The Fifth Heart

CHAPTER 1

In the rainy March of 1893, for reasons that no one understands (primarily because no one besides us is aware of this story), the London-based American author Henry James decided to spend his April 15 birthday in Paris and there, on or before his birthday, commit suicide by throwing himself into the Seine at night.

I can tell you that James was deeply depressed that spring, but I can’t tell you for a certainty why he was so depressed. Of course there had been the death in England, from breast cancer, of his sister Alice a year earlier on March 6, 1892, but Alice had been a professional invalid for decades and had welcomed the diagnosis of cancer. Death, she’d told her brother Henry, was the event which she’d always been anticipating with the greatest enthusiasm. At least in his letters to family and friends, Henry had seemed to support her in her eagerness for an ending, down to describing how lovely her corpse had looked.

Perhaps this unchronicled depression in James was augmented by the problem of his work not selling well over the immediately preceding years: his 1886 novels The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima, both influenced by Alice’s slow dying and her Boston-marriage relationship with Katharine Loring, had been a major sales disappointment for all concerned, both in America and England. So by 1890 James had turned his quest for riches toward writing for the theater. Although his first melodramatic stage offering, The American, had done only moderately well, and that only in the provinces rather than in London, he’d convinced himself that the theater would turn out to be his ultimate pot of writer’s gold. But already by early 1893, he was beginning to sense that this hope was both illusion and self-delusion. Just as Hollywood would beckon literary writers to their doom for more than a century to come, the English theater in the 1890’s was sucking in men of letters who—like Henry James—really had no clue as to how to write a successful stage production for a popular audience.

Most biographers would understand this sudden, deep depression better if it were early spring of 1895 rather than March of 1893, since his first major London play, Guy Domville, two years hence will see him jeered and booed when he foolishly will step onto the stage to take his author’s bow. Most of the paying spectators in the hall, as opposed to the many glittering ladies and gentlemen in attendance to whom James sent complimentary tickets, will have never read a novel by Henry James, most will not know he had written novels, and thus they will boo and jeer the play based on its merits alone. And Guy Domville will be a bad, bad play.

Even a year from now, after January of 1894 when his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson will throw herself to her death from a high window in Venice (possibly, some shall whisper, because Henry James had not come to stay near or with her in Venice as he’d promised), we know he will have to fight off a terrible depression tinged with real guilt.

By the end of 1909, the elderly James will fall into his deepest-depression yet—one so deep that his older (and dying from a heart condition) brother William will cross the Atlantic to literally hold Henry’s hand in London. In those years, Henry James will be mourning the “disastrously low sales” and lack of profit from his 1906–1908 “New York Edition” of his works, an exhausting project to which he’d donated five years of his life rewriting the long novels and providing lengthy introductions to each piece.

But that final depression was sixteen years in our future in this March of 1893. We have no real clue as to why James was so terribly depressed that spring. Nor why he suddenly decided that suicide in Paris was his only answer.

One factor may have been the severe attack of the gout that James had suffered that cold English winter of 1892–93, cutting down on his daily walks and causing him to put on more weight. Or it could have been the simple fact that his upcoming birthday in April was his 50th: a landmark that has brought depression to stronger men than the sensitive Henry James.

We’ll never know.

But we do know that the reality of that depression—and his plan for self-annihilation by drowning in the Seine on or before his April 15 birthday—is where this story begins. So, in mid-March, 1893, Henry James (he’d dropped the “Jr.” sometime after his father died in 1882) wrote from London to family and friends saying that he was “taking a short leave from the daily duties of composition to celebrate spring and my own mid-century anniversary in sunlit Paris before joining my brother William and his family in Florence later in April”. James had no intention of ever going to Florence.

Carrying some of his sister Alice’s purloined ashes in a snuffbox, James left his tidied-up apartments in De Vere Gardens, burned some letters from Miss Woolson and from a few younger male friends, took the boat-train to Cherbourg, and arrived in the City of Light the next evening on a day darker and wetter and colder than any he’d suffered that March in chilly London.

There he settled into the Westminster Hotel on the Rue de la Paix where he’d once stayed for a month when he was writing several stories in Paris, including a favorite of his, “The Pupil”. But this time, “settled in” was not the correct phrase. He had no intention of spending the weeks there until his birthday. Besides, the fares at the Westminster were too extravagant for his current budget. He did not even unpack his steamer trunk. He did not plan to spend a second night there. Or, he decided on a whim, a second full night anywhere on this earth.

After a wet, cold day walking in the Jardin de Tuileries and a dismal, lonely dinner—given his resolve, he’d made no effort to contact any of his Parisian friends or other acquaintances who might have been passing through Paris—Henry James drank a final glass of wine, tugged on his woolen overcoat, made sure that the sealed snuffbox was still in his pocket, and, with the bronze tip of his still-folded umbrella tapping on wet cobblestones, set off in the drizzle and darkness for his chosen final destination near Pont Neuf. Even at his portly gentleman’s gait it was less than a ten-minute walk.

The ultimate man of the written word left no note behind.

CHAPTER 2

The place James had chosen from which to leave this life was on the north side of the river less than sixty yards from the broad, well-lighted bridge of le Pont Neuf, but it was dark there below the bridge, even darker on the promontory along the lowest level of walkways where the black, cold waters of the Seine swirled around the base of moss-darkened stone. Even in the daylight, this promontory was little used. Prostitutes, James knew, sometimes frequented the place at night, but not on a cold and drizzling March night such as this; tonight they stayed close to their hotels in Pigalle or stalked their furtive patrons in the narrow lanes on either side of the glowing Boulevard Saint Germain.

By the time James had umbrella-clacked his way to the narrow esplanade promontory that he’d picked out in the daylight—it had been just as he’d remembered it from earlier trips to Paris—he could no longer see to find his way. Distant street lamps across the Seine were ornamented with ironic halos by the rain. The barges and water taxis were few this night. James found his way down the final steps to the esplanade more by feel than by sight and tapped his way slowly beyond them like a blind man with a cane. Somewhere seemingly very far above, the usually distinctly pronounced sounds of carriage wheels and horses’ hooves were muffled and made more distant, almost less real, by the worsening rain and deeply puddled thoroughfares.

James could sense and hear and smell the river’s imminence rather than see it in the near-total darkness. Only the rather shocking emptiness of the point of his umbrella suddenly finding a void where pavement should be ahead brought him to a stop at the edge of what he knew to be the short, curved promontory. There were no steps going down to the river here, he knew: only a six- or seven-foot drop to the swirling black waters. The Seine ran fast and deep and wicked here. Now he could take one step forward into emptiness and it would be done.

James removed the small ivory snuffbox from his inner pocket and stood running his fingers across it for a moment. The motion made him remember a squib in The Times the previous year that claimed that the Eskimaux of the Arctic made no artwork to view, but shaped certain smooth stones to enjoy by touch during their many months of northern night. This thought made James smile. He felt he had spent enough of his own months in the northern night.

When he’d purloined a few pinches of his sister’s ashes the previous year—Katharine Loring waiting just outside the door at the crematorium where she’d come to claim the urn she would take back to Cambridge and the Jameses’ corner of the cemetery there—it had been with the sincere plan of spreading them at the place his younger sister had been most happy. But as the months passed, James had realized the impossibility of that idiot’s mission. Where? He remembered her brittle happiness when they were both much younger and had traveled in Switzerland with their Aunt Kate, a lady as literal as Hamlet’s by-the-card Grave Digger. Alice’s already pronounced penchant for hysterical illnesses had receded somewhat during those weeks free from her larger family and American home—and his first thought for his fiftieth birthday was to travel to Geneva and spread her ashes where he and she had laughed and matched wits, with poor Aunt Kate understanding none of their ironic wordplay, happily teasing each other and Aunt Kate as they walked the formal gardens and lakeside promenades.

But, in the end, Geneva did not feel right to James. Alice had been play-acting her “recovery” from her destined life of invalidism during that trip, just as he had been play-acting his collusion with her brittle high spirits.

The point of land near Newport, then, where she’d built her little house and lived in apparent health and happiness for a year or so.

No. That had been her early days with Miss Loring and, James felt more grimly in every month that had passed since Alice’s death, Miss Katharine P. Loring had had enough time and way with his sister. Not Newport.

So in the end he could think of no place to spread these few pitiful ashes where Alice had truly been happy. Perhaps she had glimpsed happiness, never really seized it, only during those months or years in Newport and then Cambridge, before what she called that “terrible summer” when her oldest brother William and Alice Gibbens were married on July 10, 1878. For years her brother William, her father, her brother Harry, brothers Bob and Wilkie, and an endless succession of visitors to their homes had kept up the joke that William would marry her—Alice James. Alice had always acted irritated at the running joke, but now—after her years of self-imposed invalidism and death—Henry James realized that she’d begun to believe in that marriage to William and had been all but destroyed when he married someone else. And someone else named, with cruel irony, Alice.

As she’d once put it to Henry James, that summer of William’s marriage had been when she “went down to the deep sea, and the dark waves clouded over her.”

So now, this night, this final night, James decided that he would merely hold tight to the snuffbox with its remnants of Alice’s tentative existence as he stepped forward and fell into the black water and oblivion. To do this, he knew, he would have to shut his author’s imagination down: no wondering in the second it will take to step forward as to whether the water will be freezing cold or whether, as the filthy water of the Seine began to fill his lungs, his atavistic urge for survival would cause him to thrash around, try to swim to the unclimbable mossy stone of the promontory.

No, he had to think of nothing but leaving his pain behind. Empty his mind of everything—always the hardest thing he’d ever tried to do.

James moved one foot forward, beyond the edge.

And suddenly realized that a dark shape he’d taken for a post was really the outline of a man standing not two feet from him. Seeing the dim outline of the soft hat pulled low and the silent figure’s aquiline profile half-hidden by the turned-up collar of a traveler’s cape-coat, James could now hear the man’s soft breathing.

With a stifled gasp, James took two clumsy steps backward and to the side.

“Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur. Je ne t’ai pas vu là-bas,” he managed to say. It was the truth. He hadn’t seen the man standing there.

“You’re English,” said the tall form. The man’s English had a Scandinavian accent. Swedish? Norwegian? James was not sure which.

“Yes.” James turned to go back up the steps and away from this spot.

At that moment a rare—for the season—Bateaux Mouches, part water taxi steamer, part tour-boat—passed by, and by the sudden light from the boat’s starboard lanterns, James could clearly see the tall man’s face.

“Mr. Holmes,” he said almost involuntarily. In his surprise he stepped backward toward the river, his left heel went over the edge, and he would have ended up in the water after all if the tall man’s right arm hadn’t shot out with lightning speed. Long fingers grasped James’s coat front in an amazingly firm grip and with one jerk the man pulled Henry James back onto the promontory.

Back to his life.

“What name did you just call me by?” asked the man, still tightly gripping James’s coat front. The Scandinavian accent was gone now. The voice was distinctly upper-class British and nothing else.

“I am sorry,” stammered James. “I must have been mistaken. I apologize for intruding upon your solitude here.” At that second, Henry James not only knew the identity of the tall man—despite blacker hair than when he’d met him four years earlier, fuller hair somehow, now raised to odd spikes rather than slicked back, and a thick mustache that had been lacking four years ago, combined with a nose slightly altered with actor’s putty or somesuch—but also knew that the man had been on the verge of throwing himself into the Seine when James had interrupted him with his arrival in the darkness announced by the tap-tap-tap of his ferule.

Henry James felt the fool at that moment, but he was a man on whom nothing was ever lost. Once he’d seen a face and learned its name, he never forgot.

He tried to move away, but the powerful fingers still gripped the front of his coat.

“What name did you call me by?” demanded the man again. His tone was as chill as iron in winter.

“I thought you were a man I’d met named Sherlock Holmes,” gasped James, wanting only to get away, wanting only to be back in his bed in the comfortable hotel on the Rue de la Paix.

“Where did we meet?” demanded the man. “Who are you?”

James answered only the second part. “My name is Henry James.” In his sudden panic, he’d almost added the long-abandoned “Jr.”

“James,” said Mr. Sherlock Holmes. “The younger brother of the great psychologist William James. You are the American scribbler who lives in London much of the time.”

Even in his intense discomfort of being held and touched by another man, James felt an even stronger resentment at being identified as being the younger brother of the “great” William James. His older brother had not even been known, outside of small, tight Harvard circles, until he’d published his The Principles of Psychology three years earlier in 1890. The book, for reasons somewhat lost on Henry, had catapulted William to international fame among intellectuals and other students of the human mind.

“Please be so kind as to release me at once,” said James in as stern a tone as he could muster. His outrage at being handled made him forget that Holmes—he was certain it was Sherlock Holmes—had just saved his life. Or perhaps that salvation was another mark against this hawk-nosed Englishman.

“Tell me when we met and I shall,” said Holmes, still gripping the front of James’s overcoat. “My name is Jan Sigerson. I am a Norwegian explorer of some renown.”

“A thousand apologies then, sir,” said James, feeling absolutely no apology in his heart. “I am obviously mistaken. For a second here, in the darkness, I thought you to be a gentleman I met four years ago at a tea-party benefit in Chelsea. The party was given by an American lady of my acquaintance, Mrs. T. P. O’Connor. I arrived with Lady Wolseley, you see, along with some other writers and artists of the stage—Mr. Aubrey Beardsley, Mr. Walter Besant . . . Pearl Craigie, Marie Corelli, Mr. Arthur Conan Doyle, Bernard Shaw, Genevieve Ward. During the tea, I was introduced to Mrs. O’Connor’s house guest for the weekend, a certain Sherlock Holmes. I see now that there is . . . no real resemblance.”

Holmes released him. “Yes, I remember now. I was there at Mrs. O’Connor’s estate briefly while solving a series of country home jewel thefts. It was the servants, of course. It always is.”

James straightened the front of his overcoat, arranged his cravat, firmly planted the tip of his umbrella, and resolved to leave Holmes’s presence without another word.

Ascending the dark steps, he realized with a shock that Holmes was walking beside him.

“It’s amazing, really,” said the tall Englishman in the slight Yorkshire accent James had heard at Mrs. O’Connor’s tea party in 1889. “I’ve used this Sigerson disguise for the past two years and passed close by—in daylight!—personages I’ve known for years, without their recognizing me. In New Delhi, in broad daylight in a sparsely populated square and for more than ten minutes, I stood next to Chief Inspector Singh, a man with whom I’d spent two months solving a delicate murder in Lahore, and the trained professional never glanced at me twice. Right here in Paris, I have passed by old English acquaintances and asked directions of my old friend Henri-August Lozé, the recently retired Prefect of Police for Paris with whom I’d worked on a dozen cases. With Lozé was the new Prefect de la Somme, Louis Lépine, with whom I have also had a close working relationship. Yet neither man recognized me. And yet you did. In the dark. In the rain. When you had nothing but self-murder on your mind.”

“I beg your pardon,” said James. He stopped out of sheer shock at Holmes’s effrontery. They were on the street level now and the rain had subsided a bit. But the numerous street lamps there still held their halos.

“Your secret is safe with me, Mr. James,” said Holmes. He was trying to light his pipe despite the damp. When the match finally flared, James could see even more easily that this was the “consulting detective” whom he’d met at Mrs. O’Connor’s tea party four years earlier. “You see,” continued Holmes, speaking now between puffs on the pipe, “I was there for the same purpose, sir.”

James could think of no reply to that. He turned on his heel and headed west along the sidewalk. Holmes caught up to him with two strides of his longer legs.

“We need to go somewhere for a late meal and wine, Mr. James.”

“I prefer to be alone, Mr. Holmes. Mr. Sigerson. Whomever you are pretending to be this night.”

“Yes, yes, but we need to talk,” insisted Holmes. He did not seem angered or perturbed by being found out. Or frustrated that his own suicide-by-Seine had been interrupted by the writer’s arrival. Only fascinated that James had seen through his disguise.

“We have absolutely nothing to discuss,” snapped James, trying to walk more quickly but only making himself look foolish in a portly way as the tall Englishman easily kept pace.

“We could discuss why you were ending your life with your sister Alice’s ashes in a snuffbox clenched so tightly in your right hand,” said Holmes.

James came to a full stop. After a moment he managed, “You . . . can . . . not . . . know . . . such a . . . thing.”

“But I do,” said Holmes, still working with his pipe. “And if you join me for a late snack and some good wine, I shall tell you how I know and why I know you will never complete the grim task you assigned yourself tonight, Mr. James. And I know just the clean, well-lighted café where we can talk.”

Holmes grasped James’s left elbow and the two began walking arm-in-arm up the Avenue de l’Opéra. Henry James was too shocked and astonished—and curious—to resist.

CHAPTER 3

Despite Holmes’s promise to lead them to a “well-lighted place,” James expected a dimly lighted out-of-the-way café opening onto some back alley. Instead, Holmes had brought him to the Café de la Paix, very near James’s hotel and at the intersection of Boulevard des Capucines and Place de l’Opéra in the 9th arrondissement.

The Café de la Paix was one of the largest, brightest, and most vividly decorated establishments in all of Paris, rivaled in its elaborate décor and number of mirrors only by Charles Garnier’s Opéra directly across the plaza. The place had been built, James knew, in 1862 to serve guests at the nearby Grand-Hôtel de la Paix and had come into its full fame during the Expo Exhibition of ’67. It had been one of the first of Paris’s public buildings to be lighted by electricity, but as if the hundreds or thousands of electric bulbs were not enough, bright lanterns with focal prisms still threw beams of light onto the grand mirrors. Henry James had avoided the place over the decades, if for no other reason than it was a common saying in Paris that to dine in the Café de la Paix meant one would eventually run into friends and acquaintances. The place was that popular. And Henry James preferred to choose the times and places that he would “run into” old acquaintances or friends.

Holmes seemed undisturbed by the crowds, the roar of conversation, and scores of eager faces looking up as they entered. James listened as the faux-Norwegian explorer requested his “usual table” from the maître d’—in fluent and properly accented French—and they were led to a small, round table somewhat away from the primary hustle and bustle of the buzzing establishment.

“You come here often enough to have a ‘usual table’?” asked James when they were alone. Or as alone as they could be amidst such bustle and noise.

“I have dined here at least three times a week in the two months I’ve been in Paris,” said Holmes. “I’ve seen dozens of acquaintances, former police partners in my detection business, and clients. None have looked twice at or through my Jan Sigerson disguise.”

Before James could respond, the waiter appeared and Holmes had the effrontery to order quickly for the both of them. After designating a rather good champagne, and perhaps due to the late hour, he ordered a huge after-Opera assortment for two: le lièvreen civet, pâtes crémeuses d’épeautre accompanied by a plateau de fromage affinés and a concurrent platter of la figue, l’abricot, le pruneau, en marmelade des fruits secs au thé Ceylan and biscuit spéculos, concluding with mousse légère chocolat.

James had no appetite. His delicate stomach was upset by the shocks of the past hour. More than that, he did not care for hare—especially jugged hare with the heavy and grainy French wheat-sauce ladled on it—and this night he had no taste whatsoever for the fruit. And after indulging in it far too much when he was a small boy in France, he detested chocolate mousse.

He said nothing.

James was dying to know how Holmes—this cut-rate street-corner magus—“knew” that sister-Alice’s ashes were in the snuffbox, but he would die rather than bring up the subject here in this public place. It was true, however, that between the din of chatting, laughing diners and the placement of their table, it would have been terribly hard for anyone to eavesdrop on them. But that was not the issue.

As they sipped the rather good champagne, Holmes said, “Did you read my obituary in The Times almost two years ago?”

“Friends brought it to my attention,” said James.

“I read it. The paper was three weeks old—I was in Istanbul at the time—but I did get to read it. That and the later interview with poor Watson describing my death at Reichenbach Falls while struggling with the ‘Napoleon of Crime’, Professor James Moriarty.”

Henry James would have preferred to stay silent, but he knew he was expected to fulfill his role as interlocutor.

“How did you survive that terrible fall, Mr. Holmes?”

Holmes laughed and brushed crumbs from his bristling black mustache. “There was no fall. There was no struggle. There was no ‘Napoleon of Crime’.”

“No Professor James Moriarty?” said James.

Holmes chuckled and dabbed at his lips and mustache with the white linen serviette. “None whatsoever, I am afraid. Invented from whole cloth for my own purposes . . . purposes of disappearance, in this event.”

“But Watson has told The Times of London that this Professor Moriarty had authored a book—The Dynamics of an Asteroid,” persisted James.

“Also invented by me,” said Holmes with a smug smile under the Sigerson mustache. “No such book exists. I cited it to Watson only so that he could later give the press—and his own inevitable publication of the events preceding Reichenbach Falls in his only recently released tale ‘The Final Problem’—some . . . what do you authors call it? . . . verisimilitude. Yes, that’s the word. Verisimilitude.”

“But might not,” said James, “after this detail has been mentioned in the various newspaper accounts of Moriarty and your demise, might not people attempt to find this Dynamics of an Asteroid book, even if just out of simple curiosity? If it does not exist, your entire Reichenbach Falls story must collapse.”

Holmes laughed this away with a flick of his hand. “Oh, I stressed to Watson, who has in turn stressed to the press, that Moriarty’s book was of the most unreadable and difficult advanced mathematics—I believe my exact words to Watson were ‘it was a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it’. That should give pause to the merely curious. I also remember telling Watson that so few copies of Moriarty’s famous book—famous within mathematical circles only—were published that copies were extremely rare, perhaps not even findable today.”

“So you deliberately lied to your friend about this . . . this ‘Napoleon of Crime’ . . . only so that Dr. Watson would repeat these total fabrications to the press?” said James, hoping that the chill in his tone would get through to Holmes.

“Oh, yes,” said Holmes with a slight smile. “Absolutely.”

James sat in silence for a while. Finally he said, “But what if Dr. Watson were called to give sworn testimony . . . perhaps in an inquest into your demise?”

“Oh, any such inquest would have been completed long before this,” said Holmes. “It’s been almost two years since Reichenbach Falls, after all.”

“But still . . .” began James.

“Watson would not have been perjuring himself in such testimony,” interrupted Holmes, showing the slightest hint of irritation now, “because he sincerely believed that Moriarty was, as I explained to him in such detail, the Napoleon of Crime. And Watson believes with equal sincerity that I died with Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland.”

James blinked several times despite his best effort to show no reaction to this. “You have no remorse about lying to your best friend? The press has reported that Dr. Watson’s wife has died in the interval since your . . . disappearance. So presumably the poor man is now mourning the loss of both his wife and his best friend.”

Holmes helped himself to more fruit. “I did more than lie, Mr. James. I led Watson on a merry chase—pursuing the mythical Moriarty, you understand—across England and Europe, ending at the fabled waterfall from whose waters neither my body, nor Professor Moriarty’s, shall ever be recovered.”

“That was beastly,” said James.

“That was necessary,” Holmes said with no anger or emphasis. “I had to disappear completely, you see. Disappear without a trace and in a manner that convinced the multitudes—or at least that small share of the multitudes that has shown interest in my modest adventures—that I was dead. Was there much mourning in London upon news of my demise?”

James blinked at this and was sure it was levity. Sure, that is, until he saw the serious expression on Sherlock Holmes’s disguised face.

“Yes,” he said at last. “Or so I hear.”

Holmes waited. Finally he said, “Watson’s telling of the Reichenbach tale, his story called ‘The Final Problem’, appeared in The Strand only three months ago—December of ’ninety-two. But I’m curious about the reaction when the news stories appeared two years ago.”

James resisted a sigh. “I don’t read The Strand,” he said. “But I’m told that young men in London, both when the news of your death was first published and then again this winter when Dr. Watson’s story appeared, started wearing black armbands.”

It was true that James would never read the kind of cheap-romance fiction and casual science-fact and household gossip that appeared in The Strand. But his younger friends Edmund Gosse and Jonathan Sturges both did. And both had worn black mourning armbands for months in solemn memory of Holmes’s presumed death. James had thought it all ridiculous.

Sherlock Holmes was smiling as he finished the last of his mousse.

Henry James, still terrified that the conversation would turn back to the contents of his snuffbox if Holmes were allowed to guide it, said, “But why carry out such a hoax, sir? Why betray your good friend Dr. Watson and thousands of your loyal readers with such a ruse if there were no grand criminal conspiracy—no Napoleon of Crime—pursuing you? What could be your motive? Sheer perversity?”

Holmes set his spoon down and stared directly at the writer. “I wish it had been something so simple, Mr. James. No, I decided that I had to fake my own death and disappear completely because of discovering through my own ratiocination . . . through the inductive and deductive processes by which I’ve become the most famous consulting detective in the world . . . a fact so shocking that it not only irrevocably changed my life but led me, as you found me tonight by le Pont Neuf, ready to end it.”

“What single fact could possibly . . .” began Henry James and then closed his mouth. It would be the worst of manners and presumptuousness to ask.

Holmes smiled tightly. “I discovered, Mr. James,” he said as he leaned closer, “that I was not a real person. I am . . . how would a literary person such as yourself put it? I am, the evidence has proven to me most conclusively, a literary construct. Some ink-stained scribbler’s creation. A mere fictional character.”

CHAPTER 4

Henry James now knew beyond a doubt that he was dealing with a crazy person. Something had driven this Sherlock Holmes person—if this was the Sherlock Holmes he had met four years earlier at Mrs. O’Connor’s garden party—to and beyond the raveled edge of rationality.

But the perverted truth was simple and shocking: James was fascinated with Holmes’s delusion that he was a fictional character and he wanted to hear more about it. It struck him as a wonderful conceit for a short story someday—perhaps one involving a famous writer who also had descended into believing that he was one of his own characters.

Holmes had ordered cognac—a poor choice, James thought, after the champagne and late evening meal—but both men sipped it now as the writer worked to pose his questions. Suddenly a noisy commotion erupted in the terrace-covered area of the café across the wide dance floor from where they were seated. Dozens of people had gotten to their feet; men were bowing; a few applauded.

“It’s the King of Bohemia,” said Holmes.

Henry James wondered if he should humor the madman across from him and then decided not to.

“There is no King of Bohemia, Mr. Holmes,” he said flatly. “That is the Prince of Wales. I’ve heard that he dines here from time to time.”

Holmes, not sparing another glance at the royal party across the crowded room, sipped his cognac. “You really have not read any of Watson’s chronicles of me in The Strand, have you, Mr. James?”

Before James could reply, Holmes continued, “One of his first published stories of our adventures—if, indeed, John Watson was the chronicler or author of these adventures—was titled ‘Scandal in Bohemia’ and dealt with an indelicate case—a former prima donna of the Imperial Opera of Warsaw using a certain photograph to blackmail, for . . . romantic indiscretions . . . a very famous member of a certain royal house. Watson, always discreet, invented the ‘King of Bohemia’ in his clumsy attempt to disguise the royal gentleman’s true identity, which was, of course, our very own Prince of Wales. In truth, the ‘scandal’ was the second time I had helped the Prince out of a jam. The first time was with a potential scandal dealing with a debt incurred in card games.” Holmes smiled above the rim of his cognac glass. “There is, of course, no ‘Imperial Opera of Warsaw’ either. Watson there was doing his earnest best to disguise the Paris Opéra.”

“You are making up for Dr. Watson’s attempts at discretion with amazing indiscretion,” murmured James.

“I am dead,” said Sherlock Holmes. “A dead man has little use for discretion.”

James glanced over to where the Prince of Wales was at the center of a laughing, bowing, fawning circle of dandies.

“Since I have neither read nor heard of the story . . . chronicle . . . of your ‘Scandal in Bohemia’ adventure,” he said softly, “I must presume that you reclaimed the blackmailing adventuress’s incriminating photograph for the Prince.”

“I did . . . and in a most clever manner,” said Holmes and laughed out loud. In the noise of the busy restaurant, no one seemed to notice. “And then the woman stole it back from me, leaving a framed portrait of herself in its place.”

“You failed, in other words,” said James.

“I failed,” said Sherlock Holmes. “Completely. Miserably.” He took another sip of his cognac. “I’ve been bested by very few men in my career, Mr. James. Never before or since by a . . . woman.”

James noticed that he uttered that final word with a strong tone of contempt.

“Does this have anything to do with your recent revelation that you are not a real person, Mr. Holmes?”

The tall man across the table from James rubbed his chin. “I suppose I should really ask you to address me as ‘Sigerson’, but tonight I do not care. No, Mr. James, the ancient case of the Prince of Wales and his former paramour—may she rot in peace—has nothing whatsoever to do with the reasons for me realizing that I am not, as you said earlier, ‘real’. Would you care to hear those reasons?”

James hesitated only a second or two. “Yes,” he said.

Holmes set his empty glass down and folded his long-fingered hands on the tablecloth. “It began, as so many things in life do, with simple domestic conversations,” he began. “Those who have read Dr. Watson’s chronicles in The Strand are aware—from certain background information he has given—that in eighteen eighty, the good doctor was removed from the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, then on duty in India, to the Berkshires Sixty-sixth Foot. On twenty-seven July of that year, Watson was severely wounded during the Battle of Maiwand. For many weeks his life teetered in the balance—the intrusive piece of lead had been a jazail bullet, that kind of heavy slug fired by the long, heavy musket so commonly used by the rebels in Afghanistan—and it had done serious internal damage.

“But Watson lived, despite the heat and flies and primitive regimental medical care available to him,” continued Holmes. “In October of eighteen eighty-one, he was dispatched back to England on the troopship Orontes.”

“I fail to see how this proves or disproves . . .” began Henry James.

“Patience,” said Holmes, holding up one long finger to command silence.

“The wound from the jazail bullet was in Watson’s shoulder,” said Holmes. “At various times, in Turkish baths and once when we had to strip to swim a river while on one of my . . . adventures . . . I saw the ugly scar. But Watson had no other wounds from the wars.”

Henry James waited. A waiter came by and Holmes ordered black Turkish coffee for the both of them.

“But five years ago—I remember the date in eighteen eighty-eight,” said Holmes, “Watson’s spidery shoulder wound from the jazail bullet had suddenly become a bullet wound he was complaining of, even in print, in his leg.”

“Could there not have been two such wounds?” asked James. “One in the poor man’s shoulder, the other in his leg? Perhaps he received the second wound in London, during the course of one of your adventures.”

“A second Afghan jazail bullet?” laughed Holmes. “Fired at Watson in London? Without my knowledge? It would seem highly unlikely, Mr. James. And added to that improbability are the twin facts that Watson was never wounded, never shot, during any of our adventures he chronicled and . . . this I find most interesting . . . the original shoulder wound that I’d seen, a terrible spiderweb of scars and a livid entry wound still visible, simply had disappeared when Watson began talking and writing about his leg wound.”

“Distinctly odd,” said James. He wondered what he should do if this Holmes-Sigerson person, almost certainly an escaped patient from some secured madhouse, should suddenly grow violent.

“And then there is the fact of Dr. Watson’s wives,” said Holmes.

James merely raised one eyebrow at this non sequitur.

“He has too many of them,” said Holmes.

“Dr. Watson is a bigamist then?”

“No, no,” laughed Holmes. Their coffee arrived. It was far too bitter for James’s taste, but the madman seemed to enjoy it. “They simply come and go—as if they flicker in and out of existence—primarily depending upon what I take to be a fiction-author’s need to have Watson living with me at our apartments at two-twenty-one-B Baker Street or not. And their names keep changing almost at random, Mr. James. Now a Constance. Then Mary. Then no name at all. Then Mary again.”

“Wives have a way of dying,” said James.

“That they do, thank God,” said Holmes, nodding in agreement. “But in reality there is usually some warning of that, some illness, and—failing that—some period of mourning for the widower. Watson, bless his heart, simply moves in with me again and our adventures continue apace. Between these mythical wives, I mean.”

Henry James cleared his throat but could think of nothing to say.

“Then there is the odd fact of our residence itself,” bore on Holmes, taking no clue to stop based on his interlocutor’s obvious boredom. “I have lived—Watson and I have lived—at two-twenty-one-B Baker Street since shortly after we met in January of eighteen eighty-one.”

“Is there a paradox in that?” asked James.

“When these doubts of mine began and multiplied in the winter and spring of eighteen ninety and eighteen ninety-one,” Holmes said very softly, “I went to the office of the City Surveyor and looked at the most recent maps of our neighborhood. As of eighteen ninety-one, a full ten years after we took up residence at two-twenty-one-B, the residences and structures on Baker Street ended at Number Eighty-five.”

“Incredible,” muttered James.

“But mostly . . .” continued Holmes as if he’d not heard Henry James speak, “it is the . . . cloudiness, lack of daily detail, emptiness . . . for me of the periods between my actual cases that most makes me doubt my existence separate from some fictional page. It’s as if I’m alive . . . real . . . only when investigating a case.”

“Could not your . . . ah . . . disposition toward indulging in certain drugs account for that?” asked James.

Holmes laughed and set his coffee cup down with a clatter. “You do read my adventures in The Strand after all!”

“Not at all,” said James. “But as I mentioned, some younger friends of mine do. I remember their commenting on your frequent injections of . . . cocaine, was it not?” James well remembered Edmund Gosse’s fascination with Holmes’s dependence upon the drug. It had made Henry James suspect that Gosse himself had experimented with injecting it upon occasion.

“Only a seven-per-cent solution,” laughed Holmes. “Quite tame by any opium-eater’s scale. But since my death on twenty-four April eighteen ninety-one, I have successfully cured myself of that self-indulgence.”

“Very good,” said James. “How did you manage that?”

“By the replacement use of a much less harmful injected substance called morphine,” said Sherlock Holmes. “And in the past weeks, I have discovered an even more miraculous and innocuous replacement—distilled by our German friend who created aspirin, Mr. Bayer himself—a drug so habit- and side-effect-free that both Bayer and those who use it have named it after its heroic qualities.”

“Yes?” said James.

“It is called heroin,” said Sherlock Holmes, “and I look forward to finding greater . . . and less expensive . . . quantities of it in America when you and I go there next week. Morphine has been sold in abundance on the streets of the United States—much more so than in England—since so many tens or hundreds of thousands of wounded soldiers continued to use it after their Civil War thirty years ago. And now this heroic heroin, while not yet released to the general marketplace, is becoming equally abundant there.”

James was goggling at the tall man. “We’re going to America? We?”

“We’re leaving for Marseilles and a steamship bound for America early in the morning,” said Holmes. “There is a seven-year-old murder there in their capital city that I am duty bound to solve, and it is in your very deep interest—compelling interest, my dear James—for you to accompany me. I could not, in good conscience, leave you behind in Paris while you are in this melancholic and possibly still self-destructive state of mind. Besides . . . you will enjoy this! The game’s afoot and we’re called to it as certainly and inescapably as your next story or book calls to your creator’s soul and writer’s pen.”

Holmes beckoned for the waiter to bring the bill and paid it while James sat there with his eyes still wide and his mouth hanging unbecomingly open.

CHAPTER 5

In the ten days that followed, while crossing the Atlantic from France to New York and then taking a train to Washington, D.C., Henry James felt as if he were in a dream. No, not so much in a dream—his dreams tended to be specific and colorful and powerful—but, rather, in a fog. A delicious and dangerous and decision-free fog.

They sailed from Marseilles on the older French liner the Paris. James thought he remembered being aboard her twelve years before, the last time he’d visited America, when he’d hurried home to Cambridge during the period when first his mother and then his father had been dying. Sherlock Holmes refused to take a more modern English steamship since it would mean a stop somewhere in England on the way—the Paris paused only briefly in Dublin—and Holmes would not set foot in England, he said, until he was “fully satisfied”. Satisfied as to what, was not further defined at that time, but James had to guess that it related to the subject of the consulting detective’s real versus fictional existence.

There had been five amazing conversations—revelations, in truth—during the past ten days before landfall in New York, and James had to sort them out not only by content but by the context of where they had been announced.

The first had been outside his hotel on the Rue de la Paix after their late-evening dining on the night they had met.

“It is, of course, absurd to think that I can—or should wish to—go to America now,” James had said, holding his umbrella in both hands like a weapon.

“But you must,” said Holmes in calm terms. “My case depends upon it.”

“ ‘Case’?” repeated Henry James. “I thought you had left being a consulting detective behind when you faked your own death almost two years ago.”

“Not a bit of it,” said Holmes. “Even as Jan Sigerson, I did my bit of detecting in Turkey, India, and elsewhere. But that was for my brother Mycroft, for Whitehall, and for England. Now I find I must take up a private case again. Solve what is almost certainly an apolitical mystery.”

James continued to hold his folded umbrella at port arms. The rain had stopped. “Let me guess,” he said. “In Dr. Watson’s absence, you need me to chronicle your adventures. To be your Boswell.”

Sherlock Holmes laughed loudly enough that the sound echoed back from the nearby stone buildings. “No, no, not at all, Mr. James. Nor do I think such a role as Boswell would suit you in any event, but certainly not in writing up the details of a mystery.”

James’s spine stiffened a bit at that. He considered himself capable of writing any sort of story—as long as neither its topic nor style was beneath his dignity. And he had done a few of those stories for money in his youth.

“What I mean,” continued Holmes, “is that while I have not had the pleasure of reading your novels and shorter fiction, Mr. James, many of my more literary acquaintances—including Watson himself—have. And from what they tell me, your rendering of the most exciting adventures you and I might have in America would end up with a beautiful young lady from America as the protagonist, various lords and ladies wandering through, verbal opaqueness followed by descriptive obtuseness, and nothing more exciting being allowed to occur in the tale than a verbal faux pas or tea service being late.”

James wondered whether he should be—and act—offended, but decided that he was not. All in all, he was amused.

“Then you could have no conceivable need for my presence in this quixotic jaunt to America you seem about to undertake, sir.”

“Ah, but I truly do, Mr. James,” said Holmes. “I need you for introductions, for information, for American context, for—what did you call it earlier?—for cover, and for companionship. I shall be a stranger in a strange land and to solve this mystery I shall need your help. Do you wish to hear more of the reasons for this?”

James said nothing. His thought had already turned away from suicide in the Seine toward the soft bed in his hotel room a few dozen paces and a lift ride from where he stood in the darkness.

“In March of eighteen ninety-one, almost exactly two years ago,” continued Holmes, either unaware of or indifferent to James’s very obvious lack of interest, “I had a visit at my bachelor quarters at two-twenty-one-B Baker Street from a prospective client. The distressed gentleman was an American, the topic was murder in the American capital, and his name was Edward Hooper. He showed me three thousand dollars that he was willing to pay me if I came with him to America and solved the mystery of his sister’s death. I accepted only one dollar—as my retainer—but it has taken these three years for me to become active in the . . . mystery.”

“No, I do not know nor have I heard of . . .” began James and then stopped abruptly.

“I believe you knew Mr. Edward Hooper’s sister—Marian Hooper Adams,” said Holmes.

“Clover,” James said so softly that he could hardly hear the two syllables himself. “Clover Adams,” said Henry James. “From the time she was a girl, everyone called Marian Hooper ‘Clover’. It suited her.”

“You knew her well then,” pressed Holmes.

“I have been friends with Henry Adams for . . . many, many years,” said James. He wished he could will himself not to speak of any of this, but this night he seemed under some strange compulsion to break confidences he normally would have guarded with his life. “I was also close to Clover Adams—as close as anyone could be to such an intelligent but unpredictable and frequently melancholic woman. I was a guest in their home the last time I was in America in the early eighteen eighties.”

“You know the public details of her death then,” said Holmes. There was a strange light in the consulting detective’s eye, James thought, but it could have been a reflection from one of the gas lights that still illuminated this section of the Rue de la Paix.

“Her death by suicide,” James said in a sharper tone than he might have intended. “By her own hand. Six . . . no . . . some seven-and-a-half years ago now. It is ancient history for all but the most closely bereaved such as her husband Henry and her dear friends—a category which includes me.”

“On six December, eighteen eighty-five,” Holmes said quietly. “The date is part of the mystery presented to me by her brother, Mr. Edward Hooper.”

James started to say that he had never had the pleasure of actually meeting Clover’s brother Edward, that Clover and Henry had always referred to him as “Ned”, but instead he heard himself snapping words like a whip. “Death by sad suicide, Mr. Holmes. Everyone agreed to that. Her husband Henry. My particular mutual friend and neighbor to the Adamses, Mr. John Hay. The doctor. The police. The newspapers. Everyone agreed that she had taken her own life. She was of a melancholic nature, you see. All of us who knew and loved Clover Adams had known that. A tendency toward melancholy—and even self-murder—ran in the Hooper family. And she was in a deep, perhaps irrecoverable mourning for her father who had passed away earlier that year. She had been very close to her father, you see, and nothing that Henry Adams or anyone else could do in the months following Mr. Hooper’s death seemed capable of breaking the iron bonds of loss and melancholy that had closed around poor Clover.”

James stopped. He was almost panting from the intensity and exertion of his little speech. He felt like a fool for saying so much.

Holmes reached into an interior pocket of his tweed jacket and removed what looked to be a small white card. Despite his spirit of resistance, James unclenched one hand from his umbrella and took the offered card. It looked like a lady’s visiting card, although it was done in simple white rather than the colorful cards now in vogue in England and America and was embossed with a subtle white rectangle within the rectangle of the card itself. At the top of the card within that plain border, there were five hearts embossed. Four of the hearts had been colored in, in blue, with what looked to have been hasty strokes of a colored pencil or crayon. The fifth heart was left uncolored—blank.

Henry James knew immediately the more general meaning of what the hearts signified. He had no clue as to what the empty heart or the single line of print below the hearts—a single sentence that looked to have been added by a typewriting machine—might mean.

She was murdered.

“When he visited me asking for help two years ago, Edward Hooper, Clover’s brother, said that he had received exactly this card every six December—every anniversary of his sister’s death—since the first anniversary of her odd death in eighteen eighty-six,” said Holmes. “And I notice, Mr. James, that you instantly recognized the significance of the five embossed hearts on the card. Mr. Hooper told me that the four surviving members of the Five Hearts also annually received such a card. This, he said he knew for a certainty, included Mr. Henry Adams, although Adams had never spoken to the others about it.”

“Ned Hooper was not one of the Five Hearts,” James said numbly.

Holmes nodded. “No. And he believed that he was the only person who was not one of the Five Hearts who annually received this note. But, of course, he could not be certain of that.”

“Clover Adams’s death was by her own hand,” repeated Henry James. “It is of no one’s business except her husband’s, and Henry Adams does not speak of that time or that event. He came close to death himself from sheer grief after . . . her actions.”

“What of her brother’s suspicions?” asked Holmes.

“They are misplaced,” said James. “These . . . cards . . . if they are or were actually being sent, are an example only of someone’s sick and perverted sense of humor. As I said, melancholy—and perhaps some not-infrequent sense of persecution—runs in the Hooper family. I have not met Mr. Edward Hooper—I always heard him referred to as ‘Ned’—but I am sure that he was—and remains—mistaken.”

“Mr. Edward Hooper is dead,” said Sherlock Holmes.

“Dead?” James could hear how small the single syllable sounded amidst the carriage and pedestrian background bustle of Paris’s joyous Rue de la Paix at night.

“He attempted suicide this past December—the day after the December-six anniversary of his sister’s so-called suicide—by throwing himself from a third-story window of his home on Beacon Street, in Boston,” said Sherlock Holmes. “Although badly injured, he survived and was taken to a Boston asylum. Hooper appeared to be recovering, both mentally and physically, but two weeks ago he came down with pneumonia. The disease carried him off.”

“This is terrible,” muttered James. “Horrible. Henry did not write me of these events. How is it that you, Mr. Holmes, who say that you have been in the wilderness of the far-flung Empire for these last two years, should be aware of such recent events in America when I am not?”

“Every good Englishman is behind The Times,” said Sherlock Holmes.

James blinked either his lack of understanding or his disgust at hearing the ancient joke in this context. Perhaps he meant to signal both.

“I have read my London newspapers even when, as in India, they were weeks out of date,” elaborated Holmes. “Here in Paris, they are quite current. And the choice of American newspapers here—including the newspaper from Boston which carried the news of Edward Hooper’s suicide attempts and final death by pneumonia—is very extensive indeed.”

James took a ragged breath and looked back toward the beckoning lights of his hotel.

Holmes took a half step closer until he gained James’s full attention again. “You see why I owe it to Ned Hooper to fulfill my promise of taking up the case of his sister’s death.”

“There is no ‘case’,” James said again. “There was only the tragedy of her suicide more than seven years ago. The ‘case’, as you so melodramatically call it, is closed.”

“Do you remember the cause of Mrs. Adams’s death?” asked Holmes.

Henry James knew that he should turn away at that point, go into his hotel, and never talk to this madman again. But he did not move.

“At the depths of her melancholy, when she was alone for a few moments one Sunday, Clover drank a potion that was part of her photographic developing chemical apparatus,” James said at last rather than continue suffering the silence. “It contained arsenic. Death was instantaneous.”

“Death from that type of arsenic, potassium cyanide, is relatively quick but rarely instantaneous,” Holmes said calmly, as if he were discussing railroad timetables. “She would have eventually asphyxiated but only after long moments of the most exquisite agony.”

James raised his free hand as if he could shield himself from such words and images.

“Who found her body?” persisted Holmes.

“Her husband . . . Henry . . . I am certain,” said James, coming very close to stammering. He suddenly felt very confused. Part of his consciousness wished that he had been alone to do what he had planned to do on the sidewalk along the Seine.

“Yes. The police report said it was Henry Adams who discovered her—‘on the floor and comatose before the fireplace’,” agreed Holmes. “This was at a certain time of the morning on Sunday, six December. Does that time of the day and week bear any significance for you, Mr. James?”

“No. None at all. Other than . . . do you mean because it was the time each Sunday that Clover had for years set aside to write to her father, especially during his illness?”

Holmes did not answer. Instead, he took another half step closer and whispered, “Henry Adams had told friends that he never left his wife alone at that hour, on those Sundays, precisely because he feared that her melancholia would overpower her reason. And yet on that Sunday the sixth of December seven years ago, she was alone. At least for several moments.”

“I believe that Henry was on his way out to see his dentist about a tooth that was giving him . . . are you interrogating me, Mr. Holmes?”

“Not at all, Mr. James. I’m explaining why your presence during this investigation is of the utmost importance.”

“I will not betray a friend, Mr. Holmes.”

“Of course not,” said the detective. “But would it not be a case of betraying both your friend Henry Adams and your former friend Clover Adams if it were murder and if no one even bothered to look into it?”

“It . . . was . . . not . . . murder,” James said for what he vowed to be the last time. “Clover was one of the first—and I would venture to say the preeminent—female American photographers of her era. Her work was ethereal. Other worldly. But that very quality of other-worldliness added to her inherited tendency toward terrible melancholy. On this particular winter day, that tendency must have overwhelmed her and she drank some of the easily accessible chemicals from her photographic laboratory—a mixture which, she must have known, contained arsenic.”

“And who gave her those specific developing chemicals?” asked Holmes.

“I assumed she purchased them herself,” snapped James. “If you are again hinting of any shade of guilt accruing to my good and honest friend Henry Adams . . .”

Holmes held up a gloved hand. “Not at all. I happen to know that it was a stranger who provided those chemicals to Mrs. Adams. A brother of a female ‘friend’, a certain Miss Rebecca Lorne, whose acquaintance Mrs. Adams had made quite accidentally in Washington. That friend, Miss Lorne, was there waiting . . . according to police reports and newspaper accounts given to me by Ned Hooper two years ago . . . when Henry Adams returned from his dental errand. Miss Lorne told Adams that she had dropped in to see Mrs. Adams and asked if she was receiving. Mr. Adams said he would run upstairs to see if his wife felt up to seeing a visitor and then he found her body on the floor.”

“Again, you seem to be insinuating . . .” began James, showing the fiercest scowl he could manage. Usually even a much lower-wattage version of that scowl served to silence any presumptuous or personally trespassing interlocutors. Not so this night with Holmes.

“I am insinuating nothing,” said Holmes. “I am merely explaining why you and I will be catching the early express train to Marseilles at six quarter seven tomorrow morning and be boarding a steamship to New York by tomorrow night.”

“There is no power, means, force, blackmail, inducement, or other method of persuasion—in this lifetime or in any other possible variation of this life—that you could use to persuade me to travel with you tomorrow to Marseilles, much less to America, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Henry James.

CHAPTER 6

The two men were alone in a first-class carriage compartment on the express train to Marseilles, which was some comfort to Henry James, and for the first three hours of the trip neither man spoke. James was pretending to read a novel. Holmes was behind The Times.

Suddenly, with neither warning nor prelude, Holmes lowered his paper and said, “You had a beard then as well.”

James looked up and stared. “I beg your pardon.” Eventually, he would get used to Sherlock Holmes’s sudden changes of topic or seemingly irrelevant announcements from the blue, but not this day. Not yet.

“Four years ago,” said Holmes. “When I was introduced to you at Mrs. T. P. O’Connor’s garden party. You wore a full beard then as well.”

James said nothing. He’d had that full beard since the Civil War.

“It is partially how I recognized you in the dark along the Seine,” said Holmes and returned to his paper.

Finally, seeing a way to irritate his irritating compartment-mate, James did speak. “I would think that the world’s most famous consulting detective might rely upon more points of physiognomy for recognition than a man’s beard.”

Holmes laughed. “Of course! I see the physiognomy of men, not their added facial-hair accouterments. I am, for instance, somewhat of an expert on ears.”

“You didn’t even remember we had been introduced,” said James, ignoring the absurd comment about ears.

“Not true, sir,” laughed Holmes. “I remember at the time that when I’d heard the American Mr. James was to be at the garden party, I’d hoped that it would be your brother, the psychologist, with whom I looked forward to discussing several things.”

“William hadn’t yet published his Principles of Psychology in eighteen eighty-eight,” groused James. “He was—to all intents and purposes—unknown to the world. How could you have known you wanted to talk to him? Your memory serves you poorly, Mr. Holmes.”

“Not a bit of it,” chuckled the detective. “Friends in America—friends who shared, in some way, my own peculiar vocation—had sent me copies of your older brother’s various papers on psychology, years before his full book appeared. But the primary reason I was distracted upon meeting you at Mrs. O’Connor’s garden party, Mr. James, was that at that precise moment I was watching my suspect—the jewel thief—ply his trade. We caught him, as Watson would say, red-handed. Although I admit to having never learned where that silly phrase—‘red-handed’—came from.”

“A mere servant you said last night,” said James, looking back down at the hieroglyphics of the novel on his lap. He was too upset to read, which was a very rare occurrence for Henry James.

“A mere servant, but one in the rather intimate employ of your very own Lady Wolseley,” said Holmes.

James almost dropped his book. “One of Lord and Lady Wolseley’s servants responsible for jewelry thefts!” he cried. “Impossible. Absurd.”

“Not at all,” said Holmes. “Lord Wolseley had paid me to solve the series of crimes that were plaguing his friends with such lovely country houses, but he needn’t have bothered coming to me. A moderately competent village constable could have solved that simple crime. I knew who it was—or had narrowed the very small category containing the obvious culprit—within hours of taking the case. You see, the thefts had begun in various high English houses in Ireland. All the major English houses, in fact, save for Lord Wolseley’s and a few English aristocrats there who were out of favor with Lord and Lady Wolseley.”

Henry James wanted to object again—on various obscure personal grounds as well as logical ones—but he could not yet find the words.

“The chief thief’s name was Germond,” continued Holmes. “Robert Jacob Germond. A rather aging corporal who had served as the General’s—Lord Wolseley’s—batman and even valet on various campaigns and in both the Irish military camps and at Lord Wolseley’s estate on that green isle. One has to say that Corporal Germond did not look the role of a jewel thief—he had a long, rather basset-hound face with the accompanying luminous, sad, and sensitive eyes—but one look at the record of thefts within Lord Wolseley’s regimental garrisons in Ireland over the years, and then amongst the homes of Lord W.’s friends in Ireland, and then again in England during his and Lady Wolseley’s various visits home, and the identity of the mastermind—although I admit that it is far too grand to call him by that title—of this jewel-theft ring was immediately obvious to even the least deductive mind. At the very moment you and I were meeting at the garden party, Mr. James, I was covertly watching Corporal Germond go about his actual thieving. He was very smooth.”

James felt himself blushing. He’d come to know several of Lord and Lady Wolseley’s primary servants over the years—most of them former military men under the General—but Germond had been assigned as his own personal servant during James’s only visit so far to Ireland and Lord Wolseley’s estate there. James had felt a strange . . . affinity . . . for the soft-spoken, sad-eyed personal valet.

James was not pleased that he and Holmes had to share a stateroom on the Paris, even though it was in first class and adequate to their needs. The booking had been so close to sailing time, Holmes had explained, that only a cancellation of this two-bed single stateroom had been available. “Unless,” he had added, “you would have preferred traveling in steerage . . . which, I know from personal experience, has its peculiar charms.”

“I do not wish to be traveling on that ship . . . or any ship . . . at all,” had been James’s rejoinder.

But save for the sleeping hours, the two saw little of each other. Holmes never went to breakfast, was rarely seen partaking of the rather good petit déjeuner in the morning dining area, was never glimpsed at lunch times, and only occasionally filled his assigned seat at the captain’s table where, every evening in his black tie and tails, James tried to converse with the French aristocrats, German businessmen, ship’s white-bearded captain (who seemed primarily interested in his food at any rate), and the single Englishwoman at the table—an almost-dotty dowager who insisted on calling him “Mr. Jane”.

James spent as much of each day at sea as he could either browsing the ship’s modest library—none of his works were there, even in translation—or pacing the not-terribly-spacious deck, or listening to the occasional desultory piano recital or small concert arranged for the passengers’ amusement.

But twice Henry James had accidentally caught Sherlock Holmes in powerfully personal and embarrassing moments.

The first time he’d surprised Holmes—who showed no surprise or embarrassment either time—had been after breakfast when James was returning to the shared stateroom in order to change his clothes. Holmes was lying, still in his nightshirt, on his bed, some sort of strap wrapped around the upper bicep of his left arm, and was just in the process of removing the needle of a syringe from the soft flesh at his inner elbow joint. On the bedside table—the table they had shared, the table on which James set his book when it came time to extinguish the lights—there was a vial of dark liquid that James had to assume was morphine.

Henry James was not unacquainted with the delivery and effects of morphine. He had watched his sister Alice float off on its golden glow, away from all humanity (including her own), for months before her death. Katharine Loring had even been instructed by Alice’s physician on how to administer the proper syringe-amount of morphine should no one else be available. James had never been required to give his dying sister the injection, but he had been prepared to. Alice, in her final months the year before, had also received regular sessions of hypnosis, along with the morphia, in the concerted efforts to lessen her seemingly endless pain.

But Sherlock Holmes was in no physical pain that Henry James knew of. He was simply now a morphine addict, after having been a cocaine-injection addict for many years. And he’d already stated that he was eager to find and use this new “heroic” drug of Mr. Bayer’s since it was so available in the United States.

Holmes had not been embarrassed—he’d simply looked up at James under heavy eyelids and calmly set away the bottle, syringe, and other apparatus in a small leather case James had already seen him carrying (and assumed to be his shaving kit)—and then smiled sleepily.

Disgusted and making no efforts to hide that reaction, James had turned on his heel and left the room, despite the fact that he had not changed into his deck-walking clothes.

Another painfully intimate moment came when James entered the stateroom after a perfunctory knock late on the fourth night out from Dublin only to find Holmes standing naked in front of the nightstand that held their water basin and small mirror. Again, Holmes showed no appropriate embarrassment and did not hurry to pull on his nightshirt, despite his stateroom-mate’s obvious discomfort.

Henry James had seen grown men naked before. He tended to react in complicated ways to the naked male form, but his primary reaction was to think of death.

When Henry James had been a toddler, he’d followed his brother William—older by just a year—everywhere William went. Henry couldn’t (and did not wish to) keep up with William during his brother’s rough-and-tumble years of outdoor play, but later, when William decided that he would become an artist, Henry decided that he would also become an artist. As many times as he could, he would join William in the drawing and painting classes their father paid for.

One day James entered the Newport drawing studio to find his orphaned cousin Gus Barker posing nude for the life-drawing class. Shocked to his marrow by the beauty of his red-headed cousin—that paleness of skin, the flaccid penis so vulnerable, Gus’s nipples so femininely pink against that white skin—James had pretended to an artist’s professional interest only, scowling down at William’s and others’ drawings as if preparing to seize paper and stroke some lines of charcoal of his own to capture such an ineffable power of nakedness. But mostly young Henry James, the incipient writer in him rising more certainly than any specific sexual consciousness, was fascinated with his own layered and troubled response to his male cousin’s calmly displayed body.

Young Gus Barker was the first of their close circle of family and friends to die in the Civil War, cut down by some Confederate sniper’s bullet in Virginia. For decades after that, Henry James could not think of his first shock of admiring the naked male form without thinking of that very form—the copper stippling of Gus’s pubic hair, the veins on his muscled forearms, the strange power of his pale thighs—lying and rotting under the loam in some unknown Virginia field.

After Henry James’s youngest brother Wilkie was badly wounded during the Massachusetts 54th black regiment’s ill-planned and disastrous attack on South Carolina’s Fort Wagner, he had been in such terrible condition when he’d been brought home—found among the dying in an open army surgical station in South Carolina and saved purely by the coincidence of family friend Cabot Russell there looking for his missing dead son on the battlefield—that they’d had to leave Wilkie on his filthy stretcher in the hallway entrance by the door for weeks. James had been with both his father and mother when they’d bathed their mutilated youngest child, and Wilkie’s naked body was a different sort of revelation for young Henry James, Jr.: a terrible wound in the back from which the Confederate ball had not yet been removed and a sickening wound to the foot—they’d roughly operated on the boat bringing Wilkie north to remove that ball—that showed both decay and the early conditions of gangrene.

The first time Henry had watched his brother naked on the cot, being turned and touched so gingerly by his mother after Wilkie’s filthy-smelling uniform had been cut off, he had marveled at how absolutely vulnerable the male human body was to metal, fire, the blade, disease. In many ways, especially when turned—screaming—onto his stomach so that they could bathe his back and legs, with both wounds now visible, Wilkie James looked more like a week-old corpse than like a living man. Than like a brother.

Then there was the other “Holmes” whom James had seen naked. Near the end of the war, James’s childhood friend—only two years older than Henry but now aged decades by his war experiences—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had come to visit James in Boston and then traveled with him to North Conway, where James’s cousin Minnie Temple and her sisters had lived. For the first night of that North Conway visit, this other Holmes and young James had been forced to share an absurdly spartan room and single sagging bed—before they found a more suitable rental the next day—and James, already in his pajamas and under the covers, had seen Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., standing naked in the lamplight in front of a wash basin and mirror just as Sherlock Holmes was this night somewhere in the tossing North Atlantic on the Paris.

The young James had once again marveled at the beauty of the lean and muscled male body when Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had stood there in the lamplight that night, but once again there had been the all-too-visible connection with Death: terrible scars radiating like white spiderwebs across Oliver’s back and sides and upper leg. Indeed, that other Holmes—James’s Holmes—had also been terribly wounded in the war and was so proud of the fact that he would talk about it, in detail not usually allowed in front of ladies, for decades afterwards. That other Holmes, eventually to be the famous jurist, insisted on keeping his torn and bloody Union uniform, still smelling of gunpowder and blood and filth just as Wilkie’s cot and blanket and cut-away uniform had, in his wardrobe for all these decades to follow. He would take it out upon occasion of cigars and conversation with his fellow men of name and fortune and show them the blood long dried-brown and the ragged holes that so paralleled the white-webbed ragged holes James had glimpsed scarring his childhood friend’s bare body.

For James, it had been another glimpse not only at the beauty of the naked male form but at the mutilating graffiti of Death trying to claim the mortality of that form.

So, even in his shock, Henry James was not surprised to see in the stateroom’s dim lamplight that Mr. Sherlock Holmes—leaner even than Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had been at an age fifteen years Sherlock’s junior—also had scars across his back. These looked as raw as the bullet wounds James had seen in Wilkie’s and Oliver’s flesh, but those wounds radiated outward like some zealot flagellant’s self-inflicted lashes that had cut through skin and flesh.

“Excuse me,” James had said, still standing in the open door to the stateroom. “I did not . . .” He did not know what he “did not” so he stopped there.

Holmes turned and looked at him. There were more white scars on his pale chest. James had time to note that despite the tall man’s extreme thinness—his flanks were all but hollowed in the way of some runners and other athletes whom James had seen compete—Mr. Sherlock Holmes, whose flesh in the lamplight glowed almost as white as James’s cousin Gus Barker’s had been, was a mass of corded muscles which seemed just waiting to be flexed and used in some urgent circumstance.

“Excuse me,” James had said again and had gone back out through the door. He stayed in the First Class Lounge that night, smoking and reading some irrelevant magazine, until he was certain that Holmes would be in bed asleep before he himself returned to the stateroom.

The Paris, far behind its own rather unambitious schedule, came into New York Harbor in early evening when part of the city’s oldest skyline was backlit by the setting sun. Most of the transatlantic liners James had taken back from Europe over the years, if arriving in New York, did so early in the morning. He realized that this evening arrival was not only more aesthetically pleasing—although James could no longer tolerate the aesthetics of New York City—but also seemed somehow more appropriate to their covert mission.

Holmes had joined him, uninvited, at the railing where James had been watching the scurry of tug boats and flurry of harbor traffic, listening to the hoots and bells and shouts of one of the world’s busiest harbors.

“Interesting city, is it not?” asked Holmes.

“Yes,” was James’s only response. When he’d left New York and America ten years earlier in 1883, he’d vowed never to return. Safely back in Kensington, he had written essays about his American and New York impressions. The city itself—where James had enjoyed years of what he thought was a happy childhood in their home near Washington Square Park—had changed, James observed, beyond all recognition. Between the 1840’s and the 1880’s, he said, New York had become a city of immigrants and strangers. The civilities and certainties of the semi-rural yet still pleasantly urban Washington Square years had been replaced by these hurtling verticalities, these infusions of strange-smelling, strange-speaking foreigners.

At one point, James had compared the Jews in their ghettoes of the Lower East Side to rats and other vermin—scurrying around the feet of their distracted and outnumbered proper Anglo-Saxon predecessors—but he also admired the fact that these . . . immigrants . . . put out more daily newspapers in Hebrew than appeared in the city in English; that they had created a series of Yiddish theaters that entertained more people nightly—however boorishly and barbarically—than did the Broadway theaters; that the Jews—and the Italians and other lower orders of immigrants, including most of the Irish—had made such a niche for themselves in the new New York that Henry James was certain that they could never, having attached themselves like limpets to that proud Dream of America shared by so many of its inhabitants, be displaced.

It had made Henry James feel like a stranger in his own land, in his own city, and his essays had returned to that theme again and again and again.

He said nothing of that now as he and Holmes silently watched the final preparations for the old liner to be nudged into its proper berth along the busy docks.

“You will want to know how I knew that night along the Seine that you were carrying your sister Alice’s ashes,” Holmes said very softly. People were shoving and milling to lean along the long railing now, but there nonetheless seemed to be a bubble of privacy around the two men.

“I want to know nothing of the kind,” returned James with equal softness but much more intensity. “Your wild and inaccurate speculations do not interest me in the least, Mr. Holmes.”

“I had been there in the dark longer than you,” continued Holmes, his eyes on the surrounding ships and fireboats and rowboats and busy mayhem, “and my eyes had much better adapted to the dark than had yours. I saw you remove the small ivory snuffbox several times . . . hold it in a way that almost might be called prayerful—return it to your inner pocket, then retrieve it again. I knew it was an ivory snuffbox—only ivory gleams that way in such low light—and I also knew at once that you did not take snuff.”

“You know nothing of my habits, sir.” James’s voice could not have been colder nor more dismissive of this uninvited conversation. But because of the crowd behind them, he could not simply turn and walk away. He shifted his gaze away from Holmes instead.

“I do, of course,” said Holmes. “A user of snuff, even an occasional user, has telltale nicotine stains on his thumb and second finger. You did not. Also, someone using a snuffbox to retrieve pinches of snuff does not carefully and permanently join the various openings of the box with sealing wax.”

“There is no way you could have seen such things in those seconds, in that darkness,” said James. His heart was pounding against his ribs.

“I could. I did,” said Sherlock Holmes. “And then, as we were leaving, I contrived to light my pipe to confirm my earlier observations. You were not aware of it—holding the snuffbox obviously had become a nervous habit with you, Mr. James, especially in extremis, as it were—but you had removed it briefly several times after we’d walked away from the river. I could see that it was more than a mere talisman for you; it was sacred.”

James turned angrily to stare at the intruder and was shocked to see that Holmes had removed the blue lenses that had altered his true eye color. Now Henry James’s coldly angry gray-eyed stare met the calm gray-eyed gaze of Sherlock Holmes.

“While I was in India, I’d read in The Times of your sister’s death in March of eighteen ninety-two and, later, a notice of Miss James’s funeral and cremation at Woking and the mention that your sister’s companion, Miss Katharine Peabody Loring, would be returning the ashes to Cambridge, America, for interment there at the family plot.”

James said nothing. He continued to glare. He was glad he was leaning on a ship’s railing because he thought he might be sick.

“I could tell at once that night along the Seine that—with Miss Loring’s and your family’s knowledge or, more likely, without it—you had appropriated some of your sister’s ashes, made them safe in that absurdly expensive ivory snuffbox, and were transporting them . . . somewhere. But where? Certainly not just to the bottom of the Seine.”

James could not remember ever being insulted in quite this intimate fashion before. If he were his brother William, he knew, he would strike this Holmes in the face as brutally and bruisingly as possible. But Henry James was not William; he had never in his life coiled his fist in real expectation of striking another boy or man. He did not do so now. He continued to glare.

“I think perhaps,” concluded Holmes, “that you were considering a voyage back to America anyway. Before your melancholy overtook you in Paris, I mean. I believe that earlier thought of a voyage to America is why you finally changed your mind last night about joining me on this mission. Perhaps you thought to scatter your sister’s ashes at some spot important . . . sacred to both of you? It is not, of course, any of my business. But I respect your bereavement, sir, and I shall not raise this subject again. I did so now primarily to acquaint you with some of the simpler methods of my powers of observation and ratiocination.”

“I am not impressed, sir,” said James when at last he could speak. But he was. Despite himself, he was very impressed.

The old ship was being settled up against the wharf like a matron being led to a groaning buffet. French sailors fore and aft made ready to toss the ropes that would precede the massive cables that would soon pull them tight to America.

“You’ll pardon me, Mr. Holmes. I forgot something in the stateroom. I shall meet you when you clear Customs inspection.”

Holmes nodded, seemingly lost in his own thoughts. James knew that Holmes—as Jan Sigerson, traveling on what he presumed to be a false Norwegian passport—would be held up for some time in line while Henry James, expatriate at heart but still traveling on his American passport, would pass through with only the most cursory inspection.

Still, he trundled quickly back to the stateroom in the hopes that the porters they’d given orders to had not yet taken down the bags and steamer trunks. They had not.

James locked the door to the stateroom behind him, unlocked his steamer trunk, removed a mahogany box from a recessed area, and opened it carefully. The interior was custom-lined in velvet with an indentation cut to his prescribed dimensions.

James withdrew the snuffbox from his waistcoat pocket, set it carefully within the mahogany box, locked the box, locked the steamer trunk again, made sure he had his passport and papers ready in his briefcase, and left the stateroom just as the porters arrived to haul away the luggage. They touched their caps as they passed and Henry James nodded in return.

CHAPTER 7

I had planned on describing to you Holmes’s and James’s one evening, night, and morning in New York City, but I could find no record of where they stayed. I have the records of both of them clearing Customs by 7 p.m. Thursday evening, 23 March, 1893—Holmes under his J. Sigerson Norwegian national’s passport, James under his own name—but lost track of them in the hours after that. Based on the dialogue I know they had on the train to Washington the next day, it’s possible that they did not dine together that night or even stay in the same hotel. It appears as if they hadn’t spoken since Holmes’s intrusive “explanation” along the rail of the French steamship Paris as they were docking.

I had also assumed that they would have taken one of the Washington, D.C.–bound trains from the conveniently located Grand Central Depot that Friday the 24th of March, but it turns out that Holmes—who had been in charge of all their rushed travel arrangements—had booked them on the Boston–Washington, D.C., express called the Colonial or sometimes the Colonial Express, a service provided jointly by the Pennsylvania Railroad and New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad. But in 1893 the Colonial did not yet come into Manhattan or connect to Grand Central Depot—that change would be made after the Titanic sank in 1912—and Holmes and James would have had to have arisen early and taken one of several early ferries to Jersey City, there to board the Colonial that would take them down the Pennsylvania main line to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and finally Washington. It was the fastest express available to them on that Friday, but not the most convenient for someone who had spent the night in Manhattan.

I did confirm that Henry James had sent John Hay a hurried cable from Marseilles stating only that he was coming back to America “for private and personal reasons, please tell no one except perhaps Henry A.” and gave the date and rough time of his arrival in Washington and told his old friend that he and “a Norwegian explorer whom I have befriended and who is temporarily traveling with me” would find lodging in a Washington hotel. James received, upon arrival in New York, a cable from John Hay saying, in full:

Nonsense. You and your traveling companion must stay with us for the duration of your visit. Clara and I insist. There shall be room and food and wine and conversation enough for all. Adams is currently away traveling but will be thrilled that you have decided to visit your home country again. By great good coincidence, the diplomatic attaché from King Oskar II, King of Sweden and Norway, is scheduled to be our dinner guest on Sunday night. We all look forward to meeting your intrepid explorer friend!

James showed Holmes the cable on their way to the Jersey City terminal and could not resist a grim smile. “A bit of a problem, perhaps?”

“What is that, my dear fellow?” said Holmes as they waited at the front of the ferry.

“Does the disguise of Mr. Jan Sigerson include a native’s facility with the Norwegian language?” James asked most pointedly. “Perhaps you had better stay at a Washington hotel, visit Hay and Adams only upon careful occasion, and be indisposed this coming Sunday evening.”

“Nonsense,” said Holmes and smiled. “It is a great advantage to stay with the Hays. You said that their home was near that of Henry Adams’s?”

“Next door and contiguous,” said James. “Just like Sweden and Norway.”

“There you have it then,” said Holmes. “We shall leave the representative of King Oskar the Second of Sweden and Norway to sort things out for himself on Sunday.”

Their rail tickets were nominally “first class” but there was nothing resembling a private compartment. Luckily, the first-class carriage was not crowded this Friday morning and, while sitting across the aisle from each other, Holmes and James could lean forward and converse in private when they wished. James also noticed that while the disgusting American male habit of constant expectoration had not disappeared, there seemed to be somewhat fewer spittoons visible everywhere than there had been in the early 1880’s during his last visit and the red runner down the aisle of the first-class carriage was not so spongily porous with liquified tobacco as so many rugs and carpets had been ten years earlier. James had decided in 1883 that he could never again live in—and possibly never again visit—America if it was only because of the universal spitting.

“Tell me about the Five Hearts,” said Holmes as they left Philadelphia. For this conversation, the detective had crossed the aisle and was sitting uncomfortably close to James, knee to knee as it were, and was perched on the north-facing seat across from the south-facing writer. Holmes leaned on his northern-European-style walking stick. James wished that he had brought a stick to the compartment, if only to use as a barrier between them.

James set his palms firmly on his knees as if that created a structure separating them further. “In truth,” he said, “they referred to their small group not as the Five Hearts but as the Five of Hearts.”

“Tell me then about the Five of Hearts,” said Holmes.

“In truth, it was Clover Adams’s salon,” said James. “A very uniquely American salon, I might say.”

“How so?”

James paused a second to comprehend exactly what he had meant. “It was not, as are so many scores of salons I’ve known in France and Italy and elsewhere, centered on things or people literary, nor upon artists and art, nor upon that most central trinity of salons—money, aristocracy, or notoriety, although the Adamses might not be found wanting in any of the three of those categories.”

“Really?” said Holmes. “I thought there was no aristocracy in the United States of America.”

James smiled almost pityingly at the younger man. James was turning fifty in a few weeks and Holmes had mentioned that he was currently thirty-eight years old, turning thirty-nine in April, but at this moment Henry James felt very much the wiser, older gentleman. “Every society has its subtle aristocracies, Mr. Holmes . . . er . . . Mr. Sigerson. If not based on birth, then upon wealth. If not upon wealth, then upon power. And so forth.”

“Yet isn’t Henry Adams a member of the ruling aristocracy in Washington?” asked Holmes.

James frowned before answering. Was the insufferable detective trying to be provocative? Pretending to be dense? After a few seconds of thought, James decided not. He was simply naïve.

“Henry Adams is a grandson of one American president and the great-grandson of another, both on his paternal side of course, but he has never held any political power of his own. He is rich, yes. He and Clover were at the center of Washington social power in the first half of the eighteen eighties, yes. But while being a member of what French philosophers or Jefferson might have called ‘a natural aristocracy’, Adams never controlled power, per se. I mean, he started as a Harvard professor, for heaven’s sake!”

Holmes nodded. “Let us return to Mrs. Adams. Describe your former friend Clover to me . . . as briefly and succinctly as you can, please.”

James felt his infinitely delicate feathers ruffle again at this peremptory command. “You are asking me to reveal personal details of a dear, departed friend of mine and the wife of a friend of mine, sir,” he said stiffly. “You must remember that I am, while not English by nationality, a gentleman. And there are things which gentlemen simply cannot do.”

Holmes sighed. “Right now, Mr. James, and for the foreseeable future, you are an American gentleman who has agreed to help solve the possible murder—or at least the mystery surrounding someone annually claiming her death to be murder—of a fellow American citizen. In that sense, sir, your responsibilities to your friend as a witness outweigh vague conceptions of gentlemen not discussing their friends. We must both get beyond that if we are to decide whether your friend Clover Adams was murdered or not.”

Easy for you to get beyond it, thought James. You are not a gentleman.

He sighed aloud. “Very well. What do you wish to know about Clover?”

“Her appearance to begin with.”

James felt himself bridle again. “Why should her appearance be a factor, Mr. Ho . . . Mr. Sigerson? Do you have the theory that someone murdered her because of her looks?”

“It is a simple piece of a complex puzzle,” Holmes said quietly. “And somewhere to start. What did Clover Adams look like?”

James paused again. Eventually he said, “Shall we say that Henry Adams did not marry Miss Marian Hooper in June of eighteen seventy-three for her beauty alone. She was . . . plain-looking, although, as Henry himself once wrote to me years ago, she should ‘not quite be called plain’. And she was petite. But Henry Adams, as perhaps you will see, is also a small man by modern standards. But, although it was not unduly sharpened by education, Clover had a lively and intelligent mind.” He hesitated again. “And, I must admit, a quick and acerbic tongue. During the five years they lived in Washington before her death, Clover made many enemies—especially amongst social climbers, shunned senators, and their wives.”

“So you would categorize this Five of Hearts salon at which she was the center as more exclusionary than not?” asked Holmes.

James wished again that he had brought his walking stick into the carriage . . . to lean on as he thought this time. “Yes, definitely,” he replied softly, more to himself it sounded than to the detective sitting across from him. “Henry and Clover Adams—and the other three members of the Five of Hearts—would never invite someone to their inner circle because of that person’s power or notoriety. Rather, they invited artists, writers, minor politicians, and such to the dinners held after the five o’clock daily teas of the inner salon of the Five of Hearts based on that person’s ability to amuse them. I once wrote a story in which I portrayed Clover Adams in the form of a certain Mrs. Bonnycastle and . . .”

James stopped in mid-breath. He was aghast at his own lack of discretion.

“Go on,” said Sherlock Holmes.

James took a breath. Well, he had already crossed the discretionary Rubicon, as it were.

“It was in a story called ‘Pandora’,” said Henry James. “But you must understand that I never base any of my fictional characters on actual living or deceased persons. They are always . . . an amalgam . . . of experience and pure fiction.” This was as disingenuous as Henry James could get. All of his important characters—and most of his minor ones—were based exactly and precisely upon living or deceased personages from his own life and experience.

“Of course,” purred Holmes, sounding as disingenuous as Henry James felt.

“At any rate, in this short story, I described Mrs. Bonnycastle as a ‘lady of infinite mirth’ and her salon as one which ‘left out, on the whole, more than it took in’.”

“But you’ve already told me that the actual Clover Adams was not exactly a lady of infinite mirth,” interrupted Holmes. “You’ve explained that she had been, since childhood, visited by deep and frequent spells of melancholy.”

“Yes, yes,” James said impatiently. “One omits certain features of a character for a short story. Had Mrs. Bonnycastle been a central character in a novel . . . well, we would have had to explore all sides of her. Even those that seem, upon first glance, to be mutually contradictory.”

“Please go on,” said Holmes almost contritely. “You were describing your fictional treatment of Clover Ada . . . of Mrs. Bonnycastle’s salon.”

“I remember writing that the very rare senator or congressman whom they allowed to visit was invariably inspected with . . . I remember the precise words, Mr. Holmes . . . ‘with a mixture of alarm and indulgence’.”

Holmes smiled thinly. It looked as if he wanted to ask James whether the writer could remember, verbatim, large tracts from his dozens of books and hundreds of short stories, but he obviously did not want to derail the conversation again. “Go on, please,” he said.

“I know,” continued James, “that my good friend Henry Adams recognized himself in the story, ‘Pandora’, when I described Mr. Bonnycastle as having once said to his wife, in a fit of unusual broad-mindedness—‘Hang it, let us be vulgar and have some fun—let us invite the president!’ ”

“And did they regularly invite the president?” asked Holmes.

James made an almost impolite noise. “Not that worm James Garfield,” said the writer, “although I imagine that Garfield would have galloped barefoot across Lafayette Square to the Adamses’ home should he have ever been tendered. But they did, or at least Henry did—I believe for the first time with their architect, Richardson—cross the street to visit the White House once Grover Cleveland came to power in March of eighteen eighty-five. Only a few months before Clover’s death.”

Holmes raised a single finger. “Pardon me for interrupting again, James. But this is something else about America that confuses me a trifle. It was my understanding—at least in my childhood—that unlike Her Majesty or most other royalty worldwide, American presidents were elected for a limited period of time. Four years was my hazy recollection. Yet President Cleveland was in office when Clover Adams died in eighteen eighty-five and, correct me if I am wrong, he is in office now in the spring of eighteen ninety-three. Have the Americans discovered the benefits of lifetime public service?”

Can any grown Englishman really be so ill-informed? wondered Henry James.

As if reading James’s mind, Holmes smiled and said, “During a railway voyage in a recent case set far out on distant moors, one not mentioned—so far at least!—in his published chronicles of our adventures, I had the opportunity to reveal to Dr. Watson that, until he had mentioned it in passing that day, I had no idea that the Earth went around the sun. I may have learned it at one time, I explained to Watson, but—as with all things that do not relate directly to my profession and avocation of detective work—I quickly put it out of my mind. I can, you shall find, be rather singularly focused. So you will have to make allowances for me at times, sir.”

“But for a man who brags of being set so firmly behind The Times . . .” James began and stopped. Holmes could not possibly be telling the truth here. And James wanted no argument. Not yet.

“Mr. Grover Cleveland,” he began again, “is in the unique position of being the only President of the United States who has served two non-consecutive four-year terms. He was in office between March eighteen eighty-five and March of eighteen eighty-nine. After a four-year interval where a certain Benjamin Harrison served in the office, Mr. Cleveland was elected again just last November and was sworn into office again only a few weeks ago.”

Holmes nodded briskly. “Thank you. And please return to your description of all five of the Five of Hearts.”

James looked around. “I fear that the dining car will be closing for luncheon service soon. Perhaps we could have a late lunch and continue our discussion there?”

CHAPTER 8

James chose trout for lunch; he didn’t care that much for trout, but eating it always reminded him that he was “home” in the United States. Actually, nothing outside the window of the moving dining car gave him any sense of being “home”. The trees along the rail line here as they moved from New Jersey toward Baltimore were too small, too tightly clustered, and too obviously just stands of new growth where farms had spared a patch of forest. The farmhouses were of wood and often needed new coats of paint. Some of the barns sagged. It was a tapestry of American chaos overlaid on a layer of poverty; England and Italy and France had more than enough poverty, Henry James knew well enough, but it rarely manifested itself as sagging, unpainted, wildly planted chaos. In England—in most of James’s Europe—the old and poor and rundown were picturesque, including the people.

Many years earlier, in an essay on Hawthorne (who had been an early passion of his), James had made the mistake of writing to American readers that American soil and history were a sad, blank slate for any American writer, poet, or artist: New England, he had pointed out, lacked Europe’s all-important castles, ancient ruins, Roman roads, abandoned sheepherders’ cottages, and defined social classes capable of appreciating art. American artists of any sort, he’d suggested, could never achieve a real mastery of their art by reacting to the vulgar, pressing, profit-centered, and always-pressing new the way writers and artists in Europe could react romantically to the old.

Certain American reviewers, editors, and even readers had taken him to task for these less-than-praise-filled paragraphs. In their eyes, James knew, America, even without any true history, could do no wrong and the vulgar and ever-shifting “newness” that he hated so profoundly—primarily as an impediment to his and any American writer’s art—was an aphrodisiac to their Philistine and America-tuned senses.

James remembered writing, in 1879 or thereabouts, putting down his thoughts on Hawthorne and his contemporaries—“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature” and “One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.” Perhaps this is why he had added, in Chapter VI of his Hawthorne book—“It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them.”

No, it had not made him popular to American readers and reviewers.

Now James shrugged and set all that ancient emotion away from his thoughts as he finished his trout and sipped the last of his less-than-mediocre white wine.

Holmes had ordered only tea and then let the poor American imitation of his choice sit unsipped in its Pennsylvania and New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad–crested cup. James was not certain that he’d seen the detective actually eat anything since their dinner in Paris on the evening of March 13, now eleven days in the past, and was beginning to wonder how the gaunt detective stayed alive.

“We were talking about Mrs. Clover Adams,” Holmes said so suddenly that it startled James.

“Were we? I thought we had moved on to her husband and other members of the Five of Hearts.” James made sure that no one was seated in their half of the emptying dining car or any waiter within earshot before he spoke. And even then he spoke very softly.

“You mentioned that Clover made enemies, partially through excluding people from her salon, but also with her wit . . . perhaps you said because of her ‘sharp tongue’,” said Holmes. “Can you give me some examples of her saying or writing specific things that hurt specific people?”

James dabbed at his lips with the linen napkin as he thought about this. Then, in a choice so rare as to be all but unique, he chose to share a story in which he had been the butt of the joke.

“The last time I was here in America,” he said, “a decade ago, I wrote to Clover before boarding my ship back to England and in that missive I explained to her that I had chosen her to receive my last note from our common country because I considered that she—Clover—how did I put it? ‘Because I consider you the incarnation of your native land’ is the precise wording, I think. Clover wrote back at once, saying that she considered my gesture ‘a most equivocal compliment’ and, she continued, ‘Am I then vulgar, dreary, and impossible to live with?’ ”

James looked up at Holmes but the detective showed no response. Finally Holmes said, “So the lady did have wit and a sharp tongue. Do you have another example?”

James quenched a sigh. “What good do such stories do now, sir?”

“Clover Adams was a victim of a murder,” said Holmes. “Or at least of someone’s cruel hoax that she was murdered. In either case, learning who the lady’s enemies were—even enemies created by the sharpness of her own acerbic wit—is the obvious way to approach this case.”

“Unless, of course, as was the case in this instance, it was not murder at all but rather a suicide,” said James. “In which case your list of suspects in the so-called ‘case’ is quickly narrowed to one name. Elementary, my dear Mr. Holmes.”

“Not always,” Holmes said cryptically. “I have investigated obvious suicides that were the result of other people’s murderous schemes. But please continue.”

James did sigh now. “My other friends in the Five of Hearts had, for years, expressed their admiration, if not outright adoration, of my fiction,” he said. “Henry Adams, John Hay, Clarence King, even Clara Hay, were genuinely enthusiastic about my stories and novels. Clover Adams was always . . . more reserved. At one point, an interlocutor who . . . shall we say . . . knew the lady well said that in an argument with her husband and John Hay on the literary merits, or lack of same, of a certain Henry James, Clover was quoted as saying, ‘The problem with Harry’s fiction isn’t that he doesn’t chaw what he bites off, but, rather, that he chaws more than he bites off.’ ”

“Droll,” said Holmes. “And I presume the American colloquial dialect was meant to be part of the humor.”

James said nothing.

“I am surprised that someone close to both of you chose to report that particular bon mot to you,” said Holmes.

James remained silent. It had been told to him in one of the finest of London’s clubs by no less than Charles F. Adams, Henry Adams’s brother—a man whom Henry James had always found to be vulgar in the extreme. Charles Adams had a cruel sense of humor, so unlike his brother’s generosity, and enjoyed—James knew—seeing the edge of that humor embarrass or hurt others. Yet James had no doubt that Clover had said precisely those words; it was her dismissive style and, yes, her Boston Brahmin’s use of rude American dialect. It had hurt James’s feelings extremely upon the hearing. But he had kept Clover as his friend, and that barb—and others Charles Adams and others had relayed to him—had done nothing significant to lessen his sorrow when James had learned of her death more than seven years earlier.

If Henry James wished to be truly indiscreet about Adams’s brother Charles, he could have reported the cruel statement by Charles that John Hay had relayed to him as far back as the announcement of Henry Adams’s and Clover Hooper’s marriage—“Heavens! No! The Hoopers are all as crazy as coots. Clover’ll kill herself just like her aunt!” Indeed, Clover’s Aunt Carrie had killed herself when she was several months pregnant.

And upon return to Boston after many months of the newlyweds’ honeymoon in Egypt and Europe, it was William Dean Howells who had written to James about yet another truly vulgar comment in a letter from Charles Adams to Howells—“To see Henry these days, I have—quite literally!—to tear him from the arms of his new bride! For Henry’s always in clover now! (Joke! ha! ha!)” The “ha! ha!” alone would have made James distrust Charles Adams for life.

“Tell me more about Henry Adams,” said Holmes.

James found himself shrugging—a gesture he had long ago given up in Europe. It was a sign of how upset even retelling the Clover-anecdote had made him. “What more do you need to know?”

“Far more than we can cover before this railway voyage ends in Washington,” said Holmes. “But for now we shall settle for what else Henry Adams was known for at the time of Clover’s death other than being descended from two American presidents and being a member of his wife’s salon of the Five of Hearts.”

“If I gave the impression that the Five of Hearts was solely, or even primarily, Clover’s salon, I was mistaken to do so,” James said rather waspishly. “Everyone in it, except perhaps Clara Hay, was a powerful personality. For four of them, save for Clara who tends toward the literal in a pleasant way, their wit and even their sense of humor matched perfectly. They punned without mercy. I once observed in person that when one of the Adamses’ terriers came home with a scratched eye, John Hay immediately announced that it was obviously a cataract. Clarence King’s instant addition was . . . a tom-cataract.”

Holmes waited.

“Henry Adams was a respected lecturer in medieval history at Harvard University,” said James. “He turned from academic circles to become one of America’s most respected historians. He and Clover were consummate collectors—Adams continues to be so—and, as you may see if Adams is home and invites us to visit, their home reflects an astounding level of both high and advanced taste in everything from Persian carpets to Ming vases to exquisite works of art, including Constables and Turners, chosen before most art collectors could recognize those estimable gentlemen’s names. Their home, designed by the late H. H. Richardson as was the Hays’, is a work of art.”

Holmes nodded as if he were taking mental notes on these most elementary of facts about a shy but world-famous man. “And Mr. John Hay?”

“A very old and rather close friend of mine,” said James. “I met Hay through William Howells—a famous editor and also an old friend—years ago and have enjoyed seeing him and his wife Clara many times in England, on the Continent, and in the United States. He is an extraordinary man.”

“So far all of these Five of Hearts sound extraordinary,” said Holmes. “At least by American standards.”

Before James could protest, Holmes went on, “I’ve read of Hay being referred to as Colonel Hay. Has he a military history?”

James chuckled. “When Hay was only twenty-two years old, he became an assistant to John Nicolay, who was personal secretary to President Abraham Lincoln.”

Holmes waited impassively. James waited for some flicker, some sign, of the detective being impressed—or even interested—but none came.

“In truth,” James continued, “Hay served as co-secretary to Lincoln during the darkest years of the Civil War. But, you see, there was no appropriation for a second secretary. Nor even for an assistant to Mr. Nicolay as secretary. So his friend Nicolay arranged it that he, young John Hay, would receive a salary as an employee of the Department of the Interior, assigned to the White House. When that was challenged by some appropriations committee in eighteen sixty-four, the War Department commissioned Hay as a major—‘assistant adjutant general of volunteers’, I believe was his full title. A year later he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and, shortly after that, received the rank of full colonel.”

“Without ever seeing a battlefield,” said Holmes.

“Only the ones he toured with President Lincoln.”

“I assume Mr. Hay has shown certain accomplishments—besides accruing wealth and a wife—since then,” said Holmes.

James did not especially like the detective’s tone. It seemed very . . . common . . . to the writer. But he decided not to make an issue of it at that moment. The waiters were standing by the walls at the opposite end of the dining carriage, hands solemnly folded across their crotches, waiting for Holmes and him to depart.

“Even by the time John Hay married Clara Stone in eighteen seventy-four—when Hay was thirty-five—he’d held important diplomatic posts in three countries.” James didn’t add that Hay had groused and complained of manners, language, culture, and government in all three of those important European countries in which he’d served. “Also by eighteen seventy-four,” added James, “John had become well known as a poet, then as a distinguished journalist. He was famous for his coverage of the Chicago Fire and of the assassination of President Garfield in eighteen eighty-one and of the trial of the anarchist-assassin Charles Guiteau.”

“Interesting,” said Holmes. “I confess that I wasn’t aware that President Garfield had been assassinated, much less by an anarchist.”

James simply did not believe this statement. He chose to say nothing.

“Is Mr. Hay still a journalist?” asked Holmes. The detective had lit his pipe and showed absolutely no concern about the impatient waiters.

“He became editor of Mr. Greeley’s famous paper—the Tribune—but then returned to government service,” said Henry James. “In eighteen eighty, poor President Garfield had asked John to move from the State Department to the White House, to become the president’s personal secretary. But Hay declined. He left public service before Garfield was shot. Amongst his other pastimes—or perhaps I should say amusements—was writing fiction anonymously. At one time, his friend Henry Adams wrote and anonymously published a novel called Democracy. Since then there has been infinite speculation about the author’s identity; Clover Adams and Clarence King were both suspects of the literati’s fevered detecting at one point, but it was John Hay whom most of the experts were sure was the actual author. One rather suspects that the Five of Hearts enjoyed leading the literary world on their round robin chase.”

“Democracy,” muttered Holmes around his pipe. “Did not that book sell rather well in England some years back?”

“Amazingly well,” said James. “In England. In America. In France. In Germany. In Timbuktu, for all I know.” He was dismayed to hear an undertone of bitterness in his remarks.

“And Clara Hay?” said Holmes. He removed his watch from his waistcoat and glanced at it.

“A lady’s lady,” said James. “A delightful hostess. A helpmate to her husband. A generous soul. One of the most important loci in the Washington social whirl.”

“How would you describe her . . . physically?” asked Holmes.

James raised an eyebrow at the impertinent question. “A pretty face. An impeccable dresser. Lovely hair. Exquisite complexion. Physically . . . a bit on the pleasantly solid side.”

“Stout?”

“Solid,” repeated James. “She looked thus when John Hay fell in love with her and married her almost twenty years ago, and time and children have added their solidity.”

And eating, thought James with a slight pang of betrayal. He remembered a letter from Hay only a year ago in which his dear friend said that the couple and their son were visiting Chicago where he, Hay, had been very active indeed but where Clara, according to Hay, had stayed at the hotel and . . . “tucked enthusiastically into every victual the dining room offered.” Privately, Henry James thought Clara Hay to be matronly, not terribly intelligent—although she was well-read and wise enough to admire James’s novels—sanctimonious in a backwoods American Baptist-minister’s-daughter’s sort of way (although this was not at all her background, although she did come from Ohio), and altogether an unworthy member of the extraordinary Five of Hearts.

He would never tell Sherlock Holmes this.

“Tell me about Clarence King,” said Holmes, “and we shall return to our carriage and let these good people tidy up their dining car for the dinner service.”

“There is no dinner service on the Colonial Express,” said James, inwardly pleased to have caught the famous detective out on an error. “We are scheduled to arrive in Washington before the dinner hour.”

“Ahhh,” said Holmes, blowing a column of smoke from the oversized pipe. “Then you can describe Clarence King at leisure. Oh, I should say that I remember reading about Mr. King’s exposure of that western diamond-mine hoax in the late eighteen seventies. Somewhere in Colorado, was it not?”

“It was supposed to be,” agreed James. “Clarence King—all five foot six of him—is a truly extraordinary man: geologist, mountain climber, explorer, surveyor, government servant, aficionado of fine food and fine wine and fine art. Henry Adams and John Hay always believed—sincerely, one thinks—that of all of the Five of Hearts, Clarence King was the one whose future was least limited . . . most probable for fame, glory, and high position.”

“Did Clover Adams believe that?”

James hesitated for only the briefest of heartbeats. “She thought Clarence something of a rogue. But she loved him more for that, if anything. It was Clarence King who sent the Adamses and the other Hearts both fine Five of Hearts stationery for all of their use and a beautiful Five of Hearts tea set.”

“Describe it, please,” said Holmes, removing the pipe stem from his mouth.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Please describe the tea set.”

Henry James looked out the window at the increasingly summer-like forests and fields flashing by as if he could gain strength from the gaze. It was evening. The last rays of a late-March sunset tinged the trees and telegraph poles.

“The tea set is quite charming, actually,” he said at last. “Five cups and saucers, of course. All heart-shaped and a bit undersized.”

“All five of the Hearts are—were—small people,” said Holmes.

“Why . . . yes,” said James, a bit nonplussed by the observation. Had he supplied that information? He only remembered mentioning Clarence King’s height.

“What else can you tell me about the tea set?” asked Holmes.

The man is mad, thought Henry James. He said, “The tea tray is beautifully enameled and inset with designs that look like small fruit on branches but are actually each a cluster of five hearts. The sugar and cream bowls also follow the hearts theme. On the teapot, and just below the upper appendage of the tray—which, if I remember correctly, is set off by a large and quite fragile capital ‘T’—are painted clocks showing the hour of five o’clock, exactly.”

“The hour the Five of Hearts met each day of the work week,” said Holmes. “Usually in front of the Adamses’ hearth in chairs designed specifically for their diminutive size. Adams and his wife Clover seated opposite one another in tiny—and matching—red-leather chairs.”

“Yes,” said James, having no idea where Holmes had dredged up that last fact, although it was accurate enough.

Holmes nodded as if satisfied. “Let us return to our rather public first-class carriage,” he said.

Problems with the track somewhere south of Baltimore set the Colonial Express far behind schedule. For hours Holmes and James sat in the relatively uncomfortable so-called “first-class” section with nothing to look at out the windows—night had fallen hours earlier—no dinner, and little relief from the tedium save for their reading and an occasional cup of coffee brought by an apologetic steward. Holmes asked no more questions—a rather pathetic show for a detective, James thought—and they sat in silence for the long, humid hours.

At long last the “Express” got back under way, but they arrived in the nation’s capital many hours late—long after civilized Washingtonians had dined and after many had turned in for the night.

But the Hays’ brougham was waiting for them at the station, along with Hay’s first footman, Severs, and their trunks and valises were soon loaded outside, and covered with a tarpaulin (a light rain had begun to fall), as James and Holmes climbed into the compartment of the gleaming black Kinross Brougham that Hay had sent for them.

Street lamps were surrounded by soft halos that reminded James of the night some eleven days earlier when he and Holmes had met on the bank of the Seine. With those thoughts came a dire sense of something very much like terror. What was he doing introducing this strange and almost certainly deranged man into the inner circle of some of his closest private friends? Holmes’s pathetic disguise of “Mr. Jan Sigerson, Norwegian explorer” would be found out, if not on Sunday evening when the Norwegian ambassador was dining at the Hays’, then even earlier than that. What would his old friends John and Clara Hay—much less Henry Adams, who never spoke to anyone of his late wife or her suicide out of the long resonances of his terrible grief—think of him for deceiving them in this way, for introducing this madman to them?

Henry James was actively sick to his stomach as the brougham rolled through the brick and cobblestoned streets of this least-businesslike of all major American cities. The few shops, restaurants, and public places they passed along the way were closed and dark. Even in the finer neighborhoods here near the Executive Mansion, only a few interior gas or electric lights still burned. The trees in this southern city were fully leafed out and it felt to James as if they were being carried deeper and deeper into a dark tunnel of his own foolish construction.

“I believe the Americans have a saying—‘They roll the sidewalks up after dark’,” Holmes said at one point and the sound of the tall shadow’s voice gave James a start but did not bring him fully back from his broodings. “It certainly seems true of Washington, D.C.,” added the detective.

James said nothing.

Then they were next to Lafayette Square—a darkened Executive Mansion was visible through the trees—and turning at the intersection of Sixteenth Street onto H Street. St. John’s Church rose whitely on one side of the street and the Hay residence loomed in wet red brick on the other. John Hay was standing in the strange Richardsonian arched-tunnel of an entranceway to greet them.

“Harry, Harry, we’re so delighted you came back,” boomed Hay, a compact, thin, elegant man with receding hair parted neatly in the middle, dark brows, and a full but triune-shaped mustache-chin-beard that was going white before the rest of his hair. Hay’s eyes were alight with intelligence and his voice echoed in the tunnel of an entrance with a sincere welcome.

And then they were in the house proper, coats and hats were smoothly removed by servants while other footmen bustled past and then up a staircase beyond the huge foyer with their bags and trunks, and James had made the treacherous introduction of “Sigerson” without faltering, although his heart pounded at his own deception and his mouth was unnaturally dry.

“Ah, Mr. Sigerson,” cried John Hay. “I read about your Tibetan adventures last year in both the English and American papers. It is such a pleasure having you as our guest.”

James could see Holmes looking around at the house . . . the mansion. The foyer was huge and paneled with South American mahogany so perfectly polished that one could almost see one’s reflection in the dark wood. Above the mahogany wainscoting the walls were a rich terra-cotta red that matched the red in so many of the Persian carpets and runners set about on the gleaming floors. High above them—St. John’s Cathedral–high—the spaces above the gleaming chandeliers were crisscrossed with massive mahogany rafters. Ahead of them, the grand stairway was wide enough to accommodate a marching band walking ten-abreast if the occasion ever arose.

“Clara sends her deepest regrets for not staying up to greet you,” said Hay. “I’m afraid she had to take to her bed early tonight due to one of those rare fierce headaches that have plagued her for so long. She looks forward to meeting both of you at breakfast—unless you prefer to breakfast in your rooms, of course. I know that you enjoy taking your breakfast in your room, Harry.”

“Alas, a bachelor’s old habits,” said James. “Especially on the first morning after a somewhat arduous week and a half of constant travel.”

“Clara and I shall see you later in the morning then,” laughed Hay. “Mr. Sigerson? Would you also like to receive your breakfast in your room?”

“I sincerely look forward to coming down and meeting Mrs. Hay at breakfast,” said Holmes in what James now heard as an exaggerated—an obviously false—Scandinavian accent.

“Wonderful!” cried Hay. “Clara and I will press you on all the current gossip surrounding Harry.” He smiled toward James to show he was jesting.

“But speaking of dining, gentlemen, I know how late the train was in arriving and also know that the accursed Colonial Express offers no dinners during its approach to Washington. You must be starved.”

“We lunched rather late . . .” began Henry James, blushing slightly not at the thought of putting his host out but at the sheer awfulness of what he was doing.

“Nonsense, nonsense,” said Hay. “You must be famished. I’ve had Cook and Benson set out a light repast for you.” He put a well-manicured hand on each of their shoulders and led them through the cavernous—but strangely warm—space and into the dining room.

James saw at once that the dining room was larger, more elegant, and certainly furnished with a finer taste than the one he had seen in photographs of the dining room in Mr. Cleveland’s White House. In every room they had been in or passed by, James had noticed the elaborately and beautifully sculpted stone fireplaces. The walls boasted art masterpieces interspersed with ancient tapestries and the occasional framed light sketch—the signs of high taste combined with a gifted collector’s eclecticism.

The “light repast” consisted of a groaning sideboard loaded with a freshly baked turkey, half a Virginia ham, salads, steaming vegetables, and a second buffet gleaming with wines, clarets, whiskeys, waters, and various liqueurs. The long table had been set and lighted by candelabra for three at the far end.

“We are all bachelors tonight,” laughed Hay. “We shall have to feed and fend for ourselves.”

They did this, of course, by pointing and having Hay’s Benson and two under-butlers fill their plates with their choices.

When they were seated in the circle of candlelight and after Hay had toasted their safe arrival in America, they set to. James was astonished to find that despite his nausea during the drive from the huge railway station, he was indeed famished.

“Harry,” said Hay, addressing James, “I’m sorry to tell you that Adams is not yet returned from some southern lark to Cuba with Phillips. He was scheduled to return home last week but somewhere down there he ran into Alexander Agassiz and since then he’s thrown schedules to the wind—quite literally—and has been geologizing on coral reefs with Agassiz. Evidently they drifted north to further relax with the Camerons at the Coffin Point retreat on St. Helena. I must say that Adams is not exactly rushing home to spend time with me or his other friends here.”

“Shall I miss him then?” asked James, shocked to hear some audible sound of relief in his own voice.

“Oh, no, I think not!” cried Hay with a laugh. “I believe that Adams will show up in the first week of April . . . just days away now. You can enjoy the comparative sanity with us until he does arrive.”

Hay turned to Sherlock Holmes. “Is your repast edible after the ardors of your crossing and non-express Colonial Express traveling, Mr. Sigerson?”

“Delicious,” said Holmes, and James noticed that the detective actually had taken a few forkfuls of ham. “Quite perfect, Mr. Hay.”

“Good, good,” boomed John Hay. “And we shall do everything in our modest powers to make all the rest of your stay with us here in Washington equally as pleasant.” Hay turned back to James. “Oh, Harry, another bonus—I’ve just learned today that Clarence King will be arriving in Washington tomorrow, on the way to or from some Mexican gold mine no doubt, but he’s agreed to join us for dinner on Sunday night. That is the night when King Oskar the Second’s diplomatic emissary is dining with us. Clarence will be so delighted to see you after all these years.”

James looked at Holmes and allowed himself a small but secretly wicked smile. “You are in great luck, Sigerson,” he said. “Not only will the ambassador from the King of Sweden and Norway be here on Sunday, but so shall one of the world’s most famous and best-informed explorers. I am sure that each of them will have many questions to put to you.”

Holmes looked up from sipping his wine, smiled thinly, and nodded without comment.

CHAPTER 9

Hay had said that breakfast would be served in the smaller dining room—the one with so many windows looking out into their garden area—at 7:30, so Holmes allowed himself to sleep until 7:00 a.m. He slept well but awoke with joint pains and an incipient sense of panic. Going into the resplendent bathroom that was, amazingly, part of his guest suite, Holmes unfolded a soft leather bag and removed the dark vial and syringe from their leather pockets. After holding the syringe’s needle for a moment in alcohol that had come from a small stone bottle in an adjacent pocket, Holmes filled the syringe to the proper level, tapped it to remove any air bubbles, removed a short length of flexible chemist’s tubing that was folded into the leather travel “sponge bag”, tied it tightly around his upper left arm—increasing the tension by gripping the tubing firmly by his teeth and tugging sharply—and then he injected the morphine into the vein at the crook of his inner arm. There were dark marks and scabs showing many, many earlier injections there.

Holmes sat on the edge of the bathtub until the morphine began to work on his pain and panic. For the first time he noticed that the bathtub-rim and walls surrounding the tub were of a beautiful blue-and-white Delft pattern.

He took his time bathing—marveling at the truly hot water that flowed instantly from the tap after only a slight turn of the silver spigot by Holmes’s amazingly prehensile toes and then shaved with his straight razor while looking down from the mirror frequently to throw suspicious glances at what looked to be a secondary and much smaller Delft bathtub permanently set into the floor near the corner of the wash basin. Holmes’s incredible deductive powers told him that this must be some bizarre American instrument for bathing one’s feet. (At the very least it was far too low to serve as a bidet—a French invention and toilette-related custom that Holmes, for all of his interest in staying clean, had always found disgusting.)

Bathed and shaved, Holmes touched up his Sigerson-hair with a darkening agent, made the darkened hair wilder and more vertical with some patented hair crème and attacks from two hairbrushes, ran a mustache comb under Sigerson’s nose, and dressed in a bit-too-wooly-thick green tweed suit for his day in the city.

Then Holmes found his way down the huge stairway where a servant immediately led him to the breakfast room.

Wait a minute.

The reader needs to pardon this interruption as the narrator makes a comment here.

Perhaps it slipped your notice, although I doubt it (since it is dangerous for a narrator ever to underestimate the intelligence and observation powers of readers), but at this point we have shifted point-of-view in the narrative. Up until now I have kept our perceptions focused on what writers and professors call either “a limited third-person point-of-view”, the third person in this instance being Mr. Henry James, or at most I have indulged in a very limited “limited omniscient point-of-view”. In truth, there has been a distinct lack of omniscience throughout this manuscript.

As the narrator in question, I may further alienate you from your suspension of disbelief vis-à-vis the current narration by telling you that I dislike shifting points-of-view in a tale. I find a narrator’s presumed ability to hop from mind-to-mind both presumptuous and unrealistic. Worse than that, it is so often simply inelegant.

As literature has descended into mere entertainment via a deliberate vandalism and diminishment of our once-proud language, authors also have begun leaping around between and into their characters’ minds for no other reason than that they can.

Regarding my shift to Sherlock Holmes’s point-of-view, I could give a dozen convincing explanations as to why I make this shift at this time: i.e., Henry James later learned this information and I, as narrator, am somehow receiving the intelligence from him retroactively in time. Neither will Dr. John Watson, M.D., ever hear the details of this 1893 American adventure, so I would be lying to claim the overused doctor as my source of information.

Or perhaps this narrator could say that he has, through the usual arcane means involving opened bank vaults or misplaced trunks found in attics, come across a long-lost manuscript (discovered, perhaps, alongside Holmes’s equally lost volumes titled The Whole Art of Detection?) which conveniently included encrypted notes from these days in question, notes which somehow allow us to perceive things from the detective’s point-of-view for this part of the tale. Surely more apparently miraculous things have happened in real life than this “discovery” of long-lost notes by the beekeeping retired gentleman who lived out the last years of his life in “a small farm upon the [Sussex] downs five miles from Eastbourne.”

Alas, no. No encrypted notes from the beekeeper. No discovery of Holmes’s promised-but-never-found The Whole Art of Detection. To be specific, none of my information comes directly from James or Holmes, nor even from Dr. Watson or his literary agent, Arthur Conan Doyle. At some point I may—or may not—discuss the source of my information about this period and these men, but for now the simple truth and short version are that I know more about most of Holmes’s and James’s three-month stay in America in 1893 from Sherlock Holmes’s point-of-view than James’s. I don’t know all of his thoughts—I do not have that power over or insight into either character, either man—but I do have more information on Holmes’s actions during these weeks than I know of anyone else’s in this narrative, and, from that, any competent narrator should be able to guess or intuit or deduce or simply imagine many of his thoughts.

But if the reader is not already overly estranged by this temporary shift in our focus, your narrator will do his best to keep the number of points-of-view to two while working diligently to keep those two viewpoints from hopping back and forth like the proverbial grasshopper in the very real skillet.

The buffet in the sunny breakfast room was smaller than last night’s long mahogany sideboard in the dining room, but its groaning nature was comparable. Artfully arranged on delicate china and in silver chafing dishes were the makings for full English breakfasts, light French breakfasts, astounding American breakfasts, and, of course, presumably because Jan Sigerson was supposed to be Norwegian, smoked salmon and slivers of whitefish, a salmon-omelette, pickled herring, and English cucumbers—supposedly a London favorite of visiting Norwegians—mixed in with red and green peppers. John Hay—or, to be more precise, John Hay’s cook—had somehow provided Syltetøy, a Norwegian sweet jelly, to go with the morning breads. With the French, Swiss, and American cheeses were Jarlsberg, gouda, Norwegia, Nøkkelost, Pultost, and grunost, a very sweet Norwegian cheese made from goat’s milk. (Holmes had tried grunost once and that, he’d decided at once, had been more than enough experience with the cloying goo.)

Sherlock Holmes filled his plate with bits of English, American, and Norwegian breakfasts—although a French croissant and Turkish-strong coffee were his usual breakfast when he was at 221 B Baker Street—and enjoyed his morning conversation with John and Clara Hay.

The 44-year-old Mrs. Hay, Holmes saw at once, had long since passed Henry James’s somewhat unkind description of “solid”, had—probably in her mid- to late-30s—passed through and beyond the category of “matronly” and was now set firmly in a thickset, multiple-chinned sort of upper-class glory that would probably stay with her until her last years. It did not seem to diminish John Hay’s delight in her (Holmes remembered James saying that she was “solid” when Hay fell in love with her and seemed to revel in it) and, in truth, Holmes still saw Clara Hay’s beauty in the perfection of her clothing, the gleam of a perfect but modest jewel on one soft finger of her pudgy hand, the coruscations of her perfectly set hair, her near-flawless complexion, and a lustrous quality to her wide, bright eyes that no amount of “tucking into her victuals” would probably ever erase.

Also, Clara Hay was a pleasant, caring person and a wonderful hostess. Holmes—especially in his strange, wild-haired, fiercely mustached Sigerson persona—could tell that almost at once. Her voice was a pleasant contralto and, when Clara Hay was in a position where listening was called for (such as after asking Mr. Sigerson a question), she actually listened. Holmes knew how rare this gift was of being patient enough actually to listen and immediately saw why Mrs. John Hay, “Clara” to so many hundreds of her close friends (in that bold American way where people in society actually used each other’s Christian names without that English fear that they would be mistaken for a servant), would be the indispensable hostess for a capital city such as Washington.

When Holmes complimented Clara Hay on the beautiful blue-and-green gown she was wearing—and it was beautiful, in a dignified and understated way—his hostess did not blush or act like a falsely modest maiden but said, “Yes, it is nice, isn’t it, Mr. Sigerson, even if designed only for everyday wear. I appreciate your appreciation of it—a sign of your good taste, I believe. The design is by the Parisian couturier Charles Worth . . . who was referred to me by our late friend Mrs. Clover Adams.” Clara Hay glanced at her husband as if to ask if she could tell more, but if there were some signal sent from the colonel to his lady, Holmes missed it.

“Clover used to say,” continued Clara Hay, “that a Worth gown not only filled her soul with happiness but . . . what was her exact phrase, John.”

“Not only filled her soul with happiness but sealed it hermetically,” said Hay.

“Ah, yes,” said Holmes’s hostess, smiling as he did. “Monsieur Worth won Clover Adams’s undying loyalty one day in Paris in eighteen eighty-one when the couturier continued to stay with Clover and make last-minute alterations to her gown when both Mrs. Vanderbilt and Mrs. Astor were waiting in the outer room. That was enough recommendation for me, you see, and I have never regretted turning to Monsieur Worth first when we are shopping in Paris.”

“It is a truly stunning dress,” said Holmes. “Knowing as little as I do about such things as I am a bachelor, I would still venture to say that Monsieur Worth’s particular genius has more than repaid your allegiance.” He set down his empty coffee cup and shook his head slightly when the under-butler moved to refill it.

“So what would you like to do today, Mr. Sigerson?” asked John Hay. The more Holmes saw of the diplomat’s long, white fingers, the more he was sure that Hay could have been a fine violinist if his musical tastes had turned that way, as Holmes’s had, at a young age.

“We can wait for Harry and take a carriage excursion through the city,” continued Hay. “Show you the historical sites and monuments, drive through Rock Creek Park, perhaps peek in on Congress in session and have some bean soup there for lunch.” Hay laughed easily. “Harry hates sight-seeing of any organized sort, but we shall simply outvote him. That’s what democracies are for, after all . . . the tyranny of the less-cultured majority such as myself!”

“Thank you,” said Holmes. “But if you and Mrs. Hay do not mind, I would like to spend this first day in Washington as I tend to spend all first days in new cities or locales . . . exploring on foot.”

“Very good,” Hay said with real enthusiasm. “Would you like us to give you some directions for the major sights?”

Holmes smiled under his Sigerson mustache. “Getting lost is my preferred first step in each of my explorations.”

Hay laughed at this.

“If you leave before Harry comes down we shall tell him that you will be back by . . . when?” said Clara Hay. “Shall we plan on you for luncheon, tea, or dinner?”

“Tea, I think,” said Holmes. “Do you have it at five p.m.?”

“That is the hour,” said John Hay, dabbing at his lips beneath the billowing white mustache with a pure-white linen napkin. “Although there may be other options than tea for us men if you’ve had an adventurous day exploring.”

Fifteen minutes later, James having still not made an appearance, Holmes left the house in his green tweed suit, a walking stick with a silver head in the shape of a barking dog, and a full briefcase clutched in his left hand. He was striding briskly under low gray clouds. The day was rather muggy, much warmer than either Paris or New York had been, and Holmes’s/Sigerson’s wool suit was too warm for such a spring day, but this did not stop him from walking at a very brisk pace with the effortless, long-legged strides of the indefatigable explorer he was supposed to be.

The briefcase contained a strange change of clothes. In the upper inside pocket of his tweed jacket he carried photographs of three men, one much younger than the other two. In his right trouser pocket, Holmes carried a French-made, spring-opening knife with a 6-inch blade that had a cutting edge so sharp that one could remove all the hairs on one’s arm with it without feeling the slightest touch of contact.

Holmes had two objectives for his day of “exploring” in Washington: the first was a mere local errand that might end up a tad expensive; the second was a longer voyage by foot into areas that would almost certainly be dangerous. He looked forward to the second task.

Now as he ambled along, seemingly oblivious to the threatening weather or even the city around him, he took in—as was his training and habit—almost everything around him.

Holmes saw that no one was following him.

Holmes noticed that while the homes were rather nice here near Lafayette Square and the Executive Mansion—what Americans would come to call the White House—they were mostly of the flat-fronted, old Federalist design with their modest stoops opening directly onto the sidewalks. The exception to this traditional flavor had been the Hays’ and Adamses’ towering twin piles of red brick in the Richardsonian design. Even as he’d walked away, Holmes had noticed that the bricks of Hay’s mansion facing Sixteenth Street had been architect-unique: longer, wider, and deeper than any standard building brick. He hadn’t yet taken time to study the front of Henry Adams’s house next door on H Street, but he hoped to see that home soon enough.

The trees in bloom along the not-very-wide sidewalks were relatively young and short. Only in the parks had some of the chestnut and elm trees reached their mature height. Washington, D.C., although almost a hundred years old and despite its gleaming-white Roman civic architecture and few great monuments, had the feel of a new and rather sleepy city.

The boulevards were broad but not very busy even in late morning; by London or Paris standards, they were all but empty. On the busier cross-streets, Holmes caught glimpses of small, hooded gigs—what the Americans called “buggies”—as well as fashionable cabriolets and chaises, commercial coaches and canvas-sided “floats” filled with milk churns or stacked marble, the occasional stylish four-in-hand dashing through traffic, some dog carts (usually with young people at the reins), quite a few gleaming black broughams of the quality Hay had sent to the rail station the night before, a plodding assortment of wagons, wagonettes, and vans hauling goods, a few men on horseback, and even a very few gleaming and belching brass and red-leather horseless carriages being guided by men in dusters and goggles at the tillers.

Even though he had to pass the Executive Mansion, Holmes’s glance did not linger on the miniature white palace housing President Cleveland. The detective had last been to the White House in November of 1881—during the trial of President Garfield’s assassin, the pathetic and more-or-less insane Charles Guiteau. Holmes had been pressed into the service by his older brother Mycroft at Whitehall and by Mycroft’s superior in the intelligence services at the time, Sir George Mansfield Smith-Cumming.

In 1881—as now in 1893—the formal British Secret Service had not yet formally come into being (it will be founded in 1909), much less branched into its domestic intelligence service (MI5) and its foreign intelligence service (MI6), but Prime Minister Disraeli had established a “Joint Information and Research Unit” that was actually an oversight and political-liaison committee between the prime minister’s office, Whitehall, and the hodge-podge of intelligence services run by the Army Intelligence Service, Royal Navy Intelligence, and half a dozen other military agencies.

Mycroft Holmes, only 34 years old at the time but already indispensable at Whitehall due to his astounding mathematical ability and reasoning skills, was second-in-command of the Joint Committee (reporting only to the Acting Director at the time of its founding in 1881, Captain Sir George Mansfield Smith-Cumming of the Admiralty’s intelligence service). Mycroft was now co-director of the nascent British Secret Service along with William Melville.

Sherlock’s brother had been given a basement office at 12 Downing Street for his intelligence duties, but Holmes knew that his massive brother had never visited the fully fitted-out Downing Street office. All Joint Committee and Military Directorate of Intelligence operations were soon directed out of Mycroft’s office at Whitehall with his nominal superiors coming there for briefings. This was because Mycroft divided his time between Whitehall and his own creation, the Diogenes Club, a private club half a block away from Whitehall and reachable by both formal tunnels and covered walkways. The older Holmes brother had divided his world between these two interior spaces; there was no third. He slept and ate and amused himself at the Diogenes Club. His younger brother had long known that Mycroft was terrified by open spaces. In years yet to come, Mycroft Holmes would be described as “agoraphobic”.

The Diogenes Club itself, begun, as mentioned earlier, by Mycroft and half a dozen other very strange London men of means and power who shared a fear of open spaces and strangers, was by far the strangest of all the scores of men’s clubs in the city. There were the usual newspapers and meals available, the usual staff of capable servants and silent waiters, a rather good dining room and an excellent and extensive library, comfortable sleeping rooms and even more comfortable deep leather reading chairs in the Upstairs Lounge, but the primary rule—and primary source of comfort for the Diogenes Club members—was that members (and the very few and very rare authorized visitors) could not begin a conversation or speak to anyone, even other charter members, in any place except the sealed-off Strangers Room. Mycroft and the other founding members of the Diogenes Club were not only afraid of strangers and of talking to strangers, they were afraid of clubs.

Sherlock Holmes knew that his brother had many other debilitating phobias. Such was the nature of the de facto director of all of Her Majesty’s de facto Secret Service in late March of 1893.

When Sherlock was hastily dispatched to America in 1881 to interview and investigate President Garfield’s assassin Guiteau (an assignment especially inconvenient to Holmes, not the least of which reason being that he’d only recently settled into his new digs at 221 B with Watson and was finally receiving his first trickle of private, paying clients), he assumed that the assignment was to be a waste of time due to what the consulting detective then believed was his brother Mycroft’s phobia related to anarchists and what Sherlock Holmes saw as his brother’s baseless fantasy about an “international conspiracy of anarchists”. Consulting Detective Holmes thought it was about as likely that there would be an annual Anarchists’ Convention as any real conspiratorial connections between the random madmen.

But while Holmes helped prove that Guiteau had been a lone actor, the continued international anarchist threats, bombings, assassinations, and sometimes elaborate plots turned out to be very real indeed. In 1886 Holmes was back in America, investigating the site of the so-called Chicago “Haymarket Square Massacre”. It was Holmes who discovered who had actually killed the seven policemen—papers and legend were suggesting then that the police had shot each other and textbooks today repeat the calumny—and the results of his investigation remain secret to this day. A year later, in 1887 London, it was Sherlock Holmes and two men from a specially formed squad from Scotland Yard who prevented—only in the very nick of time—the assassination of Queen Victoria by the famed big-game hunter and marksman-for-hire Colonel Sebastian Moran and an accomplice. The two had positioned themselves to fire Jebel rifles placed in an advantageous firing position within the closed Royal Aquarium opposite Westminster Abbey just as Her Majesty entered her royal coach on her own Jubilee Day. The accomplice had been captured; the master marksman and ultimate mercenary huntsman Moran had somehow escaped through the maze of tunnels, labyrinths, steam pipes, and workers’ service corridors beneath the Royal Aquarium.

Holmes’s first stop as Mr. Jan Sigerson was at the Clarkson Scientific Apparatus and Photographic Materials shop only some ten blocks from the Hays’ front door.

As he entered the dimly lit interior, Holmes could not but speculate that this was almost certainly the very shop in which Clover Adams not only had bought her own photographic supplies before her death in 1885, but whoever had supplied her with the poisonous potassium cyanide fixing-solution as a gift might well have also purchased it here.

“May I help you?” asked a pleasant-looking man with sharp-boned but ruddy cheeks and the tiniest-diameter spectacles Holmes had ever seen.

“I am looking for a magic-lantern projector,” said Holmes in his slight Norwegian accent.

“Very good, sir. For in-home purposes or larger commercial presentations—say in a music- or science-hall or general auditorium space?”

“To be put to relatively modest in-home use for now,” said Holmes, looking around admiringly at the rows of carefully lighted cameras, enlargers, glass-plate slide projectors, developing devices, and rack after rack of chemicals. The place had the quiet aura of a wizard’s shop. “Perhaps later,” added Holmes, “I will require a more elaborate projection apparatus.”

“To purchase today or to rent, sir?”

“To rent,” said Holmes. The irony was that he had no fewer than three specialized photographic-plate slide projectors back at 221 B Baker Street. He had used them for years for a wide variety of reasons, not the least of which was to project and compare fingerprints or microscopically enlarged shard-ends of tobacco or cloth. But obviously he hadn’t taken the bulky and delicate projectors—or any of his hundreds of carefully labeled glass photographic plates—with him when he’d arranged to “die” along with the mythical Napoleon of Crime at Reichenbach Falls two years earlier.

The clerk, who announced that his name was Charles Macready—youngest brother of the late English actor William Charles Macready—and that it was his shop and a pleasure to wait on the Norwegian gentleman, led Holmes into a curtained alcove near the rear of the store where a cluster of black-metal and gleaming mahogany-and-brass projectors sat on carefully lighted shelves.

Mr. Macready touched a black-metal device. “This is the newest thing—the lamp is electric so no illuminant fuel is required. A seven-foot electrical cord. No smell of paraffin or fear of tipping over or overheating. The mirror above the electrical bulb focuses the light, you see.”

Holmes had noted that the Hay house was electrified, but he thought it would be undignified to ask that cords be hung from chandelier sockets. “I won’t require electric.”

Macready nodded and moved to a more compact black-metal-and-brass device. “Here is a Woodbury and Marcy Sciopticon. It uses a double flat-wick illuminant, fueled by kerosene, and you can control the height of the wicks for maximum light intensity on the images.”

“I think not,” said Holmes, stroking his chin. “What is that smaller one?”

“A very bright and sturdy little projector manufactured by Ernst Plank at Fabrik Optischer und Mechanischer Waren in Nuremberg,” said Mr. Macready. “But it takes small glass plates. What is the size of the slides you wish to show, sir?”

“Three and a half by five inches,” said Holmes. “Reduced by half from original plate size.”

Macready nodded. “Then I’m afraid the little Ernst Plank model will not suit your needs. It’s wonderful for small science-class presentations or home magic-lantern shows, but your presentation sounds more serious, more . . . panoramic.”

“Yes,” said Holmes.

“We have double- and triple-lensed projectors for special effects, especially when shown in a larger hall,” said the proprietor. “You may know that it allows the projection operator to fade from one image to the next, to overlay two or three images, and thus to give the illusion of movement if the slide images are consecutive in motion. They really act as a sort of motion-picture projector.”

Holmes shook his head. “I require only a good, solid, safe magic-lantern projector. What is this one?” Holmes touched the larger model with its boxes of mahogany-and-brass lenses and a rather beautiful red-leather bellows lens extender. The detective knew its worth because he owned one almost identical.

“Ah, yes, a very fine unit, sir,” said Macready, setting his blunt hands on the larger machine. “Made by Archer and Sons in Liverpool. It is illuminated using a limelight burner, so one must take special care—it burns very hot. But the images are spectacular . . . in small rooms or large halls. You see that each side has a square-hinged door opening into the illumination chamber as well as a blue-glass circular viewing door with a swivel glass cover. The Japanned metal top cover attaches the tall chimney-cowl here . . .”

Macready gently touched an oval aperture. “I have the cowl and chimney in the back, Mr. . . .”

“Sigerson,” said Holmes.

“You see, Mr. Sigerson, how easily the illumination unit slides right out with one easy pull of this brass knob.”

“I shall take it,” said Holmes.

“How many nights’ rental, sir?”

“Just two nights. I shall return it on Monday.”

“That works well since the shop is closed on Sundays, sir. So we shall charge for only one night’s rental. We would be delighted to have the projectors returned before noon on the workday they are due, if that is convenient for you, Mr. Sigerson.”

“Perfectly convenient,” said Holmes. He didn’t comment on the price when Macready quoted it but counted the dollars out from a rather absurdly thick wad of American bills he carried in his pocket. Holmes pulled the shopkeeper’s small pad closer, clicked open his mechanical pencil, wrote, and said, “Can you have it delivered to this address?”

Macready glanced at Holmes’s handwriting and said with a tone of even deeper respect, “Colonel Hay’s home. Absolutely, sir. It shall be delivered before five p.m. today.”

“Oh, and I’ll need fuel for it,” said Holmes.

“Included in the price, sir. The carrying bottles are foolproof and fireproof and set into their own wooden carrying tray. And may I compliment you on your choice, sir. Archer and Sons is a superb optical manufacturer and this unit works with such brilliance that the viewers almost think they are actually there within the frames of the photographic slide. This projector will serve you well whether you’re presenting your slides to a packed house of scientists at the Smithsonian Institution or in the Executive Mansion itself.”

Holmes smiled. “Those venues may have to come somewhat later in my schedule, Mr. Macready.”

CHAPTER 10

Now Holmes was seeking out the worst slums in Washington, D.C.

He walked west through the southern reaches of one of these slums—Foggy Bottom—a low-lying industrial area hosting the city’s gas works, some still-working glass plants amidst the stone and brick remains of their closed brethren, and a diminishing number of odiferous breweries. The air here was thick enough and foul enough to justify the slum’s name, some of the industrial miasma clearly visible as a sort of swirling green fog. As with all of Washington, D.C.’s, worst slums, the inhabitants here built their shelters along the long, unpaved alleys. Many of the residents of Foggy Bottom were—or had been at one time—employed in these abandoned breweries and tumbledown manufacturing ruins, but the alleys were still lined with tin shacks and wooden hovels, many of them abandoned but others still housing families (or solitary, sullen men) too poor to move elsewhere. Along with the miasma that hung over Foggy Bottom, there seemed to hover a second fog of vain hopes that industry and living wages would once again return to the disintegrating neighborhoods.

Holmes found what he wanted near the southwest edge of Foggy Bottom: five rotting, peeling, once middle-class homes standing amidst high weeds on an otherwise abandoned block.

He chose his house carefully, walked around the back, and tested the still-intact rear door. It was locked. These homes were almost certainly for sale, although their former owners and current sales agents were living in a fantasy world if they thought anyone would buy them now for purposes of residence.

Using the small jimmy-tools from his folded leather purse, Holmes let himself in and wandered through the chilly rooms where wallpaper, once eagerly chosen with hope in some long-failed domestic future, peeled away from clammy walls like skin from a corpse.

Upstairs he found what he’d sought: a locked closet. Holmes jimmied it open, undid the clasp of his bulging briefcase, and brought out a change of clothes. When he was completely changed, down to his underlinens, Holmes folded his good tweed “Norwegian suit”, shirt, shoes, and underclothes into the briefcase, set the briefcase on the high shelf of the otherwise empty closet, and used his tools to lock the warped door once again.

There was no mirror left intact in the old house but it had grown dark enough out under the advancing storm that Holmes could check his appearance in one of the long windows in an empty upstairs room.

He was now a grubby American laborer—down to the thick boots and soiled Irish cap—complete with dirty waistcoat and baggy trousers held up with one suspender. He’d applied make-up to approximate months of grime to his face and hands and nails. Holmes allowed his hair to fall from beneath his foul cap at random, greasy angles and now even his carefully trimmed Norwegian-explorer’s mustache had been augmented into an overgrown American’s soup-strainer. Even his fancy cane, the outer sheath slid away, was now a rough walking stick with a lump of brass rather than sculpted silver at its head. Unless someone hefted that stick, they wouldn’t guess that it had a core of lead poured down its center and a solid lead sphere centered under the wood in the rough knob at the top. He still carried the French gravity blade in the pocket of his working-man’s trousers and kept the three photographs tucked securely in his shirt pocket.

Holmes went out of the old house, locked it behind him, and walked south toward the Southwest slums he sought, his stout stick banging against tilted sidewalk pavers and rough cobblestones as he went.

No trace of either the Norwegian gentleman he was currently passing as or the English gentleman he’d so long passed as was left as he walked the rough, dangerous streets of southwest Washington, D.C. His “disguise” as an unemployed, rum-reeking common American laborer did not feel strange on him. He had been pretending to be an English gentleman all of his adult life and sometimes the pretense grew wearisome indeed.

In the century and more to come from this moment in March of 1893, there will be multiple biographies written about Sherlock Holmes. Most will get his birth year—1854—correct. Most will write about how he and his older brother Mycroft came from landed gentry in Yorkshire. They will tell of his youthful education in a Yorkshire manor and his years at Cambridge. Almost all of these facts—after the year of his birth—will be incorrect.

Everything that future biographers—speculators—of Sherlock Holmes’s past assume as true comes from a few words quoted by Dr. John Watson and published in The Strand in a tale titled “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter”. The conversation between the doctor and the detective that particular lazy summer-evening had been running in its “desultory, spasmodic fashion from golf clubs to the causes of the change in the obliquity of the ecliptic” (note here that if Holmes had really not known that the earth orbited the sun, he hardly could have been chatting about the “obliquity of the ecliptic”) when Watson changed the topic to “hereditary aptitudes”. The point under discussion, Watson reported in his chronicle, was how far any singular gift in an individual was due to his ancestry, and how far to his own early training. In today’s parlance, it was a discussion about nature versus nurture.

Then Watson went on with his fateful four paragraphs:

“ ‘In your own case,’ said I, ‘from all that you have told me it seems obvious that your faculty of observation and your peculiar facility for deduction are due to your own training.’

“ ‘To some extent,’ he [Holmes] answered thoughtfully. ‘My ancestors were country squires, who appear to have led much the same life, as is natural to their class. But, nonetheless, my turn that way is in my veins, and may have come with my grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist. Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.’

“ ‘But how do you know that it is hereditary?’

“ ‘Because my brother Mycroft possesses it in a larger degree than I do.’ ”

This was the only time, in hundreds of thousands of words “chronicled by Watson”, that Holmes will ever mention his ancestors. It was the first time he ever mentioned the existence of his brother Mycroft, and Watson was duly astonished.

Yet nothing in this short “revelation” to Dr. Watson by Sherlock Holmes, other than Mycroft’s existence, was true in any real sense: not even the simple fact of his “grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist”.

There was, of course, a well-known French artist of the era, Émile Jean-Horace Vernet (1789–1863), whose specialty was painting scenes of battle and Orientalist-Arab subjects. Vernet’s most-remembered painting in Holmes’s and Watson’s time (and in ours) was his large canvas titled Street Fighting on Rue Soufflot, Paris, June 25, 1848. If Vernet is remembered for any utterance today it is from the time when a patron asked him to remove the image of an especially obnoxious general from one of his battle paintings. “I am a painter of history, sire,” Vernet is reported to have said, “and I will not violate the truth.”

But Holmes, in his recitation to Watson, certainly violated the truth; Émile Jean-Horace Vernet had three brothers and one younger sister who died of typhus when she was 7 years old. She could hardly have been Sherlock Holmes’s grandmother.

William Sherlock Holmes had been born in the Eastside slums of London and had spent the majority of his young years in those slums and on those rough streets. When the older Holmes summoned his barefoot, ragamuffin group of “street Arabs”—his Baker Street Irregulars, as he called them—he might as well have been summoning his much-younger self.

Future biographers will state with certainty, among other “known facts”, that Holmes’s father was either an invalided-out cavalry lieutenant named Siger Holmes or a member of the landed gentry named William Scott Holmes. Neither account has an ounce of truth to it. One famous biography of the Great Detective will have Sherlock’s father and the Holmes family inheriting a Yorkshire estate called “Mycroft” and will trace the family ownership of that grand estate back to the 1550’s.

This is nonsense and wholly manufactured. Holmes’s actual family once had partial claim to some acres of land in Yorkshire, but it was a non-producing hardscrabble farm during Queen Elizabeth’s reign and had been under the mere hired-management of Sherlock’s uncle for only a few years when that man died in 1860, two years after Sherlock’s mother—of whom the adult detective had no clear memory—died of consumption in an Eastcheap boarding house.

It’s true that the Yorkshire farm once had held some delusions of grandeur. In the sixteenth century the nobleman owner—who was not an ancestor of Sherlock Holmes—had begun work on a grand country house there that was to be known as “Ashcroft Manor”. But the nobleman had made the mistake of remaining a practicing Catholic when England had been converted, forcibly when necessary, to the Church of England, and by 1610 “Ashcroft Manor” had been burned to ashes and equally vanished were the fortune and hopes of the noble squire who had so briefly owned the land. History reports that the lord cut his own throat; he had no male descendants who lived beyond the age of 11.

In centuries to come, some Yorkshire locals still referred to the ever-dwindling estate—dwindling due to inevitable entailment of Commons and larger and larger sections being sold off to pay debts by the distant relatives who’d assumed ownership of the farm—as “Ashcroft Farm”, but by 1800 the appellation had become “Ash Heap Acres” after the chimneys and windowless brick buildings of a profitless lead mine that had been built on the remaining 60 acres in a last-ditch effort by an American cousin to earn some money from the place. Until the lead works closed down in 1838, “Ash Heap Acres” often filled the entire Yorkshire valley with a thick, dark cloud of unhealthy lead-laced smoke.

After the death of Sherlock’s uncle Sherrinford in 1860—he had been administering Ash Heap Acres for an absentee Birmingham landlord—Sherlock’s father had bought (at far too high a price) that over-mined and overgrown Yorkshire farm and then brought the 13-year-old Mycroft and 6-year-old Sherlock out to the remaining 38 acres of ruined woodland, unyielding fields, grazed-out pastures, and polluted swamp. Mycroft never left his small room while there, but the farm—what was left of it—was an exploratory and play-filled heaven to the young Sherlock. He even had a swaybacked pony to ride during those three golden years in the Yorkshire Dales.

But by early 1863, Sherlock’s father, who was both a drunkard and spendthrift and who, in young Sherlock’s memory, had spent most of his time at Ash Heap Acres riding the plow horse to nearby Swinton to waste his nights (and many days) in Swaledale’s more sordid public houses, had lost ownership of the farm after spending the last of his brother Sherrinford’s money. Then in 1863, the father and his two extraordinary but unappreciated sons returned to London and a succession of ever-more-seedy rental homes and boarding houses. For Sherlock, it meant a return to their family life of always fleeing their creditors and his return to the streets.

But Mycroft, turning 16 that year, did not return to London with them. He went to Oxford instead.

Even while “in exile” at Ash Heap Acres in the Yorkshire Dales, their father had used Mycroft’s mathematical gifts to have his son pore through racing touts’ data sheets and pick future thoroughbred winners sold at Tattersall in London in Hyde Park, and then Holmes, Sr., after cabling cronies in the city, would place bets on those very horses at Alexandra Park’s “The Frying Pan” racecourse in the city. What Sherlock had noticed in those years (but their father hadn’t) was that Mycroft—seemingly as lazy and listless as he was overweight and brilliant—had been taking money from his father’s bets to place his own racing wagers, adding his secret picks through the agency of his father’s crony who lived in London and returning his smaller but ever-accruing winnings to a separate account. By 1863, 16-year-old Mycroft Holmes had set aside quite a bit of money. And he knew precisely how he was going to spend it.

Mycroft qualified to enter Oxford at the age of 16, paid his tuition and board with what he called his “Tattersall-Frying Pan Money”, and late one night, after waking his younger brother and uncharacteristically shaking hands with young Sherlock (Mycroft hated touching or being touched by other people), took himself off to Oxford. He brought with him only his cardboard suitcase containing a few clothes and a cheese sandwich Sherlock had made for him.

Over the next few years, disowned by his furious father, Mycroft sent Sherlock elaborately encrypted letters in which the older brother described how he reveled in everything that venerable institution had to offer, including the friendship of a certain mathematics professor at Christ Church named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, soon to be known to the world as Lewis Carroll. Mycroft and Dodgson soon became fast friends, sharing their excitement about mathematics (especially prime numbers), difficult codes, and odd patterns of numbers within such everyday things as railway schedules.

William Sherlock Holmes never met Dodgson; the younger son spent the later years of the 1860’s and early 1870’s fighting for his survival in the rough streets of London. In the late 1870’s, Mycroft Holmes plucked his younger brother out of the streets and paid to send him to Oxford. Sherlock refused to attend a school where his older brother had been such a well-known and admired figure. Mycroft then used the money to send his brother to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he hoped Sherlock would focus on Natural Sciences. Sherlock enjoyed some of his chemical-laboratory time at Cambridge but hated his instructors and fellow students and soon dropped out—twice.

To get a glimpse of the actual biography of the early years of Sherlock Holmes—a biography that will never be written—one might use as a template a biography of the younger years of James Joyce, with his drunken, often abusive father first renting fine homes in neighborhoods such as Kensington and then, fleeing landlords demanding rent, dragging his sons to ever-dirtier-and-more-cramped rental houses and then to seedy rooms in boarding houses smelling of boiled cabbage. Sherlock had almost no formal education until his brief stint at Cambridge—had never attended a school, public or private, and had only intermittent tutors at home (when his father had “made a score” on the ponies or some other shady venture).

While Holmes’s father, during the brief periods he had a few coins and he and his son were not actively fleeing landlords in the night, had the habit of hiring a succession of fairly useless (and soon-to-throw-up-their-hands-in-surrender) tutors for young Sherlock, the senior Holmes did spend real money on excellent instructors in five areas of young Sherlock Holmes’s instruction: single-stick combat which Sherlock studied from the age of 7 onwards, boxing (including time spent sparring with several retired but still-famous English champion prizefighters), four years of having a Thai expert teach him the intricacies of Muay Boran martial arts, fencing (the most expensive instruction, the young Holmes sometimes taught by top French fencing experts even when the family could barely afford food), and shooting.

It was as if Sherlock’s father envisioned his strange, wild, but often withdrawn and brooding younger son becoming a soldier someday. Sherlock Holmes, of course, even at the age of 8 or 14, had no more interest in ever being a soldier than he had in being the first aeronaut to travel via balloon to the moon.

It had begun to rain. Holmes carried no umbrella, of course, since his down-at-the-heels-working-class-American disguise would not have included such a thing, so he simply pulled his soiled and ancient Irish cloth cap lower over his brow and kept slogging along as the paved streets finally gave out for good. Streets, as such, had all but disappeared in this part of the Southwest slums and been replaced by countless, hovel-lined alleys consisting of mud and deep ruts and the occasional board thrown down to more easily traverse some important short distance as from a tumbledown tin shack to a three-sided wooden privy.

His contacts in New York had told him that for what he sought he should seek out a former blacksmith shop on what was called Casey’s Alley, but of course there were no street signs here in the slums, no corner policeman from whom to ask directions (not that he would have given them to the unemployed-bounder likes of Holmes), and when Holmes asked directions of some raggedy children playing at torturing a rat, they responded by throwing horse apples at his head.

Before he found the abandoned blacksmith shop and the men he sought, Holmes came across the sort of abandoned commercial building he’d hoped to find amidst these shacks and empty factories. He stepped up onto the structure’s disintegrating wooden sidewalk, kicked open the warped front door, and looked inside.

It had been a cheap railroad-man’s hotel at one point in the past—the tracks, rusted over now, ran next to it in the high weeds—but now it was home to only pigeons and four-legged vermin. Not even the poorest families from the nearby slums sought shelter here. The reason was fascinating to Holmes—in the large sitting room just off what had once served as a small reception lobby, the ceiling had collapsed in a strange way that had created a rough circle almost ten feet across. It was a four-story building and what made that collapsed ceiling interesting to Holmes was that, peering carefully up through the aperture, he could see similar round cavities on what Americans counted as the second, third, and fourth stories. Staring upward, Holmes’s face grew wetter from a constant drizzle dropping through a gap in the old hotel’s rooftop some fifty feet above.

What could have weighed so much that it tore such a vertical path through a ceiling and three floors and a rooftop? Granting that the rain and rot had been far advanced when the event occurred, not even the heaviest of beds or metal safes or player pianos could carve out such destruction through a thick roof and three such reinforced layers of flooring.

There was no clue on the ground floor where Holmes stood save for a purplish-red discoloration that had ruined the splintered floorboards in a fifteen-foot-wide asterisk. It was as if twenty or so absurdly obese men had clustered tightly together on the fourth floor and fallen through three floors before splattering to their death here in the wide sitting room just off the lobby.

The man who had billed himself as the World’s First Consulting Detective—despite scores of private detectives also working in London at the time—did not put much faith in this primary hypothesis of the Case of the Falling Fat Men.

But the hotel would serve. The banister and railings were fallen away on much of the central staircase, but the stairs themselves might hold.

Two muddy blocks further on he found three walls and a canvas sheet, the remains of what had once been a blacksmith shop. Besides the old sign hanging slack from one hook, there was a rusted anvil lying in the alley mud. Clues enough for the World’s First and Foremost Consulting Detective. Holmes stepped up onto a wooden platform hardly less muddy than the alley below and moved the canvas aside with the knob of his lead-cored walking stick.

Smoking and sorting through what appeared to be piles of trash tossed onto a low table were three of the roughest-looking scoundrels Sherlock Holmes had ever encountered in the daylight. Two of them—they looked like idiot brothers—had arms so long and expressions (behind their red stubble) so primitive that they might have stepped out of a Stone Age Troglodyte diorama in the British Natural History Museum. The third man smelled so strongly of body odor that the stench seemed to shove Holmes physically back against the filthy canvas wall. The tall man had a sheath on the belt around his sagging, patched trousers and in that sheath was a Bowie knife the length of some Afghani and Zulu short swords Holmes had seen.

“What the fuck do you want?” said the taller man with the knife. He put a grimy hand on the heavy hilt.

“Someone told me that you could come up with the amount of morphine I need,” said Holmes in his best Philadelphia-American accent. Holmes had first seen the United States when he toured in the 1870’s with Percy Alexander’s acting troupe—nineteen cities in seven months—and he had taken care at the time to acquire as many regional dialects as he might need in the future.

“And heroin,” added Holmes. “I want heroin. If you don’t have the morphine, I’ll take the heroin.”

The tall man looked at Holmes’s worn work boots and patched clothing, smirked, and said, “Who’s to tell us you ain’t a bluecoat without the fuckin’ coat?”

“I’m not a copper,” said Holmes.

“Take your shirt off,” said the man with the knife. “Roll up your sleeve.”

Shaking slightly, Holmes removed his jacket, rough waistcoat, and workman’s wool shirt and rolled up his torn and dirty undershirt. All three of the men leaned forward to look at the constellation of scabs and scars on his inner arm.

“He slams regular on somethin’,” said the second Troglodyte, his hairy face hovering close to Holmes’s bare arm.

“Shut up, Finn,” said the tall man.

“Then who says you got the fucking money?” said the other Troglodyte.

“Shut up, Finn,” snapped the man with the Bowie knife. Evidently, since they were obviously brothers, calling both of the Troglodytes by the same name saved time.

Before the closer Finn backed away, Holmes caught a glimpse of a crudely tattooed-in-blue-ink st on his right wrist. This told Holmes that he was in the right place, at least according to his connections in Hell’s Kitchen in New York. He wanted to make contact with someone in the Washington gang known as the Southwest Toughs. It looked as though he had.

That tall man pointed at Holmes. “This ain’t Chinatown. Not even a hospital nearby to get supplies from. Mr. Bayer’s schmeck comes pure but it costs more hereabouts. You got what it takes to get it?”

“I have money,” whined Holmes in the desperate tones of an addict. He pulled out a thick wad of American bills.

“I guess you do, pal,” said the tall man with his fingers tapping idly on the hilt of the knife. “Finn, both of you, go get Mr. Culpepper and Mr. J. Now.”

Holmes saw a not-unfamiliar light come into their eyes then, although the man with the knife at least tried to conceal his gleam. They were going to kill him for the cash.

CHAPTER 11

With the Finns gone, there were only the three of them in the canvas-walled blacksmith shop—Holmes, the tall man with the big knife, and the tall man’s body odor. Holmes stayed silent, the man with the knife stared at him without speaking, and the stench spoke for itself.

Less than ten minutes later, the Finns returned with two well-dressed men. One was tall, thin, and silent, with the slightest trace of thin mustache above perfectly formed lips. He had very dark hair and the kind of pale-to-translucent skin that meant even by this time in the early afternoon, he could have used a second shave of the day, although everything else about the man was impeccable. There was not the slightest hint of mud on his polished shoes or white spats. This tall, thin, silent man was dressed well enough that he could have joined Wall Street executives or—closer to home—Washington’s annual Easter Parade on K Street without looking out of place.

The other, shorter and heavier fellow, while expensively dressed, showed too many vulgar aspects not to stand out amongst real gentlemen. He sported a gold tooth that matched the gold-colored threads in his elaborate waistcoat. Visible above the waistcoat, most of it tucked into his impossibly clean trousers given the mud of Casey’s Alley, was the butt of a double-action pistol. A new, brown-felt homburg was perched above his greased-back black hair. He was smiling.

“Good God, Murtrick,” gasped the shorter, heavier newcomer with the pistol. “It’s powerful rank in here. It’s almost April . . . haven’t you taken your annual bath yet?” He waved the Finns out of the little shop and Holmes could hear the brothers’ boots squelching in the mud outside.

The tall thin man leaned back against a counter, only after dusting it with his handkerchief, and watched the proceedings in continued silence.

The vulgarly dressed man extended a rough hand. “Howard Culpepper,” he said in a rich baritone.

Holmes shook hands with him. If this was Culpepper, then the younger, silent man must be “Mr. J”—obviously the most important of the five thieves. The man Culpepper had called Murtrick never quit tapping at the hilt of his huge knife. Holmes felt in luck that his first real contact in Washington was this Culpepper fellow; based on his flashy dress and confident attitude, he might possibly be high enough up in the city’s criminal organization to answer Holmes’s questions. If given the proper incentive. He doubted very much if Mr. J would be so foolish as to give names—or any useful information for that matter.

“And your name, sir?” asked Culpepper.

“Henry Baskers,” said Holmes.

“Well, Mr. Baskers, I apologize, if your host has not, for the olfactory unpleasantness currently haunting our temporary place of business,” said Culpepper. “You’ve seen the local neighborhood, sir. Water has to be carried down here by hand all the way from Four-and-a-Half Street. There’s not so much as a single public pump in all of this Southwest quarter.” He squinted at Murtrick. “But that is little excuse, since civilization demands a price.”

Murtrick never took his eyes off Holmes, who had nothing to say to all of this. He allowed himself to show several subtle signs of nervousness without overplaying his role. Mr. “Baskers” would have purchased illicit drugs in unsavory places before this.

From time to time, Holmes allowed his nervous gaze to flick to Mr. J as if he were one gentleman appealing for help from another, but the tall man leaned against the counter with a withdrawn silence bordering on complete indifference. It was as if he weren’t there.

But Culpepper rubbed his palms together. “To business then, sir. My confederates tell me that you wish to purchase a modest amount of morphine and . . . how shall I put it? . . . a more significant amount of Mr. Bayer’s new heroic pharmaceutical.”

“Yes,” said Holmes. He repeated the amount of each he was ready to purchase.

“You’re aware, Mr. Baskers,” said Culpepper, “that Bayer has not yet fully released this miraculous heroin for general sale either in Europe or the United States. Soon it will be on every grocery store’s shelf, but right now it is undergoing—what do they call it?—trials in select hospitals, including Dr. Reed’s clinic.”

Holmes nodded impatiently. He allowed his gaze to remain riveted on the three bottles of heroin salts Culpepper was holding between the fingers of his right hand like a magician preparing to do a trick. Each label read FRIEDIR BAYER & CO., ELBERFELD, 40 STONE ST., NEW YORK.

In truth, Holmes was also noting the make and model of the pistol set in Culpepper’s tight waistband. It was familiar to the detective since not only was it British-made but had been standard issue for the British military until it had been replaced by the Enfield pistol in 1880. It was the .442-caliber Beaumont-Adams revolver that had become so famous in England’s war with the Zulus—this model almost certainly modified, as so many had been that had seen action in America’s Civil War, to take center-fire cartridges. This pistol had sported the first modern double-action system. Holmes knew that many American officers and cavalry in their Civil War had preferred it to the American military Colt due to the Beaumont-Adams’s superior trigger-cocking speed and more rapid rate of fire in close action. He wondered idly if Culpepper had been an officer in that war, now almost 30 years in the past, and if he kept this pistol for reasons of sentimentality. Based on the gray in the man’s sideburns and the obvious use of hair-darkening materials elsewhere under that homburg—perhaps the same patent goop Holmes was using in his Sigerson disguise—Culpepper could easily be in his late fifties or early sixties.

Holmes assumed that Mr. J was also armed, but almost certainly with a much smaller and more sensible pistol to carry in a city.

“The morphine will cost you only twenty dollars,” said Culpepper, holding the two smaller vials in his left hand. That was twice what Holmes would pay for it near one of the hospitals or in the Negro sections of town just a dozen alleys from here.

As if reading Holmes’s thoughts, Culpepper chuckled and said, “Yes, yes, you could get if for less in niggertown, Mr. Baskers, but God knows what our darky friends might have mixed into it. And as for the heroin . . . no, you have come to the one and only supplier in your nation’s capital, sir. You will find it nowhere else.”

Holmes knew that this wasn’t true either, but he said, “How much for the three bottles of salts?”

“One hundred and fifty dollars, sir,” said Culpepper. Even Murtrick glanced over at the well-dressed man in surprise. This was more than four times the street price Holmes would have paid for an equal amount of the drug in New York.

He wrestled visibly with the shock of the price, allowing only the slightest hint of the serious addict’s always-losing war between absolute need and mere money to show on his face.

“Oh, what the heck,” laughed Culpepper. “We’ll throw both morphines in as part of the price. A better deal you’ll get nowhere east of the Mississippi, Mr. Baskers.”

Holmes swallowed hard and nodded. “All right.” He watched both men’s eyes glint as he counted a hundred and fifty dollars from his absurd wad of American bills. He was carrying more than eight hundred dollars with him—every bit of what he’d brought from France and converted to dollars in New York.

When the transaction was completed and the morphine and heroin bottles nestled most carefully in Holmes’s various jacket pockets, Culpepper asked in a casual tone, “Will we be having the pleasure of your future business, Mr. Baskers? I can give you the address of one of my . . . ah . . . less fragrant and more convenient places of business.”

This was it. If Holmes told them that he was going to be a regular customer, they might let him live. At these extortionate prices for heroin alone, they could have his remaining $650 in a few months without resorting to violence. Over a year or two, he would be worth a true fortune to them.

“No,” said Holmes. “I’m leaving tomorrow for San Francisco. I’m from Philadelphia and didn’t know if the heroin was in use out there yet and so . . . I thought . . .”

“We understand,” grinned Culpepper. He gave Murtrick the briefest of glances. “Have a safe trip, Mr. Baskers.”

Mr. J did not even turn his head to watch as Holmes left the former blacksmith shop.

CHAPTER 12

They’d sent one of the Finns to follow him up Casey’s Alley. Following a man surreptitiously up such a narrow venue, crowded as its sides were with a contiguous wall of shacks and tumbledown ruins, would have been difficult enough when the dirt street was dry; with the mud, it was impossible.

Holmes squelched northward, never looking back, assured that this Finn was merely keeping him in sight while the other three men—or possibly more by now—were moving up an adjacent north-south alley. When Holmes stopped, this Finn would get the word to the others in less than a minute.

Culpepper and Murtrick would be betting that this addict’s need was so great that he could not wait to get back to his hotel, but would seek out a private place along the way in which to inject his newly acquired heroin. They would also be banking that Holmes—“Mr. Baskers”—would do this before he left the slums of the Southwest quarter.

Holmes would not disappoint them.

He left the door of the abandoned hotel ajar behind him. The giant stain in the floor of the large room off the lobby remained just as disturbing as at first encounter and the three stories of cratered floorboards beginning with that room’s ceiling just as shocking. The cold spring rain had settled into a heavy drizzle and it continued to fall through the shattered rooftop more than three stories above.

Perhaps a meteor or comet struck the hotel, was the ironic thought that came from the most reasoned and deductive mind in England. Holmes was in great physical pain. The morphine he’d injected that morning had been the last of his store, had been far too little for the pain that had accrued over the past week, and pain continued to distract him despite his years of disciplining himself to ignore it. A gunshot wound, something less than mortal, would have distracted him less than this ferocious full-body ache that came from too long of an interval between applications of his ameliorative.

He climbed the stairs slowly, testing each one carefully before committing his weight. The wood was soaked and rotten but had once been a sound and noble wood and only a few steps had to be avoided completely. The railing was continuous for the length of its long, curving climb, but so many balusters had fallen away that nowhere was the banister solid enough to hold a person’s weight should he or she be pressed against it. Between what the Americans called the second and third stories, there was almost no banister at all.

He turned into the dripping, wallpaper-curling corridor on the fourth floor and threw his shoulder against the warped door of his chosen room.

This was it. There was a rotting floor intact for only eighteen inches or more before the huge cavity began. Holmes could see lathing and shards of ancient carpet that had been left in the interstices between joists when the impossible weight had crashed down for forty feet. There was space enough only on the right side of the crater to edge around the hole in this unfurnished room, and the constant drizzle from above—lit by the dim sunlight coming through gray clouds—gave an eerie and unreal illumination to the bare walls and remnant of floor and ceiling. Holmes had hoped that there’d be room enough against the wall opposite the doorway for him and there was—just. Four feet or so of downward-sloping floor there before the hole began.

If Culpepper wanted to kill him, all he had to do was open the door, aim, and fire—their target would be fewer than twenty feet away. But the odds of “Mr. Baskers” falling forward after being shot by a .442-caliber ball were almost 100% and it was Holmes’s mortal wager that Culpepper and Murtrick—or whatever their real names were—wanted the bottles of morphine and heroin intact after their other thievery was finished.

Holmes squeezed against the wall opposite the mild waterfall and empty space separating him across the room from the door he’d closed behind him and then slid down that wall, hoping the sloping floor would hold his weight. It did, although it groaned in protest. He got out one of the bottles and his leather syringe kit.

In France and during the crossing, Holmes had pondered the wisdom of arming himself with a pistol. He’d had one in India but France had been so peaceful—even the time he’d spent with the experimental chemists in Montpelier where he’d decided to wean himself off morphine by shifting to this newer, safer drug—that he’d had no need of a firearm there. His last chance to pick one up had been his one night in New York, but he’d been so busy there getting information about possible contacts in Washington that he hadn’t had time to go pistol-shopping. In truth, the thought had never entered his mind while he was there.

Sitting with his knees apart and one shoe bracing the bottle on the floorboards should it roll toward the terrible crater, Holmes set out his various apparatuses and smiled.

In Watson’s many written “Adventures . . .” and “Cases . . .”, most of which he kept in his older medical satchel on the shelf in his room and which the public had not yet heard of or read, Watson almost always portrayed himself as the one who brought a pistol to the adventure when a pistol was needed. In truth, despite the hundreds of hours of shooting instruction by his father and many more hours of lonely practice since, Holmes did indeed dislike firearms of any sort. But he smiled again at the memory of Watson always describing his own pistol only as “my old [or “trusty”] service revolver”, but his medical friend had learned enough about writing from Conan Doyle to know that readers were bored by details.

Holmes lived (and would probably die someday) for details. He’d noticed the first time Watson had ever armed himself for one of their mutual adventures that the “service revolver” was an Adams six-shot caliber .450 breechloader with a 6-inch barrel; standard issue for the British Army during the second Afghan war in which Watson had received his suspiciously mobile Jezail bullet. Dr. Watson’s weapon was not so different, in size and capability, from the Beaumont-Adams pistol that Culpepper had been showing off from his belted waistband. Holmes had noticed that the dandy had worn both braces—“suspenders” his Mr. Baskers would call them here in America—and a thick belt. Mr. Culpepper was a cautious man. Just how cautious, thought Holmes, they would all soon see.

Perhaps all five of them are carrying pistols by now, was Holmes’s last thought before he heard the front door of the hotel being forced open three stories below.

But no—Holmes felt certain, to his deep disappointment, that Mr. J had not joined this expedition. He’d certainly returned to report the interaction to his own superior.

Which meant that he would have to leave at least one of the four men tracking him alive. But not necessarily Culpepper.

Holmes’s materials were set before him on the leather cloth. He’d preloaded his syringe with saltwater and now he brought out a bottle cap taken from a bottle of Hires Root Beer he’d purchased earlier in the morning, after renting his magic-lantern projector. Holmes had tossed away the bottle and its contents—hideous stuff, “root beer”; he wondered how Americans could buy and guzzle three million bottles of it a year. Now he filled the bottle cap with the heroin salts and then squeezed out enough water to liquify the salts.

From another pouch in his unrolled leather bag, Holmes extracted the bit of chemical tubing he’d used that morning to tie off his arm. He did so again, tapping at the veins on the inside of his elbow and then, from his waistcoat pocket, brought forth perhaps the most unique device he owned—a prototype cigarette lighter presented to Holmes in 1891, just months before his self-disappearance, by a satisfied client: a scientist by the name of Carl Auer von Welsbach. The patenting of a flint-like substance called ferrocerium allowed the von Welsbach lighter to be small, simple, and safe, in comparison to the bulky, complex, and extremely dangerous Döbereiner flame-makers of decades past. He held the blue flame from von Welsbach’s gift under the bottle cap.

The von Welsbach lighter had saved Holmes’s life numerous times in the Himalayas; now he asked it only to work quickly so he could heat the heroin-crystal-saltwater mixture before the audible footsteps on the stairway reached his floor.

Holmes took a small pellet of cotton he’d been carrying in his shirt pocket next to the three photographs and dropped the cotton wad onto the Hires bottle cap he was using for a cooker. The cotton acted as a filter, blocking the inevitable undissolved clumps of heroin salts that would clog the syringe and stop his heart.

The footsteps were climbing above the second-story landing.

Holmes lifted the filled syringe, tapped it, squirted a tiny bit to be sure there were no air bubbles, and leaned over to inject the contents into his vein.

It sounded like only four men, not five, climbing to the fourth floor. They were trying to climb quietly, but not too quietly. They obviously weren’t overly concerned as to whether meek Mr. Baskers heard them or not. What could he do if he did?

Holmes wanted time for the heroin to take effect. He tugged the tubing off, emptied and disassembled the syringe, and put the bottles, bottle cap, and precious von Welsbach cigarette lighter back in their proper places.

The heroin hit his system almost at once.

First came the glowing warmth filling his heart, chest, torso, limbs, and then brain. Then came the fading of all pain—especially the pain of his question of existence or non-existence—and then came the sense of rising on the crest of a curling wave.

The footsteps stopped outside the door of his room. Holmes vaguely heard whispering. He ignored it.

Rising rapidly on that silent wave, he could see and sense his own life better now. He could make out the lacunae, the ellipses, the terrible gaps between his so-called cases, his so-called adventures, his so-called life as a famous consulting detective. Those days or weeks or sometimes months between the cases that Watson had been feverishly chronicling were not a memory of life; they were a glimpse of rough sketches with faces not drawn in, backgrounds not sketched, days not filled. Holmes remembered screeching his bow on his expensive violin. He remembered injecting cocaine. He remembered sleeping long afternoons and fooling around in his locked room with his chemistry set like a child, bubbling things, burning things. He remembered the ghost of Mrs. Hudson carrying trays into the common room, carrying trays out. There were a few times when Mrs. Hudson—still looking and sounding like “Mrs. Hudson” in Holmes’s memory—had been inexplicably referred to as “Mrs. Turner” in Watson’s chronicles. All that was a blur now. None of it had any sense of solidity or the simple taste of the real.

The warped door was shoved open. The Finns came in, almost tiptoeing, like cartoon characters from Comic Cuts, Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday, or Illustrated Chips, all guilty favorites of Dr. Watson. Holmes ignored them; he had no time left but he also had no choices left. He had to see what the drug would allow him to see before he could pay attention to his would-be murderers.

Holmes’s consciousness had expanded until he came up against the horizontal iron bars of his cage. The bars were not solid. Sections of different lengths floated in the gray air—no, not air, some gelatinous aether—in front of him, but no two horizontal blocks were far enough apart that he could press his head or shoulders between them. Holmes realized that the floating horizontal elements of his cage were distinct words, giant words, separate words like slugs of type set into a gelatinous void of a medium, but the huge words and sentences were written backward from his point-of-view. Holmes grabbed at two of the longer floating words—the metal was so cold it burned his hands—and he stared through the imprisoning word-bars with the expression of a madman or a castaway seeing his first ship in years receding from view.

Holmes looks at you. He sees the blurred outlines of the room or space behind you. He strains to make out your face.

“He’s slammed,” said one of the Finns.

“He’s all shot up. He ain’t even half here,” said the other Finn.

“Shut up,” snapped Murtrick.

All four men were inside the open door now, the Finns and Murtrick having worked their way carefully around to their right, Holmes’s left. But Culpepper stayed in the doorway. Braces and belt, Holmes remembered through the glow and wondrous, fearless terror of the heroin. If Culpepper remained a truly cautious man for the next two minutes, Mr. Sherlock Holmes of London would soon be a corpse.

Holmes had tucked away his leather foldaway and was on his knees as if praying to the drizzle falling vertically in front of him. Somewhere above the hole in the ceiling the sun had grown brighter; the waterfall was now made of skeins of liquid gold. Holmes’s walking stick was propped against the wall behind him and to the right. It would be most awkward for him to try to reach it and would take too long to try. The three men creeping up on him noted this. Holmes’s eyes were not focused on anything, but he vaguely noticed that Murtrick had removed the Bowie knife from its sheath. Culpepper had removed the revolver from his waistband. The Finns now raised their Paleolithic clubs.

Then Culpepper stepped into the room and wedged shut the door behind him. Most probably it was just old habit—seeking some privacy for a murder. Holmes had instinctively hoped for such a habit to be there, but he had not been certain. He had not been certain. Now he seemed to take no notice.

Now all four men were moving carefully around the perimeter of the terrible hole in the floor, keeping as close to the west wall of the empty room as possible. The Finns kept glancing down into the cavity with something like terror in their little Troglodyte eyes.

Holmes decided that it would have to be one of the Finns who should survive and carry back the details of this encounter to Mr. J and his superiors.

“Don’t cluster too close when you get him,” whispered Culpepper, following them but staying several paces back, then stopping completely at the west side of the hole while watching the other three advance. “The floor might not hold you there if you cluster up. We need the bottles intact.”

No one said anything but the three men opened more distance between themselves. The Finns shouldered their short clubs with nails driven through the working ends. Murtrick had his knife and was moving in an experienced knife-fighter’s crouch. Culpepper held his pistol loosely down at his side, every inch the vision of the accomplished duelist anticipating another easy victory. The Beaumont-Adams revolver’s hammer was cocked.

Holmes had not turned his head to watch their final approach. His eyes were vacant, the drug obviously in full control. There was a single drop of blood on the inside of his still-bare left arm.

The Finns attacked with Murtrick close behind.

Holmes—so cool behind his buffer that he watched with the most disinterested attention imaginable—whirled, away from the attacking men, as if attempting a retreat into the dead-end corner where the crater came all the way to the east wall, but the whirl was no half-turn away. He twirled almost completely around and came up out of his crouch with his walking stick in his hand.

The Finns shouted a single primal scream and raised their clubs.

Decades of single-stick practice guided Holmes’s two-second blur of six blows: two lateral swings to break their right arms; two vertical swings to club their underjaws and drop them to their knees; two fluidly vicious downward swings—one to crush the larger Finn’s skull, a lesser blow to knock the slightly shorter Finn down, but to leave him semiconscious.

Murtrick had made the mistake of staring at the blur of violence and leaping blood, but now he leaped closer, crouched lower, swung the deadly blade to the right, to the left. He jumped over the dead Finns: one motionless on its face, a river of blood flowing from his ears, the other twitching on his back, moaning as he cradled his aching head and bleeding scalp with both hands.

Holmes took a step backward, not because he feared Murtrick’s blade or needed the room but because he was sending a subliminal message to Culpepper to join the fray. Come closer. The dandy did take two steps closer but still stayed well out of club range. His pistol was raised but the man was obviously waiting for Murtrick to do his job. “The heroin bottles!” he screamed at his stinking friend. “Don’t break them!”

The Bowie knife was its own blur. Holmes was fast enough with his stick to have batted it across the room in the quarter of a second when Murtrick tossed it from hand to hand—the man was obviously as ambidextrous at ripping his enemies open from sternum to crotch as he was filthy—but Holmes had use for the knife stuck in the floor here, not lost down the golden waterfall hole or sticking from an unreachable wall or door across the room. He risked more by waiting for Murtrick to sweep the blade a final time and then lunge forward in a ballet-beautiful single motion. Only in Spain and once in Calcutta had Holmes seen knife-fighters perform that brilliantly. It was precisely the kind of super-fast knife move, Holmes knew, that almost always left the expert knife-wielder’s opponent’s bowels hanging out and then dropping to the floor with that ultimately final, squishy sound that the horrified and dying victim lived long enough to see and hear. The length of a Bowie knife only made that full hari-kari more likely, but the weight of Mr. Bowie’s famous blade and hilt did slow the killing move by that necessary fraction of a second on which Holmes counted.

Holmes arched his body while balancing on his heels, the tip of the Bowie knife took a button off his waistcoat, and then he slammed his weighted stick down on Murtrick’s right hand—the knife dropped and embedded its point in the floor exactly where Holmes had wished it—and then, without pausing in its complex arc, the stick swung up and caught Murtrick in the side of the head.

Dazed, Murtrick wobbled toward the drop, started to go over.

Holmes grabbed the man, then pulled him toward his own chest with what felt like an infinitely powerful heroin-assisted left hand, keeping his stick in his right hand between them. Holmes brought his face so close to Murtrick’s it seemed as if he was going to kiss the semi-conscious thug, then Holmes lowered his face to the man’s chest, making himself smaller as he pushed both of them forward around the perimeter of the crater.

The four cracks from the .442 Beaumont-Adams revolver seemed to reach Holmes hours after the impacts had shattered the back of Murtrick’s skull, lodged in the man’s spine, blown his left shoulder into bone fragments, and passed through his body—that final ball passing between Holmes’s right arm and his torso.

It was a five-shot pistol, but Holmes had pushed the upright corpse up and into Culpepper by this point and the fifth shot blew wet plaster out of the rotted ceiling. Holmes dropped Murtrick’s corpse, unhurriedly clubbed the empty gun out of Culpepper’s hand, and dragged him back to where he had injected the heroin, both men doing rather dainty dances over the three fallen bodies. The rotted and tilting floor sagged under their weight, but Holmes needed Culpepper near the knife embedded hilt-up in those groaning floorboards.

He swung Culpepper around and shoved him toward the edge of the hole, stopping his fall only with his left hand grasping the older man’s jacket collar. Culpepper teetered and whimpered. Holmes suddenly smelled urine.

Holmes tossed away his club and reached into his shirt pocket to retrieve the three photographs there. Still holding Culpepper at a steep angle over the drop, he thrust the first photograph—the one of the older, heavier, dark-eyed, mustached man—in front of the murderer’s face.

“Do you know this man?” barked Holmes. “Have you ever seen him?”

“No.” Culpepper’s baritone was now a soprano’s quaver.

“Make sure,” said Holmes. “I don’t know which of the Southwest Toughs’ bosses you report to—Dillon, Meyer, Shelton—but it would have been at their headquarters, maybe in their office. Or perhaps this man and your boss dining together.”

“I’ve never seen him!” screeched the dangling man. Every time Culpepper tried to bring his arms back to grab at Holmes, the detective let him tilt a little more over the drop. Culpepper quit trying to grab and let his pudgy hands and arms flap like a pigeon’s broken wings.

Holmes pocketed that photo and brought forth the photograph of the much younger man. In profile—thin lips, long, straight nose, hair combed back, eyes as light as a reptile’s. The image terrified Holmes even in the perfectly disinterested state the heroin had granted him.

Culpepper’s hesitation told Holmes what he needed to know. “Tell me. Now!” he said and let the big man tilt a few more inches forward. Holmes’s left arm and hand were growing tired; he knew he’d almost dropped Culpepper three stories by accident right then. That would never do. But he couldn’t change hands. Not yet. “Tell me now!” he bellowed.

“I think I saw this fellow . . . maybe . . . once. Dear Jesus, don’t drop me!” Holmes pulled him a few inches closer.

“A couple of years ago,” babbled Culpepper. “Maybe three. At Shelton’s office on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“What was his name?”

“I just saw him, from a distance,” quavered Culpepper. “I swear to God. If I knew anything more about him I’d tell you. I swear to God. Please don’t push me! Please don’t drop me. I’ll change my life. I swear to Jesus Christ.”

“And this man?” demanded Holmes, showing the third photograph. The oldest of the three in the photographs—one of a shockingly pale and cadaverous-looking, hollow-cheeked, and balding man. But the sharpness of features does not create sympathy in the viewer; this face is one of a predator, not of a victim or prey. One’s first impression is of an almost disturbingly large shelf and dome of white forehead looming above deep-set eyes magnified by old-fashioned pince-nez spectacles. The sense of the older man being an intellectual created by the oversized forehead and glimpse of old-fashioned collar, ribbon tie, frock coat, and pince-nez is immediately counteracted by the sharp and strong jut of the older man’s chin, from which various and strong—and somehow angry-looking—cords of wrinkle and muscle rise to the sharp cheekbones and to both sides of the vulpine blade of a nose. It is a predatory face made even more raptor-like by the hunched shoulders rising like a vulture’s black feathers on either side of the grub-white blade of a face.

“Never seen him . . .” gasped Culpepper. “I’m slipping! I’m slipping! Oh, Jesus . . .”

“Perhaps you’ve heard his name,” said Holmes, feeling the strength in his restraining hand beginning to fade. “Moriarty. Professor James Moriarty.”

“No! Never!” cried Culpepper, and Holmes could see in his eyes that he was lying. Perfect.

Holmes shot a brief glance at the surviving Finn, still slumped against the wall and holding his bleeding head. He’d ceased moaning and had seen and heard everything well enough. But there was no fight left in him. Blood from the scalp wound had soaked his fingers, wrists, and sleeves.

Holmes put away the photos and pulled Culpepper back from the edge. He didn’t believe he’d get any more. What had he learned? That Lucan might or might not have been in Washington two or more years ago. That Culpepper had definitely heard of Professor Moriarty but almost certainly hadn’t seen him.

Holmes released his grip on the stocky man and looked at the floor. Blood had pooled completely around the dead Finn’s head. Murtrick’s body lay across the dead man’s legs, his bullet-shattered head no longer recognizable as something that had once been human. The surviving Finn had managed to scrunch back further from his dead brother and boss. The bleeding Finn’s eyes were as big as saucers staring at Holmes through his carmine-stained fingers.

All this for the information that Lucan might have been in Washington and in touch with the Toughs a few years ago? And that the criminal organization here simply knows of Moriarty? He was assailed by a sudden sadness, amplified to something like grief by the fading of the first-freedom of the heroin.

He should have left all this drama aside and simply coldcocked and kidnapped Mr. J and interrogated him. He was the only one Holmes had encountered this afternoon who might know if they’d done business with Lucan.

Holmes sighed and turned his back on Culpepper as if to retrieve his dropped club.

The Bowie knife had been sticking hilt-up only inches from Culpepper’s right boot. The big man tugged the blade out with a grunt and leaned forward to strike.

Holmes leaned away from him, his head almost to the moldy wall, his right elbow on the floor, and kicked his left leg straight, his foot flat as he’d been trained in his youth, the leverage in that leg of his suddenly uncoiled body carrying enough energy to have kicked in a locked and barred door.

Culpepper actually flew upward and backward so that Holmes caught a glimpse of the soles of his shoes looking like two exclamation marks hanging in mid-air before Culpepper screamed and the drizzle, no longer golden, seemed to carry him down into the center of the ten-foot-wide hole in the floor.

Holmes paused in the room only long enough to pick up the fallen Beaumont-Adams revolver. It was an old weapon, but not unattractive. Wiping it off with his handkerchief, he disassembled it and dropped the pieces down the wide hole.

The living, still-bleeding Finn tried to push himself further back, literally into the wall, as Holmes passed him with his heavy club swinging idly by his side. The detective could only trust that the surviving Finn had just enough intelligence—and not such a serious concussion—that he could reliably report these proceedings to Mr. J and his other bosses.

Holmes had told Watson more than once that when he, Sherlock Holmes, retired, he was going to write his opus—The Whole Art of Detection. But the book he should really write, Holmes knew, was How to Get Away with a Murder. Rule No. 8 would be—Never take away anything of the victim’s. Nothing at all.

He closed the door behind him, the surviving Finn still shaking in fear as if he thought Holmes would come back around the hole with its rainbow waterfall to finish the job, and then Holmes was stepping carefully down the stairway. It had borne more weight than it was used to this rainy March day. Holmes did stop in the large room off the lobby. A second broad stain had joined the first. Somehow Culpepper had contrived to land directly on the top of his head. His homburg was not the better for it, and the sharp, bloody-white base of the heavy man’s spine had been pushed out through his buttocks.

Holmes rolled the body over, taking care to keep even his disguised-as-poor-American-bloke’s clothes free from stain, and retrieved his $150. He would have use for it in the coming weeks.

It was Saturday, March 25. Holmes expected Henry James to come to his senses soon and return to England or France, but he knew that he himself might have to stay in America at least until the official opening on the first of May. President Cleveland was scheduled to push the button that let the fountains jet high, the battleship to fire, and the chorus to unleash the “Hallelujah Chorus”. Holmes would have to stay here in America that unbearable time unless, of course, circumstances of his own doing—including this encounter—or a telegram from his older brother released him from such long and tiresome obligations.

’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, thought Holmes, remembering that evening in 1874 when the 20-year-old Sherlock Holmes, understudy to the lead under a different name entirely, had replaced the suddenly-taken-ill bright new acting star in the firmament and troupe-director Henry Irving for one glorious night not as Rosenkrantz, not as faithful Horatio (“Yes, m’lord,” “No, m’lord” for two and a half aching hours), but as Hamlet. The ovation had been standing. The reviews in The Times had been sterling. Irving had fired him from the troupe the next day.

Holmes left the mold- and blood-coppery-smelling old hotel and walked up Casey’s Alley until his feet found pavement again.

His briefcase and other clothes were where he had placed them in the abandoned house in Foggy Bottom. Holmes took care folding away his American clothes and getting into his Norwegian gentleman’s too-heavy tweeds. It took him a minute to get the black cover and silver barking-dog’s head secured in place over the cruder wooden walking stick he’d had to wash along the way.

Holmes peered into a glass pane that threw back his reflection. He’d made sure his hands were clean but now he saw three tiny rosettes of blood line up like crimson snowflakes along his left cheekbone. Wetting his handkerchief in a puddle near a broken window, he dabbed the spots away. Then he tossed away the un-monogrammed handkerchief.

Leaving the house with the confidence of an absentee owner after an inspection, Holmes headed back through Foggy Bottom and into the lovely Federalist-style-lined streets closer to the downtown and the Executive Mansion. His walk now was the wide and confident stride of a famous explorer. His fancy stick now clacked on perfectly laid bricks.

Holmes had plenty of time to bathe and change before five o’clock tea time.

When they all met in the smaller parlor, Holmes thought that Henry James looked especially bleak, as if he had been brooding away the day. But it was obvious that James hadn’t yet revealed anything about Holmes’s identity to John or Clara Hay; Holmes could see and hear that in his host and hostess’s joyous welcomes and easy behavior during the energetic conversation at tea.

“Did you find our quiet city as exciting as your explorations in Asia?” asked Clara Hay.

“Just as stimulating, in its own unique way,” replied Jan Sigerson, his Norwegian accent faint but present.

A few hours later, they had roast beef for dinner. It seemed to be a specialty of the Hays’ cook—or perhaps they had made it in honor of Henry James, whom they obviously considered more English than American now.

Holmes chose his slices very rare.

CHAPTER 13

The weekend turned out to be one of the most painful in Henry James’s memory.

James’s depression had deepened during the long sleepless night, but with the increase of melancholy had come an increase in clarity; he’d decided sometime before the day began growing gray at his windows that as soon as Holmes left the Hays’ home that Saturday, he would talk to John Hay and make a full confession about his sin (and he fully considered it a sin, against friendship, against all discretion) of bringing this stranger in disguise into the embrace of one of his closest circles of friends. James could not imagine any way that the Hays and Henry Adams and Clarence King would ever forgive him, and the writer was prepared to skulk away at once, taking the mid-day train back to New York there to seek passage back to England. He knew that other fast friends of the Hays and Adamses—including James’s old friend William Dean Howells—would be as equally outraged at his unspeakable behavior. He would accept all their anger and disapprobation; the alternative was to continue this vile charade and James saw now that he could not do that.

He’d hoped to speak to John Hay alone just after breakfast, but business took Hay out of the house, “Jan Sigerson” had left for his walk, and Henry James found himself alone with Clara Hay all morning and into the afternoon. As pleasant as Clara had always been to Henry James, he could not bring himself to reveal the truth to her.

So they chatted about mutual friends, about the weather in England and on the Continent this time of year versus the early spring of Washington, about various artists they knew—including Daniel Chester French, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and John Singer Sargent—and then about writers again. After the luncheon dishes were removed, they discussed Turgenev’s work and Mr. Emerson’s essays (which James did not much admire) and others until Clara Hay finally laughed and said, “You’ve seen John’s library, of course, but you should really see my bookshelves of shameful pleasures, Harry.”

James raised an eyebrow. “Shameful pleasures?”

“Yes, you know . . . books I enjoy tremendously that John and Henry Adams and Howells and others simply think I should not stoop to read. But I enjoy them! Perhaps you can offer me some dispensation. Come along.”

She led him up the wide staircase and down the right hallway toward their master bedrooms. For a horrified instant, James thought that this woman with whom he was alone in the house (save for six or eight servants) was going to lead him into her bed-sitting-room, but she stopped in the hall outside. The bookcase there was of polished mahogany and was at least twelve-feet long.

“Yellow-backed books!” he exclaimed.

“Yes. I can’t resist picking them up at the railway stations when I’m traveling in England,” said Clara Hay and set the fingers of both hands against her reddening cheeks. “Have you ever succumbed to the temptation, Harry?”

He smiled with what he hoped looked like friendly benevolence. “Of course, my dear woman. The yellow-backed books are designed to while away a boring railway trip. I see you have Collins’s The Moonstone and The Woman in White there amongst your other sensationalist novels.”

Still blushing, Clara said, “Oh, yes. How I enjoy Wilkie Collins’s books. And how sorry I was when he passed away four years ago. I do read serious books as well, you know.”

“If I remember correctly, you were amongst the first of the Five of Hearts to discover my work,” said James, removing a few of the volumes from the bookcase of third- and second-rate H. Rider Haggard–style “adventure romances” and glancing at titles before setting them back. Not all of the books here—not even a majority—were actually yellow-backed British novels that invariably dealt with bigamy, illegitimacy, murder, blackmail, and the like, but all were “sensationalist novels”.

“Oh, long before Clover’s the Five of Hearts began meeting, Harry! John and I were each reading your work when we met.”

“What is this?” asked James removing a crisp new volume with a light tan binding. On the spine it read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and lower on the spine and below that, boxed, The Strand Library.

“I became addicted to Mr. Conan Doyle’s stories when John and I spent three months in London two years ago,” said Clara. “But they don’t sell The Strand Magazine here so when I heard that they were releasing that collection of the Strand’s Sherlock Holmes stories here last month—a dozen stories in all—I purchased it immediately.”

“Last month, you say,” murmured James, leafing through the indifferently bound book. There were illustrations. “It appeared in February?”

“Yes.”

“May I borrow this, Clara?” asked Henry James, slapping the book shut and lifting it. “My gout is acting up and I could use some amusing light reading to take my mind off it.”

“Of course!” said Clara Hay, blushing again. “Just do not tell John what kind of book I’ve lent to such an illustrious author. I would never hear the end of it.” The two stood in the hallway smiling at one another like two conspirators.

With his gout as an excuse—and it was acting up, causing his left foot to ache something terribly—James spent the rest of the afternoon in his room. A girl came in to build up the fire, and James sat close to it, his aching foot up on an overstuffed footstool, as a light rain began to tap and streak the windows.

Edmund Gosse and his other younger friends who enjoyed and recommended Henry Rider Haggard’s jungle adventures and the supposedly true Sherlock Holmes tales in The Strand, or the longer Holmes pieces in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, hadn’t told James much detail about the Conan Doyle tales—other than it was their perception that Doyle was the literary agent and editor, a sort of collaborator, for Dr. John H. Watson’s true tales of the reclusive (but evidently very busy) London detective.

James had attempted to read precisely one H. Rider Haggard romance, but when he came to a graphic scene whereby the white hunter blew his black native bearer’s brains out rather than allow his man to be tortured, James had set aside the book—and all thoughts of reading future Haggard—for good. Glimpses of life on the streets of London were difficult enough to reconcile with a graceful, dignified life; James wanted to encounter no more lovingly detailed descriptions of skulls exploding and brain matter flying free.

The Holmes stories he had never been even slightly curious about.

Thinking back now to Mrs. O’Connor’s and Lady Wolseley’s benefit garden party where he had been introduced to Sherlock Holmes four years earlier, James could remember that A. Conan Doyle had been on the guest list—several popular but not very highly thought of authors had been a part of the charity effort—but he couldn’t remember being introduced to Conan Doyle or talking with him. He had no memory of any Dr. John H. Watson being present at the affair.

Shifting his swollen and slippered foot so that it would be more comfortable, nodding his thanks to the footman who’d brought him his tea with lemon, James settled back and began reading the twelve stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

James recognized his traveling companion through Dr. Watson’s—or perhaps Conan Doyle’s—descriptions: the lean physique, oversized pale forehead, gaunt cheeks, hawklike nose, expressive eyebrows, and intense gray-eyed gaze—although the illustrator for The Strand stories, a certain Sidney Paget, showed a man much better looking and even more the gentleman than the real Holmes. Of course, James realized, he’d not yet fully seen the real Sherlock Holmes, dressed fully as himself and behaving fully like himself.

If there were a real Sherlock Holmes.

In the first story, “A Scandal in Bohemia”, James was shocked to encounter “the King of Bohemia”—whom Holmes had clearly identified as the Prince of Wales while the two were late-dining at Café de la Paix a mere twelve days earlier. James thought the quality of prose something less than merely serviceable and the plot ridiculous. Holmes’s machinations to retrieve the “incriminating photograph” for the Prince of Wales were contrived and absurd and—in the end—unsuccessful. A mere female adventuress had outsmarted him at every turn. If this tale were true, why would Holmes—whose income seems to flow only through these private clients—ever allow Dr. Watson to work with Conan Doyle to publish the details of such a singular failure?

Even more interesting to Henry James was the sense, sometimes emerging from between the lines or a sardonic comment, that Holmes—at least the character of Holmes as shown in this odd tale—holds the “King of Bohemia”—England’s actual Prince of Wales—in something like cold contempt. At the end of the tale, Holmes seems to be glad that he had been beaten and that “Irene Adler” had retained the incriminating photograph. (James also noticed that Watson—or Conan Doyle—had referred to the adventuress as “the late Irene Adler.”)

“The Red-Headed League” was more amusing but Henry James found the detective’s “startling deductions” in the tale merely silly. Nowhere in either of these stories had the author, whoever he really was, attempted to get into the minds or motivations of any of the characters. Watson insisted on viewing his flatmate at 221 B Baker Street with awe no matter the level of idiocy Holmes was perpetuating.

Proofreading errors were rampant. The red-headed character named Wilson started work—simply sitting in a room for four hours a day and copying pages from the Encyclopaedia Britannica—on April 29, 1890. After 8 weeks’ work and 32 pounds paid for his labors, Wilson shows up promptly at the empty room (save for table and chair where he sits to copy) and finds a note pinned to the door—

But—and James did this calculation in his head—the 8 weeks and 32 pounds would have brought Wilson (and the story) only to June 23, not October 9. And Wilson would have been owed an extra 58 pounds, 10 shillings, and 2 pence were it actually October 9.

The author also has “Wilson” mentioning that he was moving into the “B’s” in the encyclopedia at the time the Red-Headed League was dissolved and he lost his silly job. Holmes had noticed the recent 1889 Ninth Edition of the encyclopedia in a hallway bookcase, and Henry James rang for a manservant to fetch the first volume of the Britannica. After actually counting the words on an “average” page in the first section, James hobbled over to the room’s small writing desk, retrieved some foolscap and a pencil, and figured that the character of “Jabez Wilson” had copied some 6,419,616 words in eight weeks’ work . . . and that while copying for only four hours a day! With a little division on his foolscap, James averaged this to a rate of some 33,435 words per hour or a little over 557 words per minute. Extraordinary!

Ridiculous! The author, whether Watson or Conan Doyle, literally had not done his arithmetic.

On another page of the same story, the careless writer has Holmes, Watson, a constable, and others suffering a “long drive” through “an endless labyrinth of gas-lit streets”, even though their objective would have been only a short walk from where the party had started.

In another part of the story, Henry James could not stop himself from laughing out loud. Holmes has announced that the mystery facing him was a “three-pipe problem” and then drew his legs up into his chair and—using a disreputable black-clay pipe that James had seen the detective smoke while on their trip here—supposedly smoked three pipes of shag tobacco in fifty minutes. James knew that one shag of such rough tobacco in an hour would almost certainly ruin any man’s throat and nose membranes; three shags would probably kill a man.

In “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”, the Holmes character is his usual arrogant, condescending self to Watson—a man older and certainly more experienced in life and war than the so-called “consulting detective”—but he also continues to prove that he has no right to act that way. At the first news of a murder in the mythical “Boscombe Valley” near the very-real city of Ross in Herefordshire, Holmes has Watson join him in a pall-mall earliest-train-possible rush to the city and crime scene. But once Holmes arrives in Ross, he inexplicably takes two days off in the hotel there before venturing out to the outdoor crime scene where a man had died by having his skull caved in. Holmes even emphasizes the absolute importance of inspecting that crime scene “before it rains and all evidence is washed away”, but then is satisfied that the weather shall remain “No wind and not a cloud in the sky” by consulting a barometer which reports the pressure at 29.

Now Henry James was no meteorologist and to the best of his recollection he had never used a barometer reading as a plot point in any of his stories or novels, but he had spent enough time with farmers—both back in New England and in England and France—and with sea captains during his various crossings of the Atlantic to know that a reading of “29” does not insure good weather; indeed, if, with that reading, a serious rainstorm had not arrived, it was certainly on the way.

After a day lost not viewing the crime scene, Holmes again refers to the barometer reading of 29 as “promising fine weather” and proceeds to waste another day that should have been close to typhoon weather.

Holmes then solves the mystery largely due to inferring that the murdered man’s seemingly incomprehensible last words to his (accused-of-murder) son—“A rat”—actually must mean “Ballarat” in Australia. Therefore the murderer had to be from Ballarat. But even granted the identity of the murderer as Australian and Henry James’s personal lack of knowledge of the continent, one flip open of the first volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica showed James that there were several other Australian towns and regions that ended with “arat”, including “Ararat”.

James’s dismay at the lack of proofreading—as well as the carelessness of the writing itself—was not diminished in the story called “The Man with the Twisted Lip” when Dr. John Watson’s wife, visited in the night by a distraught and veiled lady whom she soon sees to be a certain acquaintance known to her as “Kate Whitney”, says—“It was very sweet of you to come. Now, you must have some wine and water, and sit here comfortably and tell us all about it. Or should you rather that I sent James off to bed?”

James? thought Henry James in growing contempt. The gentleman in question, unless Mrs. Watson had a lover hiding under the table, had to be her husband, John Watson. Doesn’t this author even bother to proofread his work?

In the same story, Holmes reveals the true identity of a “filthy prisoner” by rubbing his face lightly with a large, wet sponge he’s been thoughtful enough to bring to the prison, thus removing—according to the author of the tale—layers of actor’s greasepaint. Henry James, who had spent much of the previous eighteen months traveling around England with an acting troupe putting on his first play, The American, knew from simple observation that Holmes’s “wet sponge” would have just mottled and muddled an actor’s disguise: all of the actors and actresses James had watched removing their make-up first had to carefully apply a layer of cold cream before beginning to remove theatrical make-up.

And so it went, story after story, idiocy after idiocy.

James set aside the collection only when a footman came up to announce that everyone was meeting in the parlor for tea or drinks before dinner. He did not have to feign his limp when going down, and at John Hay’s concerned questioning, James admitted that his gout—about which he’d written Hay the previous December—was indeed acting up.

The dinner, although so limited in number it was essentially diner en famille, was roast beef for which James had little appetite this particular evening. John Hay was expansive, happy and perfect as their host, Clara was kind and sure that everyone was involved in the conversation, “Jan Sigerson” described his pleasure at seeing the gleaming white Capitol and other such wonders—including what James considered the wedding-cake baroque-on-baroque monstrosity of the State Department just down the street, where Hay had worked for so many years—and James was quiet, save for nods of attention and various smiles of appreciation. The others must have put his quietness down to his gout, although it was more or less characteristic of Henry James at any table.

In truth, James was carefully observing this Sherlock Holmes/Jan Sigerson person. Yes, it had been he—James—who had recognized Holmes in the almost absolute darkness along the Seine, for despite the actor’s putty on the nose, added hair, and other make-up (none of which would come off with a simple pass of a wet sponge), the hawk-look of that lean face remained. But James was beginning to have a different feeling about both Holmes and about his own plan to talk to John Hay privately after dinner and there—with endless apologies—expose the hoax and humbug he’d brought to the Hays’ household.

No . . . tomorrow would serve. James saw how it would be better to wait until the real explorer and mountain-climber Clarence King exposed Holmes for the fraud he was. Or, failing that, the certainty of the Norwegian emissary tripping up Holmes’s clumsy and shallow disguise. Then James could act as shocked and deceived as everyone else at the table. It would be embarrassing, yes, but it wouldn’t necessarily put Henry James beyond the pale with these old friends. Holmes would be banished, James would apologize to John and Clara for his own unforgivable naïveté in believing the man, he would leave almost immediately to sail to England, and that would be that.

Hay invited the men into his library for brandy and cigars, but after quickly finishing his drink there, James pled gout again and went back upstairs, leaving his host and “Sigerson” energetically discussing the European gold situation, the recent slaughter of thousands of Arabs by Congo cannibals, and the possible injustice of canal-builder de Lesseps’s imprisonment for fraud.

CHAPTER 14

James read into the night. The authorial and plot idiocies continued to accrue. But here and there, James did see elements of the Sherlock Holmes character which reminded him of the man he’d met thirteen days earlier and with whom he’d dined that night. And he began to understand, dimly, the attraction of these “adventures” to educated friends of his such as Edmund Gosse. The heart of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes lay not in the clumsy “adventures”—which never struck James as that adventurous—but rather in the friendship between Holmes and Watson, their breakfasts together, the foggy days shared indoors by the crackling fire, and Mrs. Hudson coming and going with her food trays and messages from the world. Holmes and Watson lived in a Boys’ Adventure universe and, like Peter Pan, and despite Watson’s rather confused mentions of being married, neither of them ever grew up.

In “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor”—which, like so many of the other Holmesian “adventures”, was no adventure at all, but just a vulgar domestic misunderstanding in the flimsy guise of a mystery—a certain “Lord Robert St. Simon” of high-birth visits 221 B Baker Street to seek advice and Holmes is instantly rude to him. Besides botching the title and crying “Good-day, Lord St. Simon” rather than the proper “Lord Robert” or “Lord Robert St. Simon”, Holmes immediately insults his guest and client.

Henry James had to stop himself at the last minute from marking the following passage in Clara’s book with pencil or pen. Lord Robert, who has been left at the altar by an American bride, is speaking:

“ ‘A most painful matter to me, as you most readily imagine, Mr. Holmes. I have been cut to the quick. I understand that you already managed several delicate cases of this sort, sir, though I presume that they were hardly from the same class of society.’

“ ‘No, I am descending.’

“ ‘I beg pardon?’

“ ‘My last client of the sort was a king.’

“ ‘Oh, really! I had no idea. And which king?’

“ ‘The King of Scandinavia.’

“ ‘What! Had he lost his wife?’

“ ‘You can understand,’ said Holmes suavely, ‘that I extend to the affairs of my other clients the same secrecy which I promise to you in yours.’ ”

What utter bombast, thought James. Any gentleman with a shred of discretion might have mentioned similar details in another case, but would never be so indiscreet as to mention the name of another client—especially not a royal one.

It was all a reverse snobbery that James had heard from Holmes—or at least from the man downstairs who might be pretending to be Sherlock Holmes in the same penumbra of insanity that led him to pretend that he was Holmes pretending to be explorer Jan Sigerson—and it led, along with so many other clues both in these “adventures” and in James’s time with the detective, to one conclusion: Sherlock Holmes was no gentleman. He was simply someone gifted in disguises who had been play-acting for years at being a gentleman—cultivating the casual dress, bored air, and upper-class educated accents of a true gentleman, but never showing the soul of one.

The last story in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes—read with the window open because of a growing warmth in the air and with moths batting at the lamp—made the usually staid Henry James stifle his laughter with his hand over his mouth. It would not do to have the Hays’ servants—or perhaps the other guest down the hall—hear gout-ridden Henry James laughing aloud after midnight.

The final story in the collection was “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” and it was a fitting finale, since it included all of the authorial sloppiness, logical idiocies, and Holmesian blunders that made the other stories all but unreadable. Here they were gathered into a primary mass of one sensationalist writer’s execrable laziness.

The story starts with an attractive but far-too-familiar young lady—a stranger to Holmes and Watson but one acting as if she were already an intimate of the detective—a certain Violet Hunter, appearing one morning and demanding the Great Detective’s advice on an earth-shattering matter: should she take a well-paying job as governess for the son of an immensely fat man named Jephro Rucastle.

Mr. Rucastle’s interview with her was “odd” because he declared himself and his wife as “faddy” and said her employment would require her to wear a certain dress “Or to sit here, or sit there, that would not be offensive to you?”

Miss Hunter declares herself shocked to hear of the idea of her wearing certain clothing—although all domestic servants and many governesses of the era were required to do so—and the warnings of orders “to sit here, or sit there” were foolish for Rucastle to mention if he had dark intentions; the lord and lady of households routinely ordered their domestics and governesses around.

Then Mr. Rucastle informed Violet Hunter that she would have to cut her lovely and luxuriant hair short. At this outrageous condition, Miss Hunter turned down the job offer but kept thinking about the high salary and after a few days came close to changing her mind. Then a letter arrived from Rucastle, still insisting on the cut-hair and wearing of certain clothes as a condition, but raising her proposed salary to thirty pounds a quarter: a fortune for a governess, especially one with the admittedly limited education and experience of Miss Violet Hunter.

“ ‘That is the letter which I have just received, Mr. Holmes, and my mind is made up that I will accept it.’ ”

“Then what in Hades are you doing wasting this detective’s time in asking for advice if you’ve already decided?” softly hissed Henry James in the moth-circling night.

With the certainty of the machineries of plotting thudding and racketing along, drowning all logic and careful introspection, the telegram “which we eventually received came late one night” . . .

Please be at the “Black Swan” Hotel at Winchester at midnight

Tomorrow. Do come! I am at my wit’s end.

Hunter

This wasn’t a telegram; it was a royal summons. So naturally Holmes and Watson are thundering toward Winchester in a morning train. In this sequence, the interesting part, from what James’s brother William would have called “a psychological perspective”, was this rather amazing outburst from Holmes as he looks at the peaceful English countryside beyond London and comments upon the bucolic homes and cottages:

“ ‘ . . . I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation, and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.’

“ ‘Good Heavens!’ I cried. ‘Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?’

“ ‘They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.’

“ ‘You horrify me!’

“ ‘But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it doing, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lovely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser . . . ’ ”

Henry James had lived in England long enough to know that this was pure twaddle. There were certainly instances of crime and domestic brutality in any picturesque village or cottage, but none of the wanton crime, neglect, and lack of law that Holmes here states—absurdly—would be so quickly reported and corrected, with punishment invariably handed out, in the slums and tenements of London. Indeed, the cruelty of Henry James’s favorite city was known to all of its urban inhabitants.

What struck Henry James in this silly outburst of the literary Sherlock Holmes was twofold:

First, it was not an English attitude about the city versus country. In fact, it was decidedly “un-English”. French, perhaps, Russian, possibly, but never English.

Second, James could all but hear his brother William’s strong voice saying—“This is a sort of confession from the man’s own background, Harry. A psychological plea for help and understanding. Something very dark and painful happened to this man in the country sometime in his past—a countryside he was not used to, being a former city slum-dweller perhaps—and his subconscious now loathes and fears the very idea of bucolic quiet and those stretches of peaceful darkness between the country homes and cottages. It would be very interesting to explore the basis for this man’s deep fears.”

Henry James occasionally lectured on great writers, but should he ever give a symposium on Ludicrous Writing, he would use as his text the rest of “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”:

Miss Hunter—her hair now cropped short in a way that reminded James, with a pang, of his teenaged cousin, now deceased, Minnie Temple posing as Hamlet for them after a serious illness had caused her hair to be roughly shorn—meets Holmes and Watson at the Black Swan Hotel (evidently she is a governess who has no problem leaving her young charge, the Rucastles’ only child—a son, Edward, described only as having “a huge and oversized head” and of being “evil”—at any time of the day or night).

Indeed, other than her ascertaining that the odd-looking boy is evil, there is no mention of Miss Hunter’s governess duties or interactions with the boy. The Rucastles have informed Violet Hunter that their daughter—who looked very much like Violet Hunter—had died of “brain fever” (which was the reason for the daughter’s shortened hair), and now Hunter informs a solicitous Holmes and Watson that she has been made to sit in front of a bow window (with her back to the window, of course) in the dead daughter’s dress and laugh aloud at Mr. Rucastle’s endless trove of amusing anecdotes. When Violet secreted a small mirror into her handkerchief to look out the window behind her, she saw a young man standing at the fence to the property, staring intently at her back. But the humorless Mrs. Rucastle noticed the mirror, exclaimed that there was an intruder on the property, and demanded that Violet wave him away before they immediately lowered the blinds. Miss Hunter then easily unlocks a “locked drawer” in a chest of drawers in her room and finds a coil of hair that has precisely the color and texture of her own when it had been long.

As established forever in such gothic tales as Jane Eyre, there was the inevitable locked room—in fact, an entire locked wing—which Miss Violet Hunter was told to avoid. Naturally, she soon finds a key (inevitably, conveniently) left in the lock there and explores the empty, dusty wing . . . empty save for one room which is also locked, with the iron headboard from a bed used as bars across it. She does not have time to go inside.

Mr. Rucastle almost immediately learns of her transgression and threatens to feed her to the large mastiff, called Carlo, that he orders the single manservant, named Toller, to loose from the kennel to prowl the grounds at night. Toller, it seems, has drunk himself into oblivion that very afternoon. Holmes immediately announces that she must lock Mrs. Toller in the cellar that evening and that he and Dr. Watson, carrying his trusty service revolver, will be at Copper Beeches at seven p.m.

Holmes has stated that it is obvious that Mr. Rucastle has imprisoned his still-living daughter—Judy—in the locked room for some nefarious reason, probably about an inheritance he wants to control, and the three adventurers have soon broken through the locks and bedstead grille and flung open the door, only to find . . .

“It was empty. There was no furniture save a little pallet bed, a small table, and a basketful of linen. The skylight above was open, and the prisoner gone.

“ ‘There has been some villainy here,’ said Holmes; ‘this beauty has guessed Miss Hunter’s intentions, and has carried his victim off.’

“ ‘But how?’

“ ‘Through the skylight. We shall soon see how he managed it.’ He swung himself up onto the roof. ‘Ah, yes,’ he cried, ‘Here’s the end of a long light ladder against the eaves. That is how he did it.’

“ ‘But it is impossible,’ said Miss Hunter. ‘The ladder was not there when the Rucastles went away.’

“ ‘He has come back and done it. I tell you that he is a clever and dangerous man . . . ’ ”

Here Henry James cannot resist the soft laughter that overcame him. “A clever and dangerous man . . .” who for some reason found it necessary to bring a tall ladder to his own home, cross the roof, and drop through a skylight to retrieve a young woman from a room to which he had the keys and could easily unlock and walk in—and take his daughter out the normal way should he need to—any time he chose. This was typical of Holmes’s “deductions” and—James thought—it was typically asinine.

The end of the story was almost apologetically pro forma: Rucastle appears: “You villain!” cries Holmes. “Where is your daughter?” Then Rucastle rushes out to free Carlo, the giant mastiff, who we know from Mr. Toller’s two days of reported drunkenness—has not been fed for two days. Our trio hears “the baying of a hound”—another authorial idiocy, James notes tiredly. Although Henry James prefers small dogs, lap dogs suitable for parlors, such as dachshunds, he’s been around all breeds of dogs enough at other people’s country homes to know that mastiffs—which are usually quite gentle around people—are incapable of “baying”. Growling, perhaps. Roaring from the chest when threatened, perhaps. But baying, never. That ability to “bay” belongs to the “hounds” group of canines—and a mastiff is not a hound.

At any rate, Carlo chews out Mr. Rucastle’s throat, Dr. Watson with his trusty service revolver “blew its brains out” (but too late, alas!), and a suddenly helpful Mrs. Toller explains the entire plot, the need for Rucastle to fake his daughter Judy’s death (for inheritance reasons!) and hide her away in the locked wing, and the whole pantomime of Violet Hunter being made to impersonate Judy so that the daughter’s persistent fiancé (a “Mr. Fowler” whom Violet Hunter glimpsed in her mirror) will give up, accept Judy’s death, and go away.

In one final paragraph all the loose ends are tied and tidied up—we never meet Judy or Mr. Fowler, but hear from the narrator that they were married and that the lucky groom is now “the holder of a Government appointment in the Island of Mauritius”, and that Miss Violet Hunter has gone on (perhaps with the help of Sherlock Holmes?) to be “the head of a private school at Walsatt”. (A rather good job for a young woman with no real references who admitted in the story that she had as skills “only a little music, a tiny bit of French and German”.)

Henry James, setting the finished book on his bedside table, again has to press his knuckles against his lips lest an audible laugh escape.

The writer—Dr. John H. “James” Watson? Arthur Conan Doyle? A bizarre blend of the two hacks?—has forgotten all about the son, Edward. The boy with the “oversized head” and reported penchant for evil. It’s obvious that all of the characters, including his former governess, Miss Hunter, had also forgotten that Edward was supposed to exist. With the happy ending of Mr. Rucastle having his throat torn out by a hungry and impossibly baying mastiff, Edward just seems to have vanished. Poof!

Lying in the warm darkness, James thinks of a future story about a governess that he’s contemplated writing from time to time: his story, should he ever write it, would be from the governess’s mentally clouded point-of-view and would deal with a palpable—although imagined—evil that seems to threaten the child or children in the remote country house. James sees it as a ghost story without any certain ghost and knows it will require the lightest and subtlest of touches to make the increasingly nervous reader begin to wonder if the governess is insane . . . or evil . . . or if it is the children who are evil. Or perhaps there is a ghost (or ghosts, James hasn’t decided), despite all the psychological suggestions to the contrary.

His brother William would almost certainly like such a “psychological” tale.

All James knows for certain is that the tale will require all of his hard-earned skills and the most delicate of authorial brushstrokes to help the reader slowly become aware of the multiple levels of honesty, lying, guilt, and innocence—not even to mention survival—even while keeping the story explicit enough to chill the reader to goosebumps. But everywhere and always he will have to leave the reader in deep doubt about what has “really” happened and which of the events are only in the increasingly unstable governess’s mind.

Smiling slightly from the pathetic absurdities of the “Copper Beeches” and thinking ever so gently of ghosts and of the human mind in murky conflict with itself, Henry James falls asleep in the warm Washington night.

CHAPTER 15

Sunday was quiet in the sprawling Hays household—at least until Henry James cornered Sherlock Holmes.

Clara Hay had gone to church after informing everyone that she would be doing some charity volunteer work for hours after the church service proper. John Hay had hosted his two guests at breakfast but then disappeared into his beautiful study for hours of his own sort of literary or historical devotion. The huge home was quiet except for the reassuring sound of horses’ hooves and buggy wheels on the street outside and the occasional nunlike hushed rustle of servants moving efficiently to and fro within the light-filled, mahogany-scented mansion.

It was late morning when Henry James knocked on “Jan Sigerson’s” guest room door. Holmes, smoking cheap shag tobacco in his disreputable black clay pipe, let the writer in and beckoned to an extra chair near the window where he’d been reading. James was carrying a book of his own but he carefully kept the cover and spine hidden while the two men took their seats.

“Clarence King will be here in a few hours,” said James.

“Yes,” said Holmes. “I’m very much looking forward to meeting him.”

“I think you should not.” Henry James’s soft voice could be firm to the point of hardness when he willed it to be. He willed it so now.

“I beg your pardon?” Holmes batted the ashes from the old pipe into a crystalline ashtray on a side table.

“I think you should not put the household through this farce,” said James. “John Hay may be busy in his study until tea time. I propose that you pack your bags and leave while you can.”

“And why would I do that?” Holmes asked softly. “Henry Adams won’t even be back until sometime next week. I’ve hardly begun the investigation into his wife’s death.”

“That’s all humbug,” snapped James. “Clover Adams suffered from a melancholic disposition. She fell to a low after her father’s death and never recovered. Melancholy ran in her family, as her brother Ned’s suicide attests. Turning it into a mystery is humbug.”

Holmes looked as if he were interested in what the writer was saying. “Then what about the annual ‘She was murdered’ notes sent to . . .”

“More humbug,” Henry James said firmly. “I shall not allow you to re-open old griefs in such a way. I have no idea why I’ve gone along with your insanities this long. But no matter. It must end. Today. You pack and leave and I shall think of something to tell the Hays and Clarence King and the others. I myself shall leave early tomorrow.”

“So you no longer think me capable of solving this mystery?” asked Holmes, repacking and relighting his pipe.

“I no longer think that you are Sherlock Holmes.” There, thought James. I’ve said it.

The other man looked up from his pipe with obvious surprise and an even greater expression of interest. “James, it was you who identified me from memory—despite my Sigerson disguise—near le Pont Neuf.”

“I was mistaken. Or perhaps I had met you at Mrs. O’Connor’s garden party four years ago, but you were in disguise then as well.”

“In disguise as . . .”

“As Sherlock Holmes. A fictional character.”

“Oh hoh!” cried the man whom James had known as Holmes. “So now you agree with me that Sherlock Holmes does not really exist! What changed your mind, James?”

“This.” The writer held out the tan edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

“May I?” asked the man with the pipe. He took the book gently in his long, strong fingers and began to flip through it. “I was vaguely aware that the American edition of Watson’s collected Strand stories was coming out this year, but I had no idea it would be published here so early.”

“Last month,” said James and wished that he hadn’t spoken.

“The illustrations by Sidney Paget are rather good, aren’t they?” asked the other man. His tone held mild amusement.

“If they purport to be of you,” said James, “they flatter you.”

“Oh, absolutely!” cried Holmes. He removed the pipe from between his teeth as he laughed. “But, you see, I’ve never met Mr. Sidney Paget. Nor have I allowed a photograph to be taken of me. Paget uses his brother as a model for his ‘Sherlock Holmes’—or so I am told. His brother is an even more well-known illustrator and Watson informed me that the Strand people had meant to hire him rather than his brother Sidney, but the letter went to the wrong Paget.”

James stared blankly at Holmes—at the man whom he still thought of as Holmes—until finally he could stand the silence no longer. The smoke from the shag tobacco made him cough before he could get a sentence out. “I now believe, sir, that you are some person . . . some deranged person . . . pretending to be the fictional character Sherlock Holmes who, in turn, is pretending to be a fictional explorer named Jan Sigerson.”

“Oh, I say!” cried Holmes, removing his pipe again and smiling most broadly. “Very good, James. Very good indeed. That hypothesis makes much more sense than my own . . . that is, that I simply don’t exist outside these little”—he held up the book—“fictions.”

“So you admit it,” said Henry James. He felt a strange and not very pleasant but quite persistent invisible weight press against his chest.

“Admit that I am deranged? I can hardly defend myself against that accusation. Admit that I am someone other than the possibly—quite probably—fictional character Sherlock Holmes? Alas, I cannot confess to that, sir. I am either the real Sherlock Holmes or the fictional simulacrum of same. Those are my sad choices at the moment.”

James felt something like panic pluck at him. The other man was deranged. And he might well be dangerous—a physical threat to James even at this moment.

“Oh, I think not dangerous,” said Holmes, puffing away again. “Not to you, at least, Mr. James.”

It was as if he’d plucked the author’s thoughts out of the air.

“What did you think of Watson’s . . . stories?” asked Holmes, closing the book and setting it on the table next to James.

“They’re absurd.”

Holmes laughed again. “Yes, they are, aren’t they? Poor Watson works so hard to bring the rough notes of his chronicles up to Conan Doyle’s literary standards, but I doubt if either man understands how the reality of my cases could ever really be translated into any work of art. You see, James, the better cases already are works of art—without the melodrama and fictional trappings.”

“So you admit that these stories are inferior literary efforts,” managed James. “Mere overwrought . . . romances.”

Holmes winced at the last word but sounded amiable enough as he said, “Absolutely, my dear chap.” He opened the book again. “I see that Watson included the tale he called ‘The Copper Beeches’. Shall we just take that as an example of literary failure?”

“I already have taken it as such,” said James.

“As well you should,” said Holmes, prodding the stem of his pipe in James’s direction. “I ask you . . . does it make any sense whatsoever that this . . .” He had to fan through pages and glance down at the story. “That this Violet Hunter person should come to our apartment and take up our time, Watson’s and mine, asking advice on whether she take some dreary governess position in the country? No matter how odd her employer’s requirements might have been, I mean. And does it make sense that I would waste my time listening to such a plea for advice . . . unnecessary advice, since you may have noticed that the baggage had already made up her mind about taking the position.”

“Total nonsense,” said James. He felt a sense of oddness verging on vertigo that he was agreeing with Holmes. Or vice versa.

“This ‘Violet Hunter’—that wasn’t the wench’s real name, of course—was not my client.”

“No?” James would have called back the syllable if he’d been able to.

“No. Our client—the person in need of help who showed up on this cold day in early March of eighteen eighty-six—was the ‘Mr. Fowler’ to whom Watson refers, but who is never directly introduced to the reader.”

“Mr. Fowler?” repeated James, despite himself. “The imprisoned Alice Rucastle’s fiancé? The man in the mirror? The one whom Dr. Watson informs us ends up marrying the liberated Miss Rucastle and moves with her to Mauritius?”

Holmes grinned around the pipe in a way that looked almost evil. “Precisely,” he said. “Although ‘Mr. Fowler’—I shall call him Peter since that was the gentleman’s real first name—did not, as it turned out, marry the liberated and enriched Miss Alice Rucastle and . . . how did Watson put it?” He flipped pages. “Oh, yes . . . become ‘the holder of a Government appointment in the Island of Mauritius.’ ”

“Is any of this relevant or of any importance whatsoever to your fraudulent representation of yourself as Sherlock Holmes?” asked James.

“Only if you wish to understand the wide gap between this . . . fictional . . . Sherlock Holmes’s life and his reported adventures,” said Holmes.

“I see no purpose to discussing either,” said Henry James.

Holmes nodded in agreement but removed the pipe and began speaking in slow, low tones.

“Peter . . . Fowler . . . came to see Dr. Watson and me in March of eighteen eighty-eight. His problem was a domestic one, yes, but one which I thought at the time might serve my need to some true detection. In the end, you see, James, ‘Mr. Fowler’—who was a very nice London gentleman, by the by—did not marry Miss Alice Rucastle and live happily ever after. The truth of the matter . . . the sort of truth that Watson so frequently works so hard to avoid . . . was that his former fiancée, Alice Rucastle, tore Fowler’s throat out with her teeth. She murdered him.”

“Good God,” breathed James.

“Mr. Fowler came to me because he’d been happily engaged to Alice Rucastle . . . Watson’s clumsy choice of a name, of course . . . until what Fowler had referred to as his fiancée’s ‘pleasant if frequent flightiness’ had turned into a severe brain fever . . . whatever ‘brain fever’ might actually be. Watson, like most medicos in our benighted era, swears by ‘brain fever’, but not one doctor in a thousand can describe its cause or cure.”

“But Miss Rucastle . . . whatever her real name might be . . . did have it?” asked James. His weakness for hearing bizarre stories was almost the equal of his penchant for writing them.

“She had it . . . but her infant younger brother, Edward, was the one who died from it,” said Holmes.

“Edward,” repeated James. He remembered the moths circling the lamp late the night before as he approached sleep and the end of the collection of tales. “The little boy with evil behavior and the oversized head. The object of Miss Violet Hunter’s efforts of instruction as a governess.”

Holmes laughed again. “Miss Violet Hunter was not hired as a governess. Baby Edward had been murdered by the time Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle hired her . . . and they hired her only to impersonate their imprisoned daughter Alice.”

“Wait,” said Henry James, holding up one well-manicured hand. “You’re saying that Violet Hunter, by any other name, knew from the start that she had no duty except to impersonate the imprisoned daughter of the Rucastles? Mr. Fowler’s fiancée?”

“That’s precisely what I am saying, James.” Holmes stared out the window at leaf-shadows on St. John’s across the street. “ ‘Violet Hunter’ was nothing more than a woman of the streets . . . in company, she could not have impersonated even so lowly a lady as a governess. Mr. ‘Jephro Rucastle’—who, by the by, was no villain as Watson re-created it but who also was soon to die violently—made it clear to the London wench from the first that she would be paid thirty pounds a month—not a quarter as Watson’s re-telling has it—thirty pounds a month just to cut her hair as Alice’s had been cut during her terrible illness, to wear Alice’s blue dress, to sit in the window where Peter Fowler could, from behind her and from a distance, see her laughing and evidently recovered from her madness.”

“Her madness?” gasped James.

“Oh, yes. I forgot to put that little fact in sequence, didn’t I? This is why Watson says that I must never write up my own adventures. When Alice’s father—Alice was her real Christian name, by the way—when her father realized that she would never regain her sanity, he wrote to Peter Fowler in a poor imitation of his daughter’s hand to break off their engagement. But Fowler never believed that the letter was from Alice.”

“Alice Rucastle was mad?”

“As a hatter,” said Holmes with absolutely no tone of sympathy in his voice. “It had manifested itself in sly and then secret but serious ways for years, but during the winter of her engagement to Peter Fowler—a marriage which her parents did not know of and would never have allowed since the insanity was hereditary—the worsening illness led first to the fits, then to the seizures, and finally to the violent behavior that the Rucastles reported to Fowler and the world as ‘brain fever’.”

“But surely Mr. Fowler would have understood,” said James. He tried to imagine writing this tale himself, but failed. It was too sensationalist. Too much the fever-dream territory of a contemporary Wilkie Collins.

“Understood that in her violent madness Alice Rucastle had murdered and partially eaten her two-year-old younger brother Edward?” Holmes asked blandly. “I rather doubt it.”

“Good Lord,” gasped James. “But you knew of this . . . abomination?”

“From the beginning,” said Holmes, no longer smiling. “Far from being a villain seeking an inheritance or whatever twaddle Watson added to distort the tale, the so-called Jephro Rucastle—his real name Jethrow Dawkins—was such an indulgent and loving father that he could not abide the thought of his daughter Alice—the murderer of his only son, the heir of the family name and title—being locked away in a bedlam. Thus the locked wing, the barred door.”

“But if Miss Violet Hunter did not discover these things . . . if she already knew about Alice’s madness, the reason for the locked wing and room . . .”

“It was Peter Fowler, not the harlot Violet Hunter, who insisted on luring the Rucastles into town that March night in eighteen eighty-six,” Holmes said grimly. “He sent us a telegram stating his intentions of ‘saving’ his beloved Alice. I sent him an immediate telegram in return, ordering him not to go anywhere near Hodgkyss Hall—he never received the telegram since he had already left his hotel in Wells—and Watson and I rushed out to Wookey Hole as fast as we could . . .”

“Wookey Hole?” chimed James.

“Yes, of course. Close by the famous caves near Wells in Somerset. ‘Fowler’ was staying in the Wookey Hole Hotel in Wells. Watson’s fictionalized ‘Rucastles’ were actually the well-known Dawkins family. Alice’s father was Jethrow Dawkins, Lord Hodgkyss of Hodgkyss Hall, first cousin to the Vicar of Wookey and so-called ‘Hero of the Transvaal’ in the eighteen eighty-one Boer Rebellion.”

“Even I, a mere American, have heard of the Witch of Wookey Hole,” said James. His voice sounded strange to his own ears. He could not quite believe what he had just said. Henry James, Jr.—like his father Henry James, Sr., and his older brother William—had always had a weakness for ghost stories.

“The Witch of Wookey Hole is a limestone stalagmite that’s been scaring tourists since the sixteen hundreds,” Holmes said in the flattest of tones. “Alice Dawkins was the real-life Monster of Wookey Hole. And only seven years ago.”

Henry James squinted at Holmes. “You said that Peter Fowler was murdered. It was written that Mr. Rucastle—and this Dawkins, Lord Hodgkyss, ‘died violently’. There’s a lot of yet-unexplained mayhem there.”

“We arrived only minutes too late, Watson and I,” Holmes said in a barely audible voice. “Fowler had brought a tall ladder, risked the dangerous traverse across ancient slate tiles in the darkness, and let himself down through the small skylight in Alice’s locked room. She must have sat on the bed in silence and let him unlock her manacles, padlocks, and chains while he whispered endearments. Then she used her teeth and uncut nails to slash his throat. She was eating his heart when Dawkins, her father, rushed in. The ‘Violet Hunter’ hired harlot was close on Dawkins’s heels, and, by pure coincidence, wearing Alice’s blue dress that evening.”

James sat, staring and waiting. Despite the fact that all this had to be pure invention, he found that he had trouble breathing.

“Mr. Dawkins, Lord Hodgkyss, had brought a pistol with him,” continued Holmes in the same flat tones. “He had told me in an interview the week before that he was sure he could never use it on his daughter, no matter what new unspeakable actions she might undertake. He was correct. As Watson and I ran down the dusty hallway and shouted at him, Dawkins raised the pistol to his temple and blew his own brains out.”

“And Miss Violet Hunter?” asked James. “The non-governess governess?”

“Mad,” said Sherlock Holmes. “She began screaming at the sight of what was transpiring in Alice Dawkins’s room and continues to scream to this day, although her asylum care is paid for by Lady Hodgkyss.”

James smiled to show that he was not a total rube. “Rube”—the word came from when a traveling circus had come to the outskirts of Newport when he was young. James hadn’t thought of that word for years; he’d never used it in a story.

“And what about Carlo?” he asked softly.

“Carlo?” said Holmes.

“In ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’, Watson writes about Carlo, the giant baying mastiff that prowled the yard at night and that tore out Mr. Rucastle’s throat in the end.”

Holmes smiled thinly. “ ‘Baying mastiff’. Watson never has been able to tell his Hound Group from his Herding Dogs . . . Watson just doesn’t know dogs. There was a mastiff at Hodgkyss Hall. His name was Barney, he was fifteen years old, and if he’d encountered a burglar in the night, Barney would have rolled over to have his belly rubbed. The only infamy Barney ever committed, according to Jethrow Dawkins when Watson and I spoke to him three days before he died, was when he playfully chewed up one of Lady Hodgkyss’s stuffed animals.”

“But Watson wrote in ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’ that he had to take his service revolver and—I quote—blow the creature’s brains out after it had killed Mr. Rucastle,” said James in a strained voice.

“It was Mr. Dawkins’s revolver, and I used it,” said Holmes. “Alice Dawkins was preoccupied with devouring her father when I took the fallen revolver and blew her brains out.”

The two men sat in silence for several minutes.

Finally Sherlock Holmes—or the man pretending to be the imaginary Sherlock Holmes—said, “I believe I understand why Watson felt he had to write about the Wookey Hole Affair . . . the so-called ‘Adventure of the Copper Beeches’. It haunted him. Bothered his sleep. It’s in Dr. Watson’s nature to try to rearrange things into simpler stories of right and wrong. But if I were he, I would have left the entire Wookey Hole business alone.”

Henry James looked the other man in the eye and said, “You realize, of course, that everything that you’ve told me here sounds absolutely insane.”

“Absolutely,” said Holmes. The detective checked his watch. “John Hay said that a light lunch would be set out in the conservatory dining area at noon and for us to go ahead even if he were still busy. Would you care to join me, Mr. James?”

“I’ll wait until tea with Clarence King and dinner with the Norwegian emissary, Mr. Holmes,” said James. He said nothing else before going back to his room to lie down on the perfectly white bedspread.

CHAPTER 16

Clarence King arrived promptly upon the chime of 5 p.m. A portly 51-year-old now and long past his once athletic, mountain-climbing physical prime, King appeared at the Hays’ threshold wearing a large beret and a well-worn green velvet corduroy suit complete with knee breeches and high wool socks.

“Your old European traveling suit!” cried John Hay, fervently using both hands to shake King’s. “Are you going abroad again?”

“Not unless one counts Mexico as ‘abroad’,” laughed King in a voice Henry James found as velvety as the absurd traveling suit—and just as well-worn. “I found myself traveling through Washington with no other clothes available and knew that my oldest friends would understand this velveteen invasion. Consider it a tardy celebration of St. Patrick’s Day.”

“You could have worn your old cowboy britches and chaps and been dressed perfectly for this home, Clarence,” said Hay, who had already made the dinner less formal by decreeing it only black tie rather than white tie, even with a Norwegian emissary and his wife and daughter attending.

King whipped off the oversized beret and handed it to the waiting servant. James noticed that Clarence King’s hairline had receded considerably since the writer had seen him last, leaving only the graying hint of what had once been long golden locks. King still wore a beard clipped closely in the U. S. Grant manner that had long since gone out of style for younger men. Combined with the velvet-corduroy suit, thought James, the beard and added weight made the explorer look not a little like paintings of Henry VIII. Then again, realized James, some had almost certainly made the same comment about him.

James and Holmes stood and watched Clara Hay hug and kiss their old family friend with an almost girlish enthusiasm that struck both men as very un-Clara-Hayish.

“Clara, my dear!” cried King. “You remain the truest and brightest ray of sunshine in this old man’s too-clouded life. You have, as you know”—and here King shot an almost boyishly mischievous glance at John Hay—“ruined for me all other members of your sex. I must now remain a bachelor for all my few remaining days, looking forward only to cremation since that alone guarantees to be a new experience.”

“Ohhh!” cried Clara Hay and slapped King on his green-velvet-corduroy sleeve.

“Harry, by God!” cried King, shaking Henry James’s hand with great animation. “Adams has so far won the race to baldness amongst our band, but I see that you and I are finally giving old Henry a run for his money. What brings you out of the London fog and back to the States, my friend?”

“First and foremost,” James said softly, retrieving his hand and resisting the urge to rub circulation back into it, “this chance to see old friends. May I introduce a traveling companion and fellow guest . . . Mr. Jan Sigerson? Mr. Sigerson, I present to you the original and inimitable Clarence King. Mr. King, Mr. Sigerson.”

King shook hands but then took a step back in the huge foyer as if needing to give Holmes a second inspection. “Sigerson? Jan Sigerson? The Norwegian explorer? The fellow who just a couple of years ago penetrated deeper into the Himalayas than any white man has been known to go? That Jan Sigerson?”

Holmes bowed modestly.

“By God, sir,” boomed King, “it is a pleasure and honor to meet you. I have a thousand questions for you regarding the Himalayan Mountains and the Forbidden Land you managed to penetrate. While I misspent my youth clambering up this continent’s molehills, you, sir, have gone to real mountains.”

“Only to their most modest passes, Mr. King,” said Holmes in his Norwegian accent. His dark mustache seemed thicker this evening and James actively wondered if he’d touched it up somehow. “And even then on the backs of ponies.”

“Come into the parlor, King,” cried John Hay, obviously delighted to see his friend. But there was something else that James was picking up from their host . . . embarrassment at the way their friend was dressed? Some unfinished and probably unnameable business between the two? Money borrowing, perhaps? As portly and ruddy as King appeared upon first glance, a closer inspection suggested that he had recently passed through an illness . . . perhaps a serious one.

“It is tea time!” exclaimed Clara Hay.

Clarence King smiled almost sadly. “Ah, those were the days, Clara. John leaving the State Department early—choosing to leave the nation to unintended wars and misdirection rather than miss our five o’clock tea. And Adams poking his pale dome out of his study precisely at five—nothing else would have separated him from his lamprey-like attachment to his moldy green books. And Clover . . . Clover laughing and leading us into the fireplace room where the little red-leather chairs awaited.”

King seemed to notice the effect his eulogy was having on the company and immediately lightened his tone and expression. “Actually, John, I was hoping that we might substitute some of your sherry for tea this one afternoon.”

“And so we shall,” said Hay, putting his arm around King and leading the way into the fireplace-dominated parlor. “And so we shall.”

Sitting sipping his tea—they had poured sherry, but he would have it after the tea—Henry James was reminded of how small all five of the Five of Hearts had been. Clarence King, at five foot six, had been the tallest of all of them.

After some friendly chatter—Hay probing as to whether King was off that week for a diamond mine in the Andes or a gold mine in the Alaskan Rockies (to which Clarence King had replied only, “Neither! A silver mine in Mexico!”)—King asked Holmes a few questions about the Himalayan peaks. Holmes seemed to answer, albeit vaguely, but then the two men began discussing exploration in earnest. James waited for the inevitable revelation that Sherlock Holmes could not tell the difference between a Himalayan peak and a Herefordshire hillside.

“I read your book,” ‘Jan Sigerson’ said almost diffidently to King. “Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada. I enjoyed it immensely.”

“That old tome,” laughed King. “It’s more than twenty years out of date. And half the chapters are about my Early Pleistocene period around the summer and fall of eighteen sixty-four. But tell me, Mr. Sigerson . . . did you enjoy the section where I described conquering Mount Whitney?”

Sherlock Holmes only smiled.

John Hay said, “Now, Clarence . . .”

“I used two chapters to describe clambering up Mount Tyndall,” boomed King. “Half the book to describe hiking all over other peaks around Yosemite. But only two subordinate clauses to describe my triumph atop the mighty Mount Whitney.”

“Not all peaks are ascendable upon one’s first attempt,” Holmes said softly.

King laughed and nodded. To Henry James he said, “Here were my two subordinate clauses in toto, Harry—and I quote: ‘After trying hard to climb Mt. Whitney without success, and having returned to the plains . . . ’ ”

King was the only one in the room laughing, but that did not seem to inhibit his mirth. James watched him closely, seeing the deeper bitterness that had settled into the old friend of his old friends—no, more a damp rising from within than something settling from without, as Dickens used to describe the damp rising from tombs under an old church until it chilled the entire congregation.

“Young, fit, outfitted, motivated to greatness,” said King, “and not only could I not get within four hundred feet of that summit on the first attempt, but when I finally returned and climbed it, it was the wrong mountain. Somehow, in the exertion of the climbing, I’d managed to misplace an entire mountain . . . all fourteen thousand five hundred feet of it.”

“But you did return again and make the summit,” John Hay said softly.

“Yes,” said King, “but only after other white men had joined the Indians who’d made the summit before I did. And I named the mountain!”

“And you have one named for you,” said Holmes. “Mount Clarence King . . . northwest of Mount Whitney in the Sierra Nevada range, I believe.”

“Our exploration group was keen on naming mountains after one another,” said King, holding out his sherry glass so the silent but ever-present male servant could refill it. “It’s called ‘Mount Clarence King’ because there was already a peak in the Yosemite named after a preacher called Thomas Starr King. My hill is twelve thousand nine hundred and five feet tall. Somehow I always manage to be the runt of the litter. How high was that pass you crossed to get into Tibet from Sikkim, Mr. Sigerson?”

“Jelep La?” said Holmes. “Thirteen thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine feet at the pass’s summit.”

“Admit it now,” said King. “Weren’t you a tiny bit tempted to pile up a little rock cairn, just a foot or so tall? Then you could have said you summited a ‘fourteener’. Fourteeners are highly thought of in the American West.”

Without waiting for an answer, King began to question Sigerson/Holmes about climbing; it was almost a staccato interrogation. Holmes answered each question promptly and succinctly, evidently understanding the terms well enough. Sometimes he posed counter questions that made Clarence King laugh and say that he’d been burrowing into and under mountains the last two decades or so, not climbing them. James could only note the arcane terms that were filling the air: belay, being on belay, going off belay, debating the best new forms of belay, rappelling, rappel ropes, anchors high and anchors low, stemming and counterforce, manteling, methods of chimneying, fist-jamming, using one’s bootlaces for Prusik knots when dangling from a rope after a fall from an overhang . . . James understood none of it, but Holmes made it sound as if he understood it all.

Finally Clarence King sighed. “Well, I leave the mountains to you younger generation of climbers. My days on belay—or being belayed—are finished, I fear.”

Rather than let this set the tone again, John Hay said to King, “I’m sure Adams will be damnably sorry he missed you.”

“As well he should be,” muttered King, holding his glass out for another refill of sherry.

“You should tell our other guest of how you met Henry Adams,” said Hay.

Clarence King seemed to ponder a minute on whether it would be worth anyone’s time to hear the story, but then he drank down his sherry and turned to Holmes. “You’ve not met Adams yet, is that right, sir?”

“I’ve not yet had the pleasure of making his acquaintance.”

King grunted. “Way back in eighteen sixty-seven, not being able to find honest work—and not especially wanting to—I convinced Congress to create a Survey of the Fortieth Parallel and to put me in charge of it. In eighteen seventy-three I was headed from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to Long’s Peak in Colorado Territory to meet up with one of my partners, a certain Arnold Hague . . . Do you happen to know about Long’s Peak, Mr. Sigerson?”

“No,” said Holmes.

“It’s one of those much-loved Colorado fourteeners . . . fourteen thousand and ninety-three feet, I seem to remember . . . named after Lieutenant Long of Zebulon Pike’s expedition and it happens to be at the easternmost bend in the spine of the Rocky Mountains in all of North America. Which is all irrelevant to my story . . .”

James smiled. He’d almost forgotten how Clarence King had the born raconteur’s ability to let his tales meander like a mountain stream without making his audiences impatient. James had often pondered why that gift rarely translated from verbal storytelling to the written page.

“Anyway, I’d only reached the valley of Estes Park by the time the sun had set that night when I was trying to get to Long’s Peak, so I got the loan of one of the little shacks there in which I could spend the night.

“Well, the shack had a bed but no stove and the night was cold. I was shivering under every blanket I’d brought with me when I heard this sound from outside and I carry a lantern out and there’s . . . Mr. Henry Adams on muleback. I’m not sure which one looked more relieved to have found a human habitation . . . Adams or his mule.

“At any rate, Henry had just finished his first year as an assistant professor of history at Harvard and had recently become interested in geology after writing an article about the British geologist Charles Lyell for the North American Review. A friend had suggested to Adams that he come out west for the summer to see the work of our survey party, so he had. I guess Henry figured that there had to be some geology involved in so much surveying. Adams actually knew Arnold Hague from Boston and had been hanging around his camp on Long’s Peak when Henry decided that he’d board a mule and do some fishing. Naturally he got lost, but Adams had the good sense to give the mule her head . . . if there’s one sure way to find cooking and civilization, it’s by giving a hungry mule its head. So he ended up at my little cabin in Estes Park at about ten o’clock at night.”

Here Clarence King grinned and James could see that John and Clara Hay were smiling in anticipation of the finale of the explorer’s little story.

“I’d actually briefly crossed paths with Henry before that night,” continued King. “Once in Washington and again in Cheyenne the week before this. But I didn’t think I knew him well enough for the giant bear hug he gave me when he got down off that mule and came into the light of that cabin. Henry had grown hungry and, I imagine, a mite anxious. Anyway, Estes Park is high up and it was a cold night for August, it can snow in August up there, so after sharing some cold beans, we crawled fully dressed into that bed—the only one the cabin had to offer naturally—and talked almost ’til dawn. We’ve been fast friends ever since.”

“Adams will be so sorry he missed you,” said John Hay.

“Yessirree, but I have to get to that silver mine in Mexico or head back to the high Sierras and find gold if I’m ever going to add a Constable to my Turners.”

John Hay smiled at Holmes. “Harry knows this story, but it’s worth repeating. Some years ago Clarence was in England buying art—amongst other things—and Ruskin had two wonderful Turners for sale. When he asked King which one he wanted, Clarence bought both, saying ‘One good Turner deserves another.’ ”

King smiled wanly. “In those years I was buying twin Turners. These days I am forced by penury to come to my best friends’ formal dinner party in a faded velvet-corduroy traveling suit.”

“Corde du roi,” murmured Henry James. “The corded-cloth of a king. And such a beautiful wale.”

“Those were Captain Ahab’s last words before Moby Dick sank the Pequod out from under him,” said King.

When Holmes raised one eyebrow in query, John Hay said, “It was a novel that came out more than four decades ago and wasn’t really noticed by most readers and reviewers, but Clover had recommended it and all of us in the Five of Hearts loved it and referred to it frequently. It’s about Ahab, a whaler sea captain who becomes obsessed with a white whale that took his leg years earlier.”

“Ahab’s policy toward his white whale has become my attitude toward life in general these days,” said Clarence King.

“Which policy is that?” asked Henry James.

“ ‘ . . . to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee’,” recited King, leavening the ferocity of the statement with a boy’s sweet smile.

Clara Hay, who had slipped out of the parlor a few minutes earlier, returned with her hands clasped together. Her smile was radiant. “Emissary Helmer Halvorsen Vollebæk, Mrs. Vollebæk, and their daughter have arrived. It’s a bit crowded and warm in here, so I thought we might take our drinks into the conservatory. Cook assures me that dinner will be ready in less than an hour.”

CHAPTER 17

Henry James had known an elderly duchess who may have been the cruelest person he’d ever met. When she returned for the London Season after months in Venice, her habit upon arriving at her townhome was to throw an initial dinner party that might have been designed by the Borgias. James had been invited to one of these autos-da-fé to fill out the complement of bachelors at the table (and perhaps, as part of his role, to serve as observer of the rites of cruel sacrifice to be explored that night) and, although he’d long since been forewarned of the duchess’s venom, he had attended out of sheer curiosity. The turn of the social screw at the dinner party he had attended included inviting five couples who—although none of them rising to the duchess’s social circle and not socially acquainted with one another—were comprised of four of the women having illicit affairs with no fewer than five of the men present. In addition were the brace of bachelors—Henry James foremost amongst them in both age and social ranking—and five unmarried young ladies, each of whom (the duchess well knew) were (or had been) involved in disastrous liaisons with some of the single or married men.

In no case was the spouse aware of the connections with others at the table.

That dinner had been fairly leaking with tensions, but Henry James found himself far more tense at this cozy dinner on Sunday, March 26, 1893, where the Hays—perhaps the least cruel couple James had ever known—were happily hosting their old friend Harry, Mr. Sigerson, Clarence King, and the Norwegian emissary and his wife and daughter.

The emissary, Mr. Helmer Halvorsen Vollebæk, was not the ambassador to the United States from the Kingdom of Scandinavia only because King Oskar II of Scandinavia preferred to have two emissaries in Washington at all times—one from Sweden and one from Norway, titularly united under Oskar II but still proud of separate origins—and currently the Swedish emissary was the official Scandinavian Ambassador. In two years, it would be Mr. Vollebæk’s turn.

James judged Vollebæk’s age at around 60, but his wife, Linnea, if James had heard correctly during introductions, must have been at least 20 years younger. Their daughter Oda, who was also present, was in her late adolescence and was reputed to be the most sought-after debutante on Embassy Row. They all spoke English flawlessly.

James was disappointed—or perhaps relieved, it was hard for him to record his emotions at the moment—when “Sigerson” was introduced to Mr. Vollebæk, and the two men clicked heels and bowed at the same moment, but exchanged greetings in English.

The early courses were passed in easy conversation. John and Clara Hay were experts at involving everyone at a table in conversation. The only element even approaching politics was the Vollebæks’ united enthusiasm at the pageantry of Grover Cleveland’s inauguration a few weeks earlier and their eagerness to look in on the Columbian Exposition—Chicago’s World’s Fair—in May before they returned to Norway for the summer. Miss Vollebæk appeared to have given her attention only to the many inaugural balls around the city that night and weekend of March 4.

“Oda is of the age now where every ball is an opportunity to meet eligible young men,” said Mrs. Linnea Vollebæk in her soft Scandinavian accent.

“Mother!” cried Oda, blushing fiercely.

“Well, it is true, is it not?” laughed her father. Emissary Vollebæk dabbed at his lips with the napkin. “My baby girl will soon be finding herself a husband.”

While Oda blushed more deeply, Clara Hay smiled and said, “Why, we have two of America’s most eligible bachelors at this table, Your Excellency.”

When Mr. Vollebæk raised an eyebrow in polite interrogation, Clara went on, “Mr. James and Mr. King have long been considered prize catches for the young lady who finally lands one or the other.”

“Is this true, Mr. James? Mr. King?” asked Mrs. Vollebæk in a tone that actually sounded interested. “Are you both still eligible bachelors?”

Henry James hated this. He always hated it when he was teased about this at someone’s table. He’d been irritated by it for decades, but at least he knew his response by heart.

Smiling softly and bowing his head ever so slightly as if he were being knighted by the Queen, James said, “Alas! I am on the cusp of turning fifty years old and at that age an old bachelor may no longer be called ‘eligible’, but, rather, ‘confirmed’. It appears all but certain now that the only marriage I shall enjoy in this lifetime is to my art.” When he saw a flicker of confusion in Mrs. Vollebæk’s lovely eyes, he added, “To my writing, that is, since I am only a poor scribbler and currently a playwright.”

“Mr. James, as I believe I mentioned to you, my darlings,” said Mr. Vollebæk, “is one of the greatest of all living American writers.”

James bowed his head again in response to the compliment, but smiled and said, “Based on sales of my work in recent years, my publisher—alas again, even my readership—might well disagree with you, sir. But I thank you for the generous words.”

“And how about you, Mr. King?” teased Mrs. Linnea Vollebæk as she leaned forward over the table the better to see the geologist/explorer. The emissary’s wife was still young enough to be attractive when she teased in a coquettish manner. “Are you wed to your profession?”

Clarence King raised his glass of wine to the lady. “Not in the least, ma’am. My problem is that I keep being introduced to the loveliest young ladies in New York, Boston, and Washington—including, of course, now to your truly beautiful daughter Oda . . .”

King raised the glass higher and then drank from it while poor Miss Vollebæk began blushing wildly again. “But, as our friend Harry puts it so well, alas!” continued King. “All of America’s and England’s . . . and Norway’s . . . finest beauties are so wonderfully pale, while some strange inclination in my make-up has made the dusky ladies of the South Seas the avatar and pinnacle of feminine beauty for me.”

John Hay began to laugh at this and most people at the table joined him.

“Have you been to the South Seas, Mr. King?” asked Mrs. Vollebæk.

“Alas, no,” said King with a mischievous smile. He was obviously enjoying tweaking at James for using the lady-poet’s word. “But Henry Adams and John La Farge spent a couple of years traveling from island to island in the Pacific, sending me long letters describing the beauty of the dusky ladies there.” He finished his wine. “Darn their mangy hides.”

John Hay nodded to a servant, and everyone’s wine glasses were refilled in an instant. “Clarence has been to Cuba and the Caribbean,” said Hay.

“And to Mexico and Central America and points south of there, but . . . alas . . .” He bowed his head in a caricature of defeat.

“To Mr. King finding his dusky beauty,” said little Oda as she raised her refilled glass, and after everyone laughed long and heartily at the young lady’s pluck, they toasted King.

The primary courses were arriving. James found himself agitated with impatience and his appetite depressed as he waited for the inevitable unveiling of “Jan Sigerson” as a humbug. He also realized that he was motioning for his own wine glass to be refilled more than was his usual practice at dinner.

Suddenly the focus turned to Clarence King again, and the men—and even Clara Hay—were taking turns trying to explain the 1872 Great Diamond Hoax (and King’s role as hero in it) to the female Vollebæks. Mr. Vollebæk required no tutorial since it turned out that his uncle had been in New York at the time and had been eager to be an investor in the “miraculous diamond mountain” somewhere in western Colorado. King’s first role had been in finding the mesa-shaped mountain and proving that it was all a hoax; the diamonds, rubies, and other gems found there were real enough, at least $30,000 worth, but they were low grade and purchased in London by the men “seeding” them, just as others had blasted real gold into played-out gold mines in Cripple Creek and elsewhere, to make millions from their $30,000 investment. Clarence King had saved Helmer Halvorsen Vollebæk’s Uncle Halvard—and scores of American millionaires and eager would-be investors—from losing their trousers in the hoax.

“But had not Mr. Tiffany of New York certified that the diamonds and other gems found on the mountain were worth huge fortunes?” asked Mrs. Vollebæk.

“He did indeed,” said King. “But it turned out—as I knew even while Mr. Tiffany was certifying them being worth millions—that the jeweler and his associates had no real experience with uncut diamonds.”

“When you found the mountain, Mr. King,” queried Miss Vollebæk in her delightfully accented tones, “what . . . how do Americans say it? . . . what ‘tipped you off’ that the stones had been planted there?”

King laughed so richly that others joined in for no reason. “My dear young lady,” he said at last. “We arrived at the so-called Diamond Peak on an early November day so cold that our whiskey had frozen in its bottles. We got off our mules on a bare, iron-stained strand of coarse sandstone rock about a hundred feet long and we could not put our boot soles down without dislodging a diamond or other precious stone.

“At first we ran around like children at Christmas, seeking out gems and diamonds as fast as we could, but then my scientific training took over. I noticed that we never found the valuable stones at any place where the earth had not been disturbed. We were finding rubies in anthills, for instance, but only in anthills that had two holes—one where the ants came and went and another, smaller break in the crust on the opposite side. I immediately understood that someone had been pushing the rubies in with a stick.

“Diamonds, rubies, and other valuable gems are never found together in such profusion, Miss Vollebæk. And to prove this to the men in San Francisco and elsewhere who were so eager to buy shares in the fraudulent mining corporation the hoaxers had set up, my friends and I spent two days digging a trench three feet long and ten feet deep down in a gulch where—if this was truly a ‘Diamond Peak’—hundreds of diamonds should have been found beneath the surface. Instead . . . nothing.”

John Hay held his glass of wine in both hands. “And so young Clarence King was awake three more days and nights hurrying back to San Francisco not only to prevent the investors from losing millions, but to stop speculators from scoring big by selling short on the stock.” Hay lifted the glass. “To an honest man!”

“To an honest man!” said everyone save for Clarence King and lifted their glasses to him. King’s blush was visible even through his deep tan.

“Now,” said His Excellency Emissary Vollebæk when the main course had been served and a temporary hush had fallen over the table, “I would beg everyone’s apology for my rudeness, but I would like to address my fellow countryman, Mr. Sigerson, in our native language for a moment or two.”

“By all means!” cried Hay.

Henry James set his own glass down and found that his hand was shaking.

Mr. Vollebæk leaned across the table toward Sigerson/Holmes and unleashed a rapid-fire volley of rather melodious Norwegian. “Sigerson” looked as if he were about to speak but then said nothing. Vollebæk followed up with another paragraph.

Sherlock Holmes still remained silent.

James realized that his heart was pounding as if it wanted to escape his ribcage. In seconds it would be revealed that the man he had brought into the family circle of his dear friends the Hays was an imposter and it would be equally obvious that James had known that “Sigerson” was an imposter.

Or would it be so obvious? James looked at the suspended moment as if it were a scene in one of his novels or short stories. How should “his character” respond to the coming revelation—a hoax much more damaging to those at this table than King’s long-ago Great Diamond Hoax? James could feign the shock and surprise and anger that the others here—especially John and Clara—would actually be feeling.

But then Holmes might very well reveal everything—James’s complicity from the beginning—and James would have to choose between calling the uncloaked “Sigerson” a liar . . . pistols at dawn at 20 paces! . . . or simply apologizing profusely with whatever dignity might remain, announce that he would leave Washington that very evening, and leave the table after bowing in apology to everyone there.

James felt sick to his stomach. He was sure that Holmes would explain their ruse in terms of solving the “mystery” of Clover Adams’s suicide and he knew that this would send another seismic tremor of shock through the Hays. (Which would be nothing to the level of shock and betrayal that Henry Adams would feel next week when he arrived home to hear this terrible story from his neighbors and intimate friends. Henry James had not forgotten that Clover’s death was so traumatic to Adams that his historian friend had never once mentioned the day or details of her death in the more than seven years since the event.)

James felt actively dizzy as the nausea and excess of wine mixed to make the table and all the silent, waiting people around it seem to rise and fall before him. He set both his palms flat against the white linen, pressing down hard to try to stop the vertigo.

Then Holmes/Sigerson began to speak.

It sounded like Norwegian to James. And while Holmes started speaking slowly, the trickle of what-sounded-like-Norwegian soon turned into a torrent. When Holmes paused, Mr. Vollebæk asked a fast question in even-more-rapid Norwegian and “Sigerson” replied at the same rate—a long few paragraphs in a language that Henry James refused to believe that Sherlock Holmes had picked up in a quick study session or two.

James looked at the two Vollebæk women, but mother and daughter’s faces showed interest, not astonishment or disbelief of any sort.

Emissary Vollebæk apparently posed another question. The Norwegian explorer—Sherlock Holmes—laughed and responded for half a moment in the quick, fluid language of Jan Sigerson’s supposed homeland.

As a writer, Henry James often—more frequently than not if truth be told—felt somewhat detached from events and conversations occurring around him. Even as he worked at being a man on whom nothing was lost, the world often seemed more like a template for fiction than something that should be indulged in for its own sake. But this Sunday evening in March, James felt as if he had completely floated out of his body and were hovering over the table, a ghost watching the still-living chatting in an indecipherable language. Or perhaps like a spectator at a play—the way he felt while watching the touring acting groups in England rehearse or actually act the lines from his first effort, The American. Detached, critical, unconvinced, but strangely enchanted.

Except that now he felt convinced and horrified.

Emissary Helmer Halvorsen Vollebæk turned to the Hays, King, and James, and said, “Again I apologize for the rudeness of us speaking our native language and thank you for your patience and kind indulgence. But speaking to Mr. Sigerson has convinced me of something I only guessed at before hearing him speak . . . things are not completely as has been represented regarding Mr. Sigerson.”

James felt his breath catch in his throat. So Holmes’s attempt at Norwegian had been deficient. How could it not be? An Englishman can’t fool a Norwegian into believing that he, the Englishman, is a native Scandinavian. James had simply been disoriented by Holmes’s whole-throated attempt.

“ . . . we had read and heard that Mr. Sigerson was a Norwegian explorer,” continued Helmer Halvorsen Vollebæk in an apologetic tone. “But after speaking with him for only these few minutes, my family and I realize that Mr. Sigerson is almost certainly the preeminent explorer from our nation at the present time. The London and American papers spoke of Mr. Sigerson’s . . . ah . . . penetration of certain mountain ranges in India, but we had no idea of how unique and spectacular his explorations into Tibet in the past two years truly were. Also, Mr. Sigerson is from Løiten, my own tiny hometown in Hedmark County—fewer than one hundred people live there—and Mr. Sigerson grew up knowing my cousin Knut who still lives there.”

Holmes said something brief in Norwegian.

Mr. Vollebæk laughed. “Oh, yes, and my Aunt Oda after whom our daughter was named.”

“Incredible coincidence,” said John Hay.

“I always say, ‘It’s a small world’,” said Clara Hay.

James felt that he might be having a heart attack. His chest felt so constricted that he had to will himself to breathe in and out.

“I asked Mr. Sigerson about his surname,” continued Vollebæk, “since ‘Sigerson’ is not a common Norwegian name—or at least not a common spelling of it. As I expected and as Mr. Sigerson explained, his family name had been Sigurdson but his grandfather had married a German lady—they had lived a few years in England—and the spelling had been changed for convenience’ sake during that time and never changed back.”

Henry James’s mind was churning. Obviously “Jan Sigerson”—or “Sigurdson”—was not the English consulting detective impersonating a Norwegian explorer; rather, Jan Sigerson/Sigurdson was a real Norwegian, a real explorer, who—for reasons probably not sane—was pretending to be the most likely fictional English personage known as Sherlock Holmes.

Then to whom was I introduced three years ago at Mrs. O’Connor’s benefit party with Lady Wolseley?

The most logical guess—the only logical guess—was that it was Jan Sigerson playing out his fantasy of being the written-about detective.

But the Sherlock Holmes stories had not yet begun being published in The Strand in 1889.

True, thought James, but he was vaguely aware of Gosse or one of his Holmes-fanatical friends mentioning that the first Holmes novel or novella (he was not sure which)—A Study in Scarlet—had appeared as early as 1887, to be followed by—what was the title?—The Sign of the Five? The Sign of the Four?—something like that—in Lippincott’s Magazine 1889. Gosse had said that the book version had come out the following year. Only after these initial forays into print did Sherlock Holmes begin to appear regularly in The Strand Magazine. A demented Jan Sigurdson/Sigerson would have heard much talk, both in England and on the Continent, about the London detective.

James later vaguely remembered something baked being brought for dessert, but whether he’d eaten a slice of cake or pie or baked Alaska, he later had no memory.

The men gathered in John Hay’s impressive study. Clara Hay and the Vollebæk ladies had conferred and decided that they were not that interested in images of cold, high places. Hay, King, Sigerson, Emissary Vollebæk, and James were served their brandy in the study. Servants had already set up a screen and Sigerson’s rented magic-lantern projector—all polished wood and brass—and had fueled and primed it. The men took their seats in various deep leather chairs or couches. James was so rattled that he drank off half his snifter of brandy without agitating it or inhaling the fumes in preparation.

The silent servants drew the blinds and let themselves out. Sigerson ignited the projector lamp and a rectangle of bright light illuminated the square screen that covered one wall of books.

“I only brought a few of my glass slides,” said Jan Sigerson. “There are few crimes more heinous than boring one’s audience.”

“Bored by images of the Himalayan peaks and Tibet?!” cried Clarence King. “I hardly think so!”

“Clara will be sorry she missed this and may ask for an encore,” said Hay.

“I will be most happy to provide it,” said Sigerson with a short, quick, northern-European bow. “This first image is of our approach to the Himalayas in northern Sikkim.” An image filled the screen.

“Dear God,” cried King. “Are those tiny specks beyond the moraine there men and mules?”

“Men and mules and Tibetan ponies, yes,” said Sigerson.

“It gives one perspective on how truly astounding the Himalayan Range is,” said Mr. Vollebæk.

“They make the Alps and the American Rocky Mountains look like molehills,” said King.

“Here is the Jelep La that we mentioned earlier,” said Sigerson. “La, of course, means ‘pass’ in Tibetan.” An image changed to a line of small ponies and heavily bundled men—no more than two dozen—crossing boulder-fields amidst near vertical snow slopes on either side. “It seemed formidable at the time but was no more than fourteen thousand feet at its summit.”

The slide changed. The room was filled with the smell of the projector’s limelight fuel.

“This is Tang La,” said Sigerson. “The last real gateway before the Forbidden Kingdom of Tibet. Tang La, which means ‘Clear Pass’, was a bit more of a challenge since it is exposed to snow avalanches, even in the autumn when my small party attempted it, and its high point above fifteen thousand feet saw severe blizzards. You can see that both we and the ponies were liberally caked with ice.”

These photographs were not taken by “Sigerson”, thought James. He’s come into their possession somehow and passes them off as his own, but one always sees the Europeans and Tibetans from a distance. One can never make out the so-called Sigerson.

The next photograph was a close-up of Sigerson in padded clothing—mustache and eyebrows caked with ice—sitting astride one of the ponies. Behind him, out of focus but solid, was the trail down the pass to a high valley rimmed with countless giant peaks.

“The Tibetan pony is a tough little creature,” said Sigerson, “but with emphasis on ‘little’ as much as on ‘tough’. As you can see, my boots constantly dragged on the ground. If the pony attempted to take me somewhere I did not want to go, I would simply stand up and let the pony run out from under me. At other times, if I did not want the pony to go somewhere it wanted to go, I would grab that uncomfortable-looking Tibetan wooden saddle and lift the pony off its hooves until we agreed on a direction.”

The next photographic slide showed palm trees, tropical plants in giant pots, and Sigerson standing with a much younger blond man on a terrace of some sort. Women in saris stood in the background.

“Sven Hedin!” cried Mr. Helmer Halvorsen Vollebæk.

“Yes, I’m sorry,” said Sigerson. “This slide is out of sequence. I asked an acquaintance to take this photo in Bombay when I stopped there to see Sven Anders Hedin.”

“May we inquire who Mr. Sven Anders Hedin is?” asked Clarence King, rising to pour himself more brandy from a decanter on a side table.

“Oh, Mr. Hedin is one of Norway’s most promising young explorers and alpinists,” replied Mr. Vollebæk. “He is only twenty-eight yet already he has shown glimpses of his great accomplishments to come.”

“In Bombay, Sven told me that he decided to become an explorer when he was fifteen years old,” said Sigerson, stepping back from the heat rising from the projector’s chimney. “He witnessed the triumphant return of our nation’s great Arctic explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld and then and there decided his future profession.”

“I am surprised that young Hedin did not cross the passes into Nepal with you, Mr. Sigerson,” said Clarence King.

Sigerson nodded. “Hedin was seriously ill with recurring malaria when I visited him in Bombay,” he said softly. “But this autumn he should be embarked upon his first great quest—a multi-year exploration of Central Asia.”

The large glass slide rasped in its mechanism, and the image on the screen changed. Most of the men in the room gasped.

“The Potala . . . the temple-residence of the Dalai Lama in Lhasa in the heart of Tibet,” said Sigerson.

Henry James, who had also gasped at the photo, tried to take in the impossible scale of the palace. Were those saffron-colored specks at the bottom of the golden staircase actually human beings?

As if reading his thoughts, Sigerson said, “Yes, the scale of the Potala is hard to fathom . . . especially since the rest of Lhasa is so pathetic: sagging mud-and-timber homes, endless narrow alleyways filled with dog carcasses and unspeakable refuse. But rising above all that . . . this. To give you a sense of its scale, all of Britain’s Parliament would fit along the lower third of the Potala, with Big Ben rising only to the high point of the staircase. The temples and lamas’ residences are all higher than that in the structure.”

“I don’t see how you did it, Mr. Sigerson,” Clarence King said flatly. “I just don’t understand how you did it.”

“Did what, Mr. King?”

“Got into Tibet . . . all the way to Lhasa. Scores of Europeans have tried it. None have succeeded. Surely you couldn’t have disguised yourself as a Tibetan pilgrim as so many of our explorers have . . . down to shaving one’s head and wearing saffron rags. The Tibetan authorities always find them out. And you’re far too tall to pass yourself off as a Tibetan.”

Sigerson smiled. “I did not disguise myself in any way. I simply told the sheriffs, warlords, soldiers, and palace police whom I met that I was a pilgrim.”

“And did your fellow travelers over the high passes also get to Lhasa?” asked John Hay.

“No. They were all turned back near the border.”

“I don’t understand,” King said a final time.

“We Norwegians are a persistent race,” offered emissary Mr. Vollebæk.

The last slide filled the screen. It was taken from a distance but showed Sigerson sitting on a low boulder in a courtyard talking to a young boy in a saffron robe. The brown-skinned lad’s head was shaved save for a single topknot, and his back was to the camera.

“The thirteenth Dalai Lama,” said Sigerson. “He was sixteen years old when I was allowed multiple audiences with him in the winter of eighteen ninety-one, ’ninety-two. The audiences were a double honor since His Holiness was in seclusion away from the Potala, receiving intense and rigorous instruction for the role he was soon to assume.”

“I’ve read that most of the young Dalai Lamas don’t live long enough to assume temporal power,” said John Hay.

“This is true,” said Sigerson. “The ninth through twelfth Dalai Lamas all died young, many presumed to have been murdered by their acting regents, all of whom have a tendency to cling to power. This young man’s predecessor, the twelfth Dalai Lama, died after his regent arranged for his bedroom ceiling to collapse on him while he slept.”

“Mother of God,” whispered King.

“One of the few religious concepts that Tibetan Buddhists do not recognize in some form,” Sigerson said without any obvious irony.

“May we ask what you discussed with the thirteenth Dalai Lama?” Hay asked diffidently.

“The nature of reality,” said Jan Sigerson/Sigurdson.

The Vollebæk family was the first to depart. Handshakes and announcements that it had been a wonderful evening filled the huge mahogany-walled foyer.

When Clarence King asked a servant to fetch his cape, hat, and walking stick, Sigerson surprised James—and the others it seemed—by saying, “Could I please speak to you gentlemen in Mr. Hay’s study for one minute?”

The study was still overheated and smelling of limelight, although servants had already removed the screen and bulky projector.

“I have to go soon,” grumped King. “I have to travel to New York tomorrow before heading to Mexico and . . .”

“This will take only a second, gentlemen,” said Sigerson, presuming the liberty of closing the door of Hay’s study behind him.

“I need to talk to all of you tomorrow at ten a.m.,” said Sigerson in a voice that James had not heard from him yet. If it was not a tone of absolute command, it was very close to it. “Mr. Hay, may I presume upon your good graces a final time to allow the meeting here in your study?”

“I . . . well . . . on Monday I must . . . well, yes. If it’s a brief meeting.”

“It will be brief,” said Sigerson.

“Not possible,” said Clarence King. “I have the noon train to New York to meet and several . . .”

“Mr. King,” Sigerson said softly, “I would not ask you to come back unless it were of extreme importance. One might say it is a matter of life and death. And it involves your friend Mr. Henry Adams.”

Hay and King looked at each other, and James could almost imagine the near-telepathy at work between the old friends.

“Damn it, man,” barked King, “don’t make a mystery out of it if it’s something that involves Adams. Tell us now why you have us gathered here.”

“I’m sorry but it must be tomorrow morning here at ten o’clock,” said Sigerson. “I understand that Mrs. Hay will be out of the house for most of the day so we will not be disturbed. Do I have your solemn promises that you will be here?”

“I also have plans to . . .” began Henry James and then stopped when he saw the hawk-like intensity of Sigerson’s glance at him. The Norwegian was quite obviously mad as a hatter and it seemed safer for James to play along with the others present than to become the sole object of the madman’s attention.

John Hay, Henry James, and Clarence King promised to be there. King did not sound happy.

“Thank you,” said Jan Sigerson and opened the door to the study as if releasing them all from his control, but only for the time being.

CHAPTER 18

They assembled in Hay’s study promptly at 10 a.m. and took the same seats they’d occupied the night before: John Hay behind his broad desk; Clarence King and Henry James in leather wingback chairs set on both sides of the desk and still turned toward the wall of books where the screen had been. King was grumbling. Hay looked embarrassed that this was happening in his home. The internationally renowned wordsmith Henry James kept his mouth shut.

At ten minutes after ten, King said, “What the hell? That impertinent Norwegian orders us . . . orders us . . . to be at his beck and call at ten a.m. and then he doesn’t show up? I’ve boxed men’s ears for less.”

“Benson told me that Sigerson left the house very early this morning. Very early,” said Hay. “And Benson said that he was carrying his portmanteau.”

“Have you counted the silver?” said King.

James concentrated on not speaking. He’d gone to Sigerson’s room at eight that morning only to find the room empty. His first impulse had been also to pack and flee, but then he realized that the imposter’s absence might give him a way to make things right with John and Clara—perhaps even with King if the Norwegian lunatic did not reappear.

At quarter after ten, all three men stood.

“I see no need . . .” began Hay.

“If he thinks . . .” began King.

James was straightening his waistcoat and trying to get his thoughts in proper alignment.

A stranger stepped into the room and closed the door behind him.

It took even Henry James, who’d met the man in this form only a few years before, to see that it was Sherlock Holmes. The Sigerson make-up had disguised the Englishman more than James had given it credit for. Holmes was now in a proper British suit. His hair was now brown, not black, and receding much more dramatically than had Sigerson’s spiky top. With the mustache and make-up around the nose and eyes removed, this version of Sigerson/Holmes looked even leaner, a face that seemed all sharp cheekbones, deep shadows, hawk nose, strong chin, and those piercing eyes.

“Be seated, gentlemen,” said Holmes. His upper-class British accent had returned. “And thank you for coming.”

“Who . . .” began John Hay.

“Who do you . . .” said Clarence King.

Holmes closed the door behind him and motioned with palms out for them to sit. “Everyone here but Mr. James—who has some hint of the truth—knew me the last few days as Jan Sigerson. My true name is Sherlock Holmes. I am a consulting detective. Until two years ago, I lived in London. I went to Nepal in eighteen ninety-one and have now come to Washington in service of Her Majesty’s Government and in the vital interest of the government of the United States of America.”

There was babble and outrage. Clarence King shouted until servants came knocking at the door inquiring as to whether everything was all right. Hay sent them away. Only James had remained seated. For a few moments he felt anaesthetized, totally immobilized, and during those moments he was convinced that either he had died in Paris, in the Seine, that Sunday night, or the deep melancholy that had driven him to France and the Seine two weeks earlier had driven him quite mad. Madness was the only logical explanation for what he was experiencing now.

But is it my madness or this Sigerson/Holmes’s?

Holmes waited until the outcry died down and at least John Hay sat back in his chair. Clarence King still stood and paced, his hands clenched into fists, his usually amiable expression now frozen into a frightening scowl.

“In the spring of eighteen ninety-one, Edward Hooper—you all knew him as ‘Ned’—hired me to look into the circumstances of his sister’s death in eighteen eighty-five and the fact that every year on the anniversary of her death, he—and each of you—has received one of these.” Holmes removed from his tweed jacket not one but six of the She-was-murdered typed cards and handed the short stack to John Hay, whose expression of surprise almost instantly changed to one of shock.

“Ned is dead,” snapped Clarence King. “A suicide like his sister seven years before him.”

“I know that Ned Hooper is dead,” said Holmes. “I do not yet know—none of us here know—if either his death or his sister Clover’s was so simple as suicide.”

“Everyone . . . everyone . . . agreed that Clover’s death was suicide,” snapped King, taking an aggressive step toward Holmes, who watched the shorter but stouter man with what seemed to be complete calm. Holmes removed his black clay pipe and with a “May I?” to Hay, who nodded distractedly, fussed with lighting it. At least, based on the scent when it was lit, the tobacco was not that cheapest of shags he’d used near James a few times on the ship and train.

“Clover took potassium cyanide when she was alone in her house,” continued King, who waved away the stack of cards when Hay tried to pass them to him. “Ned Hooper tried twice to kill himself—once by throwing himself in front of a trolley—and finally threw himself from a high window of the sanitorium . . . some called it an asylum . . . to which he’d been referred.”

“But no one we know of saw either Mrs. Adams’s death by potassium cyanide or her brother Ned’s actual throwing himself from the window,” said Holmes between slow puffs that seemed to be further antagonizing King.

“You don’t need to see the snow falling to know it’s snowed if you go to sleep outside in the mountains on dry grass and wake up under a coating of new snow,” growled King.

“Very good,” said Holmes. “I applaud the use of inductive logic. However, in this case, we have a brother and sister dead supposedly by their own hand, but in neither case need it be suicide. Mrs. Clover Adams became quite good friends with a Miss Rebecca Lorne in the year before she died. Is this not true?”

“What?” snapped King.

“She did,” said John Hay. “I met Miss Lorne on several occasions. A pleasant lady.”

“And this was the lady who was waiting outside Mr. Adams’s former home when he came home to find his wife dead upstairs, is this not correct?” said Holmes. He relit the pipe.

“So what?” said Hay, sounding angry himself now. “Miss Lorne visited Clover almost every day in those last months. She was waiting outside when Adams was about to go to his appointment that morning. Or perhaps when he came back for something, I forget which. At any rate, Miss Lorne did not find the body . . . poor Henry did.”

“And Miss Lorne moved away from Washington a month or so after Clover Adams’s death?” Holmes’s voice was soft but persistent.

“Yes . . . to Baltimore,” said Hay. “Where she married a Mr. Bell some months later . . . by the summer of eighteen eighty-six, I believe. Henry still corresponded with her in the years after Clover’s death. Perhaps he still does from time to time.”

“I doubt it very much,” said Holmes. “I believe the woman you knew as Miss Rebecca Lorne was murdered shortly after she left Washington. Perhaps before.”

“You’re mad,” said Clarence King.

“Wait a minute,” said Hay. “Let’s discuss this . . . performance of the past few days and last night in which you claimed to be an explorer named Jan Sigerson. What on earth was that about?”

“A necessary ruse,” said Holmes. There was a third leather chair empty, one facing Hay’s desk, and he sat in it. “Those who have been hunting me knew that I would come to honor Ned Hooper’s request.”

“Those who have been hunting you . . .” said Hay.

“Damned slow about getting here,” said King. “You say Hooper—you have no right to call him ‘Ned’, whoever you are—asked you to come help him with this cards-thing in the spring of ’ninety-one, yet here you are showing up in the spring of ’ninety-three, months after Ned killed himself. Good thing you’re not a fireman or policeman.”

“I am a policeman in a manner of speaking,” Holmes said quietly. He had sprawled into the deep chair with one leg thrown carelessly over the other.

Henry James finally found his voice. He deliberately spoke to Hay and King, not to the man sitting opposite him. “Last night we received, from Mr. Vollebæk and his family, near-conclusive proof that this man, in make-up or not, is the Norwegian explorer Jan Sigerson. We heard the Norwegian language spoken fluently between them. We heard His Excellency Mr. Vollebæk speak of Norwegian friends he and Sigerson had in common. We then saw the slides of Sigerson’s expedition into Tibet, including the photograph from Bombay of Sigerson with the younger explorer Sven Anders Hedin—known to all three of the Vollebæks. It seems to me that the only sane conclusion we can draw here is that this man has long been pretending to be the English detective Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps the high-altitude in the Himalayas affected his mind . . .”

Holmes removed the pipe from his mouth and chuckled. “My dear James, do you accept the legerdemain of a theatrical magician with as much eager credulity as you did my bona fides for being Jan Sigerson?”

James felt himself flushing with anger and embarrassment but he forced his voice to remain calm, reasonable, and civilized. “There was no reason for Mr. Vollebæk and his wife and daughter to perjure themselves with . . .”

“There was one excellent good reason, my dear James,” said Holmes, standing again and prodding the air with the stem of his pipe. “As soon as I learned that I’d be dining with the Vollebæks on Sunday, the twenty-sixth, I cabled King Oskar the Second of Scandinavia and asked him to have his Norwegian emissary support my story and disguise. You see, I still have use for explorer Sigerson. Mr. Vollebæk is giving interviews to reporters from the Washington Post and a writer from the Washington Critic even as we speak, telling all about his delightful evening with his fellow countryman Sigerson at the home of Mr. John Hay . . .”

“So you get the King of Scandinavia to do your bidding with a cable?” said Clarence King, who’d decided to sit down in the chair Holmes had just vacated. “Including having one of the most respected diplomats in Washington and his wife and daughter lie to two people so respected as John Hay and Henry James? And you expect us to believe that?”

“Believe what you will,” Holmes said carelessly. He’d crossed to a window and opened the slats of the louvered wooden shutters and was peering out onto the street.

“The dialogue in Norwegian . . .” said Henry James.

“Was far from fluent on my part,” said Holmes, half turning from the window so that his rather distinctive silhouette was visible against the light. “My greatest fear was that the daughter, young Oda—despite being coached by her father to go along with the fiction that I was Norwegian—would blurt out a criticism of my pathetic Norwegian, most of which I picked up while spending time with His Majesty King Oskar the Second in London for two months in eighteen eighty-eight, and again for nine weeks in the winter-spring of eighteen ninety-one, shortly before my ‘death’ at Reichenbach Falls.”

“You must have handled a very delicate domestic problem,” King said sarcastically, “to put European royalty so deeply into your debt.”

“I did, actually,” said Holmes. “But that is not the reason that His Majesty the King of Scandinavia ordered his emissary to lie during a social occasion. Rather, King Oskar the Second well knows the reasons both for my mission to Tibet and my mission here in Washington. He knows the enemies we face . . . and they are his enemies as well, gentlemen. Should these people have their way, His Majesty is on a long and distinguished list of targets who will be murdered in the next few months or years.”

Clarence King sighed and steepled his fingers. “ ‘These people . . . ’ Now we have the conspiracy talk and the paranoia. Are there no traits of madness you will not trot out for our distraction, Mr. . . . Whoever You Are?”

Holmes laughed almost boyishly at King’s comment. Without answering, he fished in his inside jacket pocket and removed what looked to be four photographs. Setting two of them back in his pocket, he handed the first of the two remaining photos to King. “Would you hand that around to Mr. Hay and Mr. James? Thank you.”

James waited. When the photograph finally came his way he saw that it was almost certainly blown up in size since the subject was in two-thirds profile against a grainy and blurry background of a crowded street. The photo was of a dark-complexioned man with black hair brushed straight back, a carefully trimmed mustache that looked rather military in origin, and fiercely angled eyebrows. The man looked to be in his late forties or early fifties, but only a tendency toward jowls betrayed his age.

“That is Colonel Sebastian Moran, a veteran of the Indian Army and formerly of the First Bangalore Pioneers. He was mentioned in various dispatches during the different Afghan wars, received a medal for killing nine Afghans in a hand-to-hand fight in Kabul, and was considered by many to be the finest hunter and rifle marksman in Asia . . . perhaps in the world. His full name is John Sebastian ‘Tiger Jack’ Moran, although very few people know that.”

“Colonel Sebastian Moran . . .” muttered Clarence King when James handed the photograph back to him. “By God, I read his books! Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas and Three Months in the Jungle. Hunting memoirs . . . and cracking good tales!”

Holmes, now standing with his back to the window, nodded. “He published both of those in the early eighteen eighties. He gave his publisher his birth date as being eighteen forty, but in truth it was eighteen thirty-four. Colonel Moran will be sixty years old next February.”

“He certainly does not look that old in the photograph,” said John Hay. “When was the photo taken?”

“A year and a half ago. In Calcutta,” said Holmes. “You see, Colonel Moran followed me to India from Switzerland in order to assassinate me. He was paid quite a large amount of money for my assassination . . . assassination is the Colonel’s major source of income, just ahead of guiding fat, rich gentlemen-hunters to where they can kill dangerous animals and far ahead of his less taxing profession of separating fat, rich gentlemen from their money at various card tables.”

“Hired to kill you . . .” sighed King. “And now comes the paranoia.”

“Oh, yes,” said Holmes. “Colonel Moran tried twice . . . once in Calcutta, again in Darjeeling . . . but was unsuccessful in both attempts. Then, having spent almost all of the money paid to him for the botched job and not wanting to wait for me to re-emerge from Tibet, the good colonel returned to London. For one of the world’s greatest hunters, Moran has surprisingly little patience.”

“I fail to see what any of this has anything to do with . . .” began John Hay.

“Imagine my surprise then, when I came back to Sikkim from Tibet over the high passes, to be shot three times by a high-velocity rifle fired from almost a mile from my position.”

The room fell thickly silent. James could hear a servant’s shoes against carpet on the main staircase and a carriage passing outside.

“Shot three times by a high-velocity rifle,” said Clarence King at last. “Then you are . . . must be . . . quite dead. So we have been dealing not only with a liar and imposter but with a ghost.” King checked his watch. “And my time here is almost up. I must . . .” He looked up, saw what Holmes was doing, and fell silent—aghast.

Holmes had removed his jacket and waistcoat and collar and cravat and was in the process of unbuttoning his shirt.

John Hay stood. “My dear sir . . .”

“This will take only a few seconds,” said Holmes. He was wearing no undershirt. He folded his shirt carefully across the back of the closest chair, turned sideways to the window, and opened the louvered shutters.

For the second time—and even more clearly now—Henry James saw the two terrible round wounds on Holmes’s upper right back near the shoulder blade—“entrance wounds” he believed they were called when caused by bullets—and the livid spiderweb tracery of scars radiating from them. There was a third pattern of white scars just above the man’s right hip.

Holmes turned around so that the light fell on his chest and belly and right side.

There was another cratered round scar—the “exit wound” James had heard it called—on Holmes’s upper right chest and below and to the left of it a few inches, a more complicated and ghastly scar, not circular, with even more scars radiating from it. Just above his right hip was the pattern of exit scars of the third wound.

Holmes’s long, white fingers touched each of the wounds starting with the highest just under his collarbone. “As I said, the assassin fired from almost a mile away and struck me three times, ratcheting the bolt-action of his powerful rifle and firing three times in less than two seconds. This third wound . . .” He touched the latticework of scars above his hip. “Struck me as I was falling.” He moved his fingers, which were as steady as a surgeon’s, back up to the terrible white web of scarring of the second wound. “The second round did not pass through me and my savior—and surgeon in this instance—had to dig it out. She started from the back and then realized that it was closer to the surface in the front, under my chest muscles. It was a long process and she had no anaesthetic.”

“She?” Clarence King said in a strangely dulled voice.

“My savior and surgeon?” said Holmes, calmly putting his shirt back on. “She is an English missionary named Annie Royle Taylor who had just made an attempt to travel to Lhasa—her Saviour had spoken to her in a dream and said that her destiny was to carry Christ’s word to Lhasa, the Dalai Lama, and to all of the Forbidden Kingdom. So Miss Annie Taylor had shaved her head and dressed herself in Tibetan males’ clothing, but she was discovered far from Lhasa, turned back, and escorted back to the border by Tibetan guards. My own Tibetan helpers, assigned to me by His Holiness the Dalai Lama to escort me over the newly opened passes, had just bidden me farewell on the south side of the final pass and were heading their ponies homeward north again when they heard the three shots and were kind enough to return to where they’d last seen me. I was unconscious and bleeding badly. My Tibetan friends brought me to the nearby border trading post of Yatung. There was no doctor there, but the Tibetans and Sikkimese had grudgingly allowed Miss Taylor to take up residence nearby as she waited for her next covert attempt to enter Tibet. Perhaps the locals allowed her to stay there because her first name, ‘Annie’, sounds very much like the Tibetan word for ‘nun’—and so this missionary, who’d studied medicine and had occasion to practice it in the slums of London and again in China—staunched the bleeding, dug the second bullet out of me, and arranged blood transfusions that saved my life.”

“Incredible,” whispered John Hay.

“Yes, isn’t it,” agreed Holmes.

“How do we know that those supposed scars aren’t just more make-up?” demanded Clarence King.

Holmes had buttoned up his waistcoat and was in the act of sliding on his jacket when he paused. “Would you like to set your fingers into the wounds?” he asked softly. “You can, especially in the surgical incisions. Almost up to the knuckle of your index finger. Here, I shall remove my shirt again . . .”

“No!” cried King, waving for Holmes to stop the unbuttoning.

“So you are saying that Colonel Sebastian Moran did wait through the winter and tried to assassinate you as you came down out of Tibet in the spring of eighteen ninety-two,” said Hay.

“Not at all,” said Holmes, shooting his cuffs. “This man is the one who shot me three times from so far away. He’s perhaps the only marksman in the world who could have pulled off that shot and he’s long since displaced Colonel Sebastian Moran as the world’s deadliest assassin.” He’d set the second photograph in his outside jacket pocket, but now he handed it to be circulated in their small circle.

When it came to James, he was surprised to see a blurred photo of a much younger man than Moran—very short hair in a widow’s peak, sharp cheekbones, ears close set to his head, eyes that appeared all black in the image.

“You’re looking at the only known photograph—taken on a busy Indian street by a British Secret Service agent in New Delhi who was murdered the day after he sent that photograph to his superiors in Whitehall—of Colonel Sebastian Moran’s son. It’s a poor image, but the only photograph police and intelligence services have of this young man. He was illegitimate of course—Colonel Moran left a brace of bastards in his wake across India, Africa, Europe, and England—but this child was sired to a young adventuress in Warsaw. Surprisingly, Moran took the boy from his mother at a young age and raised him himself, dragging the boy around the world with him and using the lad as a sort of gun-carrier and general assistant in his Asian and other long hunting expeditions and . . . I am sure . . . on more private missions of paid assassination. The boy learned quickly. His first name is Lucan. He has in recent years, as I said, replaced his father as the most accomplished assassin the modern world has had the misfortune to know, but, totally unlike his father, he never kills for money. Lucan kills for his fanatical political beliefs. In this case his goal and god is . . . Anarchy.

“In that sense, never assassinating his enemies for pay, he is as much unlike his father, Colonel Moran, as any man on earth could be. But they both ended up serving the same master in Sikkim along the border of Tibet . . . the international group of anarchists who first paid Colonel Moran to follow me to India in eighteen ninety-one and then dispatched Lucan early the following year after his father had failed.”

“Anarchists,” muttered Clarence King. “Now comes the conspiracy.”

“A very real conspiracy, I’m afraid,” said Holmes. “I was also skeptical about the international threat of anarchists when I came to America in September of eighteen eighty-one to investigate your President Garfield’s assassination—and, indeed, there was no direct conspiracy involved there. But I later became certain that Colonel Moran had been the assassin in the pay of the anarchist terrorists at Chicago’s so-called Haymarket Square riots in eighteen eighty-six. The rifle shots that killed three of the four dead civilians and four of the seven dead policemen were fired, I proved to the American police and authorities beyond any doubt, from a rooftop half a block from the square. Colonel Moran and one henchman, not Lucan, used the same modern Lebel rifles that the colonel left behind in his attempt to assassinate Her Majesty in London the following year.”

“I’ve never read any of this anywhere,” said Hay.

“And you shan’t,” said Holmes. “At least until the Anarchist threat against England, Europe, and the United States is dealt with.”

“It seems a rather haphazard and random threat, Mr. Holmes,” said Hay.

James thought, Does John now believe that this is Sherlock Holmes with whom we’re dealing?

“Not haphazard or random at all, in their scheming,” said Holmes. “They have a list of presidents and royalty whom they plan to assassinate. In eighteen eighty-seven, as I said, they hired Moran to assassinate Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, at her own Golden Jubilee. Moran came far too close to succeeding. He did leave his new Lebel rifles—the first to use smokeless ammunition—behind in London, and using certain techniques I’ve refined over the years, I was able to ascertain that it was one of the same rifles used at Haymarket Square.

“The anarchists’ list remains. They currently plan to have your President Cleveland assassinated on May first, Opening Day of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. I need to stay here in America long enough to stop that.”

“Moran . . . senior or junior?” asked King.

“What?” said Holmes.

“You said that Moran had tried to kill Queen Victoria six years ago,” said King. “Colonel Moran, senior, or young Lucan Moran?”

“Oh, the only ‘Moran’ we’re dealing with is Colonel Moran . . . the father,” said Holmes. “He never gave his son Lucan his name.”

“May I see that second photograph again?” asked John Hay.

Holmes, who’d received it from King after it had gone around the circle of three men, carried it over and set it on the leather desktop in front of Hay.

“I know this man,” whispered Hay. “He was Rebecca Lorne’s . . . Clover Adams’s good friend Rebecca Lorne’s . . . young cousin, Clifton Richards. Also a photographer. Clover enjoyed talking to the young man about their shared art.”

“He bought her the new developing chemicals she used,” said Holmes, not asking a question. “Including the potassium cyanide solution.”

“Yes . . . yes . . . I believe you are correct,” said Hay in a pinched voice.

“I am,” said Holmes. He removed a third image from his jacket pocket and set it on the desk in front of Hay. James and King both stood and moved to Hay’s side to peer down at the photo.

It was obviously a professionally taken photograph, the kind done up for celebrities, and the woman was as beautifully dressed and attractive as any celebrity in any photograph James had ever seen—her dark hair raised in an artful sculpture, her large, dark eyes dancing with subtle lighting, her full lips at the level of her beautiful hands that were raised to grasp the handle of the parasol that shaded her.

“Why, that’s Rebecca Lorne, Clover’s good friend during the last year of her life,” said Hay. “She’s younger here than when I knew her in the months before Clover’s death, but I’m certain it’s the same woman. Very attractive.”

“Yes,” said King. “I also met her then . . . this Rebecca. I remember that Clover first saw her from her window at the Adamses’ former house, the house where Clover died, the Little White House at sixteen-oh-seven H Street just down the block. Clover saw her walking alone in Lafayette Square daily for some weeks before she finally went down to introduce herself. After that they were fast friends, even during Clover’s long period of melancholy.”

“And, strangely,” said Sherlock Holmes, “Mrs. Adams’s melancholy only grew worse despite the best efforts of her new friend Miss Lorne—and her young cousin Clifton—to cheer her up.”

Henry James had never seen this woman before, but then, he’d only heard about the delightful Rebecca Lorne in letters.

“I remember Adams saying that Clover had photographed her friend Rebecca several times,” said Hay, touching the borders of the lovely woman’s photograph.

“Ned Hooper told me that two years ago,” Holmes said very quietly.

“And she photographed Clif . . . Rebecca’s cousin . . . as well,” said Clarence King. “I saw work prints of photographs Clover had taken of the young man when they were all on a picnic in Rock Creek Park. She said that he should have been a good photographic subject but she mustn’t have clicked the shutter probably because his head was almost always blurred in movement despite her admonitions for her subjects to be still.”

“Almost certainly a deliberate movement to blur his own features,” murmured Holmes.

“But I believe that one or two images of the cousin came out,” said King. “They just were not up to Clover’s high standards.”

“And Adams still has those photographs?” asked Holmes. “Of the cousin as well as Miss Lorne?”

“I’m sure he does,” said John Hay. “All labeled now and set away in archives.”

“But he’ll never let you see them,” said Clarence King. “Adams can’t speak about Clover, much less about her death, and he would never show her photographs to anyone. Not even the ones she’d shared in public of her father or of Henry or of Richardson, their architect.”

“That’s why I need to get into Adams’s house next door—with the servants out of the way—before Mr. Adams returns home in the coming week,” said Holmes. “If Clover Adams achieved a clear photograph of Rebecca Lorne’s nice young cousin Clifton, it will be only the second photograph the Secret Service or police services around the world will have of the anarchists’ chief assassin. Colonel Moran’s bastard son and brilliant protégé, Lucan.”

“If Clifton was this . . . Lucan,” said Hay, his perfectly manicured fingers still surrounding the photograph on his desktop, “then who was Rebecca Lorne?”

“Lucan’s mother, whom he murdered shortly after I believe they worked together to arrange the death of Clover Adams,” said Holmes.

He took the photograph from Hay and carefully set it away in his jacket. “This is an earlier photograph—I’ve had it for years, gentlemen—of Lucan’s mother, the late American-born opera diva and actress and successful blackmailer named Irene Adler.”

CHAPTER 19

Holmes was following his man on the afternoon train from Washington to New York City.

The detective this afternoon was the perfect image of a poorly paid, mid-level bureaucrat or office worker: his dark suit was presentable, but only just; his shoes were shined but down at the heel; his homburg was brushed, but showing its age; his battered old briefcase was overstuffed with folders, papers, and pens. This particular bureaucrat was red-headed, with a mop of unruly curls escaping from the homburg on every side and red cheek-whiskers—what the Americans had called “sideburns” ever since a Civil War general named Burnside had made them popular—coming almost to the corner of his mouth. Prominent, yellowed, and somewhat carious teeth gave the clerk a rabbity look (and Holmes knew that people tended to look away, or at least not look carefully, at faces where prominent and poorly cared for teeth were on display). His cheeks were red not with a flush but with what seemed to be a permanent—and unhealthy looking—reddish-pink rash.

Another reason not to stare too closely.

This bureaucrat or clerk was reading the mid-day Washington paper and every time Holmes’s prey looked back from where he was sitting near the front of this railway carriage, all the man would have seen was the raised paper.

Holmes really did not want to spend this afternoon of March 27—the same Monday on which he’d spent part of the morning revealing his identity to John Hay and Clarence King—tailing this man to New York, but he realized that it might be now or never. There was a complex spiderweb woven around the death of Clover Adams, and Holmes knew that before he could penetrate it, he would have to follow several of the strands—at least those of Clover’s closest friends near the time of her death—to wherever they might lead.

This one might well lead nowhere and Holmes would rather have been spending his afternoon organizing the years of typewritten envelopes and correspondences that Hay had promised him. He also had to break into Henry Adams’s mansion next door to the Hays. This would have to wait until after dark tomorrow night, Tuesday. Clara Hay had told him that Adams’s servants, who’d been permitted a few days of holiday this extended weekend during Mr. Adams’s extended absence, would be returning on Wednesday afternoon, the 29th of April, to begin the process of opening up and airing out the house in preparation for their master’s return on Friday, the first day of May.

So it was now or possibly never concerning following his man, and Holmes peered over the top of his raised newspaper and watched the broad back and head of short-cropped blond hair. It was quite possible that his quarry might bolt out of the carriage at one of the many stops on this line to New York and Holmes must be prepared to follow him at a second’s notice. And to do so while looking casual about it.

After almost two full years away, Holmes missed London. He missed his rooms at 221 B Baker Street and he missed Mrs. Hudson—and even Watson—but mostly he missed the city. At one point, to prepare for his future profession as Consulting Detective, Holmes had spent a year driving a London hansom cab. He rather flattered himself that he knew every street, boulevard, thoroughfare, and alley in the City. More than that, Holmes had set his goal to memorize every business and manufactory and warehouse and noble townhouse in the City—a Herculean task, made even more impossible by the fact that, since the 1870’s, Old London was being torn down, torn up, and rebuilt in a crazed hurry like no other city on earth. Business establishments that may have stayed at the same address for a century and a half were suddenly out of business or moved to much lesser surroundings because of the hurtling cost of rent as the “trendier” neighborhoods in the city were fruitful and multiplied.

Most importantly, Holmes knew the trains and times in general in England and specifically in London. He and Watson had each worn out their respective Bradshaw’s. Mycroft Holmes—to the detective’s chagrin, since his portly brother never really went anywhere—had memorized the national Bradshaw’s Guide and could give any timetable for any railway at any time of the day or night for any connections.

Sherlock Holmes felt that Mycroft’s little trick rather amounted to showing off.

But at least in England, Holmes always had his yellow-covered Bradshaw’s in his pocket or portmanteau. Here in America, he’d found nothing comparable to the great Bradshaw’s Guide . . . only untrustworthy timetables for this specific railway company or that one. He could only hope that this train actually was going to New York City.

While they rumbled north, Holmes thought about Henry Adams, the late Clover Adams, Clarence King, John Hay, and Clara Hay. They all held secrets relevant to Holmes’s investigation, even Clover Adams. The dead, Holmes knew, hug their secrets tightly in the grave, but not as tightly as the living.

He was aware that Henry James had known Clover Adams a long time, even before she had married Henry Adams. And Holmes had met few men in his life and career who hugged their secrets closer than did Henry James. But he already knew the secret-of-secrets that James would die to protect.

They hadn’t discussed it, of course, but both Sherlock Holmes the detective and Henry James the writer were celibate. Holmes had given up any plans for a romantic or a sexual life so that he could devote one hundred percent of his time and vital energies to his career. If pressed, James would—Holmes knew—claim the same; and he’d already written that now, as an “old bachelor”, he should never marry because he was already married to his art.

But Holmes knew that there was more to the story. There had been many attractive young women and men on the ship coming over from France—the men and women often walking the promenade deck arm-in-arm, men with men, women with women.

The detective didn’t know whether James played whist or poker or bridge or any other card game where concealment was a great part of the game, but he knew that James’s impassive countenance would be an asset in such a competition. He showed little reaction, even to surprising statements or revelations. But once, unaware that Holmes was even looking his way, Henry James’s gaze had paused for no more than a second on two loud, laughing, carefree young American men, walking arm-in-arm along the deck in the way American men do so freely, and Holmes caught the complex flicker of reactions in James’s gaze: envy, wistfulness, longing, and—again—that vague hunger. The hunger had not seemed primarily sexual in nature to Holmes’s trained eye but it was most certainly an emotional reaction.

Holmes didn’t care about this fact, only that it was James’s deepest secret—that and some hidden shame about his health and back pains and relationship to his older brother William—and what made Holmes care even less was that it could not have any direct bearing on either the serious business that had brought the detective to America or on this odd little case of Clover Adams’s death.

After far too many suburban stops, the train from Washington finally pulled into New York’s Grand Central Depot at the junction of 42nd Street and Park Avenue. This three-story Victorian pile was not the new six-story “Grand Central Station” that both Holmes and James would see after the turn of the century, much less the “Grand Central Terminal” that would stand at the same spot from 1913 on for a century into the future.

This “Grand Central Depot”, Holmes could see, was a hodge-podge wedding-cake of a place with dark portals opening for more rails that would allow a few horse-drawn trains to continue toward downtown Manhattan and oversized signs for the NEW YORK AND HARLEM, NEW YORK AND NEW HAVEN, and NEW YORK AND HUDSON RIVER lines.

Holmes’s man, obviously familiar with the maze of connections here, hurried out of the stopped carriage, up flights of stairs, across a crowded open space, and outside, where he ran to catch a horse-drawn trolley headed down Park Avenue. There was nothing Holmes could do but run even harder—a solid sprint with his side whiskers flying and one hand holding his homburg in place—and leap onto the trolley at the last second.

If his prey looked back, he would be most obvious. But Holmes could see that the man he was following had already settled into a seat far forward on the trolley and was paying no attention to anything but the newspaper he’d opened in front of him.

Holmes knew that his man belonged to several rather elite (for Americans) clubs, including two where he kept a room—the Union Club at 69th Street and Park Avenue and the Century Club at 42 East 15th Street. The man also had a permanent room at the Brunswick Hotel at Madison Square at Fifth Avenue and 25th Street.

Holmes knew that the Union Club was not the immediate destination, because his target stayed on the slow trolley as the horses took it further south on Park Avenue. The Union Club’s 69th St. and Park Avenue address obviously would mean that Holmes’s man would have gone north from Grand Central Terminus at 42nd Street. The same applied to his quarry’s rooms at the Century Club, since that elite institution had recently moved to 7 West 43rd Street, which would also have required a turn north from the terminal.

If the man he was following was heading toward the Brunswick Hotel—where Holmes knew he kept a permanent room—he should get off the trolley no further south than 25th Street, since the Brunswick was two blocks east where Fifth Avenue crossed 25th St.

But the man, hunched over slightly and seeming lost in the afternoon edition of the New York paper he’d picked up at Grand Central, stayed on the trolley past both the 25th and then 23rd Street stops. So the destination wasn’t the Union Club, the Century Club, or his much-frequented Brunswick Hotel.

At Union Square, the trolley took the slight jog to avoid the transition from Park Avenue to Broadway and followed 4th Avenue for five blocks to Lafayette Street. Holmes’s man showed no interest in getting off anywhere along these blocks just above and below Canal Street. When Lafayette Street merged with Centre Street, and City Hall came within view, the man stood on the running board to hop off the trolley. Holmes let the horses plod on another half block before he also jumped off and doubled back through the throng of pedestrians, keeping his target’s head and shoulders in view at all times.

Holmes immediately saw their destination and was a little surprised. He’d imagined that if they were going to cross the East River, his quarry would take one of the ferries. The fact that they weren’t going to a ferry landing pleased Holmes; he’d been in New York City several times since the Brooklyn Bridge was finished a decade earlier in 1883, but he’d never had reason or opportunity to cross it before. As with Henry James a week and a half earlier, a ferry had always seemed a more reasonable way to make the switch of railway connections from Manhattan to Staten Island or Brooklyn.

He watched his man pay his toll at the ornamental iron tollbooth and climb the broad iron stairway to the waiting platform. Half a dozen heads behind him in the queue, Holmes paid his nickel and joined the crowd on the platform. The train cars crossing the bridge followed their course in the center of the span with the pedestrian walkway above it and the roadbeds for carriages and other conveyances running along on either side, and Holmes knew that the trains made no stops on the bridge. Thus he felt perfectly comfortable taking a seat and relaxing in the rear of the car his man had entered, his back to his quarry. He could see reflections of the front of the car in nearby windows, but it would be difficult—not to mention senseless—for his target to jump from one of the train cars in mid-span.

Holmes noted for future reference—although he doubted he’d ever have a case concerning the Brooklyn Bridge railway cars—that the cars were very much like the newest and most luxurious cars on New York’s elevated trains: double-sliding doors opening from open platforms decorated with elaborately worked wrought-iron, comfortable rows of seats, and large windows.

New Yorkers and Brooklynites had long since grown accustomed to the fact that the cars had no engines pulling or pushing them, but the occasional tourist exclaimed when their car began moving smoothly away from the station, seemingly under its own power. Holmes knew that down under the rails there was an ever-moving steel traction cable that the cars hooked onto for motivation. Holmes knew that San Francisco had a much more elaborate web of cable cars and that the grades were much steeper there. Still, one could feel this Brooklyn Bridge car climbing up the visible grade of the suspended roadways and superstructure.

Sherlock Holmes was not a man who usually went out of his way to be impressed either by works of nature or works of man. The latter he found largely irrelevant to his work except for the layouts of interior murder scenes and the like; the former he always considered ephemeral in terms of the expanse of time and mankind’s tiny part in it. Holmes had studied his Darwin when he was a boy and it had left him not only with the feeling that he and everyone he might know had their place in the world, and then would know it no more, in a blink of an eye, but even the Pyramids and other “great works” were as ephemeral as a castle of sand on the beach at Brighton.

So cathedrals and great buildings of any age did not move Sherlock Holmes to any level of emotion—with the few exceptions such as London Bridge or Big Ben, the latter heard more often than seen through the City’s deadly fogs. They were touchstones of the city he worked in and, in his own rigidly controlled way, loved.

But now, looking up, Holmes had to admit that the stone towers of the Brooklyn Bridge—they were just passing under the first one set out in the river—were impressive indeed. For many decades, the tallest structure in New York City had been the spire of Trinity Church at 284 feet. Just three years earlier, New York’s World Building, at the corner of Park Row and Franklin Street, became the tallest structure in the city at 309 feet. And while this stone arch in the tower that the train was presently passing through was only 117 feet and the height of the towers only 159 feet above the roadways and rail tracks, 276 and a half feet above the river itself, the sheer stone-Gothic strength of the towers impressed the unimpressionable Holmes to some degree.

Holmes knew that remembering such precise numbers was just a waste of his precious mental attic space—remembering the heights of the arches and towers and roadway of this bridge would almost certainly never help him in a case—but he’d encountered the information during one of his many sleepless nights spent reading one of the twenty-five volumes of his newer, 1889, 9th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Watson had called that purchase a foolish waste of money since Holmes already owned the 6th and 8th Editions, but Holmes treasured his 9th Edition. Unfortunately—and although his brother Mycroft was the one with the amazing mathematical abilities—once Sherlock Holmes was exposed to facts in the form of numbers, he found it all but impossible to forget them.

This seemingly miraculous bridge supported by cables descending from two stone towers that rose 276 feet above the river.

America, he thought, and not for the first time, is a nation with huge dreams and not infrequently the ability to realize them.

Meanwhile, the car descended the grade beyond the second tower and slowed as it approached the Brooklyn terminal, even more of an elaborate and painted iron structure than on the New York side, with a gentle release of the ingenious “Paine’s grip” device freeing them from the cable. Holmes knew about Colonel W. H. Paine’s gripping-releasing device only because he’d been hired in the mid-1880’s by one of Paine’s executives to look into a patent infringement of the grip, then in use only in San Francisco, by a would-be cable-car company in Paris.

Holmes followed his man down onto the street and then to a short series of horse-drawn trolley rides, finally walking half a block behind the man as he strolled southeast down a rough cobblestoned extension of Flatbush Avenue. His target never looked back over his shoulder or paused at a window front to check in the reflection to see if he was being followed.

Brooklyn, Holmes vaguely knew, had once been—save for Irish and Negro areas along the river to the north—a wealthy and self-satisfied city of wide, leaf-shaded avenues and many stately homes. The neighborhood they were in now, not that far from where they had demolished so many old structures to allow for the approaches to the Bridge, was far from stately. An apparently self-respecting three-story home, its trim and siding brightly painted in the most popular current colors of rose or aqua or mint green or sunset orange, might have on either side of it a rundown old structure whose inhabitants had abandoned all efforts at repair or upkeep.

It was at one of the nicer homes on Hudson Street that Holmes’s man bounded up the four front steps, unlocked the front door, shouted something that Holmes could not quite hear from his place more than half a block away, and was immediately engulfed in hugs from two little girls and a woman with a babe in arms.

The girls and babe and woman were Negroes—the woman especially ebony in color. The two girls in clean, white shifts were lighter shades of tan in complexion but had kinky hair carefully brushed, braided, and tied up in fresh ribbons. There was no doubt that this was an affectionate homecoming. This surprised Holmes a bit. The man Holmes had been tailing all day was white.

“Yeah, they got three children. The two older ones are girls,” said Mrs. Banes, the woman with a missing front tooth.

“The littlest one, the baby’s a boy. They had a boy before, he was their first, but he died,” said Mrs. Youngfeld, an older woman with gray hair. It was her house across the street on Hudson. “They named the first boy, the one who died, LeRoy.”

Le roi, thought Holmes. The king.

Holmes had lost the excessive facial hair, wig, and prominent front teeth, and parted his own hair in the middle with a generous use of hair crème. He now wore thick but frameless spectacles. There were seven pencils visible in his left jacket pocket. From his briefcase he had produced an oversized ledger filled with what looked to be official forms.

It was late and several homes on Hudson Street had not responded to his knocking—a white man knocking in what was obviously a colored neighborhood—but Mrs. Youngfeld and her visitor and good friend from down the street, Mrs. Banes, had peeked through the sidelights and decided that the prissy-looking Holmes was not a threatening character.

They’d had no interest when Holmes had explained that his name was Mr. Williams and he was taking a “local census” so that the Brooklyn Benevolent Neighborhood Association could upgrade local parks and facilities, but when he’d brought out the two dollars he’d pay each of them in return for their brief time answering a few questions about their neighbors, they warmed to him.

“And the family’s name is Todd?” said Holmes, pursing his lips and fussing with the complex form of boxes and printed lines on the leaves of paper in his ledger.

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Youngfeld. “James and Ada Todd. You want the children’s names too?”

“I don’t believe that will be necessary,” said Holmes. “But you say there are the two girls and one baby boy in the household.”

“Another baby on the way,” said Mrs. Banes. “Ada told me that their old house there is getting too small for them.”

“Would you happen to know their ages? Approximate ages will suffice.” Holmes was speaking with a slight whistling lisp through his permanently pursed lips. He was a government bureaucrat who liked being a government bureaucrat. (A charge he’d once, in pique, leveled at his brother Mycroft, who had responded at once in his slow, unexcitable drawl—“But, Brother, I do not work for the British Government. At times I am the British Government.”)

“Mr. Todd, he about fifty-one, fifty-two. Ada’s going to be thirty-two this coming April nine,” said Mrs. Youngfeld.

Holmes made no comment on the disparity of ages. He’d seen that with his own eyes in the failing light of evening.

“And would you have any idea of when they were married?” asked Holmes, pursing and whistling ever so slightly. Just another line to fill. Just another box to check.

“What’s it matter to the Benevolent Whatever of Brooklyn when a legally married couple got married?” demanded Mrs. Banes. Her hands were now fists and her fists were on her bony hips.

“September twenty-two, eighteen eighty-eight,” said Mrs. Youngfeld.

Mrs. Banes turned a wide-eyed stare on her friend. “Ella, how . . . do . . . you . . . know . . . that? The exact date that Ada got hitched? I can’t even remember my own anniversary.”

“I remember numbers and dates,” said Mrs. Youngfeld. “Totty, your anniversary is on December fourteen . . . not that it matters since Henry run off four years ago.”

Mrs. Banes looked away and stomped her foot.

“Ada told me that she and James got married over in New York at her aunt’s place on West Twenty-fourth Street,” Mrs. Youngfeld continued to Holmes, who scribbled quickly to keep up. “She said they brought a colored Methodist minister down from a church on Eighty-fifth Street to do the ceremony. They had an organ brought in to play and a cake with white icing.”

Mrs. Banes stared daggers at her friend but said nothing.

“Almost done here,” said Holmes. “Mr. James Todd’s occupation . . . he is employed by the gas works?”

“No, you got that wrong!” laughed Mrs. Banes. “Ada’s man James is a railroad porter, ’riginally from Baltimore. A head porter. He works for the New York Central Railroad, but . . . poor Ada . . . the railroad keeps sending him all over the place: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Massachusetts . . . even up into some places in Canada.”

“Ontario and Quebec,” said Mrs. Youngfeld.

“Wherever they send him, he’s gone a whole bunch of the time,” said Mrs. Banes, clearly exasperated at her friend and neighbor’s vast store of information. “Ada’s home alone, expecting again, alone all by her own self with the two girls and the baby boy to take care of most of the time. That man may make good money as a chief porter, but he’s not home two days out of fifty.”

“I shan’t take up any more of your time, ladies,” said Holmes, putting away his ledger and adjusting his glasses on his nose. “You’ve been most helpful. Your census information on the Todds and other neighbors may well enable the Brooklyn Benevolent Neighborhood Association to fund a fine playground near here.”

“The childrens got plenty of empty lots ’round here to play in,” said Mrs. Banes. “What we really could use is a nice, clean, respectable saloon like the ones that used to be up on Flatbush Avenue before the Bridge squashed everything.”

“Oh, hush up, Totty,” said Mrs. Youngfeld. Looking Holmes in the eye, she said, “She doesn’t mean that, Mr. Williams.”

Holmes nodded, raised his hat, backed down to the sidewalk level, made as if to turn away, but then turned back to the two women. “You’ll forgive me if this question is insensitive . . . it is supposed to be part of the neighborhood census, but I rarely have to ask it . . .”

The two ladies waited.

“Coincidentally, I have had the occasion to see Mr. James Todd without having the pleasure of actually making his acquaintance,” Holmes said softly, showing visible signs of embarrassment. “The gentleman has blue eyes, blond hair—not much left, but definitely blond—and a very fair complexion . . .”

Mrs. Banes laughed heartily. “So he fooled you, too,” she said, the missing tooth even more visible in an otherwise perfect wide expanse of white teeth.

“Fooled . . .” began Holmes.

“James Todd is passing,” said Mrs. Youngfeld. She also sounded embarrassed. “He told Ada that he’s been passing since he was a boy.”

“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Banes, still laughing. “James Todd, he good at passing.”

“Passing?” said Holmes. “You mean, passing as . . .”

“White,” said Mrs. Youngfeld. “James Todd doesn’t look black, but his wife Ada told us a dozen times that his grandpa and mama were field slaves down in Carolina. Lots of ’scegenation going on with those field slaves and lots of children of those ’scegenations trying to pass up here. Though not many looks as white as James Todd.”

“At least he kept to his own kind in marryin’,” said Mrs. Banes.

Holmes tipped his hat a final time. “Thank you again, ladies.”

On the late-night train back to Washington, Holmes realized he was very tired. Tomorrow would be busy because he would have the mystery of who sent the annual She-was-murdered cards solved by afternoon and he would have to break into Henry Adams’s mansion after dark—always a delicate proposition in such a swanky and well-policed area as the Hays and Adamses had chosen to live in.

He knew one of the original Five of Hearts secrets now—Mr. Clarence King, “America’s most eligible bachelor” according to his friend John Hay and an editorial writer in Century Magazine, had been married to a colored woman named Ada Copeland since September, 1888. There seemed no doubt—at least to his neighbors—that the two girls, living baby boy, deceased baby boy named LeRoy, and baby on the way were all his. And Holmes himself had noticed how light-skinned the baby and one of the girls had been, especially when compared to their attractive ebony mother.

Uncovering one such secret of the Five of Hearts was a start, Holmes knew, but there remained secrets he would have to ferret out of John and Clara Hay’s lives, of Henry Adams, and even of the late Clover Adams.

Every man or woman alive, Holmes knew, had secrets. Most, like Clarence King—deliberately misleading his closest friends with his boisterous talk of being attracted only to “swarthy South Sea Island beauties”—had secrets within secrets.

A few, like Henry James and Holmes himself, had secrets within secrets within secrets.

One of Holmes’s small secrets had asserted itself before he left Brooklyn. It had been too many hours since that early morning’s injection of the heroic drug, and before Holmes took a ferry across the river back to Grand Central Terminus, he found an empty shed in Brooklyn in which he could cook-up his little solution of heroin and inject it with some privacy. He’d been in pain, both physical and psychological, for the entire afternoon, and the relief in the moment after the injection was heavensent.

Now Holmes closed his eyes and literally nodded off as the train rushed south through the night.

CHAPTER 20

My dear Harry,” cried John Hay, “you simply cannot desert me now!”

“Not deserting, surely,” said Henry James. “Merely drawing a polite boundary to my intrusion, despite your and Clara’s generous and obviously boundary-less hospitality. You remember that you helped find a room for me to rent near here in eighteen eighty-three when I was here last and visiting the Adamses.”

“But that’s quite different!” said Hay. Both men were standing in Hay’s study this Tuesday morning. Hay had informed James that the servants had reported “Mr. Sigerson”—hat brim low and collars high—coming in and retiring to his room not long before dawn.

“We have Holmes and his mysteries now,” continued Hay. “This is all simply too fascinating to face alone. You must share this excitement with us.”

“I apologize again for bringing the detective here in disguise and under false pretenses . . .” began James.

“Nonsense,” cried Hay, waving away the apology with his long, elegant fingers. “It’s a profoundly exciting experience and one that I wouldn’t have missed for the world. Look at what he’s had my secretaries doing all yesterday afternoon and this morning.”

James looked at the boxes of envelopes and cards which covered every desk and table surface in the study.

“Surely you are not going to allow this . . . stranger . . . to read your personal and business correspondence,” said James. He was unable to keep his sense of shock out of his voice.

Hay laughed. “Of course not, my dear Harry. These are envelopes and cards with typed addresses only, although he will be comparing the first line or so of some harmless correspondence to the ominous cards all of us in the Five of Hearts receive annually. All these addresses and notes have been typewritten, you see. Holmes told me yesterday morning that, and I believe I quote him correctly—‘A typewriter has really quite as much individuality as a man’s handwriting’.”

James made a noncommittal sound.

“So you really must stay,” repeated Hay. “I need your advice and ready counsel, old friend. It will be a very sensitive thing when Adams gets home.”

“It will indeed,” said James. “You have no intention of . . .”

“Of telling him that the English detective Sherlock Holmes is investigating Clover’s suicide?” finished Hay. “Certainly not. You know as well as I that Henry will never agree to discuss that terrible December day. Adams would be outraged and appalled at the very idea of a detective poking around amidst the burned rubble of his painful memories.”

“We can only hope,” said James, “that what Adams does not know doesn’t end up somehow hurting him anyway. Lies and omissions have a way of getting out, especially among close friends.”

Hay frowned at this in silence for a long moment but finally said, “The real question is whether to tell Clara about all this. By odd coincidence, she’s a great collector of the published tales of our new friend’s so-called adventures.”

“Tell Clara about what?” asked Clara Hay from the door that had been quietly opened while the two men had been so loudly debating.

Leaving his room locked, James took his umbrella—despite the fact that the skies were perfectly blue this warming Tuesday in March—and set off on what Hay had told him was a walk of about two miles to the U.S. Capitol and its Library of Congress. Hay had added that if Harry wanted to see the beautiful new Thomas Jefferson Building currently under construction to house the enlarged Library in a few years, he might add a block or so to his walk to view the rising front façade facing 2nd Street N.E.

James felt bad telling his friend Hay that he simply wanted to get in some exercise and a spot of sight-seeing when, in truth, he had a much more sinister reason for visiting the Library of Congress installed in the Capitol Building.

The previous afternoon, Henry James had done what was almost certainly the least-gentlemanly act of his adult life.

The maids were cleaning “Mr. Sigerson’s” room when James went upstairs that afternoon. They were carrying out sheets and fetching new ones while airing out the room of a visible miasma of pipe smoke and they’d left the door ajar.

James had paused and peered in. Holmes had bustled out earlier, working to hide his appearance with a derby pulled low and a macintosh collar tugged high, but almost certainly had been in some disguise. There was no telling when he might return. His room, the bedding being dealt with first by the maids, was a mess—clothes flung on the floor, books strewn everywhere, ashes spilled on the Hays’ expensive bedside tables and sitting-area tables, maps of Washington and New York lying open on the floor atop discarded socks and shoes. A messy young boy intent upon outraging his parents with his slovenliness could hardly have done worse.

But there, hung over the back of a chair not three feet inside the room, was the jacket that Holmes had been wearing yesterday morning when he’d spoken to Hay, King, and James in Hay’s study.

Glancing guiltily over his shoulder, seeing no one but realizing that he would have only a few seconds in which to spy and pry, James stepped quickly into the room and felt in the inside breast pocket of that jacket. Holmes had taken out four photographs at the beginning of his talk and eventually shown them three of them—Colonel Sebastian Moran, the blurred image of young Lucan Adler, and an old photograph of the woman he said was Irene Adler before she pretended to be Clover Adams’s friend Rebecca Lorne.

The fourth photograph, he’d never shown them.

James did not expect to find anything, so he was surprised when he pulled out the small pack of four photos and a telegram flimsy. Three of the images were indeed the ones shared with the other men on Monday, but the fourth photograph—quite formal, the man wearing a long-tailed black suit and old-fashioned high collars, the single image obviously snipped with scissors from a larger photograph—was of a man in his forties or fifties, clean-shaven and strangely hollow-cheeked, his penetrating gaze peering out from under a commanding (and balding at the top) brow. A few loose strands of both dark and graying hair hung down over the man’s oddly lupine ears.

There was something professorial in the man’s dress and slightly hunched manner, but also something predatory in the way the sharp-featured face protruded forward with the black shoulders rising behind it. As formal as the man’s pose was, James thought he could see a strange glimpse of the man’s tongue caught in the act of flicking out over just-visible small, disturbingly sharp teeth.

The telegram was addressed to Sherlock Holmes to be picked up in a nearby Washington Western Union office, had the previous day’s date on it, and was brief:

James set the four photos and folded telegram back in the jacket pocket and hurried out into the hall just as one of the maids carrying fresh linens turned the corner.

She stepped aside to let James pass toward his own room and the author detected no recognition of his quick trespass in her properly downturned eyes.

James crossed the small park and walked east on Pennsylvania Avenue, occasionally glancing without much interest through the iron fence across the north lawn of the Executive Mansion on its open acres of grass. At the corner he turned south on 15th St. N.W. and walked a little more than four blocks that way before he turned southeast onto a more southerly extension of Pennsylvania Avenue N.W.

After a brisk mile on Pennsylvania Avenue, James had to wait a moment before he could cross between carriages and heavy horse-drawn carts to follow Constitution Avenue a little more than a half mile due east. He’d decided to get a glimpse of the new Thomas Jefferson Building, if only to tell Hay later that he had.

Three blocks walking south on 2nd Street brought him to the construction site—three stories of the imposing new home for the Library had risen, but the shell was still hollow and the façades festooned with cranes, ropes, nautical-looking arrangements of block and tackle, and wood-and-iron lattices making rigid the empty areas between the high pillars up on that third-story level. The entire city block surrounding the rising structure was littered with numbered blocks of granite, pallets of lumber protected from the weather with rubber-canvas wrappings, loaded carts, workmen, and even more cranes, pulleys, and cables.

James could have continued walking south and then back to the Capitol via Independence Avenue, but he chose to turn around, retrace his steps to East Capitol Street, and pass through a muddy expanse of nothingness which might have been unkempt gardens—making sure to stay on the narrow paved path—before climbing the stairs to the east entrance of the nation’s Capitol.

That morning when James and Hay had been overheard by Clara, the author expected either a row or for his friend John to lie, but neither occurred. Hay confessed everything to his wife. Instead of being outraged at being misled, Clara Hay had been delighted that their guest “Jan Sigerson” was actually the detective Sherlock Holmes in disguise. James guessed that Hay had revealed all this to his wife because he was uncertain about when Holmes himself might appear before Clara and the servants sans the Sigerson disguise.

“Oh, he’s a master of disguise!” Clara had gushed, clapping her hands together as if in prayer. “What an honor to have the World’s First and Foremost Consulting Detective as a guest here in our home. I cannot wait to tell Marie and Ellen and . . .”

“You must tell no one, my dear,” interrupted Hay, holding one finger up in stern admonition. “Mr. Holmes is here in disguise on what I take to be a very serious mission indeed, and one in which his life may be in danger if the news of his presence in America were to become known. This is a good part of the reason that Harry has asked us to keep his visit with Holmes confidential as well.”

“Oh, yes, of course . . . I understand . . . but after the adventure is over,” said Clara Hay, her steepled fingers moving to her lips as if sealing them for the time being. She was still smiling broadly. “I must bring down the January issue of Harper’s Weekly with the shocking story ‘The Cardboard Box’ in it! Oh, and the February Harper’s with the ‘Yellow Face’ tale in it. We must ask Mr. Holmes’s opinion on Dr. Watson’s chronicling of these adventures!”

Hay took his wife’s hands in his own. “Clara, darling, we must not make our guest feel self-conscious. Mr. Holmes is not the author of these . . . published adventures . . . you must remember. There might be elements of exaggeration or other possibly embarrassing parts to the tales that Mr. Holmes may feel uncomfortable about.”

“Of course, of course,” said Clara. But she was still smiling. And James was sure, as he hurried upstairs to fetch his umbrella so he could leave before Holmes awoke, that the copies of Harper’s Weekly would make their way downstairs and into Holmes’s sphere of attention before the day was out.

When James had told Hay that “I might drop in at the Library of Congress” to browse a bit, Hay had insisted on writing “a little note of introduction”. James hadn’t thought that a note of introduction would be needed to use what he understood was a public library, but he’d tucked the note in his jacket pocket and not thought about it until stopped by some minor librarians just inside the door of the cluttered Library part of the Capitol Building.

Naturally, Hay being Hay, the “note of introduction” was to the Librarian of Congress, a certain Ainsworth Rand Spofford. The lowly librarians at the entrance desk had leaped out of their seats upon reading the note from Hay, fluttered like startled pigeons, and then the chief amongst these lowly workers personally led Henry James up two flights of stairs to the Librarian of Congress’s office.

Spofford himself was a thin, sickly looking old fellow with a scraggly gray beard and long, lank hair that fell away from a part that was more bald pate than part. His face was dominated by a nose that James thought might be up to chiseling stone over at the Library’s new site.

The Librarian came around his huge desk to shake James by the hand, although it was more a limp offering of a dead, white, boneless thing than a handshake. “Welcome, Mr. James, welcome indeed. The Library of Congress is honored to have you visit us. How can we be of service today?”

James was, for the instant, a bit nonplussed. He’d imagined his research here as being anonymous, invisible.

“Looking in on our collection of your own wonderful novels and collections perhaps?” prompted Ainsworth Rand Spofford. He was still standing next to James and seemed to be feeling out of his element when not sitting behind his huge desk.

“Oh, gracious, no, no,” demurred James. “Just a few minutes of . . . research . . . one might generously call it.”

“Of course!” cried Spofford, rubbing his bony hands together as if the two men had just consummated a major business deal. The Librarian touched an elaborate gadget on his desk, and a second later a hidden door in a wall of books to one side opened and a tall, thin lady entered silently.

“This is Miss Miller, my chief librarian assistant,” said Spofford. “Our honored guest today, Miss Miller, the famous American writer Henry James.”

Since Miss Miller had stopped three yards away, too far for even an American gender-egalitarian handshake, the famous American writer Henry James bowed slightly.

Miss Miller, James saw, was a newspaper cartoonist’s caricature of a librarian. Tall, thin to the point of visible boniness, hair done up in an unattractive bun, dressed in an ugly brown cotton shift with what looked to be a man’s shirt buttoned beneath it, tiny Benjamin Franklin bifocals perched on the end of her long nose, and with a name tag on the slight bump of what could be her left breast under the burlap-looking fabric of her shift. D. MILLER.

D. Miller, thought James. Please, God, no.

“Miss Miller’s first name is Daisy, so the two of you should be well-acquainted,” said Librarian Ainsworth Rand Spofford with a graveled bark that must have been some form of laughter.

Miss Miller blushed mightily. James looked down at his shoes, which had picked up some unsightly dust during his walk from the construction site.

“Mr. James would like to conduct some research, Miss Miller,” Spofford was saying. “If you need any additional help, Mr. James, please call upon me at once . . .” And the limp hand was offered again.

James touched the relic and followed Miss Miller out through the door in the bookcase.

The mere librarian . . . no capital “L” with her . . . led him through a warren of book-cluttered small offices and then out into a narrow, three-story-high corridor which James, with a sense of shock, realized was the Library of Congress itself. Or part of it. Books not only filled every available shelf but were stacked on the main floor, behind the iron railings on each mezzanine, and on each available table, desk, and surface.

Miss Miller caught his shocked gaze.

“When Librarian Spofford assumed his post in eighteen sixty-four, appointed by President Lincoln himself,” she said in a surprisingly sensual voice, “the Library of Congress had fewer than sixty thousand volumes, much of the collection based upon Thomas Jefferson’s original gift of his private library. Now we have almost four hundred thousand . . . passing the Boston Public Library as the richest library-source in America . . . and Librarian Spofford fully intends for the Library to have one million volumes by the time we move to the new Thomas Jefferson Building in three years.”

“Commendable,” James heard himself murmur as they moved down the crowded corridor, dodging piles of books. “Most commendable. Wonderful.”

They paused at a junction of corridors. More heaps of books visible everywhere below the narrow, vaulted corridor ceiling three stories above.

“How may I help you, Mr. James?”

“Ah . . . I was thinking . . .” stammered the famous author. “That is, I wondered if you might have a copy of a rather obscure book of physics or mathematics titled The Dynamics of an Asteroid?”

Miss Miller laughed softly and her laugh was as pleasant and melodious as her superior’s had been grating. “Professor Moriarty’s book! Of course, we have it, though you are right, Mr. James . . . it is very rare. But Librarian Spofford has continued the Library’s original goal of advancing its collection of science and mathematical references.”

James put both hands on his umbrella handle and nodded, trying to hide how startled he’d been by her quick recognition of the volume’s author.

“It’s good you asked for assistance, sir,” said Miss Miller. “For we’ve had to put The Dynamics of an Asteroid on a restricted viewing basis.”

“Really? For such an obscure and technical title? Why is that, Miss Miller?”

“Why, after the Reuters News Agency story two years ago—as well as the story The New York Times reprinted from the London Times—of Professor James Moriarty’s disappearance at Reichenbach Falls with the English detective Sherlock Holmes, we’ve had far too many requests by common visitors to the Library to see this valuable book. We were afraid that without supervision, someone would pilfer it for novelty value if nothing else.”

“Ahhh,” said James.

“This way, Mr. James.” Miss Miller led him toward a staircase with only a narrow aisle on the iron steps between more unruly stacks of books.

The next two hours were an odd education for Henry James.

He would have never found Professor James Moriarty’s works or any references to him had he been left to his own devices, as he’d planned so furtively to be, but Miss Miller tracked down everything the United States Library of Congress had on the now famous—or infamous—professor.

The first two books she brought him were the much-mentioned The Dynamics of an Asteroid—two hundred and nine pages of impenetrable equations with very few words, just as advertised—and then a thinner book, the 68-page A Treatise on the Binomial Theorem. The latter had been published way back in 1871, the same year, according to a brief note in the back, that James Nolan Moriarty received his twin degrees, in mathematics and applied physics, from University College, Dublin. The book had been released by a small Dublin publishing house which James had never heard of and was dedicated to Carl Gottfried Neumann, a professor at the University of Leipzig.

James had never heard of Professor Neumann, but Miss Miller assured him that he was an important figure, mentioned frequently in German and other foreign journals of mathematics, and even brought him Neumann’s book Das Dirichtlet’sche Prinzip in seiner Anwendung auf die Reimann’schen Flächen to prove it.

James might have paused to wonder why a student at Trinity College in Dublin was so advanced that he dedicated his first book of mathematical theory to a professor in Leipzig, but instead he explained to Miss Miller that he was primarily interested in biographical information about Professor Moriarty—and any photographs of the professor, if those were handy.

He could see the curiosity in her eyes, but Miss Miller was far too much the professional to inquire Are you thinking of writing a book about the man who killed Sherlock Holmes? She hurried off to find more references in various science sections of the maze of stacks, shelves, and locked rooms that was the Library of Congress.

In less than an hour, James had every reference the Library had on the man Sherlock Holmes, in print, had called the Napoleon of Crime and, in person, had insisted was a figment of his imagination.

Even dates and places of birth did not agree. One Who’s Who in European Mathematics from 1884 stated that Professor James Moriarty—no middle name given—author of the Treatise on the Binomial Theorem, had been born in Dublin in 1846. A reference book for the University College, Dublin, which showed a Professor James N. Moriarty as being a professor of mathematics there from 1872 until 1878, gave the man’s year of birth as 1849 and the place of birth as Greystones, which Miss Miller helped James look up in an atlas of Ireland and which turned out to be a small village between Dublin and Wicklow.

So if Moriarty were alive today, if he hadn’t died in 1891 at Reichenbach Falls, how old would he be—47 or 44?

The next shock for James was when he found the copyright date of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, published by an imprint he’d never heard of in London—1890. Even if Moriarty had been born at the later date given, he would have been 41 years old in the year the book was published. Old, from the little that Henry James understood, for a mathematician’s first major publication. Some don at Oxford had once told James, in passing, that mathematicians such as Charles Dodgson, known to the world as Lewis Carroll, usually published their best work when they were younger than thirty.

Thumbing through the literal hieroglyphics—to James—of the mathematical equations of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, he found himself muttering aloud, “If I only had the vaguest idea of what this volume is about . . .”

“I’ve heard some of the visiting scientists discuss it,” said Miss Miller, thinking that he had addressed her with the question. “It seems that the asteroid in question creates what is known to astronomers and mathematicians as a Three-Body-Problem. Take any two celestial bodies, and their gravitational attraction, tidal effect on the other, tumbling, three-dimensional orientations, and so forth can be plotted with both modern and classical mathematical techniques. But add a third body . . . evidently then the tumbling, orientation, and even trajectory of an asteroid becomes all but incalculable. Professor James Moriarty’s great renown in this book came, if I understand the scientists and mathematicians correctly, from pointing out what cannot be calculated.”

“Very interesting,” said James, although her summary of others’ analysis was useless to him. After a moment he spoke again, “So it appears that there is no chance of finding a photograph of Professor Moriarty.”

“Please come with me, Mr. James.” Miss Miller—James tried not to think of her unfortunate first name—marched ahead of him with elbows pumping, a soldier going off to war.

They had to climb into what had to be the dusty attic of the Capitol (although not under the great dome as far as James could tell) and Miss Miller had to unlock three more doors before they came to a room filled with thousands of carefully filed journals.

“Mathematics . . . European . . . conferences . . .” muttered Miss Miller to herself, gesturing behind her back for James to take the only seat available in the room. A low chair at what seemed to be a student’s desk in the center of the impossibly cluttered room. James was certain that he would have nightmares about this Library for years to come.

“Here!” she cried at last and brought a German journal with a title too long and umlauted and Fraktured for James to bother trying to decipher. She opened to page thirty-six and stabbed her finger down at a line of eight middle-aged men standing in a line facing the camera. The caption, in German, beneath the photograph said “Conference on Advanced Mathematics and Astronomical Physics, University of Leipzig, July, 1892.”

The names were listed under each man, but James didn’t need to read them. He saw Moriarty at once, on the far right—the same balding head, straggling dark hair, reptilian forward thrusting of his neck, and hint of tongue showing between the thin, pale lips. It was precisely the photograph that he’d illicitly taken from Holmes’s jacket and peeked at that very morning. Holmes must have torn it out of a copy of this very journal.

“Professor James N. Moriarty, London.” No university affiliation given. But the date of the conference—July, 1892. More than a full year after Holmes and the newspaper accounts recorded Moriarty as dying at Reichenbach Falls in May of 1891!

Satisfied that he would find out no more about this particular Lazarus at the Library of Congress, James went through the motions of taking a few notes and assured the apologetic Miss Miller that no, no, despite the apparent paucity of information available, she had been of inestimable help to him. Inestimable.

He stood and turned to go then but could not even find his way through the attic to the stairs. Miss Miller inquired as to which exit from the Capitol he wished to use.

“The main . . . front . . . entrance, I believe,” said James.

“Wonderful,” said the helpful Miss Miller. “You’ll get some glimpses of the actual Capitol.”

She was his Aeneas down several flights of stairs, around endless stacks of books that would have stopped him in his tracks, through the long, high, cluttered corridors, and then out into the formal marble vaults and under the majestic dome of the United States Capitol Building itself. Henry James was impressed not by the colossal Roman size of the structure, but by its almost Grecian white purity. And the early afternoon light shining down onto the marble floors was lovely.

Out under the high portico and with the grand columns framing a view back toward the Executive Mansion less than a mile away, James turned to the librarian. “Once again, Miss Miller, I must thank you most sincerely for your inestimable help on my little research errand.”

He tipped his hat and started to descend but stopped and turned back when Miss Miller called his name.

“Mr. James, I . . .” She was wringing her hands and blushing. “I may not get another chance, so I hope you will not think it impertinent of me if I take this opportunity to thank you so much for writing what I consider such a lovely and wise novel about a woman’s mind.”

Daisy Miller? thought James. The poor lady has so much to learn about life. He’d certainly had when he wrote that popular but shallow confection so many years earlier.

“Thank you, Miss Miller,” he said smoothly. “But the eponymous title pales in comparison to its namesake’s true beauty and wisdom.”

“Eponymous . . .” repeated Miss Daisy Miller and then blushed an even deeper crimson. “No, Mr. James . . . I did not mean your novel Daisy Miller. That was adequate as an . . . entertainment. No, I was referring to your wonderful The Portrait of a Lady.”

“Ahhh, so kind,” murmured James through his beard and tipped his hat again and bowed slightly and then turned to umbrella-tap his way down the wide, white stone steps. Adequate as an entertainment? Who did this homely prune of a spinster think she was?

It was already mid-afternoon. Not ready to return to the Hays’ home, James hunted for a place near the Capitol where he might have a light luncheon. He’d imagined a bistro or charcuterie, but managed to find only a delicatessen sort of place—obviously the kind of establishment attuned to the needs of busy government workers and clerks with only a brief break time for their luncheons—that served only rude sandwiches and tepid coffee. But it had empty tables outside at this after-luncheon hour and he was glad to sit in the shade and sip his coffee and think about the import of what he’d seen and learned in the Library of Congress.

Until this afternoon, James had been determined to say good-bye to the Hays, preferably before Henry Adams returned home later in this week, and to return to London on his own. Whatever wave of despair had driven him to Paris and the bank of the Seine at night had passed over, dissipated, and he only wanted to extricate himself from this sticky web of disguises and assumed identities that this Holmes-person, whoever he really was, had entangled him in.

But now, knowing beyond a doubt that Holmes—by whatever name—had lied to him about inventing Professor James Moriarty just so that he could “die” with him at Reichenbach Falls, and after seeing the photograph of the real Moriarty both from Holmes’s jacket pocket and the European journal covering mathematicians and astronomy physicists, James felt a grim new determination to stay with his friends, the Hays and Henry Adams, until this “Sherlock Holmes” was completely exposed as the fraud and humbug he was.

Reinvigorated by this new resolve, James took the scenic route back to Lafayette Square and John and Clara’s front door.

Hay, in a state of some excitement, rushed down the stairs to escort him up to the study the minute a servant had let him in.

“He’s just now revealing it,” Hay said. “He wouldn’t until you returned, Harry.”

“Reveal . . .” said James. He felt the shadow of dread that came over him every time this Holmes-person “revealed” anything.

Hay’s study was a mess—typewritten cards and envelopes turned out of their boxes and files and strewn everywhere. James was surprised to see Clara there along with her husband and Holmes not wearing his Sigerson disguise.

“Clara,” said James, somewhat bewildered, “you are a part of this . . .”

“Oh, yes, yes!” cried Clara Hay, the respectable Washington society matron, while squeezing his hand like a school girl with one hand while fluttering two copies of Harper’s Weekly with her other hand. “And Mr. Holmes has given me his impressions of both ‘Silver Blaze’ and ‘The Yellow Face’ and . . .”

“Silence!” shouted John Hay. The diplomat renowned for his unflappability was beside himself with excitement. “We’re just about to hear, for the first time, the results of the typewriter font comparisons.”

Sherlock Holmes obviously had the spotlight and he reveled in it, holding up the original She-was-murdered cards along with various envelopes and typed notes.

“I have the typewriter behind these annual anonymous cards, if not the man,” said Holmes, showing the aspects of the typefaces that matched up “beyond any doubt”.

“For heaven’s sake!” cried John Hay. “Who is it, man?”

Holmes peered up from examining the font on different notes under a hand lens. “Who,” he asked, holding up matching typewritten fonts, “is this . . . Samuel Clemens?”

CHAPTER 21

Holmes waited restlessly for the Hay household to go to sleep. He smoked pipe after pipe in his room, cracking the door occasionally to listen. Still, the last shufflings and whispers of the servants continued long after both the Hays and Henry James had gone to their respective bedrooms.

Finally it was silent. Opening wide the window of his room—a window that looked out upon the dark backyard of the large house here at the junction of H Street and Sixteenth Street—Holmes took his heavy shoulder-bag of burglary tools and slipped out of the room and down the stairway. He wore a black sweater under a soft black jacket, workman’s black trousers, and black shoes with crepe soles Holmes had ordered made specially for him by Charles F. Stead & Company, a tannery in the north of England. He tip-toed through the kitchen, opened the door without a noise, slipped out, and used one of his breaking-and-entering tools to lock the door behind him.

The Hays’ backyard, mostly garden, faced the Adamses’ backyard and shared a tall brick wall separating the two. Holmes tossed a rope with a small grapple, tested it, then climbed the wall and dropped to the other side in ten silent seconds. The garden here was little more than a gesture and the back of the Adamses’ property was dominated by a stable designed by the same architect who had done both homes—but an empty stable this night.

As Henry James had told him, Henry Hobson Richardson had designed and built both the Adams and Hay houses at roughly the same time, but the designs were different. Holmes had spent a long tea with Clara Hay this Tuesday afternoon showing more than a polite interest in the layout of both grand homes. Now he moved toward the Adams house with the floor plan in his mind.

Henry Adams no longer kept a dog. The house was dark save for a few gas pilot lamps burning. The stables were a tall, dark mass behind him. Holmes had made note that all of the first-floor windows of the Adams house were covered with wrought-iron grilles.

The kitchen rear door was the best place to enter and Holmes knew that the easiest way to do that would be to cut a circle of glass from a pane—the iron grille there would be no hindrance to his instrument—but this would leave a sign of his illegal entrance. Holmes placed a soft cloth on the ground outside that door and went to one knee. He could manage the door lock in less than a minute, but the kitchen door had been bolted at two places from the inside before the last servants had left for the night. He would have to dismantle the entire lock, reach in with a rigid piece of wire he could bend to his purposes, pull back those bolts, get in, and then reconstruct the entire lock in its proper place. It would take the better part of an hour, but since he did not plan to leave via this same kitchen door, it would only have to be done once.

Holmes glanced at the stars. It was not yet one a.m. He had time.

Once inside the kitchen, Holmes squatted for several minutes of absolute silence—controlling his breathing so that even he could not hear it—and did nothing but listen to the house. He’d heard both John and Clara Hay mention that Adams’s people were off at play for these final three days before they would regather and regroup to prepare the house for Henry Adams’s return on Friday, and Holmes’s instincts told him that the huge house was indeed empty.

He lit a hand lamp no larger than his palm and closed the upper and lower louvers so that it cast the dimmest of lights and that only straight ahead in a narrow beam. In a few minutes he’d reassembled the entire lock and doorknob apparatus, locked and bolted the back door from the inside again, and was stealing silently up the narrow steps of the servants’ rear staircase.

Although both houses had been designed in the so-called Romanesque style, Adams’s home had a different feeling on the inside and different proportions on the outside. Holmes had noted to James the profusion of towers, turrets, gables, and huge chimneys on the Hays’ home; the Adamses’ abode—dwelt in only by the widower and his staff now, of course—was simpler, more modern-looking from the outside, set off architecturally only by the twin white arches of its entrance.

Both homes were four stories tall, but the Adams house had a flat front. One of these rooms on the second floor was Henry Adams’s private study and Holmes found the locked door to it in no time. Next to the study, door also locked, was a room that had been Clover Adams’s combination darkroom and small photographic workshop and which now—according to Clara Hay—had been converted to archives for the dead woman’s carefully inventoried photographs.

The simple lock took Holmes less than a minute and then he was in the windowless inner archives room, re-lighting his louvered hand lamp and looking at the drawer upon drawer of photographic prints and plates.

He trusted in Henry Adams’s famous neatness and efficiency and was not disappointed. It had been Adams who had inventoried and archived most of Clover’s photographic images after her suicide in December of 1885. It took Holmes only a few minutes to find both the inventory journal—most of it typed out, some still in Henry Adams’s neat hand—and then the key to the specially constructed archival file cabinets.

Vol. 7—p. 24—#50.23—“R. Lorne, Feb., 1884”, the caption in Clover’s tighter script—“Rebecca Lorne, standing, in Roman costume”.

Holmes found and removed the photo and crouched low to prevent any escape of light as he played the beam of his hand-lantern over it.

The woman’s pose was awkward, the “Roman costume” amateurly made, and her face was turned two-thirds away from the camera. But there was no doubt at all that “Rebecca Lorne” was the woman Sherlock Holmes had known as Irene Adler. He set this photograph back in place.

Vol. 7—p. 9—#50.9—“R. Lorne”, no date given, caption in Clover’s hand—“Rebecca Lorne with banjo”. And also in Clover Adams’s hand—“Very good”.

Holmes turned the narrow beam on the image. It was a very good photograph of Irene Adler/Rebecca Lorne. The woman was older than Holmes remembered, but Adler was still quite attractive. Clover Adams had posed the woman in the corner of a room near a window, holding her banjo as if she were playing it. Holmes had seen that banjo before. Lorne’s/Adler’s face was turned toward the window and tilted slightly forward, catching the soft light. Clover had used a wide-angle lens—Holmes guessed it to be the Dallmeyer lens, new to photography about the time Clover died—and had achieved an image poised somewhere between a portrait and capturing an instant of everyday life.

Vol. 7—p. 10—#50.10—“R.H., Feb. 8, 1884”, date and the identical caption to the first photo Holmes had seen, also written in Clover’s hand—“Rebecca Lorne, standing, in Roman costume”. Again the face was turned mostly away from the camera. Holmes set it back.

Vol. 9—p. 17—#50.106—“Old Sweet Springs, Virginia, June, 1885, Rebecca Lorne, her cousin Clif Richards, H.A.”—“On piazza of house”.—The writing was all in Henry Adams’s careful hand.

Holmes removed his small magnifying glass and studied the image. Rebecca Lorne was looking at the camera with only the upper part of her face hidden by her bonnet, but her “cousin Clifton Richards” had lowered his head so that the brim of his hat hid all of his face. The form of the man was athletic-enough looking to be Lucan Adler, but one would never be sure. He put the photograph back in its archival setting.

Vol. 9—p. 21—#50.108—“Old Sweet”—captions written in Henry Adams’s hand—“View of house with people on piazza”. Again, part of “Rebecca Lorne’s” face was visible, but the man, still Clifton Richards from the clothing and hat, had turned his face full away.

Holmes swore under his breath. There was only one more photograph in this series.

Vol. 9—p. 23—#50.109—“Old Sweet Springs, June, 1885, Rebecca Lorne and Cousin”—all in Henry Adams’s careful script—“Standing in meadow with house in background”.

Clover had obviously taken this photograph with no warning to her subjects. The two figures stood in high grass that rose almost to their waists. “Rebecca Lorne’s” head and shoulders were a blur as she turned her head to hear something spoken by the man standing next to her and slightly behind her.

The man’s face—unaware that Clover was taking a photo—was in perfect focus. It was the single finest and clearest image of young Lucan Adler ever captured in a photograph.

Holmes’s heart was pounding. There were two identical prints in the archival sleeve. Holmes removed one of them, checked with his narrow-beam lantern to make sure that the face was as clear as in the top print, and put that photograph in his inner pocket above his heart. He set the other image back in the proper file and closed and locked the long archival drawers.

He was just leaving the room when he heard voices downstairs.

“ . . . rousting me out of bed in the middle of the night . . .” a man was saying in an angry voice.

“Not his fault the weather turned rough on the Atlantic . . .” another man, an older man, was saying.

“ . . . home two days early with no warning . . .” groused a third and younger man.

“Have to change the linens in the master bedroom, air everything out, check the towels and . . .” a woman was saying to another woman who kept interrupting with complaints about the late hour.

“The cable didn’t say what time in the morning Mr. Adams will be arriving,” came the older man’s deep voice again. “Let us have everything ready tonight and have everyone back and ready for inspection at seven in the morning. I’ve ordered Martin to deliver messages to the rest of the staff.”

“Damn,” whispered Holmes without actually saying the word aloud. He shut off his tiny lantern and tip-toed toward the rear staircase.

The servants—almost certainly the head butler and two other male under-butlers, the housekeeper and at least two of her staff—were coming up the main staircase. Obviously Henry Adams was returning several days early and his diligent staff was making sure everything would be ready for him in the morning.

“Damn,” Holmes mouthed again and slipped up the narrow servants’ staircase to the rear of the high third floor. With no carpet, the ancient wooden stairs creaked under his weight.

“Hear that?” one of the under-butlers cried from downstairs.

“If it’s a burglar, he’s going to get an unwelcome surprise,” came the head butler’s deep voice.

“Shall I send for the police?” asked the head housekeeper.

“No,” said the head butler. “William, Charles, get two pokers from the fireplace. Bring one for me. Come with me, William, and we’ll check the back rooms and rear staircase.”

Most of the third floor was given over to servants’ rooms. Holmes had to feel his way in the dark until he found the final staircase—almost steep enough to qualify as a ladder—and as the men stomped and climbed to the second and then third floor below him, calling to one another as they checked rooms, Holmes tip-toed up to the attic. The door to the attic was locked and it took him precious minutes, working in the near absolute darkness, to use his burglar wires and tools to pick that lock. He stepped into the musty attic.

The men had checked all the rooms on the second floor and were converging on the third floor beneath him. Holmes had to risk a light as he shined his lantern in the attic packed with old steamer trunks, a dressmaker’s form rising in front of him like a headless corpse, more suitcases, an empty birdcage. He tip-toed away from the door even as the voices grew louder below him and someone started climbing the steep stairway to the attic. Holmes had been playing his narrow beam across the steeply sloped ceiling until he found the inevitable trap door to the roof.

Luckily it was directly above two tall trunks that he clambered up like a ladder. He put his back into lifting the trap door and hoped that the crashing footfalls below would drown out the slight noise it made as it creaked up on hinges.

Then Holmes was outside on the steep and slippery rooftop.

The trap door had opened onto the back side of the sloping roof that faced the backyards and the stables. Giving silent thanks for H. H. Richardson’s elaborate care with the quality of the building—thick floorboards that had not transmitted his crepe-soled steps, this triple-thick roof with sturdy tiles—Holmes moved quickly toward the taller pitches and chimneys and gables of John Hay’s home.

From H Street and the front of the Adamses’ house, the two grand brick homes looked to be contiguous, but in reality Richardson had separated the east wall of Adams’s house from the west wall of the Hays’ house by a gap of about eighteen inches. Holmes prepared to jump that gap—a narrow black abyss that fell more than fifty feet to the street level—with the full knowledge that the Hays’ roof was slightly higher than the Adamses’ roof he was jumping from.

Hearing noises at the trap door far behind him, Holmes shut down his imagination and leaped. He slid back down the steep, gabled surface, slipping toward the sheer drop-off to blackness, but stopped his descent by spread-eagling his body and using his toes and fingers and his body’s friction against the tiles.

Men were emerging from the trap door in the Adamses’ roof.

Holmes slid two feet to his right. The main chimney handling a dozen outlets to Adams’s many fireplaces on the east side of his huge house was at this east edge of Adams’s rooftop and it was easily twenty feet tall. Holmes kept it between himself and the trap door in order to hide himself from the view of the men emerging onto the Adamses’ roof as he scrambled up the much steeper roofline of the north-south gable on the Hays’ home. He rolled over the ridgeline of that gable and ducked low just as the head butler and his two assistants reached the east end of the Adamses’ roofline and shined their bright lantern along the empty west slopes of the Hays’ gables. Part of the tall, triangular façade that faced H Street and Lafayette Square and the White House hid Holmes from view of anyone out there in the night.

When Adams’s servants had convinced themselves that no burglar was on their rooftop, they carefully—holding hands at one point—made their way back to and down through the trap door into Adams’s attic.

Moving on tip-toe again, only occasionally using his fingertips on the terrible steep rooftop, Holmes went up to the ridgeline and then north along it to where the Hays’ rooftop gabled up to its highest point, the highest ridgeline almost seventy feet above the sidewalk level.

Rather than two massive chimney structures—one west, one east—as on the Adamses’ home, the Hays’ rooftop sprouted six varying brick chimneys.

Holmes allowed himself to slide down the steep upper roof until he’d planted his rubber-crepe soles against a tall, thin chimney only about a third of the way up on the northwest roofline. He rested there a minute, panting softly, and listened to the lonely clop-clop of a single carriage going down Sixteenth Street.

Someone was moving horses into the Adamses’ stables. Holmes had no idea where they’d been stabled during Henry Adams’s weeks of traveling, but here were grooms or stable boys returning them to their stalls at two a.m. Various lanterns and at least one glaring electric light illuminated the stable yards, garden, and the entire west rooftop and west side of the chimney behind which Holmes was hiding. He checked his watch and sighed softly.

This had not been his first or second plan for egress from the presumably empty Adams home and return to his own room. But at least he’d made a Plan C. While the grooms got the horses settled below, trying to keep their work as quiet as possible, Holmes removed the thick loop of rope from his burglar bag.

It would be embarrassing if he’d not estimated the length of the rope properly. Embarrassing and—from this height—most probably fatal.

Eventually the Adamses’ horses were back in their stalls, the lanterns extinguished, and even the glow of light onto the backyard from Adams’s kitchen had grown dark, although Holmes guessed that the butlers, housekeeper, and the few other servants there so late tonight were in their rooms sleeping.

Holmes checked his watch again with the briefest flicker of his hand lantern.

Almost four a.m. The Hays’ domestics would be rising soon to start their interminable days.

Holmes tapped the photo secure over his heart, secured the lantern in his burglar bag, and then made sure the bag was clasped shut and its strap secured over his head and shoulder. There were two coils of rope, one short and one long and heavy. Years ago, he’d learned the basic art of rappelling in the Alps. Now he looped the shorter strand of rope around the fireplace, tied it off securely with double fisherman knots backed up by overhand knots, and ran his longer rope through this anchor sling at mid-point. Running the double rope between his legs, just under his backside, and out to his right hand in what his first Alpine climbing guide had called the dulfersitz.

Firmly holding the doubled line of rope that led to the anchor strap around the chimney in his left hand and the dangling longer strand of doubled rope that made his uncomfortable dulfersitz, he carefully let himself down the steep gable to the west edge of the long drop to the Hays’ backyard.

That morning—the previous morning, he realized now—and again that afternoon, he’d walked to the rear and sides of the Hays’ backyard, nominally to smoke his pipe and think but actually to look up and measure the alignment of this thinnest of the six chimneys directly above his second-floor (by American reckoning) room. Now he had to trust to his estimated measurement even while trusting again that no servant, wandering the halls after midnight, had felt a draft in the hallway and been brazen enough to go into his guest room and shut and latch the window he’d left open. Someday, some repairman on the roof would find his anchor sling, but that was of no concern to Holmes this night. Leaning far back, almost to the horizontal, letting the rappel rope shuffle through his left hand as he wrapped the other length of rope around his right wrist, Holmes walked himself down the side of John Hay’s huge brick home, hopping the four feet over the dark window on the third floor that Holmes had ascertained earlier to be an empty servant’s bedroom currently being used for storage.

Eventually he was at the second-story window and he bounced far over the upper glass pane—not wanting to have to explain how his own bedroom window was broken in the night—and, after tapping his crepe soles on the lower windowsill, swung himself far enough into his own room to grab the headboard of the heavy brass bed and steady himself.

First setting the photograph of Irene Adler and Lucan Adler carefully on his bedside table, Holmes went back to the open window and pulled the long length of rappel rope down, taking care that it did not strike a lower window when it dangled. Then he pulled it up, coiled it carefully, and set it back in his black burglar bag. The well-tied short length of anchor rope would remain up there.

The night air was cool and he left the window open until the sheen of perspiration he’d worked up in all the climbing, jumping, and rappelling dried off.

Then Holmes took off his burglar clothes—folding them away neatly—washed himself at the basin, got into his nightclothes, and set his watch to tap its small rod against the open cover at nine a.m. He and Henry James were leaving for New York City on the 10:42 a.m. train.

Holmes had left his palm-torch out on the table next to his bed and before falling asleep he activated it and played its narrow beam one last time on the photo marked by Henry Adams as “Old Sweet Springs, June, 1885, Rebecca Lorne and Cousin—Standing in meadow with house in background.”

Staring most intensely at the young man’s face, Holmes thought at him—Why did you kill your mother?

CHAPTER 22

So I had stopped by the office of the Century on a whim after our ship docked and was sitting there on their horsehair sofa reading over some early galleys for my new book, Pudd’nhead Wilson,” said Clemens, “and what do I discover but that some pragmatical son of a bitch had been mucking about with my punctuation. My punctuation, gentlemen! The punctuation which I had so carefully thought out and laboriously perfected! I sat there seeing more of this vandalism until my hot fury turned itself loose and I had a comment for every publisher, editor, secretary, and errand boy in the Century’s office. I found as I shouted that the fury had turned itself into a volcano and the words I was using . . . well, they were not suited to any Sunday school.”

“So what happened to the edited copy?” asked Howells.

Clemens lowered his head and peered out from under his bushy eyebrows. “It was explained to me, as one would explain the lower multiplication tables to a drooling idiot, that the culprit proofreader was peerless, imported from no less than Oxford University, and that his word around the Century was considered, and I quote, ‘sacred, final, and immutable’.”

Howells was smiling openly. James showed a hint of a smile and had lowered his chin to his bosom. Holmes sat with his head cocked at a slight angle of polite anticipation.

“So did you have a chat with this just-down-from-Oxford don whose copyedits are ‘sacred, final, and immutable’?” asked Howells, who obviously had played straight man to Clemens many times before this.

They were between courses and Clemens was puffing away at a cigar, his brow was furrowed, his bushy eyebrows almost coming together in his anger, his chin firmly set, and upper body imitating that of a bull ready to charge the toreador. He removed the cigar from beneath a full mustache that was turning white.

“I did,” said Clemens. “I confronted him in the publisher’s office, using the poor man as a witness should an actual homicide occur. I was a volcano. And such an angry volcano that not a single poor wretch in the Century’s offices escaped without being scorched. The publisher and his Oxford proofreader were Pompeii and Herculaneum to my Vesuvius.”

“What did you say to your punctuation culprit?” Henry James asked in soft tones.

Clemens shifted his fierce stare to the other writer.

“I told both men that I didn’t care a fig leaf in Hell if the Oxford Marvel was an Archangel imported directly from heaven, he still could not puke his ignorant impudence over my punctuation. I said I wouldn’t allow it for a moment. I said I couldn’t stand or sit in the same room, in the presence of a single proofreader sheet where that brainless blatherskite had left his chicken-manured tracks. By this time, both Herculaneum and Pompeii had backed up all the way to the windows and I had a hunch they were ready to throw themselves out those twelve-story-high portals. So I literally buttonholed the Archangel before he attempted to fly and explained that all this . . . stuff . . . must be set up again and my punctuation restored exactly as I had typed it. Then I promised to return there tomorrow, that is today, precisely at noon to read the deodorized proof.”

Howells was laughing loudly now. James was smiling as broadly as Holmes had ever seen him. Holmes allowed himself a thin smile.

When the laughter at the table subsided—nearby diners looking over at the table and then murmuring amongst themselves, obviously the curly-haired author now burying his teeth into the Cuban cigar—Howells said, “When did you leave Europe, Sam? And from which port?”

“From Genoa,” said Clemens. “On the steamship Lahn. Got in, as I said, yesterday morning.”

“That was a very rapid crossing,” said James.

“The captain said that he knew of a short cut,” said Clemens, exhaling rich smoke. “And—by dander—so he did!”

Howells, usually a serious man, Henry James knew, was still laughing and still eager to play the straight man.

“A short cut across the North Atlantic,” laughed Howells. “Can you tell us what secret route your captain of the Lahn took?”

Clemens leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “I fear that I cannot. A small group of perspicacious passengers—with me as their leader, of course—plotted to steal an officer’s sextant and thus learn our latitude and longitude.”

“Did you carry out your plot?” asked Holmes.

“Indeed we did, sir,” answered Clemens. “We simply forgot that none of us knew how to use the device. So after several hours of messing with the clumsy thing, we had succeeded only in pinpointing our precise location either in central Africa or, equally improbable, Saskatchewan.”

Howells was howling now, but Clemens never relinquished his bushy-browed scowl.

“There were no clues as to the nature or direction of this trans-Atlantic short cut?” asked James, allowing himself a quick glance at Holmes when he said the word “clues”.

“None,” said Clemens. “None, I should say, save for the time my fellow passengers and I noticed penguins dancing and frolicking in the ice floes that the Lahn was bullying her way through.”

“Penguins!” cried Howells and laughed all the harder. Henry James suddenly understood that the serious and often melancholy author, deadly serious editor, and mature citizen who was William Dean Howells used Samuel Clemens’s presence as an excuse to become a boy again.

“Naturally we assumed that the penguins were the ship’s waiters and doormen, still in their formal attire,” said Clemens, “allowed out by the captain for a short period to frolic on the ice.”

“No!” cried Howells with tears running down his cheeks. The loud negative seemed more related to an earnest request that Clemens give him a moment to catch his breath.

“Alas, the knowledge of their penguintude was too late,” Clemens said in a remorseful tone. “I had given generous tips to three of them. At least one of them had the decency to hide his face under his upper flipper, or wing, or whatever that thing is called.”

Howells continued to laugh.

The waiters were bringing their main courses.

On the previous day, Tuesday, March 28, when Holmes had announced to the small group in John Hay’s study that the typewriter that had produced the She-was-murdered cards over the past seven years was the same machine that had typed addresses and cards to the Hays from someone named Samuel Clemens, the room had erupted in babble and surprise. It was Hay who explained that Samuel Clemens was the real name for the famous author who wrote under the nom de plume of Mark Twain.

“I must interview him at once,” Holmes had said. “Either Hay or James shall accompany me.”

“I fear that will not be possible,” said Henry James. “I’ve read over the past few years in the London papers that Mr. Twain . . . Mr. Clemens . . . has been, en famille, on an extensive tour of Europe—Germany, Switzerland, Italy—since eighteen ninety-one, I believe. Something to do with debts, persistent American creditors, and the strength of the dollar on the Continent. The last I read, Clemens and his family had moved on from Florence and to Bad Neuheim, with Mr. Clemens occasionally taking the baths for his rheumatism.”

Holmes looked crestfallen until John Hay said brightly, “Actually, we’re in luck. I received a letter from Sam . . . from Mr. Clemens . . . only two weeks ago in which he said he’d be sailing from Italy on the twenty-second of this month, bound for New York, to carry out several business meetings. I believe he was eventually going to Chicago, to meet with someone there and to get a preview of the Columbian Exposition, before returning to Europe six weeks from now.”

“He’ll be in New York?” Holmes asked.

“He should be there—or on the point of arriving there—even as we speak,” said Hay.

“We must leave at once,” said the detective.

Clara Hay gave her husband a sharp glance and Hay held up his hands. “Alas, I’m too busy this week—socially and otherwise—to take time out for a trip to New York. But I’m sure Harry would enjoy accompanying you. I don’t believe that he and Clemens have met yet. And Harry . . . Sam wrote me that he planned to dine with Howells as soon after he reached New York as he could. Perhaps you could join them.”

“Who is Howells?” asked Sherlock Holmes.

“William Dean Howells,” said Hay. “He’s an old friend of Harry’s as well as of Sam’s, an author of some renown in his own right, but also a well-known critic. Howells was fiction editor of The Atlantic Monthly from ’seventy-one to ’eighty-one—helping not only to publish friends such as Harry and Sam, but to promote them—and wrote a column for Harper’s Weekly until ’eighty-two.”

“Good,” said Holmes. “James can introduce me when the three old literary colleagues are chatting and we can ease our way into the Clover Adams business. If you shall be so kind as to cable Howells of our arrival, we shall leave today for New York.”

“But . . .” said James but could come up with no reason for his not going other than his not wanting to do so.

“Clemens might well have taken the typewriter to Europe with him,” said Hay.

“Not important,” Holmes had said. “The important thing is for Clemens to tell us who had access to his typewriter between December six, eighteen eighty-five, and December six, eighteen eighty-six.”

“But that . . .” began Clara Hay and then stopped. “I see. If the cards were all typed at the same time, you think it must have been between Clover’s death and the first anniversary of her death . . . the first time we all received the typewritten cards.”

“Surely you’re not considering Samuel Clemens . . . Mark Twain . . . as a suspect!” said John Hay.

“Only his typewriter,” replied Holmes. “And before we go any further, we must know who had access to it after Clover Adams’s death.”

“Someone could have typed those cards before her death,” said Clara Hay.

Holmes had smiled thinly at his hostess. “Perhaps. But that person would also have been her murderer. All the more reason to speak to this Twain-Clemens person as soon as possible.” Turning to Henry James, Holmes cried, “Quick, James. Pack some things in your Gladstone bag and let’s be off. The game is afoot!”

“What brings you back to the States, Sam?” Howells was asking.

“Business,” growled the man between bites of his prime rib. “All business. Money, debt, and business. Business, debt, and money. Last night I had dinner with Andrew Carnegie.”

James, who paid little attention to millionaires or their comings and goings, was still impressed.

“How did that dinner go?” asked Howells.

“Just dandy,” said Clemens. “Carnegie wanted to talk to me about yachting, about the price of gold, about the British royal family, about libraries, about my family’s experience living in Europe the past few years, about Swiss tutors, and especially—at great length I might say—about his harebrained scheme for the United States to absorb Canada, Ireland, and all of Great Britain into a single American Commonwealth. I, on the other hand, wanted to talk about him lending me some money . . . or I should say, investing some capital in marvelous and foolproof ventures.”

“I trust your conversations were productive,” said James.

Clemens’s brows came down. “I explained to Carnegie my own investments in Kaolatype, in various other sure-to-be-hits inventions and games, in my publishing house, and especially in Mr. Paige’s typesetting machine, which, by itself, to date, for only the Paige typesetter investment, I have poured something like one hundred and ninety thousand dollars into without ever seeing the godda . . . without seeing the blasted thing work properly for more than two minutes at a time.”

“What did Mr. Carnegie say to these investment possibilities?” asked Howells.

“He leaned forward and whispered to me his secret of getting and staying rich,” Clemens said in a low, conspiratorial tone of voice.

The three other men at the table, even Holmes, also leaned forward conspiratorially to hear the secret from no less an expert than Andrew Carnegie.

“Carnegie said,” whispered Clemens, “and I quote him exactly . . . ‘M’boy, put all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket.’ ”

While Howells and James laughed and Holmes allowed himself a smile, Sam Clemens continued to scowl. “He was serious,” Clemens growled into the laughter.

“Perhaps the Paige typesetter is your basket,” said Howells.

Clemens grunted. “If it is, it’s a basket without a bottom or handles.”

“Why don’t you just . . . how do you Americans put it? . . . cut your losses and get out?” asked Holmes.

“I’ve invested too much,” growled Clemens. “As a businessman, I give the word ‘fool’ a bad name. Livy says so. My muscular Christian minister friend Joe Twichell says so. All my friends who are not earlobe-deep in debt say so. But I still hope this Paige machine will be the avenue to my own fortune and to my family’s security. The thing not only sets type brilliantly, you see, it automatically justifies . . . something that no typesetting device on the planet can do. The good news is that forty or fifty of Paige’s miracle typesetters are in the process of being produced and The Chicago Tribune is going to give one a trial by fire. Before this trip is over, I plan to make the eight-hundred-mile trip to Chicago to talk to Paige. My goal was to dissolve our partnership during that conversation . . .”

“But James Paige can be very convincing in person,” suggested Howells.

“Convincing!” cried Clemens loud enough that a few other diners looked toward his table. “Why, every time I arrange it so that Paige’s doomsday moment is nigh, the termination of my investment irrevocable, and my lawsuits against the man shatteringly inevitable, the inventor pitches another bravura performance that would put Edwin Booth to shame—tears, earnest promises, heartfelt assurances, injured dignity, a list of facts and figures that would put a certified accountant into a coma, and all while showing a woeful, profoundly hurt expression that would put a basset hound with hemorrhoids to shame. Why, James Paige could persuade a fish to come out and take a walk with him. No matter how much resolve and determination I stockpile ahead of time for the encounter, whenever I am with Paige I believe him. I can’t help it. Livy says that the man is a mesmerist, not an inventor. I say that he is one of the most daring and majestic liars ever to bilk a hard-earned fortune out of a hard-working author. One ends up giving him another fifteen or twenty or fifty thousand dollars just for the quality of his performance.”

There was an uncomfortable silence broken only by the change of plates by the waiters and then Howells cleared his throat.

Holmes had heard of William Dean Howells, had even read one of his novels, and found little unusual in the writer-editor-critic’s appearance: stolid form, short-cut hair thinning on the front and top to the extent that Howells combed a few curly strands forward, a full mustache turning white, an intelligent gaze, and a soft voice.

“Do you know, for me this is a most important—one might almost say ‘historical’—evening,” said Howells.

“Why is that?” asked Clemens. “Because of the overpriced mediocrity of this somewhat decrepit claret?”

Howells ignored that comment. “Tonight two of my most famous authors, and two of my oldest and dearest of friends, are dining with me. I was beginning to think it would never come about.”

“I’ve read,” said Henry James, “that Mark Twain and I are as opposite, in all things literary, as the North and South Poles.”

“I have never understood that bromide,” said Clemens. “Certainly from what we know of the Arctic and what they are now calling the Antarctic, the poles must be far more alike than different. So saying that we are Howells’s poles would mean that we’re both cold, barren, impossibly distant, impossible to reach, and dangerous to travelers.”

“However that may be,” said James, determined not to be sidetracked by Sam Clemens’s nonsense, “you, Howells, especially during your years at The Atlantic Monthly, have managed to make literary successes of both of us.”

“Nonsense,” said Howells, flicking away the tribute with his well-manicured fingers. “You both were destined for literary immortality. It was simply my honor to publish and write essays about your work.”

“You often didn’t sign the critical essays of praise that you printed in your own magazine even while our books were being serialized there, Howells,” laughed Clemens, obviously, in James’s estimate, feeling the wine. “I appreciated it, as I’m sure did Mr. James, but if there were an Editors’ Board of Ethics and Review . . .”

“You know, Mr. Clemens,” interrupted James before the joke could hatch into a full insult, “I actually met you—or at least shook hands with you—once before this.”

“Upon what occasion?” asked Clemens. They were now on the post-dinner wine-and-cigars course and James could see that Mark Twain was enjoying both vices as he worked to focus his eyes a little better on James.

“December fifteen, eighteen seventy-four,” said James. “There was a grand dinner in the Parker House in Boston to celebrate The Atlantic’s first year under its new owners. You were there, Mr. Howells . . .” James turned toward his host and nodded.

“And so were many other well-known authors—now published in The Atlantic—as well as editors, various dons from Harvard and Princeton, architects, clergymen—although not the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher that evening . . .”

“Ah,” said Clemens. “That was in the early days of the Elizabeth Tilton scandal, was it not? Alas, poor Beecher . . . I knew him, Horatio . . . his sister Harriet was my neighbor at Nook Farm in Hartford. Poor Henry Ward had all those ladies in love with him—or at least with his preaching voice—and then most of the leading suffragettes turned against him like harpies during the scandals: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Victoria Woodhull, even his other sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker. They all wanted his hide.”

“But his other sister, your neighbor in Hartford, Harriet stuck by him, did she not?” said Howells.

“She did,” said Clemens. “Until the end. And since it’s been six years this month since Reverend Beecher died of that sudden stroke, I raise a glass to him and to all poor men who are punished so by harridans and harpies for such venial sins.”

All four men solemnly drank their toast to Beecher and his adultery.

The other tables there in the restaurant of the hotel were empty. The waiters were standing, visibly waiting, their gloved hands folded over their crotches. James knew that the evening was over and that he had to speak now or lose the opportunity.

“Mr. Clemens,” he said. “Howells mentioned that you were traveling up to Hartford tomorrow.”

“Yes,” said Clemens. “A necessity. Money, debt, and business. Just for the day though. I’ll be returning to Dr. Rice’s tomorrow evening.”

James knew that Clemens was currently the house guest of Dr. Clarence C. Rice, an ear-and-throat specialist who included amongst his famous clients Miss Lillian Russell, the aging actor—referred to earlier by Clemens—Edwin Booth, and Enrico Caruso.

“We wondered if Mr. Sherlock Holmes and I might travel to Hartford with you,” said James. “And perhaps convince you to stop by your home there on Farmington Avenue.”

Clemens stared as if he’d been asked to swallow a snake.

“Would you happen to know if your typewriter is still at your Hartford house?” Holmes asked quickly.

Clemens turned his head to look at the detective. “My typewriter?”

“We mentioned earlier that certain cards typed on that machine have been coming to Henry Adams, John and Clara Hays, and Clarence King for the years since Clover Adams’s death. It might help me in my investigation if I were to see the actual machine.”

“Your investigation?” repeated Clemens. He leaned closer to Holmes. “I have been polite so far this evening, but I do have to ask . . . are you really Sherlock Holmes? The 221 B Baker Street Sherlock Holmes? The ‘Come, Watson, the game’s afoot!’ Sherlock Holmes?”

“I am,” said Holmes.

“Well then you . . . and James, and you, too, Howells, if you’re not doing anything important . . . are welcome to travel up to Hartford with me tomorrow, and perhaps we’ll be able to get into the house if I cable ahead—it’s being leased, you know—but first, Mr. Holmes, you must answer a most pressing question that has been haunting me all through this evening’s fine meal and frivolity.”

“I shall if I am able,” said Holmes.

Clemens leaned even closer to the detective. “The question is simply this, sir . . . are you real, or are you a fictional character?”

“That is one of the things I am attempting to determine in this case of Clover Adams and the Five of Hearts,” said Holmes.

Clemens looked at him and said no more.

Howells gestured for the bill, they paid, and—since James and Holmes were staying overnight at this hotel, the Hotel Glenham on Broadway—the two men walked Clemens and Howells to the cabs waiting at the curb.

“Come, Howells,” said Clemens, “we’ll take this one and I’ll drop you on the way to Dr. Rice’s place.”

“But it is out of the way . . .” protested Howells.

“In the cab, sir,” said Clemens. “It would be unseemly for two gentlemen of our age and station to be arrested for wrestling on the curb at this hour of the night.” He turned his dangerous gaze on James and Holmes. “It’s a fool’s errand you’re on, gentlemen, but this Great Fool always welcomes other fools for company. I’ll meet you all tomorrow at Grand Central Station at nine a.m.”

CHAPTER 23

William Dean Howells accompanied them to Hartford that Thursday—Holmes was not sure why, since he assumed Howells had a full business day in New York—and the dreary passing countryside was surpassed only by the dreariness of the conversation. In that one railway trip, Sherlock Holmes learned more about the business of writing and publishing than he could ever use.

Clemens and the usually reticent James had been agreeing vocally while Howells mostly listened and Holmes tried to catch a nap.

“Publishing is changing rapidly, and not for the best,” Clemens was saying.

“I agree,” said James.

“The magazines want a new type of story, if they want stories at all,” said Clemens.

“I heartily agree,” said James. “My number of short story sales has dropped off abysmally. A writer of short fiction can no longer make a living.”

“And subscription novels—once my livelihood and the bread and butter of my own publishing house—are disappearing.”

“Too true, Mr. Clemens.”

“So where in blazes are we to find our wages?” demanded Clemens between puffs on his Havana cigar. “Even serialized novels are disappearing from the magazines.”

“Very difficult to place, very difficult,” murmured James.

“Henry,” said Howells, his tired eyes coming alive. “Do you remember about nine years ago—I think it was early in ’eighty-four—when my The Rise of Silas Lapham was being serialized in the Century at the same time as your The Bostonians?”

“I was deeply honored that my modest early effort was sharing space with your masterpiece,” said James. William Dean Howells nodded his appreciation for the compliment.

Holmes noticed a very subtle, quite hidden, but still—to him—noticeable expression come over Henry James’s face. The look, gone before it could be seen for a certainty, reminded Holmes of a proper little girl who was going to say or do something mischievous.

“Mr. Clemens,” said James, “did you by any chance ever happen to read The Bostonians?”

A strange, embarrassed look came over the confident Clemens. “Ah . . . no, sir . . . Mr. James, I’ve not yet had that pleasure.”

“I ask,” said James very softly, with more than a hint of a smile, “because an English friend mentioned to me that he’d been at a banquet in Boston around that time—eighteen eighty-four, I believe—during which you said from the podium, and I think I am quoting you properly, ‘I would rather be damned to John Bunyan’s heaven than to read The Bostonians.’ ”

Holmes was astounded at Henry James’s bold frontal attack on Clemens. Holmes had only known James for a short time, but everything he had observed in the writer’s demeanor—everything—suggested that James would avoid controversy at almost any price, and if forced to react would do so by the most subtle suggestion and most shaded ironical nuance. Yet here he was coming at Clemens like Admiral Nelson at the French or Spanish fleets—straight at ’em.

Also astounded, it was obvious, was Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain. The other writer’s face, so animated by dramatic scowls or controlled expressions of exaggerated surprise or joy in every other exchange Holmes had seen, now bore a look as blank and open and pathetically embarrassed as any 11-year-old boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

“I . . . he . . . I . . .” stammered Clemens, his cheeks and nose looking as though they might burst any second from exploding capillaries, “it doesn’t . . . I certainly did not mean . . . podiums . . . banquets!” The last two words were launched in a tone of disgust emphasized by Clemens waving his hand as if wafting away a noxious odor. Clemens worked to light a new cigar, bending to focus all his energy on the business, even though he had two-thirds of one still burning in the ashtray.

Holmes could see by William Dean Howells’s paled and absolutely frozen face that he had been the one to carry original word of the insult to James almost a decade ago.

James let a few more delicious seconds of this heavily weighted silence pass before he said, “But, sir, many readers—including this one after sufficient time had passed—fully agreed with you on the faults of The Bostonians. And I fully and heartily agree with you, sir, that it would be the worst sort of Hell to be damned to John Bunyan’s heaven.”

For a while the silence ruled. Clemens held his cigar, James and Howells smoked their cigarettes, and Holmes puffed away at his pipe. The four men peered at each other through a strained but collegial blue haze.

“Henry,” said Howells after clearing his throat, “you have diversified, as the businessmen say, into the theater, have you not?”

James nodded modestly. “Three years ago, at Mr. Edward Compton’s request, I adapted my novel The American into a play. The novel was not entirely suited to dramatization, but writing and revising the play gave me much needed theatrical experience.”

“Did it reach the stage?” asked Clemens.

“Yes,” said James. “And with some success. Both in the provinces and eventually in London. The next drama I write will be done exclusively for the theater and will not be an adaptation. In some ways, to be candid, I feel that I have finally found my true form. I find dramatical writing, with its emphasis on the scene, much more interesting than the novel or short fiction, do you not?”

Clemens grunted. “I adapted my book The Gilded Age into a play, known by most folks as Colonel Sellers because of the strength of the main character, played by John T. Raymond. Do you know Raymond, Mr. James?”

“I’ve not met him or seen any of his plays,” said James.

“He was a perfect Colonel Sellers,” said Clemens. “This was during the Grant presidency, and President Grant attended one of the New York performances and friends of mine told me that one could hear the president laughing all the way to the rear balcony rows.”

“It was a comedy then?” said James.

“In part,” said Clemens. “Certainly John T. Raymond made it so. I would have appreciated it if he had played his famous turnip-eating scene more in the spirit of the pure pathos of poverty which I’d intended rather than the broad comedy Raymond made of it. But I cannot complain. Colonel Sellers netted ten thousand dollars in its first three months and I imagine that it will make me seventy-five or a hundred thousand dollars before it, or I, or both of us together, die of old age.”

There was another silence then amongst the four men as the vulgarity of someone stating how much money he’d made from a job was left to drift away slowly with the cigar, cigarette, and pipe smoke. Holmes looked at Samuel Clemens with his most analytical gaze. Much of Holmes’s job depended upon reading people as much as reading clues. Coming to a decision on the quality of a person or the veracity of his statements or the solidity of his personality led to more revelations in detective work than did the inspection of footprints or types of cigarette ash left behind. Clemens, Holmes saw, used vulgarity as a device—not only to shock his audience (and everyone around him was, always, his audience), but to move beyond that shock at obvious vulgarity to some (hoped-for) higher level of humor or farce.

Or at least to Clemens it would seem a higher level.

As if reading Holmes’s thoughts, Clemens removed the cigar from his mouth and leaned forward into the circle of men facing each other. “What about you, Mr. James? What do you think of seeking one’s fortune by writing for mere actors?”

James smiled. “I have friends who would say that such money is tainted.”

“By Jove, it is tainted!” cried Clemens in a loud voice while slapping his knee. All of the boy’s embarrassment and guilt was gone now, replaced by a boy’s enthusiasm. “The kind of wealth being made these days by writing for the stage by, say, that Irishman Oscar Wilde is twice tainted!”

“Twice tainted?” echoed Henry James.

“Twice tainted,” repeated Clemens. “Tain’t yours, and certainly tain’t mine.”

Hartford was a dreary one-business town—insurance companies on every other dreary corner and no civic architecture of any significance—but by the time the brougham carrying the four men to Nook Farm turned onto Farmington Avenue, Holmes and James could see the beauty of Mark Twain’s old neighborhood.

The houses were large but distinct from one another, obviously designed by architects with their particular clients’ dreams and desires in mind. Each lot covered several acres and, while a house might put an iron fence around some of the front yard to separate it from the paved and gently curving avenue, the larger properties themselves tended to blend together in forest and glade with no proprietary fencing.

“See that gazebo?” said Clemens, pointing into the trees between two fine homes. “Harriet Beecher Stowe and I shared the expense of building that since it sits right on the invisible line between our properties. She and I would meet there often on a warm summer day or brisk autumn morning to swap yarns and discuss the inevitable decline of Western Civilization.”

“Is she still living?” asked Holmes. Uncle Tom’s Cabin had run on the stage in London literally for decades since his boyhood.

“Oh, yes,” said Clemens. “Almost eighty-two now, I believe, and still as gracious and cussed as ever. The little woman, as President Lincoln said upon first meeting her, whose book started the great war.”

Their brougham paused to let two builders’ wagons slowly pass and since they were still gazing at the gazebo amidst the trees, Clemens went on, “Some nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d steal out to sit on the railing in the gazebo and smoke and admire the stars or moonlight. Often I’d find Mrs. Stowe already there. We’d talk ’til almost dawn, two happy insomniacs.”

“One must wonder,” said Henry James, “what two writers of such major accomplishment and diverse talents would discuss in the starlight or moonlight. The nature of evil? The past and future of the black race in America? Thoughts on literature or dramaturgy?”

“Mostly,” said Clemens, taking the cigar from his mouth, “we talked about our aches and pains. Especially before Mr. Stowe died in ’eighty-six. She’d tell me hers; I’d tell ’er mine.”

Holmes saw Howells smile at this. Obviously some Sam Clemens story was imminent while they waited for the dray wagons to rumble past.

“I remember one night,” said Clemens between blue puffs, “when she listed her aches and pains, sure that they must signify imminent mortality . . . the darling lady was almost as hypochondriacal as I was . . . when I was amazed to hear that her problems exactly matched a recent list of my own . . . and a list of pains and symptoms of which I had just been cured!”

Holmes folded his arms. The dray wagons were past and now their brougham turned onto a paved lane that curved up a gentle hill.

“I told her . . .” continued Clemens. “I told her . . . ‘Harriet,’ I said . . . ‘my doctor just cured me of precisely those ailments. Precisely!’ ‘What medicine did he prescribe?’ asked little Mrs. Stowe. ‘Why, no medicines at all!’ says I. ‘My doctor just told me to take a two-month sabbatical from my habits of heavy drinking, constant smoking, and exploding into wild bouts of profanity in irregular but frequent intervals.’ I told her, ‘Harriet, you give up cussin’, drinkin’, and smokin’ for a couple of months and you’ll be right as rain.’ ”

Clemens peered at them through the smoke, making sure that they were still absorbed in his tale.

“ ‘Mr. Clemens!’ cried she. ‘I have never partaken of any of those terrible behaviors.’ ‘Never?’ says I, and I can tell you, gentlemen, I was shocked. ‘Never,’ says Harriet Beecher Stowe, gathering her shawl around her because the night was nippy. ‘Well then, my dear lady,’ I broke it to her with infinite sadness, ‘there is no hope for you. You are a balloon going down and you have no ballast to cast overboard. You have neglected your vices.’ ”

The brougham stopped at the crest of a rise and there was Samuel Clemens’s former home. Although he still owned it, he explained, for the last two years he and Livy had leased it to a certain John Day and his wife Alice, the daughter of Isabella Hooker, for a much-needed two hundred dollars a month. Clemens said that he’d cabled ahead and John and Alice would be out this afternoon; the house was theirs for the time-being.

Stepping out of the carriage, Holmes looked at the house. The sunlight created a rich mixture of shade and colors on three stories of salmon-colored bricks. The steeply pitched gables along with five balconies gave the large home a bit of a castle look. Its main window was on a two-story tower and overlooked the porte cochère over the driveway.

Clemens saw where the detective was gazing. “Some have written or said that I wanted that bit to resemble a riverboat’s pilot house,” he said, stubbing his last cigar out on the curb. “But I didn’t. That wasn’t the plan at all. It’s just, as they say, a happy coincidence.”

Clemens fetched a key from a flower pot on the front porch, unlocked the door, and swept it open for them to enter.

A few yards down the hallway they could peer into the main rooms and Holmes knew that it was a home dedicated to good taste and quality items. Sherlock Holmes’s bachelor bedroom and sitting room at 221 B Baker Street might be a toss-about mess—was a toss-about mess when Mrs. Hudson wasn’t interfering—with everything thrown and dropped rather than folded and placed, but Holmes knew attractive domestic order when he saw it. He was seeing it now.

“Nineteen rooms, seven bathrooms,” Clemens was saying as if he were a real estate man intent upon selling the house to them. “All the bathrooms with flush toilets, which was a curiosity in its day. Speaking tubes so that anyone can talk to anyone from any floor. In this parlor—enter, gentlemen—you see Hartford’s first telephone in its particular little niche there. Since I was one of the first to install the infernal device, there were precious few other telephonic interlocutors I might talk to.

“Here’s the drawing room . . . the stencil designs on the walls were from Lockwood de Forest.”

“A partner in the firm begun by Mr. Tiffany,” added Howells.

“This little solar conservatory area was where my girls would put on their plays,” said Clemens, gesturing to an area filled with plants. “You see how the drapes can be drawn across here like a theater curtain.” Clemens paused and then seemed to look at the room and peer into the adjoining rooms for the first time.

“This is . . . strange,” he said in a choked voice. “For the first year or so we were abroad, Livy and I had all the furniture, carpets, vases, beds, knick-knacks in storage, but when John and Alice leased the place, rather than have the young couple furnish such a large house, we got everything out of storage for them . . . for a small additional fee. But . . .”

Clemens walked into the library and returned to the drawing room. Above the broad, carved mantel in front of them was a window looking out onto the yard from above the fireplace. Clemens patted it. “This was my idea. Few things are cozier than sitting inside on a winter day with one’s family, watching the snow fall just above the crackling fire.” He touched little carvings and vases set along the mantel and atop the bookcases on either side.

“John and Alice have placed everything just as we had it,” he said in that strange voice. “Every vase and carpet that Livy and I had purchased on our early travels. Every beloved-by-the-children carving and knick-knack.” He touched one of the carved pieces on the mantel. “You see, every Saturday, Susy and Jean and Clara would demand stories about various ornaments and paintings that stood on these top shelves and on this mantelpiece. At one end of the procession, you see, was a framed oil painting of a cat’s head; at the other end was a head of a beautiful young girl, life size, called Emmeline, an impressionist watercolor. Between the one picture and the other there were twelve or fifteen of the bric-a-brac things . . . oh, and also an oil painting by Elihu Vedder, the Young Medusa. So my little girls required me to construct a romance—always impromptu—not a moment’s preparation permitted—and into that romance I had to get all that bric-a-brac and the three pictures. I had to start always with the cat and finish with Emmeline. I was never allowed the refreshment of a change, end for end. It was not permissible to introduce a bric-a-brac ornament into the story out of its place in the procession. These bric-a-bracs were never allowed a peaceful day, a reposeful day, a restful Sabbath. In their lives there was no Sabbath. In their lives there was no peace. They knew no existence but a monotonous career of violence and bloodshed. In the course of time the bric-a-brac and the pictures showed wear. It was because they had had so many and such violent adventures in their romantic careers.”

“Good practice for a writer,” chuckled Howells.

“The stories often included a circus,” said Clemens. He hadn’t seemed to have heard Howells. He didn’t seem to remember that the other men were in the room with him.

“The girls truly loved stories about a circus and so I usually wove a circus into . . .”

Clemens seemed stunned. He took a few staggering steps and collapsed more than sat in a flowery chair.

“Sam?” said Howells.

“I’m all right,” said Clemens, shielding his eyes with his hand as if hiding tears. “It’s just that . . . it is only, you see, that everything is in its proper place.”

The others stood without knowing what to say.

“I promised Livy that even though I had to see old Hartford friends about investing in some of my endeavors, I would not get close enough to the Farmington Avenue house even to see its high chimney. But as soon as I entered the front door here I was seized with a furious desire to have my entire family in this house again . . . and right away . . . and never go outside the grounds of here and Nook Farm anymore forever. Certainly never again to Europe.”

Clemens lowered his hand and looked around him as if in a dream.

“Everything in its place. Everything that Livy and I so treasured and shopped for and debated purchasing and celebrated in what now feels like our youth. When the girls were babies or toddlers or wee ones.”

He turned and looked directly into the eyes of Howells, then James, and finally Holmes.

“How ugly, tasteless, repulsive are all the domestic interiors I have ever seen in Europe, gentlemen. Compare that baroque awfulness with the perfect taste of this ground floor, with its delicious dream of harmonious color and its all-pervading spirit of peace and serenity and deep, deep contentment. This is simply nothing more than the loveliest home that ever was.”

“It is beautiful, Sam,” said Howells.

It was as if Clemens hadn’t heard him speak. “Somehow, through some dark, malevolent enchantment, I had wholly forgotten our home’s olden aspect,” he said softly, speaking to himself. “This . . . this . . .” Clemens simultaneously slapped his palms on the arms of his chair and brought his polished shoes down hard on the floor, although he meant to signify neither in its isolation. “This place, to me, gentlemen, is bewitchingly bright and splendid and homelike and natural and it seems at this moment as if I have just burst awake out of a long and hellish dream. It is, gentlemen, as if I have never been away and that I will turn my head . . .”

He did so toward the stairway.

“ . . . and see my dearest Livy drifting down out of those dainty upper regions with the little children tagging after her.” He looked at them each in turn again. “But I feel in my heart that it is not to be. That it is never to be.”

No one spoke after this.

Clemens passed his hands over his eyes again and stood abruptly. “Enough of this nonsense,” he said, voice harsh. “Let us get up to the billiards room on the third floor where I kept my typewriter . . . that instrument of the Devil around which Mr. Holmes’s murder investigation pivots so ingeniously.”

CHAPTER 24

James and Howells were trailing behind Clemens and Holmes and on the second-story landing, Howells touched James’s sleeve to bring him to a stop.

“That was Sam and Livy’s bedroom,” whispered Howells, pointing to a door at the far end of the hall as Clemens and Holmes climbed out of sight to the third floor. “In Italy they’d bought this amazingly large bed with such an intricately carved headboard that Sam and Livy always put their pillows at the footboard end so, Sam would say, that staggeringly expensive headboard would be the last thing they’d see at night and the first thing they’d see in the morning. John and Alice Day provided their own bed, so Sam and Livy’s carved wonder is still in storage.”

James nodded, but Howells’s soft grip on his forearm continued.

Using his free hand to point to another door far down the hallway, Howells whispered, “That was always my room when I visited. Many’s the time that I would awake to some stealthy sound at one, two, even three o’clock in the morning only to peer out and see Sam in his nightshirt carrying a billiards cue . . . walking the halls in search of a playmate as it were.”

“Did you accommodate him?” whispered James.

“Almost always,” said Howells with a soft chuckle. “Almost always.”

Clemens’s voice suddenly roared down the stairway—“Are you two coming up, or are you busy ransacking through drawers down there in search of treasure? I need someone to play billiards with. The World’s Foremost Consulting Detective doesn’t know how to play the game and refuses to be taught!”

Henry James made mental notes of the American writer’s billiards room. The inward-sloping walls—this room was at the top of the tallest tower rising from the home—had been painted a light red that bordered on pink. The room was dominated by the five-foot-by-ten-foot billiards table, and James noticed that it was one of the more recently designed pocket-billiards tables with the six holes and external pockets of gold cloth and tassels at each corner and halfway down each long side. The billiards pockets gave a sense of Christmas-stocking celebration to the room, and the sloping ceilings made it feel like what it was—a playroom in a high attic.

The floor was completely carpeted over with a Persian rug that boasted patches of more (and brighter) red amongst its intricate designs. A brick fireplace on the far wall was offset from the center of the table and room and James could imagine how cozy this small, high room could be in the winter or on a chilly and stormy summer night. Next to the fireplace was a rough-hewn and open-faced storage cabinet rising about five feet high. There were still a few stacks of papers and books in it.

A few feet beyond the far end of the billiards table was a table with an oil lamp on it, but actual lighting at night would be provided by the four large, upward-opening gas lamps suspended low over the table on a four-spoke brass chandelier. Beyond both the billiards table and writing table was a door opening out to one of the balconies; sunlight poured in through the fan light over that door, through the tall lights on either side of it, and through smaller square windows low to the floor.

There was no door on the wall to James’s left as he entered, but the tall, fan-light-topped windows there were of stained glass with its central design showing crossed pool cues, a smoldering cigar between the cues, and a foam-topped glass mug of beer above the center of the crossed cues.

“My family crest,” said Clemens, who had already lighted a fresh cigar and was pacing back and forth between the fireplace and the billiards table, a cue stick in his hand. “Shakespeare’s family crest boasted only a sort of sickly looking pen against what Ben Jonson called a mustardy background. Mine is better, I think.”

James noticed that the theme of crossed cue sticks was also repeated on the painted ceiling. In the far left corner, in front of one of the low, square windows, was a smaller table with the typewriter and what looked to be some lead typesetting slugs on it. Holmes was already there.

“May I put this machine on that table and try it out?” asked Holmes.

Clemens just flicked a fast glance to his left. “By all means.” He removed the cigar and stared at Howells and James. “Now, Mr. James, would you join me in a fast game of pocket billiards to decide who is the Anglo-American Literary Billiards Champion of the World?”

“Alas,” demurred James, “I do not play. Have never played. I would never risk vandalizing that perfect field of green baize by attempting to learn to play today.”

“No?” said Clemens, audibly disappointed. “Are you sure, sir? In all of its many versions, billiards is most amusing and satisfactory you see, and when I play badly and lose my temper it shall almost certainly amuse you. Unless, of course, you are one of those blue-light Methodist preacher sorts who find oaths, epithets, blasphemies, and inventive obscenities objectionable.”

James held his hand up, palm out, and seemed to underline his rejection by taking a step backward. He noticed the mismatched furniture in the room: a few more small tables, wicker chairs, rocking chairs, and a couple of what he thought of as Wild West Saloon Chairs. He chose one of the few upholstered chairs to his left and sat.

“Very well,” exhaled Clemens with a cloud of smoke. “Howells, old foe, dear friend, fine foil, it is just you and me . . . again.”

Howells went around to choose a cue stick from where they were propped against the wall to the left of the fireplace.

“Please observe,” said Sherlock Holmes, “that the blank, white card I am placing in the typewriter is identical in size, texture, and cotton content to the one received by Henry Adams, the Hays, and Clarence King every December on the anniversary of Clover Adams’s death. Ned Hooper also received one each year before his untimely death this last December.”

“How do you know it’s the same cotton content and all that?” asked Clemens.

“I took the liberty of analyzing the card under my microscope and with some portable chemical apparatus I’d brought to Washington with me,” said the detective.

Holmes centered the card and typed a few words. For a moment, everyone gathered behind him.

She was murdered.

The detective had set out six of the cards received by the Hays and one on loan from Clarence King and now he set the new card flush below each of the old ones.

“You see,” said Holmes, “this chip in the ‘a’, this tendency in each card for the ‘r’ to be above the bottom alignment, the shape and increasing murkiness within the closed loop of the ‘d’, and the common opacity within the angles of the ‘w’.”

No one said anything. Now that his attention had been brought to the small imperfections, James could see them as a product of this machine. He also noticed that each small problem was more distinct on the card Holmes had just typed.

Holmes seemed to read his mind. “Use has somewhat exaggerated these nicks and alignment problems,” said the detective. “Since the original seven cards we have here look exactly the same, I would deduce that they were all typed at the same time, necessarily at least seven years ago since the Hays, King, and presumably Mr. Adams all received their first card on six December eighteen eighty-six.”

Clemens thrust out his fists, wrists close together as if awaiting hand manacles. “I confess. I will go peacefully.”

Holmes twitched an impatient shadow of a smile. “I presume, Mr. Clemens, that it would not have been difficult, say during the daytime, for one of your house guests to come into your billiards room and spend a few minutes typing a few dozen cards?”

“Certainly it’s possible,” said Clemens, putting the cigar between his teeth and striding back to the billiards table. “Even at night, no one save for me would have noticed the sound of typing and been curious.”

James cleared his throat. “You had no need for your typewriting machine while you have been in England and Europe the last few years?” he asked.

“Obviously not,” said Clemens, leaning forward over the edge of the table and positioning his cue in that odd but graceful sprawl of arms and elbows. “The last few years in Europe, I have written longhand once again and—in the few instances I wanted a typed version of any of my manuscripts—I hired a stenographer who provided the machine along with his or her note-taking skills.”

“Could I impose upon you, Mr. Clemens,” said Holmes, “to provide me with the names and last-known addresses of all the servants who worked for you here in eighteen eighty-six?”

“The list will be somewhere here in the house,” grumbled Clemens. “I shall find it for you before we leave today. May we resume our game now?”

“By all means,” said Holmes.

Clemens smashed the white ball into a random cluster of waiting balls. Three of those he’d struck with his ball or which had been struck in ricochet went into three of the pockets. Clemens straightened up and put chalk on the end of his cue as Howells frowned and leaned over the table.

“In billiards, that’s called nigger luck,” said Clemens.

“Did you keep a guest book from eighteen eighty-five until you began your travels?” asked Holmes.

“Yes,” said Clemens. “I don’t believe we packed them away and John and Alice Day keep their own guest book. There’s a drawer in that table at which you’re sitting, Mr. Holmes—yes, just lift up that tablecloth a bit . . .”

Holmes removed four leather-bound 8 x 12 journals or ledgers.

“May I . . .” began the detective.

Clemens nodded.

Howells struck the white ball and it caromed off two other balls and two of the side cushions before being the only ball to go in a pocket. “Heck and spit and damnation,” muttered the former editor.

“I’ll rack them up properly and we’ll start again,” Clemens said to Howells. “I don’t know why I’ve come to enjoy pocket billiards more than the carom billiards that stole so much of my youthful time, energy, and fortune. Most of the tables in England and Europe don’t even have pockets.”

While Clemens retrieved the white ball and shoved the others toward the point on the table where a wooden triangle waited, Holmes said, “Mr. Clemens, you and your family had many hundreds of visitors . . . per year it looks like.”

“Yes, well . . . .” said Clemens and just trailed off in whatever he was going to say. “I have nothing to hide, Mr. Holmes. I am serene in knowing that I have stealthily excised the pages on which Madame Lafarge and Her Writhing Pack of Belly-Dancing Virgins have written their names and left their comments on the visit.”

Holmes looked up from the four books filled with their hundreds of scrawls. “Perhaps, if it might be possible . . .”

“Yes, yes,” said Clemens. “Those four guest books cover eighteen eighty-five until we all sailed in June of eighteen ninety-one. All the names of all our overnight guests are there. Take the books with you, but make sure that Hay returns them to me in pristine condition. For I am certain, you see, that someday my biographers will have much need to refer to those guest books after they’re done with the immediate task of blotting the spot where I leave off.”

“Thank you,” muttered Holmes, “but I won’t need to borrow the guest books. Merely memorize the December ’eighty-five pages and all of the eighteen eighty-six.” Holmes began flipping through the pages of names and comments, running his finger down each page.

“You can memorize those hundreds of signatures and comments merely by looking at them once?” asked Clemens. His tone sounded dubious to James’s ear.

Holmes’s finger paused and he looked up at the others. “Unfortunately, my memory has been like this since I was a small boy. If I see something, I can call it back at any time. It is more of a curse than gift.”

“But it must be wonderfully handy in your line of work,” said Howells.

“At times, quite so,” said Holmes. “But it took me years to learn how to deliberately forget things which were of no use to me.”

“Remind me never to play poker with you, Mr. Holmes,” said Sam Clemens.

But Holmes had immersed himself in the 1886 guest book again, his finger rapidly sliding down page after page.

Clemens shrugged and gestured toward Howells, who leaned forward, got the white ball in his sights, and rocketed it into the triangle of clustered spheres. Balls rolled and caromed everywhere. One went in. Howells continued—sinking a second, then third before failing to get any in a hole on his fourth attempt.

“I presume we are playing eight ball, Sam,” Howells said.

“Ah hah!” said Clemens, flicking ash into a waiting bowl. “Assumptions are dangerous, Howells! In truth we’re shooting straight pool—fifteen points wins.”

“What can you tell me about billiards technique based on what I have seen so far?” asked Henry James as Clemens lined up his next shot.

“Well,” said Clemens, “from observing both Howells and me, you can see that if your ball glides along in the intense and immediate vicinity of the object ball, and a score seems exquisitely imminent, you must lift one leg; then one shoulder; then squirm your body around in sympathy with the direction of the moving ball; and at the instant when the ball seems on the point of colliding, you must throw up both your arms violently. Your cue will probably break a chandelier and then catch fire from the exposed gas jet, as Howells has demonstrated here in this very room so many times, but no matter; you have done what you could to help the final score.”

The game proceeded, Clemens evidently winning, when suddenly Holmes finished scanning the thick guest book, slammed it shut, and said, “You had Rebecca Lorne and her cousin as guests in February of ’eighty-six!”

“Lorne? Lorne?” said Clemens, his head snapping up with its lion’s mane of white hair. “Oh, yes, I remember the woman and her shy cousin . . . what was his name? Carlton? No . . . Clifton. ‘Clif’ with one ‘f’ as Miss Lorne called him. I couldn’t have told you that it was in February of ’eighty-six, not so soon after Clover Adams’s suicide.”

“How did you know them?” asked Holmes.

“Oh, I’d met Miss Lorne the previous summer . . . no, early autumn, just after Congress had convened . . . while I was staying with Hay and Adams for a few days as I lobbied before a congressional committee for my copyrights. She was spending quite a bit of time with Mrs. Adams . . . with Clover . . . as I recall. Henry Adams was beside himself with worry about Clover’s unhappiness . . . it’s why I shifted my visit from his home to Hay’s . . . and it seemed as if Rebecca Lorne was the only friend who visited her on a regular basis during that dark time.”

“But how did she and her cousin Clifton end up spending a night with you here in Hartford two months after Clover’s death?” asked Holmes. “Had you struck up a separate friendship or habit of correspondence with Miss Lorne and her cousin?”

“Heavens no!” said Clemens. “As I remember, the two simply dropped by one Sunday to pay their respects. A Sunday in the middle of the month as I recall.”

“The fourteenth of February,” said Holmes, whose gray-eyed stare was so intense that it might have frightened Clemens if the humorist-writer hadn’t been staring into space as he tried to remember Rebecca Lorne and her visit.

“That’s right,” said Clemens. “But you must remember, Detective, that this was more than seven years ago. Miss Lorne and her cousin Clifton stopped by to pay their respects since they, or at least Rebecca Lorne, were aware that I’d known Clover Adams for years and they ended up having to spend the night because of a terrible snowstorm that swept in that afternoon. I remember that Livy insisted they stay with us rather than try to get to the train station. I believe they were going to Boston at the time . . . not just visiting, as I recall, but in the process of moving there from Washington.”

Clemens leaned on his cue stick, getting blue rosin on his cuff, and fixed Holmes with a stare almost as intense as the gaze the detective had shown only a moment earlier. “Why this interest in Miss Lorne, Mr. Holmes? Is she a . . . suspect . . . in this investigation of yours?”

“She is an unknown factor, Mr. Clemens,” said Holmes, not shrinking from the writer’s formidable gaze. “Mrs. Adams . . . Clover . . . had known Rebecca Lorne for only a year, yet they seemed the most intimate of friends in the weeks and months before Mrs. Adams’s apparent suicide.”

“Apparent suicide?” barked Clemens. “How could it be anything but suicide, Mr. Holmes? Henry Adams himself found her body, still warm after drinking the cyanide from her photographic developing potions.”

“With Miss Rebecca Lorne waiting outside the house,” said Holmes. “Miss Lorne may have been the last person to see Clover Adams alive.”

“You are misinformed, Mr. Holmes,” barked Clemens, his face growing dark above the white mustache. “I have it from Henry Adams himself that he encountered Miss Lorne waiting outside their house at sixteen-oh-seven H Street because she had come to visit Clover but had been waiting to go up because no one answered the bell.”

Holmes nodded. “You have it from Henry Adams himself that the woman who called herself Rebecca Lorne said that she had been waiting outside when no one answered the bell. But there remains the possibility that Miss Lorne had visited Clover Adams during the few minutes that Henry Adams was gone and was coming out of the home at sixteen-oh-seven H Street rather than waiting outside it.”

“Preposterous,” cried Clemens.

“Possibly,” said Holmes.

“And what do you mean by saying ‘the woman who called herself Rebecca Lorne’, sir? Who else might she be?”

“Indeed,” said Holmes.

James had been watching this exchange with the utmost interest and now he looked to Holmes to give his theory about Lorne being the woman Holmes had known as Irene Adler.

Instead, Holmes asked the humorist, “During Miss Lorne’s brief visit here in Hartford or during your earlier encounters with her in Washington, did she give you the sense of having ever been familiar with theatrical life?”

“Theatrical life,” repeated Clemens, lighting a new cigar. “I don’t know what you . . . wait. Wait. Now that you mention it, I remember telling Livy after their visit—‘This woman has been on the stage’. Yes, by God, I remember now.”

“Did she say as much?” asked Holmes.

“No, no, not in the least,” laughed Clemens. “But once when her cousin Clifton took the wrong chair at dinner—next to her, not what couples or guests do at another’s table—she’d said, ‘You’ve missed your mark.’ And another time, we were playing billiards that evening—Mrs. Lorne, or whoever she might be, was deucedly good at the game—turned to her cousin as he was ready to take a shot and she said, ‘Break a leg’. Now, as far as I know, those terms are little known outside the theater.”

“Do you actually think that Rebecca Lorne might have been upstairs with Clover Adams when she . . . when the poison was taken?” asked William Dean Howells, the billiards cue still in his hand. It had been so long since Howells had said anything that all heads turned toward him.

“It’s possible,” said Holmes. “It is more likely that the woman taking the name Rebecca Lorne had been posted outside to make noise should Henry Adams return early . . . which he did.”

James blinked. He’d not heard this part of Holmes’s surmising before and it made a terrible dark sense.

“Make noise . . .” said Clemens, clearly not seeing the implications.

“So that the man she called her cousin Clifton would not be interrupted in whatever he was doing upstairs with Clover,” said Holmes.

“But Adams went straight upstairs,” said Howells, his face white with horror. “He saw only Clover’s body on the floor.”

“Even though the Adamses’ old house was much smaller than Henry Adams’s current home, it also had a rear servants’ staircase,” said Holmes. “I inquired.”

Sam Clemens exhaled blue smoke. “So he could have come quietly down that rear stairs while poor Adams went up the main stairs,” he rasped. “And out the back door, no doubt.” Clemens turned to Holmes. “Do you know the true identity of this ‘cousin Clifton’?”

“I do,” Holmes said softly and with not the least tone of triumph or superiority. “There was no record of Clifton Richards in Washington or Boston save for the six months previous to Clover’s death, when this ‘Clifton’ worked in the photographic supplies department in the Department of State. It was he who provided the new developing solution—with the cyanide—to Clover Adams. He resigned—and disappeared—in January of ’eighty-six, just a few weeks after Mrs. Adams’s death. His true identity—absolutely confirmed by me only yesterday—is that of Lucan Adler, an international anarchist and deadly assassin.”

“My God!” cried Clemens, sending the billiards cue crashing onto the green baize table. “Livy and I hosted a murderess and murderer. We could have been poisoned at our own table. Stabbed in the night. Smothered to death in our own bed!”

Holmes smiled thinly. “Possible, but not probable. It was not you they were after but, rather, Clover Adams. They closed their circle around her for months.”

“But why?” asked Clemens. “Clover offended some members of the Washington establishment, but certainly no one disliked her to the point of wanting to kill her.”

“That is what I am looking into,” said Holmes. “At this moment, I fear that a former actress and adventuress named Irene Adler and her son Lucan Adler arranged Mrs. Adams’s death primarily in order to bring me to the States.”

The other three men could only stare at the detective. Finally James said, “Bring you here to America in December of ’eighty-five or the winter of ’eighty-six, you mean?”

“No,” said Holmes. “To bring me here after Ned Hooper brought me the evidence of the She-was-murdered cards. To bring me here now.”

For a moment no one said anything. Then Clemens took Howells’s cue, set it against the wall with his own, and said, “Come with me please, gentlemen.”

James had assumed that Clemens was going to show them out of the house—the brougham and driver were still waiting in the driveway—but instead their host led them out onto a covered second-story porch. It was a wide porch with a wonderful view, and seven rocking chairs waited there in the shade.

“Please be seated, gentlemen,” said Clemens. “You may choose any rocker save for this one.” He had his hands on the back of a mustard-yellow rocker with well-dented cushions. “And God bless John and Alice Day for keeping everything here where it should be.”

When they were all seated, Howells and James lit cigarettes. Holmes worked to get his pipe drawing properly. Clemens found yet another cigar in a pocket, bit off the end, spit the shred over the railing, and lit the cigar with a satisfied grunt. James had smoked cigars but he did not pretend to be an aficionado of the many brands. He only knew from the smoke that Clemens’s cigar was a cheap cigar.

Clemens caught his gaze. “I used to smoke cigarettes as you do, Mr. James. But Olivia told me that it was a dirty habit and certainly no benefit to my health. So, on the principle that the only way to break one bad habit was by replacing it with an even worse habit, I began smoking cigars.”

Howells guffawed at this, although he must have heard it many times before.

“But I do follow Livy’s admonitions to moderation, Mr. James,” continued Clemens. “I rarely smoke more than one cigar at a time.”

“Have you ever tried to break the habit, Mr. Clemens?” asked Holmes.

James immediately thought of Holmes’s syringe and his addiction to whatever he was daily injecting into himself. Holmes also smoked constantly, varying between cigarettes and his pipes. Was Holmes really curious about whether Twain had found a way to break his addiction to tobacco?

“Oh, of course,” laughed Clemens. “It’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done it hundreds of times.”

James saw Howells smile and Holmes nod recognition of the tiny clench. They were, James knew, bits and pieces of prepared and rehearsed lines that had flowed from the podium and over footlights many times, but James was not offended by being turned into yet another audience. Clemens seemed to require an audience at all times.

But for several moments Clemens fell silent and no one else spoke. The only sound was the unsynchronized creaking of their four rocking chairs and ambient bird sounds and leaves stirring in the wind. James wondered if the great elms and chestnut trees and maples might be further along in their stately process of leafing out than usual for the end of March. The smaller dogwoods were in their glory. Henry James remembered winter surrendering its sovereignty in Cambridge with frigid and snowy rearguard actions deep into April in some late springs, including the year a decade ago when his parents died and he had stayed behind to sort out insurance and moneys owed and moneys promised. He remembered how he and Alice James—the other Alice James, William’s wife—had begged William by letter not to return home from his sabbatical in England. His presence would have only made the confusion—of money going to Wilkie and others, of Henry forsaking his own share of their father’s modest fortune by signing it over to their sister Alice, of Aunt Kate’s and sister Alice’s part in all this—hopeless. William had stayed in England and Europe, but not without threatening a hundred times that he would board the next ship U.S.-bound.

That had been a sad but deeply satisfying few months for Henry James. For once he was undoubtedly and indisputably in charge of the family—its finances, its security, its future with both parents now gone—and he had liked the feeling. He had liked being free and separate from the shadow of the all-powerful older brother William.

The wind rustled leaves again and James enjoyed the view from this high porch. He could see the white gazebo, needing paint now, where Clemens had spent starry nights talking with Harriet Beecher Stowe. Or so he had said. James had read that the old lady, in her 80’s, was almost an invalid now. And no longer interested in life or ideas since her husband had died.

James remembered reading the novel—Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly—only a year or two after it had been published in 1852. Henry James, Jr., was only 10 years old but he had instantly seen the crude melodrama of the novel as the propaganda broadside it was meant to be, filled with stereotypes and unartistic exaggerations: not drawn from life. But he had also sensed the flame of fury and indignation that had driven the author and—even then at 10 years of age—Henry James had known for a certainty that he would never write anything or paint anything or create anything from any similar boundless passion. His work, he knew even before he had known what direction his work in life might take him, would all be minded—carefully thought out and planned, deliberate, well-chewed.

Samuel Clemens turned his rocker so that he could look directly at James and said, “I had dinner in Florence with your brother just a few months ago.”

“Indeed?” James said politely, his heart sinking. Of course William had written to him about the encounter. Of course William had thought it significant, primarily due to sharing his wisdom with this rustic who had so presumptuously dismissed his younger brother Harry’s book The Bostonians. But in the end, James remembered, after many Italian courses and several bottles of wine, William had come away deeply impressed with this Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens dual personality.

“We talked until very late—until the waiters were making noise with brooms and coughing discreetly to let us know it was far past the Florentine restaurant’s closing time,” said Clemens. “And for the last two hours, I did little more than listen to your brother.”

I am sure that is the case, thought Henry James. Thus it is with me, his wife, and most of his interlocutors.

“I was in something like awe,” said Clemens. He turned toward the other two men in their rockers. “You both know of Mr. William James’s amazing book Principles of Psychology?”

Holmes merely nodded but Howells said in mock anger, “Know of it? Sam, I not only penned one of the earliest positive reviews of the book but I was the first to recommend it to you. I purchased a second copy of it myself and mailed it to you with an admonition to read it despite your aversion to ‘dry’ books, if I recall correctly. And I do . . . recall correctly.”

“It’s an amazing book,” continued Clemens as if Howells had not spoken. “But in our conversation in Florence, William James elaborated even further than his seminal book does on the definitions of—and differences between—‘I’ and ‘me’.”

Oh, my, thought James, trying to calm his thoughts by looking out toward the distant gazebo once again.

“Mr. Holmes,” cried Clemens, leaning toward the thin man in his black suit and long black scarf despite the warmth of the day. “Do you enjoy being a detective?”

“It is what I do,” said Holmes after the briefest of pauses.

Clemens nodded as if the answer satisfied him deeply. “The published stories of your adventures are becoming very popular both here and, as I understand it, in England.”

Holmes said nothing to this.

“Are you satisfied with the way Dr. Watson and Mr. Doyle present your adventures?” pressed Clemens.

“I’ve never had the pleasure of making Mr. Doyle’s acquaintance,” Holmes said softly. “As for Watson’s writing—many is the time I’ve told him that his little romances based on my cases mistakenly emphasize drama, and sometimes, I admit, melodrama, rather than the cold, sure science of deduction that he could have shared with interested and intelligent readers.”

Holmes leaned forward on his walking cane. “Furthermore,” he said, “both Watson and his editor and agent, Mr. Doyle, have a deep fear of mentioning any well-known public names—or even private ones, or even the accurate place or time—in the published tales. More often than not it leads to a great confusion in the tales themselves. The published versions hardly ever match the original notes in my case files.”

“But you enjoy being a detective?” Clemens asked again.

“It is what I do,” repeated Holmes.

Clemens laughed and slapped his knee. “By God, I am going to write a book called Tom Sawyer, Detective. Between my beloved literary character and your profession, sir, we shall sell a million copies.”

Holmes said nothing to this.

“Enjoy your pipe and cigarettes, gentlemen,” cried Clemens. “For I am now going to explain Mr. William James’s brilliant definitions of the quite different ‘I’ and ‘me’ in all of us and should show Mr. Holmes why he might be correct in thinking that he does not exist!”

CHAPTER 25

Our friend Henry James’s brother William sees the ‘I’ in each of us as the active agent, the first-person doer, as it were—that part of our consciousness or being which sets our goals and initiates our actions in quest of those goals, whether the goals be getting closer to a pretty girl or being seen as the best writer of our generation,” said Clemens between deep draws on his cigar. “Does anyone here disagree with such a definition?”

No one spoke for a moment and James returned his attention to the sound of the breeze in the nearby trees. Then Holmes said, “This seems somewhat self-evident, perhaps to the point of being obvious.”

“Quite so!” cried Clemens. “Then perhaps you will also agree with Mr. William James’s definition of ‘Me’ as being the third-person object of self-reflection . . . reflecting on one’s own traits, as in ‘Am I a friendly person?’ or pondering our own beliefs, as in ‘Do I really believe in an all-powerful God?’ or ‘Do I really like chocolate?’ as well as querying our states . . . ‘Am I angry that Clemens is wasting my time like this?’ and so on.”

“What does this have to do with the question of whether Mr. Holmes exists or not?” asked Howells.

Clemens put a hand on his old friend’s knee. “Be patient, Howells. Be patient.” Clemens removed his hand and clasped both hands over his stomach while he began to rock again. Then he removed the cigar and flicked ash on the wooden floor of the porch. “Our friend Henry James’s brother William explained to me that these two parts of each of us, the self as known—the ‘Me’—and the self-as-knower—the ‘I’—are in constant interplay, sometimes actively competing with one another.”

“How can this be?” asked Holmes. “A man’s deepest self, his soul as it were, cannot be divided against itself.”

“Can it not be?” said Clemens. “Are we not, each of us in our deepest selves, divided against ourselves? The ‘Me’ asks ‘Am I not a kind man?’ and hopes it to be so, even while our ‘I’ commits selfish or thoughtless actions which hurt our spouses, our children, our closest friends. Have you not encountered, Mr. Holmes, rogues who committed the worst of actions—murder even—yet insist they are good people, decent people, and that their heinous crimes were mere temporary aberrations, done, as it were, against their will?”

“I have,” said Holmes after a moment. “But I fail to see how this has anything to do with the question of whether I am real or a fictional construct, existing only within the confines of some author’s imagination.”

Clemens nodded and flicked ash. “Our little bark is heavily loaded, but we trust that it will reach shore by and by, Mr. Holmes. The ‘I’ in us acts; the ‘Me’ in us weighs those actions as we reassure ourselves that we are really fine fellows after all. And since the ‘Me’ becomes what your brother called our ‘empirical selves’—the ones people see and know—it becomes the one the world knows.” He exhaled a small cloud of smoke and pulled a folded slip of paper from his vest pocket.

No one spoke as Clemens unfolded the page and held it at arm’s length to read. “As your brother writes, Mr. James—‘I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well-dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher, a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a ‘tone-poet’ and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire’s work would run counter to the saint’s; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike, possibly to a man. To make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All the other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real. Its failures are real failures, its triumphs are real triumphs, carrying shame and gladness with them.’ ”

There was a long silence—common to groups who have just had a long passage read to them—and then Howells said plaintively, “Sam, how on earth did you just happen to have that page at hand to read?”

Clemens grinned. He looked at Henry James. “I tore it out of this man’s brother’s book, Principles of Psychology, in my library not ten minutes ago.”

“For shame,” said Howells.

“It is better to break the spine of a man than of a book,” murmured James.

“Oh, its spine is intact,” said Clemens. “But I confess to the crime of ripping a page out of the guts of William’s beautiful book. Page . . . ah . . .” He peered at both sides of the page. “Pages three hundred and nine and three hundred ten.”

“Unforgivable,” said Howells.

“I shall do my best to repair it,” said Clemens. “I am, you know, in the book-binding business myself.” He turned to Sherlock Holmes. “Did that passage not reassure you that even though you are a fictional character, your failures would be your own, your triumphs would be your own?”

“It did not,” said Holmes. “If I am some hack author’s pawn, then neither my triumphs nor failures can I call my own.”

Clemens sighed.

Howells said, “That’s all very well for this theoretical ‘Me’ that is, at any given moment, the sum of all behaviors, decisions, and possessions. But what about the ‘I.’ Where is it all this time?”

When no one spoke, James cleared his throat and said, “The ‘I’ knows all past thoughts and appropriates them—but outside of time, as it were—since the ‘I’ itself is a thought from moment to moment, each different from that of the last moment, but appropriative of the latter, together with all that the latter called its own.”

The other three men were staring at James as if he’d broken wind. Howells ground out his cigarette underfoot. Holmes was holding his pipe in his lap.

“You see,” continued James, knowing that he should say no more, “William’s logic is that since the stream of thought in each of us is constantly changing, there is no reason to suppose some fixed entity beyond the stream itself. No soul. No central spirit. No ego, as such. Rather, there are pulses of consciousness—thoughts which are unified in and of themselves—involving among other things the immediate awareness of the body. And William thinks that these thoughts . . . as sovereign ‘I’s . . . can remember and appropriate prior thoughts to the stream. But the ‘I’ is always in motion, always in flux—part of a greater stream of consciousness, one might say.”

Sam Clemens tossed his stub of a cigar over the porch railing. “Yep. That’s pretty much what Mr. William James and I thrashed out in Florence—at least by the time the espresso had come.”

“You explored all this with my loquacious brother over the course of a mere dinner?” asked James.

“Never in your life!” cried Clemens. “It was over a long Italian dinner, then brandy and coffee, and dessert and cheese, and then more brandy and then the espresso. The World was created in less time. Or at least its peninsulas and fjords were.”

“But you are speaking of identity, Sam, not of reality of existence,” said Howells.

“Are they not the same thing?” asked Clemens. “My little dog knows me, therefore I am myself. Identity, good sirs!”

“My little dog knows me, therefore I am?” James asked drily. “This was the depth and breadth of my brother’s philosophy?”

“Not quite,” said Clemens. “Your brother William explained to me that in its widest sense, a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he can call his: not only his body and its ailments and his psychic powers, such as they are, but also his clothes and his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his competitors and sworn enemies, his reputation and works, his lands and horses and yacht and bank account.”

“I have no yacht,” Howells said softly. “Non navigare, ideo non esse.”

James and Holmes both surprised themselves by laughing. Howells did not sail, therefore he was not.

“Ego navigare, ergo sum,” said Holmes. “Except that I don’t. Sail, that is.”

Now even Sam Clemens joined in the laughter.

Suddenly Howells cried “Look!” and pointed.

A deer bolted across the shade-dappled lawn behind Harriet Beecher Stowe’s home. It disappeared into shrubs to the north, and the men on the porch remained quiet. James was wondering whether he should suggest that they go; he and Holmes had a long train ride ahead of them.

Clemens spoke and his voice had a strange, strained, changed, distant tone to it. “Just before I sailed from Genoa last week,” he said softly, no longer rocking, “my daughter Susy celebrated her twenty-first birthday. It bothered me for some reason—in more ways than having a father’s daughter grow up and thus never again be his little girl, which is bothersome enough, God knows.

“My own birthday was last November—I turned fifty-seven years old—and I remember thinking, I think it to this day, that I wished it were seventeen or ninety-seven, any age but fifty-seven.”

When no one else said anything, James found himself thinking of his own fiftieth birthday—less than two weeks away now—and how he had long vowed that he would be recognized as Master in his field by the time he was fifty. Instead, he could barely get a new short story published. He was attempting to start over as a writer—at age fifty!—to make his fortune in writing for the stage. His enthusiasm for that self-transformation had waned a little more each day since he had left Paris and steamed to America.

He knew that Howells was 56 years old. Clemens, as he complained, was soon to turn 58 years old. Holmes was the relative youngster in the group, only 39.

“People wonder why I’ve traveled back to the United States so much—and why I shall continue to do so, no matter how long our European exile lasts,” Clemens was saying, “so when they ask, ‘Why do you go so much, Mr. Twain?’ I say to them . . . ‘Well, I go partly for my health, partly to familiarize myself with the road.’ But mostly I go, gentlemen, primarily to convince the ‘Me’ in me that I truly exist, that there is something more to Mr. Samuel Clemens than his clothes and his wife and his children . . .”

All four of them had ceased rocking now and three of the men were looking at the white-haired humorist.

“You see, I dreamed that I was born and grew up and was a pilot on the Mississippi, gentlemen,” said Clemens, his voice little more than a whisper. “I dreamed that I was a miner and journalist in Nevada and a pilgrim in the good ship Quaker City and wrote a very popular book about those travels abroad and that I had a wife and children, yes, and went with them to live in a villa just outside of Florence . . . and this dream goes on and on and on, and sometimes it seems so real that I almost believe it is real. But there is no way to tell . . . no way to tell, Mr. Holmes, Mr. James, my dear Howells . . . for if one applied tests, then they would be part of the dream, too, and so would simply aid in the deceit. I wish I knew . . . I wish I knew . . .” Clemens looked down and, for a terrible moment, James thought he might be weeping.

“Knew what, Sam?” asked Howells.

Clemens looked up at them and his eyes were dry. Distant, with a tired and haunted look, but dry. “I wish I knew whether it all was a dream or real,” he said.

“Livy is real,” said Howells. “You have that indisputable point of reality to cling to when the black dog and blue devils try to pull you down.”

“Livy . . . Olivia,” said Clemens and nodded. “I wrote, not long ago, about Adam and Eve . . . about how Adam had no name for this new creature taken from his rib and how he became bewildered by all these new events over which he had no control. He resented her, you see. She was an intrusion on the placid perfection of his life alone in the Garden.

“But after years passed, I had Adam change his mind. ‘I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning,’ he says. ‘For it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.’ ”

James thought that Clemens was finished with his long digression, but the humorist cleared his throat and said, “When Eve finally dies, after centuries with Adam, I have Adam carve her headstone on wood and on that slab of wood he has carved—‘Where she was, there was Paradise’.”

Clemens looked around with an expression of embarrassment. “Well, we are discussing Mr. Holmes’s reality and identity, gentlemen. Mr. Holmes . . .”

He looked directly at the detective.

“Mr. Holmes, you will have an identity as long as there are deerstalker caps and magnifying glasses in the world.” Clemens pantomimed holding the handle of a magnifying glass.

Howells chuckled.

“Oh, dear God,” moaned Holmes. He folded his hands into fists and set his fists on his knees.

“The artist for The Strand, the artist who draws versions of me,” said Holmes, “is named Sidney Paget. I have never had the dubious pleasure of making his acquaintance and he, in turn, has never set eyes on me. I have never allowed my photograph or a photogravure to appear in any newspaper, no matter how major the crime might have been or how clever the apprehension of the criminals. Paget has only the vaguest idea, through Watson’s stories, of what I look like or how I dress.

“Since The Strand had originally intended Sidney’s older brother Walter to be the illustrator of the stories, perhaps Walter Paget’s only consolation is that his younger brother uses him as his model for me. That is, for the detective Sherlock Holmes as illustrated in The Strand.”

Holmes struck his walking stick hard against the wooden floor of the balcony. “I do own a soft, two-flapped cap like that but hardly wear it constantly as the Paget illustrations would have it. And yes, I do, upon occasion, travel in a wool, caped traveling overcoat, but so do thousands of other English gentlemen when leaving the city. And here is the magnifying glass I use to examine dust, ash, particles, fibers, and other minute clues . . .” Holmes reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out a tiny magnifying lens with no handle; it was black rimmed and thick, the sort of glass one would use to magnify tiny details on a large map.

Clemens and Howells were laughing at Holmes’s outburst, and James could not help it, he also chuckled.

“Well,” said Clemens as Holmes sat silent, leaning on his stick, “I only wish I had a trademark like your deerstalker hat, caped coat, and magnifying glass, Mr. Holmes. God knows I do love being known and recognized. Providence and Presbyterians please forgive me, I live for recognition and for my own insignificant little bit of fame. Life is short enough, is my belief, without passing through it unnoticed by the multitudes. If you hadn’t become known for your deerstalker cap, Mr. Holmes, perhaps I would be wearing one myself. I do so enjoy standing out in a crowd.”

“Go about a German or American city in a deerstalker,” said Howells, “and you will stand out in an asylum.”

James chuckled again. Sherlock Holmes said, “Wear white.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Clemens. He was preparing a new cigar.

“Wear a white suit . . . but with your regular black shoes,” said Holmes.

“I wear white suits from time to time every summer,” said Clemens, puffing the cigar to a glow. “A lovely, comfortable white-linen suit. And, yes, with my regular black shoes, which is a mortal sin and unspeakable faux pas at Newport and at several clubs to which I have been invited. But, alas, I am only one white suit amidst thousands as the temperatures soar and the season of white suits rolls round.”

“Wear them in the winter,” said Holmes. “Year-round.”

“Year-round?” repeated Clemens, looking to Howells who only smiled and shrugged. “They will put me in an asylum if I start doing that.”

“With your notoriety . . . fame I should say . . .” said Holmes, “and with your mane of white hair, it will be seen as an attractive eccentricity, a whim of a great and amusing man. You will stand out in every crowd, at least from September to May. The white suit shall become, one could say, your signature in society. Behold, Mark Twain cometh.”

Clemens laughed along with the rest of them, but there was a calculating look in his eye.

Henry James, allowing himself to get into the mood of the moment—which was very rare for him—said, “If anyone asks why you wear white linen suits all winter, Mr. Clemens, tell them that cleanliness is paramount for you and that you have become aware that men’s black suits merely hide the dirt and soot. How many weeks or months—or years—go between cleanings of those dark suits? No, sir . . . you will not be part of that suspiciously dark crowd. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, you can say, and Mark Twain is next to his white linen suit.”

This time Clemens threw his head back and roared with the others.

Howells stayed in Hartford with Clemens as the humorist made his afternoon round of visits and had dinner with old Connecticut friends who might just have money to invest or loan. James and Holmes took the afternoon train back to New York where they would catch the evening train to Washington.

“Henry Adams will be home in a very few days,” said James after they had made the connection in New York. “I’m a trifle curious how you will present yourself to him . . . the intrepid Norwegian explorer Jan Sigerson or the consulting London detective Sherlock Holmes. Of course, you and John Hay have three or four days to decide the better course.”

Holmes was reading a small guide to Chicago that he had picked up at a Grand Central Station kiosk, but now he looked up at James sitting across from him. “I’m afraid Hay and I have no more time to discuss such things. Mr. Adams is returning today—almost certainly before you and I arrive at Mr. Hay’s home.”

James blinked rapidly. “But John Hay said . . . the servants said . . . everyone said.” He calmed himself and leaned on his stick. “Are you sure of this, Mr. Holmes?”

“I am, Mr. James.”

“So will you be introduced to Adams as Sherlock Holmes or as Mr. Sigerson?” asked James.

“With luck, by tomorrow morning we’ll have shifted quarters to those nearby rooms to let about which Mr. Hay talked to you. You are certain they will be satisfactory?”

“They were in ’eighty-three when I was here last and Clover Adams arranged for me to stay there,” said James. “Light, clean rooms—and Hay says that we shall each have a corner bed-sitting-room of our own.”

Holmes nodded. “The privacy will help in my investigations.”

James looked out at the countryside passing by, the small white houses and red barns and newly plowed fields and small remaining bits of forest enriched by the warm light of the setting sun and the long shadows. When he turned back, he said, “I take it you would rather meet Henry Adams as yourself—as Holmes.”

“It would simplify much,” said Holmes and they rode in silence for half an hour or so.

“Mr. James,” said Holmes at last, “since we may not have the opportunity for a private conversation for some time to come, allow me to say Mr. Clemens’s reprise of your brother William’s theory of self—of ‘I’ and ‘Me’—was of the greatest interest to me.”

James nodded his appreciation and stifled a sigh. He’d been in his older brother’s shadow for fifty years now and, while he loved William dearly—part of James still wanted to follow William around and be in his presence constantly as he did when he was a small boy—he would, at age fifty, appreciate stepping into the sunshine of praise for his own work, his own achievements, his own life.

“I mention it,” continued Holmes, “because I see the same analysis of the polyphonicdialogic of multiple selves and most especially of the spiritual core, the ‘I’ caught up constantly in the flow of thoughts and events—what your brother so brilliantly labeled as ‘the stream of consciousness’—in your writing, sir. That is, in your stories and novels and characters. It is astounding to me that two brothers, usually separated by an ocean, could so masterfully come to the same impression and explanation of human consciousness—your brother from the scientific side and you, even more powerfully, from the literary.”

For the first time in years, Henry James found himself speechless. Finally he managed to say—“Thank you, sir. You have read my work?” He heard the odd tone in his own voice in that query.

“I’ve read and enjoyed your work for years,” said Sherlock Holmes. “For reasons that may be all too obvious, I found your The Princess Casamassima a wonderful examination of how the working classes in England and America turn to anarchy . . . and thus to terrorism.”

James again nodded modestly toward his interlocutor. The author had been inordinately fond of his The Princess Casamassima. For one thing, the novel was a far cry from Daisy Miller and his many stories about young American women encountering Europe, but the critical response to the book had been muted and mixed.

As if reading his mind again, Holmes said, “I happened to read one review in The Times that criticized the book—and you—for placing so much of the social interaction on Sundays.” Holmes shook his head and smiled. “That reviewer, and perhaps too many of our upper classes, simply don’t realize that for the foreign working class you were describing, Sunday afternoons are the only time they have for any sort of social activity.”

“Exactly,” said James, who had actually researched his novel about the foreign-born working classes more diligently than any other work he’d written. “Thank you for realizing that.”

“The prison so aptly described in your book was Millbank Prison,” said Holmes. “I saw you there—inside the prison—early on a December morning in eighteen eighty-four. You were being led by one of the surlier day wardens, he took you to the women’s wing probably conjecturing that it might seem less oppressive to a renowned author’s sensibilities, but the warden with a small lamp was so far ahead of you that you seemed alone, squeezing up the metal stairs from cell ward to cell ward with your shoulders brushing cold stone.”

“Yes!” cried James, amazed. “But I saw no other gentlemen during my visit. Not even Millbank’s warden with whom I had corresponded, through the kind offices of a friend in Whitehall, to receive permission for the visit. There was only that surly, as you say, and infinitely uncommunicative guard. Where were you, sir? In the process, perhaps, of delivering some fiend you and Dr. Watson had just caught?”

“I was a prisoner,” said Holmes. “I saw you through the tiny Judas hole in my cell’s door—the guards were often too lazy to close it—before you climbed the steps to the women’s ward.”

“A prisoner?” gasped James. He knew his features were aghast, reflecting the shock he felt.

“I was there for a little more than two months in disguise—if a prison uniform, welts from beatings, and severe malnutrition from the slop Millbank served out can be called a disguise—and my plan was to get close to another inmate whom I was sure was a killer of young women, but I admit, Mr. James, that it crossed my mind more than once that if something were to happen to both Inspector Lestrade and the warden, I might be in Millbank to this day.”

“Who was the killer?” asked James in a soft voice.

“An Oxford-educated barrister named Montague Druitt,” said Holmes, his eyes veiled as he seemed to be looking backward in time. “Druitt was also a schoolmaster with a record of occasional insanities and was found one Sunday outside the school where he taught. He was covered in blood. Inside the school was the dead and vivisected body of a certain Mary O’Brian, one of his students. Druitt was found guilty by a lower court but was in Millbank Prison only a few more days than I was. He had friends in high places, especially among the Inns of Court, and a second trial declared him innocent—they accepted his explanation that he had dropped by the school on a Sunday to pick up his books so that he could prepare his Monday lessons, found Miss O’Brian dead there, and, in his distress, held her body in his arms—thus explaining the copious amounts of blood on him.

“No knife was found on Mr. Druitt’s person or in the vicinity of the crime, so the courts let him go. He was a gentleman, you see,” said Holmes. “But I saw Miss O’Brian’s body before it was moved. She had been dismembered, sir. Her body had been eviscerated and was in pieces—each piece slashed and stabbed until she was turned almost inside out. Even the most compassionate gentleman would not have cradled that dissectionist’s work.”

“So you think he was guilty?” asked James.

“After he was released, I found the knife where he dropped it down a nearby sewer,” said Holmes. “It actually had his initials inscribed on it. And I was in the same terrible cell with him for seven weeks. He never fully confessed to the crime, Watson . . . I’m terribly sorry, Mr. James . . . but, in the privacy of that dark, dank cell along the Thames, Druitt smirked enough to me about no one ever solving the crime that, in my professional opinion, he all but bragged of committing it.”

“Surely Scotland Yard must have arrested him again after you showed them the knife and told them of his demeanor?” said James.

“Scotland Yard misses much, Mr. James—including this knife in their searches just after the crime. Including the family history of Druitt’s bouts of madness. But Scotland Yard does not want to advertise the things and criminals they miss.”

“That’s terrible,” said James, looking at Holmes in a new and strange light. “What happened to Mr. Montague Druitt?”

“After his release from Millbank, he returned to an ever more successful career as a barrister,” said Holmes. “When the so-called Jack the Ripper murders in the East End captured the press’s attention in ’eighty-eight, I joined Mr. Anderson of the CID in looking at many suspects. There were other murders of women through that period, but I was certain that the Ripper’s victims were only five—the poor ladies Chapman, Stride, Nichols, Eddowes, and a certain Mary Kelly, who had known Miss O’Brian who had been murdered in eighteen eighty-three. The man whom I became convinced was behind all the so-called Jack the Ripper murders was Mr. Montague Druitt.”

“But Jack the Ripper was never caught!” said James.

“No, but the body of Montague Druitt was fished out of the Thames on December thirty-first of eighteen eighty-eight,” said Holmes. “The police ruled it a suicide.”

“Was it . . . a suicide?” asked Henry James.

“No,” said Holmes. His gray eyes now looked so cold to James that he would have described them as inhuman, reptilian. But a reptile that was both satisfied and deeply sad.

Suddenly Henry James felt his body grow cold and a strange and unpleasant prickling flowed down his arms, the back of his neck, and along his spine.

Eventually James said, “I thank you again for your comments about my Princess Casamassima. It pleases me that someone as thorough with detail as yourself approves of its research.”

Holmes smiled. “You remember the location of the Hotel Glenham where we met Mr. Clemens last night for dinner?”

“Of course,” said James. “Nine ninety-five Broadway.”

“Well, Mr. James,” said Holmes. “Within ten blocks of that hotel were more than thirty beer halls, union halls, lecture halls, and even churches where anarchists meet every week. For your American anarchists are primarily socialists, you see, and your American socialists are primarily German . . . moderately recent German immigrants, to be precise.”

“I would never have guessed that, sir,” said Henry James. “Of course, many of the workers in my Princess Casamassima were German, but that was due to the prevailing feeling . . . the stereotype in England, as it were . . .”

“The German neighborhoods in the Lower East Side of New York are the nexus for ninety-eight percent of anarchist sentiment and activity in America,” continued Holmes, as if James had not even spoken. “I found it located primarily in the Tenth, Eleventh, and Seventeenth Wards. Germans refer to this part of New York as Kleindeutschland—‘Little Germany’, as I am sure I don’t have to translate for you. This area is bounded by Fourteenth Street on the north, Third Avenue and the Bowery on the west, Division Street on the south, and the East River on the east. It has been Kleindeutschland since the Civil War.”

“Certainly, sir,” protested James, “you are not saying that all German immigrants in New York are anarchists.”

Holmes was still smiling. “Of course not,” he said softly. “But I am saying that a surprisingly large number of your German immigrants have brought socialism with them from Europe, and at the core of the most fanatical socialism lie the embers and sparks of today’s anarchism and terror.”

“I find this hard to believe,” said James.

“Between eighteen sixty-one and eighteen seventy,” continued Holmes, “some zero-point-three percent of your immigrants were from Austria and Hungary, fewer than eight thousand people. Between eighteen eighty-one and eighteen ninety, more than six-point-seven percent of your immigrants are Germans or Austrians, almost seven percent of your total. Some eighty-two thousand people, most of whom chose to reside in the most crowded sections of New York or Brooklyn and not move west. And the ratio is rising dramatically. Demographers working in my brother Mycroft’s department at Whitehall predict—rather confidently, I feel—that a full sixteen percent of your immigrant population will be German by the year nineteen hundred, almost six hundred thousand German men and women and children, and by nineteen ten, lower-class Germans should be almost twenty-five percent of your total immigration, numbering more than two million.”

“But certainly there are German immigrants who are hard working, God-fearing . . . I mean, you mention only a few German beer halls . . .” stammered James.

“There are more than two hundred German beer halls associated with the anarchist movement in New York City right now, just in eighteen ninety-three,” said Holmes. “Many of these are what they call Lokalfrage—secure places—where they can speak freely or hold socialist meetings where they can openly discuss anarchist plans.”

Holmes leaned forward, his weight on his walking stick.

“And yes, your German immigrants are very hard working, Mr. James—I can tell you that by working alongside them under the most inhuman of conditions in factories in New York. But the majority of them resist learning the English language. And the literate among them—and literacy is high in the German community, as you doubtlessly know—have read and absorbed their European communist-anarchist philosophers such as Bakunin and recently have moved on to the more violent communist-anarchist leaders such as Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, and Élisée Reclus. Your German immigrants have brought with them not only their capacity for hard work six long days a week, but their hatred of the upper classes and their interest in anarchy and . . . for a minority, but still for too many of them . . . a willingness to turn to the bombings, uprisings, and the assassinations of all-out anarchy.”

Holmes patted his cane absently, as if his own recitation upset him.

“Socialists—and anarchists—also use these beer-house Lokalfrage as clubhouses for trade-union locals, singing societies, and German mutual-aid organizations. But the anarchists, including the most virulent kind, Mr. James, also meet there, store weapons there, make their plans for assassinations there. And we could have walked to a dozen of these Lokalfrage from the Glenham Hotel last night.”

James desperately needed to change the subject. Many of his characters in The Princess Casamassima had been German immigrant workers, but Henry James actually knew no such Germans, no industrial workers. The Germans he did know were teachers, professors, artists, and literary men in Germany itself. He said, “But the man you are seeking . . . this Lucan Adler . . . he is not German.”

“No,” said Holmes in a strange tone. “Lucan Adler is not German.”

Knowing he should stay silent and let this disturbing conversation die, he still spoke. “This search for the person behind Clover Adams’s death—the search for Lucan Adler, Mr. Sebastian Moran’s bastard son, is terribly personal to you, is it not, Mr. Holmes?”

Holmes stared at him with those cold gray eyes and nodded ever so slightly.

“It must be because of the wounds,” said James. “Those terrible gunshot wounds inflicted upon you by Lucan Adler.”

Incredibly, inexplicably, Sherlock Holmes smiled. He flung his long black scarf around his neck in the flamboyant manner James had become accustomed to, while cocking his head back, chin jutting strongly beneath that odd, almost lighthearted, smile.

“Not at all,” said Holmes. “The wounds are a price of my profession. But it’s true I seek out Lucan Adler for a deeper reason than an attempt to save untold public figures from the world’s most terrible anarchical assassin. You see, Mr. James, Sebastian Moran took the small child Lucan away from Irene Adler, claiming him and raising him as his bastard even though he never gave the boy his last name. He trained Lucan in every dark art of murder that he knew, and young Lucan, no older than twenty-one years of age, learned even more on his own, surpassing Moran as both a marksman and an assassin.”

Holmes looked directly into James’s eyes, the detective’s fathomless gaze meeting James’s frightened but deeply curious and unblinking gray gaze in return.

“Trust me that I have more reasons for finding Lucan Adler than I can share at this time,” said Holmes. “He needs to be put to death. But I hope to speak with him first.”