The Dante Club

XV

“O pilgrims: Come now to the final circle of this blind prison that Dante must explore on his sinuous journey downward, on his fated journey to relieve mankind of all suffering!” George Washington Greene raised his arms wide above the compact lectern that stopped at his narrow bosom. “For Dante seeks nothing less than that; his personal fate is secondhand to the poem. It is humankind he shall lift up through his journey, and so we follow suit, arm in arm, from the fiery gates to the heavenly spheres as we cleanse this our nineteenth century of sin!”

“Oh what a formidable task lay ahead of him in his unhappy tower in Verona, with the bitter salt of exile on his palate. Thinks he: How shall I sketch the bottom of the universe with this frail tongue? Thinks he: How shall I sing out my miraculous song? Yet Dante knows he must: to redeem his city, to redeem his nation, to redeem the future—and us, we who sit here in this reawakened chapel to revive the spirit of his majestic voice in a New World, we too are redeemable! He knows that in each generation there shall be those fortunate few who understand and see truly. His is a pen of fire with heart’s blood as his only ink. 0 Dante, bringer of light! Happy are the voices of the mountains and the pines that shall forever repeat thy songs!”

Greene gulped down a deep lungful of air before narrating Dante’s descent into the final round of Hell: a frozen lake of ice, Cocytus, slick as glass, with a thickness found not even on the river Charles in the dead of winter. Dante hears an angry voice flare up to him from this icy tundra. “Look how thou steppest!” cries the voice. “Take heed thou do not trample with thy feet the heads of us tired, miserable brothers!”

“Oh wherefore came these accusatory words to sting the ears of well-intentioned Dante? Looking down, the Poet sees, embedded in the frozen lake, heads sticking out from the ice, a congregation of dead shades—a thousand purple heads; sinners of the very basest nature known by the sons of Adam. What wrong is reserved for this frozen plain of Hell? Treachery, of course! And what is their punishment, their contrapasso, for the cold in their hearts? To be entombed wholly in ice: from the neck down—so that their eyes may forever view the miserable penalty called up by their wrongs.”

Holmes and Lowell were overcome, hearts contorted in their throats. Lowell’s beard hung low while Greene, glistening with vitality, described how Dante clutches the head of the berating sinner and demands his name, cruelly twisting out shocks of his hair by their roots. Though thou strip off my hair, I will not tell thee who I am! One of the other sinners unwittingly calls by name for his fellow shade to stop his galling shouts, much to Dante’s satisfaction. He could now record the sinner’s name for posterity.

Greene promised to reach bestial Lucifer—the worst of all Traitors and all sinners, the three-headed beast who is punisher and punished—in his next sermon. The energy that had charged through the old minister during the sermon drained rapidly when it was over, leaving only a pinwheel of color in his cheeks.

Lowell struggled against the crowd in the darkened chapel, parting soldiers mingling and squawking in the aisles. Holmes chased behind.

“Why, my dear friends!” Greene said cheerfully at the first sign of Lowell and Holmes. They shuttled Greene into a small chamber in the rear of the chapel, Holmes fastening the door. Greene took a seat on a board by a heating stove and held up his palms. “I daresay, fellows,” he observed. “With this dreadful weather and a new cough, I shan’t complain if we—”

Lowell roared, “Tell us everything directly, Greene!”

“Why, Mr. Lowell, I haven’t the most remote notion what you are driving at,” Greene said meekly, and glanced at Holmes.

“My dear Greene, what Lowell means…” But Dr. Holmes could not maintain his calm, either. “But what in the devil were you doing here, Greene?”

Greene looked hurt. “Well, you know, my dear Holmes, that I offer guest sermons at a number of churches around the city and in East Greenwich whenever I am asked and able. A sickbed is a dull place at best, and mine has grown anxious and painful in the last year, so I am more willing than ever when such requests arise.”

Lowell interrupted. “We know of your guest preaching. But you were preaching Dante out there!”

“Ah, that! It is a quite harmless amusement, really. Preaching to these woebegone soldiers was so challenging an experience, rather different from any I had known. In speaking with the men the first weeks after the war, especially when Lincoln was so treacherously killed, I found them plagued, in great numbers, with urgency by worries of their own fate and of the workings of the afterlife. One afternoon—sometime in the late-summer weeks—feeling inspired by Longfellow’s commitment to his translation, I introduced some Dantesque descriptions during my sermon and judged their effect rather successful. And so I began with general summaries of Dante’s spiritual history and journey. At moments—forgive me. Look how I blush to confess to you —I fancied I could teach Dante myself and that these brave young men were my pupils.”

“And Longfellow knew nothing of this?” Holmes asked.

“I wished to share the tidings of my modest experiment, but, well…” Greene’s skin was pale as he fixed his gaze into the flaming porthole of the heating stove. “I suppose, dear friends, I was a trifle embarrassed to profess myself a teacher of Dante next to a man like Longfellow. Only, don’t tell him so, if you please. It will only discomfit him, you know he doesn’t like to think himself different…”

“This sermon just now, Greene,” Lowell interrupted. “It was entirely made up of Dante’s encounters with the Traitors.”

“Yes, yes!” Greene said, rejuvenated by the reminder. “Isn’t it marvelous, Lowell? Soon enough I discovered that expressing a canto or two in its entirety held the attention of the soldierly quarter quite better than a sermon of my own frail thoughts, and doing so served well to arm me for our Dante sessions the following week.” Greene laughed with the nervous pride of a child who has reached some accomplishment unexpected by his elders. “When the Dante Club started Inferno, I began my current practice, preaching one of the cantos we were to translate in the next meeting of our club. I daresay I now feel quite prepared to take on this vociferous canto, for Longfellow has scheduled it for tomorrow! Normally, I would offer my sermon on Thursday afternoon, shortly before railroading back to Rhode Island.”

“Every Thursday?” asked Holmes.

“There were times when I was confined to bed. And the weeks that Longfellow canceled our Dante sessions, alas, I had no heart to speak of Dante then,” said Greene. “Then this last week, how wondrous! Longfellow has been translating at such a rapid, eager pace, I have stayed put in Boston and given a Dante sermon nearly every night for a week!”

Lowell lunged forward. “Mr. Greene! Review in your mind every moment of your experience here! Were any of the soldiers especially set on mastering the contents of your Dante sermons?”

Greene pushed himself to his feet and looked around him confusedly, as though he had suddenly forgotten their purpose. “Let me think. There were some twenty or thirty soldiers every session, understand, never all the same men. I’ve always wished I were better with faces. A number of them, now and again, did express admiration for my sermons. You must believe me—if I could aid you…”

“Greene, if you don’t instantly…” Lowell began in a choking voice.

“Lowell please!” Holmes said, assuming Fields’s usual role in taming his friend.

Lowell emitted a billowing exhale and waved Holmes forward.

Holmes began, “My dear Mr. Greene, you will aid us—tremendously, I know. Now, you must think fast for our benefit, dear friend, for Longfellow. Revisit all the soldiers you might have conversed with since starting this.”

“Oh, hold.” Greene’s half-moon eyes opened unnaturally large. “Hold now. Yes, there was one specific inquiry directed at me by a soldier wishing to read Dante for himself.”

“Yes! How did you reply?” Holmes asked, beaming.

“I asked whether the young man was at all familiar with foreign languages. He suggested he was the sharpest brand of reader since early boyhood but only of the English language, so I encouraged him to take up Italian. I noted that I was helping to complete the first American translation with Longfellow, for which we had a small club at the poet’s home. He seemed quite enticed. So I urged him to look for news of the Ticknor and Fields publication early next year at his bookseller,” Greene said with all the zeal of one of Fields’s planted puffs in the gossip pages.

Holmes paused for a hopeful glance at Lowell, who urged him on. “This soldier,” Holmes said slowly. “Might he have given you his name?” Greene shook his head. “Do you remember what he looked like, my dear Greene?”

“No, no, I’m terribly sorry.”

“It’s more important than you can imagine,” Lowell entreated him.

“I have but the foggiest recollection of the exchange,” Greene said, and closed his eyes. “I seem to remember he was rather tall, with a hay-colored mustache of the handlebar shape. And perhaps walked with a limp. But so many of them have become stumps of men. It was months ago, and I did not pay any special mind to the man at the time. As I say, I am not gifted at remembering faces—precisely why I’ve never written fiction, my friends. Fiction is all faces.” Greene laughed, finding this last statement enlightening. But the distress on the faces of his companions sagged into heavy stares. “Gentlemen? Pray tell me, have I contributed to some sort of problem?”

As they carefully made their way outside through groups of veterans, Lowell helped Greene step up into the carriage. Holmes had to rouse the cabman and horse, and the driver turned his lethargic horse’s head away from the old church.

In the meantime, from behind a dingy window of the soldiers’-aid home, the sight of the fleeing party was swallowed whole by the sentinel eyes of the man the Dante Club called Lucifer.

George Washington Greene was settled into a reclining armchair in the Authors’ Room at the Corner. Nicholas Rey joined them. The questions teased every bit of information from Greene about his Dante sermons and the veterans who eagerly came to hear them each week. Then Lowell launched into a blunt chronicle of the Dante murders, to which Greene could hardly conjure a response.

As the details fell from Lowell’s mouth, Greene felt his secret partnership with Dante gradually wrested away from him. The modest pulpit in the soldiers’-aid home facing his spellbound listeners; the special place where Devine Comedy stood in his library shelf in Rhode Island; the Wednesday nights seated before Longfellow’s fireplace—all of these had seemed such permanent and perfect manifestations of Greene’s dedication to the great poet. Yet, as with everything else that had once been satisfactory in Greene’s life, all along there had been far more at hand than he could conceive. So much occurring independent of his knowledge and indifferent to his sanction.

“My dear Greene,” Longfellow said gently. “You must not speak to anyone of Dante outside those in this room until these matters are resolved.”

Greene managed to simulate a nod. His expression was of a man both useless and disabled, the face of a clock from which the hands had been torn. “And our Dante Club meeting that was planned for tomorrow?” he asked feebly.

Longfellow shook his head sadly.

Fields rang for a boy to escort Greene to his daughter’s house. Longfellow started helping him into his overcoat.

“Never do that, my dear friend,” Greene said. “A young man does not need it and an old one does not want it.” He paused on the arm of the messenger boy as he stepped into the hall; he spoke but did not look back at the men in the room. “You could have told me what had happened, you know. Any one of you could have told me. I may not have the strongest… I do know I could have helped you.”

They waited for the sound of Greene’s footfalls to die in the hallway.

“If only we had told him,” said Longfellow. “What a fool I was to envision a race against the translation!”

“Not so, Longfellow!” Fields said. “Think of what we now know: Greene preached his sermons on Thursday afternoons, directly before returning to Rhode Island. He would select a canto he wished to brush up on, choosing from the two or three cantos you had set as the agenda for the next translation session. Our blasted Lucifer heard the same punishment we were to sit down with—six days before our own group! And that left ample time for Lucifer to stage his own version of the contrapasso murder just a day or two before we transcribed it onto paper. So, from our limited vantage point, the whole farrago assumed the appearance of a race, of someone taunting us with the particulars of our own translation.”

“What of the warning cut into Mr. Longfellow’s window?” asked Rey.

“La Mia Traduzione.” Fields threw up his hands. “We were hasty to conclude it was the work of the murderer. Manning’s damned jackals at the College would surely stoop so low as to try to frighten us off the translation.”

Holmes turned to Rey, “Patrolman, does Willard Burndy possess anything that can help us from here?”

Rey answered, “Burndy says a soldier paid him for instruction in how to open Reverend Talbot’s safe. Burndy, assuming it was easy profit with little risk, went to Talbot’s house to scout the layout, where several witnesses happened to see him. After Talbot’s murder, the detectives discovered the eyewitnesses, and with the help of Langdon Peaslee, Burndy’s rival, they fixed their case against Burndy. Burndy is a lush and can barely remember any more of the killer than the fact of his soldier’s uniform. I wouldn’t trust his mind even for that if you hadn’t discovered the source of the murderer’s knowledge.”

“Hang Burndy! Hang ‘em all!” Lowell cried. “Can’t you see, men? This is in our sights. We’re so close on Lucifer’s path that we can’t help but step on his Achilles’ heel. Think of it: The erratic pacing between murders now makes perfect sense. Lucifer was no Dante scholar after all—he was but a Dante parishioner. He could only kill after hearing Greene preach on a punishment. One week Greene preached Canto Eleven as his text—Virgil and Dante sitting on a wall to get accustomed to the stench of Hell, discussing Hell’s structure with the coolness of two engineers—a canto that features no specific punishment, no murder. Greene then took ill the next week, didn’t attend our club, didn’t preach—no murder again.”

“Yes, and Greene was ill once before that during our time translating Inferno, too.” Longfellow turned a page in his notes. “And once after that. There was no murder in those periods, either.”

Lowell continued, “And when we put a pause in our club meetings, when we first decided to investigate after Holmes’s observation of Talbot’s body, the killings stopped cold—because Greene had stopped! Until we had our ‘respite’ and decided to translate the Schismatics—sending Greene back to the pulpit and Phinny Jennison to his death!”

“The killer’s putting the money under the Simoniac’s head now comes into plain daylight, too,” Longfellow said remorsefully. “That was always Mr. Greene’s preferred interpretation. I should have noticed his readings of Dante in the particulars of the murders.”

“Do not bring yourself down, Longfellow,” urged Dr. Holmes. “The murders’ details were such that only an expert Dantean would have known them. There was no way to have guessed Greene was their unwitting source.”

“I’m afraid, however well-intentioned my reasoning,” replied Longfellow, “that we’ve made a grave error. By our accelerating the frequency of our translation sessions, our adversary has now heard as much Dante from Greene in a week’s time as he would over the span of a month.”

“I say put Greene back in that chapel,” Lowell insisted. “But this time we make him preach on something other than Dante. We watch the audience and wait for someone to become agitated, then we nab our Lucifer!”

“It is far too dangerous a game for Greene!” said Fields. “He is not up to the trick. Besides, that soldiers’-aid home is half-closed up, and the soldiers are probably dispersed throughout the city by now. We haven’t time to plan anything of the kind. Lucifer could strike at any moment, against anyone who, in his distorted vision of the world, he believes has transgressed against him!”

“Yet he must have a reason for those beliefs, Fields,” replied Holmes. “Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.”

“We know now that the killer required at least two days’ time, sometimes more, after hearing a sermon to prepare his murder,” said Patrolman Rey. “Is there a chance we can predict potential targets now that you know the portions of Dante Mr. Greene has shared with the soldiers?”

Lowell said, “I fear not. For one thing, we have no experience by which to guess how Lucifer would react to this recent flurry of sermons as opposed to a single one. The canto of the Traitors we just heard would be most prominent in his thoughts, I suppose. But how could we possibly guess what ‘Traitors’ might haunt the mind of this lunatic?”

“If only Greene could better recall the man who approached him, who inquired about reading Dante for himself,” Holmes said. “He wore a uniform, had a hay-colored handlebar mustache, and walked with a limp. Yet we know what physical strength was shown by the murderer in each of the killings, and what swiftness of foot—seen neither by man nor beast before or after the murders. Wouldn’t a disabling injury render that unlikely?”

Lowell rose and headed for Holmes with an exaggerated limp. “Might your gait not turn soft as this, Wendell, if you wished to hide suspicions of your strength to the world?”

“No, we haven’t seen any evidence of our killer hiding at all, only of our inability to see him. To think that Greene would have looked into the eyes of our demon!”

“Or into those of a thoughtful gentleman struck by the force of Dante,” Longfellow suggested.

“It was remarkable to see how excitedly the soldiers anticipated hearing more Dante,” Lowell admitted. “Dante’s readers become students, his students zealots, and what begins as a taste becomes a religion. The homeless exile finds a home in a thousand grateful hearts.”

A light rapping and a soft voice from the hall interrupted.

Fields shook his head in frustration. “Osgood, please manage it yourself for now!”

A folded paper skated in under the door. “Just a message, if you please, Mr. Fields.”

Fields hesitated before opening the note. “It’s Houghton’s seal. ‘Given your earlier request, I trust you would be interested to know that proofs from Mr. Longfellow’s Dante translation appear to have indeed gone missing. Signed, H. O. H.’ “

As the others fell silent, Rey inquired as to the context.

Fields explained: “When we mistakenly believed that the murders were racing our translation, Officer, I asked my printer, Mr. Houghton, to ensure that nobody had been tampering with Mr. Longfellow’s proof sheets as they were being made and thus somehow anticipating our pattern of translation.”

“Good God, Fields!” Lowell tore Houghton’s note from Fields’s hands. “Just when we thought Greene’s sermons explained everything. This flips the whole thing over like a flapjack!”

Lowell, Fields, and Longfellow found Henry Oscar Houghton busy composing a threatening letter to a defaulting plate maker. A clerk announced them.

“You told me that none of the proofs were missing from the file room, Houghton!” Fields had not even removed his hat before he began to shout.

Houghton dismissed his clerk. “You’re quite right, Mr. Fields. And those still haven’t been disturbed,” he explained. “But, you see, I deposit an extra set of all important plates and proofs in a strong vault downstairs, in precaution against the event of a fire—ever since Sudbury Street burned to the ground. I’ve always thought none of my boys use the vault. They have no call to—there certainly is not much of a market for stolen proof sheets, and my printer’s devils would just as soon strike a game of pool as read a book. Who said, ‘Though an angel shall write, still ‘tis the devils must print?’ I mean to have that engraved on a seal one day.” Houghton covered his dignified chuckle under his hand.

“Thomas Moore,” Lowell could not help answering, all-knowingly.

“Houghton,” said Fields. “Pray show us where these other proofs are kept.”

Houghton led Fields, Lowell, and Longfellow down a flight of narrow stairs and into the basement. At the end of a long corridor, the printer spun an easy combination into a roomy vault he had purchased from a defunct bank. “After I had checked on Mr. Longfellow’s translation proofs in the file room and found them complete, I had a thought to check my security vault. And, lo! Several of Mr. Longfellow’s early proofs for the Inferno portion of the translation have taken flight.”

“When did they go missing?” asked Fields.

Houghton shrugged. “I do not enter these vaults very regularly, you understand. These proofs could have been gone for days—or months—without my noticing.”

Longfellow located the bin labeled with his name and Lowell helped him sort through the Divine Comedy sheets. Several cantos of Inferno were gone.

Lowell whispered, “They seem to have been taken entirely higgledy-piggledy. Parts of Canto Three are gone, but that seems the only one stolen which also has a corresponding murder.”

The printer horned in on the poets’ space and cleared his throat.

“I could gather together everyone who would have access to my combination if you’re so inclined. I’ll get to the bottom of this. If I tell a boy to hang up my overcoat, I expect him to come back and tell me he has done it.”

The printer’s devils were running the presses, restoring foundry type to the cases and scrubbing away the ever-flowing lagoons of black ink when they heard the signal of Houghton’s bell. They herded into the Riverside Press coffee room.

Houghton clapped his hands several times to silence the usual chatter. “Boys. Please, boys. A minor problem has been called to my attention. You surely recognize one of our guests, Mr. Longfellow of Cambridge. His works represent an important commercial and civic portion of our literary printings.”

One of the boys, a red-haired rustic with a pale-yellow face soiled with ink, began squirming and casting nervous glances at Longfellow. Longfellow noticed this and signaled Lowell and Fields.

“It seems some proofs from my basement vault have been… mislaid, shall we say.” Houghton had opened his mouth to continue when he caught the restless expression on the pale-yellow devil. Lowell arched his hand lightly on the agitated devil’s shoulder. At the sensation of Lowell’s touch, the devil toppled a colleague to the floor and darted away. Lowell gave immediate chase and rounded the corner in time to hear footsteps race down the back stairs.

The poet dashed to the front office and down the steep side stairs. He burst outside, cutting off the deserter as he ran along the riverbank. He threw a lusty tackle, but the devil eluded him, sliding down the frosty embankment and tumbling hard into the Charles River, where some boys were spearing eels. He smashed through the river’s wrapper of ice.

Lowell took a spear from a protesting boy and fished out the ice-shocked devil by his water-logged apron, which was tangled in bladderworts and discarded horseshoes.

“Why did you steal those proofs, you blackguard?” cried Lowell.

“What’r’ya jawin’ about? Away with you!” he said through chattering teeth.

“You’ll tell me!” said Lowell, his lips and hands shaking almost as much as his captive’s.

“Go stubble your red rag, ya shit ass!”

Lowell’s cheeks flared. He dunked the boy by the hair into the river, the devil spitting and shouting into the chunks of ice. By this time, Houghton, Longfellow, and Fields—and a half-dozen hollering printer’s devils from ages twelve to twenty-one—had squeezed out the front doors of the press to watch.

Longfellow tried to restrain Lowell.

“I sold the damned proofs, I did!” the devil yelled, gasping for air. Lowell raised him to his feet, holding his arm tight and keeping the spear at his back. The fisher boys had salvaged the captive’s round gray cap and were trying it on for size. Breathing wildly, the devil blinked out painful ice water. “I’m sorry, Mr. Houghton. I never thought they’d be missed by nobody! I knew they were just extras!”

Houghton’s face was tomato-red. “Into the press! Everyone back inside!” he yelled to the disappointed boys who had wandered outside.

Fields approached with patient authority. “Be honest, lad, and this’ll come off better in the end. Tell us straightaway—to whom did you sell those sheets?”

“Some crank. Happy? Stopped me when I was leaving work one night, jawin’ ‘bout how he wanted me to heave out twenty or thirty pages or so of Mr. Longfellow’s new work, any pages I could find, just enough so it wouldn’t be missed. He kept edging me ‘bout how I could put a few extra beans in my wallet.”

“Blast your red whiskers! Who was he?” asked Lowell.

“A real swell—tall hat, dark greatcoat and cape, beard. After I yessed his plan, he palmed me. I never seen the pig-widgeon again.”

“Then how did you get him the proofs?” asked Longfellow.

“They wasn’t for him. He told me to deliver them to an address. I don’t think it was his own house—well, that was just the sense from the way he talked. I don’t remember what the street number was, but it ain’t far from here. He said he’d get the proofs back to me so as I wouldn’t feel no heat from Mr. Houghton, but the jackcove never came back.”

“He knew Houghton by name?” Fields asked.

“Listen good, man,” said Lowell. “We need to know exactly where you took those proofs.”

“I told you,” the shivering devil answered. “I don’t remember no number!”

“You don’t look that stupid to me!” Lowell said.

“Guess not! I’d remember easy enough if I went by the streets on my trotter, I would!”

Lowell smiled. “Excellent, because you’re taking us there.”

“Nah, I ain’t turning stag! Not unless I keep my job!”

Houghton marched down the embankment. “Never, Mr. Colby! Choose to reap another’s harvest and you’ll soon sow on your own!”

“And you’ll be hard-pressed for another job locked up in the blockhouse,” added Lowell, who didn’t exactly understand Houghton’s axiom. “You’re going to take us to the place you delivered those proofs you stole, Mr. Colby, or the police will take you there for us.”

“Meet me back in a few hours, when night falls,” the devil replied in proud defeat after considering his options. Lowell released Colby, who bolted off to thaw at Riverside Press’s stove.

In the meantime, Nicholas Rey and Dr. Holmes had returned to the soldiers’-aid home where Greene had preached early that afternoon, but they found nobody who fit Greene’s description of the Dante enthusiast. The chapel was not being prepared for its usual supper spread. An Irishman, bundled in a heavy blue coat, lethargically nailed boards over the windows.

“The home’s been spending nigh all its money heating the stoves. The city hain’t approved more funds for soldiers’ aid, that’s how I hear it. They say they gotta close up, at least for the winter months now. Doubt we’ll see it reopen, ‘tween us, sirs. These homes and their mangled men are too strong a reminder of the wrongs we’ve all done.”

Rey and Holmes called on the manager of the home. The former church deacon seconded what the caretaker had told them: It was a function of the weather, he explained—they simply couldn’t afford to heat the premises anymore. He told them there were no lists or registers maintained of the soldiers who made use of the facilities. It was a public charity, open to all in need, from all regiments and towns. And it wasn’t just for the poorer lot of veterans, though that was one of the charity’s stated purposes. Some of the men just needed to be around people who could understand them. The deacon knew some soldiers by name and a small number of those by regimental number.

“You might know the one we seek. It’s a matter of absolute importance.” Rey relayed the description George Washington Greene had given them.

The manager shook his head. “I’d be happy to write down the names of the gentlemen I do know for you. The soldiers act as though they’re their own country sometimes. They know one another much better than we can know them.”

Holmes wriggled back and forth in his chair while the deacon nibbled at the feather end of his pen with painstaking slowness.

Lowell was driving Fields’s coach to the Riverside Press’s gates. The red-haired printer’s devil was sitting atop his old spotted mare. After cursing that they were putting his horse at risk for the distemper, which the board of health had warned was imminent after a review of stable conditions, Colby sped through small avenues and down unlit frozen pastures. The path was so circuitous and unsure that even Lowell, master of Cambridge since infancy, was disoriented and could only stay on course by listening for the pounding hooves ahead.

The devil pulled in rein at the backyard of a modest Colonial house, first going past and then turning his horse around.

“This house here—that’s where I brought the proofs. Dropped them right under the back door, just as I was told to.”

Lowell stopped the coach. “Whose house is this?”

“The rest is up to you birds!” Colby snarled, sandwiching his heels into his mare, who galloped away over the frozen ground.

Carrying a lantern, Fields led Lowell and Longfellow to the piazza at the rear of the house.

“No lamps lit inside,” Lowell said, scraping frost from a window.

“Let’s go around the front, take down the address, then return with Rey,” Fields whispered. “That rogue Colby might be playing games with us. He’s a thief, Lowell! He could have friends in there waiting to rob us.”

Lowell slammed the brass knocker repeatedly. “The way this world goes for us lately, if we leave now, the house will have vanished by the morning.”

“Fields is right. We must step lightly, my dear Lowell,” Longfellow urged in a whisper.

“Hullo!” Lowell shouted, now pounding his fists on the door. “There’s nobody here.” Lowell kicked the door and was surprised that it swung open with ease. “You see? The stars are on our side tonight.”

“Jamey, we can’t just break in! What if this house belongs to our Lucifer? It is we who’ll end up in the blockhouse!” Fields said.

“Then we’ll make our introduction,” Lowell said, taking the lantern from Fields.

Longfellow stayed outside to watch that the carriage was not spotted. Fields followed Lowell inside. The publisher shuddered at every creak and thud along their way through the dark, cold halls. The wind from the open back door sent the draperies fluttering in ghostly pirouettes. Some of the rooms were sparsely furnished; others were entirely bare. The house had the thick, tangible darkness that accumulates with disuse.

Lowell entered a well-appointed oval room with a chapel-like curved ceiling, then he heard Fields suddenly spit and scratch at his face and beard. Lowell drew the lantern’s light in a wide arc. “Spiderwebs. Half formed.” He placed the lantern on the center table of the library. “Nobody’s lived here for sometime.”

“Or the person living here doesn’t mind the company of insects.”

Lowell paused to consider this. “Look around for anything that might tell us why that rogue would be paid to bring Longfellow’s proofs here.”

Fields began to say something in response, but a garbled shout and heavy footfalls careened through the house. Lowell and Fields exchanged looks of horror, then scrambled for their lives.

“Burglary!” The side door into the library was flung open and a squat man in a wool dressing gown came charging in. “Burglary! Account for yourselves or I cry ‘Burglary!’ “

The man thrust his strong lantern forward, then paused in shock. He glared as much at the cut of their suits as their faces.

“Mr. Lowell? That you? And Mr. Fields?”

“Randridge?” cried Fields. “Randridge, the tailor?”

“Why, yes,” Randridge answered shyly, shuffling his slippered feet.

Longfellow, having run inside, traced the commotion to the room.

“Mr. Longfellow?” Randridge fumbled off his sleeping cap.

“You live here, Randridge? What were you doing with those proofs?” Lowell demanded.

Randridge was bewildered. “Live here? Two houses down, Mr. Lowell. But I heard some noise, and thought to check on the house. I feared there was looting afoot. They haven’t boxed up and removed everything. Haven’t quite gotten to the library, you can see.”

Lowell asked, “Who hasn’t removed everything?”

“Why, his relatives, of course. Who else?”

Fields stepped back and waved his light over the bookshelves, his eyes doubling at the inordinate number of Bibles. There were at least thirty or forty. He dragged out the largest one.

Randridge said, “They’ve come from Maryland to clear out his belongings. His poor nephews were terribly unprepared for such a circumstance, I can tell you. And who wouldn’t be? At all events, as I was saying, when I heard noises, I thought some fellers might be trying to make away with some souvenir—you know, for the sensation of it. Since the Irish began moving into the neighborhood… well, things have been missed.”

Lowell knew exactly where Randridge lived in Cambridge. He was mentally galloping through the neighborhood, looking two houses in every direction with the frenzy of Paul Revere. He commanded his eyes to adjust to the dark room, to search out the dark portraits lining the wall for a familiar face.

“No peace these days, my friends, I can tell you that,” the tailor continued with a sad lament. “Not even for the dead.”

“The dead?” Lowell repeated.

“The dead,” whispered Fields, passing Lowell an unclasped Bible. Its inside cover was neatly inked over with a complete family ancestry, written in the hand of the house’s late occupant, the Reverend Elisha Talbot.

XVI

University Hall, 8th October 1865

When the three scholars returned to Craigie House, they held four such letters, addressed to Elisha Talbot and headed by the emblazoned seal of Harvard, as well as a stack of Dante proof sheets—the ones missing from Riverside Press’s security vault.

“Talbot was the ideal hack for them,” said Fields. “A minister respected by all good Christians, an established critic of Catholics, and someone outside the Harvard faculty, so that he could give sugarplums to the College and sharpen his pens against us with the appearance of objectivity.”

“And I suppose one needn’t be an Ann Street fortune-teller to know the sum Talbot was awarded for his troubles,” Holmes said.

“One thousand dollars,” Rey said.

Longfellow nodded, showing them the letter to Talbot in which the amount was specified as payment. “We held it in our hands. One thousand dollars for miscellaneous ‘expenses’ related to the writing and research of the four articles. That money—we can now say it with certainty—cost Elisha Talbot his life.”

“Then the killer knew the precise amount he wished to take from Talbot’s safe,” said Rey. “He knew the particulars of this arrangement, of this letter.”

“ ‘Keep guard over your ill-gotten loot,’ “ Lowell recited, then added: “One thousand dollars was the bounty on Dante’s head.”

The first of Manning’s four letters invited Talbot to come to University Hall to discuss the Corporation’s proposal. The second letter outlined the content expected in each paper and forwarded the full payment, which had earlier been negotiated in person. Between the second and third letters, it seemed, Talbot had complained to his correspondent that no English translation of the Divine Comedy could be found at any Boston booksellers—apparently, the minister was trying to locate a British translation by the late Reverend H. F. Cary for the purposes of writing his critique. So Manning’s third letter, which was really more of a note, promised Talbot he would procure an advance sample directly from Longfellow’s translation.

Augustus Manning knew when he made this promise that the Dante Club would never hand over any proofs to him after the campaign he had already waged to derail them. So, the scholars surmised, the treasurer or one of his agents found a shady printer’s devil, in the person of Colby, and bribed him to smuggle out pages of Longfellow’s work.

Reason counseled where they would find answers to new questions regarding Manning’s scheme: University Hall. But Lowell could not examine the files of the Harvard Corporation during the day, when the fellows hovered over their territory, and he lacked the means to do so at night. A rash of pranks and tampering had led to a complex system of locks and combinations to seal up the records.

Penetrating the fortress seemed a hopeless aim until Fields recalled someone who could do it for them. “Teal!”

“Who, Fields?” asked Holmes.

“My nighttime shop boy. During that ugly episode we endured with Sam Ticknor, he was the one to save poor Miss Emory. He mentioned that in addition to his several nights a week at the Corner, he is in the daytime employ of the College.”

Lowell asked if Fields thought the shop boy would be willing to help.

“He is a loyal Ticknor and Fields man, isn’t he?” Fields answered.

When the loyal Ticknor & Fields man stepped out of the Corner around eleven that night, he found, to his great surprise, J. T. Fields waiting out front. Within minutes the shop boy was seated in the publisher’s chariot, where he was presented to his fellow passenger—Professor James Russell Lowell! How often had he pictured himself among such sterling men. Teal did not seem to know quite how to react to such rare treatment. He listened closely to their requests.

Once in Cambridge, he guided them through Harvard Yard, past the disapproving hum of the gas globes. He slowed to look over his shoulder several times, as though worried that his literary platoon might vanish as quickly as it had appeared.

“Come on. Move along, man. We’re right behind you!” Lowell assured him.

Lowell twisted the ends of his mustache. He was less nervous about the prospect of someone from the College finding them on campus than about what they might find in the files of the Corporation. He reasoned that as pro

fessor, he would have a sensible pretext if caught at such a late hour by one of the busybody resident faculty—he had forgotten some lecture notes, he could explain. Fields’s presence might seem less natural, but it could not be avoided, for he was needed to ensure the participation of the fretful shop boy, who did not seem much over twenty. Dan Teal had clean-shaven boyish cheeks, wide eyes, and a fine, almost feminine, mouth that constantly worked in a gnawing motion.

“Don’t worry yourself at all, my dear Mr. Teal,” Fields said, and took his arm as they started up the imposing stone staircase that led to the boardrooms and classrooms in University Hall. “We just need a peek at some papers and then shall be on our way, with nothing changed for the worse. You’re doing a good thing.”

“That is all I wish,” Teal said sincerely.

“Good boy.” Fields smiled.

Teal had to use a ring of keys—they had been entrusted to him—to negotiate the series of bolts and locks. Then, having gained entrance, Lowell and Fields lit candles packed in a case for the occasion and relocated the Corporation’s books from a cabinet to the long table.

“Hold your peace,” said Lowell to Fields when the publisher started to dismiss Teal. “Look at the number of volumes before us we must go through, Fields. Three would do it more efficiently than two.”

Although he was nervous, Teal also seemed enthralled by their adventure. “Guess I can help, Mr. Fields. Anything at all,” he offered. He looked on the mess of books in confusion. “That is, if you explain to me what it is you wish to find.”

Fields began to do just that but, remembering Teal’s wobbly attempt at writing, suspected his reading would be little better. “You’ve done more than your share and should have some sleep,” he said. “But I shall call on you again if we need further assistance. Our united thanks, Mr. Teal. You shall not regret your faith in us.”

In the uncertain light, Fields and Lowell read through every page of minutes of the Corporation’s biweekly meetings. They came upon the occasional condemnation of Lowell’s Dante class, sprinkled throughout more tedious university business. “No mention of that ghoul Simon Camp. Manning must have hired him on his own,” said Lowell. Some things were too shady even for the Harvard Corporation.

After sorting through endless reams, Fields found what they were looking for: In October, four of the six members of the Corporation had eagerly sanctioned the idea of engaging the Reverend Elisha Talbot to pen critiques of the upcoming Dante translation, leaving the matter of “appropriate compensation for time and energies” to the discretion of the Treasury Committee—that is, to Augustus Manning.

Fields began pulling the records of the Harvard Board of Overseers, the twenty-person governing body, annually elected by the state legislature and one step removed from the Corporation. Speeding through the overseers’ books, they found many mentions of Chief Justice Healey, a loyal member of the board of overseers even until his death.

From time to time, the Harvard Board of Overseers elected what it called advocates in order to thoroughly consider issues of particular importance or controversy. An overseer so anointed would offer a presentation to the full board, using the extent of his abilities of persuasion to argue the case for “conviction,” as it were, while a counterpart overseer presented a contending basis for exoneration. The chosen overseer-advocate did not have to possess a personal belief in line with his side in the argument; indeed, the individual was to present a clear-thinking and fair evaluation to the board without influence of private prejudices.

In the Corporation’s campaign against the various Dante-related activities by persons prominently affiliated with the university—that is, James Russell Lowell’s Dante class, and the translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with his purported “Dante Club”—the overseers agreed that advocates should be chosen to present both sides of the issue fairly. The board selected as the advocate for the pro-Dante position Chief Justice Arte-mus Prescott Healey, a thorough researcher and gifted analyst. Healey had never claimed himself a litterateur and so could evaluate the matter dispassionately.

It had been several years since the board had asked Healey to advocate a position. The idea of choosing sides in a venue outside the courtroom apparently made Chief Justice Healey uncomfortable, and he declined the board’s request. Taken aback by his refusal, the board let the matter pass and did not follow through that day on the fate of Dante Alighieri.

The story of Healey’s refusal occupied a mere two lines in the Corporation record books. Having understood its implications, Lowell was the first to speak:

“Longfellow was right,” he whispered. “Healey wasn’t Pontius Pilate.”

Fields squinted over gold-framed glasses.

“The Neutral that Dante calls only the Great Refuser,” Lowell explained. “The only shade Dante chooses to single out while crossing through Hell’s antechamber. I’ve read him as Pontius Pilate, who washed his hands of deciding the fate of Christ—just as Healey washed his hands of Thomas Sims and the other fugitive slaves brought before his court. But Longfellow—nay, Longfellow and Greene!—always believed that the Great Refuser was Celestine, who turned away a position rather than a person. Celestine abdicated the papal throne conferred on him when the Catholic Church needed him most. That led to the rise of Boniface and ultimately to Dante’s exile. Healey surrendered a position of great importance when he refused to argue on behalf of Dante. And now Dante’s exiled again.”

“I’m sorry, Lowell, but I shan’t compare refusing the papacy to turning down a boardroom defense of Dante,” Fields replied dismissively.

“But don’t you see, Fields? We don’t have to. Our murderer has.”

They could hear cracking noises in the thick crust of ice outside University Hall. The sounds came closer.

Lowell ran to the window. “Hang it, a blasted tutor!”

“Are you sure?”

“Well no, I can’t make out who it is… there’s two of them…”

“Have they seen our light, Jamey?”

“I can’t say—I can’t say—clear out!”

Horatio Jennison’s high-pitched, melodious voice rose above the sounds of his piano.

It was one of his finer renditions of Shakespeare’s song, but then his bell rang, a most unexpected interruption, for his four invited guests were already sitting around the parlor, enjoying his performance so thoroughly that they seemed on the verge of complete entrancement, Horatio Jennison had sent a note to James Russell Lowell two days ago, asking him to consider editing Phineas Jennison’s journals and letters in memoriam—for Horatio had been named literary executor, and he would settle for nothing short of the best: Lowell was the founding editor of The Atlantic Monthly and now editor of The North American Review, and, along with all this, had been his uncle’s close friend. But Horatio had not expected Lowell to simply appear at his door unceremoniously, and at a terribly late evening hour.

Horatio Jennison knew immediately that the idea presented in his note must have impressed Lowell, for the poet urgently requested, or rather demanded, Jennison’s most recent journal volumes, and had even brought along James T. Fields to suggest his seriousness about publication.

“Mr. Lowell? Mr. Fields?” Horatio Jennison sprang to his front step when the two callers conveyed the journals, without further exchange, out the door and into their waiting carriage. “We will arrange the proper royalties from the publication, I trust?”

In those hours time became immaterial. Back at Craigie House, the scholars waded through the almost indecipherable scrawl of Phineas Jennison’s most recent journal volumes. After the revelations surrounding Healey and Talbot, it was no surprise for the Danteans, intellectually speaking, that the “sins” of Jennison punished by Lucifer would revolve around Dante. But James Russell Lowell could not believe it—could not believe such a thing of his friend of so many years—until the evidence drowned his doubts.

Throughout the many volumes of his journal, Phineas Jennison expressed his burning desire to secure a spot on the board of the Harvard Corporation. There, mused the businessman, he would finally achieve the respect that had passed him by for not having attended Harvard, for not having come from a Boston family. To be a fellow meant to be welcomed into a world that had been locked away from him his whole life. And what other-wordly power Jennison seemed to find in the notion of holding sway over Boston’s finest minds, just as he had over its commerce!

Some friendships would be strained—or sacrificed.

In the last months, on his many visits to University Hall—for he was a considerable financial patron of the College and often had business there—Jennison would privately entreat the fellows to prevent the teaching of such rubbish as was being advanced by Professor James Russell Lowell and that would soon be disseminated to the masses by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Jennison promised key members of the board of overseers his full financial support for a campaign to reorganize the Department of Living Languages. At the same time, Lowell recalled bitterly as he read the journals, Jennison had been urging Lowell to fight the escalating efforts of the Corporation to smother his activities.

Jennison’s journals revealed that for over a year, he had toyed with plans to empty a seat on one of the university’s governing boards. Building a controversy among the College’s administrators would create casualties and resignations that would have to be filled. He was smoldering mad, after Judge Healey’s death, when a businessman with half his worth and a quarter of his savvy was elected to the empty overseer seat—only because this other man was a Brahmin aristocrat by heritage, and an inconsequential Choate, of all things. Phineas Jennison knew the unspoken policy had been enforced by one person above all others: Dr. Augustus Manning.

At what exact point Jennison heard about Dr. Manning’s consuming determination to emancipate the university from its connection to the Dante projects was unclear, but at that moment he found his opportunity to finally secure a seat in University Hall.

“There was never a jar between us,” Lowell said sadly.

“Jennison spurred you on to fight the Corporation and spurred the Corporation to fight you. A battle would wear Manning down. Whatever the final outcome, seats would be emptied, and Jennison would look like a hero for having lent his support to the cause of the College. It was his objective all along,” said Longfellow, trying to assure Lowell he had done nothing to lose Jennison’s friendship.

“I cannot get it through my skull, Longfellow,” Lowell said.

“He helped split you and the College, Lowell, and was split apart in return,” Holmes said. “That was his contrapasso.”

Holmes had appropriated Nicholas Rey’s preoccupation with the scraps of paper found near Talbot’s and Jennison’s bodies, and they had sat together for hours sharing possible combinations. Holmes was now composing words or partial words with hand copies of Rey’s letters. No doubt others had been left with the body of Chief Justice Healey as well but were taken away by the river breeze in the intervening days between the murder and discovery. Those missing letters would have completed whatever message the murderer wanted them to read, Holmes was certain. Without them, it was but a broken mosaic. We cant die without it as im upon…

Longfellow turned to a fresh page in their investigative journal. He drenched his pen in ink but sat staring ahead so long that the tip dried. He could not write down the necessary conclusion of all this: Lucifer had meted out his punishments for their sake—for the sake of the Dante Club.

The gated entrance to the Boston State House stood high on Beacon Hill; higher still was the copper dome capping it, with its short, sharp tower watching over the Boston Common like a lighthouse. Towering elms, stripped naked and whitened by the December frost, guarded the state’s municipal center.

Governor John Andrew, his black curls coiling out from under a black silk hat, stood with all the dignity his pear shape would allow as he greeted politicians, local dignitaries, and uniformed soldiers with the same inattentive politician’s smile. The governor’s small, solid gold-framed spectacles were his only sign of material indulgence.

“Governor.” Mayor Lincoln bowed slightly as he escorted Mrs. Lincoln up the steps to the entrance. “It looks to be the finest soldiers’ gathering yet.”

“Thank you, Mayor Lincoln. Mrs. Lincoln, welcome—please.” Governor Andrew motioned them inside. “The company is more prestigious than ever.”

“They’re saying even Longfellow has been added to the list of attendees,” Mayor Lincoln said, and passed a complimentary pat on the shoulder to Governor Andrew.

“It is a fine thing you do for these men, Governor, and we—the city, I mean—applaud you.” Mrs. Lincoln held up her dress with a slight rustle as she took a queenly step into the foyer. Once inside, a low-hung mirror provided her and the other ladies a view of the nether regions of their dresses, in the event that the garment had repositioned itself inappropriately along the way to the reception; a husband was wholly useless for such purposes.

Mingling in the massive parlor of the mansion were seventy to eighty soldiers from five different companies, garbed splendidly in their full-dress uniforms and capes, alongside twenty or thirty guests. Many of the most active regiments being honored had only a small number of survivors. Although Governor Andrew’s counselors had urged that only the most upstanding representatives of the soldierly core be included at the gatherings—some soldiers, they remarked, had grown troubled since the war—Andrew had insisted that the soldiers should be feted for their service, not their level of society.

Governor Andrew walked through the center of the long parlor with a staccato march, enjoying a surge of self-importance as he surveyed the faces and felt the ringing of the names of those with whom it had been his good fortune to become familiar during the war years. More than once during those wrenching times, the Saturday Club had sent a cab to the State House and forcibly removed Andrew from his office for an evening of gaiety in Parker’s hot rooms. All time had been separated into two epochs: before the war and after the war. In Boston, Andrew thought as he melted seamlessly into the white cravats and silk hats, the tinsel and gold lace of the officers, the conversations and compliments of old friends, we have survived.

Mr. George Washington Greene positioned himself across from a glowing marble statue that showed the Three Graces leaning delicately against one another, faces cold and angelic, eyes filled with calm indifference.

“How could a veteran from the soldiers’-aid home who heard Greene’s sermons also know the minute details of our tension with Harvard?”

This question had been posed inside the Craigie House study. Answers were proposed, and they knew that to find this answer would mean to find a killer. One of the young men consumed by Greene’s sermons could have had a father or uncle in the Harvard Corporation or the board of overseers who innocently related his stories over supper, not knowing the effect they might have in the shattered mind of someone occupying the next seat.

The scholars would have to determine exactly who was present at the various board meetings involving the roles of Healey, Talbot, and Jennison in the College’s position against Dante; this list would be compared with the names and profiles of as many soldiers from the soldiers’-aid home as they could collect. They would require Mr. Teal’s help once more to access the Corporation Room; Fields would coordinate the plan with his shop boy once the night workers arrived at the Corner.

In the meantime, Fields ordered Osgood to compile a list of all employees of Ticknor & Fields who had fought in the war, relying primarily on the Directory of Massachusetts Regiments in the War of Rebellion. That evening, Nicholas Rey and the others would attend the governor’s latest reception to honor Boston’s soldiers.

Messrs. Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes dispersed themselves through the crowded reception hall. Each of them kept a watchful eye on Mr. Greene, and, in casual pretext, interviewed many veterans, searching for the soldier Greene had described.

“One might think this was the back room of a tavern rather than the State House!” Lowell complained as he waved away some fugitive smoke.

“Why, Mr. Lowell, have you not bragged of smoking ten cigars in one day, and called the sensation a Muse?” Holmes chided.

“We never like the smell of our own vices in other people, Holmes. Ah, let’s steer here for a drink or two,” Lowell suggested.

Dr. Holmes’s hands burrowed into the pockets of his moire silk waistcoat; his words poured through him as through a sieve. “Every soldier I’ve spoken to either claims never to have met anyone remotely matching the description given by Greene or has seen a man exactly of that type just the other day but doesn’t know his name or where I might find him. Perhaps Rey will have better luck.”

“Dante, my dear Wendell, was a man of great personal dignity, and one secret of his dignity was that he was never in a hurry. You will never find him in an unseemly haste—an excellent rule for us to follow.”

Holmes laughed skeptically. “And you’ve followed this rule?”

Lowell helped himself to a meditative sip of claret, then said thoughtfully, “Tell me, Holmes, have you ever had a Beatrice of your own?”

“Beg your pardon, Lowell?”

“A woman to have fired the awesome depths of your imagination.”

“Why, my Amelia!”

Lowell bellowed with laughter. “Oh, Holmes! Did you never sow your tame oats? A wife cannot be your Beatrice. You may trust my advice, for in common with Petrarch, Dante, and Byron, I was desperately in love before I was ten years old. What pangs I have suffered my own heart only knows.”

“How Fanny would enjoy such talk. Lowell!”

“Pshaw! Dante had his Gemma, who was the mother of his children but not the reach of his inspiration! You know how they met? Longfellow does not believe it, but Gemma Donati is the lady mentioned in Dante’s Vita Nuova, who comforts Dante over the loss of Beatrice. You see that young woman?”

Holmes followed Lowell’s gaze to a slender young maiden with raven hair, which was shining under the hall’s brilliant chandeliers.

“I remember it still—1839, at Allston’s Gallery. There was the most beautiful creature I had ever set eyes upon, not unlike that fair beauty enchanting her husband’s friends over there in the corner. Her features were perfectly Jewish. She had a dark complexion, but one of those clear faces where every shade of feeling floats across like the shadow of a cloud across the grass. From my position in the room, the outline of her eyes entirely merged in the shadows of her brows and the darkness of her complexion, so that you only saw a glory undefined and mysterious. But such eyes! They almost made me tremble. That one vision of her seraphic loveliness gave me more poetry…”

“Was she intelligent?”

“Heavens, I don’t know! She batted her lashes in my direction and I could not bring myself to say a word. There is only one way to go with flirtatious women, Wendell, and that is to run. Still, twenty-five years and more pass, yet I cannot banish her from my memory. I assure you we all have our own Beatrice, whether living near us or alive only in our mind.”

Lowell stopped as Rey approached. “Officer Rey, the winds have shifted in our favor—I can tell as much. We are only fortunate to have you on our side.”

“Your daughter must be thanked for that,” Rey said.

“Mabel?” Lowell turned to him, aghast.

“She came to speak with me, to persuade me to assist you gentlemen.”

“Mabel spoke with you in secret? Holmes, did you know of this?” Lowell demanded.

Holmes shook his head. “Not at all. We must toast her, though!”

“If you grow warm with her over it, Professor Lowell,” Rey warned him with a serious upward lift of his jaw, “I shall have you arrested.”

Lowell laughed heartily. “Incentive enough, Officer Rey! Now, do let us keep the pot boiling.”

Rey nodded confidentially and continued across the room.

“Can you imagine that, Wendell? Mabel going behind my back like that, thinking she could change things!”

“She is a Lowell, my dear friend.”

“Mr. Greene remains strong,” Longfellow reported as he joined Lowell and Holmes. “But I am worried that—” Longfellow broke off. “Ah, here come Mrs. Lincoln and Governor Andrew.”

Lowell rolled his eyes. Their station in society had proved bothersome for this evening’s purposes, as handshakes and lively conversations with professors, ministers, politicos, and university officials distracted from their intended purpose.

“Mr. Longfellow.”

Longfellow turned to his other side to find a trio of Beacon Hill society women.

“Why, good evening, ladies,” Longfellow said.

“I was just speaking of you, sir, while on holiday in Buffalo,” said the raven-haired beauty of the trinity.

“Is that so?” Longfellow asked.

“Indeed, with Miss Mary Frere. She speaks so tenderly of you, says you are a rare person. She had such wonderful times with you and your family at Nahant last summer, from the sound of it. And now I happen upon you here. How wonderful!”

“Oh? Well, how very kind of her to say that.” Longfellow smiled, but then quickly adjusted his gaze away. “Now, where has Professor Lowell run to? Have you met him?”

Nearby, Lowell was loudly retelling one of his vintage anecdotes to a small audience. “Then Tennyson growled from his corner of the table: ‘Yes, damn ‘em. I’d like to take a knife and rip their guts up!’ Being a true poet, King Alfred used no circumlocution—such as ‘abdominal viscera’—for that part of the body!”

Lowell’s hearers laughed and jested.

“If two men should try to look alike,” Longfellow said, turning back to the three ladies, who stood with their ears glowing bright pink and their mouths helplessly open, “they could not do it better than Lord Tennyson and Professor Lovering of our university.”

The raven-haired beauty beamed gratefully at Longfellow’s swift flight away from Lowell’s indecency.

“Why, isn’t that something to think about?” she said.

When Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior received a note from his father that Dr. Holmes, too, would be attending the soldiers’ banquet at the State House, he sighed, reread it, and then cursed. It was not a matter of minding his father’s presence as much as a matter of others demanding for their entertainment that they account for each other’s welfare. How is dear old Dad? Still tinkering with his poems while he’s at his teaching? Still tinkering with his teaching while at his poems? Is it true that the little doctor can speak________words every minute, Captain Holmes? Why should he be bothered with questions on Dr. Holmes’s favorite subject: Dr. Holmes.

In a crowd of other members of his regiment, Junior was now introduced to several Scottish gentlemen who were visiting as a delegation. At the enunciation of Junior’s full name there was the usual rehearsal of questions regarding his parentage.

“Are you the son of Oliver Wendell Holmes?” a latecomer to the exchange, a Scot around Junior’s age, asked after presenting himself as some sort of mythologist.

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t like his books.” The mythologist smiled and walked away.

In the silence that seemed to surround Junior, standing there alone amid the chatter, he felt abruptly angry at his father’s omnipresence in the world and cursed him again. Did one want to spread his reputation so indiscriminately wide that worms of men, like the one Junior had just met, could judge you? Junior turned and saw Dr. Holmes on the edge of a circle, along with the governor, and James Lowell gesticulating in the center. Dr. Holmes was on his toes, mouth drifting open; he was lying in wait for a chance to barge in. Junior tried to skirt around the group to the other side of the hall.

“Wendy, that you?” Junior pretended not to hear, but the voice came again and Dr. Holmes pressed through some soldiers to reach him.

“Hello, Father.”

“Why, Wendy, don’t you wish to come and say hello to Lowell and Governor Andrew? Let me show you off in your dapper uniform! Oh, hold.”

Junior noticed his father’s eyes wander.

“That must be the Scottish coterie Andrew was talking about—over there, Junior. I should like to meet the young mythologist, Mr. Lang, and discuss some ideas I have about Orpheus fiddling Eurydice out of the infernal regions. Have you read anything of his, Wendy?”

Dr. Holmes took Junior’s arm and pulled him toward the other side of the hall.

“No.” Junior yanked his arm away hard to stop his father. Dr. Holmes looked at him, hurt. “I’ve only come to make an appearance for my regiment, Father. I must meet Minny at the Jameses’ house. Please excuse me to your friends.”

“Did you see us? We are a happy band of brothers, Wendy. More and more still as the years roar by us. My boy, enjoy your passage on the ship of youth, for it too easily grows lost at sea!”

“And, Father,” Junior said, looking over his father’s shoulder at the grinning mythologist. “I heard that dastard Lang talking down about Boston.”

Holmes’s expression turned solemn. “Did you? Then he is not worth our time, my boy.”

“If you say so, Father. Tell me, are you still at work on that new novel?”

Holmes’s smile sprang back at the interest intimated by Junior’s question. “Indeed! Some other enterprises have taken up my time of late, but Fields promises it shall turn a penny when published. I shall have to leap into the Atlantic if it doesn’t—I mean the original damp spot, not Fields’s monthly.”

“You shall invite the critics to assault you again,” Junior said, hesitating to continue his thought. Suddenly, he wished to heaven he had been quick enough to run the wormy mythologist through with his dress sword. He promised himself he would read this Lang’s work, knowing he would take satisfaction if it was poor stuff. “Perhaps I shall have a chance to read this one, though, Father, if some time appears.”

“I’d like that very much, my boy,” Holmes said quietly as Junior started out.

Rey had found one of the soldiers mentioned by the deacon of the soldiers’-aid home, a one-armed veteran who had just finished dancing with his wife.

“There were some who says to me,” the soldier said proudly to Rey, “when they’d outfitted you boys, ‘I ain’t fighting a nigger war.’ Oh, and wouldn’t you know that made me red.”

“Please, Lieutenant,” said Rey. “This gentleman I’ve described to you—do you think you might have ever seen him at the soldiers’-aid home?”

“Certainly, certainly. Handlebar mustache, hay-colored. Always in uniform. Blight—that’s his name. I’m absolutely certain of it, though not positively. Captain Dexter Blight. Sharp, always reading. Good an officer as ever broke bread, seems to me.”

“Pray tell me, was he very interested in Mr. Greene’s sermons?”

“Oh, sure liked ‘em, the old rowdy! And wouldn’t you know those sermons were some fresh air. So much bolder than anything I’ve heard. Oh sure. Cap liked ‘em better’n anybody, seems to me!”

Rey could barely contain himself. “Do you know where I can find Captain Blight?”

The soldier plopped his stump into the palm of his only hand and paused. Then he threw his good arm around his wife. “Why, wouldn’t you know, Mr. Officer, my pretty filly here must be your luck charm.”

“Oh my stars, Lieutenant,” she protested.

“I think I do know where you can see him,” said the veteran. “Right ahead.”

Captain Dexter Blight, of the 19th Massachusetts, wore an upside-down U mustache, hay-colored, just as Greene had described.

Rey’s stare, lasting a long three seconds, was discreet but vigilant. He was surprised at the hunger, the curiosity he felt about every detail of the man’s appearance.

“Patrolman Nicholas Rey? Now, isn’t that you?” Governor Andrew looked up at Rey’s intent face and ceremoniously extended his hand. “I wasn’t told you were expected!”

“I hadn’t planned on attending, Governor. But I’m afraid you must pardon me.”

With that, Rey retreated into a throng of soldiers, and the governor who had appointed him to the Boston Police was left standing in a trance of disbelief.

His sudden presence, seemingly unnoticed by the others at the reception, eclipsed all other thoughts of the members of the Dante Club as they noticed him one by one. They consumed him with a collective stare. Could this man, seemingly mortal and ordinary, have overtaken Phineas Jennison and sliced him to pieces? His features were strong and brooding but otherwise unremarkable under his black felt hat and single-breasted dress tunic. Could this be him? The translator-savant who turned Dantean words into action, who had outdone them time and again?

Holmes excused himself from some admirers and rushed over to Lowell.

“That man…” Holmes whispered, filled with a sense of dread that something had gone wrong.

“I know.” Lowell whispered back. “Rey has seen him, too.”

“Should we have Greene approach him?” Holmes said. “There is something about that man. He does not seem…”

“Look!” said Lowell urgently.

At that moment, Captain Blight noticed George Washington Greene loitering alone. The soldier’s prominent nostrils flared with interest. Greene, having forgotten himself amidst paintings and sculptures, continued his browsing as if at a weekend exhibition. Blight contemplated Greene for a moment, then took slow, uneven steps toward him.

Rey moved ahead to position himself closer, but when he turned to check on Blight, he found that Greene was in conversation with a book collector. Blight had crossed through the door instead.

“Hang it,” Lowell cried. “He’s leaving!”

The air was too still for clouds or snowfall. The wide-open sky showed off a moon so precisely halved that it appeared to have been sliced by a freshly honed blade.

Rey caught sight of a uniformed soldier in the Common. He was wobbling away with the support of an ivory cane.

“Captain!” Rey called out.

Dexter Blight swerved around and regarded his solicitor through hard, squinting eyes.

“Captain Blight.”

“Who in the world are you?” His voice rang deep and bold.

“Nicholas Rey. I need to speak with you,” said Rey, displaying his police badge. “Just for a moment.”

Blight stabbed his cane into the ice, propelling himself faster than Rey would have thought possible. “I’ve nothing to say!”

Rey caught up and grabbed Blight by the arm.

“If you try to arrest me, I’ll rip your damned guts out and scatter them over the Frog Pond!” Blight yelled.

Rey feared there had been a terrible mistake. This careless burst of anger, the uncontrolled emotion, belonged to the fearful, not the undaunted—not to the one they sought. Looking back at the State House, where the members of the Dante Club were hurrying down the steps, their faces lined with hope, Rey also saw the faces of the persons throughout Boston who had brought him to this pursuit. Chief Kurtz—with each death, his time growing shorter as the guardian of a city that was expanding too voraciously to accommodate all who wished to call it home. Ednah Healey—her expression fading in the dying light of her bedchamber, clinging to handfuls of her own flesh, waiting to be whole again. Sexton Gregg and Grifone Lonza: They were two more victims, not of the murderer, exactly, but of the insurmountable fear that created the murders.

Rey intensified his hold on the struggling Blight and met the wide, careful stare of Dr. Holmes, who seemingly shared all his doubts. Rey prayed to God there was still time.

Finally. Augustus Manning moaned as he answered the bell and let in his guest. “Shall we to the library?”

Smugly, Pliny Mead chose the most comfortable place to sit, in the center of the Mannings’ molehair settee.

“I thank you for agreeing to meet at an evening hour, Mr. Mead, away from the College,” Manning said.

“Well, sorry I’m late. Your secretary’s message said this is about Professor Lowell. Our Dante class?”

Manning passed his hand over the bare ravine between his two cresting tufts of white hair. “Right, Mr. Mead. Pray, did you speak with Mr. Camp about the class?”

“Guess I did,” said Mead. “For a few hours at that. He wanted to know just about everything I could tell him on Dante. He said he was asking on your account.”

“He was indeed. Yet since then it doesn’t seem he wishes to speak to me. I wonder why.”

Mead crinkled his nose. “Now, how should I know your business, sir?”

“You shouldn’t, my son, of course. But I thought perhaps you could help me nonetheless. I thought that we could marry our information and understand what he might have come upon that would prompt such a shift in his behavior.”

Mead stared blandly, disenchanted by the fact that the meeting held little benefit or enjoyment for him. A box of pipes sat on the mantel. He cheered at the idea of smoking at the fireside of a Harvard fellow. “Those look A1, Dr. Manning.”

Manning nodded pleasantly and prepared a pipe for his guest. “Here, unlike at our campus, we can smoke openly. We can speak openly as well, our words coming out as freely as our smoke. There are some other strange happenings of late, Mr. Mead, that I would like to bring into the light. A policeman came to see me and started asking questions about your Dante class, then stopped himself, as though he had wished to tell me something important but changed his mind.”

Mead closed his eyes and puffed out luxuriously.

Augustus Manning had been patient enough. “I wonder, Mr. Mead, if you’re aware what a dead slide your class ranking has taken presently.”

Mead bolted upright, a grammar school child ready to be ferruled. “Sir, Dr. Manning, believe me it is not for any reason other—”

He interrupted. “I know, my dear boy. I know what happens. Professor Lowell’s class last term—that is to blame. Your brothers have always been first scholars in their commencement classes. Haven’t they?”

Bristling with humiliation and anger, the student looked away.

“Perhaps we can see to it that some adjustments are made to your class number to bring your standing more in line with your family honor.”

Mead’s emerald green eyes came to life. “Truly, sir?”

“Perhaps I shall have a smoke now.” Manning grinned, rising from his chair and scrutinizing his beautiful pipes.

Pliny Mead’s mind raced to find what it was Manning might be after to make such a proposition. He relived his meeting with Simon Camp moment by moment. The Pinkerton detective had been trying to collect negative facts about Dante to report to Dr. Manning and the Corporation, to boost their position against re-forming and opening the curriculum. In the second meeting, Camp had seemed excessively interested, now that Mead thought of it. But he did not know what the private detective could have been thinking. Nor did it stand to reason that Boston policemen would ask questions about Dante. Mead thought about recent public events, the insanity of violence and fear that had enveloped their city. Camp had seemed particularly interested in the punishment of the Simoniacs when Mead mentioned it in a long list of examples. Mead thought about the many rumors he had heard about Elisha Talbot’s death; several, although details differed, involved the minister’s charred feet. The minister’s feet. Then there was poor Judge Healey, found naked and covered in…

Why, darn them all! Jennison too! Could it be? And if Lowell knew, wouldn’t that explain his sudden cancellation of their Dante class without real explanation? Could Mead have unwittingly prompted Simon Camp to comprehend it all? Had Lowell concealed his knowledge from the College, from the city? He could be ruined for that! Damn ‘em!

Mead sprang to his feet. “Dr. Manning, Dr. Manning!”

Manning succeeded in lighting a match, but then put it out, suddenly dropping his voice to a whisper. “Did you hear something from the entry?”

Mead listened, shook his head. “Mrs. Manning, sir?”

Manning hooked a long, crooked finger to his mouth. He glided from the parlor to the hallway.

After a moment, he returned to his guest. “My imagination,” he said, locking eyes squarely with Mead. “I only want you to be assured that our privacy is complete. In my heart, I know that you will have something important to share tonight, Mr. Mead.”

“I might indeed, Dr. Manning,” taunted Mead, having organized his strategy in the time Manning had taken to prove their privacy. Dante is a damned murderer, Dr. Manning. Oh yes, I might indeed share something. “Let us talk about class rankings first,” Mead said. “Then we can move on to Dante. Oh, I think what I have to say shall interest you greatly, Dr. Manning.”

Manning beamed. “Why don’t I fix some refreshment to accompany our pipes?”

“Sherry for me, if you please.”

Manning brought over the requested stimulant, which Mead downed in a single gulp. “How about another, dear Auggie? We’ll make a wet night of it.”

Augustus Manning, hunching over his sideboard to prepare another drink, hoped for the student’s sake that what he had to say was important.

He heard a loud thump, signifying, he knew without looking, that the boy had broken a precious object. Manning looked back over his shoulder with irritation. Pliny Mead was sprawled senseless on the settee, his arms hanging limply off either side.

Manning spun around, the decanter slipping out of his grasp. The administrator stared into the face of a uniformed soldier, a man he had seen almost daily along the corridors of University Hall. The soldier had a fixed stare and chewed sporadically; when his lips parted, soft white dots floated on his tongue. He spat and one of the white dots landed on the rug. Manning could not help but look; there seemed to be two letters printed on the wet bit of paper—L and I.

Manning rushed to the corner of the room, where a hunting rifle was posed decoratively on the wall. He climbed a chair to reach it, but then stuttered, “No. No.”

Dan Teal plucked the gun away from Manning’s trembling hands and pummeled his face with its butt in one effortless motion. Then he stood there and watched, watched as the Traitor, cold to the core of his heart, flailed and crumpled to the floor.

XVII

Dr. Holmes scrambled up the long staircase to the Authors’ Room. “Hasn’t Officer Rey come back?” he asked, panting.

Lowell’s knitted eyebrows expressed his frustration.

“Well, perhaps Blight…” Holmes began. “Perhaps he does know something, and Rey will come with good tidings. What of your return visit to the University Hall records room?”

“I’m afraid we might not have one,” Fields said, sighing into his beard.

“Why not?” Holmes asked.

Fields was silent.

“Mr. Teal has not shown himself this evening,” Longfellow explained. “Perhaps he has taken ill,” he added quickly.

“Not likely,” Fields said, crestfallen. “The books show that young Teal hasn’t missed a shift in four months. I’ve called some trouble down on the poor boy’s head, Holmes. And after he volunteered his loyalty again and again.”

“What folly…” Holmes began.

“Is it? I oughtn’t have involved him! Manning might have found out that Teal helped us break in and had him arrested. Or that blasted Samuel Ticknor might have taken revenge on Teal for stopping his shameful games with Miss Emory. In the meantime, we’ve been talking with all my men who fought in the war. None admit to ever using a soldiers’-aid home, and none reveal anything remotely worth knowing.”

Lowell paced back and forth with an extra long shuffle, inclining his head toward the cold window and glaring down at the dim landscape of snowbanks. “Rey believes Captain Blight was merely another soldier who enjoyed Greene’s sermons. Blight is likely to tell Rey nothing of others, even after he’s calmed himself—he may know nothing of the other soldiers at the home! And without Teal, we have no hope of breaking into the Corporation Room. Shan’t we ever stop pumping at dry wells!”

A knock at the door brought in Osgood, who reported that two more employee-veterans were awaiting Fields in the cafeteria. The senior clerk had given him the names of all former soldiers in the employ of Ticknor & Fields. There were twelve men: Heath, Miller, Wilson, Collins, Holden, Sylvester, Rapp, Van Doren, Drayton, Flagg, King, and Kellar. One former employee, Samuel Ticknor, had been drafted but, after two weeks in uniform, had paid the mandated three hundred dollars to buy a substitute.

Predictable, thought Lowell, who said, “Fields, give me Teal’s address and I will look for him myself. There’s nothing we can do until Rey comes back, in any case. Holmes, will you come along?”

Fields instructed J. R. Osgood to remain in the clerks’ quarters in case he was needed. Osgood threw himself into an easy chair with a tired sigh. To occupy his time, he selected a Harriet Beecher Stowe book from the nearest shelf, and when he opened it, he found that bits of paper, about the size of snowflakes, had been torn from the cover page, which was inscribed by Stowe to Fields, Osgood flipped through and found the same sacrilege had been committed on several pages. “How queer!”

Down at the stables, Lowell and Holmes discovered to their horror that Fields’s mare was writhing on the ground, unable to move. Her companion looked on sadly and kicked at anyone who dared approach. The horse distemper had completely disabled public modes of transportation citywide, so the two poets were forced to trudge on foot.

The meticulously scrawled number on Dan Teal’s employment form matched that of a modest house in the southern quarter of the city.

“Mrs. Teal?” Lowell pressed his hat to the careworn woman at the door. “My name is Mr. Lowell. And may I make you acquainted with Dr. Holmes.”

“Mrs. Galvin,” she said, and put a hand to her chest.

Lowell checked the number of the house against his paper. “There’s someone boarding here named Teal?”

She looked at them with sad eyes. “I’m Harriet Galvin.” She repeated this with slow elocution, as though her callers were children or simpletons. “I live here with my husband, and we’d take no boarders. I’ve never heard of this Mr. Teal, sir.”

“Have you moved here recently, then?” asked Dr. Holmes.

“Five years now.”

“More old wells,” Lowell mumbled.

“Madam,” Holmes said. “Would you kindly allow us a few moments inside to find our bearings?”

She led them inside and Lowell’s attention was drawn immediately to a tintype portrait on the wall.

“Ah, might I trouble you for a glass of water, my dear?” Lowell asked.

When she left, he bolted to the framed portrait of a soldier, freshly suited in oversize army rags. “Daughter of Phoebus! That’s him, Wendell! As I stand here, that’s Dan Teal!”

It was. “He was in the army?” Holmes asked.

“He wasn’t on any of Osgood’s lists of soldiers that Fields has been interviewing!”

“And here’s why. ‘Second Lieutenant Benjamin Galvin,’ “ Holmes read the name engraved underneath. “Teal is an assumed name. Quickly, while she’s busy.” Holmes stole into the next cramped room, which was filled with wartime accoutrements, carefully arranged and displayed, but one object drew his attention immediately: a saber, dangling from the wall. Holmes felt a chill run through his bones and he called Lowell. The poet appeared and his whole body trembled at the sight.

Holmes waved away a circling gnat, which came right back.

“Forget the bug!” Lowell said, and smashed it dead.

Holmes delicately removed the weapon from the wall. “It is precisely the sort of blade… these were ornaments to our officers, reminders of the world’s more civilized forms of combat. Wendell Junior has one and dandled it like a baby at that banquet… This blade might have mutilated Phineas Jennison.”

“No. It’s spotless,” Lowell said, approaching the shining instrument cautiously.

Holmes ran a finger along the steel. “We cannot know with our naked eyes. Such carnage does not wash away lightly after only a few days, not in all Neptune’s waters.” Then his eyes rested on the blood smear on the wall, all that remained of the gnat.

When Mrs. Galvin returned with two glasses of water, she saw Dr. Holmes handling the sword and demanded that he stop. Holmes, ignoring her, marched through the entry and out the front door. She professed her outrage that they would come into her house to smuggle away her property and threatened to send for the police.

Lowell inserted himself between them and stalled. Holmes, hearing her protests in the recesses of his mind, stood on the front sidewalk and raised the heavy saber in front of him. A tiny gnat spun onto the blade like a chip of iron to a charged magnet. Then, within a blink, another appeared, and two more, and then three together in a mindless clump. After a few seconds had passed, an entire flock was scuttling and humming over the deep-set blood on the blade.

Lowell stopped in mid-sentence at the sight.

“Send for the others at once!” Holmes shouted.

Their frantic demands to see her husband alarmed Harriet Galvin. She slipped into a stunned silence watching Holmes and Lowell alternate gesticulations and explanations, like two buckets in a well, until a knock at the door suspended them. J. T. Fields presented himself, but Harriet fixated on the slender and leonine figure behind this plump and solicitous one. Framed by the silver whiteness of the sky, nothing was purer than his look of perfect calm. She raised a trembling hand as if to touch his beard and, indeed, as the poet followed Fields inside, her fingers brushed against his locks. He retreated a step. She pleaded that he come inside.

Lowell and Holmes looked at each other. “Perhaps she had not yet recognized us,” Holmes whispered. Lowell agreed.

She tried her best to explain her wonderment: explained how she read Longfellow’s poetry before going to sleep each night; how when her husband was bedridden from the war she would recite Evangeline aloud to him; and how the gently palpitating rhythms, the legend of faithful but uncompleted love, would soothe him even in his sleep—even now sometimes, she said sadly. She knew every word of “A Psalm of Life,” and had taught her husband to read it as well; and whenever he left home, those verses were her only release from fear. But mostly her explanation came out as a repetition of the question “Why, Mr. Longfellow…” she pleaded again and again before giving in to heaving sobs.

Longfellow said softly, “Mrs. Galvin. we are in dire need of help that only you can provide. We must find your husband.”

“These men seem to wish him harm,” she said, meaning Lowell and Holmes. “I don’t understand. Why would you… Why, Mr. Longfellow, how could you know Benjamin at all?”

“We haven’t time to explain satisfactorily, I’m afraid,” Longfellow said.

For the first time, she looked away from the poet. “Well, I don’t know where he is, and I am ashamed for that. He hardly comes home anymore, and when he does, barely speaks. He’s away days at a time.”

“When was the last time you saw him?” Fields asked.

“He had been here briefly today, a few hours before you.”

Fields pulled out his watch. “Where was he going from here?”

“He used to take care of me. I am a mere ghost to him now.”

“Mrs. Galvin, this is a matter of…” Fields began.

Another knock. She dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief and smoothed her dress. “Surely another creditor come here to vex me.”

As she passed into the hall, the group leaned toward one another with furious whispers.

Lowell said, “He’s been gone a few hours, did you hear! And he’s not at the Corner, we know that—there’s no doubt what he’ll do if we don’t find him!”

“He could be anywhere in the city, though, Jamey!” Holmes replied. “And we still must return to the Corner to wait for Rey. What can we do on our own?”

“Something! Longfellow?” Lowell said.

“We haven’t even a horse to travel with now…” Fields complained.

Lowell’s attention snapped as he heard something from the front hall.

Longfellow studied him, “Lowell?”

“Lowell, are you listening?” Fields asked.

A barrage of words escaped from the front door.

“That voice,” Lowell said, stunned. “That voice! Listen!”

“Teal?” Fields demanded. “She may be warning him to run, Lowell! We’ll never find him!”

Lowell sprang into motion. He charged through the hall to the doorway, where a man’s weary bloodshot glare awaited. The poet lunged forward with a cry of capture.

XVIII

Lowell enfolded the man in his arms and dragged him into the house. “I have him!” Lowell cried. “I have him!”

“What are you doing?” Pietro Bachi screamed.

“Bachi! What are you doing here?” Longfellow said.

“How did you find me here? Tell your dog to take his hands from me, Signor Longfellow, or I shall see what manner of man he is!” Bachi snarled, jabbing his elbows futilely into his sturdy captor.

“Lowell,” Longfellow said. “Let us speak with Signor Bachi privately.” They ushered him into another room, where Lowell demanded that Bachi tell them his business.

“It is not with you,” Bachi said. “I am going back to speak with the woman.”

“Please, Signor Bachi,” Longfellow said, shaking his head. “Dr. Holmes and Mr. Fields presently are asking her some questions.”

Lowell continued, “What kind of plan have you concocted with Teal? Where is he? Don’t play the deuce with me. You come back like a bad shilling whenever there’s trouble.”

Bachi pulled a sour face. “Who is Teal? I am the one who is owed answers for this sort of handling!”

“If he does not satisfy me at once, I shall carry him directly to the police and tell them everything!” Lowell said. “Haven’t I known he was pulling the wool over our eyes all along, Longfellow?”

“Ha! Bring the police, do!” said Bachi. “They can help me collect! You wish to know my business? I’ve come for payment from that deadbeat rag in there.” His thick Adam’s apple rolled with the shame of his purpose. “Aye, you might guess I’m growing not a little tired of this tutoring line.”

“Tutoring. You gave her lessons? In Italian?” Lowell asked.

“The husband,” answered Bachi. “Only three sessions, some weeks ago—gratis, as far as he seems to think.”

“But you returned to Italy!” Lowell said.

Bachi laughed wistfully. “If only, signore! The closest I have come was to see off my brother, Giuseppe. I am afraid I have, shall we say, adversarial parties that make my own return impossible, for many moons at least.”

“You saw your brother off! What cheek!” Lowell exclaimed. “You were in a mad rush on a boat and were going to meet the steamer! And you were armed with a satchel full of bogus money—we saw it!”

“Now, see here!” Bachi said indignantly. “How could you know where I was that day?”

“Answer me!”

Bachi pointed accusingly at Lowell but then realized by the imprecision of his extended finger that he was queasy and rather drunk.

He felt a wave of nausea travel up his throat. He caught it and choked it back inside, then covered his mouth and belched. When he was able to speak again, his breath was noxious, but he was tamer. “I met the steamer, yes. But not with any money—queer or otherwise. I wish to Jove I had a bag of gold dropped on my head, Professore. I was there that day to give my manuscript to my brother, Giuseppe Bachi, who had agreed to escort it to Italy.”

“Your manuscript?” asked Longfellow.

“A translation into English. Of Dante’s Inferno, if you must know. I heard about your labor, Signor Longfellow, and of your precious Dante Club, and at that I must laugh! In this Yankee Athens, you men speak of creating a national voice for yourselves. You plead with your countrymen to revolt against the British command of libraries. But did you ever think I, Pietro Bachi, might well have something to contribute to your work? That as a son of Italy, as one who has been born of its history, its dissensions, its struggles against the heavy thumb of the Church, there might be something inimitable in my love for the liberty sought by Dante?” Bachi paused. “No, no. You never asked me to Craigie House. Was it the malicious talk of my being a drunkard? Was it my disgrace from the College? What freedom here in America? You happily send us away to your factories, your wars, to waste into oblivion. You watch our culture trampled, our languages squelched, your dress become ours. Then with smiling faces you rob our literature from our shelves. Pirates. Damned literary pirates, every one of you.”

“We’ve seen more of Dante’s heart than you can imagine,” Lowell replied. “It is your people, your country that orphaned him, might I remind you!”

Longfellow motioned for Lowell to hold back, then said, “Signor Bachi, we observed you down at the harbor. Pray explain. Why were you sending this translation to Italy?”

“I had heard that Florence was planning to honor your version of Inferno in the year’s final Dante Festival but that you had not yet finished your work and were in danger of missing the deadline. I had been translating Dante off and on for many years in my study, sometimes with the aid of old friends like Signor Lonza, when he was well enough. We thought, I suppose, that if we can show ourselves that Dante could be as alive in English as in Italian, we too could thrive in America. I had never considered seeing it published. But when poor Lonza died in the care of strangers, I knew nothing else but that our work must live. On the condition that I found a way to print it myself, my brother agreed to deliver my translation to a binder he knew in Rome and then take it to the Committee personally and plead our case. Well, I found a printer of gambling pamphlets and the like here in Boston to take the translation to press a week or so before Giuseppe was to leave—and for cheap. Wouldn’t you know the idiot printer did not finish till the last minute, and probably wouldn’t have finished at all had he not been in need of even my paltry coin. The rogue was in some sort of trouble for counterfeiting money for the use of local gamblers, and from what I understand, he was obliged to lock his doors in a hurry and lope.”

“By the time I got to the piers, I had to beg some shady Charon at the wharf to row me out in a small boat to the Anonimo. After I dropped the manuscript aboard the steamer, I returned directly to shore. The whole matter amounted to nothing, you shall be happy to hear. The Committee was not at this time interested in further submissions to our festival.’ “ Bachi smirked at his own defeat.

“That’s why the Committee chair sent you Dante’s ashes!” Lowell turned to Longfellow. “To assure you that your translation’s place in the festivities as the American representative would be secure!”

Longfellow thought for a moment and said, “The difficulties of Dante’s text are so great that two or three independent renderings of it will be most acceptable to interested readers, my dear signore.”

Bachi’s hard face cracked. “Do understand. I have always held dear the trust that you showed by hiring me at the College, and I do not question the value of your poetry. If I have done anything to shame myself because of my situation—” He stopped suddenly. After a pause, he continued: “Exile leaves none but the dampest hope. I thought perhaps—only perhaps—there was an opening for me to make Dante alive in a New World with my translation. Then how differently they would think of me in Italy!”

“You.” Lowell accused him suddenly. “You cut that threat into Longfellow’s window to put a scare into us so Longfellow might stop the translation!”

Bachi flinched, pretending not to understand. He removed a black bottle from his coat and heaved it to his lips, as though his throat were just a funnel to somewhere far away. He trembled when he finished. “Do not think me a sot, Professore. I never drink more than is good for me, at least not in good company. The mischief is, what is a man to do all by himself in the dull hours of a New England winter?” His brow darkened. “Now. Are we through here? Or do you wish to fag me further over my disappointments?”

“Signore,” said Longfellow. “We must know what you taught Mr. Galvin. He speaks and reads Italian now?”

Bachi threw his head back and laughed. “As little as you please! The man couldn’t read English if Noah Webster were standing by his side! He always dressed in your American soldier’s blue duds and gold buttons. He wanted Dante, Dante, Dante. It did not occur to him he must learn the language first. Che stranezza!”

“Did you lend him your translation?” Longfellow asked.

Bachi shook his head. “It was my hope to keep that enterprise entirely secret. I am sure we all know how your Mr. Fields reacts to any who try to rival his authors. In all events, I tried gratifying Signor Calvin’s strange wishes. I suggested we conduct the introductory Italian lessons by reading the Commedia together, line by line. But it was like reading alongside a dumb beast. Then he wished me to give a sermon on Dante’s Hell, but I refused on principle—if he wanted to engage me as a tutor, he must learn Italian.”

“You told him you would not continue the lessons?” asked Lowell.

“That would have given me the greatest pleasure, Professore. But one day he stopped calling on me. I have not been able to find him since—and have still not been compensated.”

“Signore,” said Longfellow. “This is very important. Did Mr. Galvin ever speak of individuals in our own time, our own city, whom he envisioned in his understanding of Dante? You must consider whether he ever mentioned anyone at all. Perhaps persons connected in some way with the College who are interested in discrediting Dante.”

Bachi shook his head. “He hardly spoke at all, Signor Longfellow, like a dumb ox. Is this something to do with the College’s present campaign against your work?”

Lowell’s attention perked up. “What do you know of it?”

“I warned you of it when you came to see me, signore,” Bachi said. “I told you to take care of your Dante class, didn’t I? Do you recall when you saw me on the College Yard some weeks before that? I had received a message to meet a gentleman for a confidential interview—oh, how convinced I was that the Harvard fellows wanted me to return to my post! Imagine my stupidity! In truth, that blasted rogue was on some assignment to prove Dante’s ill effects on students, and wished me to assist.”

“Simon Camp,” Lowell said through clenched teeth.

“I almost punched his face in, I can tell you,” Bachi reported.

“I wish to God you had, Signor Bachi,” Lowell said, sharing a smile with him. “He yet may prove the ruin of Dante through all this. What did you reply to him?”

“How was I to respond? ‘Go to the Devil’ was all I could think to say. Here I am, barely able to buy my bread after so many years with the College, and who in the administration hires that jackass?”

Lowell snickered. “Who else? It was Dr. Mann—” He stopped suddenly and whirled around with a significant glance at Longfellow. “Dr. Manning.”

Caroline Manning swept up broken glass. “Jane—mop!” She called out to the maid for the second time, sulking at the pool of sherry drying on the rug of her husband’s library.

As Mrs. Manning made her way out of the room, a ring sounded at the door. She pulled back the curtain just an inch to see Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Now, where was he coming from at this hour? She could hardly look at the poor man these last years the few times she saw him around Cambridge. She did not know how one could live through so much. How undefeatable he seemed. And here she was with a dustpan, looking positively like a housekeeper.

Mrs. Manning apologized: Dr. Manning was not at home. She explained that he had earlier been expecting a guest and had wished privacy. He and his guest must have gone for a walk, though she found this a bit queer in such ghastly weather. And they had left some broken glass in the library. “But you know how men drink sometimes,” she added.

“Could they have taken the carriage out?” Longfellow asked.

Mrs. Manning said that the horse distemper would have precluded that: Dr. Manning had strictly forbidden even the brief removal of their horses. But she agreed to walk Longfellow to the barn.

“For Heaven’s sake,” she said when they found no trace of Dr. Manning’s coach and horses. “Something is the matter, isn’t it, Mr. Longfellow? For Heaven’s sake,” she repeated.

Longfellow did not answer.

“Has something happened to him? You must tell me at once!”

Longfellow’s words came slowly. “You must remain at your house to wait. He’ll return safely, Mrs. Manning. I promise.” The Cambridge winds had grown blustery and painful to the skin.

“Dr. Manning,” Fields said with his eyes downcast on Longfellow’s rug twenty minutes later. After leaving the Galvin house, they had found Nicholas Rey, who had secured a police carriage and a healthy horse, which he used to drive them to Craigie House. “He has been our worst adversary from the beginning. Why didn’t Teal take him long before this?”

Holmes stood leaning on Longfellow’s desk. “Because he is the worst, my dear Fields. As Hell deepens, narrows, the sinners become more flagrant, more culpable—less repentant for what they have done. Until reaching Lucifer, who initiated all evil in the world. Healey, as the first to be punished, would have been hardly cognizant of his refusal at all—that is the nature of his ‘sin,’ which rests upon a lukewarm act.”

Patrolman Rey stood tall in the center of the study. “Gentlemen, you must review the sermons given by Mr. Greene in the last week so we can discern where Teal would take Manning.”

“Greene started this series of sermons with the Hypocrites,” explained Lowell. “Then he went on to the Falsifiers, including Counterfeiters. Finally, in the sermon witnessed by me and Fields, he went to the Traitors.”

Holmes said, “Manning was no Hypocrite—he was after Dante inside and out. And Traitors against Family have no bearing on this.”

“Then we are left with the Falsifiers and the Traitors against One’s Nation,” said Longfellow.

“Manning did not engage in any real trickery,” Lowell said. “He concealed from us his activities, true, but this was not his primary mode of aggression. Many of the shades in Dante’s Hell have been guilty of cartloads of sins, but it is the sin that defines their actions which determines their fate in Hell. The Falsifiers must change one form to another to incur their contrapasso–like Sinon the Greek, who tricked the Trojans into welcoming the wooden horse.”

“The Traitors against Nation undermine the good of one’s people,” Longfellow said. “We find them in the ninth circle—the lowest.”

“Fighting our Dante projects, in this case,” said Fields.

Holmes considered this. “That’s it, isn’t it? We’ve learned that Teal dresses in his uniform when involved in his Dantesque mode, whether he is studying Dante or preparing his murders. This shines light into the landscape of his mind: In his sickness, he swaps guarding the Union with guarding Dante.”

Longfellow said, “And Teal would have witnessed Manning’s schemes from his caretaker post in University Hall. For Teal, Manning is among the worst betrayers of the cause he now sets himself at war to protect. Teal has saved Manning for the end.”

Nicholas Rey said, “What would be the punishment we’d be looking for?”

They all waited for Longfellow to answer. “The Traitors are placed wholly in ice, from the neck down, in ‘a lake, that from the frost the semblance had of glass, and not of water.’ “

Holmes groaned. “Every puddle in New England has frozen over in the last two weeks. Manning could be anywhere, and we have but one tired horse with which to search!”

Rey shook his head. “You gentlemen remain here in Cambridge and look for Teal and Manning. I shall drive to Boston to find help.”

“What shall we do if we see Teal?” Holmes asked.

“Use this.” Rey handed them his police rattle.

The four scholars began their patrol of the deserted banks of the Charles River, of Beaver Creek, near Elmwood, and of Fresh Pond. Looking out by the weak halos of gas lanterns, they were at such high mental alert that they barely noticed how indifferently the night passed without granting them the slightest advance. They wrapped themselves in multiple coats, not marking the frost collecting on their beards (or in Dr. Holmes’s case, on his dense eyebrows and sideburns). How strange and silent the world seemed without the occasional clap of a horse’s trot. It was a silence that seemed to stretch all the way across the North, interrupted only by the rude belches of bulging locomotives in the distance constantly transporting wares from one stop to the next.

Each Dantean imagined in great detail how at that very moment in time Patrolman Rey pursued Dan Teal through Boston, apprehending and shackling him in the name of the Commonwealth, how Teal would explain himself, rage, justify, but yield peaceably to justice, lago-like never to speak of his acts again. They passed each other several times, Longfellow and Holmes and Lowell and Fields, offering encouragement as they circled the frozen waterways.

They began to talk—Dr. Holmes first, of course. But the others also comforted themselves with the exchange of hushed tones. They spoke about writing memorial verses, about new books, about political doings they had not been attuned to as of late; Holmes retold the story of the early years of his medical practice, when he had hung out a sign—THE SMALLEST FEVERS GRATEFULLY RECEIVED—before his window was smashed by drunkards.

“I’ve talked too much, haven’t I?” Holmes shook his head in self-admonishment. “Longfellow, I wish I could make you talk more about yourself.”

“No,” Longfellow replied thoughtfully. “I believe I never do.”

“I know you never do! But you confessed to me once.” Holmes thought twice. “When you first met Fanny.”

“No, I don’t think I ever did.”

They traded partners several times as though they were dancing; they traded conversations, too. Sometimes all four walked together and it seemed that their weight would crack the frozen earth below. Always they walked arm in arm, bracing each other.

It was a clear night, at least. The stars sat fixed in perfect order. They heard the hoof taps of the horse conveying Nicholas Rey, who was shrouded by the steam of the animal’s breath. Each silently envisioned the sight of unrestrained achievement in the young man’s striking countenance as he approached, but his face was steeled. No sightings of Teal or Augustus Manning, he reported. He had recruited a half-dozen other patrolmen to comb the length of the Charles River, but only four other horses could be secured from quarantine. Rey rode away with admonitions of care to the Fireside Poets, promising to continue his search into the morning.

Which of them suggested, at half-past three, to rest for a spell at Lowell’s house? They spread out, two in the music room and two in the adjoining study, the rooms mirroring each other in their layout and with back-to-back hearths. Fanny Lowell was drawn downstairs by the puppy’s anxious barks. She made tea for them, but Lowell explained nothing to her and only mumbled about the blasted distemper. She had been worried sick over his absence. That made them finally realize how late it was, and Lowell dispatched William, the hired man, to deliver messages to the others’ houses. They settled on a thirty-minute lull at Elmwood—no longer—and drifted off at the two firesides.

At the hour of a motionless world, the warmth fell squarely on the side of Holmes’s face. His entire body was so deeply fatigued that he hardly noticed when he found himself pulled to his feet again to tread softly along a narrow fence outside. The ice on the ground had begun to thaw rapidly with a sudden rise in temperature, and slush clotted the streams of water. The ground under his boots was set at a steep incline, and he felt himself crouch forward as though going uphill. He looked out on the Cambridge Common, where he could make out the Revolutionary War cannons coughing out billows of smoke and the massive Washington Elm that, with its thousand-branched fingertips reached in all directions. Holmes looked back and could see Longfellow gliding slowly toward him. Holmes motioned for him to hurry. He did not like Longfellow to be alone for too long. But a rumble drew the doctor’s attention.

Two strawberry-specked horses with albino hooves were storming toward him. both hauling rickety wagons. Holmes cringed, falling to his knees; he gripped his ankles and looked up in time to see Fanny Longfellow—fiery blossoms flying from her loose hair and her wide bosom—at the reins of one of the horses, and Junior in secure control of the other, as though he had been riding from the day he was born. When the figures swept by either side of the little doctor, it did not seem possible to keep his balance, and he slipped into darkness.

Holmes pushed off from the armchair and stood up, his knees inches from the grate of the crackling wood fire. He looked up. The chandelier drops were rattling overhead. “What hour is it?” he asked when he realized he had been dreaming. Lowell’s clock answered: fifteen minutes till six. Lowell, eyes peering open like a groggy child’s, stirred in his easy chair. He asked if something was the matter. The bitterness inside his mouth made it difficult to pry open.

“Lowell, Lowell,” Holmes said, pulling back all the curtains. “A pair of horses.”

“What?”

“I think I heard a pair of horses outside. No, I’m fairly sure of it. They raced by your window only seconds ago, near as you please and speeding along. It was definitely two horses. Patrolman Rey has only one horse at present. Longfellow said that Teal stole two from Manning.”

“We fell asleep,” Lowell responded with alarm, blinking himself to life, seeing through the windows the light that had begun to break.

Lowell roused Longfellow and Fields, and then snatched his spyglass and flung his rifle over his shoulder. As they reached the door, Lowell saw Mabel, wrapped in her dressing gown, come into the front hall. He paused, expecting a reprimand, but she merely stood with a remote stare. Lowell reversed his course and embraced her hard. When he heard himself whisper “Thank you,” she had already called out the same words.

“Now, you must be careful, Father. For Mother and for me.”

Moving from the warmth into the frigid air outside brought on Holmes’s asthma full force. Lowell ran ahead, following fresh hoof marks, as the other three maneuvered circumspectly through the stripped elms that reached naked branches for the heavens.

“Longfellow, my dear Longfellow…” Holmes was saying.

“Holmes?” the poet answered kindly.

Holmes could still see vividly dreamt fragments before his eyes, and he trembled to look at his friend. He was frightened that he might blurt out: I just saw Fanny come for us, I did! “We forgot the police rattle at your house, didn’t we?”

Fields put a reassuring hand on the doctor’s small shoulder. “An ounce of pluck just now is worth a king’s ransom, my dear Wendell.”

Up ahead, Lowell dropped to one knee. He scanned the pond ahead of them with his glass. His lips were trembling with fear. At first he thought he saw some boys ice fishing. But then, as he turned the spyglass, he could see the sallow face of his student Pliny Mead: only his face.

Mead’s head was visible from a narrow opening cut into the lake of ice. The rest of his naked body was concealed by the ice water, under which his feet were bound. His teeth chattered violently. His tongue was curled up in the back of his mouth. Mead’s bare arms were stretched forward on the ice and bound tightly by some rope, which extended from his wrists to Dr. Manning’s carriage, which was hitched nearby. Mead, half-conscious, would have slipped down the hole to his death if not for this bondage. At the back of the parked carriage, Dan Teal, shiny in his military uniform, dipped his arms underneath another nude figure, lifted it, and started to walk over the treacherous ice. He carried the flaccid, white body of Augustus Manning, his beard hovering unnaturally over his sprout-thin chest, his legs and hips bound by rope, his body quivering as Teal crossed the slick pond.

Manning’s nose was a dark ruby; a thick layer of dried brown blood had gathered beneath it. Teal slipped Manning feet first into another aperture in the frozen lake, about a foot away from Mead’s. The shock of the freezing water pounded Manning to life; he splashed and groped madly. Teal now untied Pliny Mead’s arms, so the only force that could possibly prevent the two naked men from sliding into their respective holes was a furious attempt, instinctually comprehended and instantaneously begun by both, to grasp each other’s outstretched hands.

Teal stepped onto the embankment to watch them struggle, and then a gunshot rang out. It cracked the bark of a tree behind the murderer.

Lowell charged ahead, gripping his weapon and sliding wildly across the ice. “Teal!” he shouted. His rifle was poised for another shot. Longfellow, Holmes, and Fields all scrambled behind him.

Fields yelled, “Mr. Teal, you must stop this!”

Lowell could not believe what he saw over the barrel of his gun. Teal was remaining perfectly still.

“Shoot, Lowell, shoot!” Fields yelled.

Lowell always liked to take aim on hunting trips but never to fire. The sun now rose to a perfect height, unfurling over the vast crystalline surface.

For a moment the men were blinded by the reflection. By the time their eyes adjusted, Teal had vanished, the soft sounds of his running echoing in the woods. Lowell fired into the thicket.

Pliny Mead, shivering uncontrollably, went entirely limp, his head drooping against the ice and his body slowly sinking into the deadly water. Manning struggled to maintain a grip on the boy’s slick arms, then his wrists, then his fingers, but the weight was too much. Mead sank down into the water. Dr. Holmes dived, sliding across the ice. He plunged both arms into the hole, catching Mead by the hair and ears, and pulling, pulling until he grabbed hold of his chest, and then pulling some more until he lay on top of the ice. Fields and Longfellow heaved Manning by the arms, sliding him to the surface before he could fall under. They untied his legs and feet.

Holmes heard the crack of a whip and looked up to see Lowell on the driver’s box of the abandoned carriage. He urged the horses into the woods. Holmes jumped up and ran toward him. “Jamey, no!” Holmes cried. “We must get them into the warmth or they’ll die!”

“Teal will escape, Holmes!” Lowell stopped the horses and stared at the pathetic figure of Augustus Manning, clumsily thrashing on the frozen pond like a fish yanked from water. Here was Dr. Manning nearly undone and Lowell could make himself feel nothing but sympathy. The ice bent under the weight of the Dante Club members and the would-be murder victims, and water bubbled up through new holes as they walked. Lowell bounded down from the carriage just as one of Longfellow’s overshoes crashed through a weak strip of ice. Lowell was there to catch him.

Dr. Holmes stripped off his gloves and hat, then his overcoat and frock coat, and began piling them over Pliny Mead. “Wrap them up in everything you have! Cover their heads and necks!” He ripped off his cravat and tied it around the boy’s neck. Then he kicked off his boots and his socks, slipping them onto Mead’s feet. The others watched Holmes’s dancing hands carefully and imitated him.

Manning tried to speak, but what emerged was a slurred humming, a faint song. He tried to raise his head from the ice but was entirely confused as Lowell forced his hat onto him.

Dr. Holmes shouted, “Make sure to keep them awake! If they fall asleep, we’ll lose them!”

With difficulty, they carried the frigid bodies into the carriage. Lowell, stripped down to his shirtsleeves, returned to the driver’s box. As instructed by Holmes, Longfellow and Fields rubbed the victims’ necks and shoulders and raised their feet for circulation.

“Hurry, Lowell, hurry!” Holmes called out.

“We’re moving as fast as we can manage, Wendell!”

Holmes had known at once that Mead had the worst of it. A terrible gash at the back of his head, presumably left there by Teal, was an ill ingredient to mix with the deadly exposure. He frantically jolted the boy’s blood circulation on the short ride back to town. In spite of himself, Holmes heard echoing in his mind his poem he recited to his students to remind them how to treat their patients.

Mead’s body was so cold that it hurt him to touch it.

“The boy was lost before we arrived at Fresh Pond. There was no way to do more. You must believe that, my dear Holmes.”

Dr. Holmes was sliding Longfellow’s Tennyson inkwell back and forth between his fingers, ignoring Fields, his fingertips blackening with ink spots.

“And Augustus Manning owes you his life,” said Lowell. “And me my hat,” he added. “In all seriousness, Wendell, the man would be returned to the dust without you. Don’t you see? We’ve thwarted Lucifer. We’ve plucked a man from the jaws of the Devil. We’ve won this time because you gave yourself completely, my dear Wendell.”

The three Longfellow girls, dressed elaborately for outdoor play, knocked at the study door.

Alice was the first inside. “Papa, Trudy and all the other girls are sledding on the hill. Can’t we go?”

Longfellow looked to his friends, who were fixed in armchairs all around the room. Fields shrugged.

“Other children will be there?” Longfellow asked.

“All of Cambridge!” announced Edith.

“Very well,” said Longfellow, but then studied them as he was overcome with second thoughts. “Annie Allegra, perhaps you’ll stay here with Miss Davie.”

“Oh please, Papa! I have my new shoes to wear!” Annie kicked up her evidence.

“My dear Panzie,” he said, smiling. “I promise just this once.” The other two skipped out, and the little girl went into the hall to find her governess.

Nicholas Rey arrived in full-dress army uniform, with a blue coat and tunic. He reported that nothing had been found. But Sergeant Stoneweather had now raised several squads of men to search for Benjamin Galvin. “The board of health announced that the worst of the distemper has passed and is releasing several dozen horses from quarantine.”

“Excellent! Then we’ll get a team and start searching,” said Lowell.

“Professor, gentlemen,” Rey said as he sat down. “You men have discovered the identity of the murderer. You saved a life, and perhaps others we will never know.”

“Only, it was because of us that they were in danger in the first place.” Longfellow sighed.

“No, Mr. Longfellow. What Benjamin Galvin found in Dante he would have found elsewhere in his life. You have called down none of these horrors. But what you have accomplished in their shadow is undeniable. Still, you are fortunate to be safe after all this. You must let the police finish this now, for everyone’s safety.”

Holmes asked Rey why he was wearing his army uniform.

“Governor Andrew is holding another of his soldiers’ banquets today at the State House. Clearly, Galvin has continued to wed himself to his service in the army. He might well appear.”

“Officer, we don’t know how he’ll answer to having been stopped from this last murder,” said Fields. “What if he tries again to enact the punishment of the Traitors? What if he returns to Manning?”

“We have patrolmen guarding the houses of all members of the Harvard Corporation and the overseers, including Dr. Manning. We’re also stopping at every hotel for Simon Camp in case Galvin targets him as another Traitor against Dante. We have several men in Calvin’s neighborhood, and we’re watching his house closely.”

Lowell walked to the window and looked down Longfellow’s front walkway, where he saw a man in a heavy blue overcoat pass the gate and then return from the other direction. “You’ve a man here, too?” Lowell asked.

Rey nodded. “At each of your houses. From his choice of victims, it seems that Galvin believes himself to be your guardian. So he may think to consort with you about what to do after such a rapid turn of events. If he does, we’ll take him in.”

Lowell pitched his cigar to the fire. Suddenly his self-indulgence disgusted him. “Officer, I think this is a shabby piece of business. We can’t just sit in this same room helplessly all day!”

“I don’t suggest that you do, Professor Lowell,” Rey replied. “Return to your own houses, spend time with your families. The duty of protecting this city is on me, gentlemen, but your presence is strongly missed elsewhere. Your life must begin to return to normal from this point on, Professor.”

Lowell looked up, stunned. “But…”

Longfellow smiled. “A great part of the happiness of life consists not in fighting battles, my dear Lowell, but in avoiding them. A masterly retreat is in itself a victory.”

Rey said, “Let us all meet here again this evening. With a little good fortune, I shall have happy tidings to report. Fair enough?”

The scholars conceded with mixed expressions of regret and great relief.

Patrolman Rey continued recruiting officers that afternoon; many of them had silently avoided Rey’s path in the past out of prudence. But he had known who they were from afar. He knew instantly when a man looked at him simply as another man and not as a black or mulatto or nigger. His straight gaze into their eyes necessitated little additional persuasion.

He posted a patrolman at the front gardens of Dr. Manning’s house. As Rey was speaking with the patrolman under a maple tree, Augustus Manning charged out from his side door.

“Yield!” Manning shouted, showing a rifle.

Rey turned. “We’re police—police, Dr. Manning.”

Manning shivered as though still locked in the ice. “I saw your army uniform through my window, Officer. I thought that madman…”

“You needn’t worry,” said Rey.

“You’ll… you’ll protect me?” Manning asked.

“Until it is no longer needed,” said Rey. “This officer shall watch over your house. Well-armed.”

The other patrolman unbuttoned his coat and showed his revolver.

Manning offered a frail nod of acceptance and extended his arm hesitantly, allowing the mulatto policeman to escort him inside.

Afterward, Rey drove his carriage to the Cambridge Bridge. He came into sight of a stopped coach blocking the way. Two men were hunched over one of the wheels. Rey steered to the side of the road and stepped down, walking to the stranded party to help. But as he reached them, the two men rose to their full height. Rey heard noises behind him and turned to see that another carriage had pulled behind his own. Two men in flowing overcoats emerged onto the street. The four men stood in a square around the mulatto policeman and remained motionless for nearly two minutes.

“Detectives. May I be of some help?” Rey asked.

“We thought we’d have a word with you at the station house, Rey,” one of them said.

“I’m afraid I haven’t time just now,” Rey said.

“It’s been brought to our attention that you’re looking into a matter without proper authorization, sir,” another said as he stepped forward.

“I don’t believe that’s your province, Detective Henshaw,” said Rey after a pause.

The detective rubbed two fingers together. A detective moved closer to Rey menacingly.

Rey turned to him, “I am an officer of the law. If you strike me, you strike the Commonwealth.”

The detective landed a fist in Rey’s abdomen and then crashed another into his jaw. Rey doubled over, nestled in his coat collar. Blood spilled from his mouth as they dragged him into the back of their carriage.

Dr. Holmes sat in his big leather rocker, waiting to leave for their appointed meeting at Longfellow’s. A partially opened blind threw a dim, religious light onto the table. Wendell Junior was rushing up to the second floor. “Wendy, my boy,” Holmes called after him. “Where are you going?”

Junior slowly backtracked down the stairs. “How are you, Father? Didn’t see you.”

“Can’t you sit for a minute or two?”

Junior perched on the edge of a green rocker.

Dr. Holmes asked about law school. Junior answered perfunctorily, waiting for the usual barb about the law, but none came. He could never get under the skin of the law, Dr. Holmes said of himself, when he gave it a try after college. The second edition improves on the first, he supposed.

The calm clock dial counted out their silence in long seconds.

“You were never frightened, Wendy?” Dr. Holmes said into the silence. “In the war, I mean.”

Junior peered at his father from under his dark brow, and grinned warmly. “It’s rank folly, Dadkins, pulling a long mug every time one might fight or be killed. There’s no poetry in a fight.”

Dr. Holmes excused his son to go to his work. Junior nodded and resumed his trip upstairs.

Holmes had to be on his way to meet the others. He decided to take his grandfather’s flintlock musket, which had last been used in the Revolutionary War. This was the only weapon Holmes allowed in his house, storing it as a piece of history in his basement.

The horsecars were still shut down. Drivers and conductors had tried to pull the cars by hand without success. The Metropolitan Railroad also attempted to use oxen to pull the cars, but their feet were too tender for the hard pavement. So Holmes traveled by foot, walking through the crooked streets of Beacon Hill, missing by only a few seconds Fields’s carriage as the publisher drove to Holmes’s house to see if he wanted a ride. The doctor took the West Bridge over the partially frozen Charles, through Gallows Hill. It was so cold that people were clapping their hands to their ears and hoisting their shoulders and running. Holmes’s asthma made the walk feel twice as long as it was. He found himself passing the First Meeting House, the old Cambridge church of the Reverend Abiel Holmes. He slipped into the empty chapel and had a seat. The pews were the usual oblong ones, with a ledge before the parishioners to support hymn books. There was a lavish organ, something the Reverend Holmes never would have allowed.

Holmes’s father had lost the church during a split in his congregation with members who wished to have Unitarian ministers as occasional guest preachers at their pulpit. The reverend had refused, and the small number of his remaining faithful moved with him to a new meetinghouse. The Unitarian chapels were all the fashion in those days, for there was shelter under the “new religion” from the doctrines of inborn sin and human helplessness propounded by Reverend Holmes and his more fire-eating brethren. It was in one of those churches that Dr. Holmes, too, had left behind his father’s beliefs and found yet another kind of shelter, in reasoned religion rather than fear of God.

There was also shelter beneath the floorboards, thought Holmes, when the abolitionists were mixed in—at least, that was what Holmes had heard: Under many Unitarian chapels they dug tunnels to hide runaway Negroes when Chief Justice Healey’s court upheld the Fugitive Slave Act and forced escaped Negroes into hiding. What would the Reverend Abiel Holmes have thought of that…

Holmes had returned to his father’s old meetinghouse every summer for the Harvard commencement, where the ceremony was held. Wendell Junior, in the year of his college graduation, as class poet. Mrs. Holmes had cautioned Dr. Holmes not to add to the pressure on Junior by advising him or critiquing his poem. As Junior took his place, Dr. Holmes sat in the meetinghouse, the chapel that had been stripped away from his father, an unsteady smile fixed on his face. All eyes were on him, to see his reaction to his son’s poem, written by Junior while he was drilling for the war his company would soon join. Cedat armis toga, thought Holmes—let the scholar’s gown give way to the soldier’s arms. Oliver Wendell Holmes, wheezing with nervousness as he watched Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, wished that he might dive down into those fairy-tale tunnels supposedly running under the churches, for what use were those rabbit holes now that the Secesh traitors would be shown what to do with their slavery laws with bayonet and Enfield?

Holmes shot to attention in the empty pew. Why, the tunnels! That was how Lucifer had eluded all detection, even when the police had been out in full force! That was why the prostitute saw Teal disappear in the fog near a church! That was why the jittery sexton of Talbot’s church had not seen the killer enter or leave! A chorus of hallelujahs lit up Dr. Holmes’s soul. Lucifer does not walk or ride the cars while dragging Boston into Hell, Holmes cried to himself. He burrows!

Lowell anxiously departed Elmwood for their Craigie House rendezvous and was the first to greet Longfellow. Lowell did not notice, on the way, that the police guards in front of Elmwood and Craigie House were nowhere to be seen. Longfellow was just finishing reading a story to Annie Allegra. He excused her to the nursery.

Fields arrived soon after.

But twenty minutes passed without word of Oliver Wendell Holmes or Nicholas Rey.

“We shouldn’t have left Rey’s side,” Lowell muttered into his mustache.

“I can’t understand why Wendell wouldn’t have come by now,” said Fields nervously. “I stopped at his house on my way, and Mrs. Holmes said he had already departed.”

“It hasn’t been very long,” said Longfellow, but his eyes did not move from his clock.

Lowell dropped his face into his hands. When he peered out between them, another ten minutes were gone. When he closed himself in again, he was suddenly hit by a chilling thought. He rushed to the window. “We must find Wendell at once!”

“What’s wrong?” asked Fields, alarmed at the look of horror on Lowell’s face.

“It’s Wendell,” Lowell said, “I called him a traitor at the Corner!”

Fields smiled gently. “That is long forgotten, my dear Lowell.”

Lowell grabbed his publisher’s coat sleeve for balance. “Don’t you see? I had my row with Wendell at the Corner the day Jennison was found shredded, the night Holmes walked out from our project. Teal, or rather Galvin, was just coming down the hall. He must have been listening in on us the whole time, just as he would have done at Harvard’s board meetings! I chased Holmes into the hall from the Authors’ Room to yell after him—don’t you remember what I said? Can’t you hear the words still? I told Holmes he was betraying the Dante Club. I said he was a traitor!”

“Brace yourself, please,” said Fields.

“Greene preached to Teal, and Teal followed up with murders. I condemned Wendell as a traitor: Teal was the vigilant audience for my little sermon!” cried Lowell. “Oh, my dear friend, I’ve done him in. I’ve murdered Wendell!”

Lowell rushed into the front hall for his coat.

“He’ll be here any moment, I’m sure,” said Longfellow. “Please, Lowell, let us wait for Officer Rey at least.”

“No, I’m going to find Wendell right now!”

“But where do you mean to find him? And you can’t go alone,” said Longfellow. “We’ll come.”

“I’ll go with Lowell,” Fields said, gathering up the police rattle left by Rey and shaking it to show that it worked well. “I’m sure everything’s fine. Longfellow, will you wait here for Wendell? We’ll send the patrol officer to fetch Rey at once.”

Longfellow nodded.

“Come then, Fields! Now!” roared Lowell, on the verge of crying.

Fields tried to keep up with Lowell as he ran down the front walkway to Brattle Street. There was no sign of anyone.

“Now, where in the deuce is that patrolman?” Fields asked. “The street looks entirely empty…”

A rustling noise sounded in the trees behind Longfellow’s high fence. Lowell put a finger to his lips to signal Fields for quiet and crept closer to the sound, where he waited frozen in suspense.

A cat sprang into view at their feet and then raced off, dissolving into the darkness. Lowell let out a sigh of relief, but just then a man came hurtling down over the fence and struck a crashing blow to Lowell’s head. Lowell collapsed all at once, like a sail whose mast had cracked in two; the poet’s face was so inconceivably motionless on the ground as to be almost unrecognizable to Fields.

The publisher backed away, then looked up and met the gaze of Dan Teal. They moved in tandem, Fields backward and Teal forward in a curiously gentle dance.

“Mr. Teal, please.” Fields’s knees bent inward.

Teal stared impassively.

The publisher tripped over a fallen branch, then turned and launched into a clumsy run. He puffed his way down Brattle, faltering as he went, trying to call out, to scream, but only producing a rough, hoarse caw lost in the frigid winds shrieking in his ears. He looked back, then he drew the police rattle from his pocket. There was no longer any sign of his pursuer. As Fields turned to look over his other shoulder, he felt his arm being grabbed, and he was flung hard through the air. His body went tumbling to the street, the rattle slipping into the bushes with a soft jingle, soft as a bird’s chirp.

Fields stretched his neck toward Craigie House with excruciating stiffness. A warm gaslight glow escaped Longfellow’s study windows, and Fields seemed instantly to know the whole purpose of his assassin.

“Only, don’t hurt Longfellow, Teal. He’s left Massachusetts today—you’ll see. I vow to you on my honor,” Fields blubbered like a child.

“Have I not always done my duty?” The soldier raised his bludgeon high over his head and struck.

Reverend Elisha Talbot’s successor had completed some meetings with deacons at the Second Unitarian Church of Cambridge several hours before Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, armed with his ancient musket and a kerosene lantern he had secured from a pawnshop, stepped into the church and sneaked into the underground vault. Holmes had debated with himself whether to share his theory with the others, but decided to confirm it first for himself. If Talbot’s underground vault was indeed connected to an abandoned fugitive-slave tunnel, this could lead the police right to the killer. It would also explain how Lucifer had entered the burial vault in advance, murdered Talbot, and fled without witnesses. Dr. Holmes’s intuition had launched the Dante Club into its murder inquiries, although it required the urging of Lowell to follow through; why shouldn’t he be the one to point them to an end?

Holmes descended into the vault and fondled the walls of the tomb for any sign of an opening into another tunnel or chamber. He did not find the passageway with his searching hands but with the toes of his boot, which by sheer accident kicked into a hollow gap. Holmes bent down to examine it and found a narrow space. His compact body fit snugly into the hollow, and he dragged his lantern in after him. After he had spent some time on hands and knees, the height of the tunnel increased and Holmes could stand up quite comfortably. He would return at once to proper ground, he decided. Oh how the others would smile at his discovery. How swiftly their adversary would now see defeat! But the sharp turns and slopes of the labyrinth left the little doctor disoriented. He rested a hand on his coat pocket, on the handle of his musket, to feel safe, and had begun to regain his inner compass when a voice scattered all his senses. “Dr. Holmes,” said Teal.

XIX

Benjamin Galvin enlisted at Massachusetts’s first call for soldiers. At twenty-four, he had already considered himself a soldier for some time, having helped conduct fugitive slaves through the city’s network of shelters, sanctuaries, and tunnels during the years before war officially came upon them. He was also among those volunteers who escorted anti-slavery speakers in and out of Faneuil Hall and other lyceums, serving as one of the human shields against rock-hurling, brick-tossing mobs.

Galvin, admittedly, was not political in the manner of other young men. He could not read the heavy broadsides and newspapers on whether this or that political scalawag should be voted out or how this or that party or state legislature had cried secession or conciliation. But he understood the stump speakers who declared that an enslaved race must be made free and the guilty parties submitted to rightful punishment. And Benjamin Galvin understood simply enough, too, that he might not return home to his new wife: If he did not come back holding the Stars and Stripes, the recruiters promised, he’d come back wrapped in it. Galvin had never been photographed before, and the one picture taken upon enlistment disappointed him. His cap and trousers appearing ill-fitting; his eyes seeming unaccountably frightened.

The earth was hot and dry when Company C of the 10th Regiment was sent from Boston to Springfield to Camp Brightwood. Dust clouds crusted the soldiers’ new blue uniforms so completely as to make them the same dull gray color of the enemy’s. The colonel asked if Benjamin Galvin wished to be the company adjutant and record casualty lists. Galvin explained that he could write out his alphabet but could not write or read correctly; he had tried learning many times, but the letters and marks got tangled up in the wrong direction in his head and crashed and turned into each other on the page. The colonel was surprised. Illiteracy was not at all unusual among the recruits, but Private Galvin always seemed to be in such deep thought, taking in everything with such big, quiet eyes and a completely still expression, that some of the men had called him Possum.

When they were encamped in Virginia, the first excitement came when a soldier from their ranks was found in the woods one day, shot in the head and bayoneted, maggots filling his head and mouth like a swarm of bees settling on their hive. It was said that the Rebels had sent one of their blacks over to kill a Yank for amusement. Captain Kingsley, a friend of the dead soldier’s, made Galvin and the men swear no sympathy when the day came to whip the Secesh. It seemed they would never have the chance to engage in the combat all men itched for.

Galvin, though he had worked outdoors most of his life, had never seen the sorts of creeping things that filled this part of the country. The company adjutant, who woke an hour before bugle each morning to comb his thick hair and record lists of the sick and the dead, would let no one kill one of these crawling creatures; he cared for them like children even though Galvin saw, with his own eyes, four men from another company die from the white worms that infested their wounds. This happened while Company C marched to the next camp—nearer, it was rumored, to a live battleground.

Galvin had never imagined that death could come so easily to people around him. At Fair Oaks, in a single burst of noise and smoke, six men would lie dead before him, their eyes still staring as though with interest in what would come for the rest. It was not the number of dead but the number of men who survived that day that was a great wonder to Galvin, as it did not seem possible, or even right, for a man to live through. The inconceivable number of dead bodies and dead horses were collected together like cordwood and burned. Every time Galvin closed his eyes to sleep after that, he could hear shouts and explosions inside his spinning head, and could permanently smell the odor of ruined flesh.

One evening, returning to his tent with a ravenous pang, Galvin found a portion of his hardtack missing from his sack. One of his tentmates said he had seen the company chaplain take it. Galvin did not believe such wickedness possible, for all of them had the same gnawing hunger and same empty stomach. But it was hard to blame a man. When the company was marching through pouring rain or blazing heat, the rations inevitably diminished to only crackers infested with weevils, and not nearly enough of them, either. Worse than anything, a soldier could not stop for a night without “skirmishing,” stripping off his clothes and digging out the bugs and ticks. The adjutant, who seemed to know about these things, said the way the insects got on them was when they stood still, so they should keep moving ahead always, always moving.

Wriggling creatures also populated the drinking water, a result of dead horses and rotten meat sometimes piled up into fords by soldiers. From malaria to dysentery, all maladies were known as camp fever, and the surgeon could not distinguish between the sick and the pretenders, and so usually thought it best to assume one belonged with the latter. Galvin once vomited eight times in one day, bringing up nothing but blood the final time. Every few minutes while he was waiting for the surgeon, who put him on quinine and opium, the surgeons would throw an arm or leg out the window of the makeshift hospital.

When they were encamped, there was always disease, but at least there were also books. The assistant surgeon collected the ones that were sent to the boys from home to keep in his tent, and he acted as librarian. Some of the books had illustrations that Galvin liked to look at, other times the adjutant or one of Galvin’s tentmates would read a story or poem aloud. Galvin found in the assistant surgeon’s library a shiny blue-and-gold copy of Longfellow’s poetry. Galvin could not read the name on the cover, but recognized the engraved portrait on the frontispiece from one of his wife’s books. Harriet Galvin always said that each of Longfellow’s books found a way to light and happiness for its characters when they were faced with hopeless paths, like Evangeline and her beau, separated in their new country only to find each other when he was dying of fever and she was a nurse. Galvin imagined that was him and Harriet, and it reassured him as he watched men drop all around him.

When Benjamin Galvin first came from his aunt’s farm to help the abolitionists in Boston after hearing a traveling lyceum speaker, he was knocked out by two hollering Irishmen who were trying to break up the abolitionist meeting. One of the organizers took Galvin home to recover, and Harriet, a daughter of this organizer, fell in love with the poor boy. She had never met anyone, even among her father’s friends, so simply certain of the rightness and wrongness of things without a corrupting concern for politics or influence. “Sometimes I think you love your mission more than you can love other people,” she said while they were courting, but he was too forthright to think of what he did as a mission.

She was heartbroken to hear from Galvin how his parents had died of the black fever when he was young. She taught him to write his alphabet by making him copy it out on slates; he already knew how to write his name. The day he decided to volunteer to fight the war, they married. She promised to teach him enough to read a whole book on his own when he returned from the war. That was why, she said, he must come back alive. Galvin would crawl under his blanket, lying on his hard board, thinking of her steady, musical voice.

When shelling began, some of the men would laugh uncontrollably or shriek as they fired, their faces blackened by the powder from tearing open cartridges with their teeth. Others would load and fire without aiming, and Galvin thought these men truly insane. The deafening cannons thundered across the earth so terribly that rabbits fled their holes, their little bodies trembling with fright as they hopped across the dead men sprawled all over the ground, which steamed with blood.

Survivors rarely had strength left to dig sufficient graves for their comrades, resulting in entire landscapes of protruding knees and arms and the tops of heads. The first rain would uncover all of it. Galvin watched his tent-mates scribble letters home telling of their battles, and he wondered how they could put to words what they had seen and heard and felt, for it was beyond all words he had ever heard. According to one soldier, the arrival of support lines for their last battle, which had massacred nearly a third of their company, had been called off on the orders of a general who wished to embarrass General Burnside in hopes of securing his removal. The general later received a promotion.

“Is it possible?” Private Galvin demanded of a sergeant from another company.

“Two mules and another soldier killed,” Sergeant LeRoy chuckled gruffly to the still-green private.

The campaign would prove only second in horrors and human flesh to Napoleon’s Russian campaign, the bookish adjutant warned Benjamin Galvin sagaciously.

He did not like to ask others to write letters on his behalf like some of the other illiterates or semiliterates, so when Galvin would find dead Rebel soldiers with letters on them he would send them to Harriet in Boston so she might hear of the war firsthand. He would write out his name at the bottom so she would know where the letter came from, and he included a local flower petal or a distinctive leaf. He did not want to bother even the men who liked to write. They were so tired all the time. They were all so tired. Galvin could often tell by the slowed expressions of some men’s faces before a battle—almost as though they were still asleep—who would surely not see the next morning.

“If I could only get home the Union can go to Hell,” Galvin heard one officer say.

Galvin did not notice the diminishing rations that angered so many, because much of the time now he could not taste or smell or even hear his own voice. With food no longer particularly satisfying, Galvin began a habit of chewing pebbles, then scraps of paper torn from the assistant surgeon’s dwindling traveling library and from Rebel letters, to keep his mouth warm and occupied. The scraps got smaller and smaller, to conserve what he could find.

One of their men who grew too lame on a march was left at camp, and was brought in two days later, murdered for his wallet. Galvin told everyone that the war was worse than Napoleon’s Russian campaign. He was dosed with morphine and castor oil for diarrhea and the doctor gave him powders that made him dizzy and frustrated. He was down to a single pair of drawers, and the traveling sutlers who sold them from wagons asked $2.50 for a pair worth thirty cents. The sutler said he would not lower the price but might raise it if Galvin waited too long. Galvin wanted to bash the sutler’s skull inside his head, but he didn’t. He asked the adjutant to write a letter to Harriet Galvin asking her to send two pairs of heavy wool drawers. It was the only letter that was ever written for him during the war.

Pickaxes were needed to remove bodies fixed to the ground with ice. When the heat came again, Company C found a stubble field of unburied black bodies. Galvin marveled at so many blacks in the blue uniform, but then he realized what he was seeing: The bodies had been left in the August sun for a full day and were burned black by the heat and crawling with vermin. Men were dead in every conceivable position, and horses beyond count, many of them seeming to kneel genteelly on all fours, as though they were waiting for a child to saddle them.

Soon after, Galvin heard that some generals were returning escaped slaves to their masters and chattering with the slave masters like they were meeting for cards. Could this be? The war made no sense at all if it was not fought to better the slaves. On one march, Galvin saw a dead Negro whose ears had been nailed to a tree as punishment for attempted escape. His master had left him naked, knowing well how the voracious mosquitoes and flies would intercede.

Galvin couldn’t understand the protests raised by Union soldiers when Massachusetts formed a Negro regiment. One Illinois regiment they came upon was threatening to desert as a group if Lincoln freed one more slave.

At a Negro revival Galvin had seen during the first months of the war, he listened to a prayer blessing the soldiers passing through the town: “De good Lord take dese ‘ere mourners and shake ‘em over Hell, but don’t lieff ‘em go.”

And they sang:

“The Negroes have helped us, spied for us. They need our help as well,” Galvin said.

“I’d rather see the Union dead than won by niggers!” a lieutenant in Galvin’s company shouted in his face.

More than once, Galvin had seen a soldier take hold of a Negro wench fleeing her master and whisk her off into the woods to roaring cheers.

Food was gone on both sides of the battle lines. One morning, three Rebel soldiers were caught scavenging for food in the woods near their encampment. They looked nearly starved, jowls hanging out. With them was a deserter from Galvin’s ranks. Captain Kingsley ordered Private Galvin to shoot the deserter dead. Galvin felt as though he would vomit blood if he tried to speak. “Without the proper ceremonies, Captain?” he finally said.

“We’re marching for battle, Private. There’s no time for a trial and no time to hang him, so you’ll shoot him here! Ready… aim… fire!”

Galvin had seen a punishment for a private who had refused such an order. It was called “bucking and gagging,” having one’s hands tied over his knees with one bayonet lodged between his arms and legs and another tied in his mouth. The deserter, gaunt and empty, did not look particularly perturbed. “Shoot me, then.”

“Private, now!” ordered the Captain. “You want your punishment with them?”

Galvin shot the man dead at point-blank range. The others ran the limp body through a dozen or so times with the blades of their bayonets. The captain recoiled, an icy glow in his eyes, and ordered Galvin to shoot the three Rebel prisoners on the spot. When Galvin hesitated, Captain Kingsley yanked him to one side by the arm.

“You’re always watching, aren’t you, Possum? You’re always watching everyone like you know better what to do in your heart than we do. Well, now you’ll do just what I say. Now you will, by thunder.” All his teeth were bared as he spoke.

The three Rebels were lined up. After “Ready, aim, fire,” Galvin shot each of them, by turn, in the head with his Enfield rifle. He could feel as little emotion, as he did so, as he could smell, taste, or hear. That same week, Galvin saw four Union soldiers, including two from his own company, molesting two young girls they had taken from a local town. Galvin told his superiors and, as an example, the four men were tied to a cannon wheel and had their backs beaten with a whip. Because Galvin had been the one to inform on them, he had to employ the whip.

At the next battle, Galvin didn’t feel like he was fighting for one side or another, against one side or another. He was just battling. The whole world was battling and raging against itself, and the noises never ceased. He could barely make out Rebel from Yank, in any case. He had brushed against some poison leaf the day before and by nightfall his eyes were almost completely shut; the men laughed at this because, while others had their eyes shot out and heads split open, Benjamin Galvin had fought like a tiger and didn’t get a scratch. One soldier, who was later put in an asylum, threatened to kill Galvin that day, pointing his rifle at Galvin’s breastbone and warning him that if he didn’t stop chewing that damned paper, he’d shoot him dead right then.

After Calvin’s first war wound, a bullet to the chest, he was sent to be a guard at Fort Warren off Boston Harbor, where Rebel prisoners were being kept, until he could fully recover. There, prisoners with money purchased nicer rooms and better food, regardless of their levels of culpability or of how many men they had killed unjustly.

Harriet begged Benjamin not to go back to war, but he knew the men needed him. When he anxiously rejoined Company C in Virginia, there had been so many openings in the regiment from death and desertion that he was commissioned a second lieutenant.

He understood from newer recruits that rich boys back home were paying three hundred dollars to exempt themselves from service. Galvin boiled over with anger. He felt heart-wrenchingly weak, and he did not sleep for more than a few minutes a night. But he had to move: to keep moving. During the next battle, he dropped among the dead bodies and fell asleep thinking of those rich boys. The Rebels, poking through the dead that night and finding him, picked him up and took him to Libby Prison in Richmond. They let all the privates go because they were not important, but Galvin was a second lieutenant, so he spent four months at Libby. Galvin remembered only blurry images and some sounds from his time as a prisoner of war. It was as though he continued to sleep and dream the whole time.

When he was released to Boston, Benjamin Galvin was mustered out with the rest of his regiment in a big ceremony on the State House steps. Their tattered company flag was folded and given to the governor. Only two hundred of the original one thousand were alive. Galvin could not understand how the war could be considered done. They had not come close to meeting their cause. Slaves were freed, but the enemy had not changed its ways—had not been punished. Galvin was not political, but he knew that the blacks would have no peace in the South, slavery or no slavery, and he knew also what those who had not fought the war did not know: that the enemy was all around them at all times and had not surrendered at all. And never, never for a moment had the enemy been only the Southerners.

Galvin felt he now spoke in a different language that civilians could not understand. They could not even hear. Only fellow soldiers, who had been blasted by cannon and shell, had that capacity. In Boston, Galvin began to travel in bands with them. They looked haggard and exhausted, like the groups of stragglers they had seen in the woods. But these veterans, many of whom had lost jobs and families and talked about how they should have died in the war—at least their wives would get a pension—were on the prowl for money or pretty girls, and to get drunk and to raise Pluto. They no longer remembered to watch for the enemy and were blind just like the rest.

While Galvin was walking through the streets, he would often begin to feel that someone was following him closely. He would stop suddenly and spin around with a frightful look in his wide eyes, but the enemy would vanish into a corner or a crowd. The Devil’s mad and I am glad…

He slept with an ax under his pillow most nights. During a thunderstorm, he woke up and threatened Harriet with a rifle, accusing her of being a Rebel spy. That same night, he stood in the yard in the rain in his full uniform, patrolling for hours. At other times, he would lock Harriet in a room and guard her, explaining that someone was trying to get her. She had to work for a launderer to pay their debts, and pressed him to see doctors. The doctor said he had “soldier’s heart”—fast palpitations caused by battle exposure. She managed to convince him to go to a soldiers’-aid home, which, she understood from other wives, helped tend to troubled soldiers. When Benjamin Galvin heard George Washington Greene give a sermon at the soldiers’-aid home, he felt the first ray of light he could remember in a long time.

Greene spoke about a man far away, a man who understood, a man named Dante Alighieri. He was a former soldier, too, who had fallen victim to a great divide between the parties of his sullied city and had been commanded to journey through the afterlife so that he might put all mankind right. What an incredible ordering to life and death was witnessed there! No bloodshed in Hell was incidental, each person was divinely deserving of a precise punishment created by the love of God. What perfection came with each contrapasso, as the Reverend Greene called the punishments, matched with every sin of every man and woman on earth evermore until final judgment day!

Galvin understood how angry Dante became that the men of his city, friend and foe alike, knew only the material and physical, pleasure and money, and did not see the judgments that were rapidly at their heels. Benjamin Galvin could not pay close enough attention to Reverend Greene’s weekly sermons and could not hear them half enough; could not get them out of his head. He felt two feet taller every time he walked out of that chapel.

The other soldiers seemed to enjoy the sermons as well, though he sensed they did not understand them the way he could. Galvin, lingering one afternoon after the sermon and staring at Reverend Greene, overheard a conversation between him and one of the soldiers.

“Mr. Greene, may I remark that I greatly liked your sermon today,” said Captain Dexter Blight, who had a hay-tinted handlebar mustache and a strong limp. “Might I ask, sir—would I be able to read more about Dante’s travels? Many of my nights are sleepless, and I have much time.”

The old minister inquired whether the soldier could read Italian. “Well,” said George Washington Greene after being answered in the negative, “you will find Dante’s journey in English, in all the detail you wish, quite soon enough, my dear lad! You see, Mr. Longfellow of Cambridge is completing a translation—no, a transformation–into English by meeting each week with something of a cabinet council, a Dante Club he has formed, of which I humbly count myself a member. Look for the book next year at your bookseller, my good man, from the incomparable presses of Ticknor and Fields!”

Longfellow. Longfellow was involved with Dante. How right that seemed to Galvin, who had heard all his poems from Harriet’s lips. Galvin said to a policeman in town, “Ticknor and Fields,” and was directed to an enormous mansion on Tremont Street and Hamilton Place. The showroom was eighty feet long and thirty feet wide, with gleaming woodwork and carved columns and counters of western fir that shone under giant chandeliers. An elaborate archway at the far end of the showroom encased the finest samples of Ticknor & Fields editions, with spines of blue and gold and chocolate brown, and behind the arch a compartment displayed the latest numbers of the publishing house’s periodicals. Galvin entered the showroom with a vague hope that Dante himself could be waiting for him. He stepped in reverentially, his hat doffed and his eyes closed.

The publishing house’s new offices had opened only a few days before Benjamin Galvin walked in.

“Here answering the ad?” No response. “Excellent, excellent. Please fill this out. Nobody better in the business to work for than J. T. Fields. The man’s a genius, a guardian angel of all authors, he is.” This man identified himself as Spencer Clark, financial clerk of the firm.

Galvin accepted the paper and pen and stared widely, relocating the bit of paper he always carried in his mouth from one cheek to the other.

“You must give us a name for us to call you, son,” said Clark. “Come on, then. Give us a name or I shall have to send you on your way.”

Clark pointed to a line on the employment form, so Galvin put his pen there and wrote: “D-A-N-T-E-A-L.” He paused. How was Alighieri spelled out? Ala?-Ali? Galvin sat wondering until the ink on his pen had dried. Clark, having been interrupted by someone across the room, cleared his throat loudly and snatched the paper.

“Ah, don’t be shy, what have we got?” Clark squinted. “Dan Teal. Good boy.” Clark sighed disappointedly. He knew the chap couldn’t be a clerk with writing like that, but the house needed every hand it could find during this transition to the massive New Corner mansion. “Now, Daniel my lad, pray just tell us where you live and we can start you tonight as a shop boy, four nights a week. Mr. Osgood, he’s the senior clerk, he’ll show you the ropes before he leaves tonight. Oh, and congratulations, Teal. You’ve just begun your new life at Ticknor and Fields!”

“Dan Teal,” the new employee said, repeating his new name over and over.

Teal thrilled to hear Dante discussed when passing the Authors’ Room on the second floor as he rolled his cart of papers to be delivered from one room to another for the clerks to have when they arrived in the morning. The fragments of discussions he overheard were not like Reverend Greene’s sermons, which spoke of the wonders of Dante’s journey. He didn’t hear many specifics about Dante at the Corner, and most nights Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Fields, and their Dante troop did not meet at all. Still, here at Ticknor & Fields were men somehow allied with Dante’s survival—speaking of how they might go about protecting him.

Teal’s head spun and he ran outside and vomited in the mall at the Common: Dante required protection! Teal listened in on the conversations of Mr. Fields and Longfellow and Lowell and Dr. Holmes and gathered that the Harvard College board was attacking Dante. Teal had heard around town that Harvard, too, was looking for new employees, since many of its regular workers had been killed or disabled in the war. The College handed Teal a day job. After a week of work, Teal managed to change his assignment from yard gardener to daytime caretaker in University Hall, for it was there, Teal learned by asking the other workmen, that the College boards made their all-important decisions.

At the soldiers’-aid home, Reverend Greene shifted from general discussions of Dante to more specific accounts of the pilgrim’s journey. Circles separated his steps through Hell, each leading closer to the punishment of the great Lucifer, the possessor of all evil. In the anteroom of Hell, Greene guided Teal through the land of the Neutrals, where the Great Refuser, the worst offender there, could be found. The name of the Refuser, some pope, did not mean anything to Teal, but his having turned down a great and worthy position that could have ensured justice for millions made Teal burn with anger. Teal had heard through the walls of University Hall that Chief Justice Healey had point-blank refused an assigned position of great importance—a position that asked him to defend Dante.

Teal knew that the bookish adjutant from Company C had collected thousands of insects during their marches through the swampy, sticky states, and had sent them home in specially crafted crates so they would survive the trip to Boston. Teal purchased from him a box of deadly blowflies and maggots, along with a hive full of wasps, and followed Justice Healey from the courthouse to Wide Oaks, where he watched the judge say good-bye to his family.

The next morning, Teal entered the house through the back and cracked Healey’s head open with the butt of his pistol. He removed the judge’s clothes and stacked them neatly, for man’s garments did not belong on this coward. He then carried Healey out back and released the maggots and insects onto the head wound. Teal also speared a blank flag into the sandy ground nearby, for under such a cautionary sign Dante found the Neutrals. He felt at once that he had joined Dante, that he entered the long and dangerous path of salvation among the lost people.

Teal was torn up inside when Greene missed a week at the soldiers’-aid home due to illness. But then Greene returned and preached on the Simoniacs. Teal had already been alarmed and panicked at the arrangement made between the Harvard Corporation and Reverend Talbot, which he had heard discussed on several occasions at University Hall. How could a preacher accept money to bury Dante from the public, sell the power of his office for a rotten one thousand dollars? But there was nothing to be done until he knew how it was to be punished.

Teal had once met a safecracker named Willard Burndy during his nights at back-alley public houses. Teal did not have trouble tracking Burndy down at one of these taverns, and though infuriated by Burndy’s drunkenness, Dan Teal paid the thief to tell him how to steal one thousand dollars from Reverend Elisha Talbot’s safe. Burndy talked and talked about how Langdon Peaslee was taking over all his streets anyway. What harm would it do to teach someone else how to open a simple safe?

Teal used the fugitive-slave tunnels to cross into the Second Unitarian Church, and he watched Reverend Talbot as he excitedly descended each afternoon into the underground vault. He counted Talbot’s steps—one, two, three–to see how long it took him to cross to the stairs. He estimated Talbot’s height and made a mark on the wall with chalk after the minister left. Then Teal dug a hole, precisely measured, so that Talbot’s feet could be free in the air when he was buried headfirst, and he buried Talbot’s dirty money beneath. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, he grabbed Talbot, took his lantern away, and poured the kerosene oil on his feet. After he punished Reverend Talbot, Dan Teal had a cloudy certainty that the Dante Club was proud of his work. He wondered when the weekly meetings were held at Mr. Longfellow’s house, the meetings Reverend Greene had mentioned. Sundays, no doubt, Teal thought—the Sabbath.

Teal asked around Cambridge and easily found the big yellow Colonial. But looking into the window on the side of Longfellow’s house, he did not see signs of any meeting taking place. In fact, there was a loud uproar from inside soon after Teal pressed his face against the window, for the moonlight had caught the buttons on his uniform and now glowed. Teal did not want to disturb the Dante Club if it was gathered, did not want to interrupt the guardians of Dante while they were on duty.

How bewildered Teal was when Greene again failed to show at his post at the soldiers’-aid home, this time without forwarding any excuse of illness! Teal asked at the public library where he might take lessons in the Italian language, for Greene’s first suggestion to the other soldier had been to read the original in Italian. The librarian found a newspaper advertisement from a Mr. Pietro Bachi, and Teal called on Bachi to begin lessons. This instructor brought Teal a small armload of grammar books and exercises, mostly ones that he had written himself—these had nothing to do with Dante.

Bachi at one point offered to sell Teal a Venetian century edition of the Divina Commedia. Teal took the volume, bound in hard leather, in his hands, but had no interest in the book, regardless of how Bachi rambled on about its beauty. Again, this was not Dante. Fortunately, soon after this, Greene reappeared at the soldiers’-aid pulpit, and there came Dante’s astounding entrance into the infernal pouch of the Schismatics.

Fate had spoken loud as cannon thunder to Dan Teal. He, too, had witnessed this unforgivable sin—splitting apart and causing schisms within groups—in the person of Phineas Jennison. Teal had heard him speaking of protecting Dante at the offices of Ticknor & Fields—urging the Dante Club to fight Harvard—but had also heard him condemning Dante at the offices of the Harvard Corporation, urging them to stop Longfellow and Lowell and Fields. And Teal led Jennison, by way of the fugitive-slave tunnels, to the Boston harbor, where he took him by the point of his saber. Jennison begged and cried and offered Teal money. Teal promised him justice and then cut him into pieces. He wrapped the wounds carefully. Teal never thought of what he was doing as killing, for punishment required a length of suffering, an imprisonment of sensation. This was what he found most assuring about Dante. None of the punishments witnessed were new. Teal had seen them all in large and small ways in his life in Boston and on the battlefields across their nation.

Teal knew that the Dante Club thrilled at the defeat of its enemies, for suddenly Reverend Greene offered a flurry of ecstatic sermons: Dante came upon a frozen lake of sinners, Traitors, among the worst sinners the jour-neyer discovers and announces. So were Augustus Manning and Pliny Mead sealed in ice as Teal watched in the morning light, clothed in his second lieutenant’s dress uniform—just as a uniformed Teal had watched Artemus Healey, the Neutral, writhe naked under his blanket of insects and had watched Elisha Talbot, the Simoniac, squirm and kick his flaming feet, his damned money now a cushion under his head, and had watched Phineas Jennison quiver and shake as his body hung shredded and snipped.

But then came Lowell and Fields, and Holmes and Longfellow—and not to reward him! Lowell had fired his gun at Teal, and Mr. Fields had cried out for Lowell to shoot. Teal’s heart ached. Teal had assumed that Longfellow, whom Harriet Galvin adored, and the other protectors who gathered at the Corner embraced the purpose of Dante. Now he understood that they did not know the true work needed from the Dante Club. There was so much to complete, so many circles to open in order to make Boston good. Teal thought of the scene at the Corner when Dr. Holmes fell into him—Lowell had followed from the Authors’ Room, yelling, “You have betrayed the Dante Club, you’ve betrayed the Dante Club.”

“Doctor,” Teal said to him when they met in the slave tunnels. “Turn around now, Dr. Holmes. I was coming to see you.”

Holmes turned so his back was facing the uniformed soldier. The muted blaze from the doctor’s lantern shakily lit the long channel of the rocky abyss ahead.

“I guess your finding me is Fate,” added Teal, and then ordered the doctor forward.

“Dear God, man,” Holmes wheezed. “Where are we going?”

“To Longfellow.”

XX

Holmes walked. Though his view of the man had been brief, he knew him at once as Teal, one of the night creatures, as Fields called them, from the Corner: their Lucifer. Now he noticed, looking back, that the man’s neck was as muscular as a prizefighter’s, but his pale green eyes and almost feminine mouth seemed incongruously childlike and his feet, probably a result of hard marches, supported his body with the eager perpendicular posture of an adolescent. Teal—this mere boy—was their enemy and opposite. Dan Teal. Dan Teal! Oh, how could a wordsmith like Oliver Wendell Holmes have missed that brilliant stroke? DANTEAL…DANTE AL…! And, oh, what a hollow sound was the memory of Lowell’s booming voice at the Corner when Holmes had run into the killer in the hallway: “Holmes, you have betrayed the Dante Club!” Teal had been listening in, as he must have done at the Harvard offices too. With all the vengeance stored up by Dante.

If Holmes was slated for final judgment now, he would not bring Longfellow and the others into it. He stopped as the tunnel sloped downhill.

“I’ll go no farther!” he announced, trying to shield himself with an artificially bold voice. “I shall do what you ask of me but will not involve Longfellow!”

Teal responded with a flat, sympathetic silence. “Two of your men must be punished. You must make Longfellow understand, Dr. Holmes.”

Holmes realized that Teal did not want to punish him as a Traitor. Teal had come to the conclusion that the Dante Club was not on his side, that they had abandoned his cause. If Holmes was a traitor to the Dante Club, as Lowell had unwittingly announced to Teal, Holmes was friend to the real Dante Club: the one that Teal had invented in his mind—a silent association dedicated to carrying through Dante’s punishments into Boston.

Holmes took out his handkerchief and brought it to his brow.

At the same moment, Teal latched a strong hand on to Holmes’s elbow.

Holmes, against his own expectations, without forethought or plan, hurled Teal’s hand away with such force that Teal was knocked into the rocky cavern wall. Then the little doctor launched into a flying run, gripping his lantern with both hands.

With laboring breath he scurried through the dark and winding tunnels, glancing behind him and hearing all kinds of noises, but there was no way to determine what came from inside his head and his heaving chest and what existed outside himself. His asthma was a chain attached to a ghost’s leg, dragging him back. When he came upon some sort of underground cavity, he threw himself inside. There, he found an army-issue fur-lined sleeping bag and some scraps of a hard substance. Holmes cracked it with his teeth. Hard bread, the kind the soldiers had been forced to live on during the war: This was Teal’s home. There was a fireplace made from sticks, and plates and a frying pan and a tin cup and a coffee boiler. Holmes was about to run off when he heard a rustle that made him jump. Raising his lantern, Holmes could see that farther back in the chamber, Lowell and Fields sat on the floor, their hands and legs tied, gags in their mouths. Lowell’s beard slumped down into his chest and he was perfectly still.

Holmes tore the gags from his friends’ mouths and tried to unsuccessfully untie their hands.

“Are you hurt?” Holmes said. “Lowell!” He shook Lowell’s shoulders.

“He knocked us cold and brought us here,” Fields replied. “Lowell was cursing and shouting at Teal when he was tying us up here—I told him to shut his blasted mouth!—and Teal knocked him out again. He’s just unconscious,” Fields added prayerfully. “Isn’t he?”

“What did Teal want from you?” Holmes asked.

“Nothing! I don’t know why we’re alive or what he’s doing!”

“That monster has something planned for Longfellow!”

“I hear him coming!” Fields cried. “Hurry, Holmes!”

Holmes’s hands were trembling and dripping in sweat, and the knots were tied tight. He could barely see.

“No, go. You must go now!” Fields said.

“But another second…” His fingers slipped again from Fields’s wrist.

“It’ll be too late, Wendell,” Fields said. “He’ll be here. There’s no time to free us, and we wouldn’t be able to get Lowell anywhere like this. Get to Craigie House! Forget us now—you must save Longfellow!”

“I can’t do this alone! Where’s Rey?” Holmes cried.

Fields shook his head. “He never came, and all the patrolmen stationed at the houses are gone! They’ve been taken away! Longfellow’s alone! Go!”

Holmes dived out of the chamber, running through the tunnels faster than he had ever run, until ahead he saw a distant spark of silver light. Then Fields’s command grew in his mind: GO GO GO.

A detective unhurriedly descended the dank stairs to the basement of the Central Station. Groans and harsh curses could be heard through the bricked-up halls.

Nicholas Rey jumped up from the hard floor of the cell. “You can’t do this! Innocent people are in danger, for God’s sake!”

The detective shrugged. “You really do believe everything you dream up, don’t you, moke?”

“Keep me in here if you like. But put those patrolmen back at those houses, please. I beg you. There is someone out there who will kill again. You know Burndy didn’t murder Healey and the others! The murderer’s still out there, and he’s waiting to do it again! You can stop him!”

The detective looked interested in letting Rey try to persuade him. He tipped his head in thought. “I know Willard Burndy’s a thief and a liar, that’s what I know.”

“Listen to me, please.”

The detective gripped two bars and glared at Rey. “Peaslee warned us to keep an eye on you, that you wouldn’t mind your business, that you wouldn’t stay out of the way. I bet you hate being locked up with no way to do anything, nobody to help.”

The detective took out his ring of keys and waved it with a smile. “Well, this day’ll be a lesson to you. Won’t it, moke?”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow emitted a series of short, barely audible sighs as he stood at his writing desk in his study.

Annie Allegra had suggested any number of games they could play. But the only thing he could do was to stand at his desk with some Dante cantos and translate and translate, to lay down his burden and cross through that cathedral door. In there, the noises of the world retreated and became an indistinguishable roar and the words lived in eternal vitality. There, in the long aisles, the translator saw his Poet in the stretch of gloom and he strove to keep pace. The Poet’s step is quiet and solemn. He is clothed in a long, flowing garment, and upon his head he wears a cap; on his feet are sandals. Through congregations of the dead, through hovering echoes flying from tomb to tomb, through lamentations below, Longfellow could hear the voice of the one who drove the Poet onward. She stood before them both, in the unapproachable, coaxing distance, an image, a projection with snow-white veil, garments as scarlet as any fire, and Longfellow felt the ice on the Poet’s heart melt as the snow does on mountain heights: the Poet, who seeks the perfect pardon of perfect peace.

Annie Allegra looked all about the study for a lost paper box she needed to properly celebrate the birthday of one of her dolls. She came upon a newly opened letter from Mary Frere, of Auburn, New York. She asked whom it was from.

“Oh, Miss Frere,” Annie said. “That’s lovely! Will she be summering near us in Nahant this year? It is always so lovely to have her near, Father.”

“I don’t believe she will.” Longfellow tried to offer a smile.

Annie was disappointed. “Perhaps the box is in the parlor closet,” she said abruptly, and left to recruit her governess for help.

A knock struck the front door with an urgency that froze Longfellow. Then it came even harder, with demand. “Holmes.” He heard himself exhale.

Annie Allegra, bored Annie Allegra, left her governess and cried out her claim to the door. She ran to the door and pulled it open. The chill from outside was enormous and embracing.

Annie started to say something, but Longfellow could sense from the study that she was frightened. He heard a mumbling voice that did not belong to any friend. He stepped into the hall and turned to face a soldier’s full regalia.

“Send her away, Mr. Longfellow,” Teal requested quietly.

Longfellow pulled Annie into the hall and knelt down. “Panzie, why not finish that part of your piece we talked about for The Secret.”

“Papa, the part? The interview—?”

“Yes, why not finish that part right away, Panzie, while I am engaged with this gentleman.”

He tried to make her understand, his widened expression signaling “Go!” into her eyes, same as her mother’s. She nodded slowly and hurried to the back of the house.

“You are needed, Mr. Longfellow. You are needed now.” Teal chewed furiously, loudly spat out two scraps of paper onto Longfellow’s rug, and then chewed some more. The supply of bits of paper in his mouth seemed inexhaustible.

Longfellow clumsily turned to look at him, and he understood at once the power that came from inhabiting violence.

Teal spoke again: “Mr. Lowell and Mr. Fields—they have betrayed you, they have betrayed Dante. You were there, too. You were there when Manning was to die, and you did nothing to help me. You are to punish them.”

Teal put an army revolver into Longfellow’s hands and the cold steel stung the soft hand of the poet, whose palms still had traces of a wound from years earlier. Longfellow had not held a gun since he was a child and had come home with tears in his eyes after his brother taught him how to shoot a robin.

Fanny had despised guns and war, and Longfellow thanked God that at least she did not see their son Charley run away to battle and return with a bullet having passed through his shoulder blade. For men, all that makes a soldier is the gay dress, she used to say, forgetting the weapons of murder that the dress conceals.

“Yes sir, you’re going finally to learn to sit quiet and act like you’re meant to, contraband.” The detective had a laughing glimmer in his eyes.

“Why are you still here then?” Rey had his back facing the bars now.

The detective was embarrassed by the question. “To make sure you learn my lesson good, or I’ll knock your teeth out, you hear?”

Rey turned slowly. “Remind me of that lesson.”

The detective’s face was red, and he leaned against the bars with a scowl. “To sit quietly for once in your life, moke, and let life to those who know best!”

Rey’s gold-flecked eyes were sadly downcast. Then without allowing the rest of his body to betray his intentions, he shot out his arm and clamped his fingers around the detective’s neck, smashing the man’s forehead into the bars. With his other hand, he pried open the detective’s hand for the ring of keys. Then he released the man, who now grasped at his throat to restore his breath. Rey opened the cell door, then searched the detective’s coat and drew out a gun. Prisoners in surrounding cells cheered.

Rey ran up the stairs into the lobby.

“Rey, you’re here?” Sergeant Stoneweather said. “Now, what’s happening? I was stationed, just as you like and the detectives came around and told me you were ordering everyone off their posts! Where you been?”

“They locked me in the Tombs, Stoneweather! I need to get to Cambridge at once!” Rey said. Then he saw a little girl with her governess on the other side of the lobby. He rushed over and opened the iron gate separating the entrance area from the police offices.

“Please,” Annie Allegra Longfellow was repeating as her governess tried to explain something to a confused policeman. “Please.”

“Miss Longfellow,” Rey said, crouching down next to her. “What is it?”

“Father needs your help, Officer Rey!” she cried.

A herd of detectives tore through the lobby. “There!” one shouted. He took Rey by the arm and threw him against a wall.

“Hold, you son of a bloody bitch!” Sergeant Stoneweather said, and cracked his billy club against the detective’s back.

Stoneweather called out and several other uniformed officers ran in, but three detectives overpowered Nicholas Rey and caught both his arms, pulling him away as he struggled.

“No! Father needs you, Officer Rey!” Annie cried.

“Rey!” Stoneweather called out, but a chair came flying at him and a fist landed in his side.

Chief John Kurtz stormed in, his usual mustard coloring flushed purple. A porter carried three of his valises. “Worst damned train ride…” he began. “What in God’s name!” he screamed to the whole lobby of policemen and detectives after he had assessed the situation. “Stoneweather?”

“They locked Rey up in the Tombs, Chief!” Stoneweather protested, blood streaming from his thick nose.

Rey said, “Chief, I need to get to Cambridge without delay!”

“Patrolman Rey…” Chief Kurtz said. “You’re supposed to be involved in my…”

“Now, Chief! I must go!”

“Let him free!” Kurtz bellowed to the detectives, who withdrew from Rey. “Every damned one of you scoundrels in my office! This moment!”

Oliver Wendell Holmes constantly checked behind him for Teal. The way was clear. He had not been followed from the underground tunnels. “Longfellow… Longfellow,” he repeated to himself as he passed through Cambridge.

Then in front of him he saw Teal leading Longfellow along the sidewalk. The poet was walking cautiously on the thinning snow.

Holmes was so afraid at that moment that there was only one thing he could do to stop himself from falling faint. He had to act with no hesitation. So he yelled at the top of his lungs: “Teal!” It was a shriek that could bring out the whole neighborhood.

Teal turned, completely alert.

Holmes took the musket from his coat and pointed it with trembling hands.

Teal did not seem to take note of the gun at all. His mouth stirred and he released a soaked orphan of the alphabet as he spat into the white blanket at his feet: E “Mr. Longfellow, Dr. Holmes shall be your first,” he said. “He shall be your first to punish for what you’ve done. He’ll be our example to the world.”

Teal lifted Longfellow’s hand, in which he held the army revolver, and directed it at Holmes.

Holmes moved closer, his musket pointed at Teal. “Don’t you move any further, Teal! I’ll do this! I’ll shoot you! Let Longfellow free and you can take me.”

“This is punishment, Dr. Holmes. All of you who have abandoned God’s justice must now meet your final sentence. Mr. Longfellow, on my command. Ready… aim…”

Holmes stepped forward solidly and raised his gun to the level of Teal’s neck. There wasn’t an ounce of fear in the man’s face. He was a permanent soldier; there was no one left beneath. There were no choices left in him—only the incorrigible zeal to do right that had passed like a current through all humanity at one time or another, usually fizzling rapidly. Holmes shivered. He did not know whether he had sufficient reserves of that same zeal to stop Dan Teal from the destiny he had caught himself in.

“Fire, Mr. Longfellow,” Teal said. “You’ll fire now!” He put his hand on Longfellow’s and wrapped his fingers around the poet’s.

Swallowing hard, Holmes moved his musket away from Teal and pointed it directly at Longfellow.

Longfellow shook his head. Teal took a confused backward step, pulling his captive with him.

Holmes nodded firmly. “I’ll shoot him down, Teal,” he said.

“No.” Teal moved his head in rapid motions.

“Yes I will, Teal! Then he’ll not have had his punishment! He’ll be dead—he’ll be ashes!” Holmes yelled, aiming the musket higher, at Longfellow’s head.

“No, you can’t! He must take the others with him! This is not done!”

Holmes steadied the gun at Longfellow, whose eyes were tightly shut in horror. Teal shook his head rapidly and for a moment seemed about to scream. Then he turned as though someone were waiting behind him and then turned to his left and then his right, and finally ran, ran with fury away from the scene. Before he was too far down the street, a shot rang out, and then another ringing burst hung in the air, mixed with a dying cry.

Longfellow and Holmes could not help looking at the guns in their own hands. They followed the last sound. There on a bed of snow was Teal. Hot blood, cutting a rivulet through untouched white and unwilling snow, floated down from him. Two red spots gurgled in the man’s army blouse. Holmes knelt down and his brilliant hands went to work, feeling for life.

Longfellow inched closer. “Holmes?”

Holmes’s hands stopped.

Over Teal’s body stood a crazy-eyed Augustus Manning, his body trembling, his teeth chattering and fingers shaking. Manning dropped his rifle into the snow at his feet. He motioned with his stiff beard back at his house and pointed.

He tried to string his thoughts together. It was several minutes before anything coherent emerged. “The patrolman guarding my house left a few hours ago! Then just now I heard shouting and saw him through my window,” he said. “I saw him, his uniform… it all came to me, everything. He stripped my clothes, Mr. Longfellow, and, and… he tied me… took me without clothes…”

Longfellow offered a consoling hand, and Manning sobbed into the poet’s shoulder as his wife came running outside.

A police carriage halted behind the small circle they formed around the body. Nicholas Rey had his revolver out as he rushed over. Another carriage followed, carrying Sergeant Stoneweather and two more policemen.

Longfellow took Rey’s arm, his eyes bright and questioning.

“She’s fine,” Rey said before the poet could ask. “I have a patrolman watching her and her governess.”

Longfellow nodded his gratitude. Holmes had grabbed a fence railing in front of Manning’s house to catch his breath.

“Holmes, how wondrous! Perhaps you need to lie down inside,” Longfellow said with giddiness and fear. “Why, you’ve done it! But how…”

“My dear Longfellow, I believe daylight will clear up all that lamplight has left doubtful,” Holmes said. He led the policemen through town to the church and the underground tunnels to rescue Lowell and Fields.

XXI

“Hold, hold, wait a minute,” spat out the Spanish Jew to his crafty mentor. “Then ain’t that mean, Langdon, that you’ll be the very last of the Boston Five?”

“Burndy wasn’t one of the original five, my fair sheeny,” answered Langdon Peaslee omnisciently. “The Five were, bless each one of their souls as they drop into Hell below—and mine own, too, when I join them—Randall, who’s serving half-a-stretch in the Tombs; Dodge, who suffered from a nervous collapse and has retired out West; Turner, who was jammed by his ladybird of two and a quarter years—if that ain’t a lesson to not hitch yourself I haven’t heard one; and dear Simonds, holed up on the wharf side, too cup-shot to crack open a child’s jug.”

“Oh it’s a shame. A shame,” moaned one of the men in Peaslee’s audience of four.

“Say again?” Peaslee raised a limber eyebrow in reproach.

“A shame to see him about to walk the ladder!” the cross-eyed thief continued. “Never met the man, no. But I’ve heard it said he was just about the best safecracker Boston’s ever had! He could knock over a safe with a feather, says they!”

The other three listeners turned silent and, had they been standing rather than sitting at a table, might have shuffled their boots nervously on the rough shells littering the bar floor or wandered away at such a comment made to Langdon W. Peaslee. Under the circumstances, they took quiet swills of their drinks or absent drags on the unwrapped cigars that had been passed out by Peaslee.

The door to the tavern swung open and a fly propelled itself into the smoky black compartments that divided the barroom and buzzed around Peaslee’s table. A small number of the fly’s brothers and sisters had survived the winter and a smaller number still had thrived in certain sections of the woods and forests of Massachusetts and would continue to do so, though Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard, had he known, would have declared it preposterous. With a darting glance, Peaslee noticed the strange flaming red eyes and large bluish body. He swatted it away, and at the other end of the bar, some men made sport of chasing it.

Langdon Peaslee reached for his strong punch, the special drink of the house at the Stackpole Tavern. Peaslee did not have to adjust his position in his hardwood chair to reach the drink with his left hand, even though the chair was pushed out a fair distance from the table so that he could adequately address his crooked semicircle of apostles. Peaslee’s arachnid arms allowed him to reach many things in life without the need to budge.

“Take my word for it, my good fellas, that our Mr. Burndy”—Peaslee hissed the name through the large gaps in his large teeth—”was merely the loudest safecracker the bean city’s ever seen.”

The audience accepted the defusing jest with a raising of their glasses and a peal of exaggerated laughter, fertilizing Peaslee’s already excessive grin. The laughing Jew stopped cold with a strained glance over the rim of his glass.

“What is it, Yiddisher?” Peaslee twisted his neck to see a man standing over him. Without a word, the minor thieves and pickpockets around Peaslee rose and veered off to separate corners of the bar, leaving behind aimless clouds of stale smoke to add to the windowless bar’s boiling atmosphere. Only the cross-eyed crook remained.

“Hike!” Peaslee hissed. The remaining cohort disappeared into the rest of the crowd.

“Now, now,” Peaslee said, looking his visitor up and down. He snapped for the barmaid, barely garbed in a low-necked dress. “Hob or nob?” the safecracker asked with a shining grin.

Nicholas Rey dismissed the server pleasantly with a motion of his hand as he took a seat across from Peaslee.

“Oh come now, Patrolman. Blow a cloud then.”

Rey refused the extended long-leaf cigar.

“What’s with the Friday face? These are bully times!” Peaslee refreshed his grin. “See here, the fellas were about to adjourn to the back to buck the tiger. We have it every other night, you see. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind you joining us. That is, unless you don’t have enough beans for an ante.”

“I thank you, Mr. Peaslee, but no,” Rey said.

“Well.” Peaslee put a finger to his lips, then leaned forward, as if to exchange a confidence. “Don’t think, Patrolman,” he began, “you haven’t been shadowed. We know you were after some goose who tried to kill that Harvard mooseface Manning, someone you seem to believe had something to do with the other Burndy murders.”

“That’s right,” Rey said.

“Well, fortunate for you, it didn’t come out,” Peaslee said. “You do know these are the fattest rewards since Lincoln was done in, and I won’t be put in a hole for my bit. When Burndy walks the ladder, my quota’ll be thick enough to choke a hog, as I told you, Rey old man. We’re still watching.”

“You’ve done Burndy in wrongly, but you don’t have to watch for me, Mr. Peaslee. If I had the evidence to free Burndy, I would have brought it in already, whatever the consequences. And you wouldn’t get the rest of your reward.”

Peaslee raised his glass of punch thoughtfully at the mention of Burndy. “It’s a nice story those lawyers make, ‘bout Burndy hating Judge Healey for freeing too many slaves before the Fugitive Slave Act and quashing Talbot and Jennison for cheating him out of money. He’s met his Waterloo, oh yes. And may he dance when he dies.” He took a long sip, then became stern. “They say the governor’s calling for the detective bureau dismantled after your row at the station, and that the aldermen are looking to replace old Kurtz and permanently demote you. I’d cap your luck, run while you can, my dear Lily White. You’ve made many enemies of late.”

“I’ve made some friends, too, Mr. Peaslee,” Rey said after a pause. “As I say, you don’t have to worry about me. There’s someone else, though. That’s why I’ve come.”

Peaslee’s wiry brows pushed up his tan derby.

Rey turned around in his seat and looked at an awkwardly tall man sitting on a stool at the bar counter. “That man’s been asking questions all around Boston. Seems he thinks there’s some other explanation to the murders than what your side has presented. Willard Burndy had nothing to do with it, according to him. His questions could cost you the rest of your share of the reward, Mr. Peaslee—every cent.”

“Dusty business. What do you suggest be done about it?” Peaslee asked. Rey thought about it. “Were I in your position? I would convince him to take leave of Boston for a long while yet.”

At the counter of the Stackpole bar, Simon Camp, the Pinkerton detective assigned to cover metropolitan Boston, reread the unsigned note that had been sent to him—by Patrolman Nicholas Rey—telling him to wait there at that time for an important rendezvous. From his stool, he was looking around with increasing frustration and anger at the crooks dancing with the cheap prostitutes. After ten minutes, he put some coins down and stood to get his coat.

“Now, where you loping off to so soon?” the Spanish Jew said as he grabbed his hand and shook.

“What?” Camp asked, throwing off the Jew’s hand. “Who in the Lord’s name are you swablers? Stand back before I grow warm.”

“Dear stranger.” Langdon Peaslee’s grin was a mile wide as he pushed apart his comrades like the Red Sea and moved to stand in front of the Pinkerton detective. “I think it best you step into the back room and join us for some bucking the tiger. We’d hate to hear of visitors to our city ever growing lonely.”

Days later, J. T. Fields was pacing an alleyway in Boston at the hour that Simon Camp had specified. He counted the coins in his chamois bag, ensuring that the hush money was all there. He was checking his pocket watch once again when he heard someone approach him. The publisher involuntarily held his breath and reminded himself to stay strong, then he hugged his bag to his chest and turned to face the mouth of the alley.

“Lowell?” Fields exhaled.

James Russell Lowell’s head was wrapped in a black bandage. “Why, Fields, I… why are you…”

“See here, I was just…” Fields stammered.

“We agreed not to pay off Camp, to let him do as he would!” Lowell said when he noticed Fields’s bag.

“So why have you come?” Fields demanded.

“Not to stoop to paying his price under the cover of darkness!” Lowell said. “Well, you know I don’t have that sort of cash at hand, in all events. I’m not certain. Just to give him a large piece of my mind, I suppose. We couldn’t let that devil drag Dante down without a fight. I mean…”

“Yes,” Fields agreed. “But perhaps we shouldn’t mention to Longfellow…”

Lowell nodded. “No, no, we shan’t mention this to Longfellow.”

Twenty minutes passed as they waited together. They watched the men on the street using staffs to light the lamps. “How has your head been feeling this week, my dear Lowell?”

“As if it were broken in two and awkwardly mended,” he said, and laughed. “But Holmes says the soreness will be banished in a week or two more. Yours?”

“Better, much better. You’ve heard the tidings of Sam Ticknor?”

“That last-year’s jackass?”

“Opening a publishing house with one of his wretched brothers—in New York! Wrote me that he’ll run us out of business from Broadway. What would Bill Ticknor have thought of his sons trying to destroy the house with his own name, I wonder.”

“Let those ghouls try! Oh, I shall write you my best poem yet this year—just for that, my dear Fields.”

“You know,” Lowell said after some more waiting, “I’d wager a pair of gloves that Camp has come to his senses and given up his little game. I think such a heavenly moon and quiet stars as these are enough to drive sin back to Hell again.”

Fields lifted his bag, laughing at its weight. “Say, if that’s right, why not use a little of this bundle for a late supper at Parker’s?”

“With your money? What holds us back!” Lowell started walking ahead and Fields called after him to wait. Lowell didn’t.

“Hold now! Poor obesity! My authors never wait for me,” Fields grumbled. “They should have more respect for my fat!”

“You want to lose some girth, Fields?” Lowell called back. “Ten percent more to your authors, and I guarantee you’ll have less fat to complain of!”

In the months to follow, a new crop of nickel crime magazines, loathed by J. T. Fields for their deteriorating influence on an eager public, reveled in the story of the minor Pinkerton detective Simon Camp, who, soon after fleeing Boston following a long interview with Langdon W. Peaslee, was indicted by the attorney general for the attempted extortion of several top government officials over war secrets. For the three years preceding his conviction, Camp had pocketed tens of thousands of dollars by extorting persons involved in his cases. Allan Pinkerton refunded the fees of all his clients who had worked with Camp, although there was one, a Dr. Augustus Manning of Harvard, who could not be located, even by the country’s foremost private detective agency.

Augustus Manning resigned from the Harvard Corporation and moved his family away from Boston. His wife said he had not spoken more than a few words at a time for months; some said he had moved to England, others heard he had gone to an island in unexplored seas. An ensuing shake-up in the Harvard administration precipitated the unexpected election of the newest overseer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, an idea hatched by the philosopher’s publisher, J. T. Fields and endorsed by President Hill. Thus ended a twenty-year exile from Harvard for Mr. Emerson, and the poets of Cambridge and Boston were grateful to have one of their own inside the College boardroom.

A private printing of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation of Inferno was produced before the close of 1865 and received gratefully by the Florentine Committee in time for the year’s final commemoration of Dante’s six-hundredth birthday. This raised expectations surrounding Longfellow’s translation, which was heralded already as “choicely good” in the highest literary circles of Berlin, London, and Paris. Longfellow presented one advance edition to each member of his Dante Club, and to other friends. Though he didn’t mention the subject very often, he forwarded the last one as an engagement present to London, where Mary Frere, a young lady of Auburn, New York, had moved to be near her fiance. He was far too occupied, with his daughters and with a new full-length poem, to find her a better gift.

Your absence from Nahant will leave a gap like that made in the street when a house is pulled down. Longfellow noticed how Dantesque his figures of speech had become.

Charles Eliot Norton and William Dean Howells had returned from Europe in time to assist Longfellow in annotating his complete translation. The halo of their foreign adventures still on them, Howells and Norton promised their friends tales of Ruskin, Carlyle, Tennyson, and Browning: There were certain chronicles better relayed in person than by letter.

Lowell interrupted this sentiment with a hearty laugh.

“But aren’t you interested, James?” asked Charles Eliot Norton.

“Our dear Norton,” Holmes said, glossing Lowell’s gaiety, “our dear Howells, it is we, though we have crossed no ocean, who had a voyage that could be contained in no mortal letter.” Then Lowell swore Norton and Howells to eternal confidence.

When the Dante Club had to end their meetings, when their work was done, Holmes thought Longfellow might become uneasy. So Holmes volunteered Norton’s Shady Hill estate to meet at on Saturday evenings. There they would discuss Norton’s progressing translation of Dante’s La Vita Nuova–”The New Life”—the story of Dante’s love for Beatrice. Some nights their little circle was enlarged by Edward Sheldon, who began compiling a concordance of Dante’s poems and minor writings, on his way, he hoped, to studying for a year or two in Italy.

Lowell had recently agreed to allow his daughter Mabel to travel to Italy as well, for a tour of six months. The Fieldses, who would depart by ship in the New Year to celebrate the passing of daily operations of the publishing firm to J. R. Osgood, would escort her.

In the meantime, Fields began arranging for a banquet at Boston’s famous Union Club even before Houghton started printing Longfellow’s Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, three volumes that reached the booksellers as the literary event of the season.

On the day of the banquet, Oliver Wendell Holmes spent the afternoon at Craigie House. George Washington Greene was in, too, from Rhode Island.

“Yes, yes,” Holmes said to Greene of the great numbers his second novel had sold. “It is the individual readers who matter most, for in their eyes reside the worth of writing. Writing is not survival of the fittest but survival of the survivors. What are the critics? They do their best to cheapen me, to make me of no account—and if I cannot endure it, I deserve it all.”

“You sound like Mr. Lowell these days,” Greene said, laughing.

“I suppose I do.”

With a shaky finger, Greene pulled his white cravat away from his baggy neck. “Just need some air, no doubt,” he said while falling into a burst of coughing.

“If I could make you well, Mr. Greene, I believe I would turn physician again.” Holmes went to see whether Longfellow might be ready.

“No, no, better not,” whispered Greene. “Let us wait outside until he’s finished.”

Halfway down the front path, Holmes remarked, “I supposed I should have had enough, but do you believe, Mr. Greene, that I have begun rereading Dante’s Comedy? I wonder, through all we experienced, you never doubted the value of our work. You never once thought something had been lost along the way?”

Greene’s half-moon eyes closed. “You gentlemen. Dr. Holmes, always thought Dante’s story the greatest fiction ever told. But I, I had always believed Dante made his journey. I had believed God had granted him that, and had granted poetry that.”

“And now,” Holmes said. “You still believe it was all true, don’t you?”

“Oh, more than ever, Dr. Holmes.” He smiled, looking back at the window of Longfellow’s study. “More than ever.”

The lamps turned low in Craigie House, Longfellow climbed the stairs, passing the Giotto portrait of Dante, who looked unfazed by his one useless, damaged eye. Longfellow thought that perhaps this eye was the future, but in the other would remain the beautiful mystery of Beatrice that set his life in motion. Longfellow listened to the prayers of his daughters, then watched Alice Mary tuck in her two younger sisters, Edith and little Annie Allegra, and their dolls, who had been taken with colds.

“But when will you be home, Papa?”

“Quite late, Edith. You’ll all be asleep by then.”

“Will they ask you to speak? Who else will be there?” Annie Allegra asked. “Tell us who else.”

Longfellow brushed his beard with his hand. “Who have I said so far, my dear?”

“Not at all enough, Papa!” She removed her notebook from under the covers. “Mr. Lowell, Mr. Fields, Dr. Holmes, Mr. Norton, Mr. Howells…” Annie Allegra was preparing a book she called A Little Person’s Memories of Great People, which she planned to publish with Ticknor & Fields, and had decided to start with a report on the Dante banquet.

“Ah, yes,” Longfellow interrupted. “You may add to that Mr. Greene, your good friend Mr. Sheldon, and certainly Mr. Edwin Whipple, Fields’s fine magazine critic.”

Annie Allegra wrote as much as she could spell.

“I love you, my dear little girls,” Longfellow said as he kissed each soft forehead. “I love you because you are my daughters. And Mama’s daughters, and because she loved you. And loves you still.”

The bright patches of the daughters’ quilts expanded and dropped sym-phonically, and there he left them, secure in the infinite hush of the night. He looked out the window to the carriage house, where Fields’s new carriage—it seemed he always had a new one—waited, the old bay horse, a veteran of the Union cavalry newly adopted by Fields, helping himself to water that had collected in a shallow ditch.

It was raining now, a night rain; a gentle, Christian rain. It must have been very inconvenient for J. T. Fields, driving from Boston to Cambridge only to go back to Boston again, but he had insisted.

Holmes and Greene had left a good space for Longfellow between them, on the seats across from Fields and Lowell. Longfellow, as he climbed up, hoped he would not be asked to speak in front of all the guests during the banquet, but if he were, he would thank his friends for bringing him along.