The Dante Club

I

John Kurtz, the chief of the Boston police, breathed in some of his heft for a better fit between the two chambermaids. On one side, the Irish woman who had discovered the body was blubbering and wailing prayers unfamiliar (because they were Catholic) and unintelligible (because she was blubbering) that prickled the hair in Kurtz’s ear; on the other side was her soundless and despairing niece. The parlor had a wide arrangement of chairs and couches, but the women had squeezed in next to the guest as they waited. He had to concentrate on not spilling any of his tea, the black haircloth divan was rattling so hard with their shock.

Kurtz had faced other murders as chief of police. Not enough to make it routine, though—usually one a year, or two; often, Boston would pass through a twelve-month period without a homicide worth noticing. Those few who were murdered were of the low sort, so it had not been a necessary part of Kurtz’s position to console. He was a man too impatient with emotion to have excelled at it anyway. Deputy Police Chief Edward Savage, who sometimes wrote poetry, might have done better.

This—this was the only name Chief Kurtz could bear to attach to the horrifying situation that was to change the life of a city—was not only a murder. This was the murder of a Boston Brahmin, a member of the aristocratic, Harvard-schooled, Unitarian-blessed, drawing room caste of New England. And the victim was more than that: He was the highest official of the Massachusetts courts. This had not only killed a man, as sometimes murders do almost mercifully, but had obliterated him entirely.

The woman they were anticipating in the best parlor of Wide Oaks had boarded the first train she could in Providence after receiving the telegram. The train’s first-class cars lumbered forward with irresponsible leisure, but now that journey, like everything that had come before, seemed part of an unrecognizable oblivion. She had made a wager with herself, and with God, that if her family minister had not yet arrived at her house by the time she got there, the telegram’s message had been mistaken. It didn’t quite make sense, this half-articulated wager of hers, but she had to invent something to believe, something to keep from fainting dead away. Ednah Healey, balanced on the threshold of terror and loss, stared at nothing. Entering her parlor, she saw only the absence of her minister and fluttered with unreasoning victory.

Kurtz, a robust man with mustard coloring beneath his bushy mustache, realized he too was trembling. He had rehearsed the exchange on the carriage ride to Wide Oaks. “Madam, how very sorry we are to call you back to this. Understand that Chief Justice Healey…” No, he had meant to preface that. “We thought it best,” he continued, “to explain the unfortunate circumstances here, you see, in your own house, where you’d be most comfortable.” He thought this idea a generous one.

“You couldn’t have found Judge Healey, Chief Kurtz,” she said, and ordered him to sit. “I’m sorry you’ve wasted this call, but there’s some simple mistake. The chief justice was—is staying in Beverly for a few quiet days of work while I visited Providence with our two sons. He is not expected back until tomorrow.”

Kurtz did not claim responsibility for refuting her. “Your chambermaid,” he said, indicating the bigger of the two servants, “found his body, madam. Outside, near the river.”

Nell Ranney, the chambermaid, welled with guilt for the discovery. She did not notice that there were a few bloodstained maggot remains in the pouch of her apron.

“It appears to have happened several days ago. Your husband never departed for the country, I’m afraid,” Kurtz said, worried he sounded too blunt.

Ednah Healey wept slowly at first, as a woman might for a dead household pet—reflective and governed but without anger. The olive-brown feather protruding from her hat nodded with dignified resistance.

Nell looked at Mrs. Healey longingly, then said with great humanity, “You ought to come back later in the day, Chief Kurtz, if you please.”

John Kurtz was grateful for the permission to escape Wide Oaks. He walked with appropriate solemnity toward his new driver, a young and handsome patrolman who was letting down the steps of the police carriage. There was no reason to hurry, not with what must be brewing already over this at the Central Station between the frantic city aldermen and Mayor Lincoln, who already had him by the ears for not raiding enough gambling “hells” and prostitution houses to make the newspapers happy.

A terrible scream cleaved the air before he had walked very far. It belched forth in light echoes from the house’s dozen chimneys. Kurtz turned and watched with foolish detachment as Ednah Healey, feather hat flying away and hair unloosed in wild peaks, ran onto the front steps and launched a streaking white blur straight for his head.

Kurtz would later remember blinking—it seemed all he could do to prevent catastrophe, to blink. He bowed to his helplessness: The murder of Artemus Prescott Healey had finished him already. It was not the death itself. Death was as common a visitor in 1865 Boston as ever: infant sicknesses, consumption and unnamed and unforgiving fevers, uncontainable fires, stampeding riots, young women perishing in childbirth in such great number it seemed they had never been meant for this world in the first place, and—until just six months ago—war, which had reduced thousands upon thousands of Boston boys to names written on black-bordered notices and sent to their families. But the meticulous and nonsensical—the elaborate and meaningless–destruction of a single human being at the hands of an unknown…

Kurtz was yanked down hard by his coat and tumbled into the soft, sundrenched lawn. The vase thrown by Mrs. Healey shattered into a thousand blue-and-ivory shards against the paunch of an oak (one of the trees said to have given the estate its name). Perhaps, Kurtz thought, he should have sent Deputy Chief Savage to handle this after all.

Patrolman Nicholas Key, Kurtz’s driver, released his arm and lifted him to his feet. The horses snorted and reared at the end of the carriageway.

“He did all he knew how! We all did! We didn’t deserve this, whatever they say to you, Chief! We didn’t deserve any of this! I’m all alone now!” Ednah Healey raised her clenched hands, and then said something that startled Kurtz. “I know who, Chief Kurtz! I know who’s done this! I know!”

Nell Ranney threw her thick arms around the screaming woman and shushed and caressed, cradling her as she would have cradled one of the Healey children so many years before. Ednah Healey clawed and pulled and spat in return, causing the comely junior police officer, Patrolman Rey, to intervene.

But the new widow’s rage expired, folding itself into the maid’s wide black blouse, where there was nothing else but the abundant bosom.

The old mansion had never sounded so empty.

Ednah Healey had departed on one of her frequent visits to the home of her family, the industrious Sullivans, in Providence, her husband remaining behind to work on a property dispute between Boston’s two largest banking concerns. The judge bid his family good-bye in his usual mumbling and affectionate manner, and was generous enough to dismiss the help once Mrs. Healey was out of sight. Though the wife wouldn’t do without servants, he enjoyed small moments of autonomy. Besides, he liked a drop of sherry on occasion, and the help was sure to report any temperance violations to their mistress, for they liked him but feared her deep within their bones.

He would start off the following day for a weekend of tranquil study in Beverly. The next proceeding that required Healey’s presence would not be heard until Wednesday, when he would railroad back into the city, back to the courthouse.

Judge Healey didn’t notice one way or another, but Nell Ranney, a maid for twenty years, since being driven out by famine and disease in her native Ireland, knew that a tidy environment was essential for a man of importance like the chief justice. So Nell came in on Monday, which was when she found the first splattering of dried red near the supply closet and another streaking near the foot of the stairs. She guessed that some wounded animal had found its way into the house and must have found the same way out.

Then she saw a fly on the parlor drapes. She shooed it out the open window with a high-pitched clicking of her tongue, fortified by the brandishing of her feather duster. But it reappeared while she was polishing the long mahogany dining table. She thought the new colored kitchen girls must have negligently left some crumbs. Contraband—which is how she still thought of the freedwomen and always would—did not care of actual cleanliness, only its appearance.

The insect, it seemed to Nell, gurgled loud as a train’s engine. She killed the fly with a rolled up North American Review. The flattened specimen was about twice the size of a housefly and had three even black stripes across its bluish green trunk. And what a phiz! thought Nell Ranney. The head of the creature was something Judge Healey would murmur over admiringly before tossing the fly to the wastebasket. The bulging eyes, of a vibrant orange color, took up nearly half its torso. There was a strange tint of orange glowing out, or red. Something between the two, something yellow and black, too. Copper: the swirl of fire.

She returned to the house the next morning to clean the upstairs. Just as she crossed through the door, another fly sailed like an arrow past the tip of her nose. Outraged, she secured another of the judge’s heavy magazines and stalked the fly up the main staircase. Nell always used the servants’ stairs, even when alone in the house. But this situation called for rearranging priorities. She removed her shoes and her wide feet fell lightly over the warm, carpeted steps, following the fly into the Healeys’ bedchamber.

The fire-eyes stared out jarringly; the body curled back like a horse ready to gallop, and the face of the insect looked for that moment like the face of a man. This was the last moment for many years, listening to the monotonous buzz, that Nell Ranney would know some measure of peace.

She rumbled forward and smashed the Review against the window and the fly. But she had faltered over something during her attack, and now looked down at the obstacle, twisted on her bare foot. She picked up the tangled mass, a full set of human teeth belonging to the upper chamber of a mouth.

She released it at once but stood attentively, as though it might censure her for the incivility.

They were false teeth, crafted with an artist’s care by a prominent New York dentist to fulfill Judge Healey’s desire for a smarter appearance on the bench. He was so proud of them—told their provenance to anyone who would listen, not understanding that the vanity leading to such appendages should prevent any discussion of them. They were a bit too bright and new, like staring right into the summer sun between a man’s lips.

From the corner of her eye, Nell noticed a thick pool of blood that had curdled and caked on the carpet. And near that, a small pile of suit clothes folded neatly. These clothes were as familiar as Nell Ranney’s own white apron, black blouse, and billowing black skirt. She had done much needlework on his pockets and sleeves; the judge never ordered new suits from Mr. Randridge, the exceptional School Street tailor, except when absolutely essential.

Returning downstairs to put on her shoes, the chambermaid only now noticed the splashes of blood on the banister and camouflaged by the plush red carpet that covered the stairs. Out the parlor’s large oval window, beyond the immaculate garden, where the yard sloped into meadows, woods, dry fields, and, eventually, the Charles River, she saw a swarm of blowflies. Nell went outdoors to inspect.

The flies were collected over a pile of rubbish. The tremendous scent caused her eyes to tear as she approached. She secured a wheelbarrow and, as she did, recalled the calf the Healeys had permitted the stableboy to raise on the grounds. But that had been years ago. Both the stableboy and the calf had outgrown Wide Oaks and left it to its eternal sameness.

The flies were of that new fire-eyed variety. There were yellow hornets, too, which had taken some morbid interest in whatever putrid flesh was underneath. But more numerous than the flying creatures were the masses of bristling white pellets crackling with movement—sharp-backed worms, wriggling tightly over something, no, not just wriggling, popping, burrowing, sinking, eating into each other, into the… but what was supporting this horrendous mountain, alive with white slime? One end of the heap seemed like a thorny bush of chestnut and ivory strands of…

Above the heap stood a short wooden staff with a ragged flag, white on both sides; it was flapping with the undecided breeze.

She could not help knowing the truth about what lay in that heap, but in her fear she prayed she’d find the stableboy’s calf. Her eyes could not resist making out the nakedness, the wide, slightly hunched back sloping into the crack of the enormous, snowy buttocks, brimming over with the crawling, pallid, bean-shaped maggots above the disproportionately short legs that were kicked out in opposite directions. A solid block of flies, hundreds of them, circled protectively. The back of the head was completely swathed in white worms, which must have numbered in the thousands rather than hundreds.

Nell kicked away the wasps’ nest and stuffed the judge into the wheelbarrow. She half wheeled and half dragged his naked body through the meadows, over the garden, through the halls, and into his study. Throwing the body on a mound of legal papers, Nell pulled Judge Healey’s head into her lap. Handfuls of maggots rained down from his nose and ears and slack mouth. She began tearing out the luminescent maggots from the back of his head. The wormy pellets were moist and hot. She also grabbed some of the fire-eyed flies that had trailed her inside, smashing them with the palm of her hand, pulling them apart by the wings, flinging them, one after another, across the room in empty vengeance. What was heard and seen next made her produce a roar loud enough to ring straight through New England.

Two grooms from the stable next door found Nell crawling away from the study on her hands and knees, crying insensibly.

“But what is it, Nellie, what is it? By Jesus, you ain’t hurt now?”

It was later, when Nell Ranney told Ednah Healey that Judge Healey had groaned before dying in her arms, that the widow ran out and threw a vase at the chief of police. That her husband might have been conscious for those four days, even remotely aware, was too much to ask her to permit.

Mrs. Healey’s professed knowledge of her husband’s killer turned out to be rather imprecise. “It was Boston that killed him,” she revealed later that day to Chief Kurtz, after she had stopped shaking. “This entire hideous city. It ate him alive.”

She insisted Kurtz bring her to the body. It had taken the coroner’s deputies three hours to slice out the quarter-inch spiraled maggots from their places inside the corpse; the tiny horny mouths had to be pried off. The pockets of devoured flesh left in their wake spanned all open areas; the terrible swelling at the back of the head still seemed to pulse with maggots even after their removal. The nostrils were now barely divided and the armpits eaten away. With the false teeth gone the face sagged low and loose like a dead accordion. Most humiliating, most pitiable, was not the broken condition, not even the fact that the body had been so maggot-ridden and layered in flies and wasps, but the simple fact of the nakedness. Sometimes a corpse, it is said, looks for all the world like a forked radish with a head fantastically carved upon it. Judge Healey had one of those bodies never meant to be seen naked by anyone except his wife.

In the stale chill of the coroner’s rooms Ednah Healey took in this view, and knew in that instant what it meant to be a widow, what an ungodly jealousy it produced. With a sudden jerk of her arm, she swiped the coroner’s razor-edged shears from a shelf. Kurtz, remembering the vase, stumbled backward into the confused, cursing coroner.

Ednah kneeled down and tenderly snipped a clump from the judge’s wild crown of hair. Crumpling to her knees, her voluminous skirts spreading to every corner of the small room, a tiny woman unfolded across a cold, purple body, with one gauze-gloved hand clenching the blades and the other caressing the plundered tuft, thick and dry as horsehair.

“Well, I’ve never seen a man so cleaned out by worms,” Kurtz said with a tenuous voice at the deadhouse after two of Kurtz’s men escorted Ednah Healey home.

Barnicoat, the coroner, had a shapeless and small head cruelly punctured by lobster eyes. His nostrils were stuffed to double capacity with cotton balls.

“Maggots,” Barnicoat said, grinning. He picked up one of the wriggling white beans that had fallen to the floor. It struggled against his meaty palm before he flung it into the incinerator, where it fizzled black and then popped into smoke. “Bodies aren’t as a practice left to rot out in a field. Still, it is true that the winged mob our Judge Healey attracted is more common to sheep or goat carcasses left outdoors.” The truth was that the sheer number of maggots that had bred inside Healey for the four days he was left in his yard was astounding, but Barnicoat did not possess knowledge enough to admit this. The coroner was a political appointee, and the position required no special medical or scientific expertise, only a tolerance for dead bodies.

“The chambermaid who took the body into the house,” Kurtz explained. “She was trying to clear the insects from the wound and she thought she saw, I daresay I don’t know how…”

Barnicoat coughed for Kurtz to get on with it.

“She heard Judge Healey moan before dying,” Kurtz said. “That’s what she says, Mr. Barnicoat.”

“Oh, very like!” Barnicoat laughed lightheartedly. “Maggots of blowflies can live only on dead tissue, Chief.” Which was why, he explained, the female flies looked for wounds on cattle to nest on, or spoiled meat. If they happened to find themselves in a wound of a living being who was unconscious or otherwise incapable of removing them, the maggots could ingest only the dead portions of tissue—which did little harm. “This head wound looks to have doubled or tripled from its original circumference, meaning that all the tissue was dead, meaning that the chief justice was quite finished by the time the insects had their feast.”

“So the blow to the head,” Kurtz said, “that caused the original wound– that’s what killed him?”

“Oh, very like, Chief,” said Barnicoat. “And hard enough to knock his teeth out at that. You say he was found in their yard?”

Kurtz nodded. Barnicoat speculated that the killing had not been intentional. An assault with the purpose of murder would have included something to guarantee the enterprise beyond a blow, like a pistol or ax. “Even a dagger. No, this seems more likely an ordinary breaking-in then. The rogue clubs the chief justice on the head in the bedchamber, knocks him out cold, then drops him outside to get him out of the way while he ransacks the house for valuables, probably never once thinking that Healey would have been so hurt,” he said, almost sympathetic to the misguided thief.

Kurtz looked right at Barnicoat with an ominous stare. “Only, nothing was taken from the house. Not merely that. The chief justice’s clothes were removed and folded up neatly, even down to his drawers.” He caught his voice creaking, as if it had been stepped on. “With his wallet, gold chain, and watch all left in a stack by his clothes!”

One of Barnicoat’s lobster eyes shot wide open at Kurtz. “He was stripped? And nothing at all was taken?”

“This was plain madness,” Kurtz said, the fact hitting him anew for the third or fourth time.

“Think of that!” exclaimed Barnicoat, looking around as though to find more people to tell.

“You and your deputies are to keep this completely confidential, by order of the mayor. You know that, right, Mr. Barnicoat? Not a word outside these walls!”

“Oh, very like, Chief Kurtz.” Then Barnicoat laughed quickly, irresponsibly, like a child. “Well, old Healey would have been an awfully fat man to haul about. At least we can trust it was not the grieving widder.”

Kurtz made every plea to logic and emotion when he explained, at Wide Oaks, why he needed time to look into the matter before the public could know what had happened. But Ednah Healey gave no response as her upstairs girl arranged the bedcovers around her.

“You see—well, if there’s a circus about us, if the press savages our methods as they do, what can be discovered?”

Her eyes, usually darting and judgmental, were sadly immobilized. Even the maids, who feared her fierce look of reprimand, cried for her current state as much as for the loss of Judge Healey.

Kurtz shrank back, almost ready to surrender. He noticed that Mrs. Healey closed her eyes tightly when Nell Ranney came into the room with tea. “Mr. Barnicoat, the coroner, says that your chambermaid’s belief that the chief justice was alive when she found him is scientifically impossible– a hallucination. For Barnicoat can tell by the number of maggots that the chief justice had already passed on.”

Ednah Healey turned to Kurtz with a quizzical open look.

“Truly, Mrs. Healey,” Kurtz continued with new self-assurance. “The flies’ maggots by their nature only eat dead tissue, you see.”

“Then he could not have suffered while he was out there?” Mrs. Healey pleaded with a broken voice.

Kurtz shook his head firmly. Before he left Wide Oaks, Ednah called in Nell Ranney and forbade her ever to repeat that most horrific portion of her story again.

“But, Mrs. Healey, I know I…” Nell trailed off, shaking her head.

“Nell Ranney! You shall heed my words!”

Next, to repay the chief, the widow agreed to conceal the circumstances of her husband’s death.

“But you must do this,” she said, gripping his coat sleeve. “You must vow to find his murderer.”

Kurtz nodded. “Mrs. Healey, the department is beginning everything that our resources and current state…”

“No.” Her colorless hand clung, immovable, to his coat, as though if he left the room now it would still hang there quite undaunted. “No, Chief Kurtz. Not to begin. To finish. To find. Vow to me.”

She left him little choice. “I vow we will, Mrs. Healey.” He did not mean to say anything more, but the pounding doubt in his chest made him speak its voice too. “Some way.”

J. T. Fields, publisher of poets, was squeezed into the window seat of his office at the New Corner, studying the cantos Longfellow had selected for the evening, when a junior clerk interrupted with a visitor. The slim figure of Augustus Manning materialized from the hall, imprisoned in a stiff frock coat. He drifted into the office, as though he had no idea how he had come to find himself on the second floor of the newly renovated mansion on Tremont Street that now housed Ticknor, Fields & Co.

“The space looks grand, Mr. Fields—grand. Though you shall always be to me the junior partner huddled behind your green curtain at the Old Corner, preaching to your little authorial congregation.”

Fields, now the senior partner and the most successful publisher in America, smiled and moved to his desk, extending his foot swiftly down onto the third of four pedals—A, B, C, and D—that sat in a row under his chair. In a distant room of the offices, a little bell marked c gave a slight note, startling a messenger boy. Bell C signified that the publisher was to be interrupted in twenty-five; bell B, ten minutes; bell A, five. Ticknor & Fields was the exclusive publisher of official Harvard University texts, pamphlets, memoirs, and college histories. So Dr. Augustus Manning, the puller of all the institution’s purse strings, on this day received a most generous C.

Manning removed his hat and passed a hand over the bare ravine between waves of frothy hair that crashed down from either side of his head. “As the treasurer of the Harvard Corporation,” he said, “I must present to you word of a potential problem that has been lately brought to our attention, Mr. Fields. You understand that a publishing house engaged by Harvard University must boast nothing less than an unimpeachable reputation.”

“Dr. Manning, I daresay there are no houses with reputations as unimpeached as our own.”

Manning braided his crooked fingers together into a steeple and emitted a long, scratchy sigh or cough, Fields could not tell which. “We have heard of a new literary translation you plan to publish, Mr. Fields, by Mr. Longfellow. Of course, we cherished Mr. Longfellow’s years of contribution at the College, and his own poems are first-rate indeed. Yet we have heard something of this project, of its subject matter, and have some concerns that this type of drivel…”

Fields composed a cold stare, at which Manning’s steepled fingers slid apart. The publisher lowered with his heel the fourth, most urgent, knob of request. “You do know, my dear Dr. Manning, how society values the work of my poets. Longfellow. Lowell. Holmes.” The triumvirate of names reinforced his position of strength.

“Mr. Fields, it is in the name of society that we speak. Your authors hang on to the skirts of your coat. Advise them properly. Do not mention this meeting if you like, and neither shall I. I know you wish your house to be held in esteem, and I do not doubt that you would consider all the repercussions of your publication.”

“Thank you for that faith, Dr. Manning.” Fields breathed into his wide spade of a beard, struggling to maintain his famous diplomacy. “I have considered the repercussions thoroughly and look forward to them. If you do not wish to proceed with the university’s pending publications, I shall happily return the plates to your possession at once without cost. You know, I hope, that you shall offend me if you say aught disparaging about my authors to the public. Ah, Mr. Osgood.”

Fields’s senior clerk, J. R. Osgood, shuffled in and Fields ordered a tour of the new offices for Dr. Manning.

“Unnecessary.” The word seeped out from Manning’s stiff patrician beard, durable as the century, as he stood. “I suppose you anticipate a good many pleasant days to come in this place, Mr. Fields,” he said, throwing a cold glance at the shining black walnut paneling. “There will be times, remember, when even you shall not be able to protect your authors from their ambitions.” He bowed super-politely and started down the stairwell.

“Osgood,” Fields said, and pushed the door closed. “I want you to place a gossip bit in the New York Tribune for the translation.”

“Ah, is Mr. Longfellow done already?” Osgood asked brightly.

Fields pursed his full, overbearing lips. “Did you know, Mr. Osgood, that Napoleon once shot a book peddler for being too aggressive?”

Osgood considered this. “No, I hadn’t heard that, Mr. Fields.”

“The happy advantage of a democracy is that we are free to puff our books as hard as we can manage and be perfectly safe of any harm. I want no family of any respectability to sleep unapprised by the time we go to the binders.” And anyone within a mile of his voice would believe he would make that happen. “To Mr. Greeley, New York, for immediate inclusion in the ‘Literary Boston’ page.” Fields’s fingers were plunking and strumming the air, a musician playing a remembered piano. His wrist cramped when he wrote, so Osgood was a surrogate hand for most of the publisher’s writing, including his fits of poetry.

It came together in his mind in almost finished form.” ‘WHAT THE LITERARY MEN ARE DOING IN BOSTON: It is rumored that a new translation is in the press of Ticknor, Fields and Co., which will attract considerable attention in many quarters. The author is said to be a gentleman of our city, whose poetry has for many years inspired public adoration on both sides of the Atlantic. We understand furthermore that this gentleman has recruited help from the finest literary minds of Boston…’ Hold there, Osgood. Make that ‘of New England.’ We don’t want old Greene to simper, do we?”

“Of course not, sir,” Osgood managed to reply between scribblings.

“ ‘…the finest minds of New England to manage the task of revising and completing his new and elaborate poetical translation. The content of the work is at this time unknown, except to say that it has never before been read in our country, and shall transform the literary landscape.’ Et cetera. Have Greeley mark it Anonymous Source.’ Have you got all that?”

“I shall send it by the first post in the morning,” said Osgood.

“Wire it to New York.”

“For printing next week?” Osgood thought he had misheard.

“Yes, yes!” Fields threw up his hands. The publisher was rarely flustered. “And, I tell you, we’ll have another ready the week after!”

Osgood turned back cautiously as he reached the door. “What was Dr. Manning’s business here this afternoon, Mr. Fields, if I might ask?”

“Nothing to think of.” Fields blew a long sigh into his beard that contradicted this. He returned to the fat cushion of stacked manuscripts on his window seat. Below them was the Boston Common, where pedestrians still clung to summer linens, even a few straw hats. As Osgood started to leave again, Fields felt the desire to explain. “If we go ahead with Longfellow’s Dante, Augustus Manning will see to it that all publishing contracts between Harvard and Ticknor and Fields are canceled.”

“Why, that’s thousands of dollars in value—tens more over the next years!” Osgood said with alarm.

Fields nodded patiently. “Hmm. Do you know, Osgood, why we did not publish Whitman when he brought us his Leaves of Grass?” He did not wait for a reply. “Because Bill Ticknor did not want to call down trouble on the house over the carnal passages.”

“May I ask whether you regret that, Mr. Fields?”

He was pleased with the question. His tone modulated from employer’s to mentor’s. “No I don’t, my dear Osgood. Whitman belongs to New York, as did Poe.” That name he said more bitterly, for reasons that still smoldered. “And I’ll let them keep what few they have. But from true literature we mustn’t ever cower, not in Boston. And we shall not now.”

He meant “now that Ticknor was gone.” It was not that the late William D. Ticknor had no sense of literature. In fact, it might be said the Ticknors had literature running in their blood, or at least in some primary organ, as their cousin George Ticknor had once been Boston’s literary authority, preceding Longfellow and Lowell as the first Smith Professor at Harvard. But William D. Ticknor had started in Boston in the field of complex financing, and he brought to publishing, which at the time was little more than bookselling, the mind of a fine banker. It was Fields who had recognized genius in half-finished manuscripts and monographs, Fields who had nurtured friendships with the great New England authors as other publishers closed their doors for lack of profits or spent too much time retailing.

Fields, while a young clerk, was even said to exhibit preternatural (or “very queer,” as the other clerks put it) abilities; he could predict by the demeanor and appearance of a customer what book would be desired. At first he kept this to himself, but when the other clerks discovered his gift, it became a source of frequent wagers, and those who bet against Fields always ended the day unhappily. Fields would soon after transform the industry by convincing William Ticknor to reward authors rather than cheat them, and by realizing that publicity could turn poets into personalities. As a partner, Fields bought out The Atlantic Monthly and The North American Review as venues for his authors.

Osgood would never be a man of letters like Fields, a litterateur, and so hesitated to compare ideas of True Literature. “Why would Augustus Manning threaten such a measure? It’s extortion, that’s what,” he said indignantly.

At this Fields smiled to himself, thinking of how much there still was to teach Osgood. “We extort everyone we know, Osgood, or nothing should get done. Dante’s poetry is foreign and unknown. The Corporation lords over Harvard’s reputation by controlling every word allowed past the College gates, Osgood—anything unknown, anything unknowable, stands to frighten them beyond measure.” Fields picked up the pocket edition of Dante’s Divina Commedia he had found in Rome. “Here is revolt enough between two covers to unravel it all. The mind of our country is moving with the speed of a telegraph, Osgood, and our great institutions are stagecoaching behind it.”

“But why would their good name be affected in this instance? They have never sanctioned Longfellow’s translation.”

The publisher mocked indignation. “I rather think not. But they still have association, most fearful, for it is something that can scarce be erased.”

Fields’s connection to Harvard was as the university’s publisher. The other scholars had stronger ties: Longfellow had been its most famous professor until retiring about ten years earlier to devote himself fully to his poetry; Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and George Washington Greene were alumni; and Holmes and Lowell were celebrated professor—Holmes holding the Parkman anatomy chair at the Medical College and Lowell being the head of modern languages and literature at Harvard College, which had been Longfellow’s former post.

“This will be seen as a masterwork springing from the heart of Boston and from the soul of Harvard, my dear Osgood. Even Augustus Manning is not so blind as to miss that.”

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, medical professor and poet, hurried through the cropped paths of the Boston Common in the direction of his publisher’s office as though he were being chased (stopping twice, however, to sign his autograph). If you passed close enough to Dr. Holmes or were one of those amblers who wielded your pen on behalf of your autograph book, you could hear him humming with purpose. In his moire silk waistcoat pocket burned the folded rectangle of paper that drove the little doctor on toward the Corner (that is, the office of his publisher) and drove him to fear.

When encountered by admirers, he sparkled to hear them name their favorites. “Oh, that. They say President Lincoln recited that poem by memory. Well, truly, he told me himself…” The shape of Holmes’s boyish face, the small mouth pushing against the loose jaw, made it appear an effort for him to keep his mouth closed for any noticeable period of time.

After the autograph hounds, he came to a stop only once, haltingly, at the Dutton & Company Bookstore, where he counted out three novels and four volumes of poetry from entirely new and (in all probability) young New York authors. Every week the literary notices announced that the most extraordinary book of the age had just been published. “Profound originality” had become so plentiful that, not knowing better, one could take it for the most common national product. Just a few years before the war, it seemed the only book in the world was his Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, the serialized essay with which Holmes had surpassed all expectations by inventing a new attitude for literature, one of personal observation.

Holmes burst into the vast front showroom of Ticknor & Fields. Like the Jews of old at the Second Temple remembering the glories it replaced, Dr. Holmes could not help resisting the oiled and polished glare and smuggling in his sensory recall of the musty quarters of the Old Corner Bookstore, on Washington and School streets, into which the publishing house and its authors had squeezed for decades. Fields’s authors called the new palace, at the corner of Tremont Street and Hamilton Place, the Corner or New Corner—in part from habit, but also as pointed nostalgia for their beginnings.

“Good evening, Dr. Holmes. Here for Mr. Fields?”

Miss Cecilia Emory, the pleasing blue-bonneted girl at the front desk, received Dr. Holmes in a cloud of perfume and a warming smile. Fields had taken on several women as secretaries when the Corner opened a month earlier, despite a chorus of critics, who condemned the practice for a building otherwise crowded with men. The idea almost certainly originated with Fields’s wife, Annie, willful and beautiful (qualities usually allied).

“Yes, my dear.” Holmes bowed. “Is he in?”

“Ah, is that the great Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table descended before us?”

Samuel Ticknor, one of the clerks, was passing an overlong good-bye with Cecilia Emory as he slipped on his gloves. Not the average publishing-house clerk, Ticknor would be welcomed home by wife and servants on one of the most desirable corners of Back Bay.

Holmes took his hand. “Grand little place the New Corner is, isn’t it, my dear Mr. Ticknor?” He laughed. “I’m half surprised our Mr. Fields hasn’t gotten lost in here yet.”

“Hasn’t he,” Samuel Ticknor muttered back seriously, followed by a light snigger or grunt.

J. R. Osgood came to usher Holmes upstairs. “Pay him no mind, Dr. Holmes,” Osgood sniffed, watching the him in question saunter onto Tremont Street and toss money at the peanut vendor on the corner as he would at a beggar. “I daresay young Ticknor believes he should command the same view of the Common as his father would have were he alive, on the basis of name alone. And wants everyone to know it, too.”

Dr. Holmes had no time for gossip—not today, at least.

Osgood noted that Fields was in meetings, so Holmes was purgatoried in the Authors’ Room, a plush chamber for the comfort and pleasure of the house’s writers. On an ordinary day, Holmes might well spend his time admiring the literary mementos and autographs hanging on the wall that included his name. Instead, his attention turned to the check that he drew flinchingly out of his pocket. In the taunting number written out in careless hand Holmes saw his failures. He saw in the stray ink spots his life as a poet, battered by the events of the last years, incapable of rising to past achievements. He sat in silence and rubbed the check roughly between his forefinger and thumb as Aladdin might his old lamp. Holmes imagined all the fearless, fresher authors Fields was courting, convincing, shaping.

He wandered from the Authors’ Room twice, twice finding Fields’s office shut. But before he could turn back this second time, the voice of James Russell Lowell, poet and editor, found its way out. Lowell was speaking forcefully (as always), even dramatically, and Dr. Holmes, instead of knocking or turning away, tried to decipher the conversation, for he believed it would almost certainly have something to do with him.

Narrowing his eyes as though he could transfer their share of power to his ears, Holmes was just making out an intriguing word when he hit something and tumbled.

The young man who had come to a sudden halt in front of the eavesdropper flailed his hands in stupid repentance.

“My fault entirely, dear lad,” the poet said, laughing. “Dr. Holmes, and it’s…”

“Teal, Doctor, sir,” the trembler, a shop boy, managed to introduce himself before turning yellow and scurrying away.

“I see you’ve met Daniel Teal.” Osgood, the senior clerk, appeared from the hall. “Couldn’t keep a hotel, but as hard a worker as we have.” Holmes chuckled with Osgood: poor lad, still green around the ears at the firm and nearly knocking heads with Oliver Wendell Holmes! This renewed self-importance made the poet smile.

“Would you like me to check on Mr. Fields?” Osgood asked.

Then the door opened from inside. James Russell Lowell, majestically untidy, his penetrating gray eyes taking one’s attention from the woolliness of his hair and the beard that he smoothed with two fingers, looked out from the threshold. He was in Fields’s office alone with today’s newspaper.

Holmes imagined what Lowell would say if he attempted to share his anxiety: This is a time to concentrate all energies on Longfellow, on Dante, Holmes, not our petty vanities… “Come, come, Wendell!” Lowell started to make him a drink.

Holmes said, “Why, Lowell, I did believe I heard voices in here just now. Ghosts?”

“When Coleridge was asked whether he believed in ghosts, he replied in the negative, explaining he had seen far too many of them.” He laughed gleefully and twisted out the glowing end of his cigar. “Oh, the Dante Club shall celebrate tonight. I was just reading this aloud to see how it sounded, you see.” Lowell pointed to the newspaper on the side table. Fields, he explained, had stepped down to the cafeteria.

“Tell me, Lowell, do you know whether the Atlantic has changed its payment policies? I mean, I haven’t heard whether you gave in any verses for the last number. Certainly, you’re busy enough with the Review.” Holmes’s fingers tangled with the check in his pocket.

Lowell wasn’t listening. “Holmes, you must have a good eyeful of this! Fields has outdone himself. There, go on. Have a look.” He nodded conspiratorially and watched carefully. The newspaper was folded back to the literary page and smelled of Lowell’s cigar.

“But what I mean to ask, my dear Lowell,” Holmes said insistently, putting the paper out of the way, “is whether recently—oh, many thanks.” He accepted a brandy and water.

Fields returned with a broad smile, stretching his rolling beard. He was as inexplicably cheery and complacent as Lowell. “Holmes! Wasn’t expecting the pleasure today. I was just about to send for you at the Medical College to see Mr. Clark. There was a blasted mistake in some of the checks for the last number of the Atlantic. You might receive one for seventy-five rather than a hundred for your poem.” Since the rapid inflation due to the war, top poets received a hundred dollars per poem with the exception of Longfellow, who got $150. Lesser names were paid between twenty-five and fifty.

“Truly?” Holmes asked with a gasp of relief that instantly felt embarrassing. “Well, I’m always happy for more.”

“This new batch of clerks, such creatures as you’ve never seen.” Fields shook his head. “I find myself at the helm of an enormous ship, my friends, that will drive upon the rocks if I do not watch it all times.”

Holmes sat back contentedly and finally glanced down at the New York Tribune in his hands. In stunned silence, he slipped deeply into the armchair, allowing its thick leather folds to swallow him.

James Russell Lowell had come to the Corner from Cambridge to fulfill long-neglected obligations at The North American Review. Lowell left the bulk of his work at the Review, one of Fields’s two top magazines, to a team of assistant editors, whose names he confused, until his presence was required for final proofing. Fields knew Lowell would appreciate the advance publicity more than anybody, more than Longfellow himself.

“Exquisite! You have a bit of the Jew in you yet, my dear Fields!” Lowell said, swiping the newspaper back from Holmes. His friends did not particularly notice Lowell’s strange gloss, for they were accustomed to his tendency toward theorizing that everyone of ability, including himself, was in some unknown way Jewish, or at least of Jewish descent.

“My booksellers will chomp at the bit,” Fields boasted. “We’ll build a shiny coach from the Boston profits alone!”

“My dear Fields,” Lowell said, laughing briskly. He patted the newspaper as if it held a secret prize. “If you had been Dante’s publisher, I daresay he would have been welcomed back to Florence with a street festival!”

Oliver Wendell Holmes laughed, but there was a little pleading too as he said, “If Fields had been Dante’s publisher, Lowell, he could have never been exiled.”

When Dr. Holmes excused himself to find Mr. Clark, the financial clerk, before they started for Longfellow’s house, Fields could see that Lowell was troubled. The poet was not one to hide displeasure, in any event.

“Don’t you think Holmes should seem more committed?” Lowell demanded. “He might have been reading an obituary,” he sniped, knowing Fields’s sensitivity about the reception of his puffs. “His own.”

But Fields laughed this off. “He is preoccupied with his novel, that’s all, and whether the critics will treat him fairly this time. Well, and he always has a hundred things on his mind. You know that, Lowell.”

“That is just the thing! If Harvard tries to daunt us further—” Lowell began, then started again. “I don’t want anyone to come to a notion that we’re not behind this to the end, Fields. Do you not ever wonder that this might be just another club for Wendell?”

Lowell and Holmes liked to sharpen their wits against each other, Fields doing what he could to discourage them. They competed mostly for attention. After a recent banquet, Mrs. Fields reported having heard Lowell demonstrating to Harriet Beecher Stowe why Tom Jones was the best novel ever written, while Holmes was proving to Stowe’s husband, the divinity professor, that religion was responsible for all the swearing in the world. The publisher was worried about more than the return of serious tension between two of his best poets; he was worried Lowell would stubbornly try to prove that his doubts about Holmes were correct. Fields could not afford that any more than he could afford Holmes’s trepidation.

Fields made a show of his pride in Holmes, standing beside a framed daguerreotype of the little doctor that hung on the wall. He put a hand on Lowell’s strong shoulder and spoke with sincerity. “Our Dante Club would be a lost spirit without him, my dear Lowell. Certainly he has his distractions, but that’s what keeps his brilliance. Why, he’s what Dr. Johnson would have proclaimed a clubbable man. But he’s been there for us all along, hasn’t he. And for Longfellow.”

Dr. Augustus Manning, treasurer of the Harvard Corporation, remained at University Hall later into the evenings than the other Harvard fellows. He often turned his head from his desk to the darkening window that glared back with indistinct light from his lamp, and he thought of the perils that daily rose up to shake the foundations of the College. Just that afternoon, he had been out for his ten-minute constitutional and recorded the names of several offenders. Three students were talking to one another near Grays Hall. By the time they saw him approach, it was too late; phantomlike, he made no noise, even when walking over crisp leaves. They would be admonished by the faculty board for “congregating”—that is, standing stationary in the Yard in groups of two or more.

That morning, at the College’s required six o’clock chapel, Manning also had called the attention of Tutor Bradlee to a student who was reading a book under his Bible. The offender, a sophomore, would be privately admonished for reading during chapel, as well as for the agitating tendency of the author—a French philosopher of immoral politics. At the next meeting of the College faculty, judgment would be entered under the young man’s name, there would be a fine of several dollars imposed, and points would be removed from his class standing.

Manning now thought about how to address the Dante problem. A staunch loyalist to classical studies and languages, Manning, it was said, had once spent an entire year conducting all his personal and business affairs in Latin; some doubted this, noting that his wife did not know the language, while other acquaintances remarked that this fact confirmed the story’s veracity. The living languages, as they were called by the Harvard fellows, were little more than cheap imitations, low distortions. Italian, like Spanish and German, particularly represented the loose political passions, bodily appetites, and absent morals of decadent Europe. Dr. Manning had no intention of allowing foreign poisons to be spread under the disguise of literature.

As he sat, Manning heard a surprising clicking sound from his anteroom. Any noise would be unexpected at this hour, as Manning’s secretary had gone home. Manning walked to the door and pushed on the handle. But it was stuck. He looked up and saw a metal point pushing into the doorframe, then another one several inches to the right. Manning yanked the door hard, again and again, harder and harder until his arm hurt and the door cracked open unwillingly. On the other side a student, armed with a wooden board and some screws, balanced on a stool, laughing as he tried to seal Manning’s door.

The offender’s cohort ran at the sight of Manning.

Manning grabbed the student from the stool. “Tutor! Tutor!”

“Just a prank, I tell you! Now let me go!” The sixteen-year-old instantly looked five years younger, and, hooked by Manning’s marble eyes, panicked.

He struck Manning several times and then sank his teeth into the man’s hand, which released its grip. But a resident tutor arrived and caught the student by the collar in the doorway.

Manning approached with deliberate steps and a cold stare. He stared so long, looking increasingly small and feeble, that even the tutor became uncomfortable and asked loudly what he should do. Manning looked down at his hand, where two bright spots of blood bubbled up in the teeth marks between the bones.

Manning’s words seemed to emerge directly from his stiff beard rather than his mouth. “Have him tell you the names of his accomplices in this endeavor, Tutor Pearce. And find out where he’s been drinking spirits. Then hand him to the police.”

Pearce hesitated. “Police, sir?”

The student protested, “Now, if that isn’t a scrubby trick, to call the police in a college matter!”

“At once, Tutor Pearce!”

Augustus Manning locked his door behind them. He ignored the fact that his breathing was heavy with fury as he resumed his place and sat up straight, with dignity. He picked up the New York Tribune again to remind himself of matters that were in desperate need of his attention. As he read J. T. Fields’s puff on the “Literary Boston” page, as his hand throbbed at the points where his skin was broken, the following thoughts, more or less, passed through the treasurer’s mind: Fields believes himself invincible in his new fortress… That same arrogance worn proudly by Lowell like a new coat… Longfellow remains untouchable; Mr. Greene, a relic, long a mental paraplegic… But Dr. Holmes… the Autocrat courts controversy only out of fear, not principle… The panic on the little doctor’s face as he watched what befell Professor Webster those many years ago—not even the murder conviction or the hanging, but the loss of his place, which had been earned in society by such a good name, by training and career as a Harvard man… Yes, Holmes: Dr. Holmes shall prove our greatest ally.

II

All over Boston, all through the night, policemen herded “suspicious persons” by the half-dozen, by order of the chief. Each officer eyed his colleagues’ suspicious persons warily as they registered them at the Central Station lest his own ruffians be adjudged inferior. Detectives in plainclothes, avoiding the uniforms, stalked upstairs from the Tombs—the underground holding cells—consorting in hushed codes and half-delivered nods.

The detective bureau, derived from a European model, had been established in Boston with the aim of providing intimate knowledge of criminals’ whereabouts, and therefore most of the chosen detectives were former rogues themselves. However, there were no sophisticated methods of investigation with which they were armed, so detectives reverted to old tricks (their favorites being extortion, intimidation, and fabrication) to secure their share of arrests and warrant their salaries. Chief Kurtz had done all he could to make sure that the detectives, along with the press, thought the new murder victim a John Smith. The last problem in the world he needed now would be his detectives trying to connive money from the wealthy Healeys’ grief.

Some of the gathered subjects were singing obscene songs or covering their faces with their hands. Others hurled curses and threats at the officers who brought them in. A few huddled together on wooden benches lining one side of the room. Every class of criminal was here, from high-tobers– the classiest crooks—down to window smashers, sneak thieves, and the prettily bonneted bludgets who lured passersby into alleys before their accomplices would do the rest. Warm peanuts were peppered down from above by pasty Irish urchins, who were kneeling at the public balcony, holding greasy paper bags, and taking aim through the rails. They supplemented these projectiles with a round of rotten eggs.

“You heard anyone swelling about croaking a man? You listening here?”

“Where did you get that gold watch chain, boy? This silk handkerchief?”

“What’re you planning to do with this billy?”

“How ‘bout it? You ever try to kill a man, chum, just to see how it is?”

Red-faced officers shouted out these questions. Then Chief Kurtz began detailing Healey’s demise, skating skillfully around the victim’s identity, but before long he would be interrupted.

“Hey, Chiefy.” A big black rogue coughed in bemusement, his bulging eyes fixed on the corner of the room. “Hey, Chiefy. What’s with the new darky booly-dog? Where’s his uniform? I don’t think you’re about to recruit nigger detectives. Or can I apply too?”

Nicholas Rey stood up straighter at the laughter that followed. He felt suddenly conscious of his lack of participation in the questioning, and of his plainclothes.

“Now, fellow, that ain’t no darky,” said a dapper string bean of a man as he stepped forward and surveyed Patrolman Rey with the look of an expert appraiser. “He looks to be a half–breed to me, and a mighty fine specimen at that. Mother a slave, father a plantation hand. That’s right, ain’t it, friend?”

Rey stepped closer to the line. “How about answering the chief’s questions, sir? Let’s help each other out if we’re able.”

“Handsomely said, Lily White.” The string bean held an appreciative finger to his thin mustache, which circled down from his lips to bracket his mouth, seeming to signal the start of a beard but dropping off abruptly before the chin.

Chief Kurtz thrust his blackjack at the diamond stud on Langdon Peaslee’s breastbone. “Don’t rile me, Peaslee!”

“Careful, won’t you?” Peaslee, Boston’s greatest safecracker, dusted off his vest. “That little luster’s worth eight hundred dollars, Chief, legitimately purchased!”

Laughter from all sides, including some detectives. Kurtz should not have let Langdon Peaslee wind him up, not on this day. “I got a sense you had something to do with the round of safes blown on Commercial Street last Sunday,” Kurtz said. “I’ll bag you with breaking the Sabbath laws right now, and you can sleep in the Tombs with the other twopenny pickpockets!”

Willard Burndy, a few spots down the line, guffawed.

“Well, I’ll tell you something about that, my dear chief,” Peaslee said, raising his voice theatrically for the benefit of the whole meeting room (including the suddenly rapt groundlings up in the high seats). “It sure weren’t our friend Mr. Burndy over there, who could pull off anything like the Commercial Street run. Or did those safes belong to an old ladies’ society?”

Burndy’s bright pink eyes doubled in size as he shoved men out of the way, clawing toward Langdon Peaslee and nearly igniting a riot among the rowdier crooks as he went, while the ragged boys above cheered and hooted. This entertainment held its own even against the secret rat pits that operated in North End cellars, and those charged twenty-five cents a head.

As officers restrained Burndy, a confused man was pushed out of line. He stumbled wildly. Nicholas Rey caught him before he could fall.

He was slightly built, his dark eyes handsome but worn, with a waywardness of expression. The stranger displayed a chessboard of missing and rotting teeth and emitted something like a hiss, releasing a stench of Medford rum. He either didn’t notice or didn’t mind that his clothes were coated in rotten egg.

Kurtz marched down the reshuffled gallery of rogues and explained again. He explained about the man found naked in a field near the river, his body swarming in flies, wasps, maggots, eating into his skin, soaked in his blood. One of the present company, Kurtz informed them, had killed him with a blow to the head and carried him there to leave to nature’s blights. He mentioned another odd touch: a flag, white and tattered, planted over the body.

Rey propped his disoriented ward to his feet. The man’s nose and mouth were red and irregular, overwhelming his thin mustache and beard. One of his legs was lame, the casualty of a long forgotten accident or fight. His large hands shook in wild gesticulations. The stranger’s trembling increased at each detail thrown out by the chief of police.

Deputy Chief Savage said, “Oh, this chap! Who brought him in, do you know, Rey? He wouldn’t give a name earlier when they were photographing all the new ones for the rogues’ picture gallery. Silent as an Egyptian sphinx!”

The sphinx’s paper collar was all but hidden under his slovenly black scarf, wrapped loosely to one side. He stared emptily and flailed his oversize hands in the air in rough, concentric circles.

“Trying to sketch something?” Savage commented jokingly.

His hands were sketching indeed—a map of sorts, one that would have aided the police immeasurably in the weeks to come had they known what to look for. This stranger had long been an intimate of the locale of Healey’s murder but not the richly paneled parlors of Beacon Hill. No, the man was sketching an image in the air not of any earthly place at all but of a murky antechamber into an otherworld. For it was there–there, the man understood, as the image of Artemus Healey’s death seeped into his mind and grew with every particular—yes, it was there that punishment had been meted out.

“I daresay he’s deaf and dumb,” Deputy Chief Savage whispered to Rey after several thoughtful hand gestures failed to get through. “And at a real altitude, from the smell. I’ll bring him for some bread and cheese. Keep an eye on that Burndy fellow, won’t you, Rey.” Savage nodded toward the show-up’s incumbent troublemaker, who was now rubbing his pink eyes with his shackled hands, spellbound by Kurtz’s grotesque descriptions.

The deputy chief gently separated the trembling man from Patrolman Rey’s stewardship and walked him across the room. But the man shook, weeping hard, then with what seemed like accidental effort hurled the deputy chief of police away, sending him headlong into a bench.

The man then leapt up behind Rey, his left arm springing across Rey’s neck, his fingers hooking underneath Rey’s right armpit and his other hand knocking off Rey’s hat and locking on to his eyes, twisting Rey’s head toward him, so that the officer’s ear was trapped in the raw dew of his lips. The man’s whisper was so low, so desperate and throaty, so confessional, that only Rey could know words had been spoken at all.

Happy chaos erupted among the rogues.

The stranger suddenly released Rey and gripped a fluted column. He hurled himself hard around its circumference, catapulting ahead. The obscure hissed words ensnared Rey’s mind, a meaningless code of sounds, so jarring and powerful as to suggest more meaning than Rey could imagine. Dinanzi. Rey struggled to remember, to hear the whisper again, just as he struggled (etterne etterno, etterne etterno) not to lose his balance as he lunged for the fugitive. But the stranger had launched himself with such great momentum that he could not have stopped himself had he wanted to in this, his last moment of life.

He crashed through the thick plane of a bay window. One loose shard of glass shaped perfectly like a scythe, swiveled out in an almost graceful dance catching the black scarf and slicing cleanly through his windpipe, flinging his limp head forward as he hit the air. He dropped hard through the shattered mass onto the yard below.

Everything fell silent. Shavings of glass, delicate as snowflakes, popped under Rey’s blunt-toed shoes as he approached the window frame and stared down. The body unfurled over a thick cushion of autumn leaves, and the lens of the window’s shattered glass cut the body and its bed into a kaleidoscope of yellow, black, hectic red. The ragged urchins, the first down to the courtyard, pointed and hollered, dancing around the splayed body. Rey, as he descended, couldn’t escape from the blurring words the man had chosen for whatever reason to bequeath unto him as his last act of life: Voi Ch ‘in-trate. Voi Ch’intrate. You Who Enter. You Who Enter.

James Russell Lowell felt much like Sir Launfal, the grail-seeking hero of his most popular poem, as he galloped through the iron portal of Harvard Yard. Indeed, the poet might have looked the part of gallant knight as he entered today, high on his white steed and outlined crisply by the autumn colors, had it not been for his peculiar grooming preferences: his beard trimmed into a square shape some two or three inches below his chin, but his mustache grown out far longer, leaving it to hang below. Some of his detractors, and many friends, noted privately that this was perhaps not the most becoming choice for his otherwise bold face. Lowell’s opinion was that beards should be worn or God would not have given them, though he did not specify whether this particular style was theologically required.

His imagined knighthood was felt with stronger passion these days, when the Yard was an increasingly hostile citadel. A few weeks earlier, the Corporation had attempted to persuade Professor Lowell to adopt a proposal of reforms that would have eliminated many of the obstacles faced by his department (for instance, that students receive half the number of credits for enrolling in a modern foreign language that they would for a classical language) but in return would have granted the Corporation final approval over all of Lowell’s classes. Lowell had loudly refused their offer. If they wanted to pass their proposal, they would have to go through the lengthy process of pushing it through the Harvard Board of Overseers, that twenty-headed Hydra.

Then one afternoon Lowell was given advice by the president that made him realize the board’s demand for approval over all classes had been a lark.

“Lowell, at least cancel that Dante seminar of yours and Manning may well improve things for you.” The president grabbed Lowell by the elbow confidentially.

Lowell narrowed his eyes. “That’s what this is? That’s all they’re after!” He turned with outrage. “I shall not be humbugged into bending to them! They drove Ticknor out. By God, they made Longfellow resent them. I think every man who feels like a gentleman ought to speak out against them, nay, every man who hasn’t passed his master’s degree in blackguardism.”

“You think me a great churl, Professor Lowell. I don’t control the Corporation any more than you do, you know, and it is like talking through a knothole to them most days. Alas, I am just the president of this college,” he chortled. Indeed, Thomas Hill was just the president of Harvard, and a new one at that—the third in a decade, a pattern resulting in Corporation members stockpiling far more power than he possessed. “But they believe Dante an improper part of your department’s development—that is plain. They will make an example of it, Lowell. Manning will make an example of it!” he warned, and grabbed Lowell’s arm again as though at any moment the poet would have to be steered away from some danger.

Lowell said he would not suffer the fellows of the Corporation to sit in judgment of a literature of which they knew nothing. And Hill did not even try to argue this point. It was a matter of principle for the Harvard fellows that they knew nothing of the living languages.

The next time Lowell saw Hill, the president was armed with a slip of blue paper on which was a handwritten quotation from a recently deceased British poet of some standing on the subject of Dante’s poem. “ ‘What hatred against the whole human race! What exultation and merriment at eternal and immitigable sufferings! We hold our nostrils as we read; we cover up our ears. Did one ever before see brought together such striking odors, filth, excrement, blood, mutilated bodies, agonizing shrieks, mythical monsters of punishment? Seeing this, I cannot but consider it the most immoral and impious book that ever was written.’ “ Hill smiled with self-satisfaction, as though he had written this himself.

Lowell laughed. “Shall we have England lord over our bookshelves? Why did we not just hand Lexington over to the redcoats and spare General Washington the trouble of war?” Lowell glimpsed something in Hill’s eye, something he sometimes saw in the untrained expression of a student, that made him believe the president could understand. “Till America has learned to love literature not as an amusement, not as mere doggerel to memorize in a college room, but for its humanizing and ennobling energy, my dear reverend president, she will not have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a people. That which raises it from a dead name to a living power.”

Hill tried hard not to sway from his purpose. “This idea of traveling through the afterlife, of recording Hell’s punishments—that’s downright harsh, Lowell. And a work like this so inaptly titled a ‘Comedy’! It’s medieval, it’s scholastic, and…”

“Catholic.” This shut Hill up. “That is what you mean, Reverend President. That it’s all too Italian, too Catholic for Harvard College?”

Hill raised a sly white eyebrow. “You must own that such frightful notions of God could not be sustained to our Protestant ears.”

The truth was Lowell was as unfriendly as the Harvard fellows toward the crowding of Irish papists along the wharfsides and in outlying suburbs of Boston. But the idea that the poem was some kind of edict from the Vatican… “Yes, we rather condemn people for eternity without the courtesy of informing them. And Dante calls it a commedia, my dear sir, because it is written in his rustic Italian tongue instead of Latin and because it ends happily, with the poet rising to Heaven, as opposed to a tragedia. Instead of endeavoring to manufacture a great poem out of what was foreign and artificial, he lets the poem make itself out of him.”

Lowell was pleased to see that the president was exasperated. “For pity’s sake, Professor, do you not think there is something at all rancorous, something malevolent, on the part of one to inflict merciless tortures on all who practice a list of particular sins? Imagine some man in public life today declaring his enemies’ places in Hell!” he argued.

“My dear reverend president, I am imagining it even as we speak. And do not misunderstand. Dante sends his friends down there, too. You may tell that to Augustus Manning. Pity without rigor would be cowardly egotism, mere sentimentality.”

The members of the Harvard Corporation, the president and six pious men of affairs chosen from outside the College faculty, were firm in their commitment to the long-standing curriculum that had served them well—Greek, Latin, Hebrew, ancient history, mathematics, and science—and their corollary assertion that the inferior modern languages and literature would remain a novelty, something to fatten their catalogs. Longfellow had made some headway after Professor Ticknor’s departure, including initiating a Dante seminar and hiring a brilliant Italian exile named Pietro Bachi as an Italian instructor. His Dante seminar, from a lack of interest in the subject and the language, was consistently his least popular. Still, the poet enjoyed the zeal of a few minds passing through that course. One of the zealous was James Russell Lowell.

Now, after ten years of his own tussles with the administration, Lowell faced an event for which he had waited, for which the time was ripe as destiny: the discovery of Dante by America. But not only was Harvard swift and thorough in its discouragement, the Dante Club also faced an obstacle from inside: Holmes and his straddling.

Lowell sometimes took walks in Cambridge with Holmes’s oldest son, Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior. Twice a week, the law student would emerge from the Dane Law School building just when Lowell had finished his teaching at University Hall. Holmes could not appreciate his good fortune at having Junior, because he had made his son hate him—if only Holmes would listen, instead of making Junior talk. Lowell had asked the young man once whether Dr. Holmes ever spoke at home about the Dante Club. “Oh, certainly, Mr. Lowell,” Junior, handsome and tall, said, smirking, “and the Atlantic Club and the Union Club and the Saturday Club and the Scientific Club and the Historical Association and the Medical Society…”

Phineas Jennison, one of Boston’s wealthiest new businessmen, was sitting next to Lowell at a recent Saturday Club supper at the Parker House when all this darkened Lowell’s mind. “Harvard is harassing you again,” Jennison said. Lowell was stunned that his face could be read as easily as a sign board. “Do not jump so, my dear friend,” Jennison said, laughing, the deep dimple in his chin jiggling. Jennison’s near relations said that his gold-flaxen hair and his regal dimple had betokened his vast fortune even from the time he was a boy, though, accurately speaking, it was perhaps a regicidal dimple, inherited as it was supposed to be from an ancestor who had beheaded Charles I. “It is only that I chanced to speak with some of the Corporation fellows the other day. You know nothing happens in Boston or Cambridge without coming under my nose.”

“Building another library for us, are you?” Lowell asked.

“The fellows seemed to be heated up speaking amongst themselves of your department anyway. They seemed downright determined. I do not mean to pry into your affairs, of course, only—”

“Between us, my dear Jennison, they mean to rid me of my Dante class,” Lowell interrupted. “I sometimes fear they’ve become as set against Dante as I am for him. They even offered to increase enrollment for students in my classes if I allow them approval over my seminar topics.” Jennison’s expression conveyed his concern.

“I refused, of course,” Lowell said.

Jennison flashed his wide smile. “Did you?”

They were interrupted by a few toasts, including the night’s most cheered improvisational rhyme, which had been demanded by the revelers from Dr. Holmes. Holmes, quick as always, even managed to draw attention to the raw style of the format.

“These after-dinner verses could kill any poet but Holmes,” Lowell said with an admiring grin. He had a hazy look in his eyes. “Sometimes I feel I am not the stuff that professors are made of, Jennison. Better in some ways, worse in others. Too sensitive and not conceited enough—physically conceited, I should call it. I know it is all wearing me out.” He paused. “And why shouldn’t sitting in the professor’s chair all these years benumb me to the world? What must someone like you, prince of industry, think of such a paltry existence?”

“Child’s talk, my dear Lowell!” Jennison seemed tired with the topic but after a moment’s thought was newly interested. “You have a larger duty to the world and to yourself than any mere spectator! I shan’t hear a bit of your hesitancy! I wouldn’t know what Dante is to save my soul. But a genius the likes of you, my dear friend, assumes a divine responsibility to fight for all those exiled from the world.”

Lowell mumbled something inaudible but no doubt self-effacing.

“Now, now, Lowell,” Jennison said. “Were you not the one to convince the Saturday Club that a mere merchant was good enough to dine with such immortals as your friends?”

“Could they have refused you after you offered to buy the Parker House?” Lowell laughed.

“They could have refused me if I had given up my fight to belong among great men. May I quote from my favorite poet: ‘And what they dare to dream of, dare to do.’ Oh, how good that is!”

Lowell fell into more laughter at the idea of being inspired by his own poetry, but in truth, he was. Why shouldn’t he be? The proof of poetry was, in Lowell’s mind, that it reduced to the essence of a single line the vague philosophy that floated in all men’s minds, so as to render it portable and useful, ready to the hand.

Now, on his way to another lecture, the very thought of entering a room full of students, who still thought it was possible to learn all about something, made him yawn.

Lowell hitched his horse to the old water pump outside Hollis Hall. “Kick them like hell if they come, old boy,” he said, lighting a cigar. Horses and cigars were among the catalog of prohibited items on Harvard Yard.

A man was leaning idly against an elm. He wore a bright yellow-checkered waistcoat and had a gaunt, or rather wasted, set of features. The man, who towered over the poet even at his slanting angle, too old for a student and too worn for a faculty member, stared at him with the familiar, insatiable gleam of the literary admirer.

Fame did not mean much to Lowell, who liked only to think that his friends found some good in what he wrote and that Mabel Lowell would be proud of being his daughter after he was gone. Otherwise he thought himself teres atque rotundus: a microcosm in himself, his own author, public, critic, and posterity. Still, the praise of men and women on the streets could not fail to warm him. Sometimes he would go for a stroll in Cambridge with his heart so full of yearning that an indifferent look, even from an entire stranger, would bring tears into his eyes. But there was something equally painful in encountering the opaque, dazed glare of recognition. That made him feel wholly transparent and separate: Poet Lowell, apparition.

This yellow-vested watcher leaning on the tree touched the brim of his black bowler as Lowell passed. The poet bowed his head confusedly, his cheeks tingling. As he rushed through the College campus to vanquish his day’s obligations, Lowell did not notice how strangely intent the observer remained.

Dr. Holmes bounded into the steep amphitheater. A round of boot stomping, employed by those whose pencils and notebooks made the use of hands inconvenient, rumbled forth upon his entrance. This was followed by rapid hurrahs from the rowdies (Holmes called them his young barbarians) collected in that upper region of the classroom known as the Mountain (as though this were the assembly of the French Revolution). Here Holmes constructed the human body inside out each term. Here, four times a week, were fifty adoring sons waiting on his every word. Standing before his class in the belly of the amphitheater, he felt twelve feet tall rather than his actual five-five (and that in particularly substantial boots, made by the best shoemaker in Boston).

Oliver Wendell Holmes was the only member of the faculty ever able to manage the one o’clock assignment, when hunger and exhaustion combined with the narcotized air of the two-story brick box on North Grove. Some envious colleagues said his literary fame won over the students. In fact, most of the boys who chose medicine over law and theology were rustics, and if they had encountered any real literature before arriving in Boston, it would have been some poem of Longfellow’s. Still, word of Holmes’s literary reputation would spread like sensational gossip, someone securing a copy of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table and circulating it, remarking with an incredulous stare to a fellow, “You haven’t yet read the Autocrat?” But his literary reputation among the students was more a reputation of a reputation.

“Today,” said Holmes, “we shall begin with a topic with which I trust you boys are not at all familiar.” He yanked at a clean white sheet that covered a female cadaver, then held up his palms at the foot stomping and hollering that followed.

“Respect, gentlemen! Respect for humanity and God’s divinest work!”

Dr. Holmes was too lost in the ocean of attention to notice the intruder among his students.

“Yes, the female body shall begin today’s subject,” Holmes continued.

A timid young man, Alvah Smith, one of the half-dozen bright faces in any class to which the professor naturally directs his lecture to intermediate for the rest, blushed vibrantly in the front row, where his neighbors were happy to taunt his embarrassment.

Holmes saw this. “And here, on Smith, we find exhibited the inhibitory action of the vasomotor nerves on the arterioles suddenly relaxing and filling the surface capillaries with blood—that same pleasing phenomenon which some of you may witness on the cheek of that young person whom you expect to visit this evening.”

Smith laughed along with the rest. But Holmes also heard an involuntary guffaw that cracked with the slowness of age. He squinted up the aisle at the Reverend Dr. Putnam, one of the lesser powers of the Harvard Corporation. The fellows of the Corporation, though they comprised the highest level of supervision, never actually attended classes in their university; tramping from Cambridge to the medical building, which was located across the river in Boston for proximity to the hospitals, would have been an unacceptable notion to most administrators.

“Now,” Holmes said to his class distractedly, setting his tools to the cadavers, where his two demonstrators gathered. “Let us plunge into the depths of our subject.”

After class ended and the barbarians elbowed their way through the aisles, Holmes led the Reverend Dr. Putnam to his office.

“You, my dearest Dr. Holmes, represent the gold standard for men of American letters. None have worked so hard to rise in so many fields. Your name has become a symbol of scholarship and authorship. Why, just yesterday I was speaking with a gentleman from England who was saying how you are revered in the mother country.”

Holmes smiled, oblivious. “What did he say? What did he say, Reverend Putnam? You know I like to have it laid on thick.”

Putnam frowned at the interruption. “Despite this, Augustus Manning has developed concern about certain of your literary activities, Dr. Holmes.”

Holmes was surprised. “You mean about Mr. Longfellow’s Dante work? Longfellow is the translator. I am but one of his aides-de-camp, so to speak. I suggest you wait and read the work; surely you will enjoy it.”

“James Russell Lowell. J. T. Fields. George Greene. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Quite a selection of ‘aides,’ now, isn’t it?”

Holmes was annoyed. He had not thought their club a matter of general interest and did not like speaking of it with an outsider. The Dante Club was one of his few activities not belonging to the public world. “Oh, throw a stone in Cambridge and you’re bound to hit a two-volumer, my dear Putnam.”

Putnam folded his arms and waited.

Holmes waved a hand in an arbitrary direction. “Mr. Fields deals with such matters.”

“Pray remove yourself from this precarious association,” Putnam said with dead seriousness. “Talk some sense into your friends. Professor Lowell, for instance, has only compounded—”

“If you’re in search of someone to whom Lowell listens, my dear reverend,” Holmes interrupted with a laugh, “you’ve made a wrong turn into the Medical College.”

“Holmes,” Putnam said kindly. “I’ve come chiefly to warn you, because I count you a friend. If Dr. Manning knew I was speaking with you like this, he would…” Putnam paused and lowered his tone eulogistically, “Dear Holmes, your future will be hitched to Dante. I fear what shall happen to your poetry, your name, by the time Manning is through, in your current situation.”

“Manning has no call to assault me personally even if he objects to our little club’s chosen interests.”

Putnam replied, “We’re talking of Augustus Manning. Consider this.”

When Dr. Holmes turned away, he looked like he was swallowing a globe. Putnam often wondered why all men did not wear beards. He was cheerful, even on the bumpy ride back into Cambridge, for he knew that Dr. Manning would be highly pleased with his report.

Artemus Prescott Healey, b. 1804, d. 1865, was placed into a large family plot, one of the first purchased on the main hillside of Mount Auburn Cemetery years earlier.

There were still many among the Brahmins who begrudged Healey his cowardly decisions before the war. But it was agreed by all that only the most extreme former radical would offend the memory of their state’s chief justice by spurning his final ceremonies.

Dr. Holmes leaned over to his wife. “Only four years’ difference, ‘Melia.”

She requested elaboration with a brief purr.

“Justice Healey’s sixty,” Holmes continued in his whisper. “Or would be. Only four years older than I am, dear, almost to the day!” Really almost to the month; nonetheless, Dr. Holmes genuinely appreciated the proximity of dead persons to his own age. Amelia Holmes, by a shift in her eyes, told him to stay silent during the eulogies. Holmes settled his mouth and looked ahead over the quiet acres.

Holmes could not claim to have been an intimate of the deceased; few men could, even among the Brahmins. Chief Justice Healey had served on the Harvard Board of Overseers, so Dr. Holmes had enjoyed some routine interaction with the judge in Healey’s capacity as administrator. Holmes also had known Healey through the doctor’s membership in Phi Beta Kappa, for Healey had presided for a time over that proud society. Dr. Holmes kept his PBK key on his watch chain, an item with which his fingers now wrestled as Healey’s body settled into its new bed. At least, Holmes thought with a doctor’s special sympathy for dying, poor Healey never suffered.

Dr. Holmes’s most prolonged contact with the judge had come at the courthouse, at a time that shook Holmes, that made him want to retreat fully into a world of poetry. The defense in the Webster trial, presided over, as all capital crimes, by a three-judge panel chaired by the chief justice, had requested Dr. Holmes’s testimony as a character witness for John W. Webster. It was during the heat of the trial so many years before that Wendell Holmes witnessed the ponderous, grueling style of speech by which Artemus Healey surrendered his legal opinions.

“Harvard professors do not commit murder.” That was what the then-president of Harvard, taking the stand shortly before Dr. Holmes, testified on behalf of Webster.

The murder of Dr. Parkman had transpired in the laboratory below Holmes’s lecture room, while Holmes was lecturing. It was hard enough that Holmes had been friends with both murderer and victim—not knowing whom to lament more. At least the customary rolling laughter of Holmes’s students had drowned out Professor Webster’s hacking of the body into pieces.

“A devout man, and one that feared God with all his house…”

The preacher’s shrill promises of Heaven, with his chief-mourner expression, did not sit well with Holmes. As a matter of principle, few ornaments of religious ceremony ever had sat well with Dr. Holmes, son of one of those stalwart ministers whose Calvinism had remained hard and fast in the face of the Unitarian upheaval. Oliver Wendell Holmes and his shy younger brother, John, had been reared with that awful bosh that still buzzed in the doctor’s ears: “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.” Fortunately, they were sheltered by the quick wit of their mother, who whispered witty asides while the Reverend Holmes and his guest ministers preached advance damnation and inborn sin. She would promise them that new ideas would come, particularly to Wendell when he was shaken by some story of the devil’s control over their souls. And so did the new ideas arrive, for Boston and for Oliver Wendell Holmes. Only Unitarians could have built Mount Auburn Cemetery, a burial place that was also a garden.

While Holmes took stock of the many notables in attendance to occupy himself, many others were tilting their heads in Dr. Holmes’s direction, for he was part of a pocket of celebrities known by various names—the New England Saints or the Fireside Poets. Whatever their name, they were the top literary contingent of the country. Near the Holmeses stood James Russell Lowell, poet, professor, and editor, idly twisting the long tusk of his mustache until Fanny Lowell would pull at his sleeve; to the other side, J. T. Fields, publisher of New England’s greatest poets, his head and beard pointed downward in a perfect triangle of serious contemplation, a striking figure to be juxtaposed with the angelic pink cheeks and perfect poise of his young wife. Lowell and Fields were no more intimate with Chief Justice Healey than was Holmes, but they had attended the service out of respect for Healey’s position and family (to whom the Lowells, in addition, happened to be cousins in some fashion or another).

Those attendees viewing this trio of litterateurs looked in vain for the most illustrious of their company. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had, as a matter of fact, prepared to accompany his friends to Mount Auburn, which was no more than a stroll from his house, but as usual had kept to his fireside instead. There was little in the world outside Craigie House that would presume to draw out Longfellow. After so many years dedicated to this project, the reality of pending publication brought full concentration. Besides, Longfellow feared (and rightly so) that had he come to Mount Auburn, his fame would have drawn the mourners’ attention away from the Healey family. Whenever Longfellow walked through the streets of Cambridge, people whispered, children threw themselves into his arms, hats were lifted in such great numbers that it seemed all of Middlesex County had simultaneously entered a chapel.

Holmes could remember one time jouncing along with Lowell in a hackney cab, years earlier, before the war. They passed the window of Craigie House that framed Fanny and Henry Longfellow at their fireside, surrounded by their five beautiful children at the piano. Back then, Longfellow’s face still was open for the world to see.

“I tremble to look at Longfellow’s house,” Holmes had said.

Lowell, who had been complaining about a defective Thoreau essay he was editing, responded with a light laugh that detached him from Holmes’s tone.

“Their happiness is so perfect,” Holmes had continued, “that no change, of the changes which must come to them, could fail to be for the worse.”

As the oration of Reverend Young came to a close and solemn whispering commenced on the cemetery’s quiet acres, as Holmes brushed small yellow leaves from his velvet collar and let his eyes travel over the engraved faces of the mourners, he noticed that Reverend Elisha Talbot, Cambridge’s most prominent minister, appeared openly irritated by the warm reception Young’s oration had produced; no doubt, he was rehearsing what he would have delivered had he been Healey’s minister. Holmes admired the Widow Healey’s restrained expression. Easy-crying widows always took new husbands soonest. Holmes also happened to linger on the sight of Mr. Kurtz, for the chief of police had inserted himself assertively next to Widow Healey and pulled her aside, apparently attempting to persuade her of something– but in such abbreviated fashion that their exchange must have been a recapitulation of some earlier talk; Chief Kurtz was not making an argument but rather tendering a reminder to Widow Healey. The widow nodded deferentially; oh, but how very tightly, thought Holmes. Chief Kurtz ended with a sigh of relief that Aeolus might have envied.

Supper that night at 21 Charles Street was quieter than usual, though it was never quiet. Guests to the house always departed flabbergasted by the rate, not to mention the sheer volume, of the Holmeses’ talk, wondering whether any of these family members ever listened to one another at all. It was a tradition started by the doctor to award an extra serving of marmalade to the best conversationalist of the evening. Today, Dr. Holmes’s daughter, “little” Amelia, was chattering more than usual, telling of the latest engagement, of Miss B______to Colonel F______, and of what her sewing circle had been making for wedding gifts.

“Why, Father,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, hero, with a small grin. “I believe you’ll be deprived of the marmalade this evening.” Junior was out of place at the Holmes table: Not only was he six feet tall in a house-hold of quick, little persons, but he was stoically deliberate in speech and movement.

Holmes smiled thoughtfully over his roast. “But, Wendy, I haven’t heard much from you tonight.”

Junior hated when his father called him that. “Oh, I won’t win the helping. But neither will you, Father.” He turned to his younger brother, Edward, who was home only occasionally now that he boarded at the College. “They say they are raising a subscription to name a chair after poor Healey at the law school. Do you believe it, Neddie? After he ducked the Fugitive Slave Act, too, for all those years. Dying’s the only way Boston will pardon your past, for aught I know.”

On his after-supper walk, Dr. Holmes stopped to give some children playing marbles a handful of pennies with which to spell a word on the sidewalk. He chose knot (why not?), and when they formed the copper letters correctly, he let them keep the coins. He was glad the Boston summer was winding down, and with it the parching heat, which inflamed his asthma.

Holmes sat under the tall trees behind his house thinking of “the finest literary minds of New England” from Fields’s newspaper puff in the New York Tribune. Their Dante Club: It had importance for Lowell’s mission to introduce Dante’s poetry to America, for Fields’s publishing plans. Yes, there were the academic and the business stakes. But for Holmes the triumph of the club was its union of interests of that group of friends whom he felt most fortunate to have. He loved more than anything the free chatter and brilliant spark that were brought out when they were unlocking the poetry. The Dante Club was a healing association—for these last years that had suddenly aged them all—uniting Holmes and Lowell after their rifts over the war, uniting Fields with his best authors in his first year without his partner William Ticknor to provide security, uniting Longfellow with the outside world, or at least with some of its more literarily inclined ambassadors.

Holmes’s talent for translating was not extraordinary. He had the imagination needed but did not have that quality possessed by Longfellow, which allowed one poet to open fully to another poet’s voice. Still, in a nation with little free trade in thought with foreign countries, Oliver Wendell Holmes was happy to consider himself well versed in Dante: a Dantean more than Dante scholar. When Holmes was in college, Professor George Ticknor, the aristocratic litterateur, was nearing the end of his tolerance for the Harvard Corporation’s constant obstruction of his post as the first Smith Professor. Wendell Holmes, meanwhile, having mastered Greek and Latin at the age of twelve, was strangled by boredom in the required recitation hours of rote memorizing and repeating verses of Euripides’ Hecuba that had long ago been pummeled of meaning.

When they met in the Holmes family drawing room, Professor Ticknor’s steady black eyes took in the collegian, who was shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Never still for a moment,” Oliver Wendell Holmes’s father, the Reverend Holmes, sighed. Ticknor suggested that Italian could discipline him. At the time, the department’s resources were too strained to formally offer the language. But Holmes soon received a loan of grammar and vocabulary instruction prepared by Ticknor, along with an edition of Dante’s Divina Commedia, a poem divided into “canticles” called Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

Holmes feared now that the swells at Harvard had hit on something about Dante from the insightful position of ignorance. In medical school, the sciences had allowed Oliver Wendell Holmes to discover how nature operated when freed from superstition and fear. He believed that just as astronomy had replaced astrology, so would “theonomy” rise up one day over its slow-witted twin. With this faith, Holmes prospered as a poet and a professor.

Then the war ambushed Dr. Holmes, and so did Dante Alighieri.

It began one evening in the winter of 1861. Holmes was sitting in Elmwood, Lowell’s mansion, fidgeting at the news of Wendell Junior’s departure with the 25th Massachusetts Regiment. Lowell was the right antidote for his nerves: brash and loudly confident that the world was at all times exactly as he said it was; derisive, if necessary, if one’s concerns were too dominant.

Since that summer, society had sorely missed the soothing presence of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow wrote his friends notes declining all invitations that would have compelled him to leave Craigie House, explaining that he was occupied. He had begun translating Dante, he said, and did not plan to stop: I have done this work when I can do nothing else.

Coming from the reticent Longfellow, these notes were screaming laments. He was outwardly calm but inwardly bleeding to death.

So Lowell, planted on Longfellow’s doorstep, insisted on helping. Lowell had long bemoaned the fact that Americans, ill-trained in modern languages, hadn’t access even to the few regrettable British translations that existed.

“I need a poet’s name to sell such a book to the donkey public!” Fields would say to Lowell’s apocalyptic warnings about America’s blindness to Dante. Whenever Fields wished to discourage his authors from a risky project, he pointed out the stupidity of the reading public.

Lowell had bothered Longfellow to translate the tripartite poem many times over the years, even once threatening to do it himself—something for which he did not have the inner strength. Now he couldn’t not help. After all, Lowell was one of the few American scholars to know anything of Dante; indeed, he seemed to know everything.

Lowell detailed for Holmes how remarkably Longfellow was capturing Dante, from the cantos Longfellow had shown him. “He was born for the task, I rather think, Wendell.” Longfellow was starting with Paradiso and then would turn to Purgatorio and finally Inferno.

“Moving backwards?” Holmes asked, intrigued.

Lowell nodded and grinned. “I daresay dear Longfellow wants to make sure of Heaven before committing himself to Hell.”

“I never can go all the way through to Lucifer,” Holmes said, commenting on Inferno. “Purgatory and Paradise are all music and hope, and you feel you are floating toward God. But the hideousness, the savagery, of that medieval nightmare! Alexander the Great ought to have slept with it under the pillow.”

“Dante’s Hell is part of our world as much as part of the underworld, and shouldn’t be avoided,” Lowell said, “but rather confronted. We sound the depths of Hell very often in this life.”

The force of Dante’s poetry resonated most in those who did not confess the Catholic faith, for believers inevitably would have quibbles with Dante’s theology. But for those most distant theologically, Dante’s faith was so perfect, so unyielding, that a reader found himself compelled by the poetry to take it all to heart. This is why Holmes feared the Dante Club: He feared that it would usher in a new Hell, one empowered by the poets’ sheer literary genius. And, worse yet, he feared that he himself, after a life spent running away from the devil preached by his father, would be partially to blame.

In the Elmwood study that night in 1861, a messenger interrupted the poets’ tea. Dr. Holmes knew quite definitively that it would be a telegram that had been elaborately redirected from his own house, informing him of poor Wendell Junior’s death on some frozen battlefield, probably from exhaustion—of all the explanations on the casualty lists, Holmes found “died of exhaustion” the most frightening and vivid. But instead, it was a servant sent by Henry Longfellow, whose Craigie House estate was around the corner: a simple note requesting Lowell’s help with some more translated cantos. Lowell persuaded Holmes to accompany him. “I have so many irons in the fire already that I dread a new temptation,” Holmes said, laughing it off at first. “I fear I will catch your Dante mania.”

Lowell convinced Fields to take up Dante, too. Though no Italianist, the publisher had a workable amount of the language at his disposal from traveling for business (this business traveling was mostly for his pleasure and Annie’s, since there was little trade of books between Rome and Boston), and now he immersed himself in dictionaries and commentaries. Fields’s interest, his wife liked to say, was what interested others. And old George Washington Greene, who had given Longfellow his first copy of Dante while they were touring the Italian countryside together thirty years earlier, began stopping by whenever he was in town from Rhode Island, offering wide-eyed assessments of the labor. It was Fields, most in need of schedules, who suggested Wednesday evenings for their Dante gatherings at the Craigie House study, and it was Dr. Holmes, a consummate namer, who christened the enterprise the Dante Club, though Holmes himself usually referred to them as their “seances”—insisting that if you looked hard enough, you could meet Dante face-to-face at Longfellow’s fireside.

Holmes’s new novel would stand his own name right side up again for the public. It would be the American Story readers awaited at every bookseller and library—the one Hawthorne had failed to find before his death; the one promising spirits, like Herman Melville, muddled out of peculiarity on the way to anonymity and isolation. Dante dared to make himself into an almost divine hero, transforming his own defective personality through the swagger of the poetry. But for this the Florentine sacrificed his home, his life with his wife and children, his place in the crooked city he loved. In impoverished solitude he defined his nation; only in his imagination could he experience peace. Dr. Holmes, in his usual fashion, would accomplish everything, all at once.

And after his novel garnered the nation’s loyalty, then let Dr. Manning and the other vultures of the world try picking at his reputation! On the crest of redoubled adoration, Oliver Wendell Holmes could single-handedly shield Dante from attackers and assure Longfellow’s triumph. But if the Dante translation too hastily opened a battle that deepened the scars already cutting into his name, then his American Story could come and go unnoticed, or worse.

Holmes saw with the clarity of a courtroom verdict what had to be done. He had to slow them down just enough to finish his novel before the translation was complete. This was not just Dante business; this was Oliver Wendell Holmes business, his literary fate. Besides, Dante had plaintively bided his time for several hundred years before appearing to the New World. What could a few extra weeks bring?

In the lobby of the police station in Court Square, Nicholas Rey looked up from his notepad, squinting at the gaslight after a long engagement with a sheet of paper. A hefty bear of an indigoed uniformed man, swaying a small paper parcel as if it were an infant, waited in front of his desk.

“You’re Patrolman Rey, right? Sergeant Stoneweather. Don’t want to interrupt.” The man advanced and extended his impressive paw. “I think it takes a man of nerve to be the first Negro policeman, whatever some of the others say. What you writing there, Rey?”

“Might I be of some help, Sergeant?” Rey asked.

“I might, just might. You’re the one been asking around the stations ‘bout that devilish beggar who jumped out the window, aren’t you? It was me that brung him in for the show-up.”

Rey made sure Kurtz’s office door was still closed. Sergeant Stoneweather took out a blueberry pie from his parcel and nourished himself at intervals in their talk.

“Do you recall where you were when you took him in?” Rey asked.

“Aye—out looking for anyone who couldn’t account for themselves, just how we was instructed. The grogshops, the public houses. The South Boston horsecar office, that’s where I’d been at that hour, ‘cause I knew a few dips who work the pockets there. That beggar a yours was slumped over on one of the benches, half sleeping, but shaking too, like, tremulous demendous or delirious tremendous or somethin’ of that sort.”

“You know who he was?” Rey asked.

Stoneweather spoke around his chewing. “Lots of loungers and lushing-tons always coming and going by the horsecar. Didn’t look familiar to me, though. Wasn’t even of the mind to take him in, to say sooth. Seemed harmless enough.”

Rey was surprised by this. “What made you change your mind?”

“That damned beggar, that’s what!” Stoneweather blurted out, losing some piecrust in his beard. “He sees me rounding up some rogues, right, and he runs up to me, wrists held out and turned up in front of him like he wanted to be shackled and booked for bloody murder on the spot! So I thought to myself, Heaven sent him to me to take to this here show-up, I guess. The damned foolish simkin’. Everything happens for some of God’s reason, I believe that. Don’t you, Patrolman?”

Rey had trouble envisioning the leaper in any circumstance other than flight. “Did he say anything to you on the way? Was he doing anything? Speaking to someone else? Reading a newspaper maybe? A book?”

Stoneweather shrugged. “Didn’t notice.” As Stoneweather searched his coat pockets for a handkerchief to wipe his hands, Rey noticed with distracting interest the revolver peeking out from his leather belt. On the day Rey was appointed to the police by Governor Andrew, the aldermanic council had issued a resolution instituting restrictions on him. Rey could not wear a uniform, could not carry any weapon stronger than a billy club, and could not arrest a white person without the presence of another officer.

In that first month, the city stationed Nicholas Rey at the District Two ward. The captain of the station house decided Rey could only be effective on patrol in Nigger Hill. But there were enough blacks there who resented and distrusted a mulatto officer that the other patrolman in the area feared a riot. The station house was not much better. Only two or three policemen spoke with Rey at all, and the others signed a letter to Chief Kurtz recommending an end to the experiment of a colored officer.

“You really want to know what drove him to it, Patrolman?” Stoneweather asked. “Sometimes a man just can’t go on how things are, in my experience.”

“He died in this station house, Sergeant Stoneweather,” Rey said. “But in his mind, he was somewhere else—far from us, far from safety.”

This was more than Stoneweather could grasp. “I wish I knew more about the poor fellow, I do.”

That afternoon, Chief Kurtz and Deputy Chief Savage visited Beacon Hill. Rey, in the driver’s box, was even quieter than usual. When they stepped down, Kurtz said, “You still thinking of that damned vagrant, Patrolman?”

“I can find out who he was, Chief,” Rey said.

Kurtz frowned, but his eyes and voice softened. “Well, what do you know of him?”

“Sergeant Stoneweather brought him in from a horsecar office. He could have been from that area.”

“A horsecar station! He could have been coming from anywhere.”

Rey did not disagree and did not argue. Deputy Chief Savage, who had been listening, said noncommittally, “We also have his likeness, Chief, from just before the show-up.”

“Listen close,” Kurtz said. “Both of you: The old Healey hen will have me by the ears if she’s not happy. And she won’t be happy, not till we give her a day as hangman. Rey, I don’t want you poking around about that leaper, you hear? We’ve got enough trouble without calling the world down on our head for a man that died at our feet.”

The windows of the Wide Oaks mansion were draped in heavy black cloth, permitting only faint stripes of daylight along the sides. Widow Healey lifted her head from a mound of lotus-leaf pillows. “You have found the murderer, Chief Kurtz,” she stated rather than asked when Kurtz entered.

“My dear madam,” Chief Kurtz removed his hat and placed it on a table at the foot of her bed. “We have men on every lead. The inquiry is still in its early morning stages…” Kurtz explained the possibilities: There were two men who owed Healey money and a notorious criminal whose sentence had been upheld five years earlier by the chief justice.

The widow held her head steadily enough to maintain a hot compress balanced on the white peaks of her brows. Since the funeral and the various memorial services for the chief justice, Ednah Healey had refused to leave her chamber and had turned away all callers outside her immediate family. From her neck hung the crystal brooch imprisoning the judge’s tangled lock of hair, an ornament the widow had asked Nell Ranney to string onto a necklace.

Her two sons, as big around the shoulders and heads as Chief Justice Healey but nowhere near as massive, sat slumped on armchairs flanking the door like two granite bulldogs.

Roland Healey interrupted Kurtz: “I don’t understand why you have advanced so slowly, Chief Kurtz.”

“If only we’d offer a reward!” the older son, Richard, added to his brother’s complaint. “We’d be sure to nab someone with enough money put up! Demonish greed, that’s all that drives the public to help.”

The deputy chief heard this with professional patience. “My good Mr. Healey, if we reveal the true circumstances of your father’s decease, you would be flooded with false reports from those looking only to turn a dollar. You must keep the entire matter dark to the public and let us continue.”

“Trust when I say, my friends,” he added, “that you would not like what should come from wide knowledge of this.”

The widow spoke up. “The man who died at your show-up. Have you discovered anything of his identity?”

Kurtz put up his hands. “So many of our good citizens belong to the same family when brought in to show themselves to the police,” he said, and smiled wryly. “Smith or Jones.”

“And this one,” said Mrs. Healey. “What family was he?”

“He did not give us any name, madam,” said Kurtz, penitently tucking his smile under the uncombed overhang of his mustache. “But we have no reason to believe he had any information on Judge Healey’s murder. He was merely cracked in the head, and a bit cup-shot, as well.”

“Potentially deaf and dumb,” added Savage.

“Why would he be so desperate to get away, Chief Kurtz?” asked Richard Healey.

This was an excellent question, though Kurtz did not want to show it. “I cannot begin to tell you how many men we find on the street who believe themselves chased by demons and report to us their pursuers’ descriptions, horns included.”

Mrs. Healey leaned forward and squinted. “Chief Kurtz, your porter?”

Kurtz motioned Rey in from the hall. “Madam, may I make you acquainted with Patrolman Nicholas Rey. You requested that we bring him with us today, regarding the man who passed away at the show-up.”

“A Negro police officer?” she asked with visible discomfort.

“Mulatto, in actuality, madam,” Savage announced proudly. “Patrolman Rey’s the Commonwealth’s very first. The first in all New England, they say.” He held out his hand and made Rey shake it.

Mrs. Healey managed to twist and crane her neck enough to view the mulatto to her apparent satisfaction. “You are the officer who had charge of the vagrant, the one who died there?”

Rey nodded.

“Tell me then, Officer. What do you think made him act in such a way?”

Chief Kurtz coughed nervously in Rey’s direction.

“I cannot say positively, madam,” replied Rey honestly. “I cannot say that he understood or considered any danger to his physical being at the time.”

“Did he speak to you?” asked Roland.

“He did, Mr. Healey. At least he tried. But I fear nothing in his whisper could be comprehended,” said Rey.

“Ha! You cannot even discover the identity of an idler who dies on your own floor! I trust you think my husband deserved to meet his end, Chief Kurtz!”

“I?” Kurtz looked back helplessly at his deputy chief. “Madam!”

“I am a sick woman, before God, but shan’t be deceived! You think us fools and villains and wish us all go to the devil!”

“Madam!” Savage echoed the chief.

“I shan’t give you the pleasure of seeing me dead in this world, Chief Kurtz! You and your ungrateful nigger police! He did everything he knew to do and we haven’t shame for any of it!” The compress crashed to the floor as she raked her neck with her nails. This was a new compulsion, shown by the fresh scabs and red marks covering her skin. She tore her neck, digging into her flesh, scratching at a cluster of invisible insects that were lying in wait in the crevices of her mind.

Her sons jumped from their chairs but could only back away toward the door, where Kurtz and Savage had also helplessly receded, as though the widow might burst into flames at any second.

Rey waited another moment, then calmly took a step toward the side of her bed.

“Madam Healey.” Her scratching had loosened the strings of her nightdress. Rey reached over and dimmed the flame of the lamp until she could be seen only in silhouette. “Madam, I wish you to know that your husband helped me once.”

She was stilled.

Kurtz and Savage traded surprised glances in the doorway. Rey spoke too quietly for them to hear every word from the other end of the room and they were too frightened of renewing the widow’s mania to move forward. But they could sense, even in the dark, how tranquil she had become, how still and silent but for her troubled breathing.

“Tell me please,” she said.

“I was brought to Boston as a child by a Virginia woman traveling here on a holiday. Some abolitionists took me away from her to bring me before the chief justice. The chief justice ruled that a slave became emancipated by law once crossing into a free state. He assigned me to the care of a colored blacksmith, Rey, and his family.”

“Before that wretched Fugitive Slave Act did us all in.” Mrs. Healey’s lids snapped shut and she sighed, her mouth curling strangely. “I know what friends of your race think, because of that Sims boy. The chief justice did not like me to attend court, but I went—there was so much talk then. Sims was like you, a handsome Negro, but dark as the blackness in some people’s heads. The chief justice would have never sent him back if he didn’t have to. He had no choice, you understand that. But he gave you a family. A family that made you happy?”

He nodded.

“Why must mistakes only be made up for afterwards? Can’t they sometimes be mended by what came before? It is so tiring. So tiring.”

Some sense returned to her, and she knew now what had to be done once the officers were gone. But she needed one more thing from Rey. “Pray, did he speak to you when you were a boy? Judge Healey always liked talking with children more than anyone.” She remembered Healey with their own children.

“He asked me if I did wish to stay here, Mrs. Healey, before he wrote his orders. He said that we would always be safe in Boston but that it had to be my choice to be a Boston man, a man who stood for himself and for his city at the same time, or I would always be an outsider. He told me that when a Boston man reaches the pearly gates, an angel comes out to warn him: ‘You won’t like it here, for it is not Boston.’ “

He heard the whisper as he listened to Widow Healey fall asleep; he heard it in the bareness of his shivering rooming house. He awoke each morning with the words on his tongue. He could taste them, could smell the potent odor that coated them, could brush against the crusted whiskers that recited them, but when he tried to speak the whisper himself, sometimes while driving, sometimes before a looking glass, it was nonsense. He sat with his pen at all hours, using up inkwells, writing it out, and the nonsense looked worse than it sounded. He could see the whisperer, reeking of rot, shocked eyes glaring at him before the body carried itself through the glass. The nameless man had been dropped from the sky from a faraway place, Rey couldn’t help thinking, into Rey’s arms, from where he had dropped him again. He trained himself to put it out of his mind. But how clearly he could see the plummet onto the courtyard, where the man became all blood and leaves, over and over again, as smooth and constant as pictures passed through the slide of a magic lantern. He had to stop the fall, Chief Kurtz’s command be damned. He had to find some meaning for the words left hanging on the dead air.

“I wouldn’t let him go with anybody else,” said Amelia Holmes, her small face pleated, pulling her husband’s coat collar to cover his neck cloth. “Mr. Fields, he ought not to go out tonight. I am worried what will come of it. Hear how he wheezes with the asthma. Now, Wendell, when will you get home?”

J. T. Fields’s well-appointed carriage had driven up to 21 Charles Street. Though it was only two blocks down from his house, Fields never made Holmes walk. The doctor was breathing with difficulty on the front step, accusing the cooling weather, as he often did the heat.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Dr. Holmes said, slightly annoyed. “I put myself into Mr. Fields’s hands.”

She said somberly, “Well, Mr. Fields, how early will you get him back?”

Fields considered this with the utmost gravity. A wife’s comfort was as important to him as an author’s, and Amelia Holmes had been apprehensive lately.

“I wish Wendell would not publish anything more, Mr. Fields,” Amelia had said at a breakfast at the Fieldses’ earlier in the month, in their pretty room looking out through leaves and flowers at the well-tempered river. “He’ll only call down newspaper criticism, and where is the use?”

Fields had opened his mouth to set her mind at rest, but Holmes was too quick—when he was agitated or panicked, no one could talk as fast, especially about himself. “How do you mean, ‘Melia? I have written something new which the critics won’t complain of. This is the American Story’ Mr. Fields has long been pressing me to make. You’ll see, dear, it’ll be better than anything I have ever done.”

“Oh, that’s what you always say, Wendell.” She shook her head sadly. “But I wish you’d let it alone.”

Fields knew Amelia had endured Holmes’s disappointment when his sequel serial to The Autocrat–The Professor at the Breakfast-Table–was dismissed as repetitive, despite Fields’s promises of success. Still, Holmes planned a third in the series, which he would call The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. There had also been his devastation over the critical attacks and only modest success wrought by Elsie Veneer, his first novel, which he had written breathlessly and published shortly before the war.

The new set of Bohemian critics in New York liked to attack the Boston establishment, and Holmes represented his proud city more than anybody– he, after all, had dubbed Boston the Hub of the Universe and had named his own class the Boston Brahmins, after those in more exotic lands. Now the ruffians who called themselves Young America and dwelt in subterranean Manhattan taverns along Broadway had declared Fields’s long dominant Fireside Poets irrelevant to the next age. What had the Longfellow coterie’s quaint rhymes and village settings done to prevent the catastrophe of a civil war? they demanded to know. Holmes, for his part, years before the war, had spoken out for compromise and had even signed, along with Artemus Healey, a resolution to support the Fugitive Slave Act, which would send escaped slaves back to their masters, as a hopeful measure to avoid conflict.

“But don’t you see, Amelia,” Holmes had continued at the breakfast table. “I shall make money by it, and that won’t come amiss.” Suddenly he looked up at Fields. “If anything should happen to me before I get the story done, you wouldn’t come down upon the widow for the money, would you now?” They’d all laughed.

Now, standing next to his carriage, Fields glanced at the checkered sky as if it could tell him the answer Amelia waited on. “About twelve,” he said. “How does twelve sound, my dear Mrs. Holmes?” He looked at her with his kind brown eyes, though he knew it would be closer to two in the morning.

The poet took his publisher’s arm. “That’s pretty well for a Dante night. ‘Melia, Mr. Fields will take care of me. Why, it’s one of the greatest compliments one man ever paid another, my going out to Longfellow’s tonight with all I’ve been doing lately, between my lectures and my novel and the fine dinners. Why, I ought not to go out at all tonight.”

Fields decided not to hear this last comment, lighthearted though it was.

It was popular Cambridge legend by 1865 that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would divine precisely when to appear outside his sun-yellow Colonial mansion to greet arrivals, whether long anticipated guests or entirely unforeseen callers. Of course, legends often disappoint, and commonly one of the poet’s servants would answer the massive door to Craigie House, so named for its previous owners; in recent years there had been times when Henry Longfellow had simply been of the mind to receive no one at all.

But this afternoon, faithful enough to village lore, Longfellow was on his doorstep when Fields’s horses towed their cargo up the Craigie House carriageway. Holmes, leaning on the carriage window, made out the erect figure from up the street before the white-dusted hedges parted and bowed. His pleasant view of Longfellow standing serenely under the lamplight in the downy snow, weighted by his flowing leonine beard and impeccably fitted frock coat, matched the representation of the poet embossed in the public mind. This image had crystallized in the wake of the unfathomable loss of Fanny Longfellow, when the world seemed intent on memorializing the poet (as if he, rather than his wife, had been the one who died) as some divine apparition sent to answer for the human race, when his admirers sought to sculpt his persona into a permanent allegory of genius and suffering.

The three Longfellow girls rushed in from playing in the unexpected snow, pausing just long enough at the entrance hall to kick off their overshoes before scrambling over the sharply angled stairs.

Holmes had just passed that broad stair and now stood with Longfellow in that study, where the lamplight illumined the poet’s writing desk. All the while, the three girls tumbled from sight. Still he walks through a living poem.

Holmes smiled to himself and took the paw of Longfellow’s yappy little dog, who showed all his teeth and shook his piglike body.

Then Holmes greeted the feeble, goat-bearded scholar who sat bent in a chair by the fire, looking lost in an oversize folio. “How is the liveliest George Washington in Longfellow’s collection, my dear Greene?”

“Better, better, thank you, Dr. Holmes. I’m afraid, though, I was not well enough to attend Judge Healey’s funeral.” George Washington Greene was generally referred to as “old” by the rest of them, but he was actually sixty– just four years older than Holmes and two years ahead of Longfellow. Chronic illnesses had aged the retired Unitarian minister and historian decades beyond his years. But he railroaded in each week from East Greenwich, Rhode Island, with as much enthusiasm for the Wednesday nights at Craigie House as for the guest sermons he offered whenever called upon—or for the Revolutionary War histories that his name had fated him to compile. “Longfellow, were you present?”

“I’m afraid not, my dear Mr. Greene,” said Longfellow. Longfellow had not been to Mount Auburn Cemetery since before Fanny Longfellow’s funeral, a ceremony during which he was confined to his bed. “But I trust it was well attended?”

“Oh, quite so, Longfellow.” Holmes locked his fingers over his chest thoughtfully. “A beautiful and fitting tribute.”

“Too well attended, perhaps,” Lowell said, coming in from the library with a handful of books and ignoring the fact that Holmes had already answered the question.

“Old Healey knew the best of himself,” Holmes pointed out gently. “He knew his place was the courthouse, not the barbaric arena of politics.”

“Wendell! You can’t mean that,” said Lowell authoritatively.

“Lowell.” Fields gazed pointedly at him.

“To think we became the hunters of slaves.” Lowell backed away from Holmes only for a second. Lowell was a sixth or seventh cousin to the Healeys, as the Lowells were sixth or seventh cousins—at least—to all the best Brahmin families, and this only increased his resistance. “Would you ever have ruled as cowardly as Healey, Wendell? If I proposed that it had been your choice, would you have sent that Sims boy back to his plantation in chains? Tell me that. Just tell me that, Holmes.”

“We must respect the family’s loss,” said Holmes quietly, directing his comment mainly at the half-deaf Mr. Greene, who nodded politely.

Longfellow excused himself when a bell sounded from upstairs. There could be professors or reverends, senators or kings among his guests, but at the signal, Longfellow would make his way to listen to the bedtime prayers of Alice, Edith, and Annie Allegra.

By the time he returned, Fields had deftly redirected the conversation toward lighter fare, so the poet walked into a round of laughter produced by an anecdote jointly retold by Holmes and Lowell. The host checked his Aaron Willard mahogany clock, an old timepiece he was partial to, not because of its looks or accuracy but because it seemed to tick more leisurely than others.

“Schooltime,” he said softly.

The room fell hush. Longfellow closed the green shutters over the windows. Holmes turned down the flames of the moderator lamps while the others helped arrange a row of candles. This series of overlapping halos communed with the flickering glow of the fire. The five scholars and Trap– Longfellow’s plump Scotch terrier—assumed their preordained posts along the circumference of the small room.

Longfellow gathered up a sheaf of papers from his drawer and passed out a few pages of Dante’s Italian to each guest, along with a set of printed proof sheets with his corresponding line-by-line translation. In the delicately woven chiaroscuro of hearth, lamp, and wick, the ink seemed to lift off Longfellow’s proofs, as if a page of Dante suddenly came alive under one’s eyes. Dante had arranged his verse in a terza rima, every three lines a poetic set, the first and third rhyming and the middle projecting a rhyme with the first line of the next set, so that the verses leaned ahead in forward motion.

Holmes always relished how Longfellow opened their Dante meetings with a recitation of the first lines of the Commedia in unassumingly perfect Italian.

“ ‘Midway through the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark wood, for the right way had been lost.’ “

III

As the first order of business in a Dante Club meeting, the host reviewed the proof sheets from the previous week’s session.

“Good work, my dear Longfellow,” Dr. Holmes said. He was satisfied whenever one of his suggested amendments was approved, and two from last Wednesday had found their way into Longfellow’s final proofs. Holmes turned his attention to this evening’s cantos. He had taken extra care to prepare, because today he would have to persuade them he had come to protect Dante.

“In the seventh circle,” Longfellow said, “Dante tells us how he and Virgil come upon a black forest.” In each region of Hell, Dante followed his adored guide, the Roman poet Virgil. Along the way, he learned the fate of each group of sinners, singling out one or two to address the living world.

“The lost forest that has occupied the private nightmares of all of Dante’s readers at one time or another,” Lowell said. “Dante writes like Rembrandt, with a brush dipped in darkness and a gleam of hellfire as his light.”

Lowell, as usual, would have every inch of Dante at his tongue’s end; he lived Dante’s poetry, body and mind. Holmes, for one of the only instances in his life, envied another person’s talent.

Longfellow read from his translation. His reading voice rang deep and true, without any harshness, like the sound of water running under a fresh cover of snow. George Washington Greene seemed particularly lulled, for the scholar, in the spacious green armchair in the corner, drifted to sleep amid the soft intonations of the poet and the mild heat from the fire. The little terrier Trap, who had rolled onto his plump stomach under Greene’s chair, also dozed off, and their snores arranged themselves in tandem, like the grumbling bass in a Beethoven symphony.

In the canto at hand, Dante found himself in the Wood of Suicides, where the “shades” of sinners have been turned into trees, dripping blood where sap belonged. Then further punishment arrived: Bestial harpies, faces and necks of women and bodies of birds, feet clawed and bellies bulging, crashed through the brush, feeding and tearing at every tree in their way. But along with great pain, the rips and tears in the trees provided the only outlet for the shades to utter their pain, to tell their stories to Dante.

“The blood and words must come out together.” So said Longfellow.

After two cantos of punishments witnessed by Dante, books were marked and stored, papers shuffled, and admiration exchanged. Longfellow said, “School is done, gentlemen. It is only half-past nine and we deserve some refreshment for our labors.”

“You know,” Holmes said, “I was thinking of our Dante work in a new light just the other day.”

Longfellow’s servant, Peter, knocked and conveyed a message to Lowell in a hesitant whisper.

“Someone to see me?” Lowell protested, interrupting Holmes. “Who would find me here?” When Peter stammered a vague response, Lowell thundered loud enough for the whole household to hear. “Who in the name of Heaven would come on the night of our club?”

Peter leaned closer to Lowell. “Mistah Lowell, he say he’s a policeman, sah.”

In the front hall, Patrolman Nicholas Rey stomped the fresh snow from his boots, then froze at Longfellow’s army of George Washington sculptures and paintings. The house had headquartered Washington in the earliest days of the American Revolution.

Peter, the black servant, had cocked his head doubtfully when Rey showed him his badge. Rey was told that Mr. Longfellow’s Wednesday meeting could not be disturbed and, policeman or no policeman, he would have to wait in the parlor. The room into which he was led was enshrined with an intangibly light decor—flowered wallpaper and curtains suspended from Gothic acorns. A creamy marble bust of a woman was guarded under an arch by the chimneypiece, curls of stone hair falling gently over softly carved features.

Rey stood up when two men entered the room. One had a flowing beard and a dignity that made him appear quite tall, although he was of average height; his companion was a stout, confident man, with walrus tusks swinging as though to introduce themselves first. This was James Russell Lowell, who paused for a long gaping moment, then rushed forward.

He laughed with the smugness of advance knowledge. “Longfellow, wouldn’t you know I’ve read everything about this chap in the freemen’s newspaper! He was a hero in the Negro regiment, the Fifty-fourth, and Andrew appointed him to the police department the week of President Lincoln’s death. What an honor to meet you, my friend!”

“Fifty-fifth regiment, Professor Lowell, the sister regiment. Thank you,” Rey said. “Professor Longfellow, I apologize for taking you away from your company.”

“We have just finished the serious portion, Officer,” Longfellow said, smiling, “and Mister shall do nicely.” His silver hair and loose beard lent him a patriarchal manner befitting someone older than fifty-eight. The eyes were blue and ageless. Longfellow wore an impeccable dark frock coat with gilt buttons and a buff waistcoat fitted to his form. “I wore out my professor’s gown years ago now, and Professor Lowell has taken it up in my stead.”

“But I still cannot get used to that confounded title,” muttered Lowell.

Rey turned to him. “A young lady at your house kindly directed me here. She said you would not be caught in a gunshot of anywhere else but here on a Wednesday evening.”

“Ah, that would be my Mabel!” Lowell laughed. “She did not throw you out, did she?”

Rey smiled. “She is a most charming young lady, sir. I was sent to you, Professor, from University Hall.”

Lowell looked stunned. “What?” he whispered. Then he exploded, his cheeks and ears baked a hot burgundy and his voice scorching his own throat: “They sent a police officer! With what possible justification? Are they not men who can speak their own minds without pulling the wires of some City Hall marionette! Explain yourself, sir!”

Rey remained as still as the marble statue of Longfellow’s wife by the fireplace.

Longfellow draped a hand on his friend’s sleeve. “You see, Officer, Professor Lowell is kind enough to assist me, along with some of our colleagues, in a literary endeavor of sorts that does not presently meet with the favor of members of the College government. But is that why…”

“My apologies,” the policeman said, allowing his gaze to loiter on the first man who had spoken, whose redness drained from his face as abruptly as it had appeared. “I called on University Hall, not the other way around. You see, I’m in search of an expert in languages and was given your name by some students there.”

“Then, Officer, my apologies,” said Lowell. “But you are lucky you’ve found me. I can speak six languages like a native—of Cambridge.” The poet laughed and rested the paper that Rey passed to him on Longfellow’s rosewood marquetry desk. He ran his finger across the slanted, scrawled lettering.

Rey saw Lowell’s high forehead furrow into creases. “A gentleman said some words to me. It was softly spoken, whatever he meant to communicate, and all rather sudden. I can only conclude it was in some strange and foreign tongue.”

“When?” Lowell asked.

“A few weeks ago. It was a strange and unexpected encounter.” Rey allowed his eyes to shut. He remembered the whisperer’s grip stretch across his skull. He could hear the words form so distinctly, but was without the power to repeat any of them. “I fear mine is only a rough transcription, Professor.”

“A choke-pear, indeed!” Lowell said as he passed the paper to Longfellow. “I’m afraid that little can be made from this hieroglyphic. Can you not ask the person what he meant? Or at least find out what language he purports to speak?”

Rey hesitated to answer.

Longfellow said, “Officer, we have a cabinet of hungry scholars locked away whose wisdom might be bribed with oysters and macaroni. Would you be kind enough to leave a copy of this paper with us?”

“I greatly appreciate it, Mr. Longfellow,” said Rey. He studied the poets before adding, “I must request that you not mention to anyone outside yourselves my visit today. This deals with a delicate police matter.”

Lowell raised his eyebrows skeptically.

“Of course,” Longfellow said, and bowed his head in a nod, as though that trust were implicit inside Craigie House.

“Do keep the good godson of Cerberus away from the table tonight, my dear Longfellow!” Fields was tucking a napkin into his shirt collar. They were settled in their places around the dining room table. Trap protested with a quiet whine.

“Oh, he is quite a friend to poets, Fields,” Longfellow said.

“Ah! You should have seen it last week, Mr. Greene,” said Fields. “While you were holed up in your bed, that friendly fellow helped himself to a partridge from the supper table when we were in the study with the eleventh canto!”

“That was only his view of the Divine Comedy,” Longfellow said, smiling.

“A strange encounter,” said Holmes, vaguely interested. “That is what the police officer said of it?” He was studying the policeman’s note, holding it under the chandelier’s warm lights and turning it over before passing it on.

Lowell nodded. “Like Nimrod, whatever our Officer Rey heard is like all the gigantic infancy of the world.”

“I partly wish to say the writing is a poor attempt at Italian.” George Washington Greene shrugged apologetically and yielded the note to Fields with a windy sigh.

The historian returned his concentration to his meal. He grew self-conscious when, the Dante Club having shelved its books in exchange for supper-table banter, he had to compete with the bright stars that inhabited Longfellow’s social constellation. Greene’s life had been cobbled together of small promise and great setbacks. His public lectures had never been strong enough to secure him a professorship, and his work as a minister never denfined enough to allow him to gain his own parish (his lectures, detractors said, were too sermonizing and his sermons too historical). Longfellow watched his old friend faithfully and sent choice portions across the table that he thought Greene would prefer.

“Patrolman Rey,” said Lowell admiringly. “The very image of a man, isn’t he, Longfellow? A soldier in our greatest war and now the first colored member of the police. Alas, we professors just stand on the gangway, watching the few who take the voyage on the steamer.”

“Oh, but we shall live much longer through our intellectual pursuits,” said Holmes, “according to an article in the last number of the Atlantic concerning learning’s salutary effects on longevity. Compliments on another fine issue, my dear Fields.”

“Yes, I saw that! An excellent piece. Make much of that young author, Fields,” said Lowell.

“Hmm.” Fields smiled at him. “Apparently, I should consult with you before letting any writer put pen to paper. The Review certainly made short work of our Life of Percival A stranger might well wonder that you don’t show me slightly more consideration!”

“Fields, I give no puffs for mere mush,” said Lowell. “You know better than to publish a book which is not only poor in itself but will stand in the way of a better work on the subject.”

“I ask the table whether it is right for Lowell to publish in The North American Review, one of my periodicals, an attack on one of my house’s books!”

“Well, I ask in return,” Lowell said, “if anyone here has read the book and disputed my findings.”

“I would venture a resounding no for the entire table,” Fields submitted, “for I assure you that from the day Lowell’s article appeared, not a single copy of the book has been sold!”

Holmes tapped his fork against his glass. “I hereby arraign Lowell as a murderer, for he completely killed the Life.”

They all laughed.

“Oh, it died a-borning, Judge Holmes,” replied the defendant, “and I but hammered the nails into its coffin!”

“Say,” Greene tried to sound casual in returning to his preferred topic. “Has anyone noted a Dantesque character to the days and dates of this year?”

“They correspond exactly with those of the Dantesque 1300,” said Longfellow, nodding. “So in both years, Good Friday fell on the twenty-fifth of March.”

“Glory!” said Lowell. “Five hundred and sixty-five years ago this year, Dante descended into the citta dolente, the dolorous city. Won’t this be the year of Dante! Is it a good omen for a translation,” Lowell asked with a boyish smile, “or an ill one?” His comment reminded him of the persistence of the Harvard Corporation, however, and his large smile wilted.

Longfellow said, “Tomorrow, with our latest cantos of the Inferno in hand, I shall descend among the printer’s devils—the Malebranche of the Riverside Press—and we shall creep closer to completion. I have promised to send a private edition of Inferno to the Florentine Committee by the end of the year, to be made a part, however humbly, of Dante’s six-hundredth-birthday commemoration.”

“You know, my dear friends,” Lowell said, frowning. “Those damned fools at Harvard are still in a white heat trying to close down my Dante course.”

“And after Augustus Manning warned me about the consequences of publishing the translation,” Fields put in, drumming the table in frustration.

“Why should they go to such lengths?” Greene asked with alarm.

“One way or another, they seek to gain as much distance from Dante as possible,” explained Longfellow gently. “They fear its influence, that it’s foreign—that it’s Catholic, my dear Greene.”

Holmes said, projecting offhanded sympathy, “I suppose it could be partially understood when it comes to some of Dante. How many fathers went to Mount Auburn Cemetery to visit their sons last June instead of to the meetinghouse for commencement? For many, I think we need no other Hell than what we have just come out of.”

Lowell was pouring himself a third or fourth glass of red Falernian. Across the table, Fields tried unsuccessfully to calm him with a placating glance. But Lowell said, “Once they start throwing books in the fire, they shall put us all into an inferno we won’t soon escape, my dear Holmes!”

“Oh, do not think I like the idea of trying to waterproof the American mind against questions that Heaven rains down upon it, my dear Lowell. But perhaps…” Holmes hesitated. Here was his opportunity. He turned to Longfellow. “Perhaps we should consider a less ambitious publication schedule, my dear Longfellow—a private issue of a few dozen books first, so that our friends and fellow scholars can appreciate it, can learn its strengths, before we spread it to the masses.”

Lowell nearly jumped from his seat. “Did Dr. Manning talk to you? Did Manning send someone to scare you into that, Holmes?”

“Lowell, please.” Fields smiled diplomatically. “Manning wouldn’t approach Holmes about this.”

“What?” Dr. Holmes pretended not to register this. Lowell was still waiting for an answer. “Of course not, Lowell. Manning is just one of those fungi that always grow upon older universities. But it seems to me that we do not want to court unnecessary conflict. It would only distract from what we cherish about Dante. It would become about the fight, not about the poetry. Too many doctors use medicine by cramming as much of it as possible down their patients’ throats. We should be judicious in our most well-meaning cures, and cautious in our literary advancements.”

“The more allies, the better,” Fields said to the table.

“We cannot tiptoe around tyrants!” Lowell said.

“Nor do we wish to be an army of five against the world,” Holmes added. He was thrilled that Fields was already warming to his idea of stalling: He would complete his novel before the nation even heard of Dante.

“I would be burned at the stake,” Lowell cried. “Nay, I would agree to be shut up alone for an hour with the entire Harvard Corporation before I would push back the translation’s publication.”

“Of course, we shan’t change publication plans at all,” Fields said. The wind came out of Holmes’s sails. “But Holmes is right about us carrying this out alone,” Fields continued. “We can certainly try to recruit support. I could call on old Professor Ticknor to use whatever influence is left in him. And perhaps Mr. Emerson, who read Dante years ago. No one on earth knows whether a book will sell five thousand copies or not when published. But if five thousand copies are sold, nothing is more certain than that twenty-five thousand copies can be.”

“Could they try to take away your teaching post, Mr. Lowell?” Greene interrupted, still preoccupied by the Harvard Corporation.

“Jamey is far too famous a poet for that,” insisted Fields.

“I don’t care a fig what they do to me, in any respect! I shall not hand Dante to the Philistines.”

“Nor shall any of us!” Holmes was quick to say. To his own surprise, he was not defeated; rather, all the more determined—not only that he was right, but that he could save his friends from Dante and save Dante from the ardor of his friends. The encouraging volume of his exclamation took in the table. “Hear, hear” and “That’s it! That’s it!” were shouted, Lowell’s voice the loudest.

Greene, seeing a remnant of tomato farcie lodged on his clinking fork, bent down to share the wealth with Trap. From under the table, Greene noticed Longfellow rise to his feet.

Though they were just five friends around Longfellow’s dining room in the infinite privacy of Craigie House, the sheer rarity of Longfellow standing to speak for a toast produced a complete stillness.

“To the health of the table.”

That was all he said. But they hurrahed as though it were another Emancipation Proclamation. Then there was cherry cobbler and ice cream, and cognac with flaming cubes of sugar, and unwrapped cigars lit on the candles at the center of the table.

Before the night came to an end, Longfellow was persuaded by Fields to tell the table of the cigars’ history. In coaxing Longfellow to speak of himself in any capacity, one was required to cloak interest in a neutral topic, such as cigars.

“I had called on the Corner on business,” Longfellow began, while Fields laughed in advance, “when Mr. Fields persuaded me to accompany him to a nearby tobacconist’s to procure some gifts. The tobacconist brought over a box of a certain brand of cigars I swear I had never before heard of. And he said, with all the earnestness in the world, ‘These, sir, are the kind Longfellow prefers to smoke.’ “

“What was your reply?” Greene asked over the gleeful din.

“I glanced at the man, looked down at the cigars, and said, ‘Well then, I must try them.’ And paid him to send a box over.”

“So what do you think now, my dear Longfellow?” Lowell’s dessert caught in his throat from laughing.

Longfellow exhaled. “Oh, I believe the man was quite right. I do find them good.”

“ ‘Therefore it is good that I should arm myself with foresight, so, if I am driven from the place most dear to me, I will…’ “ the student hummed with frustration, rubbing his finger back and forth under the Italian.

For several years now, Lowell’s study in Elmwood had doubled as a classroom for his course on Dante. In his first term as Smith Professor, he had requested a room and received a bleak space in the basement of University Hall, with long wooden boards instead of desks and a pulpit for the professor that had to have descended from the Puritans. The course was not sufficiently well attended, Lowell was told, to merit one of the more desirable classrooms. It was just as well. Holding court at Elmwood provided him the comfort of a pipe and the warmth of a wood fire, and was another reason not to have to leave home.

The class met twice a week on days of Lowell’s choosing—sometimes on a Sunday, for Lowell liked the idea of meeting on the same day of the week that Boccaccio, centuries before him, had held the first Dante lectures in Florence. Mabel Lowell often sat and listened to her father’s lessons from the adjoining room, which was connected by two open archways.

“Remember, Mead,” said Professor Lowell when the student stopped in frustration. “Remember, in this fifth sphere of Heaven, the sphere of Martyrs, Cacciaguida has prophesied to Dante that the Poet will be exiled from Florence soon after he returns to the living world, under the sentence of death by fire if he reenters the city gates. Now, Mead, translate his next phrase—’io non perdessi li altri per i miei carmi–with that in mind.”

Lowell’s Italian was fluent and always technically correct. But Mead, a Harvard junior, liked to think that Lowell’s Americanness came out in the scrupulous pronunciation of each syllable, as if each had no connection to the next.

“ ‘I will not lose other places for reason of my poems.’ “

“Stay with the text, Mead! Carmi are songs—not just his poems, but the very music of his voice. In the days of minstrels, you would pay your money and have a choice whether he would give you his stories as song or sermon. A sermon which sings and a song which preaches—that is Dante’s Comedy. ‘So that through my songs I shall not lose the other places.’ A fair reading, Mead,” Lowell said with a gesture resembling a stretch, which communicated his general approval.

“Dante repeats himself,” Pliny Mead said flatly. Edward Sheldon, the student beside him, squirmed at this. “As you say,” Mead continued, “a divine prophet has already foreseen that Dante will find sanctuary and protection under Can Grande. So what ‘other’ places would Dante need? Nonsense for the sake of poetry.”

Lowell said, “When Dante speaks of a new home in the future by virtue of his work, when he speaks of the other places he seeks, he speaks not of his life in 1302—the date of his exile—but of his second life, his life as he will live on through the poem for hundreds of years.”

Mead persisted. “But the ‘dearest place’ is never truly taken from Dante; he takes himself away from it. Florence offered him a chance to return home, to his wife and family, yet he refused!”

Pliny Mead was never one to impress instructors or peers with geniality, but since the morning he had received his marks on last term’s papers—and had been sorely disappointed—he had eyed Lowell with sourness. Mead attributed his low mark—and his resulting drop in the class of 1867 rank book from twelfth to fifteenth scholar—to the fact that he had disagreed with Lowell on several occasions during discussions of French literature and that the professor could not stand being thought wrong. Mead would have dropped his course work in the living languages altogether but for the Corporation’s rule that once enrolled in a language course, the student had to remain three more terms in the department—one of the contrivances meant to dissuade the boys from even dipping a toe. So Mead was stuck with that great bag of wind James Russell Lowell. And with Dante Alighieri.

“What an offer they made!” Lowell laughed. “Full clemency for Dante and restoration of his rightful place in Florence: in return for the poet’s request for absolution and a hefty payment of money! We marched Johnny Reb back into the Union with less degradation. Far be it for a man who cries aloud for justice to accept such a rotten compromise with his persecutors.”

“Well, Dante is still a Florentine, no matter what we say!” Mead asserted, trying to recruit Sheldon’s support with a collusive glance. “Sheldon, can’t you see it? Dante writes incessantly of Florence, and of the Florentines he meets and speaks with in his visit to the afterlife, and he writes all this while in exile! Clear enough to me, friends, he longs only for return. The man’s death in exile and poverty is his great final failure.”

With irritation, Edward Sheldon noticed that Mead was grinning at having silenced Lowell, who had risen and thrust his hands into his rather shabby smoking jacket. But Sheldon could see in Lowell, could see in the puffing of his pipe, a heightened frame of mind. He seemed to be treading on another plane of mental cognizance, far above the Elmwood study, as he paced the rug with his heavy-laced boots. Lowell typically wouldn’t allow a freshman admission to an advanced literature class, but young Sheldon had been persistent and Lowell had told him they would see whether he could manage. Sheldon remained grateful for the opportunity, and hoped for the chance to defend Lowell and Dante against Mead, the sort who had no doubt put coppers on the railroad track as a younger boy. Sheldon opened his mouth, but Mead shot him a look that made Sheldon stuff his thoughts back inside.

Lowell betrayed a look of disappointment at Sheldon, then turned to Mead. “Where is the Jew in you, my boy?” he asked.

“What?” Mead cried, offended.

“No, never mind, I didn’t think so. Mead, Dante’s theme is man—not a man,” Lowell said finally with a mild patience that he reserved only for students. “The Italians forever twitch at Dante’s sleeves trying to make him say he is of their politics and their way of thinking. Their way indeed! To confine it to Florence or Italy is to banish it from the sympathies of mankind. We read Paradise Lost as a poem but Dante’s Comedy as a chronicle of our inner lives. Do you boys know of Isaiah 38:10?”

Sheldon thought hard; Mead sat with iron-faced stubbornness, purposefully not thinking about whether he did know it.

“‘Ego dixi: In dimidio dierum meorum vadam ad portas inferi’!” Lowell crowed, then rushed to his crowded bookshelves, where somehow he instantly found the cited chapter and verse in a Latin Bible. “You see?” he asked, placing it open on the rug at the foot of his students, most delighted to show that he had remembered the quote exactly.

“Shall I translate?” Lowell asked. “ ‘I say: In the midst of my days I shall go to the gates of hell.’ Is there anything our old Scripture writers didn’t think of? Sometime in the middle of our lives, we all, each one of us, journey to face a Hell of our own. What is the very first line of Dante’s poem?”

“ ‘Midway through the journey of our life,’ “ Edward Sheldon volunteered happily, having read that opening salvo of Inferno again and again in his room at Stoughton Hall, never having been so ambushed by any verse of poetry, so emboldened by another’s cry.” ‘I found myself in a dark wood, for the correct path had been lost.’ “

“ ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. Midway through the journey of our life,’ “ Lowell repeated with such a wide glare in the direction of his fireplace that Sheldon glanced over his shoulder, thinking pretty Mabel Lowell must have entered behind him, but her shadow showed her still sitting in the adjoining room.” ‘Our life.’ From the very first line of Dante’s poem, we are involved in the journey, we are taking the pilgrimage as much as he is, and we must face our Hell as squarely as Dante faces his. You see that the poem’s great and lasting value is as the autobiography of a human soul. Yours and mine, it may be, just as much as Dante’s.”

Lowell thought to himself as he heard Sheldon read the next fifteen lines of Italian how good it felt to teach something real. How foolish was Socrates to think of banishing the poets from Athens! How thoroughly Lowell would enjoy watching Augustus Manning’s defeat when Longfellow’s translation proved itself an immense success.

The next day, Lowell was departing from University Hall after delivering a lecture on Goethe. He was not a little taken aback when he found himself facing a short Italian man rushing past, dressed in a withered but desperately pressed sackcoat.

“Bachi?” said Lowell.

Pietro Bachi had been hired as an Italian instructor by Longfellow years before. The Corporation had never liked the idea of employing foreigners, particularly an Italian papist—the fact that Bachi had been banished by the Vatican did not change their minds. By the time Lowell had assumed control of the department, the Corporation had stumbled upon very reasonable grounds to eliminate Pietro Bachi: his intemperance and insolvency. On the day he was fired, the Italian had grumbled to Professor Lowell, “I shan’t be caught here again, not even dead.” Lowell had, on whatever fancy, taken Bachi at his word.

“My dear professor.” Bachi now offered his hand to his former department head, who pumped vigorously in his usual way.

“Well,” Lowell started, not sure whether to ask how Bachi, plainly alive and breathing, came to be in Harvard Yard.

“Out for a stroll, professor,” Bachi explained. Yet he seemed to be looking anxiously past Lowell, so the professor kept the pleasantries short. But Lowell noticed, as he turned back briefly in increasing wonder at Bachi’s appearance, that Bachi was heading for a vaguely familiar figure. It was the fellow in the black bowler hat and checkered waistcoat, the poetry admirer whom Lowell had seen idling against an American elm some weeks before. Now, what business would he have with Bachi? Lowell planted himself to see whether Bachi would greet the unknown character, who certainly seemed to be waiting for someone. But then a sea of students, grateful to have been released from Greek recitations, swarmed around them, and the curious pair—if the two men were indeed to be spoken of together—were lost to Lowell’s sight.

Lowell, forgetting the scene entirely, started toward the law school, where Oliver Wendell Junior stood surrounded by classmates, explaining to them their mistake on some point of law. The general appearance was not dissimiliar to Dr. Holmes—but it was as though someone had taken the little doctor and stretched him to twice his stature on a rack.

Dr. Holmes idled at the foot of the servants’ stairs of his house. He stopped at a low-hung mirror and flung his thick shock of brown hair to one side with a comb. He thought his face not a very flattering likeness of himself. “More a convenience than an ornament,” he liked to say to people. A complexion one shade darker, the nose shapelier on the incline, the neck more pronounced, he could have been looking at the reflection of Wendell Junior. Neddie, Holmes’s youngest, had been unfortunate enough to align his looks with Dr. Holmes’s, inheriting too his breathing problems. Dr. Holmes and Neddie were Wendells, the Reverend Holmes would have said; Wendell Junior, a pure Holmes. With that blood, Junior would no doubt rise above his father’s name, not only Holmes Esq. but His Excellency Holmes or President Holmes. Dr. Holmes perked up at the sound of heavy boots and swiftly backed into an adjoining room. Then he started for the staircase again with a casual stride, his gaze pointed down in an old book. Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior burst into the house and seemed to make one great leap for the second floor.

“Why, Wendy,” Holmes called out with a quick smile. “That you?”

Junior slowed down midway up the stairs. “Hello, Father.”

“Your mother was just asking had I seen you today, and I realized I had not. Where are you coming from so late in the day, my boy?”

“A walk.”

“That so? Just you?”

Junior paused grudgingly at the landing. Under his dark eyebrows, Junior glared at his father, kneading the wooden baluster at the bottom of the stairs. “I was out talking with James Lowell, as a matter of fact.”

Holmes put on a show of surprise. “Lowell? Have you been spending time together of late? You and Professor Lowell?”

A broad shoulder lifted slightly.

“Well, what is it you talk about with our dear mutual friend, might I ask?” Dr. Holmes went on with an amiable smile.

“Politics, my time in the war, my law classes. We get on quite well, I’d say.”

“Well, you’re spending far too much time in common leisure these days. I order that you cease these trifling excursions with Mr. Lowell!” No reply. “It robs your time for studying, you know. We can’t have that, can we?”

Junior laughed. “Every morning it’s, ‘What’s the point, Wendy? A lawyer can never be a great man, Wendy.’ “ This was said with a light, husky voice. “Now you wish me to study the law harder?”

“Right, Junior. It costs sweat, it costs nerve-fat, it costs phosphorus to do anything worth doing. And I shall have a word with Mr. Lowell about your habits at our next Dante Club session. I’m sure he shall agree with me. He himself was a lawyer once, and knows what it requires.” Holmes started for the hall, rather satisfied in his firm position.

Junior grunted.

Dr. Holmes turned back. “Something more, my boy?”

“I only wonder,” Junior said. “I’d like to hear further about your Dante Club, Father.”

Wendell Junior had never shown any interest in his literary or professional activities. He had never read the doctor’s poems or his first novel, nor had he attended his lyceum lectures on medical advances or the history of poetry. This had been the case more pointedly after Holmes published “My Hunt After the Captain” in The Atlantic Monthly, retelling his journey through the South after receiving a telegram mistakenly reporting Junior’s death on the battlefield.

Junior had in fact skimmed through the proof sheets, feeling his wounds throb as he took it in. He could not believe how his father could think to roll up the war into a few thousand words, which mostly told anecdotes of dying Rebels in hospital beds and hotel clerks in small towns asking if he was not the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.

“I mean,” Junior continued with a cocked grin, “do you really bother calling yourself a member?”

“I beg your pardon, Wendy? What’s the meaning of that? What do you know of it?”

“Only that Mr. Lowell says that your voice is heard mostly at the supper table, not in the study. For Mr. Longfellow, that work is life itself; for Lowell, his calling. You see, he acts on his beliefs, doesn’t just talk of them, just as he did when he defended slaves as a lawyer. For you, it’s just another place to chime glasses.”

“Did Lowell say…” Dr. Holmes began. “Now see here, Junior!” Junior reached the top floor, where he shut himself in his room. “How could you know the first thing about our Dante Club!” Dr. Holmes cried.

Holmes wandered the house helplessly before retiring into his study. His voice heard mostly at table? The more he repeated the allegation to himself, the more stinging it was: Lowell was trying to preserve his place at the right hand of Longfellow by showing himself superior at the expense of Holmes.

With Junior’s words in Lowell’s loud baritone hanging on him, he wrote doggedly over the next weeks, with a sustained progress that did not come to him naturally. The time at which any new thought struck Holmes was his Sibylline moment, but the act of composition usually was attended with a dull, disagreeable sensation about the forehead—interrupted only from time to time by the simultaneous descent of some group of words or unexpected image, which produced a burst of the most insane enthusiasm and self-gratulation and during which he sometimes committed puerile excesses of language and action.

He could not work many hours consecutively, in any case, without deranging his whole system. His feet were apt to get cold, his head hot, his muscles restless, and he would feel as if he must get up. In the evening, he would stop all hard work before eleven o’clock and take a book of light reading to clear his mind of its previous contents. Too much brain work gave him a sense of disgust, like overeating. He attributed this in part to the depleting, nerve-straining qualities of the climate. Brown-Sequard, a fellow medical man from Paris, had said that animals do not bleed so much in America as they did in Europe. Was that not startling to think? Despite this biological shortcoming, Holmes now felt himself writing like a madman.

“You know I should be the one to speak with Professor Ticknor about helping our Dante cause,” Holmes said to Fields. He had stopped by Fields’s office at the Corner.

“What’s that?” Fields was reading three things at once: a manuscript, a contract, and a letter. “Where are those royalty agreements?”

J. R. Osgood handed him another pile of papers.

“Your time is much occupied, Fields, and you have the next number of the Atlantic to think about—you need to rest your tired brain, in any case,” argued Holmes. “Professor Ticknor was my teacher, after all. I may well have the most influence over the old fellow, for Longfellow’s sake.”

Holmes still remembered a time when Boston was known as Ticknorville by the literary set: If you were not invited to Ticknor’s library salon, you were nobody. That chamber had once been known as Ticknor’s Throne Room; now, more often, Ticknor’s Iceberg. The former professor had fallen into disrepute with much of their society as a refined idler and an anti-abolitionist, but his position as one of the city’s first literary masters would always remain. His influence could be revived to their benefit.

“My life is worn by more creatures than I can endure, my dear Holmes,” Fields said, sighing. “The sight of a manuscript is like a swordfish nowadays—it cuts me in two.” He looked Holmes over for a long moment, then agreed to send him in his place to Park Street. “But remember me kindly to him, won’t you, Wendell.”

Holmes knew that Fields was relieved to pass on the task of speaking with George Ticknor. Professor Ticknor—that title was still insisted upon, though he had taught nothing since his retirement thirty years earlier– had never thought much of his younger cousin, William D. Ticknor, and his low opinion extended to William’s partner, J. T. Fields, as he made clear to Holmes after the doctor was led up the winding staircase of nearby 9 Park Street.

“The noisy shuffle of profits, viewing books as sales and losses,” Professor Ticknor said with dried lips puckered in revulsion. “My cousin William suffered that malady, Dr. Holmes, and infected my nephews too, I’m afraid. Those who sweat over labors must not control the literary arts. Don’t you believe so, Holmes?”

“But Mr. Fields has something of a brilliant eye, though, doesn’t he? He knew your History would flourish, Professor. He does think Longfellow’s Dante will find an audience.” In fact, Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature found few readers outside of the contributors to the magazines, but the professor thought that an exacting measure of its success.

Ticknor ignored Holmes’s loyalty and delicately pulled his hands out of a bulky machine. He had had the writing machine—a sort of miniature printing press, as he described it—built when his hands began to be too shaky to write. As a result, he had not seen his own handwriting in several years. He had been at work on a letter when Holmes arrived.

Ticknor, sitting in his purple velvet skullcap and slippers, let his critical eye take in, for the second time, the cut of Holmes’s clothes and the quality of his necktie and handkerchief.

“I’m afraid, Doctor, that while Mr. Fields knows what people read, he shall never quite understand why. He grows carried away by the enthusiasm of close friends. A dangerous trait.”

“You always said how important it was to spread knowledge of foreign cultures to the educated class,” Holmes reminded him. With the curtains drawn, the old professor was lit faintly by the library’s wood fire, which in its subdued light was merciful to his crow’s-feet. Holmes dabbed his forehead. Ticknor’s Iceberg was in fact rather boiling from the always stoked hearth.

“We must work to understand our foreigners, Dr. Holmes. If we do not conform newcomers to our national character and bring them in willing subjection to our institutions, the multitudes of outside people will one day conform us.”

Holmes persisted, “But between us, Professor, what do you think the chances for Mr. Longfellow’s translation to be embraced by the public?” Holmes had such a look of resolute concentration that Ticknor paused to genuinely deliberate. His old age had bought, as a defense to sadness, a tendency to offer the same dozen or so automatic replies to all questions concerning his health or the state of the world.

“There can be, I think, no doubt that Mr. Longfellow shall do something astonishing. Is that not why I selected him to succeed me at Harvard? But remember, I too once envisioned introducing Dante here, until the Corporation made my post a farce…” A mist clouded Ticknor’s jet-black eyes. “I had not thought it possible that I would live to see an American translate Dante, and I cannot comprehend how he will accomplish the task. Whether or not the ungloved masses will accept it is a different question, one that must be settled by the popular voice, as separate from that of scholarly lovers of Dante. On that bench of judges, I can never be competent to sit,” Ticknor said with unrestrained pride that brightened him. “But I grow to believe that when we hold out hope that Dante shall be read widely, we fall prey to pedantic folly. Do not misunderstand, Dr. Holmes. I have owed Dante many years of my life, as Longfellow does. Do not ask what brings Dante to man but what brings man to Dante—to personally enter his sphere, though it is forever severe and unforgiving.”

IV

Beneath the streets that Sunday, among the dead, Reverend Elisha Talbot, minister of the Second Unitarian Church of Cambridge, held a lantern high as he weaved through the passageway, sidestepping the staggered coffins and heaps of broken bones. He wondered whether he required the guidance of his kerosene lantern at all by now, for he had grown quite accustomed to the elaborate darkness of the winding underground passage, his nasal contractions invincible to its unpleasant stew of decomposition. One day, he dared himself, he would conquer the way without a lamp, with only his trust in God before him.

For a moment, he thought he heard a rustle. He spun around, but the tombs and slate columns did not stir.

“Anyone alive tonight?” His famously melancholy voice struck the black air. It was perhaps an inappropriate comment coming from a minister, but the truth was he was suddenly scared. Talbot, like all men who lived most of their life alone, suffered many closeted fears. Death had always frightened him beyond the normal measure; this was his great shame. This might have provided one reason he walked the underground tombs of his church, to overcome his irreligious fear of corporeal mortality. Perhaps it also helped to explain, if one were to write his biography, how anxiously Talbot upheld the rationalistic precepts of Unitarianism over the Calvinist demons of the older generations. Talbot whistled nervously into his lantern and soon approached the stairwell at the far end of the vault, which promised a return to the warm gaslights and a shorter route to his home than the streets.

“Who’s there?” he asked, swinging his lantern around, this time certain he had heard movement. But again nothing. The movement was too heavy for rodents, too quiet for street urchins. What the Moses? he thought.

Reverend Talbot steadied the humming lantern at eye level. He had heard that bands of vandals, displaced by development and war, had lately taken to congregating in abandoned burial vaults. Talbot decided he would send for a policeman to look into the matter the next morning. Although what good had it done him a day earlier, when he had reported the robbery of a thousand dollars from his home safe? He was sure the Cambridge police had done nothing about it. He was only glad that the thieves of Cambridge were equally incompetent, neglecting to take the safe’s valuable remaining contents.

Reverend Talbot was virtuous, always doing right by his neighbors and his congregation. Except there were times when he was perhaps too zealous. Thirty years before, early in his stewardship of the Second Church, he had agreed to recruit men from Germany and the Netherlands to move to Boston with the promise of a place to worship in his congregation and a well-paying job. If Catholics could pour in from Ireland, why not bring some Protestants? Only the job was building the railroads, and scores of his recruits died of overwork and disease, leaving orphans and derelict widows. Talbot had quietly pulled out of the arrangement and then spent years removing any trace of his involvement. But he had accepted “consultation” payments from the railroad builders, and though he had told himself he would return the money, he didn’t. Instead, he locked it out of his mind and made each decision in life with an eye toward thoroughly skewering the wrongheadedness of others.

As Reverend Talbot took drawn-out, skeptical strides in reverse, he stumbled against something hard. He thought for a moment, as he stood transfixed, that he had lost his inner compass and steered into a wall. Elisha Talbot had not been held by another person, or even touched—except for shaking hands—for many years. But there was no doubt now, even to him, that the warmth of the arms wrapping around his chest and removing the lantern belonged to another being. The grasp was alive with passion, with offense.

When Talbot came to consciousness again, he realized, in a brief moment of eternity, that a different, impenetrable blackness surrounded him. The pungent odor of the vault persisted in his lungs, but now a cold, thick moistness brushed against his cheeks and a saltiness he recognized as his own sweat crept into his mouth, and he felt tears streaming from the corners of his eyes onto his forehead. It was cold, cold as an icehouse. His body, deprived of all garments, was shivering. Yet heat ate into his numb flesh and furnished an unbearable sensation never before known. Was it some horrible nightmare? Yes, of course! It was that awful rubbish he was lately reading before bed, of demons and beasts, et cetera. Yet he could not remember climbing out of the vault, could not remember reaching his modest peach-painted clapboard house and fetching water to his washstand. He had never emerged from the world below to the sidewalks of Cambridge. Somehow, he realized, the beating of his heart had moved upward. It was suspended above him, pounding desperately, plunging the blood in his body down into his head. He breathed in faint ejaculations.

The minister felt himself kicking his feet in the air madly and he knew by the heat that this was no dream: He was about to die. It was strange. The emotion most distant from him at this moment was fear. Perhaps he had used it all up in life. Instead, he was filled with a deep and raging anger that this could happen—that our condition could be such that one child of God could die while all others went on unbothered and unchanged.

In his last moment, he tried to pray in a tearful voice, “God, forgive me if I’m wrong,” but instead a piercing yell burst forth from his lips, lost in the merciless thundering of his heart.

V

On Sunday, the twenty-second day of October 1865, the late edition of the Boston Transcript contained on its front page an advertisement offering a reward of ten thousand dollars. Such bewilderment, such halts of clanging carriages at newspaper peddlers’ had not been known in what seemed like a lifetime since Fort Sumter had been attacked, when it was certain that a ninety-day campaign could end the South’s wild rebellion.

Widow Healey had wired Chief Kurtz a simple telegram to reveal her plans. The use of the telegram made her point, for it was known that many eyes in the police station house would see it before the chief’s. She was writing to five Boston newspapers, she told Kurtz, describing the true nature of her husband’s death and announcing a reward for information leading to the capture of his murderer. Because of past corruption in the detective bureau, the aldermen had passed regulations prohibiting policemen from receiving rewards, but members of the public certainly could enrich themselves. Kurtz might not be happy, she admitted, but he had failed in his promise to her. The late edition of the Transcript was first to carry the news.

Ednah Healey now imagined specific machinations by which the villain might suffer and repent. Her favorite brought the murderer to Gallows Hill, but instead of hanging he was stripped bare of clothes and set on fire, then permitted to try (unsuccessfully, of course) to put out the flames. She was thrilled and terrified by these thoughts. They served the additional purpose of distracting her from thinking about her husband and from the rising hate she felt toward him for leaving her.

Mittens were bound to her wrists to prevent her from scratching off more skin. Her mania had become constant, and clothing could no longer cover the scars of her self-mutilation. In the fit of a nightmare one evening, she had rushed from her bedchamber and desperately found a hiding place for the brooch containing the lock of her husband’s hair. In the morning, her servants and sons searched all of Wide Oaks, from under the floorboards and to the skeleton rafters, but couldn’t find anything. It was for the best. With those thoughts dangling from her neck, Widow Healey might never have slept again.

Mercifully, she could not know that during those cataclysmic days, during that autumn heat spell, Chief Justice Healey had slowly mumbled “Gentlemen of the jury…” again and again as hungry maggots bore by the hundreds through the wound into the quivering sponge of his brain, the fertile flies each birthing hundreds more flesh-eating larvae. First, Chief Justice Artemus Prescott Healey couldn’t move one arm. Then he moved his fingers when he thought he was kicking his leg out. After a while his words weren’t coming out right. “Jurors under our gentlemen…” He could hear it was nonsense but could do nothing about it. The portion of the brain that arranged syntax was being tasted by creatures who did not even enjoy their feeding, but needed it nonetheless. When sense returned briefly during the four days, Healey’s anguish made him believe he was dead, and he prayed to die again. “Butterflies and the last bed…” He stared at the shabby flag above him and, with the little sense left to his mind, wondered.

The sexton of the Second Unitarian Church of Cambridge had been recording the week’s events in the church diary in the late afternoon after Reverend Talbot departed. Talbot had performed a riveting sermon that morning. He spent time in the church afterward, basking in glowing notices from the church deacons. But Sexton Gregg had frowned to himself when Talbot asked him to unlock the heavy stone door at the end of the wing of the church that held their offices.

It seemed as though only a few minutes had passed after that when the sexton heard a rising cry. The noise seemed to come from nowhere and yet was clearly rooted somewhere in the church. Then, almost whimsically, with thoughts of the long buried, Sexton Gregg put his ear to that slate door that led down to the underground burial vaults, the church’s bleak catacombs. Remarkably, the noise, though now gone, did seem from its reverberations to originate from the hollowness behind the door! The sexton, taking his clattering ring of keys from his belt, unlocked the door as he had done for Talbot. He sucked in his breath and stepped down.

Sexton Gregg had worked there for twelve years. He had first heard Reverend Talbot speak in a series of public debates with Bishop Fenwick on the dangers of the rise of the Catholic Church in Boston.

Talbot had argued vigorously three chief points in these discourses:

Of course, none of the anti-Catholic Unitarian ministers condoned the acts of enraged Boston laborers who burned down a Catholic convent after witnesses said that Protestant girls had been kidnapped and kept in dungeons to be made into nuns. The rioters chalked HELL TO THE POPE! on the rubble. That was less a disagreement with the Vatican than a warning to the Irish increasingly receiving their jobs.

On the strength of his debates and his anti-Catholic sermons and writings, Reverend Talbot was encouraged by some to succeed Professor Norton at the Harvard Divinity School. He declined. Talbot enjoyed too greatly the sensation of entering his crowded meetinghouse on a Sunday morning, coming in from the Sabbath quiet of Cambridge, and hearing the solemn peals of the organ as he stood over the pulpit robed grandly in his plain college gown. Although he had an awful squint and a deep, melancholy intonation with the perpetual character that one’s voice assumes when a dead person is lying somewhere in the house, Talbot’s presence at the pulpit was confident and his pastorate loyal. That was where his powers mattered. Since his wife had died in childbirth in 1825, Talbot had never had a family and never desired another one, because of the satisfaction brought by his congregation.

Sexton Gregg’s oil lamp timidly lost its luster as he lost his courage. When the sexton had to exhale, mist encased his face and tingled his whiskers. In Cambridge it was still autumn, but in the Second Church’s underground vault it was the dead of winter.

“Anyone about here? You ain’t supposed to…” The sexton’s voice seemed to have no physical bearing within the vault’s blackness, and he shut his mouth quickly. Strewn along the edges of the vault he noticed small white dots. When their number increased, he stooped down to inspect the litter, but his attention was redirected by a sharp crackling from up ahead. A stench horrible enough to subdue even the air of the burial vault reached out to him.

With his hat held in front of his face, the sexton continued ahead between the coffins lining the dirt floor, through the sad slate archways. Gigantic rats scurried along the walls. A flickering glow, not from his own lamp, illuminated the way ahead of him, where the crackling was a continuous sizzling.

“Someone there?” the sexton continued cautiously, gripping the dirty bricks of the wall as he turned the corner.

“Upon the Eternal!” he cried.

From the mouth of an unevenly dug hole in the ground up ahead projected the feet of a man, the legs visible as far as the calf, with the rest of the body jammed inside the hole. The soles of both feet were on fire. The joints quivered so violently that the feet seemed to be kicking back and forth in pain. The flesh of the man’s feet melted, while the raging flames began to spread to the ankles.

Sexton Gregg fell on his backside. On the cold ground beside him was a pile of clothing. He grabbed the top garment and batted it against the blazing feet until they were extinguished.

“Who are you?” he cried out, but the man, who was just a pair of feet to the sexton, was dead.

It took the sexton a moment to realize that the garment he had used to put out the fire was a minister’s gown. Crawling through a trail of human bones that had risen from the earth, he returned to the tidy stack of clothing and dug through them: undergarments, a familiar cape, and the white cravat, shawl, and well-blacked shoes of the beloved Reverend Elisha Talbot.

As he closed the door to his office on the second floor of the medical college, Oliver Wendell Holmes nearly collided with a city patrolman in the corridor. It had taken Holmes longer to finish his work for the next day than he planned, having hoped to start earlier so he might have time with Wendell Junior before Junior’s usual group of friends arrived. The patrolman was searching for someone with authority, explaining to Holmes that the chief of police requested the use of the school’s examining room and that Professor Haywood had been sent for to assist in the inquest of an unfortunate gentleman’s body that had been discovered. The coroner, Mr. Barnicoat, could not be located—he did not say that Barnicoat was known to frequent the public houses on weekends, and surely would be in no condition to conduct an inquest. Finding the dean’s rooms empty, Holmes reasoned that since he was the former dean (Yes, yes, five years at the stern of the ship was enough for me, and at fifty-six, who needs so much responsibility?—Holmes carried on both sides of the conversation), he could rightfully indulge the patrolman’s request.

A police carriage carrying Chief Kurtz and Deputy Chief Savage arrived and a stretcher covered by a blanket was rushed inside, accompanied by Professor Haywood and his student assistant. Haywood taught surgical practice and had developed a keen interest in autopsy. Over Barnicoat’s objections, the police occasionally asked the professor to the deadhouse for an opinion, as when they found an infant walled up in a cellar or a man hanging in a closet.

Holmes noted with interest that Chief Kurtz posted two state constables at the door. Who would care to intrude at the medical college at this evening hour? Kurtz rolled up the blanket only to the body’s knees. This was enough. Holmes had to stop himself from gasping at the sight of the man’s bare feet, if that word could still be applied,

The feet—only the feet—had been torched by fire after a smart dousing with what smelled of kerosene. Charred to a crisp, Holmes thought, horrified. The two remaining blobs were protruding awkwardly from the ankles, displaced from the joints. The skin, hardly recognizable as such, was bloated, cracked open by the fire. Pink tissue was pushing out. Professor Haywood bent down for a better view.

Though he’d cut open hundreds of corpses, Dr. Holmes did not possess the iron stomach of his medical colleagues for such procedures and had to back away from the examination table. As a professor, Holmes had more than once left his classroom when a live rabbit was to be chloroformed, beseeching his demonstrator not to let it squeak.

Holmes’s head began to spin, and it seemed to him that there was suddenly very little air in the room, with the paltry amount present encased in ether and chloroform. He did not know how long the inquest could last, but he was quite certain he would not remain long without dropping to the floor. Haywood uncovered the rest of the body, introducing the dead man’s pained, scarlet face to the room and brushing away dirt from his eyes and cheeks. Holmes allowed his eyes to travel across the whole of the naked body.

He barely registered the familiar face as Haywood stooped over the body and Chief Kurtz delivered question after question to Haywood. Nobody had asked Holmes to remain quiet, and as Harvard’s Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, he could have contributed to the discussion. But Holmes could only concentrate on loosening his silk neck cloth. He blinked convulsively, not knowing whether he should hold his breath to save the oxygen he had already collected or breathe in quick spurts to stockpile the last pockets of air available before the others, whose apparent obliviousness to the dense air made Holmes certain they would all drop to the floor at any moment.

One of the men present asked Dr. Holmes if he was unwell. He had a gentle, striking face and shining eyes, and he looked to be mulatto. He spoke with a touch of familiarity, and in his daze Holmes remembered: The officer who had come to see Lowell at the Dante Club meeting.

“Professor Holmes? Do you concur with the assessment of Professor Haywood?” Chief Kurtz then asked, perhaps in a polite attempt to include him in the proceeding, as Holmes had gone nowhere near enough to the body to make any but the most presumptuous medical assessment. Holmes tried to think whether he had noted Haywood’s dialogue with Chief Kurtz and seemed to recall Haywood remarking that the deceased had been alive while his feet were set aflame, that he must have been in a position helpless to stop the torture, and that from the look of the face and the absence of other injuries, it was not unlikely that he had died from shock to the heart.

“Why, of course,” Holmes remarked. “Yes, of course, Officer.” Holmes stepped backward to the door as though in escape from a deadly peril. “Perhaps you gentlemen could carry on without me for a spell?”

Chief Kurtz continued his catechism with Professor Haywood, and with that Holmes reached the door, the hall, and soon the outside courtyard, taking in as much air as possible in every quick, desperate breath.

As the violet hour was overtaking Boston, the doctor, wandering through the rows of pushcarts, walking aimlessly past the seedcakes, the jugs of ginger beer, the white-smocked oyster– and lobstermen holding out their monstrosities, could not suffer the thought of his behavior at the side of Reverend Talbot’s corpse. Out of embarrassment, he had not yet unburdened himself of the knowledge that Talbot had been killed, had not yet rushed to share the sensational tidings with Fields or Lowell. How could he, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, doctor and professor of medical science, renowned lecturer and medical reformer, shiver so at the sight of a corpse as if it were a ghost in some sentimental set-novel? Wendell Junior would be particularly bemused by his father’s chickenhearted stumbling. The younger Holmes made no secret of his feeling that he would have made a better doctor than the elder, as well as a better professor, husband, and father.

Though not yet twenty-five, Junior had been in the battlefield and had seen bodies shredded, whole gaps in his ranks mowed down by cannon fire, limbs dropping off like leaves and amputations, performed with ax-saws, by amateur surgeons while screamers were held down on doors used for operating tables by volunteer nurses splattered in blood. When his cousin asked why Wendell Junior could easily grow a mustache while his own attempt could not move past the earliest stages, Junior had replied curtly, “Mine was nourished in blood.”

Now Dr. Holmes mustered all he had ever known about the process of baking the best quality of bread. He summoned all the tips known to him for finding the finest-quality vendors in a Boston marketplace by clothing or demeanor or nativity. He grabbed and squeezed the wares of the vendors harshly, absently, but with the commanding touch of a doctor’s hand. His forehead soaked his handkerchief as he dabbed it. At the next provision stall, some horrid older women poked their fingers into the salt-meat. The distractions of the task at hand could not last.

As he reached the stall of an Irish matron, the doctor realized that his tremors at the medical college had been deeper than they had first seemed. It was not caused merely by his distaste for the distorted body and its silent tale of dread. And it was not only because Elisha Talbot, as much a fixture in Cambridge as the Washington Elm, had been done in, and so brutally. No– something in the murder had been familiar, so familiar.

Holmes purchased a warm brown loaf of bread and started home. He considered whether he could have dreamt about Talbot’s death in some strange brush with prescience. But Holmes did not believe in such bugbears. He must have once read a description of this gruesome act, the details of which then flooded back to him without warning when he saw Talbot’s body. But what text would contain such a horror? Not a medical journal. Not the Boston Transcript, certainly, for the murder had just happened. Holmes stopped in the middle of the street and envisioned the preacher kicking his flaming feet in the air, while the flames moved…

“ ‘Dai calcagni a le punte,’ “ Holmes whispered aloud: From their heels to their toes—that’s where the corrupt clerics, the Simoniacs, burn forever in their craggy ditches. His heart sank. “Dante! It’s Dante!”

Amelia Holmes centered the cold game pie on the fully set dining room table. She passed some directions to the help, smoothed her dress, and leaned out on the front step to look for her husband. She was certain she had seen Wendell turning onto Charles Street from the upstairs window not five minutes ago, presumably with the bread she had asked him to bring for her supper hosting several friends, including Annie Fields. (And how could a hostess live up to the salon of Annie Fields without everything perfect?) But Charles Street was empty save for the dissolving shadows of its trees. Perhaps it was another short man in a long tailcoat she had seen through the window.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow tested the notepaper left by Patrolman Rey. He prodded the jumble of letters, copied out the text several times on a separate sheet, anagrammatizing the words at different junctions to form new scrambles, buttressing himself from thoughts of the past. His daughters were visiting his sister’s family in Portland and his two sons were traveling abroad separately, so there would be days of solitude, which he relished more in idea than in practice.

That morning, the same day on which the Reverend Talbot was killed, the poet had sat up in his bed just before dawn without the faintest consciousness of having slept at all. It was his usual routine. Longfellow’s sleeplessness was not caused by frightful dreams or traumatized by tossing or turning. In fact, he would describe the haze he entered during the night as rather peaceful, something analogous to sleeping. He was grateful that even after the long insomniac watches of the night he could still feel rested at daybreak from having laid himself down for so many hours. But sometimes, in the pale nimbus of the night lamp, Longfellow thought he could see her gentle face staring at him from the corner of the bedchamber, here in the room where she died. At these times, he would jump with a start. The sinking of the heart that followed his half-formed joy was a terror worse than any nightmare Longfellow could remember or invent, for whatever phantom image he might see during the night, he would still rise in the morning alone. As Longfellow slipped into his calamanco dressing gown, the flowing silver tresses of his beard felt heavier than when he had put himself to bed.

When Longfellow made his way down the back stairway, he was wearing a dress coat, with a rose in his buttonhole. He did not like to be at all untidy, even at home. At the bottom landing was a print of Giotto’s portrait of the young Dante, with one eye replaced by a blank hole. Giotto’s fresco had been painted in the Bargello at Florence but over the centuries had been whitewashed and forgotten. Now only a lithograph of the damaged fresco remained. Dante had sat for Giotto before the pains of exile, his war with fate, had overtaken him; he was still the silent suitor of Beatrice, a young man of medium stature, with a dark, melancholy, thoughtful face. His eyes are large, his nose aquiline, his underlip projecting, with an almost feminine softness in the lines of the face.

The young Dante seldom spoke unless questioned, so said the legends. A particularly pleasing contemplation would preclude attention to anything outside his own thoughts. Dante once found a rare volume in an apothecary’s shop in Siena and spent the whole day reading on a bench outside without ever noticing the street festival going on directly in front of him, unconscious of the musicians and the dancing women.

When he had settled in the study with a bowl of oatmeal and milk, a meal he would be content to repeat for dinner most days, Longfellow could not help thinking of Patrolman Rey’s note. He imagined a million different possibilities and a dozen languages for the scribbled writing before abandoning the hieroglyphic—as Lowell had branded it—to its place in the back of the drawer. From the same drawer he brought out proof sheets of Cantos Sixteen and Seventeen of Inferno, annotated neatly with the suggestions from the latest Dante seance. His desk had remained empty of original poems for some time now. Fields had issued a new “Household Edition” of Longfellow’s most famous poems and convinced him to complete Tales of a Way-’de Inn, hoping to spur new poems. But it seemed to Longfellow that he would never write anything original again, nor did he care to try. Translating Dante had once been an interlude to his own poetry, his Minnehahas, his Priscillas, his Evangelines. The practice had begun twenty-five years ago. Now, over the last four years, Dante had become his morning prayer and his day’s work.

As Longfellow poured his second and final cup of coffee, he thought of the report Francis Child had been rumored to have made to friends in England: “Longfellow and his coterie are so infected with the Tuscan malady that they dare classify Milton as a second-rate genius in comparison to Dante.” Milton was the gold standard of religious poets for English and American scholars. But Milton wrote of Hell and Heaven from above and below, respectively, not from the inside: safer vantages. Fields, diplomatic as long as nobody was hurt, had laughed when Arthur Hugh Clough had relayed Child’s comment in the Authors’ Room at the Corner, but it had irked Longfellow quite a bit to hear of the exchange.

Longfellow soaked his quill pen. Of his three finely decorative inkwells, this one he prized most, having once belonged to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and then to Lord Tennyson, who had sent it to Longfellow as a gift to wish him well on the Dante translation. The reclusive Tennyson was one of too small a contingent in that country that truly understood Dante and held him in high esteem, and had known more of the Comedy than a few episodes of the Inferno. Spain had shown an early appreciation for Dante until strangled by official dogma and bludgeoned by the reign of the Inquisition. Voltaire had initiated the French animosity toward Dante’s “barbarity” that continued still. Even in Italy, where Dante was most widely known, the poet had been drafted into the service of various factions fighting for control. Longfellow often thought of the two things Dante must have yearned for the most as he wrote the Divine Comedy while sitting in exile from his beloved Florence: The first was to win a return to his homeland, which he would never succeed in doing; the second was to see his Beatrice again, which the Poet never could.

Dante wandered about homeless as he composed, almost having to borrow the ink in which he wrote. When he approached a strange city’s gates, surely he could not but be reminded that he would never again enter the gates of Florence. When he beheld the towers of the feudal castles cresting the distant hills, he felt how arrogant are the strong, how much abused the weak. Every brook and river reminded him of the Arno; every voice he heard told him by its strange accent that he was an exile. Dante’s poem was no less than his search for home.

Longfellow was methodical about mastering his time and set aside the early hours for his writing and the late morning for his personal business, refusing to admit any visitors until after twelve o’clock—except, of course, his children.

The poet sifted through his piles of unanswered letters, pulling close to him his box of autographs written on small squares of paper. Since the publication of Evangeline years earlier had broadened his popularity, Longfellow regularly received mail from strangers, most of whom requested a signature. A young woman from Virginia included her own carte de visile portrait, on the back of which was written: “What fault can be found with this?” with her address below it. Longfellow raised an eyebrow and sent her a standard autograph without comment. “The fault of too great youth,” he considered replying. After sealing some two dozen envelopes, Longfellow wrote a gracious rebuff of another lady. He did not like to be discourteous, but this particular solicitant requested fifty autographs, explaining that she wanted to offer them as place settings for her guests at a dinner party. He was delighted, on the other hand, by a woman relating the story of her daughter running into the parlor after finding a daddy longlegs on her pillow. When asked the matter, the girl announced: “Mr. Longfellow is in my room!”

Longfellow was pleased to find in his pile of new mail a note from Mary Frere, a young lady from Auburn, New York, with whom Longfellow had recently become acquainted when summering at Nahant, where they walked many evenings, after the girls fell asleep, along the rocky shore, talking of new poetry or music. Longfellow wrote her a long letter, relating to her how the three girls ask often after her doings; the girls also beg him to find out where Miss Frere will be spending the next summer.

He was lured away from his letters by the ever-present temptation of the window in front of his writing desk. The poet always expected a revival of creative power with the onset of autumn. His fireless grate was heaped with autumnal leaves that imitated a flame. He noticed that the warm, bright day had waned more quickly than it seemed from inside the brown walls of his study. The window overlooked the open meadows, several acres of which Longfellow had recently purchased, stretching all the way to the gleaming waters of the Charles River. He found it amusing to think of the popular superstition that he made the purchase with a view to a rise in property value, while in fact all he wanted to secure was the view.

On the trees were no longer only leaves but brown fruits, on the bushes no longer blossoms but clusters of red berries. And the wind had a rough manliness in its voice—the tone not of a lover but of a husband.

Longfellow’s day settled into just the right pace. Supper over, he dismissed the help and resolved to catch up on his newspaper reading. But after lighting the lamp in his study, he spent only a few minutes with the paper. The late edition of the Transcript carried Ednah Healey’s startling announcement. The article contained details of the murder of Artemus Healey, which had until then been suppressed by the widow “on the counsel of the office of the Chief of Police and other official persons.” Longfellow could read no further, though certain details from the article, he would realize in the next eventful hours, had burrowed into his mind uninvited; it was not the pain of the chief justice that ended Longfellow’s tolerance for the story for now so much as that of the widow.

July 1861. The Longfellows should have been at Nahant. There was a cool sea breeze that caressed Nahant, but for reasons nobody remembered the Longfellows had not yet left the fervent sunshine and heat of Cambridge.

A tormenting scream burrowing into the study from the adjoining library. Two little girls shouting in terror. Fanny Longfellow had been sitting with little Edith, who was then eight, and Alice, eleven, sealing packages of the girls’ freshly cut curls as mementos; little Annie Allegra slept soundly upstairs. Fanny had opened a window in the unlikely hope for a puff of air. The best conjecture in the days that followed—for nobody had seen precisely what happened, nobody could ever truly see something so brief and so arbitrary—was that a flake of hot sealing wax drifted onto her light summer dress. In a single moment, she was burning.

Longfellow had been at his standing desk in the study, throwing some black sand on a newly inked poem to blot it. Fanny ran in screaming from the adjoining room. Her dress was now all flames, hugging her body like tailored Oriental silk. Longfellow bundled her in a rug and laid her on the floor.

With the fire out, he carried the trembling body upstairs to the bedroom. Later that night, the doctors put her to rest with ether, in the morning, assuring Longfellow in a bold whisper that she could feel very little pain, she took some coffee and then drifted into a coma. The funeral service in the Craigie House library fell on their eighteenth wedding anniversary. Her head was the only part of her the fire had spared, and on her beautiful hair was laid a wreath of orange blossoms.

The poet was confined to his bed that day by his own burns, but he could hear the unrestrained weeping of his friends, women and men, down in the parlor, weeping for him, he knew, as well as for Fanny. He found, in his delusional but alert state of mind, that he could make out individuals by their crying. His facial burns would necessitate his growing a full and heavy beard—not only to conceal the scars, but also because he could no longer shave. The orange discoloring on the palms of his limp hands would last painfully long, reminding him of his failure, before whitening away.

Longfellow, recuperating in his bedchamber, raised his bandaged hands upward. For nearly a week, the children could hear delirious words float into the hall whenever they passed by. Little Annie, thankfully, was too young to understand.

“Why could I not save her? Why could I not save her?”

After Fanny’s death had become real to him, after he could look at his little girls again without breaking down, Longfellow unlocked his notepaper drawer where he had once deposited fragments of Dante translations. Most of what he had done as class exercises in lighter times would be of no use. It was food for the fire. It was not the poetry of Dante Alighieri; it was the poetry of Henry Longfellow—the language, the style, the rhythm—the poetry of one content with his own life. As he started again, beginning with Paradiso, he was not chasing after a fitting style to render Dante’s words this time. He was chasing after Dante. Longfellow tucked himself away at his desk, watched over by his three young daughters, the children’s governess, his patient sons—now restless men—his hired help, and Dante. Longfellow found he could barely write a word of his own poetry, yet he could not stop himself from working on Dante. The pen felt like a sledgehammer in his hand. Difficult to wield nimbly, but what volatile power.

Soon Longfellow found reinforcements around his table: first Lowell, then Holmes, Fields, and Greene. Longfellow often said they had formed the Dante Club to amuse themselves during bleak New England winters. This was the diffident way he expressed its importance to him. The attention to defects and deficiencies was sometimes not the most agreeable interaction for Longfellow, but when critiques were harsh, the supper afterward made amends.

Resuming his editing of these latest Inferno cantos, Longfellow heard a hollow thud come from outside Craigie House. Trap let out a sharp bark.

“Master Trap? What is it, old fellow?”

But Trap, finding no source for the disturbance, yawned and burrowed back into the warm straw lining of his champagne basket. Longfellow peered outside his unlit dining room but saw nothing. Then a pair of eyes jumped out from the darkness, followed by what seemed a blinding flash of light. Longfellow’s heart leapt, not so much at the sight of a face appearing but at the sight of the face, if that is what it was, suddenly vanishing after locking eyes with him, the glass misting under Longfellow’s gasp. Longfellow stumbled backward, knocking into a cabinet and sending headlong onto the floor an entire set of Appleton family dishes (a wedding gift, as was Craigie House itself, from Fanny’s father). The cumulative shattering that followed echoed riotously, causing Longfellow to throw forth an irrational scream of distress.

Trap pounced and yapped with his entire diminutive might. Longfellow escaped from the dining room to the parlor, and then to the lazy wood fire of the library, where he examined the windows for any further sign of the eyes. He was hoping Jamey Lowell or Wendell Holmes would appear at the door and apologize for the unintended fright and the late hour. But as Longfellow’s writing hand trembled, all he could discern out his window was blackness.

As Longfellow’s scream rang down Brattle Street, James Russell Lowell’s ears were half submerged in his tub. He was listening to the hollow skip of the water, letting his eyelids droop shut, wondering where life had gone. The small window overhead was propped open and the night was cool. If Fanny came in, she would no doubt command him to the warm bed at once.

Lowell had risen to fame when most of the celebrated poets were significantly older than he, including Longfellow and Holmes, who were both around ten years his senior. He had grown so content with the title Young Poet that it had seemed at forty-eight he had done something wrong to lose it.

He puffed indifferently on his fourth cigar of the day, carelessly letting the ashes defile his water. He could recall times only a few years earlier when the tub had seemed much roomier for his body. He wondered at the spare razor blades, now missing, that he had hidden years earlier on the shelf above. Had Fanny or Mab, more perceptive than he allowed himself to believe, surmised the black thoughts that often tingled as he soaked? In his youth, before meeting his first wife, Lowell had carried strychnine in his waistcoat pocket. He said he inherited his drop of black blood from his poor mother. Around the same time, Lowell had put a cocked pistol to his forehead but was too afraid to pull the trigger, a fact of which he was still heartily ashamed. He had only been flattering himself that he could be responsible for so conclusive an act.

When Maria White Lowell died, her husband of nine years felt old for the first time, felt as if he suddenly had a past, something alien to his present life, from which he was now exiled. Lowell consulted Dr. Holmes in a professional capacity about his dark emotions. Holmes recommended punctual retirement by ten-thirty at night and cold water rather than coffee in the morning. It was for the best, Lowell now thought, that Wendell had turned in the stethoscope for the professor’s lectern; he did not have the patience to see suffering through to the end.

Fanny Dunlap had been little Mabel’s governess after Maria’s death, and perhaps someone outside his life would have known it was inevitable that she would assume a position as Maria’s substitute in Lowell’s eyes. The transition to a new, plainer wife was not so difficult as Lowell had feared, and for this many friends blamed him. But he would not wear grief on his sleeve. Lowell abhorred sentimentality from the bottom of his soul. Besides, the truth was that Maria no longer felt real to him most of the time. She was a vision, an idea, a faint gleam in the sky like the stars fading out before sunset. “My Beatrice,” Lowell had written in his journal. But even that doctrine demanded all the energy of the soul to believe in, and before long only the most vague specter of Maria occupied his thoughts.

Besides Mabel, Lowell had fathered three children with Maria, the healthiest of whom lived two years. The death of this last child, Walter, preceded Maria’s by a year. Fanny had a miscarriage soon after their marriage and was left incapable of bearing children. So James Russell Lowell had one living child, a daughter, raised forthrightly by a barren second wife.

When she was young, Lowell thought it would be enough to hope Mabel would be a great, strong, vulgar, mud pudding-baking, tree-climbing little wench. He taught her to swim, to skate, and to walk twenty miles a day, as he could.

But the Lowells from time immemorial had had sons. Jamey Lowell himself had three nephews who had served and died in the Union army. That was destined. Lowell’s grandfather had been the author of the original anti-slavery law in Massachusetts. But J. R. Lowell had borne no sons, no James Lowell Juniors to contribute to the greatest cause of their age. Walt had been such a sturdy boy for a few months; he would have been as tall and brave as Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, certainly.

Lowell let his hands indulge themselves in pulling at the corners of his walrus-tusk mustache, the wet tips curling like a sultan’s. He thought of The North American Review and how much of his time it swallowed. Organizing manuscripts and submissions was beyond the pale of his talents, and he had formerly left these tasks to his more punctilious co-editor, Charles Eliot Norton, before the latter left for a European journey undertaken for Mrs. Norton to recover her health. Questions of style, grammar, and punctuation in other people’s articles—and the pressure of personal appeals from qualified and unqualified friends alike wanting to be published—all robbed from Lowell his head for writing. And the routine of teaching, too, further dismantled poetic impulses. More than ever, he felt the Harvard Corporation was always looking over his shoulder, racking and sifting and pickaxing and hoeing and shoveling and dredging and scratching (and, he feared, also damning) his brain like so many Californian immigrants. All he needed to recover his imagination was to lie under a tree for a year, with no other industry than to watch the dapples of sunlight on the grass. He had envied Hawthorne on his last visit to his friend in Concord, for the rooftop tower he had built himself could only be entered by a secret trapdoor, upon which the novelist placed a heavy chair.

Lowell did not hear the light tread up the stairs and did not notice when the door of the bathroom opened wider. Fanny closed it behind her.

Lowell sat up guiltily. “There’s hardly a breeze in here, dear.”

Fanny had a troubled spark in her wide-set, nearly Oriental eyes. “Jamey, the yardman’s son is here. I asked him the matter, but he says he wishes to speak with you. I’ve put him in the music room. Poor little thing’s short of breath.”

Lowell wrapped himself in his dressing gown and took the stairs two at a time. The gawky young man, wide horse’s teeth protruding from under his upper lip, idled at the piano as though nervously preparing for a concert.

“Sir, beg your pardon for the bother… I was coming along Brattle and thought I heard a loud sound from the old Craigie House… I thought to call on Professor Longfellow to check if all was right—all the fellas do say he is such a kind one—but I ain’t never met him so…”

Lowell’s heart raced with panic. He grabbed the boy by his shoulders. “What was the sound you heard, lad?”

“A great impact. A crash of sorts.” The young man tried unsuccessfully to demonstrate the sound with a gesture. “The little mutt—uh, Trap, is it?– barking enough to raise Pluto. And a loud shout, I believe, sir. I have never raised the hue and cry before, sir.”

Lowell told the boy to wait and rushed to his dressing closet, grabbing his slippers and the plaid trousers to which, under ordinary circumstances, Fanny would state her aesthetic objections.

“Jamey, you shan’t go out at this hour,” insisted Fanny Lowell. “There have been a rash of garrotings of late!”

“It’s Longfellow,” he said. “The boy thinks something might be the matter.”

She grew quiet.

Lowell promised Fanny to take along his hunting rifle and, with it slung over his shoulder, Lowell and the yardman’s son made their way down to Brattle Street.

Longfellow was still rather shaken when he came to the door, and shaken further by the sight of Lowell’s gun. He apologized for the commotion and described the incident without embellishment, insisting that his imagination had merely been momentarily agitated.

“Karl,” Lowell said, and took the yardman’s son by his shoulders again. “You hurry to the police station for a patrolman.”

“Oh, that won’t be needed,” Longfellow said.

“There has been a wave of robberies, Longfellow. The police will check the whole neighborhood and make sure it is safe. Now, don’t you be selfish.”

Lowell waited for Longfellow to put up more of a fight, but he did not. Lowell nodded to Karl, who sped off to the Cambridge station with a boy’s enthusiasm for emergencies. Inside the Craigie House study, Lowell slumped in the chair next to Longfellow and adjusted his dressing gown over his trousers. Longfellow apologized for drawing Lowell out for such a petty matter and insisted he return to Elmwood. But he also insisted on brewing some tea.

James Russell Lowell sensed there was nothing petty about Longfellow’s fear.

“Fanny is probably grateful,” he said, laughing. “She calls my habit of opening the bathroom window while in the tub ‘death by bathing.’ “

Even now, Lowell felt uncomfortable saying Fanny’s name to Longfellow and tried unconsciously to alter his inflection. The name robbed Longfellow of something; his wounds were still fresh. He never spoke of his own Fanny. He would not write about her, not even a sonnet or an elegiac poem in her memory. His journal did not contain a single mention of Fanny Longfellow’s death; on the first entry after she died, Longfellow had copied out some lines from a Tennyson poem: “Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace.” Lowell believed he understood quite well the reason Longfellow had written so little original poetry over the last few years in his retreat into Dante. If it were his own words Longfellow was writing, the temptation to write her name would be too strong, and then she would merely be a word.

“Perhaps it was just a tourist here to see Washington’s house.” Longfellow laughed gently. “Did I tell you that one came by the other week to see ‘General Washington’s headquarters, if you please’? On his way out, planning his next stop I suppose, he asked if Shakespeare did not live in the neighborhood.”

They both laughed. “Daughter of Eve! What did you tell him?”

“I said that if Shakespeare has moved nearby I had not met him.”

Lowell leaned back in the easy chair. “Good answer as any. I think that the moon never sets in Cambridge, which accounts for the number of lunatics here. Working on Dante at this hour?” The proofs Longfellow had taken out were on his green table. “My dear friend. Your pen is wet at all times. You’ll tire yourself out by and by.”

“I do not grow at all weary. Of course, there are times I feel it drag, like wheels in deep sand. But something urges me on with this work, Lowell, and will not let me rest.”

Lowell studied the proof sheet.

“Canto Sixteen,” Longfellow said. “It’s due to go to the printer’s, but I am reluctant to part with it. When Dante meets the three Florentines, he says, ‘S’i’ fossi stato dal foco coperto…’ “

“ ‘Could I have been protected from the fire’ “—Lowell read his friend’s translation as Longfellow recited the Italian—” ‘I should have thrown myself down among them, and I think my Leader would have suffered it.’ Yes, we should never forget that Dante is no mere observer of Hell; he too is in physical and metaphysical danger along the way.”

“I cannot quite find the right version in English. Some would say, I suppose, that in translating, the foreign author’s voice should be modified to gain smoothness to the verse. On the contrary, I wish as translator, like a witness on a stand, to hold up my right hand and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

Trap began barking at Longfellow and scratched his pants leg.

Longfellow smiled. “Trap has been to the printing office so often he thinks he has translated Dante all along.”

But Trap was not barking at the philosophy of Longfellow’s translation. The terrier shot into the front hall. A thundering knock sounded at Longfellow’s door.

“Ah, the police,” Lowell said, impressed with the speed of their arrival. He wrung out his soggy mustache.

Longfellow opened his front door. “Well, this is a surprise,” he said in the most hospitable voice he could find at the moment.

“How so?” J. T. Fields, standing on the wide threshold, angled his eyebrows together and removed his hat. “I received a message in the middle of our whist game—on a hand where I had Bartlett beat, too!” He smiled briefly as he hung his hat. “It said to come here at once. Is everything all right, my dear Longfellow?”

“I sent no such message, Fields,” Longfellow apologized. “Wasn’t Holmes with you?”

“No, and we waited a half-hour for him before dealing.”

A rustle of dried leaves advanced toward them. In a moment, the small figure of Oliver Wendell Holmes, his elevated boots crunching leaves by the half-dozen underfoot, swerved up Longfellow’s brick footpath in a double-quick march. Fields stepped aside and Holmes sprinted past him into the hall, wheezing.

“Holmes?” Longfellow said.

The frantic doctor noticed with horror that Longfellow was cradling a sheaf of Dante cantos.

“Dear God, Longfellow,” Dr. Holmes cried. “Put those away!”

VI

After ensuring the door was tightly shut, Holmes explained in rapid-fire speech how it had flashed over him while coming home from the market and how he had rushed back to the medical college, where he found—thank heavens!—that the police had left for the Cambridge station house. Holmes dispatched a message to his brother’s whist table to fetch Fields to Craigie House at once.

The doctor grabbed Lowell’s hand and shook it urgently, more thankful he was there than he would have admitted. “I was about to send to Elmwood for you, my dear Lowell,” Holmes said.

“Holmes, did you say something of police?” Longfellow asked.

“Longfellow, everyone, please—into the study. You must promise to lock away all I am about to tell you in the strictest of confidence.”

Nobody objected. It was unusual to see the little doctor so serious; his role of aristocratic jester had long been crystallized—much to Boston’s joy and to Amelia Holmes’s chagrin. “There was a murder discovered today,” Holmes announced in a tenuous whisper, as if to test the house for eavesdroppers or to shield his dreadful story from the crowded shelves of folios. He turned away from the fire, genuinely afraid the talk could go up through the chimney. “I was at the medical college,” he finally began, “making headway on some work, when the police arrived to commission one of our rooms for an inquest. The body they brought in was covered with dirt, you understand?”

Holmes paused, not for rhetorical effect but to catch his breath. In the commotion, he had neglected the whirring signs of his asthma.

“Holmes, what has this to do with us? Why did you have me rush over from John’s game?” Fields asked.

“Hold,” Holmes said with a sharp wave of his hand. He put aside Amelia’s loaf and fished out his handkerchief. “The body, the dead man, his feet… God help us!”

Longfellow’s eyes lit up bright blue. He had not said much but had paid the closest attention to Holmes’s demeanor. “A drink, Holmes?” he asked gently.

“Yes. Thank you,” Holmes agreed, wiping his watery brow. “My apologies. I hastened here with the speed of an arrow, too restless to ride in a hackney cab, too impatient and fearful of encountering anyone in the horsecars!”

Longfellow walked serenely to the kitchen. Holmes waited for his drink. The other two men waited for Holmes. Lowell shook his head with grave piety at his friend’s jumpiness. Their host reappeared with a glass of brandy choked by ice, which was how Holmes preferred it. Holmes grabbed for it. It coated his throat.

“Though a woman tempted man to eat, my dear Longfellow,” said Holmes, “you never hear of Eve having to do with his drinking, for he took to that of his own notion.”

“Come on, then, Wendell,” Lowell urged.

“Very well. I saw it. You understand? I saw the corpse close, as close as I am to Jamey right now.” Dr. Holmes closed in on Lowell’s chair. “That body had been buried alive, upside down, his feet straight up into the air. And the soles of both feet, gentlemen, were horribly burned. They were toasted to a crisp that I shan’t ever… well, I shall remember it till nature has tucked me up well under the yearly violets!”

“My dear Holmes,” Longfellow said, but Holmes would not pause yet, not even for Longfellow.

“His clothes were off. I don’t know if the police had removed the clothes—no, I believe he was found that way by some things they said. I saw his face, you see.” Holmes reached for another dose of his drink but found only a trace left. He clamped his teeth onto a piece of ice.

“He was a minister,” said Longfellow.

Holmes turned with an incredulous stare and cracked the ice on his back teeth. “Yes. Exactly.”

“Longfellow, how did you know about this?” Fields turned, suddenly very confused at a story he still felt had nothing to do with him. “This couldn’t have been in any papers yet if Wendell just witnessed…” But then Fields realized how Longfellow had known. Lowell realized, too.

Lowell stormed up to Holmes as if to strike him. “How could you know the body had been left upside down, Holmes? Did the police tell you?”

“Well, not exactly.”

“You have been searching out a reason for us to stop the translation so that you don’t have to worry about Harvard bringing down trouble. It’s all conjecture.”

“Nobody need tell me what I saw,” Dr. Holmes snapped back. “Medicine is a subject none of you have studied. I have devoted the best part of my life in Europe and America to the study of my profession. Now, if you or Longfellow should begin to talk about Cervantes, I should feel my ignorance—well, no, I am respectfully informed about Cervantes, but I should listen to you because you have given your time to the study of it!”

Fields saw how truly nervous Holmes was. “We understand, Wendell. Please.”

If Holmes had not stopped for a breath, he would have fainted. “That corpse had been put on his head, Lowell. I saw the streaks of the tears and sweat that had rolled up his forehead—hear me: up his forehead. The blood was locked in his face. It was when I saw the horror fixed upon the face that I recognized the Reverend Elisha Talbot.”

The name surprised them all. The old tyrant of Cambridge mounted on his head, imprisoned, blinded by dirt, helpless to move at all except perhaps to kick his flaming feet in despair, just like one of Dante’s Simoniacs, the clerics who accepted money to misuse their titles…

“There’s more if you need it.” Holmes was chewing his ice with great celerity now. “A policeman at the inquest said he was found at the Second Unitarian Church burial ground—that’s Talbot’s church! The body was covered in dirt, from the waist up. But there was not a speck below the waist. He was buried naked, upside down, with his feet sticking up in the air!”

“When did they find him? Who was there?” Lowell demanded.

“For God’s sake,” Holmes cried. “How could I know such particulars!”

Longfellow watched the thick hand of his leisurely ticking clock slouch for eleven. “Widow Healey announced a reward in the evening paper. Judge Healey did not die a natural death. She believes it was a murder as well.”

“But Talbot’s isn’t just a murder, Longfellow! Must I spell out what is as plain as print? It’s Dante! Someone has used Dante to kill Talbot!” Holmes cried out, frustration painting his cheeks red.

“You’ve read the late edition, my dear Holmes?” Longfellow asked patiently.

“Of course! I think so.” He had, in fact, glanced only briefly at the paper . the entrance hall of the medical college on his way to prepare anatomical drawings for Monday’s class. “What did it say?”

Longfellow found the newspaper. Fields took it and read it aloud. “ ‘New revelations regarding the uncanny death of Chief Justice Artemus S. Healey,’ “ Fields read after opening a pair of square eyeglasses from his waistcoat pocket. “Typical printer’s error. Healey’s middle name was Prescott.”

Longfellow said, “Fields, please pass over the first column. Read how the body was found—in the meadows behind the Healey home, not far from the river.”

“ ‘Bloody… stripped fully of his suit and underclothes… found immoderately swarmed in…’ “

“Go on, Fields.”

“Insects?”

Flies, wasps, maggots—those were the particular insects cataloged by the newspaper. And nearby in the yard of Wide Oaks was found a flag that the Healeys could not explain. Lowell wanted to deny the thoughts that were being passed around the room with the paper, but instead he fell back into a reclining position in the easy chair, his bottom lip quivering as it did when he could not think of what to say.

They exchanged searching glances, hoping there would be one among them smarter than the next who could explain it all away as coincidence with a well-placed allusion or a clever quip, one who could banish the conclusion that the Reverend Talbot had been roasted with the Simoniacs and Chief Justice Healey thrown in among the Neutrals. Every detail further confirmed what they could not deny.

“It fits together,” said Holmes. “It all fits together for Healey: the sin of neutrality, the punishment. For too long he had refused to act on the Fugitive Slave Act. But what of Talbot? I have never heard even a whisper that he abused the power of his pulpit—help me, Phoebus!” Holmes jumped when he noticed the rifle leaning against the wall. “Longfellow, why in the land is that out here?”

Lowell was shaken with the remembrance of why he had corne to Craigie House in the first place. “You see, Wendell, Longfellow thought he might have seen a burglar lurking outside. We sent the yardman’s boy to fetch the police.”

“A burglar?” Holmes asked.

“A phantasm.” Longfellow shook his head.

Fields stomped on the rug with a graceless leap to his feet. “Well, perfect timing!” He turned to Holmes. “My dear Wendell, you shall be remembered as a good citizen for this. When the policeman arrives, we explain that we have information on these crimes and instruct him to return with the chief of police.” Fields had mustered his greatest tone of authority, yet he tapered off with a glance to Longfellow for endorsement.

Longfellow did not move. His stone-blue eyes stared ahead into the richly cracked spines of his books. It was not clear whether he’d remained a part of the conversation. This infrequent, remote look, when he sat silently running his hand through the locks of his beard, when his invincible tranquillity turned cool, when his maiden complexion seemed a bit dusky, put all his friends ill at ease.

“Yes,” Lowell said, trying to project something like collective relief at Fields’s statement. “Of course we’ll inform the police of our suppositions. This shall no doubt prove vital information to the unriddling of such a mess.”

“No!” Holmes gasped. “No, we mustn’t tell anyone. Longfellow,” the doctor said with desperation. “We must keep this to ourselves! Everyone in this room must keep the matter dark, as promised, though the heavens cave in!”

“Come, Wendell!” Lowell leaned over the diminutive doctor. “This is not a time to put your hands in your pockets! Two people have been killed, two men of our own set!”

“Yes, and who are we to meddle in such horrendous business?” Holmes pleaded. “The police are investigating, to be sure, and they will find whomever is responsible without our interference!”

“Who are we to meddle!” Lowell repeated mockingly. “There’s no chance the police will think of this, Wendell! They must be chasing their tails even as we sit here!”

“Would you rather they chase our wild tales, Lowell? What do we know of such a matter as a murder?”

“Why did you bother coming to us with this then, Wendell?”

“So we know to protect ourselves! I’ve done us all a good turn,” Holmes said. “This could put us in a dangerous way!”

“Jamey, Wendell, please…” Fields stood between them.

“If you go to the police, you can just count me out of this,” Holmes added with a treble voice as he took a seat. “Do it over my principled objection and my stated refusal.”

“Observe, gentlemen,” Lowell said with a demonstrative flick of his hand at Holmes, “Dr. Holmes in his usual position when the world needs him– sitting on his arse.”

Holmes looked around the room, hoping someone would speak up in his support, then sank deeper into his chair, meekly removing his gold chain, tangled with his Phi Beta Kappa key, and checking his watch against Longfellow’s mahogany clock, half certain that any moment all the timepieces of Cambridge would tick to a dead stop.

Lowell was at his most persuasive when he spoke with soft assertiveness as he did when turning to Longfellow. “My dear Longfellow, when the officer arrives, we should have a note prepared, addressed to the chief of police, explaining what we believe to have discovered here tonight. Then we can put this behind us as our dear Dr. Holmes wishes to do.”

“I’ll begin.” Fields reached for Longfellow’s stationery drawer. Holmes and Lowell began their argument again.

Longfellow breathed a small sigh.

Fields halted with his hand in the drawer. Holmes and Lowell shut their mouths.

“Pray, do not leap in the dark. First tell me,” Longfellow said. “Who in Boston and Cambridge knows about these murders?”

“Well, there’s a question.” Lowell was frightened enough to be impolite even to the one man, after his late father, whom he worshipped. “Everyone in the blessed city, Longfellow! One’s on the front page of every paper”—he grabbed the headlining page on Healey’s death—”and Talbot’s will follow suit before the cock crows. A judge and a preacher! You might as well try to lock up the beef and beer as to keep that away from the public!”

“Very well. And who else in the city knows about Dante? Who else knows how le piante erano a tutti accese intrambe? How many are strolling down Washington and School Streets peering into the shops or stopping in at Jordan, Marsh for the latest fashion in hats, thinking to themselves that rigavan lor di sangue il volto, che, mischiato di lagrime and imagining the fright of those fastidiosi vermi–the loathsome worms?”

“Tell me, who in our city—no, who in America today—knows the words of Dante in his every work, in his every canto, his every tercet? Enough to even begin to think how to turn the entrails of Dante’s punishments in Inferno into models of murder?”

Longfellow’s study, holding New England’s most sought after conversationalists, fell uncannily silent. Nobody in the room thought to answer the question, because the room was the answer: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Professor James Russell Lowell; Professor Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes; James Thomas Fields; and a small cross-section of friends and colleagues.

“Why, dear God,” Fields said. “There’s only a handful of people who would be able to read Italian, not to speak of Dante’s Italian, and, even of those who might make some of it out with a heap of grammar books and dictionaries, most have never beheld a copy of Dante’s works!” Fields should know. The publisher made it his business to know the reading habits of every litterateur and scholar in New England and everyone who counted outside it. “That is to say,” he continued, “will never behold one until there’s a completed translation of Dante to be published in all corners of America…”

“Like the one we’re working on?” Longfellow held up the proofs for Canto Sixteen. “If we do disclose to the police the precision with which these murders have been drawn from Dante and carried out, whom could they possibly single out with knowledge sufficient to commit these crimes?”

“We will not only be their first suspects,” Longfellow said. “We will have to be their prime suspects.”

“Come now, my dear Longfellow,” Fields said with a desperately serious laugh. “Let us get our heads out from under this excitement, gentlemen. Look around the room: professors, leading citizens of the Commonwealth, poets, the frequent hosts and guests of senators and dignitaries, bookmen—who would really think us involved in a murder? I do little to inflate our status by reminding us that we are men of great standing in Boston, men of society!”

“As was Professor Webster. The gallows tell us there’s no law against stringing up a Harvard man,” Longfellow replied.

Dr. Holmes grew whiter yet. Although he was relieved that Longfellow had taken his side, this last comment pierced him.

“I had just been at my post at the medical college a few years,” Holmes said staring ahead glassily. “At first, every teacher and staff hand in the school was a suspect—even a poet like me.” Holmes tried to laugh, but it came up dry. “I was put on their list of possible assailants. They came to the house to question me. Wendell Junior and little Amelia were just children, Neddie not more than a baby. It was the worst fright of my life.”

Longfellow said calmly, “My dear friends, pray agree, if you can, on this point: Even if the police wanted to trust us, even if they did trust and believe us, we would be under suspicion until the killer is caught. And then, even with the killer caught, Dante would be tainted with blood before Americans saw his words, and in a time when our country can bear no more death. Dr. Manning and the Corporation already wish to bury Dante to preserve their curriculum, and this would be an iron coffin. Dante would fall under the same curse in America he did in Florence, for a thousand years to come. Holmes is right: We tell no one.”

Fields turned to Longfellow in astonishment.

“We’ve vowed to protect Dante, under this very roof,” Lowell said quietly at the sight of his publisher’s tightened face.

“Let us make certain we protect ourselves first, and our city, or there shall be nobody left standing with Dante!” said Fields.

“Protecting ourselves and Dante is one and the same now, my dear Fields,” Holmes stated matter-of factly, tempted by the vague feeling that he had been right all along that trouble would come. “One and the same. It would not be we alone who would be blamed if all this was known but the Catholics as well, the immigrants…”

Fields knew his poets were right. If they went to the police now, their standing would be in limbo, if not in actual jeopardy. “Heaven help us. We’d be ruined.” He exhaled. It was not the law Fields was thinking about. In Boston, reputation and rumor could do in a gentleman far more efficiently than the hangman. As beloved as his poets were, the public always harbored an unhealthy pinch of jealousy against its celebrities. News of even the slightest association with such scandalous murder would spread quicker than the telegraph could carry it. Fields had been disgusted to see unblemished reputations eagerly dragged through the mire of the streets on the basis of mere gossip.

“They may be getting close already,” said Longfellow. “You remember this?” He removed a slip of paper from the drawer. “Shall we take a look now? I think it shall reveal itself.”

Longfellow flattened Patrolman Rey’s paper with the palm of his hand. The scholars leaned in to examine the scrawled transcription. The firelight gleamed streaks of crimson across their astonished faces.

Rey’s Deenan see amno atesennone turnay eeotur nodur lasheeato nay stared back at them from under the shadow of Longfellow’s leonine beard. “It’s in the middle of a tercet,” Lowell whispered. “Yes! How could we have missed that?”

Fields snatched up the paper. The publisher was not ready to admit he could not yet see it; his head was too dizzied by all that had happened to access his Italian. The paper shook in Fields’s hand. He delicately laid it back on the table and drew his fingers away.

“ ‘Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create se non etterne, e io etterno duro, lasciate ogne,’ “ Lowell recited to Fields. “From the inscription over the gates of Hell, this is just a fragment of it! ‘Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.’ “

Lowell snapped his eyes closed as he translated:

The leaper, also, had seen this sign appear before him at the Central Police Station. He had seen the Neutrals: Ignavi. They swatted helplessly in the air and then swatted their own bodies. Wasps and flies circled their white, naked forms. Gross maggots crawled out from rotted gaps in their teeth, gathering in heaps below, sipping up their blood mixed with salt of their tears. The souls followed a blank banner ahead of them as a symbol of their pointless paths. The leaper felt his own skin alive with flies, flapping up and down with globs of gnawed flesh, and he had to escape… at least to try.

Longfellow found his proof for the corrected translation of Canto Three and laid it on the table for comparison.

“Heavens above,” Holmes wheezed, clinging to Longfellow’s sleeve. “Why, that mulatto officer was at the inquest of the Reverend Talbot. And he came to us with this after Judge Healey’s death! He must know something already!”

Longfellow shook his head. “Remember, Lowell is the College’s Smith Professor. The patrolman wished to identify an unknown language, which we were all too blind at the time to decipher. Some students directed him to Elmwood on the night of our Dante Club session, and Mabel directed him here. There is no reason to believe he knows anything at all of the Dantesque nature of these crimes or that he knows about our translation project.”

“How could we not have seen it right away?” Holmes asked. “Greene thought it might be Italian, and we ignored him.”

“Thank heavens,” Fields exclaimed, “or the police would have been on us right then and there!”

Holmes continued in a refreshed panic: “But who would have recited the portal’s inscription to the patrolman? This cannot be an entire coincidence of timing. It must have something to do with these murders!”

“I suspect that’s right.” Longfellow nodded calmly.

“Who could have said this?” Holmes pressed, turning the piece of paper over again and again in his hand. “That inscription,” Holmes continued. “The gates to Hell—it comes in Canto Three, the same canto where Dante and Virgil walk among the Neutrals! The model for Chief Justice Healey’s murder!”

Footfalls multiplied up the Craigie House walkway and Longfellow opened the door for the yardman’s son, who rushed in, his obtrusive teeth chattering. Looking out onto the front step, Longfellow found himself facing Nicholas Rey.

“He made me take him along, Mr. Longfellow sir,” Karl whinnied, seeing Longfellow’s surprise, then looking up at Rey with a sour grimace.

Rey said, “I was at the Cambridge station house on another matter when this boy arrived to report your trouble. A local officer is looking outside.”

Rey could almost hear the heavy silence that set in from the study at the sound of his voice.

“Would you come in, Officer Rey?” Longfellow did not know what else to say. He explained the source of his scare.

Nicholas Rey was back among the George Washington troop in the front hall. With his hand in his trousers pocket, he stroked the gobs of paper that had been scattered about the underground vault, still moist from the damp burial clay. Some of the scraps of paper had one or two letters on them; others were smudged beyond recognition.

Rey stepped into the study and surveyed the three gentlemen: walrus-tusked Lowell with his overcoat wrapped around his dressing gown and plaid trousers; the other two in slackened collars and tangled neck cloths. A double-barreled shotgun leaned against the wall; a loaf of bread waited on the table.

Rey rested his eyes on the agitated man with the boyish features, the only one not shielded by a beard. “Dr. Holmes assisted us with an examination this afternoon at the medical college,” Rey explained to Longfellow. “In fact that is the same business which now brings me to Cambridge. Thank you again, Doctor, for your help in that matter.”

The doctor jumped to his feet and gave a wobbly bow from the waist. “Not at all, sir. And if you ever are in need of further assistance, please send for me without hesitation,” he blurted out humbly, then handed Rey his card, forgetting for a moment that he had been of no help whatsoever. Holmes was too nervous to speak wisely. “Perhaps what sounds like a useless Latin prognosis could help in some small way to catch this killer running about our city.”

Rey paused and nodded appreciatively.

The yardman’s son took Longfellow’s arm and pulled him aside. “I’m sorry, Mr. Longfellow,” the boy said. “I didn’t believe he was no policeman. He ain’t got no uniform or anythin’, just a regular day coat. But the other officer there told me the aldermen makes him wear regular clothes so nobody gets mad at him for being a nigger cop and licks him!”

Longfellow dismissed Karl with a promise of sweets on another day.

In the study, Holmes, shifting from one foot to the other as though standing on hot coals, blocked the center table from Rey’s sight. There, a newspaper headlined the Healey murder; there, Longfellow’s English translation of Canto Three, the model for that murder, was next to it; in between was the scrap of paper with Nicholas Rey’s jotting: Deenan see amno atesennone turnay eeotur nodur lasheeato nay.

Behind Rey, Longfellow stepped into the threshold of the study. Rey could feel his quick spurts of breathing. He noticed Lowell and Fields staring oddly at the table behind Holmes.

Swiftly, in a motion almost undetectable, Dr. Holmes stretched his arm, snatching the officer’s notepaper from the table. “Oh, and Officer,” announced the doctor. “Might we return your note to you?”

Rey felt a sudden rush of hope. He said quietly, “Have you…”

“Yes, yes,” Holmes said. “Part of it, anyhow. We’ve run the sounds through every language on the books, my dear officer, and I fear broken English seems our most likely conclusion. Part of it reads”—Holmes took a breath and stared hard, reciting—” ‘See no one tour, nay, O turn no door-latch out today.’ Rather Shakespearean, if a bit of balderdash, don’t you think?”

Rey glanced at Longfellow, who seemed as surprised as him. “Well, I thank you for remembering, Dr. Holmes,” said Rey. “I shall bid you gentlemen goodnight now.”

They flocked to the entryway as Rey vanished down the footpath.

“Turn no doorlatch?” Lowell asked.

“It shall keep him from suspecting anything, Lowell!” cried Holmes. “You could have looked more convinced. It is a good rule for the actor who manages Punch and Judy not to let the audience see his legs!”

“It was pretty good thinking, Wendell.” Fields patted Holmes’s shoulder warmly.

Longfellow started to speak but could not. He went into his study and closed the door, leaving his friends awkwardly stationed in the front hall.

“Longfellow? My dear Longfellow?” Fields knocked gently.

Lowell took his publisher’s arm and shook his head. Holmes realized he was holding something. He threw it down. Rey’s notepaper. “Look here. Officer Rey forgot this.”

They were no longer seeing Rey’s notebook paper. It was the cold, carved stone of colorless iron at the summit of the open gates to Hell, where Dante had stopped reluctantly, Virgil pushing him forward.

Lowell snatched the paper angrily and thrust Dante’s garbled words into the flame of the hall lamp.

VII

Oliver Wendell Holmes was late arriving at the next Dante Club meeting, which he knew would be his last. He wouldn’t accept a ride in Fields’s carriage, though the sky over the city was hooded black. The poet-doctor barely heaved a sigh when the spine of his umbrella cracked in the downpour as he slipped on layers of leaves, the last deposit of autumn, in front of Longfellow’s house. There was too much wrong in the world for him to spar with physical annoyances. In Longfellow’s pristine welcoming eyes there was no comfort, no serenity to impart, no answer to the question tightening the doctor’s stomach: How do we go on with this now?

He would tell them at supper that he was giving up his role in the Dante translation. Lowell might even be too disorientated by recent events to blame him for desertion. Holmes feared being known as a dilettante. But there was no way he could pretend to read Dante as usual with the aroma of the Reverend Talbot’s scorched flesh in the air. He was choking on an indistinct sense that somehow they had been responsible, that they had gone too far, that their readings of Dante each week had released Inferno’s punishments into the air of Boston by virtue of their own blithe faith in poetry.

One man had stomped in a half-hour earlier like an army of thousands.

James Russell Lowell. He was drenched, though he had only walked from around the corner; he ridiculed umbrellas as senseless contraptions. The soft fire of cannel coal with hickory logs radiated from the wide chimney, the heat making the moisture on Lowell’s beard gleam as though from an inner light.

Lowell had pulled Fields aside at the Corner that week and explained that he could not live in this manner. Their silence to the police was necessary– very well. Their good names had to be protected—very well. Dante had to be protected—also very well. But none of this fine rationale erased a plain fact: Lives were at stake.

Fields had said he would try to arrive at a sensible idea. Longfellow had said he did not know what Lowell imagined they could do. Holmes had successfully avoided his friend. Lowell tried his best to arrange for the four men to meet at one time, but until today they had resisted assembling as resolutely as opposing magnets.

Now that they sat in a circle, the same circle they had been sitting around for two and a half years, there was only one reason Lowell did not shake them by the shoulders one after the other. And that reason was crouched delicately in his favorite green easy chair and weighed down by Dante folios: They had all promised not to tell George Washington Greene what they had discovered.

There he was, brittle fingers unfolded out in front, warming himself at the hearth. The others knew that Greene, in fragile health, could not cope with the violent tidings they possessed. So the old historian and retired preacher, complaining lightheartedly about not having enough time to prepare his thoughts because of Longfellow’s last-minute switch of canto assignments, proved the only cheery member this Wednesday evening.

Earlier in the week, Longfellow had sent word to his scholars that they would review Canto Twenty-six, where Dante meets the flaming soul of Ulysses, the Greek hero of the Trojan War. This was a favorite among the group, so there was a hope it would reinvigorate them.

“Thank you, everyone, for coming,” Longfellow said.

Holmes remembered the funeral that, in retrospect, had heralded the start of the Dante translation. When news spread of Fanny’s death, some Boston Brahmins had felt an involuntary touch of pleasure—something they would never acknowledge or admit even to themselves—upon waking one morning to find that misfortune had visited someone so impossibly blessed in life. Longfellow had seemed to arrive at talent and luxury without the slightest strain. If Dr. Holmes had experienced anything less respectable than complete and utter anguish for the loss of Fanny to that terrible fire, it was perhaps a feeling that might be called wonder, or selfish excitement, that he would dare to aid Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in a time when he needed healing.

The Dante Club had restored life to a friend. And now—now two murders had been committed through the guise of Dante. And, presumably, there could be a third, or a fourth, while they sat by the fire, proof sheets in hand.

“How can we ignore…” James Russell Lowell blurted out before swallowing his thought with a bitter glance at the oblivious Greene, who was jotting a note in the margin of his proof sheet.

Longfellow read and discussed the Ulysses canto, not stopping to acknowledge the miscarried comment. His ever-present smile was strained and faded, as though borrowed from a previous meeting.

Ulysses found himself in Hell among the Evil Counselors as a bodiless flame, waving his tip back and forth like a wagging tongue. Some in Hell were resistant to telling Dante their stories; others were unbecomingly eager. Ulysses was above both vanities.

Ulysses tells Dante how after the Trojan War, as an aged soldier, he did not sail back to Ithaca to his wife and family. He convinced the few remaining members of his crew to continue forward past the line that no mortal should cross, to flout destiny and pursue knowledge. A whirlwind rose up and the sea swallowed them.

Greene was the only one to say much on the topic. He was thinking of the Tennyson poem that was based on this Ulysses episode. He smiled sadly and commented, “I think we should consider the inspiration Dante provides for Lord Tennyson’s interpretation of the scene.”

“ ‘How dull it is to pause, to make an end,’ “ Greene said, daintily reciting the Tennyson poem from memory. “ ‘To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life were all too little, and of one to me’ “—he paused with a visible mist in his eyes—” ‘little remains.’ Let Tennyson be our guide, dear friends, for in his sorrow he lived a bit of Ulysses, of the desire to triumph in the final voyage of life.”

After eager responses by Longfellow and Fields, old Greene’s commentary gave way to high-pitched snores. Having made his contribution, he was spent. Lowell was clutching his proof sheets tightly, his lips clamped together like those of a recalcitrant schoolboy. His frustration at the genteel charade was growing, his temper open to all comers.

When he could find nobody to speak, Longfellow said pleadingly, “Lowell, have you any comments on this tercet?”

A white marble statuette of Dante Alighieri stood over one of the study’s mirrors. The hollow eyes faced them heartlessly. Lowell mumbled, “Did not Dante himself once write that no poetry can be translated? Yet we come together weekly and gleefully murder his words.”

“Lowell, peace!” gasped Fields, who then apologized with his eyes to Longfellow. “We are doing all we must,” the publisher whispered hoarsely in a volume loud enough to chide Lowell but not so loud as to wake Greene.

Lowell leaned forward eagerly. “We need to do something… we need to decide…”

Holmes widened his quick eyes at Lowell and pointed at Greene, or, more precisely, at Greene’s shaggy ear canal. The old man could wake at any moment. Holmes then reeled in his finger and dragged it across his outstretched neck to signal their silence on the subject.

“What would you have us do anyway?” Holmes asked. He meant this to sound ridiculous enough to quash the muted asides. But the rhetorical question arched above the room with the enormity of a cathedral ceiling. “There’s nothing to do, unfortunately,” Holmes murmured now, pulling at his necktie, trying to retrieve his question. Unsuccessfully.

Holmes had unleashed something. This was the challenge waiting to be posed, the challenge that could be avoided only until that moment it was spoken aloud, when all four men were breathing the same air.

Lowell’s face flushed red with a burning need. He stared at George Washington Greene’s rhythmic respiration and his mind was filled simultaneously with all the sounds of their meeting: Longfellow desperately thanking them for coming, Greene croaking Tennyson, Holmes’s wheezing sighs, the majestic words of Ulysses, first spoken from the deck of his doomed ship and then repeated in Hell. All of this rumbled together in his brain and forged something new.

Dr. Holmes watched Lowell clasp his forehead with his strong fingers. Holmes did not know what made Lowell say it at first. He was surprised. Perhaps he expected Lowell to yell and scream to rouse them; perhaps he even hoped for this as one hopes for anything familiar. But Lowell had the exquisite sensibilities of a great poet in times of crisis. He began in a speculative whisper, every tight feature in his red face gradually relaxing. ‘ “My mariners, souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me…’ “ This was a verse from Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses stirring his crew to defy mortality.

Lowell leaned in and, smiling, continued with an earnestness that came as much from his iron-trimmed voice as from the words.

Holmes was stunned, though not at the power of the words, for he had long ago committed Tennyson’s poem to memory. He was overwhelmed at their immediate meaning for him. He felt a tremor inside. This was no recitation: Lowell was talking to them. Longfellow and Fields were also staring with heightened rapture and fear, because they too clearly understood. Lowell had, with a smile as he spoke, just dared them to find the truth behind two murders.

The sheets of cold, howling rain pounded the windows, seeming to land first only on one and then shift their attack clockwise. There was a flash of light, the ancient beckoning of thunder, and a rattling of windowpanes. Before Holmes knew it, Lowell’s voice was drowned out for a moment and he was no longer reciting.

Then Longfellow spoke, seamless in picking up the Tennyson poem in the same imploring whisper:

Then Longfellow spun his head to his publisher with a searching gaze: Your turn now, Fields.

Fields ducked his head at the invitation, his beard nestling in his parted frock coat and rubbing against the guard chain of his waistcoat. Holmes was panicked that Lowell and Longfellow had rushed into the impossible cause, but here was hope. Fields was the guardian angel of his poets and would not lead them headfirst into peril. Fields had stayed clear of trauma in his personal life, never trying to have children and thus sparing himself the sorrow of babes who did not live past their first or second birthday or mothers turned into corpses on their birthing beds. Free of domestic constraints, he devoted his protective energies to his authors. Once, Fields had spent an entire afternoon arguing with Longfellow about a poem that narrated the shipwreck of Hesperus. The argument made Longfellow miss his planned excursion on Cornelius Vanderbilt’s luxury ship, which hours later burned and sank. Likewise, Holmes prayed to himself, this would be a time when Fields would pester and nudge until the danger passed.

The publisher had to know that these were men of letters, not of action (and getting on in years at that). This madness was what they read about, what they versified on for the nourishment of a longing audience, humanity in shirtsleeves, warriors entering into battles they could never win, the stuff of poetry.

Fields’s mouth parted, but then he hesitated, like someone who tries to speak in a troubled dream but cannot. He seemed suddenly seasick. Holmes sighed sympathetically, telegraphing his approval of the demurral. But then Fields, looking with furrowed brow first to Longfellow and then to Lowell, leapt to his feet with a flourish and whispered Tennyson’s poem forward. Accepting what was to come:

Are we strong enough to unravel a murder? Dr. Holmes wondered. Moonshine, that’s what it was! There had been two murders, horrendous stuff, but it could not be proven, thought Holmes, recruiting his scientific mind, that any more would follow. Their involvement could be uncalled-for or worse, hazardous. Half of him regretted ever having observed the inquest at the medical college, and the other half regretted having reported his discovery to his friends. Still, he could not stop himself from wondering: What would Junior do? Captain Holmes. The doctor understood life from so many vistas that he could move easily over and under and around a given situation. Junior, however, had the gift and talent of narrow determination. Only the narrow could be truly brave. Holmes clamped his eyes shut.

What would Junior do? He thought about seeing off Wendell Junior’s army company in their shiny blue and gold as they left their training camp. “Good luck. Wish I were young enough to fight.” And so on. But he had not wished that. He had thanked heaven that he was no longer young.

Lowell leaned toward Holmes and repeated Fields’s words with a patient softness and a voice of indulgence rare and heart-wrenching in him. “That which we are, we are.”

That which we are, we are: what we choose to be. This calmed Holmes a bit. The three friends waiting for him had agreed. Still, he could walk away with his hands in his pockets. He drew in a deep asthmatic breath, the sort followed by an equally pronounced exhale of release. But instead of completing the motion, Holmes chose. He did not recognize his own voice, a voice composed enough to belong to the noble flame that spoke to Dante. He only barely recognized his reason for the decision that his words, Tennyson’s words, carried into existence: “‘… that which we are, we are,/One equal temper of heroic hearts, /Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find,’ “—he paused—” ‘and not to yield.’ “

“To strive,” Lowell whispered meditatively, methodically, studying the face of each of his companions in turn and pausing on Holmes’s. “To seek. To find…”

The clock chimed the hour and Greene stirred, but there was no need for further intercourse: The Dante Club had been reborn.

“Oh, a thousand apologies, my dear Longfellow.” Greene snorted himself awake over the unhurried peals of the old clock. “Did I miss much of anything?”