold pieces from his wallet. “What say you enter an indefinite respite from this case, Mr. Camp?”
Fields dropped several coins into Camp’s open hand. The detective waited patiently, and Fields dropped two more, prompting a stiff smile. “And my gun?”
Fields returned the revolver.
“I daresay, gentlemen, now and then a case works out for everyone involved.” Simon Camp bowed and made his way down the front stairs.
“To have to pay off a man such as that!” Lowell said. “Now, how did you know he would take that, Fields?”
“Bill Ticknor always said people like the feel of gold in their hands,” Fields remarked.
His face pressed against his garret window, Lowell watched with steady anger as Simon Camp crossed the brick footpath to the gates, happy-go-lucky as could be, jiggling the gold pieces, staining Elmwood with his snow prints.
That night, Lowell, overcome with exhaustion, sat still as a statue in his music room. Before entering it, he had hesitated in the doorway, as though he would find the real owner of the room sitting in his chair before the fire.
Mabel peered in from the archway. “Father? Something is the matter. I wish you would speak about it with me.”
Bess, the Newfoundland pup, galloped in and licked Lowell’s hand. He smiled, but it saddened him beyond measure to recall the lethargic greetings of Argus, their old Newfoundland, who had ingested a fatal amount of poison from a neighboring farm.
Mabel pulled Bess away to try to maintain some seriousness. “Father,” she said. “We’ve spent so little time together recently. I know…” She restrained herself from completing her thought.
“What’s that?” Lowell asked. “You know what, Mab?”
“I know something’s troubling you and gives you no peace.”
He grabbed her hand lovingly. “I am tired, my dear Hopkins.” That had always been Lowell’s name for her. “I shall go to bed and feel better. You’re a very good girl, my dear. Now, salute your progenitor.”
She complied by giving him a mechanical kiss on his cheek.
Upstairs in his bedchamber, Lowell plowed his face into his lotus-leaf pillow, not looking at his wife. But soon he tucked his head in Fanny Lowell’s lap and cried without pause for nearly a half-hour, every emotion he had ever known coursing through and spilling out into his brain; and he could see projected on the closed lids of his eyes Holmes, devastated, sprawled on the floor of the Corner and the carved-up Phineas Jennison crying out for Lowell to save him, to deliver him from Dante.
Fanny knew her husband would not talk about what was upsetting him, so she just ran a hand through his warm auburn hair and waited for him to rock himself to sleep amidst his sobs.
“Lowell. Lowell. Please, Lowell. Wake up. Wake up.”
As Lowell’s eyes creaked open, he was stunned by the sunlight. “What, what is it? Fields?”
Fields sat at the edge of the bed, a folded newspaper gripped close to his chest.
“All right, Fields?”
“All wrong. It’s noon, Jamey. Fanny says you’ve been sleeping like a top all day—turning round and round. Are you unwell?”
“I feel much better.” Lowell focused immediately on the object that Fields’s hands seemed to want to hide from his view. “Something’s happened, hasn’t it?”
Fields said bleakly, “I used to think I knew just how to deal with any situation. Now I’m as rusty as an old nail, Lowell. Why, look at me, won’t you? I’ve grown so terribly fat that my oldest creditors would hardly know me.”
“Fields, please…”
“I need you to be stronger than I am, Lowell. For Longfellow, we must…”
“Another murder?”
Fields passed him the newspaper. “Not yet. Lucifer has been arrested.”
The sweat box in the Central Station was three and a half feet wide and seven feet long. The inside door was iron. On the outside was another door, of solid oak. When this second door was closed, the cell became a dungeon, without the slightest trace of or hope for light. A prisoner could be kept inside for days at a time, until he could no longer endure the darkness and would do whatever he was asked.
Willard Burndy, Boston’s second-best safecracker behind Langdon W. Peaslee, heard a key turning in the oak door and a blinding plane of gaslight stunned him. “Keep me here ten year an’ a day, grunter! I ain’t pleadin’ to no murders I didn’t pull!”
“Cheese it, Burndy,” the guard snapped.
“I swear, ‘pon my honor…”
“Upon your-what?” The guard laughed.
“Upon the honor of a gentleman!”
Willard Burndy was led in shackles through the hall. The watching eyes of those in the other cells knew Burndy by name if not by his appearance. A Southerner who had moved to New York to reap the wartime affluence in the North, Burndy had migrated to Boston after a long stretch in the New York Tombs. Burndy gradually learned that among the ranks of the underworld, he had earned a reputation for targeting the widows of wealthy Brahmins, a pattern that he himself had not even noticed. He had little desire to be known as an assailant of old fossocks. He had never considered himself a louse. Burndy had been quite cooperative whenever a reward was offered for stolen heirlooms and jewelry, returning a portion of the goods to a fair-minded detective in return for some of the cash.
Now, a guard twisted and pulled Burndy into a room and then pushed him down into a chair. He was a red-faced, wild-haired man with so many lines crisscrossing his face that he resembled a Thomas Nast caricature.
“What’s your game?” Burndy drawled to the man sitting across from him. “I would extend a hand, but you see I’m barnacled. Hold… I read about you. The first Negro policeman. An army hero in the war. You was at the show-up when that vag jumped out the window!” Burndy laughed at the memory of the broken leaper.
“The district attorney wants you to hang,” Rey said quietly, tearing the smile off Burndy’s face. “The die is cast. If you know why you’re here, tell me.”
“My game is safe-blowing. The best in Boston, I say, better than that dog nipper Langdon Peaslee on any day! But I didn’t kill no beak, and I didn’t jam no brother of the cloth neither! I’ve got Squire Howe coming in from New York and, you’ll see, I’ll beat this in the courts!”
“Why are you here, Burndy?” Rey asked.
“Those fakers, the detectives, they’re planting evidence at every stop!”
Rey knew this was likely. “Two witnesses saw you the night Talbot’s house was robbed, the day before he was murdered, looking into the reverend’s house. They’re legitimate, aren’t they? That’s why Detective Henshaw chose you. You have just enough sin in you to take the blame.”
Burndy was about to refute this, but hesitated. “Why should I trust a moke?”
“I want you to look at something,” Rey said, watching carefully. “It may help you, if you can understand.” He passed a sealed envelope across the table.
Despite his shackles, Burndy managed to tear open the envelope with his teeth and unfold the thrice-folded fine-quality stationery. He examined it for a few seconds before ripping it in two in wild frustration, kicking wildly and banging his head against the wall and table in a pendulum motion.
Oliver Wendell Holmes watched the newsprint curl up at the corners, slowly yielding its edges before caving into the flames.
…ustice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court found stripped with insects and in…
The doctor fed in another article. The flames rose in appreciation.
He thought about the outburst from Lowell, who was not precisely right about Holmes’s blind belief in Professor Webster fifteen years ago. True, Boston had gradually lost its faith in the disgraced medical professor, but Holmes had reason not to. He had seen Webster the day after George Parkman’s disappearance and had spoken to him about the mystery. There wasn’t the least sign of deceit in Webster’s amiable face. And Webster’s story as it later emerged was entirely consistent with the facts: Parkman had come to collect on his outstanding debt, Webster paid him, Parkman canceled the note, and Parkman departed. Holmes sent contributions to help pay for Webster’s defense team, enfolding the money in reassuring letters addressed to Mrs. Webster. Holmes testified to Webster’s sterling character and the absolute implausibility of his involvement in such a crime. He also explained to the jury that there was no method to positively say that the human remains found in Webster’s rooms belonged to Dr. Parkman—they could belong to him, yes, but they could as easily not.
It was not that Holmes lacked sympathy for the Parkmans. After all, George had been the Medical College’s greatest patron, funding its facilities on North Grove Street and even endowing the Parkman Professorship of Anatomy and Physiology, the very chair that Dr. Holmes held. Holmes had even performed a eulogy at Parkman’s memorial service. But Parkman could well have gone mad, wandering away in a fit of confusion. The man could still be alive, and here they were ready to hang one of their own on the most fantastic circumstantial evidence! Could not the janitor, fearful of losing his job after poor Webster caught him gambling, have secured bone fragments from the Medical College’s large supply and positioned them throughout Webster’s rooms to appear hidden?
Like Holmes, Webster had grown up in comfortable surroundings before attending Harvard College. The two medical men had never been particularly close. Yet from the day of Webster’s arrest, when the poor man tried to swallow poison in distress over the disgrace to his family, there was no one with whom Dr. Holmes felt a closer bond. Could it not as easily have been he who had found himself in the middle of damaging circumstances? With their short statures, full sideburns, and clean-shaven faces, the two professors were physically similar. Holmes had been certain that he would yet play some small but noteworthy role in the inevitable exoneration of his fellow lecturer.
But then they had all found themselves at the gallows. That day had seemed so remote, so impossible, so alterable during months of testimony and appeals. Most of polite Boston had remained at home, ashamed for their neighbor. Teamsters and stevedores and factory workers and launderers: They were most publicly enthused by the Brahmin’s demise and humiliation.
A heavily perspiring J. T. Fields slipped through a ring of these bystanders to reach Holmes.
“I have a driver waiting, Wendell,” said Fields. “Come home to Amelia, sit with the children.”
“Fields, don’t you see what this has come to?”
“Wendell,” Fields said, putting his hands on his author’s shoulders. “The evidence.”
The police tried closing off the area but hadn’t brought long enough ropes. Every roof and every window in the buildings crowding the Leverett Street Jail yard showed the single-minded overflow. Holmes had at that moment felt the most paralyzing urge to do more than watch. He would address the mob. Yes, he would improvise a poem proclaiming the city’s great folly. After all, was not Wendell Holmes the most celebrated toastmaster in Boston? Verses extolling Dr. Webster’s virtues began to meet piecemeal in his head. At the same time, Holmes pushed up on his toes to keep an eye on the carriage path behind Fields so that he might be the first to see the clemency papers arrive or George Parkman, the supposed murder victim, stroll into view.
“If Webster must die today,” Holmes said to his publisher, “he shan’t die without praise.” He pressed forward toward the scaffold. But as he took in the hangman’s noose, he stopped cold and emitted a choking wheeze. This was the first time he had been in sight of that unearthly loop since boyhood, when Holmes had snuck his younger brother John to Gallows Hill in Cambridge just as a condemned man was writhing in his final suffering. It was this sight, Holmes always believed, that had made him both doctor and poet.
A hush swept the crowd. Holmes locked eyes with Webster, who was ascending the platform with a wobbly step, his arm held tightly by a jailer.
As Holmes took a step backward, one of the Webster daughters appeared before him clutching an envelope to her chest.
“Oh, Marianne!” Holmes said, and hugged the little angel tight. “From the governor?”
Marianne Webster held out her delivery at arm’s length. “Father wished you to have this before he’s gone. Dr. Holmes.”
Holmes turned back to the gallows. A black hood was being fitted over Webster’s head. Holmes opened the flap of the envelope.
My dearest Wendell,
How dare I strive to express my gratitude with mere sentences for all you have done? You have believed in me without a shadow of doubt on your mind, and I shall always have that feeling to support me. You alone have remained true to my character since the police snatched me from my home, when others have one by one fallen away from my side. Imagine how it feels when those of your own society, with whom you have banqueted at table and prayed at chapel, stare at you with awful dread. When even the eyes of my own sweet daughters unwillingly reveal second thoughts about their poor Papa’s honor.
Yet for all this I am beholden to tell you, dear Holmes, that I did it. I killed Parkman and hacked up his body, then incinerated it in my laboratory furnace. Understand, I was an only child, much indulged, and I have never secured the control over my passions that I ought to have acquired early; and the consequence is—all this! All the proceedings in my case have been just, as it is just that I should die upon the scaffold in accordance with that sentence. Everybody is right and I am wrong, and I have this morning sent full and true accounts of the murder to the several newspapers and to the brave janitor whom I so shamefully accused. If the yielding up of my life to the injured law will atone, even in part, that is a consolation.
Tear this up directly without another look. You have come to watch my time pass in peace, so do not dwell on what I write so tremblingly, for I have lived with a lie in my mouth.
As the note floated down from Holmes’s hands, the metallic platform supporting the black-hooded man dropped away, hitting the scaffold with a clang. It was not so much that Holmes had no longer believed in Webster’s innocence at that moment, but rather that he knew they could have all been guilty if put in the same circumstance of desperation. As a doctor, Holmes had never stopped appreciating how roundly defective was the design of humankind.
Besides, could not there be a crime that was not a sin?
Amelia stepped into the room, smoothing her dress. She called her husband. “Wendell Holmes! I’m talking to you. I can’t understand what’s come over you lately.”
“Do you know the things put in my mind as a boy, Melia?” Holmes said as he flung into the fire a set of proof sheets he had saved from Longfellow’s Dante Club meetings.
He had kept a box of all documents related to the club: Longfellow’s proofs, his own annotations, Longfellow’s reminders for him to be there on Wednesday evenings. Holmes had thought that one day he might write a memoir of their meetings. He had mentioned this in passing once to Fields, who immediately began planning who might write a puff for Holmes’s work. Once a publisher, always a publisher. Holmes now threw another batch into the fire. “Our country-bred kitchen servants would tell me that our shed was full of demons and black devils. Another bucolic lad informed me that if I wrote my name in my own blood, the prowling agent of Satan, if not the Evil One himself, would pocket it, and from that day forth I’d become his servant.” Holmes chuckled humorlessly. “However much you educate a man out of his superstitions, he will always think as the Frenchwoman did about ghosts: Je n’y croispas, maisje les crains–I don’t believe in them, but I fear them, nevertheless.”
“You have said that men are tattooed with their special beliefs, like a South Sea Islander.”
“Did I say that, Melia?” Holmes asked, then repeated it to himself. “Graphic kind of phrase. I must have said it. Not at all the kind of phrase a woman would invent.”
“Wendell.” Amelia stamped a foot on the rug in front of her husband, who was roughly her height when stripped of his hat and boots. “If you would only explain what’s upset you, I could help you. Let me hear, dear Wendell.”
Holmes fidgeted. He did not respond.
“Have you written any new verses then? I’m waiting for more of yours to read at night, you know.”
“With all the books on our library shelves,” Holmes replied, “with Milton and Donne and Keats in all their fullness, why wait for me to do anything, my dear ‘Melia?”
She leaned forward and smiled. “I like my poets better alive than dead, Wendell.” She took his hand in hers. “Now will you tell me your troubles? Please.”
“Pardon the interruption, ma’am.” Holmes’s redheaded maid stepped to the door. She announced Dr. Holmes’s visitor. Holmes nodded hesitantly. The maid departed and brought up the new arrival.
“He’s been in his old den all day. Well, he’s in your hands now, sir!” Amelia Holmes threw up her own hands and closed the study door behind her.
“Professor Lowell.”
“Dr. Holmes.” James Russell Lowell removed his hat. “I cannot stop for very long. I just wanted to thank you for all the help you’ve given us. My apologies. Holmes, for growing warm with you. And for not helping you up when you fell on the floor. And for saying what I did…”
“No need, no need.” The doctor tossed another batch of proofs into the fire.
Lowell watched the Dante papers fight and dance against the flames, spitting out sparks as they incinerated verses.
Holmes waited halfheartedly for Lowell to shout at the spectacle, but he did not. “If I know anything, Wendell,” Lowell said, and bowed his head at the pyre, “I know it was the Comedy that lured me into whatever little learning I possess. Dante was the first poet who ever thought to make a poem wholly out of the fabric of himself—to think that not only might the story of some heroic person be epical but also that of any man, and that the way to Heaven was not outside the world but through it. Wendell, there is something I’ve always meant to say since we’ve been helping Longfellow.”
Holmes arched his unruly eyebrows.
“When I came to know you, so many years ago, perhaps my very first thought was how much you reminded me of Dante.”
“I?” Holmes asked, mocking humility. “I and Dante?” But he saw that Lowell was very serious.
“Yes, Wendell. Dante was schooled in every field of science of his day, a master of astronomy, philosophy, law, theology, and poetry. Some, you know, have even said he went through medical school and that is how he could think so much of how the human body suffers. Like you, he did everything well. Too well, as far as other people were concerned.”
“I’ve always thought I had drawn a prize, a five-dollar one at least, in the intellectual sweepstakes of life.” Holmes turned his back on the hearthstone and placed some translation proofs on his bookcase, feeling the weight of Lowell’s errand. “I may be lazy, Jamey, or indifferent or timid, but I am by no means one of those men… it is just that I believe at present we cannot prevent anything.”
“The lively pop of the cork has so much power over the imagination at first.” Lowell said, and laughed with subdued pensiveness. “I suppose for a few blessed hours in all this I forgot that I was a professor and felt as if I were something real. I confess that ‘do right though the heavens fall’ is an admirable precept until the heavens take you at your word. I know what it is to doubt, my dearest friend. But for you to give up on Dante is for all of us to do so.”
“If you could only know how Phineas Jennison remains planted in my mind’s eye… shredded and broken and… The consequences of failing this…”
“It could be the greatest calamity but one, Wendell. And that is being afraid of it,” Lowell said, and headed solemnly for the study door. “Well, I chiefly wanted to send my apologies, and Fields, of course, insisted I should. It is my happiest thought that with all the drawbacks of my temperament, I have yet to lose a real friend.” Lowell paused as he reached for the door and turned back. “And I like your lyrics. You know that, my dear Holmes.”
“Yes? Well, I thank you, but perhaps there is something too hopping about them. I suppose my nature is to snatch at all the fruits of knowledge and take a good bite out of the sunny side—and after that, let in the pigs. I am a pendulum with a very short range of oscillation.” Holmes’s gaze met his friend’s large and open eyes. “How have you been these days, Lowell?”
Lowell gave a half shrug in response.
Holmes did not let his question pass. “I won’t say to you, ‘Be of good courage,’ because men of ideas are not put down by accidents of a day or a year.”
“We all revolve around God with larger or lesser orbits, I suppose, Wendell, sometimes one half of us in the light, sometimes the other. Some people seem always in the shadow. You are one of the few people I can unbutton my heart to… Well.” The poet cleared his throat gruffly and lowered his voice. “I am due at an important conference at Castle Craigie.”
“Oh? And the arrest of Willard Burndy?” Holmes asked cautiously, with feigned disinterest, just before Lowell could exit.
“Patrolman Rey has rushed to look into it as we speak. Do you think it a farce?”
“Pure moonshine, no question!” declared Holmes. “Yet the papers say the prosecuting attorney shall seek to hang him.”
Lowell crowded his unruly waves of hair into his silk hat. “Then we have one more sinner to save.”
Holmes sat with his Dante box long after Lowell’s footsteps faded from the stairs. He continued to toss proof sheets into the fire, determined to finish the painful task, yet he could not stop reading Dante’s words as he went. At first he read with the indifference of manner one employs when reading proofs, noting details but not arrested by the emotions. Then he read them quickly and greedily, absorbing passages even as they blackened into nonexistence. His sense of discovery recalled the times he first heard Professor Ticknor asserting with such earnest prescience the impact Dante’s journey would one day have on America.
Dante and Virgil are approached by the Malebranche demons… Dante remembers, “And thus beheld I once the fearful soldiers who issued under safeguard from Caprona, seeing themselves among so many foes.”
Dante was remembering the battle of Caprona against the Pisans, in which he fought. Holmes thought of something Lowell had omitted from his list of Dante’s talents: Dante was a soldier. Like you, he did everything well. And unlike me too, thought Holmes. A soldier had to assert guilt at every step, silently and thoughtlessly. He wondered whether it had made Dante a better poet to see his friends die beside him for the soul of Florence, for some meaningless Guelf banner. Wendell Junior had been the class poet at his Harvard commencement—many said only because of the name he shared with his father—but now Holmes wondered whether Junior could still know poetry after the war. In battle, Junior had seen something that Dante had not, and it had kicked the poetry—and the poet—right out of him, leaving it only to Dr. Holmes.
Holmes flipped through the proof sheets and read for an hour. He craved the second canto of Inferno, where Virgil convinces Dante to commence his pilgrimage, but Dante’s fears for his own safety resurface. Supreme moment of courage: to face the torment of the death of others and think with clarity how each one would feel. But Holmes had already burned Longfellow’s proof sheet for that canto. He found his Italian edition of the Commedia and read: “Lo giorno se n’andava”–”Day was departing…” Dante slows his deliberation as he prepares to enter the infernal realms for the first time: “… e io sol uno”–”and only I alone…”—how lonely he felt! He has to say it three times! io, sol, uno… “m’apparecchiava a sostener la guerra, sì del cammino e si de la pietate.” Holmes couldn’t remember how Longfellow had translated this verse, so leaning on his mantelpiece, he did it himself, hearing the deliberative commentary of Lowell, Greene, Fields, and Longfellow in the humming fire. Encouraging him.
“And I alone, only me”—Holmes found that he had to speak aloud to translate—”made myself ready to sustain the battle…” No, guerra. “… to sustain the war… both of the way and likewise of the pity.”
Holmes shot up from his easy chair and raced upstairs to the third floor. “I alone, only me,” he repeated as he climbed.
Wendell Junior was debating the usefulness of metaphysics with William James, John Gray, and Minny Temple over gin toddies and cigars. It was while listening to one of James’s meandering discourses that Junior heard, faintly at first, the clip-clop of his father struggling up the stairs. Junior cringed. Father had actually seemed preoccupied with something other than himself these days—potentially something serious. James Lowell had not been around the Law School much, probably, Junior had thought, because he was involved with whatever distracted Father. At first, Junior imagined Father had ordered Lowell to keep clear of Junior, but Junior knew Lowell would not listen to his father. Nor would Father have the fire in his belly to order Lowell.
Junior shouldn’t have told Father anything of his companionship with Lowell. Of course, he had kept to himself the sudden and disruptive praise Lowell would often break into about Dr. Holmes. “He not only named the Atlantic, Junior,” Lowell said, relating the time Father suggested the name of the Atlantic Monthly, “he made it with the Autocrat.” Father’s gift for christening was not surprising—he was expert at categorizing the surface of things. How many times had Junior been compelled to listen in the presence of guests to the story of how Father had named anesthesia for the dentist who invented it? Despite all this, Junior wondered why Dr. Holmes could not have done better than Wendell Junior’s own name.
Dr. Holmes knocked as a formality, then threw himself inside with a wild glow in his eyes.
“Father. We’re a bit occupied.”
Junior remained plain-faced at the too respectful greetings of his friends.
Holmes cried, “Wendy, I must know something at once! I must know whether you understand anything of maggots.” He spoke so fast that he sounded like a buzzing bee.
Junior puffed on his cigar. Would he never grow used to his father? After thinking about it, Junior laughed loudly and his friends joined in. “Did you say maggots, Father?”
“What if it is our Lucifer sitting in that cell, playing dumb?” Fields asked anxiously.
“He didn’t understand the Italian—I saw that in his eyes,” assured Nicholas Rey. “And it infuriated him.” They were gathered in the Craigie House study. Greene, who had assisted with translating all afternoon, had been returned to his daughter’s home in Boston for the evening.
The short message on the note Rey had passed along to Willard Burndy—”a te convien tenere altro viaggio se vuo’ campar d’esto loco selvag-gio”–could be translated as “it behooves you to go by another way, if you want to escape from this savage place.” They were Virgil’s words to Dante, who was lost and threatened by beasts in the dark wilderness.
“The message was merely a last precaution. His history chimes with nothing we had come upon in our profile of the killer,” said Lowell, tapping his cigar out Longfellow’s window. “Burndy had no education. And we’ve found no other connections in any of our inquiries to any of the victims.”
“The papers made it sound like they are amassing evidence,” said Fields.
Rey nodded. “They have witnesses who saw Burndy lurking around Reverend Talbot’s house the night before he was killed, the night Talbot’s safe was robbed of the thousand dollars. These witnesses were interviewed by good patrolmen. Burndy wouldn’t talk to me very much. But this fits the detectives’ practice: They find a circumstantial fact to build their false case around. I have no doubt Langdon Peaslee is leading them by their beaks. He rids himself of his prime rival for Boston’s safes, and the detectives slip him a large part of the reward money. He tried to suggest such an arrangement with me when rewards were announced.”
“But what if we are missing something?” Fields lamented.
“Do you believe this Mr. Burndy could be responsible for the murders?” Longfellow inquired.
Fields pushed out his handsome lips and shook his head. “I suppose I only want some answers so we may return to our lives.”
Longfellow’s servant announced a Mr. Edward Sheldon of Cambridge at the door, looking for Professor Lowell.
Lowell scrambled into the front hall and led Sheldon into Longfellow’s library.
Sheldon had his hat pulled tight over his head. “I beg your pardon for bothering you here, Professor. But your note sounded urgent and at Elmwood they said you might be found here. Tell me, are we ready to start the Dante class again?” he asked with an artless smile.
“I sent that note almost a week ago now!” Lowell shouted.
“Ah well, you see… I did not get your note until today.” He looked to the floor.
“Very likely! And you’ll take off your hat when you’re in a gentleman’s house, Sheldon!” Lowell knocked away Sheldon’s hat. A purple swelling could be seen around one of his eyes, and he had a puffed jaw.
Lowell was immediately repentant. “Why, Sheldon. What has happened to you?”
“A frightful heap, sir. I was about to explain that my father sent me to recuperate with near relations in Salem. Perhaps a punishment, too, to think well of my actions,” Sheldon said with a demure smile. “That is why I did not receive your note.” Sheldon stepped into the light to collect his hat, then noticed the horror-struck look on Lowell’s face. “Oh, it’s gone down very much, Professor. My eye hardly hurts in the least.”
Lowell sat. “Tell me how this came to be, Sheldon.”
Sheldon looked down to the floor. “I couldn’t help it! You must know of this horrid fellow Simon Camp roaming around. If not, I shall tell you. He stopped me in the street. Said he was doing a survey on behalf of the Harvard faculty on whether your Dante course might produce negative repercussions on the character of its students. I almost punched him in the face, don’t you know, for such an insinuation.”
“Did Camp do this to you?” Lowell asked with a fierce tremor of paternalism.
“No, no, he slithered away as fits his type. You see, the next morning I happened upon Pliny Mead. A traitor if I’ve ever known one!”
“How so?”
“He said with pleasure how he sat down with Camp and told him of the ‘horrors’ of Dante’s spleen. I worry, Professor Lowell, that any hint of scandal would be perilous for your class. Clearly enough, the Corporation has not relented in its fight. I told Mead he’d best call on Camp and take back his awful comments, but he refused and shouted a bloody oath at me, and, well, he cursed your name, Professor, and wasn’t I mad! So we had a row right there on the old burial yard.”
Lowell smiled proudly. “You started a fight with him, Mr. Sheldon?”
“I started it, sir,” said Sheldon. He frowned, soothing his jaw with his hand. “But he finished.”
After escorting Sheldon out with abundant promises that they would begin their Dante hours again soon, Lowell rushed back toward the study, but there was another quick knock on the door.
“Blast it, Sheldon, I’ve told you we’ll meet for class any day now!” Lowell threw open the door.
In his excitement, Dr. Holmes was standing on his toes.
“Holmes?” Lowell’s laughter had such unrestrained jubilance that it brought Longfellow running into the hall. “You’ve come back to the club, Wendell! We’ve missed you like thunder!” Lowell shouted to the others in the study. “Holmes has come back!”
“Not only that, my friends,” Holmes said, stepping inside, “but I think I know where we shall find our killer.”
The rectangular shape of Longfellow’s library had made an ideal officers’ mess for General Washington’s staff and in later years provided a banquet hall for Mrs. Craigie. Now, Longfellow, Lowell, Fields, and Nicholas Rey sat at the well-polished table while Holmes circled them and explained.
“My thoughts come too quickly to govern. Only listen to all my reasons before agreeing or dissenting helter-skelter”—he said this mostly to Lowell, and everyone but Lowell understood it was meant for him—”for I believe that Dante has been telling us the truth all the while. He describes his feeling as he prepares for his first steps into Hell, trembling and insecure. ‘E io sol’ and so on. My dear Longfellow, how did you translate?”
“ And I the only one made myself ready to sustain the war. /Both of the way and likewise of the woe, /Which unerring memory shall now retrace.’ “
“Yes!” Holmes said proudly, remembering his own similar translation. This was not the time to pause on his talents, but he wondered what Longfellow would think of his rendition. “It is a war—a guerra–for the poet on two fronts. First, the hardships of the physical descent through Hell, and also the challenge to the poet to tap into his memory to turn experience into poetry. The images of Dante’s world run loose in my mind, without a halter.”
Nicholas Rey listened carefully and opened his memorandum book.
“Dante was no stranger to physical engagements of war, my dear officer,” Lowell said. “At five and twenty, the same age as many of our boys in blue, he fought at Campaldino with the Guelfs, and that same year in Caprona. Dante draws on these experiences throughout Inferno to describe the frightful torments of Hell. In the end, Dante was exiled not by his rival Ghibellines but due to an internal split among the Guelfs.”
“The aftermath of Florence’s civil wars inspires his vision of Hell and his search for redemption,” Holmes said. “Think, too, how Lucifer takes up arms against God and how in his fall from the heavens the once-brightest angel becomes the fountain of all evil from Adam down. It is Lucifer’s physical fall to earth after he is expelled from above that hollows an abyss in the ground, the cellar of earth that Dante discovers is Hell. So war created Satan. War created Hell: guerra. Dante’s choice of words is never happenstance. I shall suggest that the events of our own circumstances point overwhelmingly to a single hypothesis: Our murderer is a veteran of the war.”
“A soldier! The chief justice of our state supreme court, a prominent Unitarian preacher, a rich merchant,” Lowell said. “A defeated Reb soldier’s revenge on the instruments of our Yankee system! Of course! We’re damned fools!”
“Dante has no mechanical loyalty to one or another political label,” said Longfellow. “He is perhaps most indignant against those who shared his views but failed their obligations, the traitors—just as a Union veteran might be. Remember that each murder has shown our Lucifer’s great and natural familiarity with the layout of Boston.”
“Yes,” Holmes said impatiently. “That is precisely why my thought is not simply of a soldier but a Billy Yank. Think of our soldiers who still wear their army uniforms in the street and mart. I am often puzzled when seeing these great specimens: Has he come home again, yet still wears the vestments of the soldier? For whose war has he been commissioned now?”
“But does this fit with what we know of the murders, Wendell?” urged Fields.
“Quite neatly, I think. Start with Jennison’s murder. It occurs to me in this new light precisely the weapon that could have been used.”
Rey nodded. “A military saber.”
“Right!” Holmes said. “Just the sort of blade consistent with the injuries. Now, who is trained at such usage? A soldier. And Fort Warren, the choice of locale for that killing—a soldier who trained there or had been stationed there would know it well enough! There’s more: The deadly hominivorax maggots that feasted on Judge Healey—from somewhere outside Massachusetts, somewhere hot and swampy, Professor Agassiz insists. Perhaps brought back by a soldier as souvenirs from the deepest marshes of the South. Wendell Junior says flies and maggots were a constant presence on the battlefield and among the thousands of wounded left for a day or night.”
“Sometimes maggots would have no effect on the wounded,” Rey said. “At other times, they would seem to destroy a man, leaving the surgeons helpless.”
“Those were the hominivorax, though the war surgeons wouldn’t know them from a family of beetles. Somebody familiar with their effects on injured men brought them from the South and used them on Healey,” Holmes went on. “Now, we have again and again marveled at Lucifer’s great physical strength in carrying the bulky Judge Healey down to the riverside. But how many comrades must a soldier have carried in his arms from battle without thinking twice of it! We have also witnessed Lucifer’s easy strength in subduing Reverend Talbot, and in shredding with apparent ease the robust Jennison.”
Lowell exclaimed, “You may have found our open-sesame, Holmes!”
Holmes continued, “All the murders are acts committed by one familiar with the trappings of the siege and the kill—the wounds and suffering of battle.”
“But why should a Northern boy target his own people? Why should he target Boston?” Fields asked, feeling there was a need for someone to serve as doubter. “We were the victors. And victors for the side of right.”
“This war was like no other since the Revolution in the confusion of feelings,” Nicholas Rey said.
Longfellow added, “It was not like our country’s battle with the Indians or the Mexicans, which stand as little more than conquests. Soldiers who cared to think of why they were fighting were provided the notion of the honor of the Union, the freedom of a race of enslaved people, the restoration of proper order to the universe. Yet what do the soldiers return home to? Profiteers, who once sold shoddy rifles and uniforms, now riding in broughams down our streets and prospering in oak-fronted Beacon Hill mansions.”
“Dante,” said Lowell, “who was banished from his home, populated Hell with people of his own city, even his own family. We have left many soldiers hanging on to nothing but our stirring lyrics of morality, and bloodstained uniforms. They are exiles from their former lives—like Dante, they become parties unto themselves. And consider how close on the heels of the end of the war these murders began. Just months! Yes, it seems to fall into place, gentlemen. The war sought an abstract moral—freedom—yet the soldiers fought their battles on very specific fields and fronts, organized into regiments and companies and battalions. The very movements in Dante’s poetry have something swift, decisive, almost military in their nature.” He stood up and embraced Holmes. “This vision, my dear Wendell, is from Heaven.”
There was a collective sense of accomplishment rising in the room, and everyone waited for Longfellow’s nod, which came with a quiet smile.
“Three cheers for Holmes!” Lowell cried out.
“Why don’t you give me three times three?” Holmes asked with a whimsical pose. “I can stand it!”
Augustus Manning positioned himself over his secretary’s desk tapping his fingers on the edge. “Still, that Simon Camp has not responded to my request for an interview?”
Manning’s secretary shook his head, “No, sir. And the Marlboro Hotel says he is no longer staying with them. No forwarding address was left behind.”
Manning was livid. He had not entirely trusted the Pinkerton detective, but he had not thought he was an outright crook, either. “Do you not think it queer that first a police officer comes to ask about Lowell’s class and then the Pinkerton man I paid to find more on Dante stops responding to my calls for him?”
The secretary did not respond, but then, seeing it was expected, assented anxiously.
Manning turned and faced the window framing Harvard Hall. “Lowell has been up to something in all this, I daresay. Tell me again, Mr. Cripps. Who is enrolled in Lowell’s Dante class? Edward Sheldon and… Pliny Mead, isn’t it?”
The secretary found the answer in a sheaf of papers. “Edward Sheldon and Pliny Mead, exactly right.”
“Pliny Mead. A high scholar,” Manning said, smoothing his stiff beard.
“Well, he was, sir. But he has had a fall in the last rankings.”
Manning turned to him with great interest.
“Yes, he has dropped some twenty spots in the class,” the secretary explained, finding documentation and proudly proving the fact. “Oh yes, dropped quite precipitously, Dr. Manning! Chiefly, it seems, from Professor Lowell’s mark from last term’s course in French.”
Manning took the papers from his secretary and read them. “What a shame for our Mr. Mead,” Manning said, smiling to himself. “A terrible, terrible shame.”
Late evening in Boston, J. T. Fields called on the law offices of John Codman Ropes, a hunchbacked lawyer who had made the war of the rebellion an area of expertise after his brother perished in battle. It was said he knew more about the battles than the generals who fought them. As befitted a genuine expert, he unostentatiously answered Fields’s questions. Ropes listed many soldiers’-aid homes—charitable organizations that had been established, some at churches, others in abandoned buildings and warehouses, to feed and clothe veterans who were poor or struggling to return to civilian life. If one sought troubled soldiers, these homes would be the place to look.
“There’s nothing like a directory of their names, of course, and I’d say these poor souls cannot be discovered unless they wish to be, Mr. Fields,” Ropes said at the end of their meeting.
Fields walked briskly up Tremont Street toward the Corner. He had for weeks devoted only the fraction of his usual time to business, and worried that his ship would run aground if he were absent much longer from its tiller.
“Mr. Fields.”
“Who’s that?” Fields stopped and retraced his steps to an alleyway. “Addressing me, sir?”
He could not see the speaker in the dimming light. Fields advanced slowly between the buildings, into the smell of sewage.
“That’s right, Mr. Fields.” The tall man stepped out of the shadows and removed his hat from his gaunt head. Simon Camp, Pinkerton detective, grinned at him. “You don’t have your professor friend to wave his rifle at me this time, do you?”
“Camp! What gall you have. I’ve paid you more than I should have to go away—now, shoo.”
“You did pay me, didn’t you. To tell you the truth, I had looked at this case as an annoyance, a fly in my teacup, mere bosh. But you and your friend got me thinking. What would have swells like you so excited that you’d be willing to shell out gold so I don’t look into Professor Lowell’s little literature course? And that would cause Professor Lowell to interrogate me as though I might have shot Lincoln?”
“A man like you would never understand what literary men prize, I’m afraid,” Fields said nervously. “This is our business.”
“Oh, but I do understand. Now I understand. I remembered something about that pismire Dr. Manning. He had mentioned a policeman visiting him to ask about Professor Lowell’s Dante course. The old man was in a frenzy about it. Then I started considering: What are the Boston police busy doing of late? Well, there is the small matter of these murders going around.”
Fields tried not to show his panic. “I have appointments to attend to, Mr. Camp.”
Camp smiled blissfully. “Then I thought of that Pliny Mead boy, spilling everything on his tongue’s end about the uncivilized, gruesome punishments against humanity in that Dante poem. It started coming together for me. I called on your Mr. Mead again and asked him some specific questions. Mr. Fields,” he said, leaning forward with relish. “I know your secret.”
“Stuff and nonsense. I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about, Camp,” Fields cried.
“I know the secret of the Dante Club, Fields. I know you know the truth about these murders, and that’s why you paid me to vamoose.”
“That is wanton and malevolent libel!” Fields started out of the alley.
“Then I shall just go to the police,” Camp said coolly. “And then to the newspapermen. And on my way, I will stop in to see Dr. Manning at Harvard too—he’s been sending for me frequently anyhow. I’ll see what they make of all this ‘stuff and nonsense.’ “
Fields turned back and gave Camp a hardened stare. “If you know what you say you know, then what makes you certain we’re not the ones doing the killing, and will kill you too, Camp?”
Camp smiled. “You’re a good bluff, Fields. But you’re bookmen, and that’s all you’ll be till they change the natural order of the world.”
Fields stopped and swallowed. He looked around to make certain there were no witnesses. “What will make you leave us alone, Camp?”
“Three thousand dollars, to start—in exactly a fortnight,” Camp said.
“Never!”
“The real rewards offered for information are much larger, Mr. Fields. Maybe Burndy had nothing to do with all this. I don’t know who killed those men, and I don’t care to know. But how guilty you will look when a jury discovers you already paid me to go away when I came to ask about Dante and lured me in to pull a gun on me!”
Fields realized all at once that Camp was doing this to avenge his cowardice in the face of Lowell’s rifle. “You are a small and unclean insect,” Fields could not help saying.
Camp didn’t seem to mind. “But a trustworthy one, as long as you abide by our bargain. Even insects have debts to meet, Mr. Fields.”
Fields agreed to rendezvous with Camp at the same location in two weeks’ time.
He told the news to his friends. After their initial shock, the Dante Club members decided they were helpless to influence the outcome of Camp’s scheme.
“What’s the use?” said Holmes. “You already gave him ten gold coins, and that did no good. He’ll just keep coming with his hand out for more.”
“What Fields gave him was an appetite,” Lowell said: They could not trust that any amount of money would secure their secret. Besides, Longfellow would not hear of handing out bribes to protect Dante or themselves. Dante could have paid his way out of exile and had refused, in a letter that was still fierce after all these centuries. They promised to forget about Camp. They had to continue to vigorously pursue their military exposition of the case. That night, they pored over records from the army pension office that Rey had borrowed, and visited several soldiers’-aid homes.
Fields did not return home until nearly one in the morning, much to Annie Fields’s exasperation. Fields noticed as he entered the front hall that the flowers he sent home each day were piling up on the foyer table, pointedly un-vased. He took up the freshest of the bouquets and found Annie in the reception room. She was sitting on the blue velvet sofa, writing in her Journal of Literary Events and Glimpses of Interesting People.
“Could I honestly see you less, dear?” She did not look up, her beautiful mouth striking a pout. Her jacinth-colored hair was drawn over her ears on both sides.
“I promise things will improve. This summer—why, I shall do hardly any work in the least, and we shall spend every day in Manchester. Osgood is nearly ready to be partner. Won’t we dance on that day!”
She turned away and fixed her eyes on the gray rug. “I know your obligations. Yet I waste my substance on housekeeping, without even time with you as reward. I have hardly had an hour for study or reading except when too tired. Catherine is sick again, and so the laundress must sleep three in a bed with the upstairs maid…”
“I’m home now, my love,” he pointed out.
“No you’re not.” She gathered his coat and hat from the downstairs girl and handed them back to him.
“Dear?” Fields’s face fell.
She pulled her dressing gown tight and started upstairs. “A messenger boy from the Corner came frantically looking for you some hours ago.”
“At such a witching hour of the night?”
“He said you must go there now or it is feared the police will come first.”
Fields wanted to follow Annie upstairs but rushed to his offices on Tremont Street and found his senior clerk, J. R. Osgood, in the back room. Cecilia Emory, the front receptionist, was in a comfortable armchair, sobbing and hiding her face. Dan Teal, the night shop boy, was sitting quietly in the room, holding a cloth to his bloodied lip.
“What’s wrong? Why, what’s happened to Miss Emory?” Fields asked.
Osgood guided Fields away from the hysterical girl. “It’s Samuel Ticknor.” Osgood paused to choose his words. “Ticknor was kissing Miss Emory behind the counter after hours. She resisted, shouted to him to stop, and Mr. Teal intervened. I’m afraid Teal had to physically subdue Mr. Ticknor.”
Fields pulled a chair up and questioned Cecilia Emory in a kind voice. “You can speak freely, my dear,” he promised.
Miss Emory labored to stop crying. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Fields. I need this job, and he said that if I didn’t do as he asked… well, he’s the son of William Ticknor, and they say you shall have to make him a junior partner soon because of his name…” She covered her mouth with her hand, as though to catch the dreaded words.
“You… pushed him away?” Fields asked delicately.
She nodded. “He’s such a strong man. Mr. Teal… I thank God he was there.”
“How long has this been happening with Mr. Ticknor, Miss Emory?” asked Fields.
Cecilia wept out the answer: “Three months.” Almost since she had been hired. “But as God is my witness, I never wished to do it, Mr. Fields! You must believe me!”
Fields patted her hand and spoke paternally. “My dear Miss Emory, listen to me. Because you are an orphan, I will overlook this and permit you to retain your position.”
She nodded appreciatively and threw her hands around Fields’s neck.
Fields stood. “Where is he?” he asked Osgood. He was seething. This was a breach of loyalty of the worst kind.
“We have him in the next room waiting for you, Mr. Fields. He has denied her version of the story, I should tell you.”
“If I know anything of human nature, that girl was perfectly pure, Osgood. Mr. Teal,” Fields said, and turned to the shop boy. “Was everything Miss Emory said how you witnessed it?”
Teal answered at a snail’s pace, his mouth working up and down in its habitual motion. “I was preparing to leave, sir. I saw Miss Emory struggling and asking Mr. Ticknor to leave her be. So I punched him until he stopped.”
“Good boy, Teal,” Fields said. “I won’t forget your help.”
Teal didn’t know how to respond. “Sir, I must be at my other job in the morning. I am a caretaker at the College in the daytime.”
“Oh?” Fields said.
“This job means the world to me,” Teal added quickly. “If you ever require more from me, sir, please do tell me so.”
“I want you to write out everything you saw and did here before you leave, Mr. Teal. In case the police become involved, we need a record,” Fields said. He motioned for Osgood to give Teal some paper and a pen. “And when she calms down, let her write her story, too,” Fields instructed his senior clerk. Teal struggled to write out a few letters. Fields realized he was only semiliterate, bordering on illiterate, and thought how odd it must be to work among books every night without such a basic power. “Mr. Teal,” he said. “Let us have you dictate to Mr. Osgood so it will be official.”
Teal gratefully agreed, handing back the paper.
It took Fields nearly five hours of questioning Samuel Ticknor to elicit the truth. Fields was a bit awed by how humbled Ticknor looked, his face having been pummeled by the shop boy. His nose actually looked to be off center. Ticknor’s responses alternated between the vain and the shallow. He eventually admitted his adultery with Cecilia Emory and revealed that he had involved himself with another female secretary at the Corner as well.
“You’ll leave Ticknor and Fields property at once and from this day never return! “Fields said.
“Ha! My father built this firm! He took you into his home when you were little more than a beggar! Without him, you would have no mansion, no wife like Anne Fields! It is my name on our spine, even above yours, Mr. Fields!”
“You have been the cause of ruin to two women, Samuel!” Fields said. “Not to mention the wreck of your wife’s happiness and that of your poor mother. Your father would be more disgraced than I am!”
Samuel Ticknor was near tears. As he left, he cried out, “Mr, Fields, you shall hear my name again, I promise you that before God! If you had only taken me by the hand and introduced me to your social circle…” he trailed off for a moment before adding, “I was always counted a clever young man in society!”
A week passed without progress—a week without the discovery of any soldiers who might also be Dante scholars. Oscar Houghton sent a message to Fields after his inquiry telling him that no proof sheets were missing. Hopes were dimming. Nicholas Rey felt that he was being watched more closely at the station house, but he tried again with Willard Burndy. The trial had worn down the safecracker considerably. When he was not moving or talking, he looked lifeless.
“You will not make it through this without help,” Rey said. “I know you’re not guilty, but I know also that you were seen outside Talbot’s house the day his safe was robbed. You can tell me why, or walk the ladder.”
Burndy studied Rey, then nodded listlessly. “I did Talbot’s safe. Not really, though. You won’t believe it. You won’t—I don’t believe it myself! You see, some goosecap said he’d palm me two hundred if I taught him how to crack a particular safe. I thought it’d be an easy chore—and no chance of me getting pinched! Upon the honor of a gentleman, I didn’t know the house belonged to no brother of the cloth! I didn’t croak him! If I had, I wouldn’t have forked over his money back to him!”
“Why’d you go to Talbot’s house?”
“To case it. That goosecap seemed to know that Talbot wasn’t home, so I peeked in to see the layout. I went in, just to see the stamp of safe.” Burndy pleaded for empathy with a stupid smile. “No harm in that, right? It was a basic one, and it only took five minutes for me to tell him how to crack it. I drew it on a napkin of a tavern. I should’ve known the goosecap was cracked in the head. He told me he wanted only one thousand dollars wouldn’t take a copper more. Can you imagine that? Listen, moke, you can’t tell I robbed the preacher, or I’ll walk the ladder for sure! Whoever paid me to do the safe, that’s the madman—that’s who killed Talbot and Healey and Phineas Jennison!”
“Then tell me who paid you,” Rey said calmly, “or you will hang, Mr. Burndy.”
“It was at night, and I had been a little cup-shot, you know, from the Stackpole Tavern. It all seems so quick now, like I dreamt it and it only became truth afterwards. I couldn’t really notice nothin’ of his face, or at least I don’t remember nothin’.”
“You didn’t see anything or you can’t remember, Mr. Burndy?”
Burndy chewed at his lip. He said reluctantly, “There is one thing. He was one of you.”
Rey waited. “A Negro?”
Burndy’s pink eyes flamed and he seemed about to have a fit. “No! A Billy Yank. A veteran!” He tried to calm himself. “A soldier sitting right there in full uniform, like he was at Gettysburg swinging the flag!”
The soldiers’-aid homes in Boston were locally run, unofficial, and unadvertised, except through the word of mouth of the veterans who used them. Most homes stocked baskets of food two or three times a week to be dispersed to the soldiers. With six months passing since the war, City Hall was less and less willing to continue funding the homes. The better ones, usually aligned with a church, ambitiously strove to edify the former soldiers. In addition to food and clothing, sermons and instructional talks were offered.
Holmes and Lowell covered the southern quadrant of the city. They had engaged Pike, the cabman. Waiting outside the soldiers’-aid facilities, Pike would take a bite of a carrot, then give one to his old mares, then take another bite himself, keeping track of how many horse and human bites together would complete the average carrot. The boredom was not worth the fares paid. Besides, when Pike asked why they were traveling from one home to the next, the cabman—who had that shrewdness that came from living among horses—found that their false answers made him ill at ease. So Holmes and Lowell hired a one-horse coach, whose horse and driver would fall asleep every time the coach came to a stop.
The latest soldiers’ home to receive their visit seemed to be one of the better-organized ones. It was housed in an empty Unitarian church that had been a casualty of the long battles with the Congregationalists. At this particular home, local soldiers were given tables to sit at and a warm meal to sup on at least four evenings a week. The supper having concluded shortly after Lowell and Holmes arrived, the soldiers were making their way into the church proper.
“Crowded,” Lowell commented, leaning into the chapel, where the pews were being clogged with blue uniforms. “Let us sit in. Get off our feet at least.”
“Upon my word, Jamey, I can’t see how it can help us anymore. Perhaps we should head to the next one on the list.”
“This was the next one. Ropes’s list says the other is open only Wednesdays and Sundays.”
Holmes watched as one soldier with only a stump for a leg was pushed in a wheelchair across the courtyard by a comrade. The latter was little more than a lad, with a mouth caved inward, his teeth having fallen out from scurvy. This was the side of the war that people could not learn from the reports of the officers or the letters of reporters. “What’s the use of spurring an already beaten out horse, my dear Lowell? We are not Gideon watching his soldiers drink from the well. We can tell nothing by looking. We do not find Hamlet and Faust, right and wrong, the valor of men, by testing for albumin or examining fibers in a microscope. I cannot help feeling we must find a new course of action.”
“You and Pike both,” Lowell said, and shook his head sadly. “But together we will find our way. At the moment, Holmes, let us just decide whether we should remain or have the driver take us to another soldiers’ home.”
“You men are new today,” interrupted a one-eyed soldier with tightly drawn, heavily pocked skin and a black clay pipe protruding from his mouth. Not having expected a conversation with a third party the astonished Holmes and Lowell were both at a loss for words and politely waited for each other to answer the speaker. The man was garbed in a full-dress uniform that had not seen a launderer since before the war, it appeared.
The soldier started making his way into the church and looked back only briefly to say, with some offense, “Beg your pardon. I just thought perhaps you fellows came in to see ‘bout Dante.”
For a moment, neither Lowell nor Holmes reacted. They both thought they had imagined the word he had uttered.
“Hold there, you!” Lowell cried, barely coherent in his excitement.
The two poets sprinted into the chapel, where they found little light. Facing a sea of uniforms, they could not pinpoint the unidentified Dantean.
“Down!” someone yelled angrily through cupped hands.
Holmes and Lowell groped for seats and positioned themselves on the aisles of separate pews and contorted themselves desperately to search the faces in the crowd. Holmes turned to the entrance in the event that the soldier tried to escape. Lowell’s eyes scanned the dark stares and hollow expressions that filled the chapel and finally landed on the pocked skin and the single, shimmering eye of their interlocutor.
“I’ve found him,” Lowell whispered. “Oh, I’ve done it, Wendell. I’ve found him! I’ve found our Lucifer!”
Holmes twisted, wheezing with anticipation. “I can’t see him, Jamey!”
Several soldiers violently shushed the two intruders.
“There!” Lowell whispered, frustrated. “One, two… fourth row from the front!”
“Where?”
“There!”
“I thank you, my dear friends, for inviting me once again,” a shaky voice interrupted them, floating down from the pulpit. “And now the punishments of Dante’s Hell shall continue…”
Lowell and Holmes immediately turned their attention to the front of the stuffy, dark chapel. They looked on as their friend, old George Washington Greene, coughed feebly, adjusted his stance, and settled his arms to his sides at his lectern. His congregation was spellbound with expectation and loyalty, greedily waiting to reenter the gates of their inferno.