The Fifth Heart

The Damned Cross in the Stonework

Henry Adams awoke in his own bed in his Lafayette Square mansion and for a moment he was disoriented. The air seemed too cool. The bed too familiar. The morning light too soft. And the floor was not moving.

Adams had enjoyed his last two months of lounging in Havana with a friend, then spending a fortnight at Senator Don Cameron’s place at Coffin Point on St. Helena Island, and—most of all—he’d enjoyed “geologizing on the coral reefs” with the zoologist Alexander Agassiz, son of the famous geologist Louis Agassiz, on Agassiz’s comfortable yacht Wild Duck.

But now he was home—a place he’d mostly preferred not to be in the seven years since his wife’s suicide—and after his bath he found his clothes laid out for him by his own valet rather than by one of Don Cameron’s people.

Having been so emotionally solitary in the past seven years, Adams had expected to feel some sense of relief when his shay—he’d been met at the station, as requested, only by his driver—had pulled up in front of his home on H Street next to the Hays’ similar mansion fronting on Sixteenth Street, if for no other reason than his constant daily socializing, first with Phillips in Havana, then with the Camerons, then with Agassiz, and finally with the Camerons yet again, would be at an end.

But instead he’d felt a wall of depression wash over him as he approached the familiar arches of his front door.

Clover hadn’t died in this house, of course, or he’d never have returned to it. They’d been planning to move in on New Year’s Day 1886 after the two years of elaborate work inside and out was finished but Clover had drunk her developing-chemicals poison on December six.

But the damned cross she’d insisted on, without his approval, was there above the elaborately scrolled stonework above the arches.

He and Clover had been at Beverly Farms that July when the cross—the damned cross—had been added to the façade of the stonework. Henry had asked his friend from the State Department Library, Ted Dwight, to oversee that important bit of stonework and engraving and he’d written to Dwight—“If you see workmen carving a Christian emblem, remonstrate with them like a father.”

The place between the windows above the main pillars needed something decorative, insisted their architect, H. H. Richardson, so Henry had suggested to Clover that a peacock be carved there since—to his way of thinking—the entire new mansion complete with its beautiful art, furniture, and contents was a way of showing off for a Washington society he and Clover had snubbed at the best of times. Richardson had argued for a lion, roaring and rampant. Perhaps, Henry Adams thought, because the huge architect had been forced to put up with so many of Henry’s roars and complaints over the course of building this impressive mausoleum for the living.

But it turned out that, secretly (from Henry’s point-of-view), Clover had ordered an elaborate stone cross to be carved into the brick space there between the windows. By the time Adams at Beverly Farms had heard the news of the cross, the stonework was a done deed. It had bothered him deeply. Neither he nor Clover were religious in any way. They’d often made light fun of their less-than-pious Washington acquaintances who’d managed to work Christian symbols into the stonework or interior carvings of their expensive new homes.

When Ted Dwight had written to inform him that the cross had been added by artisans under Richardson’s supervision at Mrs. Adams’s insistence, Henry had written what he hoped had been a lighthearted-sounding letter in which he said—“Your account of the cross and the carving fills my heart with sadness and steeps my lips with cocaine.” And he’d added, “Never fear, Ted, we shall plaster over it with cement soon enough.”

But of course, they never had. So he’d also written to Dwight—“It’s a done thing, a fait accompli in stone, so I can neither revolt nor complain, though the whole thing seems to me bad art and bad taste. I have protested in vain and must henceforth hold my tongue.” But he’d also asked Ted not to tell anyone else about the cross yet, since “Washingtonians chatter so much that one is forced to deny them food for gossip.”

Goodness knows that Clover had provided them all with years of food for gossip within six months of that cross going up—she a December suicide, lying dead on the carpet of their living room at the Little White House at 1607 H Street.

The cross, rising between two arches, was a backdrop for a carved medallion showing off a slightly indefinable winged beast. Certainly not Pegasus. Not quite a griffon, nor a dragon—though Adams had wished it might have been. Whatever Clover had in mind when she ordered Richardson to add that design remained a mystery to this day, but even in the summer and autumn of that fateful 1885, Henry had written to friends that the “d— —d cross and its winged creature was prophetic of the future” and that they filled him “with terror.”

They still did. He had no idea, save for his peripatetic absence at the mansion being more common than his solitary presence in the past seven years, why he hadn’t gotten rid of the cross and winged monstrosity after Clover’s death.

To Adams, that entire horrible year had been filled with omens. That spring of 1885, when the minister was trying to impress upon Clover—with the utmost care, sympathy, and gentleness—that her father was indeed dying, Adams had heard her say, “No, no, no . . . everything seems unreal. I hardly know what we are saying or why we are here. And if it seems so unreal, it must be. Or at least I must be.”

And during that hot, miserable, endless, and pointless summer at Beverly Farms while Richardson was obeying Clover’s secret orders to carve that abomination into the front of their staggeringly expensive new home, Adams had—upon more than one occasion—heard his wife cry out to her sister, “Ellen, I am not real. Oh, make me real. For God’s sake, make me real. You . . . all of you . . . are real. Make me real as well.”

As Adams breakfasted alone that morning—he had frequently break-fasted, had lunch, and dined alone for the past seven years as long as he was in this house and not traveling—he thought of the damned cross on the wall and of that sick, hot summer at Beverly Farms and of Clover’s growing melancholia and . . . yes . . . insanity.

Then he put all of that firmly out of his mind and went into his study to go over his pile of recent unforwarded and shamefully unanswered correspondence.

It was late morning when his head butler knocked softly, entered, and said, “Mr. Holmes is here to see you, sir.”

“Holmes!” cried Adams. “Good heavens.” He put down his pen, buttoned his jacket, and hurried out to the foyer where Holmes had just handed his hat and coat to the second butler.

“My dear Holmes!” cried Adams, stepping forward to shake his friend’s hand with the special holding-the-elbow-with-his-left-hand handshake that he reserved for old friends with whom he really wasn’t that close. “I had no idea you were in town,” continued Adams. “Please come in! Can you stay for luncheon?”

“I can stay for only a minute,” said Holmes. “I need to catch my train back to Boston in an hour. But I would happily sit in your study with you for a few moments and would heartily welcome a cup of coffee.”

Adams gave orders for the coffee to be brewed fresh and led Holmes to his study. At five-foot-six, Henry Brooks Adams had never felt tall—even among the shorter Americans of the nineteenth century—but he always felt especially short next to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Holmes was still “Jr.”, even at age fifty-two, because his famous father was still alive. He’d not yet struck off the mildly subordinating appellation as Henry James had a decade earlier upon the death of his father. But with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., even the “Junior” seemed to add to his appropriate grandeur.

Even while standing in the foyer with Holmes, Adams had realized that his old acquaintance was becoming more handsome in his fifties—tall, erect, the high collar trying to hide his one flaw (a neck that some said was too long), with his perfectly curved mustache only beginning to go gray and his perfectly parted hair contrasting boldly with Henry Adams’s bald pate. (And not only bald, Adams knew, but still peeling from the various sunburns he’d suffered on St. Helena and on Agassiz’s yacht, despite constantly wearing yachting caps and straw hats.)

As the steaming coffee came, Adams realized that even though he was only fifty-five, three years older than Holmes, it was his destiny to continue to grow balder and fatter and, yes, shorter, while Holmes would almost certainly keep his erect, tall, parade-ground-proud posture into his nineties and would probably reach the apogee of his male beauty in his eighties.

“What brings you to Washington, Wendell?” asked Adams. “Down to see Chief Justice Fuller perhaps?”

“Yes, Justice Fuller and President Cleveland,” said Holmes, carefully sipping his coffee. He did not offer to explain why he would be seeing the president, and Adams pointedly did not ask.

Holmes had been serving as an associate justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Court since 1883 and most astute observers Adams knew expected him to be Chief Justice of that state before long. Others would lay odds that before another decade was out, Holmes would be on the U.S. Supreme Court, although Adams had his private doubts about that.

“Well, how is Mrs. Holmes?” asked Adams. “Well, I hope.”

“Fanny is quite well, thank you.” It had been John Hay who had once commented privately to Adams about the slightly dismissive tone that always was present when Wendell mentioned his wife. Hay and Adams were in silent agreement that if ever there were a purely companionate marriage, the Holmeses’ was such.

Holmes set down his cup and saucer on a trivet the butler had placed on the top of a low bookcase next to his chair. “I stopped by to ask you about these rumors,” said Holmes in his old, somewhat abrupt manner.

“Rumors?” Adams felt his heart race when he knew he shouldn’t be alarmed. Lizzie Cameron would never reveal the contents of their personal letters—especially not Adams’s last and most personal letter to her, from Scotland to Paris, just a couple of months earlier. Still, his pulse pounded with anxiety.

“About the Hays’ visitors,” said Holmes.

Adams let his eyebrows rise. “I wasn’t aware that John and Clara had any visitors of special note, but, then, I’ve been traveling awhile now.”

“So Hay told me when I stopped by next door a few minutes ago,” said Holmes. “But your service staff must be buzzing about the visitors . . . mine certainly are.”

“Your servants in Boston are buzzing about the Hays’ visitors?” Adams cried with a smile.

“Of course not, but I’ve been here in Washington several days now and I always bring my personal valet and cook along.”

Adams folded his hands under his chin and smiled openly. “I’ve not had time to hear my servants whispering. By all means, Holmes, tell me the gossip.”

Holmes made a flicking motion with his hand—Adams noticing the long, tapering, perfectly manicured fingers—and said, “It’s certain that Henry James is back. He was staying with the Hays for the past week or so . . . I just missed him, evidently. He’s taken up lodgings nearby. At Mrs. Stevens’s place, I believe.”

“Clover arranged for Harry to stay there ten years ago, the last time he was here,” said Adams in a low voice.

Holmes nodded impatiently. “I stopped by Mrs. Stevens’s place before coming back here, but both James and his fellow lodger—the Hays’ other guest this past week and more—were out.”

“I wonder what Harry came back for,” mused Adams. Just before Henry James had left America in 1883 after his parents’ deaths and all the problems created by his father’s will and properties in Albany, Adams had heard him swear that that would be his last visit to America. His home now was in England and Europe, their old friend had said.

“Whatever brought him back, he’s trying to keep the visit confidential,” said Holmes.

Adams steepled his fingers and tapped his bearded chin. “Why would Harry want to do that? Unless . . . but William is in good health and away with his family to Italy or Switzerland or somewhere the last I heard, and I believe there were no complications last year with Harry’s sister Alice’s will. Miss Loring brought the poor girl’s ashes home last year to be interred in the family plot in Cambridge.”

“Perhaps the confidentiality relates to James’s companion—or, rather, companions—on this trip,” Holmes said softly, leaning forward over the desk. “Two men. Both rather strange, from what I hear.”

Adams allowed his steepled fingers to tap his lips. If Wendell’s gossip was about some physical liaison that Harry finally allowed to occur with some other man—on his encounters with Harry in England and the Continent, Adams had sensed the almost-perfectly-hidden infatuation that James felt toward some of his younger male artist friends—Adams most assuredly did not want to hear about it. He hoped that his expression and posture, while seemingly neutral, conveyed this message to the often too-blunt and sometimes indiscreet Wendell.

“Who are these traveling companions?” Adams asked with no great show of curiosity. “Certainly they must be above reproach if Harry is introducing them to the Hays.” Rumors of Oscar Wilde’s private behavior crossed his mind but he smiled away such an absurd thought about Henry James. Harry, while loving gossip as much as the rest of their male epistolary circle, was perhaps the most essentially private person Adams had ever known.

“Certainly, certainly,” Holmes was muttering. “But one of the guests—Hay says that he left some days ago—was supposedly the Norwegian, or perhaps it was Swede, Jan Sigerson you may have read about in the past year or two. An explorer of some sort.”

Adams dropped his small hands to his lap. “Sigerson . . . Sigerson . . . yes, I vaguely recall the name. Norwegian, I believe. He was in the news briefly a year or two ago for climbing some mountain or finding some pass in the Himalayas, wasn’t it? Or spending some time in Tibet perhaps. That is unusual.” Adams was speaking as a veteran world traveler. After Clover’s death, he’d wandered around the South Seas for almost a year with the artist John La Farge. It had been a telegram from Paris . . . from Lizzie Cameron . . . that had brought him rushing back around the planet like a fool.

Adams set that out of his mind.

“Yes, I remember something about a Jan Sigerson,” he said again. “So the explorer has come to America with Harry. Odd, but I fail to see any reason for Harry to keep his presence in America secret from old friends, unless Mr. Sigerson desperately wishes to avoid publicity, and Harry was waiting for him to depart before notifying the rest of us.”

“It’s Hay’s second guest, also James’s traveling companion, that has the servants buzzing,” said Holmes, who brought out his watch from where it was set in his vest pocket next to his Phi Beta Kappa key and checked the time. It was a short ride to the train station from Adams’s home and Henry had noticed that Holmes had his cab waiting.

“Do you want me to guess the second gentleman’s name?” asked Adams with another friendly smile.

“You wouldn’t in a hundred years,” said Associate Justice Holmes with heavy, measured tones. “It is Sherlock Holmes.”

Adams laughed heartily, actually slapping his knees under the desk.

“You laugh,” observed Holmes. Adams’s old acquaintance—they had known each other for more than thirty years—had never been known for his sense of humor, certainly not in the way John Hay and Clarence King might have been, but since he had taken up his black robes of the Massachusetts court, he seemed especially humorless to Adams.

“But isn’t Sherlock Holmes a fictional character,” said Adams, not really making it a question. “A creation of Arthur Conan Doyle? Did Harry bring Mr. Doyle on a visit to Washington?”

“No, he brought Sherlock Holmes,” repeated Holmes. “I almost got John Hay to admit it, although he seemed bound to confidence. Not only have his servants been whispering about the London detective being a guest in the house, but Clara Hay, after making her friends take an absolute oath of secrecy, has told about a hundred of those friends of Sherlock Holmes’s days in the house.”

“Perhaps an English relative of yours?” asked Adams, his mischievous smile back.

“Certainly not that I know of,” said Holmes, who was looking at his watch again. “I must go if I’m to get my luggage sorted out at the station before boarding.”

But before he stood, Adams said, “Was this Sherlock Holmes the second lodger at Mrs. Stevens’s home that you attempted to see along with Harry this morning?”

“Yes,” said Holmes, already moving with much longer strides with Henry toward the foyer, where the head butler, Addison, stood waiting with the justice’s coat, hat, and cane.

“What would you like me to do?” Adams said softly as the two men stood in the open doorway. The late-March morning air was still chill. “Watch out my window and send you a report on whether this Sherlock Holmes looks fictional or not?”

“You still do not dine out all that much, do you, Henry?” Holmes asked bluntly.

“Not really,” said Adams. In the seven years since Clover’s death, he’d come to be known as a recluse and now the invitations—save from Clarence King when he was in town or John Hay next door, old members of the Five of Hearts—no longer came in. “You know how it is in this town,” Adams heard himself saying. “If you accept someone’s dinner invitation, then the favor must be returned. I dine here now usually with the occasional fellow old widower or young bachelor.”

“Well, you’ll be invited by Hay to dine Sunday evening with a young widower whom we both know well and, since this Mr. Sherlock Holmes is reputed to be one of the other guests, I had hoped you’d write me about that.”

“A young widower whom we both know well . . .” began Adams as he walked Holmes outside under the arches and that damned cross. “You don’t mean . . .”

“I do mean,” said Holmes, almost crossly to Adams’s sensitive ear. “The Boy.”

“The Boy . . . oh, dear me,” was all that Adams could muster.

He waved to Holmes’s carriage—knowing full well that Wendell never looked back—until it disappeared around the corner.

“The Boy,” muttered Adams, feeling that he had made a great mistake in coming home several days sooner than he’d originally planned. “Oh dear me.”

Seven Inches Below Floor Level and Sinking

Holmes much preferred their new living areas in Mrs. Stevens’s home to being a guest at the home of John and Clara Hay. It was true that even here at this boarding house, Henry James was still residing in the same house as Holmes, but the door to James’s bed-sitting-room was down a long hallway and they no longer had to see each other constantly or to share each meal. But first and foremost in importance was his freedom—the second story had its own outside door and wooden staircase and each tenant received a key to that door. Holmes was free now to come and go whenever he pleased—and in whatever guise he chose—without scrutiny by Henry James or the Hays’ servants.

This morning he was in no disguise; he wore his London-tailored suit, waistcoat, top hat and gloves, long black scarf, and was carrying his cane sheathing a three-sided razor-sharp 30-inch sword.

Across Lafayette Square, Holmes hailed a hansom cab and told the driver to take him to the Metropolitan Police Department Headquarters at the corner of Fifth and Louisiana. Once there he had the driver park across the street from the old rundown precinct house.

Holmes didn’t have to wait more than ten minutes before the Major and Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police, William C. Moore, came down the steps, glanced irritably at his watch, and hailed a cab. Holmes ordered his driver to follow that cab, even though he knew where it was headed.

Holmes had never met Major and Superintendent Moore but he’d studied photographs of him and there was no mistaking that white, General Robert E. Lee–type beard. And he knew that the irritability he’d glimpsed ran deep this morning since the major and superintendent was not accustomed to being summoned anywhere by anyone, much less to the unimportant Maltby Building by order of someone in the mere State Department.

Holmes’s cab drew to the curb at the corner of New Jersey Street and Constitution Avenue just as Moore had alighted and almost bumped into the former Major and Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police, William G. Brock. Where Moore’s beard looked full, white, and happily plumped, former Major and Superintendent Brock’s beard was a straggly gray that matched his haggard appearance.

“What are you doing here . . .” began Moore.

“I might ask the same of you, sir,” snapped Brock.

The two men disliked one another intensely. More to the point, Holmes did know former Major and Superintendent Brock by sight and vice versa. Brock had reason—or thought he did—to hate Holmes even more than he detested the current Major and Superintendent of Police.

Holmes waited until the two men, still grumbling and demanding answers from one another, went into the building before he stepped out of his cab and paid the driver.

Holmes had asked John Hay about the Maltby Building the previous week, mentioning only that he’d passed by the odd-looking building, and Hay had laughed and explained that the lift inside was treacherous because the Maltby Building, a five-story apartment building purchased twenty years earlier to provide overflow space for Senate offices, had been built on the site of an old stable by its New York developer. Essentially, “as is true of so many things in Washington,” Hay had said, the building had been built on sand. The massive elevator had begun sinking into the sand, dragging the entire building down with it, and now to enter the lift one had to step up or down some seven inches. “What’s more,” added Hay with an additional laugh, “those offices still remaining in the Maltby Building are freezing in the winter, literally intolerable in the summer, and cramped at all times.”

Perfect, Holmes had thought and had cabled his brother Mycroft to have Whitehall “summon” Major and Superintendents Moore and Brock and the others to the Office of Steamboat Inspection on the fourth floor of that building. The Supervising Inspector General of Steamboat Inspection was a certain James A. Dismont, who had been warned by the State Department of this morning’s invasion but had not been told the reason for the gathering. Now when Dismont’s flustered clerk, a certain Andrew McWilliams, according to the sign on his desk, led Holmes into the Inspector General’s crowded office, it was also entry into a din of outraged voices—led by William C. Moore’s.

Holmes rapped his cane soundly on the wooden floor four times and all heads turned in his direction.

“Gentlemen,” said Holmes, using his most commanding tone, “I am Mr. Sherlock Holmes and it is at my request—relayed through Whitehall, your president, and your State Department—that we are all gathered here this morning. Mr. Dismont”—Holmes nodded at the confused Inspector General of Steamboat Inspection—“we shall need the use of your office for only about forty-five minutes and we invite you and your clerk, Mr. McWilliams, to leave the building and enjoy the lovely spring day for the next hour.”

Dismont puffed his cheeks as if ready to argue but then looked at the faces of the important men in his office, nodded curtly, and left, closing the door softly behind him. Holmes made sure that the Inspector General and his secretary were gone from the outer office and then turned back to those same apoplectic faces ready to explode at him. He held up one gloved finger.

“Stop!” he said. “Before any remonstrations or demands are made, please understand that this meeting was approved by Her Majesty Queen Victoria and President Cleveland and arranged by our Whitehall and your State Department . . . precisely for reasons of privacy.”

“My office at police headquarters would have been perfectly private!” thundered Major and Superintendent of Police Moore through his white whiskers.

“No, Major and Superintendent Moore, it would not have been,” Holmes answered softly. “For not only is the entrance to your police headquarters at Fifth and Louisiana being observed by scouts . . . touts, you might call them . . . on the payroll of this city’s criminal gangs, but there are members of your staff and police department also on that payroll.”

“That is . . . outrageous!” roared Moore.

“As outrageous as the charges by Mr. Holmes, more than ten years ago, that my detectives were corrupt!” rasped former Major and Superintendent Brock. “I lost my position in eighteen eighty-three due to such rumor mongering.”

Holmes nodded. “That was unfortunate,” he said softly. “I was invited to America to look into the assassination of your President Garfield . . . more specifically, to see if the assassin Charles Guiteau was connected to the anarchist conspiracy that had later attempted to murder Queen Victoria. My investigations showed that Charles Guiteau acted alone and out of motives concocted only in his insane mind. But those same investigations showed the active corruption of many members of your Detective Bureau—including taking money from known anarchist conspirators.”

Brock turned his back on Holmes and went to the window to look out.

Before Moore could roar again, Holmes said, “Let me introduce the three other gentlemen whom President Cleveland wanted to be here today.”

Holmes nodded toward a short, handsome man standing near Brock and the window. The gentleman’s mustache was waxed and curved in the French fashion, his dark hair was slicked close to his skull, but any sense of dandyism was immediately dismissed by his square jaw, firm mouth, and powerful gaze.

“Mr. William Rockhill, if I’m not mistaken,” said Holmes. “Executive Secretary to the Third Assistant Secretary of State and our liaison with the State Department and various European governments, should the need arise to communicate with these governments.”

Rockhill bowed toward Sherlock Holmes. “Un plaisir de vous rencontrer, Monsieur Holmes.” He bowed to the other men. “Mr. Vice-President. Gentlemen.”

Holmes gestured toward a tall, silent man with his white hair parted in the middle, the only man in the room other than Holmes who was clean-shaven. “You are Mr. Drummond, I presume?”

The tall man bowed slightly. “Andrew L. Drummond, at your service.”

“Mr. Drummond is currently Chief of the Secret Service Division of the Department of the Treasury,” said Holmes.

Drummond nodded his head again. His bright blue eyes seemed to show some slight amusement.

“What in blazes do the State Department or Treasury Department have to do with anything?” roared Major and Superintendent Moore. “And for that matter, sir”—the Major and Superintendent raised his cane in Holmes’s direction—“who the blazes are you and by what authority do you summon the Chief of the Metropolitan Police Department?”

Before Holmes could answer, the sixth and final man in the room, the only one not yet introduced, a quiet, balding, mustached man in his early sixties standing in the shadows of a corner, said softly, “I will answer that, Major and Superintendent Moore. I am Vice-President Adlai E. Stevenson. Mr. Sherlock Holmes, England’s most renowned and respected consulting detective, was asked to call today’s meeting on the authority of President Cleveland, who has asked that everyone here might give their full cooperation on an issue of the gravest national importance.”

“Mr. Vice-President . . .” stammered Major and Superintendent Moore and fell silent. Holmes knew from Hay and others that Vice-President Adlai Stevenson, elevated from assistant postmaster to vice-president by a whim of Cleveland’s party at the 1892 Democratic Convention, could walk into almost any party or assembly in Washington and not be recognized. (Nor will Holmes be surprised, four years hence, late in 1897, when he will read a small item in The Times of London—“When asked whether President Cleveland had ever asked his opinion on any matter, Vice-President Adlai E. Stevenson responded—‘Not yet. But there are still several weeks remaining in my term.’ ”)

“The issue in front of us, gentlemen,” said Holmes, noting that even former Major and Superintendent Brock had turned his attention back from the window, “is the anarchists’ plans to assassinate Her Majesty Queen Victoria, and the monarchs, emperors, and elected leaders of at least twelve other nations, beginning with the assassination of President Grover Cleveland on or before this May first.”

It was Vice-President Stevenson who took charge of moderating the outbreak of gabble into a series of questions and answers with a calm Sherlock Holmes at the swirling conversation’s locus.

Secret Service Chief Drummond: How reliable is this intelligence regarding President Cleveland, Mr. Holmes?

Sherlock Holmes: Very reliable, sir.

Secret Service Chief Drummond: Are there any specifics to this warning or is it the usual vague threat?

Sherlock Holmes: The most specific threat to date suggests that President Cleveland will be assassinated on May first . . . the socialist International Workers’ Holiday since the Haymarket Square incident . . . most probably while he is officially declaring open the Columbian World Exposition in Chicago.

State Department Sec. Rockhill: Is this supposed to be another Haymarket Square operation, Mr. Holmes? Mobs? Bombs thrown? Rampant shooting at police as well as at the president?

Sherlock Holmes: That is always possible . . . but our intelligence suggests that it is more likely to be the work of one or two master assassins hired by the anarchists.

Secret Service Chief Drummond: Do we have the identity of those hired assassins?

Sherlock Holmes: We do. Here are photographs of the two men. The older man is probably well known to you . . . Colonel Sebastian Moran. The younger man is the more able assassin . . . twenty-year-old Lucan Adler . . . and this photographic plate is the first official photograph of Adler. Please be careful with the glass. Can you make close-up copies from that plate, Chief Drummond?

Secret Service Chief Drummond: Of course. (Holding Clover Adams’s photographic plate up to the light while the other men craned to catch a glimpse of the face.) Why . . . this Adler is only a boy.”

Sherlock Holmes: That photograph was taken almost seven years ago, gentlemen. Lucan Adler was thirteen years old . . . a boy, as you say. But even at age thirteen, he was a remarkable hunter and marksman with a rifle and already trained as an assassin by his guardian, Colonel Sebastian Moran.

Former Metropolitan Police Major and Superintendent Brock: Who took this photograph of Lucan Adler?

Sherlock Holmes: I’m afraid I cannot reveal that information at this time. But I assure you that the young man in the photograph is indeed Lucan Adler and that his face, while more angular and more cruel, still looks much the same today.

Secret Service Chief Drummond: How do you know his current appearance, Mr. Holmes?

Sherlock Holmes: I’ve encountered him in recent years.

Former Metropolitan Police Major and Superintendent Brock: (Laughing derisively.) What? The famous Sherlock Holmes “encountered” our assassin and the fellow is not in custody? How can this be? Are the faculties of the famous detective slipping some with age, sir?

Sherlock Holmes: Lucan Adler stalked me, Mr. Brock. And two years ago he put three rifle bullets into me and through me from extremely long range. My survival was pure chance with some aid from the fact that the bullets were steel-jacketed—in the way of military ammunition—so they passed through me rather than tumbled. Had they been ordinary rounds, the softer bullets would have taken out my lungs, heart, and spine.

(A long silence ensues.)

Metropolitan Police Major and Superintendent Moore: On whose evidence . . . on what basis . . . are we to believe in this grand anarchists’ conspiracy? The May one date for the attack on President Cleveland? All of it?

Sherlock Holmes: On the basis, sir, of specific intelligence obtained by Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The information has been corroborated by the new Prefect of Police of Paris, Monsieur Louis Jean-Baptiste Lépine, and by Inspector Hanaud of the French Sûreté, as well as through other intelligence gathered by the Belgian and French Secret Services. And, finally, gentlemen, we act based on additional information obtained through my own investigations in the seven years since I provided evidence to the Chicago police regarding the Haymarket Square Massacre.

Former Metropolitan Police Major and Superintendent Brock: The general opinion in the United States now, Mr. Holmes, is that the Haymarket Trial was a one-sided farce, headed by an unfair judge and overzealous prosecutors. The general opinion now, Mr. Holmes, is that the five hanged men were martyrs to the workers’ movement—martyrs for the eight-hour workday.

Sherlock Holmes: If what you say is true, Mr. Brock, then the general opinion in the United States is an ass.

Metropolitan Police Major and Superintendent Moore: It seems certain, Mr. Holmes, that Illinois’s new governor, Mr. Altgeld, is going to pardon the three convicted Haymarket men who were given a fifteen-year sentence rather than death . . . Schwab, Fielden, and Neebe. A pardon with full amnesty. As Mr. Brock said, people are now of the opinion that the entire Haymarket Trial was a farce—unfair—and that Fischer, Lingg, Parsons, Spies, and Engel were unfairly executed.

Sherlock Holmes: Only four of the guilty men were hanged, sir . . . Engel, Spies, Parsons, and Fischer. Lingg, the bomb-maker, took his own life by biting into a blasting cap that he’d hidden in his cell. It blew his face off. Yet it still took him some hours to die.

Former Metropolitan Police Major and Superintendent Brock: Yet Governor Altgeld and many, many other people are saying now, seven years later, that these men were heroes of the working class.

Sherlock Holmes: These eight men were murderers and conspirators to murder. I proved this to the satisfaction of the Chicago police and to the courts. Not the least by breaking their code in the anarchist paper the Arbeiter-Zeitung . . . a code which coordinated the making of the bombs, the arming of the anarchists, and their ambush of the police that May Day at Haymarket Square.

Secret Service Chief Drummond: But no one ever caught the man who was said to have actually thrown the bomb . . . Schnaubelt.

Sherlock Holmes: Rudolph Schnaubelt.

Secret Service Chief Drummond: Yes. Schnaubelt just disappeared. Vanished. Probably forever.

Sherlock Holmes: Not forever, Chief Drummond. I found Rudolph Schnaubelt in France five years ago this May.

(The room again fills with gabble until Vice-President Stevenson raises his hand. When silence descends, the vice-president opens his palm to the Major and Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police Force.)

Metropolitan Police Major and Superintendent Moore: I heard nothing about Schnaubelt’s apprehension.

Sherlock Holmes: I am afraid that Mr. Schnaubelt died before he could be taken into proper custody. He threw himself through a glass window and drowned in the fast-running Swiss river below. But not before he admitted to—boasted of, I should say—his part in the conspiracy and his act of throwing the bomb at the police from the Chicago alley opening onto Haymarket Square on May fourth, eighteen eighty-six.

Former Metropolitan Police Major and Superintendent Brock: So, Mr. Holmes, we have only your word of Rudolph Schnaubelt’s . . . confession.

Sherlock Holmes: My word and the word of two rather extraordinary law-enforcement officers who were with me when Schnaubelt made his boasts and then tried to escape.

Secret Service Chief Drummond: Can you tell us the names of these men, Mr. Holmes?

Sherlock Holmes: Certainly. The first fellow detective present was Inspector Lépine of whom I spoke earlier, and the second police officer there to hear Schnaubelt’s confession—and to help us pull his dead body from the river—was a young and very promising new member of the Brussels police force, an inspector junior-grade by the name of Hercule Poirot. But enough of old cases. What are you gentlemen going to do in the next four weeks—or less—to save the life of President Grover Cleveland?

Holmes stepped out of the circle and set his back against a bookcase filled with steamboat boiler regulations and specifications.

Vice-President Stevenson stepped forward and faced the other men in the room. “The president,” said Stevenson, “has directed that this group—and anyone else we might find it necessary to invite—meet biweekly on this problem of executive protection. I believe Sunday mornings, ten until noon, shall suffice.”

“Sundays!” cried Brock. “Now I am to give up my Sundays and attending divine services with my family because of this . . . shadow of a phantasm of a threat? Besides, I no longer have any official capacity in law enforcement. There is no reason for me to be here.”

“The president wished you to be part of this first assembly,” Vice-President Stevenson said softly.

“For what possible reason?” demanded the haggard former major and superintendent of police.

“Your Bureau of Detectives was deeply corrupt when you resigned,” said Sherlock Holmes. “You left, many of them remained and are in positions of higher authority today. Detectives on the payroll of the gangs or anarchists could be fatal to our plans. Your expertise in that area is required. In other words, sir, the President of the United States has commanded you to be what I believe American criminals call . . . a rat.”

Brock made blustering noises but had nothing discernible to say.

“Fine, let us move on,” said Stevenson, as if some minor motion had been passed in the Senate. “Major and Superintendent Moore, please explain to us your department’s role in protecting the president.”

The major and superintendent cleared his throat. “The Metropolitan Police provide security for the president when he makes public appearances in Washington City.”

“Do your officers accompany the president to and from these public venues?” asked Stevenson.

“No, Mr. Vice-President.”

The pale, round face with its faded mustache looked around the room. “Who does travel in the city with the president?”

Silence.

“Who protects the president when he is in the Executive Mansion?” asked Stevenson.

“The White House Police,” said Major and Superintendent Moore.

“Is that a unit under your jurisdiction, Major and Superintendent Moore?”

“Not directly, Mr. Vice-President.” Moore again cleared his throat. “We train the recruits and send them to that unit, but the White House Police Force has its own autonomy.”

“Who is in charge of the White House Police Force?” asked Stevenson.

“Sergeant O’Neil, sir,” answered Major and Superintendent Moore.

“Sergeant O’Neil?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How many police officers are under your supervision in the entire Metropolitan Police Department, Major and Superintendent Moore?”

“Two hundred, Mr. Vice-President.”

“Not counting the White House Police.”

“No, sir.”

“And how many officers are assigned to the White House Police?”

“There were three until this spring, Mr. Vice-President,” said Major and Superintendent Moore. “But the number and intensity of the death threats that President Cleveland has been receiving has caused that unit to raise its numbers to twenty-seven.”

“Working on three shifts around the clock, one presumes.”

“More or less, Mr. Vice-President.”

“So at any given time, the president has about nine rookie police officers guarding his life.”

“Yes, sir,” said Moore, who was beginning to sound aggrieved. “But that is by far the most any American president has had guarding him, with the exception of President Lincoln who sometimes had an escort of federal cavalry or infantry billeted on the White House grounds.”

“But not that night at Ford’s Theatre,” said Vice-President Stevenson.

“No, sir,” said Moore. “The soldier usually assigned to sit outside the president’s booth at the theater was not present that evening.”

“When President Cleveland goes to Chicago on May first to open the Columbian World Exposition in front of a crowd of a hundred thousand or more people, how many of your Metropolitan Police or the White House Police . . . or the army, for that matter . . . will accompany the president?” asked Stevenson.

There was silence as the men looked at one another.

Finally Major and Superintendent Moore said, “None, Mr. Vice-President. When the chief executive travels to other cities, his protection is the responsibility of the police force of that city.”

Stevenson looked at Major and Superintendent Moore for a long, strangely tense moment. Stevenson’s gaze remained as soft as his voice, but there was some electrical charge in the air. The vice-president turned his gaze toward the tall Secret Service Chief.

“Mr. Drummond,” said Stevenson, “I understand that your department has had some experience in recent months in guarding the president.”

“A small amount, sir,” said Drummond. “We have well-trained and -armed agents, as you know, and from time to time in the past few weeks, the White House Police have asked us to provide some additional protection for President Cleveland.”

“At the White House or when he leaves it?” asked the vice-president.

“When he leaves it to speak or make any public appearance, sir,” said Drummond.

“That is the role of the Metropolitan Police Department, sir,” snapped Major and Superintendent Moore. It was obvious that this was the first the major and superintendent was hearing about the Secret Service poaching on the Police Department’s prerogatives.

Drummond nodded. “Yes, Major and Superintendent, we know. But during events such as the president’s address to the large crowds at City Park last Christmas, your department had only three uniformed officers there to guard the president. At the request of the White House Police—presumably because of specific threats received—we sent six of our armed agents in plain clothes.”

“Unnecessary,” snapped Major and Superintendent Moore.

Ignoring the Metropolitan Police Major and Superintendent, Vice-President Stevenson said, “Chief Drummond, has not the Secret Service Department of the Treasury also experimented in accompanying the president during his travels in the city?”

“Oh, yes!” cried former Major and Superintendent Brock, braying a laugh. “Six men in a carriage rumbling after the president’s coach, trying to keep up, getting lost on K Street! What a farce that was! The entire population of Washington, D.C., was amused by the folly.”

Drummond bowed his head. “Agents following the president’s carriage in a separate coach has not proved effective, Mr. Vice-President. And President Cleveland and his advisors understandably do not want agents in the presidential coach with them.”

Vice-President Stevenson folded his arms. “Chief Drummond, if Congress were to assign full-time protective duties to the Secret Service—full-time both here in Washington and wherever and whenever the president travels—how long would it be before your agency could assume those duties?”

Drummond blinked. “We would have to hire and train more agents, Mr. Vice-President. Currently we simply do not have enough for full-time protection duties for the president even here in Washington. And these agents would have to be trained . . . bodyguard duties require special skills beyond the usual police officer’s purview.”

“Nonsense,” said Moore.

Drummond turned his cold gaze onto the major and superintendent. “Are Metropolitan Police officers trained to throw themselves in front of the person they are assigned to protect?” he asked in a low, firm voice. “To take the bullet meant for that official?”

“Of course not,” barked Moore. “The very idea is absurd. Police seize the suspect or foil the aim of the would-be assassin before any shot can be fired. They’re not trained in suicide.”

“Effective executive protection agents from the Secret Service will have to be trained in exactly such tactics,” Drummond said flatly. “Stop the assassin if possible. Take the assassin’s bullet in protection of the president if necessary.”

Moore turned away to look out the window.

“How long, Mr. Drummond?” repeated the vice-president.

“By the beginning of the new year, Mr. Vice-President, for full, round-the-clock, traveling anywhere with the president, executive protection. We shall have to open new bureaus in various American cities. Train some agents in the full panoply of advance security work.”

Stevenson nodded almost sadly, as if he had expected that date. “But you can provide some ad hoc protection in the meantime? When called upon?”

“Yes, sir,” said Drummond.

“Arrange to have at least eight of your agents travel with President Cleveland to Chicago in May,” said the vice-president.

“Yes, sir.”

“If I may make a suggestion, gentlemen,” said Sherlock Holmes.

Everyone looked at the consulting detective, who was taking his ease sitting on one corner of the empty desk.

“I would suggest, Chief Drummond, that when you choose those agents who will most closely accompany the president, that they be chosen in part for their height and thickness of torso.”

“The public won’t be able to see the president!” cried former Major and Superintendent Brock.

“That is precisely the idea,” said Holmes. “It is a shame, however, that this tall phalanx of bodyguards cannot surround the president when he is greeting dignitaries or speaking to the crowds. Still, the closer they can press, the safer the president will be.”

Drummond nodded and made a note. “We have such large and tall men amongst our best agents,” he said softly. “I shall see that they shall be closest to the president when he is walking somewhere or standing alone.”

“Preposterous,” said former Major and Superintendent Brock.

Ignoring Brock and nodding slightly to Holmes, Vice-President Adlai E. Stevenson said, “And so we shall continue having meetings here on Sunday, gentlemen, until the details of this transfer of executive protection responsibilities are worked out.” Again he glanced at Holmes and then at Brock and Washington’s current police Major and Superintendent, Moore. “Although not everyone here today may be required in all future meetings.”

“What shall we call this committee, sir?” asked Rockhill from the State Department.

Stevenson smiled slightly. “Since it is the Office of Steamboat Inspection Department’s Supervising Inspector General Dismont, I suggest we refer to our little group as the Steamboat Inspection Committee. Any objections?”

No one spoke.

Before the men began moving toward the doorway, Vice-President Stevenson said, “A final question, gentlemen. Who is in charge of liaison with the Chicago police for the president’s security at the Columbian Exposition on May first?”

The silence was embarrassing.

“I can do that, sir,” Drummond said at last.

“I shall as well,” said Major and Superintendent Moore. “I had always intended to send a telegram or two.”

Sherlock Holmes moved away from where he lounged against the bookcase. “I shall be going to Chicago next week to make arrangements,” he said while tugging his kid gloves tighter. “I would be pleased to work with Chief Drummond and his Secret Service on such liaison with the Chicago P.D.”

The six men took turns riding the lift down in pairs. Holmes rode down with the vice-president. At the bottom, the two men had to take care in stepping up the seven inches the heavy elevator had sunk below the level of the first floor.

The Supervising Inspector General of Steamboat Inspection and his secretary were standing in the lobby, their faces red with indignation.

“Thank you, Mr. Dismont,” said the vice-president to the flustered Steamboat Inspector General. “I will be in touch regarding any future weekend needs for your office.”

“This is ridiculous,” muttered Dismont as he and his secretary jumped the seven inches down into the elevator to ride back up to their offices and while Holmes held the front door for the vice-president.

Outside on the sidewalk, Stevenson turned to the detective. “Is it, Mr. Holmes?”

“Is what, sir?”

“Is our whole effort . . . no, is this entire talk of attempted assassination by anarchists . . . ridiculous? Are we all being ridiculous?”

“We’ll know soon enough, Mr. Vice-President.” Holmes touched the handle of his walking stick to the brim of his top hat and turned away up Constitution Avenue.

Tombstones for Teeth and Tame Cats

On Saturday morning, Henry James received a hand-delivered message from John Hay asking if James could drop by that afternoon—anytime that afternoon—for a talk that would take no more than a few minutes.

James did stop by the mansion commanding the corner of H and 16th Streets, taking care to time his stop late enough after lunch and early enough before tea time so as not to put Hay to any obligation.

James had barely given his hat and coat and cane to Benson when Hay hurried from his study to shake James’s hand, thank him for coming, and lead him into the parlor.

“I’ve always admired the two kinds of stone you and Clara chose for this room,” said James, settling into the deep leather chair to which Hay had gestured.

“Do you?” asked Hay, looking around idly as if he’d not looked at the stone—or the parlor—for some time. “The African marble is called Aurora Pompadour, I seem to recall, and the rest is Mexican onyx.”

“My favorite combination of stone in your lovely home may be the yellow fireplace in the library with its reddish or pink hearth,” said James.

“Oh, yes . . . that hearthstone was damnable hard to find. Everything was either too red or too pink or too . . . something. As it was, we decided on that very subdued reddish porphyry . . . ‘Boisé d’Orient’ I think they called it. Would you care for something to drink, Harry?”

“No . . . thank you. This is a restful pause in the middle of my constitutional. Walking allows my mind to wander back to work. I’ve been pondering a new play, but nothing clear enough to talk about yet.” James had hurried that last phrase in, to make sure they would not be discussing his work.

“Then I’m doubly sorry for intruding on your Saturday afternoon,” said Hay. “But I thought a fair warning was due to you.”

“Warning?”

“And an apology,” said Hay. “You and Mr. Holmes should be receiving an invitation to a tiny dinner party for tomorrow evening, nothing elaborate, just Adams and a few friends here at the old fort. Half the sincere apology is for such short notice.”

“And the second half?” murmured James.

“You asked for discretion when you arrived—your presence not to be advertised, that is—but that was almost two weeks ago, Harry. You know how word gets around in this small town in spite of all our efforts.”

“Of course,” said James. “And I am delighted to hear that Adams is back and I look forward to seeing him.”

“He says that he never dines out,” Hay said, still seeming somewhat distracted. “But you know as well as I that that’s all hogwash. Henry has fewer full-fledged dinner parties next door, but he’s as social as ever. He simply wants to appear the recluse.”

“I possess some kindred feeling there,” said James. “May I ask who else will be attending besides Adams? King’s not back in town, is he?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” said Hay. “I sent a cable to his Union Club in New York but haven’t received a reply. He’s probably a mile underground in Mexico by now, up to his earlobes in gold nuggets or diamonds.”

James waited.

“The rest of the party will be made up of the usual suspects,” continued Hay. James remembered all too well going to a mediocre play—little more than a comic-romance melodrama, really—in London with the Hays and how for days afterward John had kept repeating that (to James) eminently forgettable line—“The party will be made up of all the usual suspects.” Knowing the rather tight Washington social circles the Adamses, Hays, et al. had always moved within, James caught at least a glimmer of the humor Hays found in “all the usual suspects”.

“Don and Lizzie are coming,” said Hay. “And Lodge and Nannie, of course. And Adams . . . the whole thing is a sort of welcome-home thing for Adams. And . . . oh, yes . . . when you inquired about the children last week, I told you that Alice, Helen, Clarence, and Del were all away at school, but Del has the weekend off from St. Paul’s Academy and Helen will also be joining us.”

“Wonderful,” said James, who loathed having children—even nearly grown children—at a dinner party. “It’s been far too long since I’ve seen them. You said in a recent letter that Del has had quite the growth spurt?”

Seventeen-year-old Adelbert—“Del”—Hay had always struck Henry James (and probably his father John Hay, as well) as a rather slow, dull, uninteresting boy. But James hadn’t seen any of the four children since the Hay family’s last en masse descent upon London at least five years ago.

“Amazing growth spurt,” laughed Hay. “Del’s over six feet tall now and weighs more than two hundred pounds. And he’s become quite the athlete at St. Paul’s. He’s going to Yale in the autumn and plans to go out for football. Football, Harry. American football, where one rarely uses one’s feet.”

“Football?” James said blankly. The name, in an American context, rang only the faintest of bells. “But not what we call soccer?”

“No, an entirely new game,” said Hay. “Evidently it was invented—or, rather, adapted from European football and rugby, mostly rugby, I think, and its rules laid down—a dozen or so years ago by a Yale undergraduate at the time, a certain Walter Camp, who became general athletic director and . . . head football coach . . . whatever that means. Football is all the rage at Ivy League colleges now, Harry. It seems that Harvard and Yale have been in a deadly annual football competition for some years. Last year, a Harvard chess master named Lorin Deland introduced a devastating new play or maneuver or move or . . . something . . . called ‘the Flying Wedge’—no clue as to what that means—but Yale still managed to win, six to zero. Del can’t wait to play under Walter Camp’s tutelage.”

“And Helen will also be here tomorrow night?” said James. He would have stabbed himself in both eyes with a dull knife if that is what it would have taken to get off the subject of sports. “She must be . . . eighteen?”

“Yes,” said Hay. “And she’s very dedicated these days to writing poetry and even some short fiction. Don’t let her corner you, Harry.”

“In London last, she was a lovely and invigorating interlocutor at age thirteen,” said James. “I can only imagine how pleasant it would be now to be ‘cornered’ by her to pursue the discussion of all things literary.”

“Adams needs to meet Sherlock Holmes,” said Hay, his voice suddenly serious. “That’s the primary reason for this gathering . . . not that Adams wouldn’t have arranged to see you at the earliest possible opportunity, Harry. He was distraught at having missed your first week here. But I wasn’t sure what to tell him about . . . the whole Holmes thing. Do you think it will be Sherlock Holmes or Jan Sigerson who will appear tomorrow night?”

“To whom did you address the invitation?” asked James.

“To Mr. Holmes.”

“Then I wager that it will be Mr. Holmes who appears.”

“Oh . . . I almost forgot,” said Hay as he walked James through the foyer to the door. “We’ve also invited . . . as Adams and Wendell always call him . . . the Boy.”

“The Boy,” mused James. “Oh, you mean . . . oh! Oh, my. Oh, dear. I keep forgetting that he’s in Washington these days.”

“I made him promise to be on his best behavior,” said Hay.

James’s smile was three parts irony to two parts anticipation. “We shall see. We shall see.”

Sherlock Holmes had been invited as “Mr. Sherlock Holmes” to the 8 p.m. Hays’ Sunday dinner gathering so he arrived as Mr. Sherlock Holmes. His second and third steamer trunks had caught up to him via the British Embassy in Washington, so he wore the latest London fashion in white tie and black tails, soft pumps so highly polished that they could be used as a signaling mirror in an emergency (but not the overly flexible Capezio black jazz oxfords so popular with the younger set for a long night of dancing), a crimson-lined black cape, the silkiest of silk, six-and-a-half-inch-tall top hat, a formal vest with lapels and scooped front, a brilliantly white formal shirt with a stand-up rather than wing collar, and—since it was a dinner, not a ball—no white gloves.

The other men were dressed similarly—no sign of the less formal (and, to Holmes, definitely déclassé) new “tuxedo jacket”—and, upon their introduction by Hay, Holmes had to award Henry Adams the laurels for oldest, most worn, and by far most beautiful jacket of the evening, although Henry Cabot Lodge’s shining new threads must have cost five times the price of Adams’s time-worn perfection. The only man there that night who did not look to have been born into his clothes was Hay’s heavily muscled and bull-necked teenaged son, Del, who seemed to be bursting out of his formalwear even as they all watched.

The ladies, with only a few missed cues, were also upholding the highest standards of modern French-American design.

The group had only a few minutes for introductions and polite conversation before they were called into the dining room.

Holmes had to admit to a feeling of admiration. He’d dined with the Prince of Wales, the King of Scandinavia, and more elite and sophisticated hosts in England, France, and around the world, but he couldn’t remember a more beautiful room, chandelier, or table. Realizing that this dining room might comfortably seat fifty at a State Department banquet, Holmes marveled at how Clara Hay had arranged it to perfection for the twelve of them—four women and eight men.

The dinner was lopsided in terms of gender, but Clara and John Hay had made up for that in careful placement of their guests and beautiful but low centerpieces that hid no one’s face from anyone else. After they found their seats—there seemed to be a white-tie-and-tails servant behind every chair to help them with the extreme effort of scooting in or scooting out—Holmes took a minute to appreciate the seating arrangements.

At the head of the table was not John Hay, as one would expect in the man’s own home, but Henry Adams. The placement emphasized the “Welcome home, Henry” aspect of the dinner, but Holmes also suspected that the chair provided to Adams had a little higher seat, a little extra cushion, and thus put the short, bald man at eye height with everyone else.

Down the right side of the table—Holmes’s side—was first the newly sworn-in Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (perfectly groomed down to his perfectly cropped beard and mustache, but cold of eye—very cold of eye), then the stolid but animated Clara Hay (whose gown of royal-blue silk blended with satin and a design of garnet-colored peacock feathers with sleeves and trim of garnet-colored silk-satin and velvet would have been absolutely breathtakingly original if it hadn’t been featured in that March’s issue of Harper’s Bazaar), and then Pennsylvania Senator James Donald Cameron (whose dark eyes seemed as sadly drooping as his thick mustache), then Sherlock—who found himself sitting directly across the table from Henry James and who knew at once that this was no accident, since at mid-table both of them could then field questions from both ends of the table—and to Sherlock’s left, young “Del” Hay smiling and ham-fisted but obviously comfortable with formal dining in such elite company as Henry Adams, Senator J. Donald Cameron, author Henry James, and the ice-eyed congressman-billionaire only this month turned U.S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.

At the end of the table to Holmes’s left was seated the other “special guest” of the evening, Civil Service Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. Other than hearing from Henry James that Adams and Hay and Clarence King and the late Clover Adams had sometimes referred to young Roosevelt whom they’d known for many years as “the Boy”, Holmes knew little about the man.

But Holmes was interested in what he saw. Merely in the act of helping young Helen Julia Hay, to his left, into her seat and then taking his own chair and beaming down both sides of the table, Theodore Roosevelt radiated aggression. With small eyes squinting out from behind pince-nez, a military-trimmed mustache, and rows of teeth that seemed strangely aligned top and bottom, a horse’s teeth, a fierce stallion’s pre-breeding grimace, and a powerful, coiled, compact body that made athlete Del Hay’s tall form seem to shrink by comparison, the grinning Theodore Roosevelt seemed prepared to attack everyone at the table.

Or eat them whole, thought Holmes.

John Hay’s 18-year-old daughter Helen Julia sitting to the Rooseveltcreature’s left was, to Holmes’s always objective eye for such things, one of those rare beautiful female creatures who actually lived up to the image of the new “Gibson Girl”—long, white neck, her hair swept back close to that perfect head until it rolled most naturally into a gay Gibson Girl puff, her soft chiffon dress emphasizing the modern ideal of a woman as tall and slender yet with ample bosom and hips, all while giving off a sense of high intelligence mixed with an athlete’s glow.

Then across the table from Holmes was Henry James, his balding dome seeming to give off an extra beneficial glow in the candlelight. Holmes could see in an instant that James was in his native element, even at an extraordinary table such as this at which sat two senators, a man who was a grandson and great-grandson of Presidents of the United States, several of the wealthiest men in America, no fewer than four famous historians, three of the most beautiful women Holmes had seen in years, and an energetic young cannibal flashing his tombstone-sized teeth.

The Hays obviously had given James the gift of beauty on either side—Helen Julia Hay to his right and Nannie Lodge to his left.

Nannie Lodge sitting between Henry James and John Hay was lovely in the usual Gilded Age ways—slim, fair, wasp-waisted, with lovely hands and a sweet disposition—but the most outstanding aspect of the 43-year-old aging beauty were her eyes . . . eyes which Holmes’s friend Watson would have immediately described as “bewitching” and which Margaret Chanler described in writing as “the color of the sky when stars begin to twinkle.”

No such poetic phrases entered Holmes’s mind on Sunday, April 2, 1893, as he paused a second to study those eyes—Nannie was turned to her left toward John Hay and was not aware of the detective’s brief but intense appraisal—so he filed away the odd, soft intensity of Mrs. Cabot Lodge’s eye color and was reminded of it years later only when his new friend, the painter John Singer Sargent, lamented never having had the chance to paint Nannie Lodge, saying, “I had such an unqualified regard for her that the odds were in favor of my succeeding in getting something of that kindness and intelligence of her expression and the unforgettable blue of her eyes.”

Perhaps.

Beyond Nannie Lodge and the smiling, laughing John Hay, at the corner of the table near Mr. Adams, was the true beauty at the table—Lizzie Cameron.

The doleful-looking Senator Cameron’s wife was, according to Henry James’s whisper as they walked to the Hays’ home that evening, the loveliest and most-sought-after woman in all of Washington society. In his cool, distant way, Sherlock Holmes saw why at once. Lizzie Cameron’s dress was simultaneously the simplest and most daring of any of the perfectly dressed women’s at the table. Her shoulders were bare and white. Her arms were long, perfectly white, and ended in long-fingered hands that looked as though they’d been designed by God to caress men’s faces and hair. She had a long neck unadorned by jewelry or cloth bands and a sharply oval face. Lizzie’s hair this night was gathered up on both sides and rose in a bun in the back but looked impossibly natural.

She did not smile much, Holmes had already noted, and yet with those arching brows, deep, dark eyes, and perfectly shaped mouth, Elizabeth Sherman Cameron was that rarest object of her sex—a woman whose entire beauty could shine through when she was not smiling or even when she looked actively severe.

In the few minutes they’d been seated, Holmes had seen enough of the almost imperceptible glances, nearly invisible reactions to tell him that Henry Adams, at age 55 some 22 years older than Lizzie Cameron, was in love with her; that their host John Hay, without ever looking directly at his table partner to the left, said with his entire body’s balance and tension that he was madly in love with Lizzie Cameron.

Henry James, Holmes could see (and would have predicted), admired Lizzie’s beauty the way a cat might admire a bowl of milk it had no intention of sipping from. Henry Cabot Lodge took his wife’s friend’s beauty as a given of their station in life, young Del Hay had known Lizzie Cameron for most of his life and was obviously looking at her as one of his parents’ friends, and Theodore Roosevelt bestowed his giant, menacing grin upon her with a happily married man’s innocent benevolence. Senator James “Don” Cameron—who would be 60 in two months—looked as miserable as if he’d been actively cuckolded by all the scores and hundreds of men who had dreamt of achieving that blissful goal with the beautiful Lizzie Cameron.

Holmes felt—knew—that Lizzie Cameron teased, teased, tempted, and teased, but did not actually bestow her favors. Not on poor Adams who, Holmes would soon learn, had rushed 10,000 miles around the world from the South Seas to come to Lizzie’s beckoning telegram from Paris only to be shunned by her once he’d arrived. Not on poor John Hay, who—Holmes sensed at once—had yet to declare his physical love for the lady but who, after his inevitable rebuff, would join Henry Adams and a mist-shrouded legion of gray others who had been relegated to the role of “tame cat” in Lizzie Cameron’s life.

And Holmes also felt—knew—that Lizzie Cameron was a dangerous and treacherous person. Certainly, Holmes exempting himself and since neither Professor Moriarty nor Lucan Adler appeared to be present this evening, the most dangerous and treacherous person in the room.

The oysters arrived and the dinner officially began.

A Shocking Shortage of Canvasbacks

While guests had been milling prior to this dinner, Henry James had stepped into the kitchen to say hello to Hay’s chef for this meal, a man named Charles Ranhofer who had served, for a while, as the personal chef for William Waldorf Astor—the richest man in America until he moved to England in 1891. Chef Ranhofer was preparing to publish a cookbook, which ran to more than 1,000 pages, called The Epicurean. It would sell more copies worldwide than any novel Henry James ever published.

James had first met Ranhofer when he was a guest at Lansdowne House, Astor’s rented London mansion, and often heard of the chef’s reputation at Delmonico’s restaurant on Fifth Avenue.

This evening, the famous chef was too busy filling Hay’s oversized kitchen and extended staff with commands, orders, and ultimatums to pause to chat, so James simply wished him well . . . but not before he caught a glimpse of Charles’s menu for the evening—

Menu

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Huîtres en coquille Ruedesheimer

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Potage tortue verte Amontillado

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Caviare sur canapé Médoc

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Homard à la Maryland Royal Charter

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Ris de veau aux champignons

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Selle de mouton

Pommes parisiennes Haricots verts

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Suprème de volaille

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Pâté de foie-gras, Bellevue [Illegible]

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Sorbet à la romaine

Cigarettes

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Teal duck, celery mayonnaise Clos de Vougeot

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Fromage Duque Port Wine

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Glacée à la napolitaine Château Lafite

Old Reserve Madeira

The “cigarettes” had been crossed out, which James wholly approved of, especially in mixed company, but also because it had become déclassé in most upper-class English and Continental meals to include smoking as a formal menu item.

The oysters were followed by soup, a light dish which James paid little attention to because of the conversation with the beautiful women on each side of him, then a fish course.

The first ten minutes of conversation were mostly taken up by questions—almost exclusively from the ladies at the table—to Sherlock Holmes. Was he really a consulting detective? What did a consulting detective do? Were his adventures as exciting as they read in The Strand and Harper’s Weekly?

“I can’t answer that last question, I fear,” said Holmes in his clipped, formal but friendly English accent. “It’s only been the last year or two that these so-called chronicles of my cases have been published by Dr. Watson, and I honestly haven’t had the time or opportunity to read any of them.”

“But they’re based on truth?” asked Helen Julia Hay.

“Quite possibly,” said Holmes. “But my friend Dr. Watson—and his editor and agent Mr. Doyle—are pledged to entertain the reader. And, in my experience, the hard truth and entertainment rarely co-exist peacefully.”

“But what about Silver Blaze?” asked Clara, her voice small but determined. “That case was true, was it not?”

“Who or what is Silver Blaze?” asked Holmes.

Clara grew a little flustered but managed—“The case . . . the name of the race horse that was stolen . . . that ran away . . . the story in last month’s Harper’s Weekly.”

“I confess that I’ve never heard of an English race horse named Silver Blaze, Mrs. Hay,” said Holmes.

“You see, Clara,” said John Hay. “I told you it was fiction. I lose a fortune at the track when I’m in England, and I’d never heard of a colt named ‘Silver Blaze’ either.”

Holmes smiled at that. “I did have a minor case involving a horse named Seabreeze in eighteen eighty-eight—he won the Oaks and St. Leger in that year—but his ‘disappearance’ amounted to little more than his wandering away one night. The neighboring farmer found him and I worked to the limits of my detecting ability to follow clear hoofprints in the mud to the neighboring farmer’s home.”

The group chuckled but Clara persisted. “So the trainer wasn’t found dead?” she asked.

“He was, actually,” said Holmes. “But it was a mere accident. The poor lad was taking Seabreeze for his evening walk, evidently had noticed some possible problem with the colt’s right rear hoof, had knelt behind the filly—never a good idea at the best of times—and lit a match in the failing light even before raising the hoof for inspection. Seabreeze kicked once, purely out of instinct, and the poor fellow’s head was . . .” Holmes glanced around the shining table at the shining faces. “That is, he died instantly of a head injury. But no foul play.”

“Silver Blaze was a colt in the story anyway,” said Clara Hay. “Not a filly.”

Everyone laughed with her.

Guided by both Hay’s and Henry Adams’s hosting expertise, the attention soon moved away from Holmes, and localized conversations quickly began to include entire ends of the table and then everyone. Twelve diners was close to the perfect number for intimate and audible table conversation, especially with such reticent conversationalists in the group as Henry Cabot Lodge, Don Cameron, and smiling, attentive, polite, but mostly quiet Del Hay.

James was reminded that Adams and Hay—and the late Clover—were neither too educated nor too proud to pun.

“Our poor Vito Pom Pom came home with an injured eye today,” said Nannie Lodge, speaking loudly to be heard by Helen Julia Hay on the other side of James so that everyone at the table heard her.

There was no lag in response.

“How dreadful,” said Henry Adams. “Now, I forget, Nannie . . . is Vito Pom Pom one of the servants or a relative?”

“Henry,” sighed Mrs. Lodge. “You know perfectly well that Vito Pom Pom is our beloved Pomeranian.”

“Your beloved Pomeranian, my dear,” murmured Henry Cabot Lodge in disapproving bass tones that caused the crystal chandelier to tremble.

“How strange,” said John Hay. “And I had thought the new immigration acts had all but shut off the flow of Pomeranian refugees into this country. Tragic, tragic.”

Nannie Lodge frowned prettily at Hay sitting on her left.

“My diagnosis is that Vito Pom Pom is most likely suffering from a cataract,” said Henry Adams.

“Most likely a tom-cataract,” added Hay.

Those who allowed themselves to chuckle at such things—a group which certainly did not include Senator Lodge nor Senator Cameron, and to which Del Hay wasn’t sure to join or not—chuckled.

“It could have been much worse,” Henry James said softly. “Our friend Vito might have been completely curtailed.”

There was the briefest of pauses and then more chuckles. Lizzie Cameron laughed out loud—a fresh, gay, unselfconscious laugh.

Then, with the happy irrelevance of youth, Helen Julia Hay said to the table at large—“Is everyone looking forward to going to the Chicago World’s Fair this summer? I know I am! Everything I’ve read about the White City says it’s perfectly marvelous!”

“It’s not precisely a World’s Fair, my dear,” said her father. “Chicago is hosting the World’s Columbian Exposition, commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America.”

“But the Exposition is opening in eighteen ninety-three,” said Del.

Henry James opened his palms. “Columbus missed finding America by . . . what? . . . some two thousand miles between here and Trinidad?”

“Two thousand one hundred and seventy-three miles from where we sit right now,” said Henry Adams.

“So Columbus missed discovering America by two thousand one hundred and seventy-three miles,” continued James. “The Exposition missed the anniversary of this non-discovery by only one year. Our aim is improving.”

Hay turned to Adams. “You’re sure about that extra one hundred and seventy-three miles?”

“Quite certain,” said Adams with a small, mischievous, and rather charming smile.

“Did you know that when Columbus landed on Trinidad, the island was occupied by both Carib- and Arawak-speaking groups?” said Helen, her tone not one of satisfaction at knowing such trivia but, rather, of anticipation.

“What does one call a resident of Trinidad?” asked Lizzie Cameron. “A Trinidadian?” She’d used the short vowel sound for the “a”.

“ ‘Dadians’ for short,” said John Hay.

“Miss Hay was correct about the natives speaking only Carib and Arawak,” said Theodore Roosevelt, his voice seeming to boom even when he spoke in low tones. “But that was only after the Pomeranian invasion of the island in fourteen thirty-nine A.D.”

They were on their fourth of nine wines to go with this dinner and the laughter was flowing more easily now.

“Vito Pom Pom understands only Arawak?” said Nannie Lodge. “How distressing.”

“Probably why that little hairball of a rat-dog can’t learn the simplest of commands,” grunted Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.

Nannie wiggled her lacquered fingertips at her husband.

“But I don’t want to miss the Fair and the White City and Mr. Ferris’s Wheel and Mr. Cody’s Wild West Show and . . . everything,” cried Helen Julia Hay in a voice that suddenly sounded 10 years younger than her 18 years.

“There’s no reason you should have to,” said Senator Don Cameron. “None of us is leaving for Europe until July. The Exposition opens on May first. Sometime in May, I’ll lay on a few private railroad cars and we’ll all go together for a few days. Are you game, Adams?”

Henry Adams grumbled but looked at Lizzie Cameron and then nodded his assent.

“Hay?”

“Absolutely. We’re with you, Don.”

“Mr. Holmes, will you join us?” asked Cameron. “We’ll park the cars right at the entrance to the Fair and there will be sleeping rooms for everyone.”

“Thank you for the invitation,” said Holmes with a nod. “I may have to be at the Exposition earlier than that. We shall see.”

Helen Julia Hay didn’t actually clap her hands, but she folded them like a little girl preparing to pray. Her smile, thought James, truly earned that tired descriptor of “radiant”.

In a departure from usual dining protocol, the remove, what Henry James knew as the relevé, this evening a saddle of mutton sliced very thin and set on a warm plate with a little gravy, was carved in the dining room by Chef Ranhofer and served between the two entrees. Servants glided in and refilled everyone’s champagne glass.

“I say,” said Senator Don Cameron, “this is smashing-good champagne. I seem to recognize it and then I don’t. What is it, John?”

“Royal Charter,” said Hay.

“I thought only Delmonico’s was allowed to lay in Royal Charter!” boomed Roosevelt.

“It is,” said Hay. “It does.”

“Well, I’d rather spend the whole summer at the Chicago Exposition than in boring old Europe, boring old Switzerland,” said Helen.

“I believe we’ll be in Zermatt and Lucerne this summer with the Camerons and the Lodges and Mr. Adams for only a few weeks,” said Clara Hay. “The July and August months of the Fair will just have to get along without us.”

“Best thing,” said Adams. “I went to the Bicentennial in ’seventy-six and, other than the warning that the telephone was about to invade our homes, the whole affair was overblown and useless. More boring than Switzerland, Helen.”

“Except for the part where they scalped Custer,” said John Hay. “That was entertaining.”

“John!” said Clara.

Hay folded his hands meekly in his lap and looked chastened.

“Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show will be at the Chicago Exposition,” said Roosevelt. “I hear that they may re-enact the Custer debacle with Sitting Bull acting his part. Sounds like great fun.”

“Wasn’t Crazy Horse with Sitting Bull when they ambushed Custer?” asked Del.

“Yes, yes,” boomed Roosevelt, turning his entire upper body so that everyone could be the recipient of his grin. “But we killed Crazy Horse in ’seventy-seven.”

“You have a history of the Wild West coming out soon, don’t you, Mr. Roosevelt?” said Lizzie Cameron.

Roosevelt nodded but also ducked his massive head almost shyly. “I do. It’s called The Winning of the West and Volumes One and Two should be published this summer. But even though I’ve spent years working on it, I hesitate to mention my scribbling in the company of the great historians at this table.”

It was true, thought James. Henry Adams was perhaps the most honored living American historian and his volumes on the Jefferson administrations were masterpieces of their kind. John Hay’s book about his former boss, Abraham Lincoln, written in collaboration with his old friend John Nicolay, had sold well in both America and Europe and was considered the reference book on Lincoln’s presidency. Henry Cabot Lodge’s ancestors had not only known George Washington on a first-name basis, but Lodge had just finished a magisterial history of Washington. Young Roosevelt, although obviously a dynamo of energy and intellectual accomplishment, had much to be modest about in this evening’s company of fellow historians.

Or in politics for that matter, thought James.

Suddenly Don Cameron piped up and his voice was surprisingly strong. James had almost forgotten that the Husband with the Doleful Countenance was also a U.S. Senator. “You have nothing to fear from me, Commissioner Roosevelt. I’ve not written a history of anything or anybody. Nor shall I. I prefer to read histories and biographies in the quiet of my study.”

“But you have so much you could write about, Don,” said John Hay. “You were Secretary of War under President Grant during the Great Sioux Wars, yes?”

Cameron nodded.

“It’s an interesting age we live in,” said Adams. “In a few years . . . or at least it seems like only a few years to an Ancient such as myself . . . we’ve gone from watching the Indians wipe out Custer’s entire troop and terrorizing the western territories to paying to watch Sitting Bull playacting himself in Mr. Cody’s Wild West Show. A massacre with no blood. A battle with no death.”

“Mr. Roosevelt,” said Nannie Lodge, “you have a ranch out west somewhere . . . or you did have one. Have you ever had to shoot at an Indian?”

James looked carefully at the young man. He knew that Roosevelt had bought and moved to that ranch when his beloved first wife, Alice, had died in February of 1884 just after giving birth to a daughter. As with Adams and Clover, Roosevelt had never mentioned his wife Alice again in public. Shortly after her death, Roosevelt had left his new daughter—named Alice—to be raised by his sister while he moved out to the Badlands of Dakota Territory to begin life anew as a rancher and cowboy.

Roosevelt gave Nannie an even larger grin than he’d shown so far, something Henry James would have not thought possible.

“Mrs. Lodge, I’ve shot at Indians, White desperadoes, drunken Mexicans, sober Mexicans, grizzly bears, wolves, scorpions, rattlesnakes, and a hundred more varieties of God’s most miserable creatures. And I tend to hit what I shoot at.”

“Do you think Indians are among God’s more miserable creatures, Mr. Roosevelt?” asked Lizzie Cameron.

The bright candlelight reflected from the chandelier’s crystal prisms made Roosevelt’s pince-nez gleam like two round beacons of light as he turned his gaze toward Lizzie.

“As your husband knew well when he was Secretary of War, Mrs. Cameron,” said Roosevelt, his grin never quite disappearing, “the most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages . . . though it’s true that such a war is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settlers who drove the savages from our western lands with Remington rifles and Bowie knives have laid all of civilized mankind under a debt to them.”

“So you think there’s no place for the various Indian nations in our national future?” asked John Hay, his voice soft but intense.

“American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori,” barked Roosevelt. “In each case the White victor, horrible though many of his deeds had to be, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people. It is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.”

Chef Ranhofer had wheeled in his pièce de résistance for the evening—a rich and elaborate meat pie made from sliced goose-liver terrine and cooked truffles that were glazed in aspic and arranged in layers in a raised pastry shell that had been baked in an intricate mold in the shape of a nautilus—and now the servants were cutting the pie and setting the warmed plates in place, but no one but Roosevelt began eating even after everyone was served and an obviously piqued chef had retired to the kitchen. Everyone was waiting for Roosevelt’s next words.

Between large and voracious bites, he continued. “You see,” he said, glancing up from the steaming goose-liver pie to Lizzie Cameron, “as my modest volumes of The Winning of the West will show in detail, hard-earned White supremacy over the savages and savage lands of this continent has given birth to a new race of mankind . . . the American Race.”

Henry Adams cleared his throat. “My British publisher has sent me an advance manuscript copy of Charles H. Pearson’s new book—I believe it will be published early next year—titled National Life and Character. Oh, have you heard of Mr. Pearson by any chance, Mr. Holmes? Or met him perhaps?”

“Yes, I’ve heard of him,” said Holmes. “I’ve not met him. I believe he only recently retired from Parliament.”

“Quite so,” said Adams. He was fumbling in his jacket and waistcoat pockets. “I’d copied down one of his . . . for possible reviewing purposes . . . just at . . . oh, here it is.” He removed a folded piece of paper, flattened it next to his untouched but still-steaming meat pie, leaned forward so the intense candlelight from the chandelier glowed on his bald pate, and said, “Mr. Pearson’s fear for the coming new century . . . and for the near future here and in Europe as well . . . was put this way.”

Adams’s reading voice was smooth and assured.

“ ‘The day will come, and perhaps is not far distant, when the European observer will look round to see the globe girdled with a continuous zone of the black and yellow races, no longer too weak for aggression or under tutelage, but independent, or practically so, in government, monopolising the trade of their own regions, and circumscribing the industry of the Europeans; when Chinamen and the natives of Hindostan, the states of Central and South America, by that time predominantly Indian . . . are represented by fleets in the European seas, invited to international conferences and welcomed as allies in quarrels of the civilized world. The citizens of these countries will then be taken up into the social relations of the white races, will throng the English turf or the salons of Paris, and will be admitted to inter-marriage. It is idle to say that if all this should come to pass our pride of place will not be humiliated . . . We shall wake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked down upon as servile and thought of as bound always to minister to our needs. The solitary consolation will be that the changes have been inevitable.’ ”

Adams folded up the paper and his tiny spectacles and looked down the length of the table to see young Theodore Roosevelt still grinning at him.

“You don’t agree, Mr. Roosevelt?” asked Adams.

“Pearson’s speaking primarily about the Black and Yellow races,” said Roosevelt. “By the time they will have the capability of threatening us militarily or in trade, the descendants of the Negro and today’s Chinaman may be as intellectual as the Athenian. The American Race . . . and the English as well, of course . . . shall simply then be dealing with another civilized nation of non-Aryan blood, precisely as we now deal with Magyar, Finn, and Basque. This is as it should be, since White Europeans and Americans were never designed by their Creator to live and propagate permanently in the hot regions of Africa, South America, and India. It’s only here on our continent—and the White Russians on theirs, the White Australians on theirs—that we must essentially eliminate savages and their cultures so that the American Race shall rule in its own home.”

“Perhaps you’d like to review Mr. Pearson’s book,” said Adams.

“I would!” said Roosevelt with an even broader grin.

“I’ll ask his publisher to send you an advance copy.”

“In the meantime, I heartily recommend the pie,” said Clara Hay. “The truffles are especially tasty and I hope that everyone had a chance to notice their artful arrangement by Chef Ranhofer. And after the pie, we shall have some sorbet and then . . . then . . . the teal duck, I believe.”

“Teal?” said Henry Cabot Lodge. “Not canvasback?”

“Evidently canvasback are all but impossible to procure these days,” said John Hay. “Possibly due to lack of their favored wild celery, or the disappearance of their wetlands, or some say due to overhunting.”

“It’s most likely a deliberate shortage,” said Henry Adams. “A ploy to raise the price of canvasback in the restaurants and butcher shops. Did you know that almost two-thirds of the decent restaurants in New York are owned, directly or indirectly, by Jews?”

No one paused in their eating save for Del Hay, who said, “Really?”

“It’s the truth,” said Adams. “Creating a canvasback shortage to drive up the price of the duck is precisely what those people—the Jews—are so clever at doing.”

There was another moment of silence.

“Well,” said Henry Cabot Lodge turning to his left to look at the obviously distraught Clara Hay, “teal is every bit as tasty as canvasback and I don’t believe anything could surpass tonight’s pâté de foie-gras, Bellevue that amazing goose-liver terrine. My compliments not only to the chef but to our lovely hostess.”

Clara smiled and blushed. Servants cleared glasses of Steinberger Cabernet that had accompanied the foie-gras and filled everyone’s new and larger glasses with Clos de Vougeot. The conversation at the table moved on.

It was almost two and a half hours since dinner had commenced and if everything simply ended now—if everyone had gone home immediately after the fromage course—several lives would have had different futures. But the glacée à la napolitaine had revived sagging spirits and the closing wines of the evening (before brandy in the library for the men, of course)—the Château Lafite and Old Reserve Madeira—were especially fine, although Del Hay looked as if he had drunk enough wine for the evening as early as the Duque Port with the fromage or even the Clos de Vougeot that had come with the teal pie. The eighth and ninth wines of the evening made Del grow quiet, perhaps even a little morose, but it loosened the already glib tongues of the majority of the people at the table. Only Sherlock Holmes and Senator Cameron were saying almost nothing; Henry Cabot Lodge had told a funny story with the fromage and was still in a talkative mood.

Suddenly Helen raised her wine glass. “We’ve toasted other things, but we haven’t toasted Uncle Harry returning to the United States!”

“Hear, hear!” cried John Hay, and everyone drank to Henry James’s return.

“I hope and trust that Mr. James will be staying in America this time,” said Theodore Roosevelt. The younger man’s eyes were bright but James had noticed all through the meal how very little wine the Civil Service Commissioner had drunk.

James smiled his appreciation at the comment, but said, “Alas, I must soon return to my modest little flat in London at De Vere Gardens. I scribble for a living and ever more rarely can find time to enjoy delightful nights out such as tonight. A true delight, Clara. John.”

Clara Hay flushed pink and smiled and her husband nodded.

“No, I mean it,” said Roosevelt. “This new American Race needs its writers. America needs its expatriate writers to come home and to write about America. Don’t you agree, Mr. Holmes?”

Holmes, who had been listening in silence for so long, showing no reaction other than a polite smile, merely nodded recognition of Roosevelt’s misplaced question. Perhaps Roosevelt hadn’t noticed that he was English.

“But Uncle Harry does write about Americans,” protested Helen.

“So much so that my publishers and literary agent all but despair,” said James with a smile.

“Did you read The Portrait of a Lady?” Helen asked Roosevelt. “It is an amazing word-portrait of an American woman.”

“And published more than a decade ago, about the last time Mr. James was here in the United States,” said Roosevelt. “I say again—America needs its writers to come home from Europe or other decadent and comfortable hiding places and to re-learn America and its people.”

Hay leaned forward as if to intervene, but James, smiling, said, “I would wager, Mr. Roosevelt, that you did not write every word of The Winning of the West while you were in the West. Your notes and memories and research certainly prepared you to continue writing that valuable tome when you were in New York or Washington or, I would assume, even aboard a steamship bound for somewhere far away.”

“Of course,” said Roosevelt and pumped his fist in an odd gesture for dismissal. “But I had lived in the West. Hunted game in the West. Tracked and captured bad men and faced down murderous Indians in the West. I was in the West and of the West before I began writing the first page of my book about the West.”

“And I was in America and of America for many years before I went to Europe to write about many topics, but often about Americans encountering Europe,” James said softly.

“But you left thirty years ago, sir, and have returned only for visits . . .” ground on Roosevelt’s high, insistent voice.

“For more than visits, I’m afraid,” James said sadly.

“You were of age to join the army during the Civil War but you never did,” said Roosevelt with an oddly triumphant tone, a chess master moving his knight to a threatening position.

Henry James’s usually cool gray eyes flashed heat. “My younger brothers Wilkie and Bob were both wounded in that war, sir. Wilkie served under Colonel Shaw in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment, mostly colored soldiers, and was terribly wounded during the attack on Fort Wagner. Terribly wounded, Mr. Roosevelt . . . he was found, by pure chance, amongst the heap of dying soldiers by our family friend William Russell, who had gone hunting for his own son—Cabot, who died at Fort Wagner—and Wilkie was not expected to live and for many weeks he had to be left on the filthy cot they brought him home on, just inside our front door. My brother Wilkie suffered the pains and disabling effects of those wounds until his death ten years ago in November of eighteen eighty-three. I knew the Civil War, Mr. Roosevelt. You were . . . what? . . . eight years old when the War ended?”

“Seven,” said Roosevelt.

“So many served and suffered in so many ways,” said John Hay. “The Civil War was a nightmare from which an entire nation—an entire people—could not awake.”

James turned to his left to look at Hay. He found the comment interesting, coming from a man who had just made a fortune co-authoring a book about Lincoln and who had been at the center of that terrible vortex of war at the age of twenty-two then for more than four years.

“I do not worry about a dearth of American writers,” said Henry Adams. “Look at this table. Almost everyone here writes for publication or aspires to and soon will . . . yes, I’m looking at you, dear Helen.”

Hay’s daughter blushed prettily.

“I do not write nor aspire to,” said Clara Hay.

“You wrote a cookbook, my dear,” said John Hay.

“My point,” continued young Roosevelt, who simply would not be deterred, “was that America, emerging into the world’s limelight as it is, simply cannot accept or tolerate the kind of undersized man of letters—all present company excepted, of course—who flees his country because, with all his delicate, effeminate sensitiveness, he finds that he cannot play a man’s part among men, and so goes where he will be sheltered from the winds that harden stouter souls.”

There was an audible intake of breath around the table. John Hay closed his eyes for a second, touched his forehead with his long white fingers, and was about to say something when James silenced him by raising two fingers of his left hand.

“Mr. Roosevelt,” said James, his piercing gaze never leaving the younger man’s double-barreled steel-spectacled stare, “first of all, I believe that the preferred word is ‘sensitivity’, not ‘sensitiveness’. Secondly, I have to believe that the Civil Service Commission must be a truly ferocious habitat indeed to house and feed such lions as yourself. My respect for government bureaucrats has just risen exponentially.”

Roosevelt opened his mouth to respond but Henry James continued in the same smooth purr as before.

“But, alas, the value of your roars this evening, my dear sir, is impaired for any possible intelligent precept by both the truly wonderful incoherence of their observations and the puerility of their oversimplifications.”

Lizzie, Nannie, and Helen laughed. Del looked in a sort of wondrous, concerned confusion from Roosevelt to James and back again. John Hay steepled his fingers, his lips thin and white. Clara Hay looked from face to face in confusion as her beautiful dinner party was shredded like a regimental banner under heavy musket fire.

“Your sentences, Mr. James,” said Roosevelt through his huge, gritted teeth, “are as incomprehensible and unparsable in person as they are on the page.”

Henry James smiled in an almost beatific manner. “On that issue, my older brother William agrees with you, Mr. Commissioner.”

“So we’re definitely all going to the Chicago Columbian Exposition in May?” asked Helen.

“I can’t wait to see Daniel Chester French’s Statue of the Republic goddess—sixty-five feet high, I understand—right in the center of the White City and lagoons,” said Lizzie Cameron.

“I admit to being eager to see Saint-Gaudens’s statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt, perched, I hear, at the very top of McKim, Mead and White’s agricultural hall,” said Nannie Lodge.

James looked to his left. As far as he knew, Henry Adams had never mentioned Clover or her death, but would he discuss Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s already famous statue overlooking her grave in Rock Creek Cemetery? Or would the mention of the sculpture bring on a long Adams silence?

Adams looked at James and, as if reading his old friend’s mind, he said, “Harry, you’ve never seen Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture at Clover’s grave in Rock Creek Cemetery, have you?”

“No, Henry. I haven’t been back since it was completed.”

“Then we must go together to look at it tomorrow,” said Adams. “Would you like to come with us, Mr. Holmes?”

“Very much.”

“It’s settled then,” said Adams, as if he were unaware of the Lodges, Camerons, and Hays staring at him in something like shock. “I’ll come for you at Mrs. Stevens’s in my open carriage around ten a.m.”

“Good,” said James, for once not knowing what else to say. He had not the slightest clue as to why Henry Adams would suddenly be willing to take two people, one of them a stranger, to see his wife’s grave and mourning sculpture.

John Hay rose. “Why don’t the ladies retire to the parlor while we gentlemen retreat to the library for brandy and cigars or cigarettes?”

“I second the motion,” said Senator Lodge. Everyone stood.

Roosevelt’s fierce gaze had never left James’s bearded face. “Overstuffed mass of emasculated inanity,” he murmured under his breath as servants pulled back chairs and the beautifully dressed men and women began to move in opposite directions.

James turned back toward Roosevelt, smiling slightly, and remained fixed as John Hay whispered something in the author’s ear. Henry James spoke in low tones but loud enough for Holmes to hear from across the table and presumably Roosevelt at the end of the table. “ . . . perhaps expecting something more than this mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding noise.”

The four women bustled out of the dining room. The eight men headed toward the library at a more leisurely pace. Only Sherlock Holmes was smiling as they left the dining room.

Kwannon, Peace, Silence or Grief

Monday morning, April 3, was the beginning of what promised to be an almost perfect spring day. The air was cool and fresh after night-time showers but the warming sun promised temperatures in the low seventies. Every street showed trees leafing in, cherry and dogwood blossoms, and flowerbeds coming into color.

James and Holmes were waiting outside Mrs. Stevens’s home when Adams showed up in his beautiful old open carriage pulled by two large, perfectly groomed horses. A footman jumped down from the box and held the half-door as Holmes and James stepped in and sat opposite Adams, who had both hands resting on his walking cane. He was smiling. “I’m so glad you were both free to do this with me today.” To the driver, he said, “Back around Lafayette Square, please, Simon.”

Holmes exchanged a glance with James. Lafayette Square was only a few blocks away. Was Adams taking them back to his home—or Hay’s—for some reason?

No. When they reached Lafayette Square, the driver kept going, the clop-clop of their horses’ massive hooves echoing back from the buildings surrounding the wooded and open space. The grass in the square looked very green today. Holmes glanced at the equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson in the center of the square.

Adams saw the direction of the detective’s gaze and said, “My wife, Clover, always referred to that statue as ‘Jackson on his rocking horse’. She wasn’t far from the truth . . . it was the first bronze statue ever cast in America and the first equestrian statue to have a horse rearing back on its hind legs. Alas, the sculptor, a certain Clark Mills, had never seen an equestrian statue before and I fear that this shows in the finished product.”

Holmes smiled but was aware of a quick look from Henry James. It was well known that Henry Adams never—ever—spoke of his dead wife, yet he just had.

“Actually,” continued Adams, “I asked Simon to bring us back this way before we head out to Rock Creek Park and the cemetery because I didn’t know whether Hay had told you the history of some of these homes facing the square, Mr. Holmes. The events here might be interesting to someone from your profession.”

“No,” said Holmes. “No one’s mentioned the other homes besides yours and Mr. Hay’s.”

“This narrow house here . . .” said Adams, pointing with his cane, but subtly, the point of the cane never rising above the height of the carriage door. “It was rented by General George McClellan during the Civil War. John Hay tells the interesting story of one night when President Lincoln—with twenty-three-year-old Hay in tow—went over to confer with the general . . . Little Bonaparte, he liked to be called . . . but McClellan was out. Lincoln and Hay sat down in the parlor to wait. Almost an hour later, the diminutive General—diminutive in stature only, I assure you, since McClellan felt that he should be Dictator and had the habit of referring to Lincoln as the ‘Original Gorilla’—came in, saw Lincoln waiting, and went up the stairs. About half an hour passed, according to Hay, and Lincoln finally asked a servant when General McClellan might be coming back down. ‘Oh, the General’s gone to bed, sir,’ reported the servant.”

“Incredible,” said Henry James.

Adams smiled. “That’s what Hay said to President Lincoln as they were walking back to the White House in the dark and rain. He suggested that Lincoln—that no President of the United States—should tolerate such insolence. Mr. Lincoln’s response to John was—‘I would hold the man’s reins if he can win this war for us.’ ”

“Fascinating,” said Holmes, “although I’m not sure I see the connection to my profession.”

“True,” said Adams. “But here . . .” The cane pointed to another house just a few doors down. “Here lived Colonel Henry Rathbone who was stabbed by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre on the same night that the president was assassinated there.” Adams paused and looked at Holmes. “I thought that might interest you, Mr. Holmes, since you seem especially interested in assassinations.”

“Did the colonel survive?” asked Holmes.

“Yes, yes . . . yes, he did. Colonel Rathbone wrestled with Booth after the actor had shot the president in the back of the head, but Booth had come equipped with a dagger as well as his pistol and the assassin slashed Rathbone cruelly in the arm and head before he—Booth—leaped to the stage and shouted his melodramatic ‘Sic semper tyrannis’.”

“Didn’t I read somewhere about Colonel Rathbone blaming himself for not stopping Booth?” said James.

“Precisely,” said Adams. “His wounds healed, but his agony at not preventing the assassination weighed heavily on poor Rathbone. A decade ago, when he was serving as U.S. consul in Germany, the colonel killed his wife Clara—both shooting and stabbing her multiple times—and would have killed their three children if someone hadn’t arrived in time to stop him. He told the police that he was innocent, that the real murderer was hiding, along with others, behind the pictures on the walls.”

“Where is he now?” asked Holmes.

“In an asylum for the insane in Hildesheim, Germany,” said Adams. The black cane pointed again. “This brick house was the home of Secretary of State William Seward and, on the night of Lincoln’s assassination, Seward was attacked in his bed by his own would-be assassin, a mentally deficient giant of a man named Louis Paine, who got into the house—at almost the same moment the president was being shot at Ford’s Theatre—by saying that he was bringing medicine for the patient and had to deliver it in person.”

“Patient?” said Holmes.

“Seward had recently been in a serious carriage accident, and among his other injuries was a broken jaw that was set in a metal splint. Paine stabbed Seward’s son and then leaped like a demon on poor bed-bound Seward, stabbing him with a huge knife, stabbing repeatedly in the face, neck, chest, and arm . . . and kept stabbing at him even after Seward had fallen down in the narrow gap between his bed and the wall. But it seems that the metal jaw splint, the plaster casts, and the thickness of the bandages saved Seward’s life that night.”

“His son?” said Holmes.

“He also survived, but with terrible scars,” said Adams. “They hanged Paine, of course . . . with the other conspirators. Now you see that tree there . . .”

Adams allowed his cane to rest on the carriage door as they approached a tree set into its little circle of dirt along the sidewalk. “Right there is where Congressman Daniel Sickles—notorious for being a rake, a gambler, and a liar even above the usual level of congressional mendacity—shot and murdered young Philip Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key, the fellow who gave us the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’, in February of eighteen fifty-nine. Sickles had married, after seducing, a rather exotic fifteen-year-old lady named Teresa Bagioli and their five years of marriage were . . . shall we say ‘explosive’? Even though Sickles was carrying on multiple liaisons with other women at the time—he took a known prostitute named Fanny White with him to England and introduced her to Queen Victoria, all this while poor Teresa was pregnant—when he learned that Key was his wife’s lover, he intercepted the poor man . . . there, right there at that tree . . . and shot him multiple times.”

“I know of this case,” said Holmes. “Sickles was found not guilty due to . . . what did they call it? . . . a temporary insanity brought on by his wife’s unfaithfulness. I noted it in my files because it was the first time, in any English-speaking country, as far as I know, that ‘temporary madness’ served as a reason for acquittal in a murder trial.”

Adams nodded. “Sickles hired the best lawyers in this city of lawyers, including Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s future Secretary of War, and a certain James T. Brady, who came up through Tammany Hall as Sickles did.”

“Wasn’t Sickles injured during the war?” asked James, who seemed to be enjoying this rather unusual sight-seeing tour.

“Yes, he lost a leg at Gettysburg,” said Adams. “But that didn’t stop Sickles from rushing back to Washington the day after his injury and amputation, July fourth, so that he could be the first man, outside of the president’s military telegraphers, to tell the story of the battle. It seems he had made a mess of things as a brigadier general and wanted to get his side of the story out first . . . which he did. Sickles was a great friend of Mrs. Lincoln and spent much time visiting her. You can visit the leg if you wish.”

“Visit the leg?” said Sherlock Holmes.

“Yes, when they amputated it at the army’s surgical tent that same afternoon of July second, eighteen sixty-three, Sickles insisted that they keep his leg and he had a little coffin-shaped box made for it. He gave it as a gift to the Army Medical Museum—just a few blocks from here—where it’s been on display in a glass case to this day, along with a small cannonball that Sickles insisted was the size of the one that shattered his leg. Dan Sickles makes annual pilgrimages every July to visit his leg . . . often he’s in the company of attractive young women. Stop the carriage please, Simon.”

The carriage stopped again and Adams pointed to an attractive brick home facing the square—it could be called a mansion—and said, “This is the house—Benjamin Tayloe’s house in eighteen fifty-nine—to which they carried the mortally wounded Philip Barton Key. He died on the living room floor and they say that his bloodstain is still soaked into the wood under the beautiful Persian carpet there now. Both the Tayloes and the current residents swear that Key’s ghost still haunts the house to this day.”

“Who are the current residents?” asked Holmes.

“Senator Don Cameron and his wife Lizzie bought the house in eighteen eighty-six,” said Henry Adams. He touched the driver’s back with his cane. “Drive on to Rock Creek Cemetery, Simon.”

Adams had said that it was about five miles from Lafayette Square to the cemetery and he and Henry James chatted most of the way: middle-aged men’s gossip, inquiring after mutual friends and various artists or writers. The sun was quite warm now, the pace slow, the clop-clop of the huge horses’ hooves almost metronomic, and Holmes pulled down the brim of his hat not only to shade his eyes but to think in peace.

He was amazed at Henry James’s calmness in the face of last night’s savage attack during dinner by Theodore Roosevelt. In the previous century, or the earlier decades of this century, words like “effeminate” and “emasculated” would have required the principals to meet at dawn, seconds standing by, pistols loaded and ready. Holmes had been astonished that James had stayed for brandy and cigars; he would have guessed that the writer would have excused himself early to walk back to Mrs. Stevens’s boarding house alone. But it was young Roosevelt, obviously ill at ease in Hay’s library after behaving so poorly during dinner, who was the first to say good night and leave. Holmes did so not long after that—it must have been around midnight—and was astonished again that James still stayed to talk.

Holmes had to keep reminding himself that James, Hay, and Adams were old friends. Still, it was hard for the detective to imagine how any friendship could survive such public insults—or why James showed such calmness and restraint in the company of two of those friends who not only had invited the insulting party to dinner, but who had said nothing to defend James.

Their carriage continued up 14th Street N.W., jogged east onto Harvard Street for a few blocks, then left again onto Sherman Avenue and then northwest on New Hampshire Avenue. Holmes allowed the lassitude that sometimes came with his morning injection of heroin to spread until he balanced there on the edge of sleep, his mind working at a furious rate despite the somnolence creeping over him. He knew that he would have to solve the riddle of Clover Adams and the sender of the annual cards in the next week or so, since he had to be in Chicago before the middle of April. He had exactly four weeks until the Columbian Exposition was to open on May 1 with President Cleveland still scheduled to throw the opening switch that would light electric lights, activate some device to pull the covering off Saint-Gaudens’s huge statue, and start all the hundreds if not thousands of pieces of machinery at the Fair.

And cables from Mycroft continued to say that the anarchists’ hired assassin, Lucan Adler, would be there to kill the president.

Holmes realized that Adams had said something to him. “I’m sorry,” he said, sitting up straighter and pushing up the brim of his silk top hat. “I was half-dozing and didn’t hear you.”

“I was just pointing out that rooftop and cupola ahead there on the right,” said Adams. “It was the Soldiers’ Home where President and Mrs. Lincoln used to go for a little cool air and relaxation during the summers of the Civil War.”

“Of course,” said Adams, “in the three decades since the War, Washington has sprawled out and around the Soldiers’ Home, Rock Creek Park, and Rock Creek Cemetery not far ahead. It was all countryside when Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln used to come here to escape the heat.”

“And did Mr. Hay come with the president?” asked Holmes.

Adams chuckled. “Very rarely. Lincoln left John and Nicolay in the sweltering White House to catch up on paperwork. Hay was especially good at forging Mr. Lincoln’s signature and he wrote many of the letters supposedly from President Lincoln himself. You’d be surprised at how many of Lincoln’s more famous letters were actually written by young John Hay.”

Holmes made that seal-barking noise that often passed for a laugh with him. “The Gettysburg Address, perhaps?” he said. “Rumor has it that it was scribbled on the back of an envelope.”

“Not that particular document, I think,” said Adams, possibly smiling as much at the unusual form and force of Holmes’s laugh as at the idea of Hay writing the Address.

Henry James, who had covered his bald pate with a straw hat, said, “You must have been very bored last night, Mr. Holmes, at all that talk of Red Indians, as you English call them.”

“Not really. I’ve long had an interest in the various tribes and nations of Indians on this continent.”

“Have you ever had a chance to see an Indian in person? In the flesh, so to speak?” asked Adams. “Perhaps when Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show visited London?”

“In slightly more interesting circumstances than that,” said Holmes. “In fact, I was taught by some Oglala Sioux how to speak a modest bit of the Lakota language.” He was sorry that he’d said anything almost as soon as the words were out.

“Really?” said Henry James with unfeigned curiosity. “Could you tell how this came about?”

Silently cursing himself for revealing too much, Holmes weighed whether he could avoid telling the story altogether but decided he could not.

“When I was in my early twenties,” he said as the carriage rolled on, “I was stagestruck and wanted to be an actor. A troupe I was with—one with mostly a Shakespearean repertoire—came to America for an eighteen-month tour, and I came with them.

“We performed in Denver and in more crowded Colorado Territory gold towns such as Cripple Creek and Central City when the director of our troupe decided that, before heading to San Francisco, we should perform in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, since that was ‘just next door’ in the Black Hills. Of course, ‘just next door’ amounted to five days of travel in a convoy of no fewer than six stagecoaches to accommodate our people and props. Twice we all had to get out to swim swollen rivers that were in our way. They floated the stagecoaches across.

“At any rate, we arrived in Deadwood on June twenty-ninth, eighteen seventy-six . . .”

“Four days after they massacred Custer,” said Adams.

“Exactly. There were no roads open going east, west, north, or south—and the railroad hadn’t yet come to the Black Hills—so our troupe was stuck in Deadwood for five weeks. We gave performances five evenings a week and a matinee on Saturday, but I soon started riding down out of the hills in the morning to spend my time with a small band of Oglala Sioux that was camping near Bear Butte, a tall hill out on the plains that was sacred to them.”

“One would think that the American cavalry would have rounded up those Sioux . . . or worse,” said Henry James.

Holmes nodded. “This band of Sioux were mostly women, children, and old men. In fact, the old men were mostly medicine men—what the Sioux called wičasa wakan—who’d come to Bear Butte weeks before Custer would be rubbed out at the Little Big Horn, what they called the Greasy Grass, in order to speak to a sort of immortal medicine man, a myth surely, named Robert Sweet Medicine. Supposedly this Robert Sweet Medicine lived in a cave somewhere on Bear Butte. But yes, even though the band was harmless enough to start with, the local cavalry stationed at Belle Fourche had taken all of the old men’s weapons. The band of about fifty Sioux was dependent upon the cavalry providing beef and they were starving, emaciated.”

“But one or more of them took time to teach you some of their language,” said Adams.

“Yes. And I would bring food to them every time I visited. The adults would immediately give it to the children.”

“I’m curious,” said James. “What did you learn from the cowboys, drunks, mule skinners, buffalo hunters, Indian fighters, bandits, cavalry deserters, and gold miners during your troupe’s five weeks in Deadwood?”

Holmes smiled thinly. “That they much prefer Hamlet or Macbeth over As You Like It. But by far their favorite was Titus Andronicus.”

The carriage turned right off the broad and dusty New Hampshire Avenue onto Allison Street. The stone and wrought-iron welcoming arch of Rock Creek Cemetery was just ahead.

As the carriage rolled through the green landscape, moving into tree shadow and then out again, Adams explained that the 86 acres of Rock Creek Cemetery had been planned in the “rural garden style” so popular not long before the Civil War. Interest in classical Greek and Roman cemeteries had led to modern cemeteries such as this being laid out to serve both as a final resting place and as a public park. People would bring their children to picnic and hike in Rock Creek Cemetery on Sundays, according to Adams.

“Clover was a dedicated equestrian,” said Adams, “and we rode in this park many times. I’m sure that we must have ridden directly over the ground in which she now lies buried.” Adams looked away and fell silent after that.

They passed no other carriages or pedestrians. Holmes knew that the cemetery must have a small army of gardeners to keep the acres of grass so neatly clipped, the beautiful flowerbeds weeded and watered, but they saw no one working. Halfway around a long, sweeping curve where the cemetery road ran between two grassy areas festooned with trees and headstones, the carriage stopped.

“If you’ll follow me, gentlemen,” said Henry Adams.

There were swatches of open grass separating sections with headstones so one did not have the feeling of walking upon graves, but Adams led them to an asphalted path that meandered under some trees and then crossed more open spaces. The visible headstones were all tastefully done. Holmes realized that Adams was leading them to what looked like a solid green wall of high hedge intermixed with densely planted holly trees, or some deciduous American version of holly which almost certainly stayed green all year round.

Adams led them around to the side where a granite column about ten feet tall rose on a two-tiered stone base. The leaves from the closely planted trees overlaid part of the column in creeping frondescence.

“This is the important side of the monument,” said Adams, touching a carved emblem of two overlapping rings set into the granite. Each ring was about twelve inches across, both were inscribed with faint leaves like laurel rings, and Holmes saw that they were entwined. There was the faintest of depressions in the granite around each ring.

Without stopping, Adams led them around the side of the leafy square. The trees rose in a solid green wall about twenty feet high, opening to a narrow gap amidst the greenery.

“Watch your step,” said Adams as he entered the break in the trees. It was good advice since, although there was gravel underfoot, that gravel was bisected by a cement ridge that separated the planting areas.

The three men stepped through the leafy doorway, stepped up and onto a higher level of stone edge and gravel base, and stopped in their tracks.

“Good heavens,” said Henry James.

Sherlock Holmes, who had little interest in funerary objects or sculptures from any era, nonetheless felt the breath leave his chest.

They were standing on a raised hexagon twenty-some feet across. On three sides rose a stone bench—the stone not made of the granite of the monument across from it—and the arms at the end of each bench were in the form of griffon’s wings with carved stone talons seizing a ball at the base.

But the focus of the hexagon was the monument and sculpture opposite the three benches.

Upon a raised granite base and set back against the high granite block, capped in classical style, was the larger-than-life bronze figure of a man or woman in a robe. The robe rose over the figure’s head like a cowl and other than the face in shadow, only a bare right arm and hand were visible.

Holmes stepped closer and so did Henry James.

“Henry,” said James, “you sent me photographs, but I had no idea . . .”

“No, photographs do not do it justice,” said Adams. “Lizzie Cameron sent me photos when I was in the South Seas, but it was not until I saw the monument in person a year ago this February that I realized its power. Many is the time in the past two years that I’ve sat and watched and listened, without being watched or listened to, as people encounter this piece for the first time. Their comments run the gamut from interesting to cruelly puerile.”

The visible parts of the human form in the massive bronze sculpture were androgynous. The raised forearm was strong, the fingers folded under the cheek and chin, but the figure might have been either male or female. There was a Pre-Raphaelite perfection to the firm descent of the cheek, the solid chin, and the straight line of the nose, but it was the eyes—almost but not quite closed in contemplation, the eyelids lowered as if in sorrow—that brought the figure out of any era or school of art, classical or otherwise.

“It’s as if his . . . or her . . . face beneath that cowl is lost in a cave of thought,” said James.

“When John La Farge and I returned from Japan in eighteen eighty-six, we all but buried Saint-Gaudens in photographs and images of Buddhas, trying to inspire him,” Adams said softly. “During my long wanderings in the South Seas, I would refer to the sculpture—not yet created by Saint-Gaudens—as ‘my Buddha’, but this is no Buddha.”

It’s true, thought Holmes. The Buddhas he’d seen in the Far East gave off a sense of calm and repose; this figure conveyed to the viewer the deepest possible sense of loss, absence, thought, pain, and even sorrow—all the emotions that the Buddha and those who followed him to enlightenment had left behind.

Holmes made a mental note that the massive robed figure was seated on an indistinct bench or boulder which lay against the upright granite block. The figure’s feet—invisible beneath the shadows of robe—rested upon a large, flat stone some three feet across, the stone in turn on the horizontal hearthstone of granite coming out from the vertical block.

As one moved to the left or right, the figure’s eyes—as cowled as the sculpture’s head—seemed to follow the viewer. The folds of the robe lay heavy between the bronze sculpture’s covered knees, which were already slightly shiny from the touch of human hands.

“Does the piece have a name?” asked Holmes, still moving to the left and right and sensing the shadowed eyes following him.

Adams sat on the bench opposite the form. He folded one leg over the other. “I want to call it ‘The Peace of God’,” he said. “But that isn’t quite right, is it? There is something beyond peace—or short of it—in this sculpture. My artist friend La Farge calls it ‘Kwannon’ after the counterpart we saw in Japan to the Chinese Kuan Yin. Petrarch would say: ‘Siccome eternal vita è veder Dio.’ I would think that a real artist—or deep soul—would be very careful to give it no name that the public could turn into a limitation of its nature.”

“The benches?” asked James, turning to look in Adams’s direction.

“Oh, Stanford White designed the benches and plantings, and obviously fell even further from my wish for the Oriental than did Saint-Gaudens. White’s workers had the site covered by a tent for more than a month in the winter of ’ninety. But the griffon wings . . . not exactly in the Sakyamuni tradition that La Farge and I had in mind when we returned from Japan. Although this sculpture is, I think, the ultimate Saint-Gaudens—the most anyone could ask for or receive from this great artist’s core of being.”

Turning back to look again at the sculpture, James said, “Does Saint-Gaudens have a name for it?”

“Several,” said Adams. “His favorite—the last time I heard anyone ask—is The Mystery of the Hereafter—but he knows that is not adequate. Saint-Gaudens’s native language is stone, not words.”

“ ‘I am the doubter and the doubt’,” said James.

“Yes,” said Adams.

“I don’t recognize the reference,” said Holmes.

“The poem ‘Brahma’ by Emerson,” said Henry James and recited:

If the red slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain,

They know not well the subtle ways

I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near,

Shadow and sunlight are the same,

The vanished gods to me appear,

And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;

When me they fly, I am the wings;

I am the doubter and the doubt,

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,

And pine in vain the sacred Seven;

But thou, meek lover of the good!

Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

Holmes nodded.

“When I was in India, trying to meditate beneath the sacred bo tree . . . which was as small as a twig now in modern times,” said Adams, “I wrote my own poem in which I attempted to summarize the truly transcendental moment. I failed even worse than Emerson had.”

“Tell us the poem, please, Henry,” said James.

Adams started to shake his head but spread his arms wide on the back of the bench and said softly:

Life, Time, Space, Thought, the world, the Universe

End where they first begin, in one sole Thought

Of Purity in Silence.

Then, startling both James and Holmes, Adams laughed quite loudly. “Pardon me,” he said after a moment. “But the Emerson poem reminds me of something that Clover wrote to her father in the winter of . . . eighteen eighty, I think it was. I believe I can quote it correctly—A high old-fashioned snowstorm here: the attempts at sleighing numerous and humorous. ‘If the red sleigher thinks he sleighs,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson would point him to the Brighton Road for the genuine article.”

Holmes and James laughed softly at this. James caught Holmes’s eye and said, “I think I’m going to take a stroll out there amongst the headstones. I shall return in a few minutes.”

When James had edged his way out through the small opening in the greenery, Adams stood and said, “Good. Mr. Holmes, you and I must now speak in earnest.”

“I know why you’re here, Holmes,” said Adams. “Why you came to Washington. Why you dragged poor Harry with you.”

“Hay told you,” said Holmes. He leaned forward, both hands on his stick, as Adams remained seated.

“No. He hasn’t . . . yet. But he will. John could never allow me to look or play the fool for long. We’re more than friends, Holmes. We’re like brothers.”

Holmes nodded, wondering just how much Adams knew or suspected.

“But I knew at once that you’d come to solve the so-called ‘mystery’ of the cards we surviving Hearts receive on the anniversary of Clover’s death,” said Adams. “So . . . have you?”

“Solved it?”

“Yes.” The syllable snapped in the languid afternoon air like the tip of a whip.

“No,” said Holmes. “I do know that the cards were typed on Samuel Clemens’s typewriter. I looked at a list of the Clemenses’ guests from Christmas eighteen eighty-five through December ’eighty-six . . . the time during which the cards were typed.”

“And have you narrowed the list down?”

Holmes opened his hands palms outward even as the heel of one hand kept pressure on his cane. “Rebecca Lorne and her cousin Clifton spent a night there that year. So did Ned Hooper. So did all of the remaining Hearts save for Clarence King. So did you, Mr. Adams.”

Adams nodded tersely. “You actually suspect Rebecca Lorne?”

Holmes removed a photograph from his jacket pocket and stepped forward to hand it to Adams. It was part of a program for a Polish opera, and the diva whose photograph was on the front was the British singer and actress Irene Adler.

“It could be the same woman,” said Adams. “It’s hard to tell with the dramatic make-up and hairdo. Miss Lorne always dressed herself plainly.”

“It is the same woman,” said Holmes.

“What if it is?” said Adams. “That solves nothing.”

“How did you know my reason for being here if Hay or James did not tell you?” said Holmes. “Ned Hooper, I presume.”

Adams smiled, handed the photo back, and crossed his arms. “I loved Ned Hooper and was crushed when we learned of his death this past December. Before that, Ned came to me almost every year, in private, begging me to bring the authorities into the so-called mystery of the December-six cards. Two years ago on New Year’s Day he promised . . . threatened . . . to go to London to hire the famous detective Sherlock Holmes if I did nothing.”

“What did you say to him then?”

“I seem to remember saying that I thought the famous detective Sherlock Holmes was fictional,” said Adams.

Holmes nodded. The two men remained silent for a long moment. Somewhere outside their leafed-in space, a distant carriage clopped along one of the cemetery’s long, curving lanes.

“My beloved wife took her own life, Mr. Holmes,” Adams said at last, his voice low. “This is why I have not spoken of her or written about her except to the most intimate of my friends these past seven years.”

“Yet today you were speaking freely,” said Holmes.

“That is because today I am going to ask you to relent in this useless quest, return to England, and leave me and my memories alone, Mr. Holmes,” said Adams. Each word was as sharp as a round fired from a Gatling gun.

“I owe something to my client, sir,” said Holmes.

Adams laughed, but it was a sad sound. “I did love Ned Hooper, Mr. Holmes. But the same strand of madness ran through Ned that ran through Clover, her father, and so many members of the Hooper family. It was no one’s fault. But Ned was as destined as poor Clover to take his own life. Your ‘client’, Mr. Holmes, suffered from multiple strands of insanity. Would you continue in your efforts when you know that any false clue or misplaced fact you might pick up in this ‘mystery’ would hurt me as surely as forcing me to swallow shards of broken glass?”

“My intention is not to hurt you, Mr. Adams. Nor anyone else, save for anyone who might be behind these . . .”

“Damn your intentions!” interrupted Adams. “Don’t you understand yet? It was Ned Hooper who typed those cards when he was visiting Clemens in eighteen eighty-six. It was Ned who managed to sneak the cards into all of the Five of Hearts’ mail on December the sixth each year.”

“Did he admit that to you?” asked Holmes, who had long considered that possibility. It was the presence of Irene and Lucan Adler in the last months of Clover Adams’s life that had convinced him otherwise.

“No, not in so many words,” said Adams. “But Ned was unbalanced, fragile, ready to crack or break at any shock . . . and his sister’s suicide was just that shock that caused the break to be final. Clover’s death was meaningless, Mr. Holmes—logical only to her and to her own pain and despair—and Ned could never accept that someone so important to him would disappear for no reason.”

“Perhaps,” said Holmes. “But in this instance, Ned’s fears seem founded more on malicious fact than innocent madness. The true identities of Rebecca Lorne and her cousin Clifton argue for . . .”

“I have a proposal for you, Mr. Holmes,” interrupted Adams.

Holmes waited.

“We’ve all heard what a master of deduction you are, Mr. Holmes . . . what a master detective. But none of us, not even Harry, I’m sure, have yet seen the slightest indication that you can solve anything with your so-called deductive powers.”

“What must I do to prove myself?” asked Holmes.

“Solve the mystery I’ve set for you,” said Adams.

“The mystery of the December-six cards . . .”

“No!” cried Adams. “The mystery that I have set for you. Solve it by five p.m. tomorrow, and you may stay—I will even cooperate with you in your investigation. Fail to solve it, and you must, on your word as a gentleman, agree to leave this town, leave this nation, and leave the so-called ‘mystery’ of my wife’s death alone forever. Agreed?”

“Shall you tell me the nature of the mystery you’ve given me?”

“No,” said Adams, his voice flat. “If you’re the marvel of observation and deduction that your . . . fictional stories . . . say you are, you’ll be able to find the mystery and solve it by tomorrow afternoon. If you are not, if you cannot, then you must say good-bye and leave me alone.”

Holmes lifted his cane and tapped it on his right shoulder for a moment. Finally he said, “I cannot return to London until other work of mine is finished, but I will agree to leaving Washington and to dropping the case of your wife’s death.”

Adams again nodded tersely. “Discover the mystery and solve it by five o’clock tomorrow afternoon or leave Washington and leave me alone. We are agreed.”

The two men remained silent for several moments, looking at each other but seeing little, when Henry James came back through the foliage and startled both of them.

“Did I miss something?” said James.

A Blind Man Could Have Seen It

Henry James was very curious.

It was obvious when he returned to the hedged-in area in front of Clover’s monument that something had happened between Sherlock Holmes and Henry Adams, but neither man would say what had occurred . . . or admit that anything had, for that matter. But Holmes and Adams were also silent during the entire ride back, Adams saying only “So long for now, my friends” as his carriage dropped Holmes and James off at Mrs. Stevens’s boarding house.

When pressed there at their temporary lodgings, Holmes still would say no more. When James asked the detective if he’d like to go out for an early dinner together that evening, Holmes said only, “Thank you, but I may not eat dinner tonight.” And then he’d gone into his room.

James spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening sitting in the window seat in his own room, smoking, looking at pages of a novel without being able to concentrate on them, and keeping watch out the window that looked out above the front entrance and short walkway to the house.

When Holmes emerged at last, about an hour before darkness would fall, dressed in a too-heavy tweed wool traveling coat with cape and matching-wool soft cap with ribbon tie-up earflaps and carrying a small canvas bag, James grabbed his own cane and top hat and hurried down to follow the detective. Holmes was certainly dressed like a gentleman, but James thought that the canvas bag made him look like some plumber or craftsman coming home from work.

Assuming that Holmes would spot him sooner or later, James was willing to bluster it out by saying that he was only out for a little evening constitutional of his own. But Holmes did not look back over his shoulder or appear to notice James striding along a half block behind and across the street.

First Holmes went three blocks and stepped into a telegraph office. James stepped into the shadows of a closed haberdasher’s front entrance and looked at ties through one of the windows, all the while watching the reflection and waiting for Holmes to emerge, which he did after only a few minutes.

Holmes walked quickly, whistling as he walked, occasionally twirling his cane, and within a few minutes was nearing the intersection of 12th Street N.W. and Pennsylvania Avenue where the old Kirkwood House hotel was in its last months before being torn down. James waited for a break in the busy carriage and occasional auto traffic to make his way across Pennsylvania Avenue, and when he reached the safety of the opposite sidewalk, Holmes had simply disappeared. James continued up the street, but more slowly, wondering if Holmes had stepped into one of these commercial buildings. The shadows were growing longer, the sun very close to setting, when James crossed a narrow alley only to have Holmes step out and block his way. James saw the sharp steel of Holmes’s sword-cane for an instant before the detective pushed the sword back in its sheath and clicked the silver cane-head tight.

“James,” said Holmes and laughed softly. “I thought it was a bit early for Lucan Adler.”

James blinked at this. Was Holmes expecting the anarchist-assassin to be stalking him? Was that one of the reasons Holmes had acceded to attending the Hays’ dinner party the previous evening . . . to widen the news that Sherlock Holmes was in Washington so that his enemies could attack him?

Stepping out of the alley, Holmes whistled and gestured to get the attention of one of the cabbies on his box on one of the several hansom cabs lined up at the curb outside the Kirkwood House hotel.

Once they were settled in, Holmes gave the driver directions to go two blocks west and then to turn right.

“Are we going somewhere?” asked James, realizing even as he spoke how absurd the question was. Of course, they might be going back to Mrs. Stevens’s—although west was the wrong direction for that.

“I need to think and I often find that a long hansom ride is conducive to serious thinking,” said Holmes. “Haven’t you also found this to be true, Mr. James?”

James made a noncommittal sound. In truth, he couldn’t remember ever having done any deep creative thinking while in a cab. In a railway carriage when traveling alone, yes, and—first and foremost—when in the bath or when taking a morning walk, but not in a cab. James made little note of which direction they were heading as Holmes called up directions—“Right here, driver”, “Left, driver”, “Straight along here until I tell you, driver.”

“Do you have some compelling reason to think about something?” asked James. “Or something new that we should both be thinking about?”

He knew that he was taking a risk asking the question so directly—a risk of rebuff or active embarrassment—but James was very curious and had been since he’d returned to the Saint-Gaudens memorial and found Adams and Holmes sitting there in such distracted silence.

“Yes,” said Holmes, “but it could be very personal . . . to Adams, to your other friends here . . . so are you certain you want to hear about it?”

James did not have to think about this for long. “I’m certain.”

Holmes succinctly described his graveyard conversation and agreement with Henry Adams.

“But you don’t even know what the mystery is?” asked James, feeling both shocked at Holmes’s decision and relieved that the detective soon would be leaving his friends alone.

“No idea,” said Holmes.

“Did you interrogate Adams about it . . . receive even a clue?”

“No,” said Holmes. “You know Henry Adams, Mr. James—and I do not, other than what Ned and you have said about him and impressions he made upon me last night at dinner and today—do you think he is being honest about there being a mystery?”

James thought about that for a while as the hansom clopped along, the cabbie receiving another “Turn right here, driver” order from Holmes. The passing scenery looked like so much of Washington—glimpses of fine homes, then rare commercial blocks, then empty fields, then more trees and homes.

“Yes,” James said at last. “Adams can be . . . playful is the word that comes to mind . . . especially when he is with Hay and Clarence King or Sam Clemens . . . and he guards his privacy as zealously as a dragon guards his gold, but if there were no mystery whatsoever, he would never have come up with this absurd . . . game. He would have just insisted you leave him and his friends alone.”

Holmes, who had been passing his black gloves through his other hand over and over, nodded distractedly. “You don’t have a clue as to what the mystery might be, do you, James?”

“Beyond the one you came here for—the death of his wife seven years ago—I do not,” said James. “But, then, for the past decade, my contact with Adams has been either epistolary or when he is visiting London or when we see each other somewhere on the Continent.”

“I’m convinced that this mystery he speaks of lies here, now,” said Holmes. “Not some conundrum he brushed up against in London or elsewhere.”

“Do you have a guess as to what the mystery might be?” said James.

Holmes slapped his gloves against his open palm, frowned, and said sharply, “I never guess, James. Never.”

“Then, have you ever had a case like this before?” asked James.

“How do you mean, sir?”

“I mean a case where to solve a mystery you must first figure out if and where there is a mystery.”

“In roundabout ways,” said Holmes. “Often I’m asked to consult on something little more than a curiosity—why a father might ask his grown daughter to change bedrooms after she’s heard something in the night, that sort of thing—and only then discover that the curiosity is wrapped in a true mystery. But I’ve never been given the task of searching out a mystery, pulling it from the background of the entire world, as it were, before having only twenty-four hours . . .” He glanced out at the long shadows and fading sunlight. “Less now . . . in which to solve it. Stop here, driver.” Holmes thumped the box above them with his cane.

Outside in the last of the evening light, James looked around but did not recognize the place.

“Here’s an incentive to wait for us for as long as it takes us to return,” Holmes was saying to the driver, giving the man what James thought was an absurd number of gold coins. The driver grinned and touched his beaver top hat.

“Come, James,” said Holmes and began walking briskly down the tree-lined side street running off the main avenue they’d come up.

It was only when he saw the arched entrance twenty yards or so ahead to the left of the street that he realized they had returned to Rock Creek Cemetery.

“Do you expect to find your mystery to solve here?” asked James as they walked along the paved lane that curved through the huge cemetery.

“Not necessarily,” said Holmes. “But if we want to walk while we think about this problem, this is certainly a contemplative place in which to stroll.”

“It will soon be a dark contemplative place,” said James.

It was true. The sun sat on the western horizon, a red orb perfectly balanced on the horizon glimpsed through the trees and various headstones and monuments. The trees in the cemetery had thrown out ever-lengthening shadows until those shadows had touched and coalesced into growing patches of darkness. It would soon be too dark to read the inscriptions on the headstones that were giving off their last warm glows of sunlight for this day.

“I brought a dark lantern should we need it,” said Holmes, jiggling the canvas bag he was carrying. He busied himself with lighting his pipe. Normally, Henry James enjoyed the smell of burning pipe tobacco, but Holmes’s choice of tobaccos was so cheap and so strong that now James changed places as they walked abreast so that he would be upwind of it.

“James, do you remember any mysteries being embedded in Mr. Adams’s conversation at dinner last night?”

“I’m afraid that due to Mr. Roosevelt’s extended and repeated efforts to be boorish, much of the dinner’s conversation was lost on me,” said James.

Holmes stopped walking and gave the writer a sharp glance through the pall of pipe smoke. “Nothing is ever lost on you, James. You know it and I know it.”

James said nothing and they resumed their walk. The sun had disappeared and much of the three-dimensionality of their surroundings disappeared in the pleasant twilight. Trees, monuments, lower headstones, and grassy knolls all took on a flatter aspect without their glow and shadows to set them off.

“There was the mystery of the canvasback ducks,” said James. “But Clara Hay brought up that subject when she explained we were having teal, and it was her husband who said that the disappearance of canvasbacks in the restaurants and shops was a bit of a mystery.”

“And Henry Adams solved that mystery,” said Holmes. “The Jews were behind the disappearance . . . just as they are behind so many nefarious plots.”

Holmes’s tone was not lost on James and he started to speak to explain his friend, to say that Adams was usually a most liberal person but had this blind spot when it came to the Jews.

Holmes interrupted the apologia with a swing of his cane. “It’s no matter, James. Many Englishmen share this reflexive mistrust and hatred of Jews, but in this country, of course, it is overshadowed by the Americans’ treatment of more than eight million Negroes as something less than citizens or full human beings.”

James almost said Not here in the North but remembered that they were in Washington, D.C., and that had never really been part of the North. He had a sudden and almost overpowering memory of a beautiful spring day in 1863—May 23—when James had deliberately chosen not to go watch his brother Wilkie parading down Beacon Street with his regiment, the famous black 54th Massachusetts Regiment then under the command of the young (and, of course, white) Colonel Shaw. Henry James had been wasting his time at Harvard, paying almost no attention to his courses in law and using his time to read fiction, but on that day when classes were canceled so that all the young Harvard men could go cheer on the departing Massachusetts regiments, James had stayed in his rented room and read. Later, he found out that his older brother William—also at Harvard—had done the same. James was certain that William could no more explain why he hadn’t joined family, friends, and strangers in seeing the regiment off than young “Harry” could.

For a moment, James felt guilt at using the wounding of his brothers Wilkie and Bob in his retort to Theodore Roosevelt the previous night. Wilkie’s wounds had been so terrible, his agony so great while lying for day after day on the moldy and bloody cot set near the front door where they had carried him in, and Wilkie’s courage so profound in later returning to active duty with his regiment, that the experience had changed something in the writer forever. He rebuked himself now for using Wilkie’s suffering as part of his argument.

But he also knew that if he had that May 23, 1863, to do over again, he still would not go to Beacon Street to watch Wilkie’s regiment parade, in all their radiant and masculine health and high spirits and bannered glory, to the train station on their way to war.

James was brought out of his reverie by the sharp report of Holmes striking the metal end of his cane on the lane. “We have to assume that—if Adams is playing fairly, as you say he probably is—his so-called mystery has to do with something he was talking to us about today rather than at the dinner party.”

“That seems likely,” said James, feeling suddenly weary. “But you remember that I missed several minutes of your conversation at Clover’s monument when I went for a walk.”

“Yes,” said Holmes and swerved them off the lane and onto the grass.

James saw the dense trees of the enclosure for Clover’s memorial ahead and said, “You think the monument may be a clue?”

“I think that there is a bench there on which I can sit and smoke while we think,” said Holmes.

They approached the back side of the monument in silence. Just as they got to the granite block, Holmes said, “Odd . . . Adams said to both of us that this was the important side of the monument.” He touched the granite block gently with his stick.

“Not odd at all,” said James. “As powerful as Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture is, it’s the entwined wedding rings on this side of the monument”—he had to reach on tip-toe to touch the large double rings—“that symbolizes their years of marriage, which is what this memorial piece is all about.”

“Yes, certainly,” said Holmes, resting his cane on his shoulder and squinting at the now-shadowed block of stone. James thought that the detective did not sound totally convinced.

Holmes led them around and through the narrow gap through the trees and hedges. The interior area bounded by the hexagon, benches, slab, and sculpture was quite dark. Holmes sat on a bench directly opposite the sculpture, set his heavy canvas bag down on the bench, laid his cane beside it, and crossed his legs while he relit his pipe.

“What did I miss when I left you two alone here this afternoon?” asked James.

Between puffs, Holmes said, “I showed him the picture of the actress and diva Irene Adler, who—I am convinced—played the part of Clover’s friend Rebecca Lorne in the months before Clover’s death. Adams said that he could not be sure it was the same woman. He asked me to drop this inquiry. I said that I had a debt to my client, which led to Adams cursing me and . . .”

“He cursed you?” said James, not even attempting to keep the shock and amazement out of his voice. This was not the character or behavior of the Henry Adams he had known all these years.

“He cursed me,” repeated Holmes, “and then explained that while he had loved Clover’s brother Ned, that madness ran through the Hooper family. He essentially suggested that I was on a mission designed by a madman and said flatly that it had been Ned who’d typed the cards and distributed them to the Five of Hearts every December six . . .”

“Did he have proof of that?” asked James. He’d considered that possibility and it certainly made sense . . . more sense than any other hypothesis.

“He did not,” said Holmes. “It was just his belief.”

“Was there more?”

Holmes opened his hands. James thought of white doves taking flight in the gloom. “Not really. Then he challenged me to find and solve this ‘mystery’ and you returned.”

“It doesn’t sound as if . . .”

“Silence please!” snapped Holmes. At first flush, James was certain that Holmes had heard someone approaching their enclosure and the writer prepared himself to come face to face with Henry Adams again. But no one came through the thin portal amongst the leaves and James realized that Holmes was requesting silence so that he could think.

James looked at the sculpture across from them and although it was impossible—the top of the bronze piece was lower than the top of the line of trees or the granite slab behind it—the cowled figure seemed to glow with more light than the rest of the dark enclosure.

Holmes sat smoking and thinking for at least twenty minutes. James did not mind the calm, although the settling darkness was mildly disconcerting. He was startled when Holmes finally spoke in a loud voice—“ ‘Many is the time in the past two years that I’ve sat and watched and listened, without being watched or listened to, as people encounter this piece for the first time—their comments run the gamut from interesting to cruelly puerile.’ ”

“What?” cried James. “I thought that today was the first time you’d seen this monument!”

“It is,” said Holmes. “It was. Those were Adams’s words this afternoon—to both of us.”

“Yes,” said James, casting his powerful memory back like a searchlight. “Those were his precise words.”

“ ‘I’ve sat and watched and listened, without being watched or listened to’,” Holmes again quoted Adams. In the gloom, Holmes opened his arms to take in all three of the benches that formed one half of the hexagon. “Where could he sit and listen without being seen in return, James?”

“I took him to mean that he stole glances at other people’s reactions to the monument when they were not paying attention to him,” said James. “And that he overheard their comments.”

“That is how I interpreted the words,” said Holmes, standing, “but you know even better than I that Henry Adams is not careless with language. He used those words deliberately—I’ve sat and watched and listened, without being watched or listened to. He has a place around here where he can eavesdrop without being observed in return.”

“Certainly not here at the benches,” said James.

“No, it must be outside this space,” said Holmes. “Do you remember a bench outside this enclosure, close enough to hear voices and to see anyone sitting on these benches?”

“I didn’t notice one during my stroll today,” said James, “but of course I wasn’t looking for benches. I was thinking.”

“Let’s find out,” said Holmes. “We can both go look.”

“It will be too dark in here for us to make out any shape from outside,” said James.

Holmes knocked the last of his ashes out of his pipe and set it away in a pocket of his caped coat. “Precisely,” he said. “This shall be our surrogate person.” He pulled the dark lantern from his bag, set it on the winged arm at the left end of the bench, lit it, and pulled the shutter back. The lantern threw its beam of light toward the only entrance through the trees. Leaving the bag and lantern behind, Holmes led the way back outside.

Outside, it was much less dark. The spring twilight still filled the sky with faint gray, although one or two of the brighter stars were making an appearance. It was almost, not quite, light enough to read by.

“What’s to have kept Adams from sitting on the grass anywhere here?” asked James, gesturing toward the various rises and dips in the turf.

“Can you see your friend Adams sitting on the grass in a cemetery?” laughed Holmes.

James shook his head. “A bench or monument then. And it has to be on this side because this is the only path through the trees wide enough to allow a view inside or out.”

Holmes pointed his cane to the right as he walked to the left. They spread out, studying the monuments and looking for a bench.

After a couple of minutes, James cried out, “This is flat. One could sit on it.” Holmes walked over to join him. Above them, bats and swallows were carving the evening sky into arcs.

“This headstone is high enough and broad enough to make a comfortable perch,” said James, patting it.

“Then why don’t you sit on it?”

James frowned at the detective’s tone. “I cannot. It is, after all, a headstone.”

“Exactly right,” said Holmes, “and we have to assume that Adams does the majority of his looking and listening here in the daylight.”

“Hay has told me that Adams comes so often to this cemetery that he’s referred to it as his real home,” said James.

Holmes nodded, distracted. “The view of people standing or sitting within the enclosure would not be good from here,” he said.

James looked. The detective was correct. Only a fringe of the lantern’s glow could be seen through the narrow break in the trees and virtually all of the hexagon area was totally out of sight.

“And it must be sixty paces from the hexagon in front of the sculpture with the trees adding another buffer,” continued Holmes. “Too far to overhear people speaking in normal tones.”

“Where then . . .” began James.

“The trees and hedge!” said Holmes, almost loping back to the ever-darkening enclosure.

They walked the outer perimeter together. “I take it that we’re hunting for what we Americans call a ‘duck blind’,” whispered James. He wasn’t sure why he had whispered.

“Yes,” replied Holmes. “Some concealed blind in the foliage here.” He poked away with his cane. “In England, a ‘blind’ is what we call a legitimate business that conceals some criminal enterprise.”

“If we find this so-called duck blind,” said James, “we still will not have answered the more important question.”

“What’s that?” asked Holmes, feeling into foliage with his bare hand as well as with his cane.

“Whether we’re hunting canvasback ducks or teals.”

They did the rest of the careful search without speaking. It was no use—the trees were only trees, the hedges real hedges. There was no place of concealment unless one bodily forced his way into the shrubbery and James knew Adams well enough to know that would never happen.

They returned to the lantern and Holmes shuttered it again, allowing their night vision to return, but instead of leaving or sitting on the bench again, he stood there several minutes obviously lost in thought. Waiting for him again, James wondered idly if Holmes’s friend and chronicler, Dr. Watson, spent much of his time waiting for Holmes to come out of his deep-thought fugues.

“Of course!” exclaimed Holmes, snapping his fingers. “I’ve been an absolute fool. A blind man could have seen it!” He lifted the lantern, unmasked it, and carried it to the sculpture, holding it first on one side and then the other, first close then further away.

James stayed where he was. He’d found Saint-Gaudens’s brooding statue disconcerting enough in the daylight; by lantern light it was downright frightening.

“Come,” said Holmes, striding quickly and returning to pick up the bag and shutter-down the lantern’s beam until it was a narrow glow.

“Are we going home now?” asked James.

“No,” said Holmes. “We’re going to Henry Adams’s duck blind.”

The Constant Red Glow in the Darkness

It was the intertwined marriage rings, of course.

For several minutes both Holmes and James had reached up to feel around the sunken edges of the granite rings with Holmes muttering much of the time—“This is the important side of the monument”—“The monument was covered with a tent for a month and a half”—“Who needs to protect a granite slab from the weather?”—“Adams did everything but draw me a map and leave real arrows on the grass showing me the way.”

On the first three tactile explorations, Holmes’s fingers found nothing. But then he felt the slight niche, the smallest of indentations, at the bottom of the ten-inch-wide right ring.

“Stand back,” he said to James and retrieved a burglar’s tool from his bag: a very short crowbar with a chisel’s narrow end to it. It fit. There was a corresponding snap from behind the granite and the two rings swiveled to almost right angles from the monument. Holmes pushed on one of them. A panel in the granite swiveled, opening into absolute darkness.

“Good Lord!” cried James as he took a quick two steps backward as if he feared being swallowed up by that black aperture.

Before stepping in, Holmes played the narrow beam from the dark lantern into that darkness and it was good that he had. About fourteen feet inside, the floor ended and a square hole in the floor—showing a ladder on the right side and just big enough for a man—dropped into blackness. Straight ahead, on the far side of that hole, was a strange cushioned seat one could reach by walking carefully along granite ledges on either side. The far side of the interior of the granite monument was irregular, a series of bronze protrusions and indentations.

“The statue’s hollow,” said Holmes, his voice showing no surprise because he’d realized all this while sitting out on the bench. He put the tool back in his bag, held the bag and his walking stick in one hand and the lantern ahead of him in the other, stepped in, moved to the ladder side along the narrow strip of granite, then played the lantern beam back over the entrance. “Take care when you step in, James.”

“I’m not going in there,” said the writer. He’d kept his distance from the monument when the panel had swiveled open.

“All right,” said Holmes, “but go back to the carriage waiting for us on New Hampshire Avenue. I shan’t be long in here.” He started to swing shut the panel.

“Wait!” said James. “I am coming in.” The portly writer stepped in with great care and balanced on the granite ledge on the left side of the hole. Holmes played the lantern beam over the inside of the portal. “I need to make sure there’s a release mechanism on the inside that does not require a key so that we don’t get . . . ahh, here it is.” Holmes worked the mechanism to his satisfaction and then swung the swiveling panel shut until it clicked.

They were entombed.

“The ladder first,” said Holmes and aimed the beam down the iron ladder driven into the granite. It had a railing and rungs and went down about eight feet. Nothing else was visible at the bottom until he realized that the wall on the statue side of the bottom of the short shaft was actually a black curtain.

“Would you please hold the lantern with that beam playing just so until I get to the bottom?” asked Holmes.

“No!” cried James. “I mean . . . you can’t. We must not! This is . . . all this . . . down there . . . it’s too terrible!” The last was said in a dying whisper since this place seemed to call for whispering.

Holmes looked at his companion’s face in the reflected lantern light and knew exactly what James was thinking lay beyond that black velvet curtain: a glass coffin with Clover Adams’s rotting remains in it. What would she look like after seven years? Unfortunately, Holmes knew all too well what a body dead seven years looked like. He whispered, “No, no, I think not, James. Your friend Adams is strange, perhaps even mad by some standards, but there’s a method to this madness. I am convinced that we will find nothing terrible or gruesome down there.”

He handed the lantern to James, set his bag and stick on the cushioned chair that was suspended along the far wall by a round iron post that was secured in the interior of the sculpture.

“Down just a bit,” said Holmes and, when James tipped the dark lantern forward, he clambered down several rungs. “I’ll take it now.” The tall man’s white fingers reached for the metal handle atop the lantern.

At the bottom, Holmes paused a moment and played the light on all sides. It was a narrow shaft, hardly broader than his shoulders, and it would have been problematic for anyone who suffered from claustrophobic panics. Holmes smiled, thinking that he must look like some archaeologist entering a newly discovered tomb in Egypt or Babylon or Troy.

But there were no hieroglyphics on these three granite walls, nor switches or niches or clues. Only the ladder and this black curtain.

Raising the lantern and opening the shutter a little wider, Holmes pushed the curtain aside and stepped forward, making sure that there was granite beneath his feet before taking his steps.

“What do you see?” James’s voice came down the shaft in a harsh, urgent whisper.

“Just a moment,” said Holmes.

The room was a rectangular prism about six feet wide and eight feet long that had been laid under the footing for the monument sculpture and the paved and graveled hexagon above. Holmes estimated that there were probably two feet of solid concrete or even granite above his head. Then soil.

Carved into the granite to his left was a long niche about shoulder high. It was filled with books. To his immediate right there was a granite column extending from the wall, also about shoulder height. On it was a small lantern. Holmes was tempted to light it with his prototype cigarette lighter—the resident lantern’s light would be better than the beam from his dark lantern—but he wanted to be sure to leave no signs of his having been here.

The rest of the granite wall to his right was carved into a larger niche, rising only some three feet from the floor, and on the upper surface of that niche was a narrow bed cushion with two pillows set at the far end. The whole bed was only about six feet long and Holmes would have had to curl his legs up if he’d lain on it. He did not. The bed was made up neatly and Holmes touched the blanket and sheets: warm, not cold or moldy-feeling. They must be changed regularly.

Holmes would wager money that these were the only times in his 55 years of life that Henry Brooks Adams had ever made his own bed.

There was a second narrow granite column at the far end and a second small lantern on it. Tucked by that lantern was a book. Holmes picked it up—it was leather bound—and played the lantern’s beam over it.

The Light of Asia: The Teacher of Nirvana and the Law by Sir Edwin Arnold. It had caused a slight stir in America and England when it was released in 1879, but Holmes had read only part of it before impatiently setting it aside. He thought Arnold’s writing was insufferably prolix. Still, he remembered the review in The Times of London, written by the noted Japanologist Lafcadio Hearn, when the 1883 edition came out: “After all, Buddhism in some esoteric form may prove the religion of the future . . . What are the heavens of all Christian fancies after all but Nirvana—the extinction of individuality in the eternal.”

Indeed, thought Holmes.

After carefully setting the book back in place above the pillows by the second lantern, Holmes stepped back through the curtain into the short vertical shaft. “Come down, James.”

“I cannot,” came the whisper in return.

“You really should,” said Holmes. “Otherwise you shall spend a lifetime wondering if I was telling the truth. Trust me that there is nothing disturbing here.”

There came down a sound like stifled hysterical laughter. In an urgent whisper, James said, “Everything about this moment is disturbing, Holmes. We have invaded the deepest part of a good man’s privacy, intruding into his mourning and perhaps into his madness. Our behavior is criminal. Unspeakable.”

“Agreed,” said Holmes. “But it’s done. Come down and look and then we’ll finish our business here.”

“Hold the lantern higher,” Henry James whispered and ponderously started down the iron ladder.

Five minutes later they were both up in the aboveground part of the monument again. The chair with its padded seat was broad enough for both of them to perch on it if each steadied himself with a leg outstretched to the granite ledge on one side.

“There’s no view through the eyes,” whispered James. It was true. They were able to make out the inverted features of the sculpture’s face now with the aid of the lantern beam, but although the eyes had seemed empty of bronze from casual inspection outside the piece, now they could see two oval slugs of metal—not bronze—covering those openings. Holmes had seen those non-bronze insets within the otherwise open, downcast eyes when he’d held the lantern up to inspect the sculpture.

“Look for a lever,” whispered Holmes. “These plugs are attached to . . . ahh!”

The lever mechanism was on James’s left side.

“Put your hand on it, but don’t open it yet,” said Holmes, his mouth close to James’s ear. “Let me turn out the lantern first and let our eyes adapt to the darkness for a moment.”

It was disconcerting for Holmes to spend that moment pressed so close to another man. He could feel James inching away, putting most of his weight on his left foot so as to avoid touching.

“Now,” whispered Holmes.

The shutters over the eyes made almost no noise as the metal rod above them rose and they lifted the eye plugs out of place.

Their angle of vision was good—the androgynous sculpture’s head was angled forward and the face partially sheltered by the cowl, but the eye openings were larger than life-size and, with Holmes taking the right eye and James the left, they could see the entire hexagon before them, the benches, and the stars above the enclosure of trees. The space was empty.

After a moment, they both sat back. The view was still good.

“This is how Adams sees and hears people’s reactions without being observed in turn,” whispered James.

Holmes nodded.

“I’m not sure that . . .” began James but silenced himself when Holmes firmly gripped his upper arm.

Someone had entered the shrub-bounded enclosure outside.

Both Holmes and James leaned forward, instinctively not putting their eyes too close to the oval openings to be sure that starlight did not cause a gleam.

Holmes could not make out any detail save for the shadows of trousered legs—definitely not a woman in a dress—but the man seemed to be very tall and very thin. This impression was confirmed when he sat on the bench directly opposite the sculpture, for his shoulders were higher than the very high back of the bench—higher even than Holmes’s had been when he’d sat there.

James leaned over to whisper directly into Holmes’s ear. “It’s not Adams!”

Holmes shushed him by squeezing harder. The scrape of the man’s boots or shoes against the gravel had been so audible that Holmes suspected the enclosure acted as a sort of hearing gallery, amplifying sound. He suspected that Adams had directed Stanford White to achieve that effect—thus the oddly high back of the benches and the triangle of stone. Holmes worried that any noise from within the sculpture might as easily be carried out to the open area.

James intuited the message and leaned forward again.

For several minutes the man did nothing. As Holmes’s eyes adapted even further to the moonless night, he could see the man’s long arms spread to either side on the back of the bench—the same posture that Holmes had assumed earlier.

After a few minutes of this silent staring match, the man’s arms came down, Holmes could make out pale hands touching pockets of a jacket or waistcoat, clearly heard the scrape of a match, and the man leaned forward to light a cigarette.

That flare of a match should have revealed the man’s face, but Holmes saw only a glow with an arc of blackness cut out of it. He realized at once that the man was wearing a broad-brimmed hat of some sort and the brim had occluded any view of his face.

Had that been an accident or coldly deliberate? Sherlock Holmes never guessed, but his hunch at the moment was that it was the latter.

He and James sat there, uncomfortably perched on the same chair, hardly daring to breathe while the man smoked his cigarette.

A single red glow in the darkness. No features visible. Only the dot of red in the darkness.

The man eventually finished that cigarette, there was a half-seen movement of pale hands, and he lit another one. Again the downturned brim of a hat concealed any features that might have been caught in the brief flare of the match.

He’s playing with us, thought Holmes.

He hadn’t expected Lucan Adler to find him so soon, but Holmes realized that he might have underestimated the speed of gossip about his presence, gossip spreading outward not only from the Hays and their servants and the Cabot Lodges and Camerons and Roosevelt, but from Clemens and William Dean Howells as well. Lucan was the ultimate predator and Holmes realized, with a tightening in his chest not unlike fear, that he had given that predator-assassin more than enough time to find him.

Then why am I alive? thought Holmes. He realized that, without thinking about it, he’d slid his right hand into his traveling coat’s pocket.

Instead of the reassuring handgrip of a pistol—he still had not taken time to buy one here in Washington—his fingers found the short, flexible grip of the cosh—Americans called it a “blackjack”—that he’d brought with him. The tough leather of the working end of the cosh was filled with sand and it was guaranteed, when used properly, to bring even the largest opponent to his knees if not facedown on the ground.

In his trouser pocket, he had his folding penknife with its four-inch blade. In his burglary bag, the short crowbar he’d used to open the monument was the closest thing to a weapon.

The great Sherlock Holmes, thought Holmes with hot irony overriding the stab of panic he’d felt a few seconds earlier. Brings a penknife and a cosh to a gunfight.

He had never wanted to confront Lucan Adler with Henry James at his side. But now, he felt almost certain, he had. He was almost as certain that Lucan knew that Holmes and someone else were in the monument looking at him.

The red glow was extinguished. Holmes tensed, gripping the handle of his cosh. At least if Lucan entered the monument—Holmes had little doubt that the anarchist assassin had watched James and him enter it—there would be so little room that Lucan’s marksmanship with a rifle or pistol would be largely negated.

A perfect space, especially with the open shaft that Lucan might not know was there, for a fight with a knife or cosh, thought Holmes.

But with Henry James in the middle of it.

A third match flared. Again the taunt with the head downward, the large brim of a hat concealing the face. Again the steady glow of the cigarette’s end in the deep darkness of the monument’s enclosure.

They had sat there for more than half an hour, Holmes estimated, staring at the unknown man who was staring at them. Or at least at the sculpture, which would be only a dark shape in the night. Holmes was almost certain that it wasn’t Henry Adams out there—even if he were wrong about the man’s height, would Adams ever wear a hat like that?—and every minute that passed made him more certain that it was Lucan Adler, playing with James and him the way a cat plays with a mouse in the minutes before biting its head off.

Holmes’s legs were cramping in the uncomfortable posture, but worse than that was the rising pain from his three bullet wounds. The one in the lower right of his back was the worst. Holmes realized that in the intensity of his brooding on Adams’s mystery that afternoon and evening, he’d forgotten to take his second injection of heroin. Its absence seemed to make the wounds ache more.

Ten minutes, he gauged, into the third glowing red dot, and Holmes set his mouth almost against James’s ear—he could smell the expensive pomade in his hair—and whispered, “Stay here . . . I’m going out there.”

He could feel rather than actually see James shaking his head no, but Holmes gripped him tightly on the upper arm again, repeating his instruction to stay where he was.

Perhaps Lucan didn’t actually see us enter the monument after all, thought Holmes. If he did not, then James has a chance to survive even if Lucan kills me.

Stepping silently on the right-side granite strip, Holmes found the lantern by feel and lifted it in his left hand. He would have to light it again outside, then shutter it quickly. But a bright beam of light shone in Lucan’s face might . . .

He did not finish the thought because he did not really believe it would.

Taking one last glance to make sure that the figure and cigarette glow were still there, Holmes gingerly stepped over his burglary bag, found the opening mechanism by touch, and clicked it open. The click was a small noise, but it sounded as loud as a rifle shot to Holmes’s anxious ears.

The air that rushed in was cold and Holmes realized how overheated the small space had become during the time that he and James had been in there, emanating body heat.

Once outside, Holmes took the risk of pushing the panel shut—another intolerable click—to give James that tiny chance of survival if this was Lucan Adler waiting.

He knelt, fished his mechanical lighter from his trouser pocket in one swift movement, and lighted the dark lantern. He’d already fully shuttered the front, so the only light had been the flare of his lighter—but that had seemed interminable and visible to anyone in the cemetery.

He’d looked away as he flicked the lighter and lit the lantern, not wanting to lose his night vision, but he still had to stand there half a moment and blink before he could fully see again. Holding the lantern forward in his left hand, the fingers of that hand ready to open the shutter all the way in one fast movement, Holmes pulled out the cosh and carried it by his side.

Holmes walked stealthily around the right corner of the enclosure, toward the side where the cleft in the trees allowed access. No light escaped from that opening. Holmes was taking care where he put his feet but did not want to walk too slowly. Surprise, after all, and perhaps a sudden shaft of light in Lucan’s eyes, were almost certainly Holmes’s only hope for surviving the next few minutes.

He got to the opening in the trees and stopped, finally leaning forward to put only his head forward in a fast peek around the edge. Even that movement, he knew, would be target enough for a master assassin with a pistol ready. Holmes knew that even though clouds had occluded the stars, it was still lighter outside the enclosure than within, and his head would be in silhouette.

No shot. No sound.

Holmes looked again, eyes straining, but could not make out the flowing cigarette or the form of the man on the bench. It was simply too dark in that enclosure now. He realized that when the clouds had come in sometime in the last forty-five minutes, he and James had been watching the red glow of the cigarette rather than the dark outline of the man in the blackness.

No further reason to wait, thought Holmes. Raising the lantern high, seeing nothing but darkness ahead in and beyond the entrance cleft, Holmes strode quickly forward, the sound of his brushing branches as loud as an avalanche in his ears.

The instant he was through the cleft in the trees his fingers swept open the shutter on the lantern, his right arm flexing as he hefted the cosh.

The place on the bench where the man had been sitting was empty.

Where had he moved? Anywhere in the enclosure would afford him a perfect shot.

Holmes considered slamming shut the lantern’s shutter—Lucan’s sharpshooter advantages eliminated, just two men in blackness, feeling for each other, and Holmes had the knife and the cosh—but he found he was too impatient for whatever the showdown would bring to follow that saner tactic.

He moved quickly, in erratic patterns, holding the lantern away from his body, aiming the beam this way and then that way. The benches were empty. The graveled hexagon in front of the sculpture was empty. The area around the granite and bronze monument was empty.

Behind the benches. It would have been Holmes’s first choice for a hiding place if he were waiting to shoot a man here.

Holmes leaped up onto the bench and then over the high back, going to a quick crouch on the back side of the bench closest to the opening in the trees, lantern beam illuminating the narrow corridor ahead of him between the stone bench and the trees.

Empty.

Rushing forward, still in a crouch so that his head was below the level of the back of the stone bench, he reached the first corner and set the lantern on the ground, its aimed beam shooting to the left.

No shot. No sound.

Holmes looked around, saw this second corridor of space empty, saw no new breaks in the wall of foliage to his right, and he hurried to the last turn, not bothering to pause before he swept around it. He was ready to dash down the lantern in a second if he couldn’t get close enough to blind his opponent with it.

Nothing.

Holmes came out into the opening and checked all the walls of foliage. Someone could have forced his way through the tree branches and hedges and out into the opening, but Holmes certainly would have heard him do so as he approached.

Satisfied that no one else was in the enclosure, he held the lantern high again and walked toward the bronze sculpture on its two-level base. He approached it obliquely, visualizing Henry James dead, his body dropped into the vertical shaft, and Lucan’s young hunter’s eyes at one of the eyehole openings and a pistol pressed against the other opening. The eyes were large enough to pass a bullet from a revolver.

His cape-coat brushed against foliage as he crept toward the seated, brooding, still-powerful sculpture. The combination of darkness and harsh lantern light brought out the draped folds in the robe, the shadows under the cowl, the straight nose and solid chin, the up-raised and folded-in right arm with its fingers disappearing under bronze cheek and chin.

“James?” Holmes had used a normal, conversational voice and the loudness of it in the thick night made him jump.

No response.

Louder—“James?”

“I’m here,” came the oddly muffled reply from the statue’s head.

Holmes imagined the portly writer under duress, the muzzle of a pistol pressed under his double chin. For that matter, he hadn’t been certain that the muffled voice belonged to Henry James.

“What was the name of that novel of yours that I said I liked?” said Holmes, still standing close to the right side of the monument so that he could not be seen or targeted from inside the sculpture.

“What?” The echoing voice sounded more like James this time. An obviously irritated James.

Holmes repeated his question.

“The Princess Casamassima,” came the anger-tinged reply. “But what on earth does that have to do with anything?”

Holmes smiled and stepped out in front of the cowled figure. He could not help but glance over his shoulder every few seconds. “Where is he?” he asked the statue.

“I don’t have the vaguest idea, Holmes.” Holmes could hear the voice better from this new vantage point and it was definitely James’s, although muffled by the bronze. “Just after you stepped out, the cigarette glow disappeared. I didn’t see the man move . . . did not see him go out through the entrance. He just . . . disappeared.”

“All right,” said Holmes. “I missed him then. Could you please bring my bag when you come out?”

“It’s too dark,” said James through one of the eyeholes. “I can’t see where to put my feet. The shaft . . . can’t find the lock mechanism . . . I’ll try, but . . .”

“No, on second thought, it’s better that I come fetch you,” said Holmes. “Sit tight for just another moment and I’ll bring the lantern.”

But instead of going outside and to the rear of the monument, Holmes went straight across the hexagon, dropped to one knee, and began examining the graveled ground near the bench. Then he took several minutes to move the lantern close to the ground near all three benches. Then he stepped around behind the bench and did the same careful examination. He was checking the ground in the open space of the hexagon when the statue made another muffled noise.

Holmes walked over to it and held the lantern high. “What was that, James?”

“What in God’s name are you doing!” demanded the androgynous face of deepest mourning.

“Looking for the cigarettes and/or ashes,” said Holmes. “We watched Lucan—this figure in the dark—smoke at least three cigarettes to their end—we could both smell the tobacco smoke in the darkness—but there’s not a single ash or remnant of a dead cigarette anywhere. He must have dropped the ashes from the cigarettes into his palm and put the ashes and the cigarette butts in his pocket. Don’t you find that odd behavior for an innocent person, James?”

“Damn the cigarette ashes,” said the shadow-sharpened bronze face. “Come get me out of here, Holmes. I’ve needed to relieve myself for more than an hour now.”

The hansom and its cabbie were not there when they reached New Hampshire Avenue.

“That blackguard!” cried James, referring to the driver. “That cursed driver took your money but left anyway.”

“We’ve been a long time,” said Holmes. He’d done the entire walk from the monument with his shoulders hunched until they ached, waiting for the impact of the pistol or rifle shot whose sound he would not hear. They stayed tensed out in the open of the lightly traveled avenue. There were no street lights or house lights here.

“Maybe our smoking friend took it,” said James. “What do we do now?”

“It’s only a little less than four miles back to Mrs. Stevens’s place, so we walk,” said Holmes, knowing that despite his best efforts to relax, his body would be expecting the impact of a bullet every step of the way. And for every hour and minute of the days and nights to come until this whole matter was resolved.

Some minutes later, they came to a single gas lamp on a post in the lawn of a darkened house. The light drew a yellow oval on the macadam of the road and illuminated both of them as James stopped for a second.

This is the perfect spot, thought Holmes. Lucan in the darkness behind the house or in the blackness under the trees to either side. His target—or perhaps targets, if Lucan was in an especially bloody mood—frozen like a deer in the beam of an illegal hunting lantern.

“I somehow contrived to lose my watch,” said James. “What time is it?”

Holmes could only hope that the author hadn’t lost the watch inside the monument. Tomorrow morning, Holmes was going to let Henry Adams know that he had figured out the little mystery, been to and inside the most expensive duck blind in history, but he didn’t want Adams to know about his friend James’s participation.

Now he set down his heavy canvas burglar bag, lifted his watch out of his waistcoat pocket by its chain, and held it so that James could see in the light.

“Quarter past midnight,” said Holmes. James merely nodded, lifted the bag for Holmes, and began walking again.

Past midnight, thought Holmes as he caught up to the other man, macadam crunching under their soles. It was now Tuesday—the fourth of April—Sherlock Holmes’s birthday.

He had just turned 39 years old.

Wiggins Two Arrived Safely New York Today

The morning after the absurd and disturbing melodrama in Rock Creek Cemetery, Henry James awoke with the immediate and determined resolution to do something. He just could not decide what. Return immediately to England. Go to Henry Adams with a confession and abject apologies for invading his most hidden privacy? (No, no . . . the thought of that bed in that sarcophagus of stone under the ground on the subterranean level close to Clover’s buried remains not only still gave James goosebumps, but made him slightly nauseous. He could never bring it up with Adams, nor hint in any way that he knew about the secret world inside Clover’s sculpture and monument stone. Nor tell John Hay. Never.)

As James bathed and trimmed his short beard and dressed that rainy Tuesday morning—wishing for the hundredth time that he had the Smiths, his mediocre cook and her less-than-mediocre tippler husband of a manservant, with him from De Vere Gardens—he decided to tell Mrs. Stevens’s slow-witted daughter that he would again take his breakfast in the privacy of his room. He was in the hall looking for her when the last man he wanted to see—Mr. Sherlock Holmes, looking damp and red-cheeked and in the process of shrugging off his waterproof macintosh—was preparing to knock him up.

“Just the man I wanted to see!” cried Holmes, as good-naturedly as if they hadn’t invaded a good man’s mind and most sacred secret the night before. “Come down to Mrs. Stevens’s breakfast room and we’ll talk over a good breakfast.”

“I was going to have mine in my room,” James replied in a cool tone.

Holmes didn’t seem to perceive the frost in the air. “Nonsense. There’s much we have to talk about and very little time in which to do it, James. No, now come on down to the breakfast room like a good fellow.”

“I have no intention of discussing any part or aspect of last night’s . . . events,” said James.

Holmes actually smiled. “Good. Neither do I. This is more important news. I’ll see you down in the breakfast room.”

And Holmes turned with one of his sudden, almost spastic (although strangely graceful), moves and bounded down the stairway, shedding rain from the macintosh folded over his arm as he went.

James paused at the head of the stairs. Should he snub Holmes now and set their relationship on the new and definitely colder and more formal level to which it needed to be adjusted? Or should he suffer hearing this “more important news”?

In the end, James’s hunger for breakfast won out over the higher moral arguments. He went downstairs.

“I have moved out of Mrs. Stevens’s comfortable abode,” said Holmes, eating his bean and egg and sausage and fried-toast English-style breakfast which he’d charmed Mrs. Stevens into making for him each morning.

For some reason, James was stunned. “When?” he said.

“This morning.”

“Why?” asked James a second before he realized that he did not want to know the answer and that it was none of his business anyway.

“Things have become too dangerous,” answered Holmes, almost gulping his coffee. Usually, James had noticed, the detective was indifferent to food, but there were times—such as this morning—where he seemed to be stoking a steam engine with fuel more than merely eating.

“Whoever that man was smoking his cigarettes at the monument last night, odds are that he was someone who had followed us there with an intention to do me harm . . . in short, to kill me,” said Holmes, eating his eggs with gusto. “My continuing to reside here would put you, Mrs. Stevens, her daughter, and everyone else around me in some danger.”

“But you’re not sure that the man last night was . . . an assassin,” said James, almost stumbling over that last melodramatic word.

“No. Nowhere near certain,” agreed Holmes. “But for the time being, I should take no chances with my friends’ well-being.”

Something about that phrase—“my friends”—made James feel warm inside. And he hated himself for feeling that way. He certainly had not included this Sherlock Holmes person in his rigidly vetted and constantly reviewed list of friends, and for Holmes to suggest that their association had reached that plane was pure presumption.

Yet James still felt the warm glow.

Holmes finished eating and lit a cigarette. The detective never ate the yolk of his fried egg and this was one reason that James dreaded having breakfast with the man; invariably, when finished with his cigarette, he would stub it out in the runny yolk, leaving the butt end sticking up like some artillery shell that had failed to detonate. The repulsive habit always bothered Henry James and this morning, he knew, it would actively nauseate him.

“I’m not very hungry this morning,” lied James, pushing his own plate forward and preparing to leave. “I wish you luck in your new habitations . . .”

“Wait, sir. Wait,” said Holmes, actually putting his long violinist’s fingers on James’s lower sleeve as if ready to physically restrain him if the author attempted to rise and leave. “There’s more I need to tell you.”

James waited but with growing anxiety as the cigarette Holmes was smoking burned itself shorter and the runny yellow-orange egg yolk sat there amidst the debris of the eaten breakfast like a leaking bull’s-eye. He was waiting because he wanted to know where Holmes would be . . . if this was indeed the last of their absurd adventure together.

“Are you going to tell me where you’ve moved?” said James, shocked at his own rude bluntness.

“No, it would be better for everyone if you didn’t know, James.”

Say nothing, James commanded himself. Several times in the last few days, he’d already stepped out of the character of “Henry James, Author” that he’d created over almost fifty years. Time to come back to himself again. The watcher, not the initiator. The wary listener, not the yammering fool. Still, he heard himself saying—“Will you be leaving Washington then? I’m asking just in case Hay or Adams or . . . someone . . . might need to know.”

“If you need to get in touch with me,” said Holmes, “send a note to this establishment.” Holmes clicked open his retracting mechanical pencil and wrote quickly on the back of one of his own business cards.

James looked at the address. It was a cigar shop on Constitution Avenue.

“You’re residing at a cigar store?” James couldn’t help saying.

Holmes made that abrupt, almost barking sound that served him as a laugh. “Not at all, my dear James. But the proprietor there will forward any message sent to me by dispatching a boy either to my new place of residence or to send a cable. For some reason known only to Americans, the cigar shop is open twenty-four hours a day, so feel free to contact me at any time.”

James nodded, slipped Holmes’s card into his wallet, set the wallet back in his jacket, and was about to rise again when Mrs. Stevens appeared in the doorway with a young boy in tow.

“He has a message for you, Mr. James.” She paused, perhaps reading James’s expression, and added, “I know the lad. His name is Thomas. He carries messages between some of the best homes and families around Lafayette Park. If you wish to send a reply message, I’m sure it will be safe and secure in his keeping—and unread until it reaches its source.”

James nodded, interpreting her final comment to mean that young Thomas couldn’t read. He beckoned the boy forward.

Unfolding the paper, he saw that it was on John Hay’s private stationery.

Dear Harry—

Should you like to drop around today just after tea-time—say 5:15 or so—I would be pleased to discuss a most important (and perhaps urgent) topic with you. I look forward to seeing you then.

Your Obedient Servant,

John Hay

P.S.—Please do not inform Mr. Holmes of your visit. This is very important.—JH

Mrs. Stevens had thoughtfully brought a small stationery pad should James wish to respond. He did. Shielding his writing from Holmes’s view, he accepted Hay’s invitation and said that he would be there promptly at 5:15 p.m.—a rather specific time, James thought, but then John Hay was a man who’d devoted his life to specifics since he’d been secretary to President Abraham Lincoln.

James handed the note and a coin to the boy, saying, “Deliver this into the hand of the person who sent this message, son.”

Thomas might not be able to read, but there was intelligence in his eye as he nodded.

“Oh, you don’t need to pay the boy, Mr. James,” Mrs. Stevens was saying. “I’m sure the person who sent the message already did that.”

“Nonetheless,” said James and waved Thomas away on his errand.

At that moment two other lads were shown in by Mrs. Stevens’s daughter, who looked confused at the sudden invasion of messengers. One was a boy about Thomas’s age although less-well dressed, the other a young man in his late teens who was wearing the livery of a Western Union delivery boy.

“Message for Mr. Holmes,” said the ragged lad.

“Telegram for Mr. Holmes,” said the older boy.

James still thought and felt as if he were on the verge of leaving, but stayed seated out of sheer curiosity. With Holmes moved away—God knows where—he might not see the detective again. All of the tantalizing events of the past couple of weeks might forever remain a mystery.

Holmes stubbed his cigarette out right in the center of the egg yolk and James looked away to control his rising nausea.

Holmes quickly read his telegram, set the flimsy on the table next to his napkin, said, “No reply” to the Western Union lad who touched his cap and left, and then waved forward the other boy with the private message. This he read quickly, clutched the pad that James had used for his own reply, and said, “I shall be back in one minute, James. I’ll only walk our young Mercury here to the door as I scribble a reply.”

Mrs. Stevens and her daughter had already left. The telegram boy was gone. Alone, James could clearly hear the footsteps of Holmes and the second messenger on the parquet floor of the foyer beyond the parlor, and then the squeak of the front door hinges as they stepped out onto the porch. The obscene cigarette butt still rose from the center of the bleeding yolk.

Beside it lay the telegram Holmes had forgotten near his napkin.

No, thought James. Absolutely not.

He stood as if heading for the stairway up to his room, turned right instead of left, and opened the top fold of the telegram with his left hand.

James quickly let the top fold of the telegram drop into place and he walked to the stairway on the opposite side of the room as he heard Holmes’s usual brisk steps on the parquet and then on the boards and braided rug in the parlor. He was standing on the first step with one foot raised to the second step when Holmes bustled back in. Holmes noticed the telegram, folded it, and set it in his hacking jacket’s pocket with the other message without showing any signs of concern at it being read.

“So, you’re heading back up to your room now,” said Holmes.

“Egad, Holmes,” said Henry James, feeling a need to put this imitation gentleman in his place. “Your powers of deduction . . . how do you do it?”

Instead of showing anger or embarrassment, Holmes merely made that semi-bark of a laugh again, raised his walking stick—the one with the sword in it, James knew—and said, “Well, then, it’s cheerio for the time being, although I fully trust that our paths shall cross again before too much time goes by.”

“I’m thinking of sailing for England very soon,” said James. He wasn’t sure why he said it, since he’d not made up his mind about any such thing. He absently touched his waistcoat pocket where the ivory snuffbox containing his sister Alice’s ashes was as firmly embedded as a tumor.

“Ah, well, then perhaps we shan’t see each other again,” Holmes said, almost lightly, almost merrily, thought James with an inward glower. “Ta-ta,” said Holmes and turned his back and walked briskly out of the room and to the front door, whistling some cheap music-hall tune that sounded vaguely familiar to James. Something he’d heard at the Old Mo on Drury Lane.

James realized that he had been standing there for almost a full minute after he’d heard the front door slam shut, one foot still raised to the second step, standing like a statue of a man turned to stone by the Gorgon’s stare. Worse than that, he realized that he was waiting for Holmes to come back to say that he’d changed his mind, he wasn’t moving out after all.

Mrs. Stevens came into the breakfast room to clear the dishes, saw James standing there frozen on the stairway with the odd look on his face, and she was clearly startled. “Is everything all right, Mr. James? Do you need something?”

“Everything is fine, Mrs. Stevens. I was just heading up to my room to do some writing. A good day to you, madam.”

“And a good day to you, Mr. James.” She craned her neck to watch him climb the steep steps as if she’d been hired by Holmes . . . or Mycroft . . . or Moriarty . . . or Lucan Adler . . . to spy on him.

James started to knock at the Hays’ front door—that is, raised his knuckled fist to knock, but decided to push the new-fangled electrical doorbell button instead—promptly at 5:15 p.m.

It had been a hard morning and afternoon. He had tried to write—working with pencil and pad on the new play he’d promised the popular actor-manager George Alexander—but while Mrs. Stevens’s boarding house was a relatively pleasant place, it was still a boarding house. Noises, loud conversations with workmen and the dull-witted daughter, the sounds of two men looking at and loudly appraising Holmes’s now-vacant bed-sitting-room, even Mrs. Stevens humming as she ironed in the little room off the kitchen or, when his window was open, when she was hanging wash on the clothesline below after the rain had stopped, all had conspired to distract the strangely anxious and irritable Henry James. A hundred times that afternoon he had unconsciously touched the hard bulge of the ivory snuffbox in his waistcoat pocket and wondered what he would do next. Go straight back to England? Go to the family burial plots in Cambridge outside of Boston and finally carry out his self-appointed duty of burying the last of his sister’s ashes there? Go to join William and his family in Florence or Geneva or wherever they were off to at the moment? He could talk to William—sometimes. Well, rarely. In truth, almost never.

In the meantime, he was happy to have this invitation from John Hay. James felt like a man who, in leaning over a ship’s railing to get a better view of something below, has fallen overboard. This invitation had felt like a life ring, complete with attached line to pull him in, tossed to him with happy, expert aim.

Benson answered the bell and, after silently directing a footman to take James’s wet coat, top hat, and walking cane, led the writer directly to Hay’s now-familiar study. Upon looking up from a formidable stack of papers to see James standing in his doorway after being announced, John sprang to his feet, was around the desk in a minute, and used one hand to shake James’s while clasping the author firmly on the shoulder with his other hand. It came close to being a hug—which, of course, would have horrified and appalled Henry James—but now it made him feel that glow of good feeling that he’d been certain he had lost.

“I am so happy to see you, Harry,” said Hay as he escorted James to the comfortable chair just opposite Hay’s across the broad desk. Hay had kept in literal contact, holding James by the elbow as he walked the few paces to the chair. When James had taken his seat, Hay perched on the corner of his desk—amazingly spry for a man who would turn 55 in October, was James’s thought (and not his first on that subject about Hay)—and cried, “Well, it’s quarter past the old Five of Hearts’ tea time, always precisely at five y’know, but we can have tea anyway—Clover’s ghost would not object although we may hear a disembodied rap or two from the table there—or perhaps some really good whisky instead.”

James hesitated. It was far too early for such a strong drink for him, he rarely touched whisky anyway, but this rainy afternoon, with the fire crackling and popping in John Hay’s study’s fireplace, he found the idea of a strong drink attractive—almost compelling.

“Is this an honest Scotch whisky, with no ‘e’ in the word?” asked James. “Or one of your American sour-mash whiskeys with the ‘e’ inserted?”

Hay laughed. “Oh, Scotch whisky, I assure you, Harry. I’d never offend your Anglicized sensibilities with either sour mash or a sneaky, unwanted ‘e’.” Hay gestured to Benson who seemed more to dissolve in thin air than step away.

“I have a twelve-year-old single-malt Cardhu from Speyside, matured in oak casks, that I find better than most twenty-one-year-old single-malt whiskeys,” continued Hay, going around the desk to take his place in the high-backed and leather-tufted chair there. “Its only drawback is that one can purchase it only at Speyside, so I must either travel there each time I’m in England or constantly be paying a man to travel to Speyside, purchase it, pack it, and ship it.”

“I look forward to tasting it,” said James, knowing that he’d sipped 12-year-old Cardhu single malts with Paul Joukowsky and even in Lady Wolseley’s salon, the latter thanks to the tastes of her husband, Field Marshal Viscount Wolseley, the inspiration for the “very model of a modern major general” in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Pirates of Penzance.

Even before Hay began speaking again, Benson was back with a silver tray holding the decanter of Cardhu, crystal whisky glasses, a spritzer of soda water, a pitcher of regular water, and a short stack of leather coasters with John Hay’s crest on them. When Benson turned toward the writer and raised one eyebrow, James said, “Neat please.”

“The usual dash of water for me, Benson,” said Hay.

When they had their whisky glasses and Benson had left, silently closing the study door behind him, each man raised his glass—the desk was too broad for any clinking of crystal—and Hay said, “Amicus absentibus.”

James was surprised by the toast—to which absent friends, exactly, would they be drinking?—but he nodded and drank some of the amber whisky. It was excellent. James knew enough about judging whiskies to know that the palate on this one was smooth and well-balanced, the finish bringing out some lingering, sweet smoke in the aftertaste, but never overpowering. Never “showing off” as so many single malts had the tendency to do.

James nodded again, this time acknowledging the quality of the whisky, all the while thinking—Which absent friend or friends?

“Harry, I won’t beat about the bush,” said Hay leaning forward and cradling his Scotch glass with both hands above the papers on his desk. “Clara and I are hoping that you might consider moving back in with us for as long as you stay in Washington.”

Is this related to last night? James’s heart was pounding painfully—all the men in the James family had bad hearts that would get them someday—so he drank a bit more of the Cardhu to give him time to think. No, he couldn’t believe that Holmes would have told anyone about James’s presence in the cemetery and in Clover’s tomb-sculpture interior. He’d promised that he wouldn’t. What is a promise to a man who is not really a gentleman?

“Why, John?” he said softly. “Surely I spent enough time here as your guest that you must welcome the quiet household after our disruption.”

“You were here with Holmes,” said Hay, “or here when Holmes was impersonating that Norwegian explorer, Jan Sigerson, which was enjoyable in its own way. But Clara and I felt that we never really had a chance to talk to you.”

James set his chin on his chest in a posture that would, half a century later, come to be called “Churchillian”.

“Unless,” continued Hay, leaning far back in his chair now and drinking the whisky almost hurriedly, as if enjoying its fragrance weren’t part of the process of enjoying it, “unless you plan to leave the city soon. To Cambridge? Perhaps then on to England? Paris?”

“No, I have no immediate plans to leave.” James realized that he’d decided that even as he spoke the words. “But my room at Mrs. Stevens’s is quite adequate.”

Hay grinned beneath his carefully trimmed whiskers. “Adequate for a bachelor junior congressman, perhaps, Harry, but certainly not for a writer. You are doing some writing, aren’t you?”

Too little, too little, thought James. But then, the plan had been to commit suicide in Paris and part of the attractiveness of that plan had been to end all the deadlines, to get his agent and stage producers and publishers and everyone else with their baby beaks wide open and waiting to be fed to—how did the Americans put it?—then get off his neck.

“Some very modest attempts at my next play,” said James, his tone as doleful as his countenance. “Little more than notes.”

Hay grinned again. “I trust that your room was comfortable when you and Holmes were staying here, but we have a much larger suite of guest rooms at the far end of the wing opposite to the one where you stayed before. We didn’t place you there during your last stay because it’s inconveniently far from the main stairway, but if you’d honor us with another visit, that suite will be yours—bedroom and much larger sitting room, both with fireplaces, of course, the sitting room with its own rather pleasant library. The colored tiles around the large bathtub are somewhat brighter than those in your former bathroom, but the wash basins are marble, the taps are silver, and I can promise you that the water will be hot as well as cold.”

James took a breath, trying to frame his refusal in the politest way possible. In truth, it was the proximity to Henry Adams—the man whose secrecy he’d so callously invaded—that was preventing him from saying yes.

“And as nice as Mrs. Stevens’s little place is,” continued Hay, the whisky gone from his glass, “I don’t believe that she can provide you with as excellent a manservant as we can.”

“Manservant,” James repeated, feeling strangely numb all over. Is this the way a character in a novel feels when the author is manipulating him or her in a way contrary to their nature or to common sense? He wished he could ask Holmes that question and actually patted the jacket pocket where his purse held the detective’s card with the name and address of the cigar store where James could get in contact with him.

“Yes, and not just any manservant,” said Hay, leaning further over the desk now, “but Gregory, one of our longest serving and most trusted employees.”

James remembered a tall, white-haired man on Hay’s staff being referred to as Gregory. The servant had emanated dignity and quiet efficiency. “Is Gregory his first or last name?” asked James.

“Last,” said Hay. “I believe his Christian name is Terrance. Gregory is not only the perfect man to stoke up your fires and lay out your clothes in the morning, but he gives the best and closest neck-shaves of any man on the staff.”

“I really have a powerful reluctance to being in your and Clara’s way once again . . .” began James.

Hay held his hands up, palms forward, and then moved them quickly in opposite directions as if opening a door or brushing something aside.

“This shan’t be like your first visit where you were a guest with a guest’s . . . well, one might call them obligations: coming down to dinner with us, making small talk, joining me for luncheon, and so forth. No, the guest suite would be yours—it’s on the northeast corner and there will be some light traffic noise coming through the windows there, but it’s very soft noise—our boy Del lived in those rooms for a while but went back to his own before going back to school. He thought the suite was too quiet. Too large.”

Perhaps the rooms in the suite are haunted, thought James. He smiled as he realized that he wouldn’t be averse to a few ectoplasmic visitations. Perhaps his sister Alice could advise him as to what to do with her ashes that he’d pilfered.

“ . . . and daily service from the maids, of course, but only when you’re out,” Hay was going on. “And you can have all your meals and tea breaks in your room if you like . . . Gregory will be your guard at the gate as well as your valet. And of course you shall have your own key to the front door so you can come and go whenever you want without disturbing anyone.”

“I confess that I have found myself a trifle lonely at Mrs. Stevens’s place,” said James, already surrendering himself to the invitation. He could rest. He could write.

“No wonder you do . . . especially with Mr. Holmes leaving so abruptly,” said Hay. The statesman did not seem to notice the minor levitation of James’s eyebrows. “You agree then, Harry?”

James nodded.

“Wonderful!” cried Hay. “I’ll have some of the lads go over now in the wagon to fetch your steamer trunk and other luggage.”

A minute later, they were standing just inside the open door, watching the spring rain fall and enjoying the scent of the rain on new grass and fresh leaves when Hay’s brougham was brought around for James—the manservant Gregory was up on the box next to the driver and sheltering under a red umbrella—and then came the good-natured stablemen, wool and leather caps beaded with raindrops, driving the flatbed wagon for his luggage.

James said, “John, how did you know that Holmes had moved out? It happened only this morning.”

Hay grinned and clapped the author on his right shoulder, opening an umbrella at the same time to escort James into the brougham. “Harry, Harry . . . one must never underestimate the speed with which even the smallest news travels in Washington City. Especially around Lafayette Park. Your landlady’s daughter, slow as the poor girl is, gave all the details of Holmes to our footman, at the morning outdoor market probably before either of us was up and dressed.”

James settled into the sweet-smelling leather of the covered brougham. Hay folded the umbrella and tapped the box with the wooden handle.

“See you soon, Harry!”

James rode in silence for the few blocks. The daughter telling the footman about Holmes’s early departure, who then mentioned it to other servants who were then overheard by Clara or John, made all the sense in the world.

But Henry James did not believe it.

We Get Lots of Cyclists Buying Lemon Squeezers

All in all, Sherlock Holmes had enjoyed an enjoyably productive birthday morning. At home—or at what he still thought of as home in his former digs on Baker Street in London—he’d often sleep in until eleven a.m. or later during those dull periods between cases. And then he’d often have breakfast and return to bed. Of course, the mixture of cocaine he injected during those dull times added to the lethargy—something this new heroic drug he was injecting himself with in the States didn’t seem to do—but then he was always especially alert when he was on a case.

This particular morning of April 4, he’d wakened at dawn and gone out to find himself a new place to live—the same old Kirkwood House hotel at the corner of 12th Street N.W. and Pennsylvania Avenue that he and James had passed the night before. Rumors still persisted that the old hotel would be torn down almost any month, but the place had a comfortable lived-in quality that Holmes approved of: expensive drapes but faded from sunlight, marvelously well-made chairs showing wear that even antimacassars could not hide, a combination of attentive service mixed with the discretion of knowing when to leave its guests to their own devices. Holmes understood why the more successful traveling salesmen were still loyal to the place.

He hired three reliable men—vouched for by the manager of the Kirkwood House since one of the men was the manager’s son—and their wagon to fetch his packed bags and steamer trunks from Mrs. Stevens’s boarding house without making a fuss.

Then, with the shops just opening, Holmes had bought himself a pistol. He’d noticed the generous number of gun shops around Washington and entered the one closest to the Kirkwood House a minute after the store opened. There was a vast array of pistols under glass, some of them evidently designed for cowboy desperadoes, and more hanging on the wall. The air smelled rather pleasantly of steel and gun oil.

“May I help you, sir?” the mustached clerk asked.

“Do you have any new lemon squeezers for sale?” said Holmes.

“Yes, sir, absolutely, sir. Which barrel length—two inches or three?”

“Three.”

“Yes, better accuracy with the three-inch barrel, sir,” said the clerk as he opened the glass case and removed the weapon.

Yes, with the three-inch barrel I might be able to hit the wall of a barn if I were inside the barn firing from close range, thought Holmes. Maybe.

“Any caliber you prefer, sir?”

“Thirty-eight S and W caliber,” said Holmes.

“It also comes in thirty-two, sir. A bit less expensive and a tad lighter.”

“The thirty-eight, please,” Holmes said firmly.

The clerk ceremoniously displayed the small pistol—and it was smaller than the vast majority of the revolvers in the store—and snapped the cylinder open to show his client that the weapon was unloaded, then handed it to Holmes.

Holmes noticed that .38 S&W cartridges would be a tight fit in the chambers and then he snapped shut the cylinder and held the weapon at arm’s length, aiming at the brick wall at the back of the store.

“One squeezes the grip as well as the trigger,” said the clerk.

“Yes,” said Holmes. He dry-fired the pistol twice. Not a good practice, overall, but necessary to get used to a new revolver.

“You like the hammerless lemon squeezers then, sir? You a bicyclist by any chance?”

“Exactly,” said Holmes. “Wouldn’t do to snag a hammer and have the pistol go off in my trouser pocket, now would it?”

“No, sir. We get lots of cyclists buying lemon squeezers. Most popular. These pistols are guaranteed not to fire if one takes a fall while cycling.” The clerk paused and cleared his throat. “Are you a bicycle fanatic then, sir?”

“Quite so,” said Holmes. “Absolutely mad about it.”

“Not too many customers from England, though . . . not to be overly personal or anything, sir.” The clerk’s cheeks reddened as he realized he’d overstepped his bounds with a gentleman.

“Not at all,” said Holmes with a smile. “One needs a pistol here to keep up on the target shooting with one’s American friends, what?”

“Of course, sir.”

“The absence of a hammer feels strange,” said Holmes. “Does the weapon jam or misfire very often?”

“No, sir. Not the Smith and Wesson brand. As reliable a double action as they make. Looks strange, I agree, but it’s the best weapon you can carry concealed when you don’t have large pockets. And even then, hammers and the larger sights can snag on cloth in pockets and such, can’t they?”

“Indeed,” said Holmes. “How much for this pistol?”

“Five dollars, sir.”

“That seems a bit steep.”

“I throw in two boxes of cartridges with the lemon squeezer, sir.”

“Done,” said Holmes.

“Shall I box it and wrap it up, sir?”

“No,” Holmes had said. “I’ll carry it on me.”

And Holmes was carrying the seemingly hammerless S&W, loaded save for one empty chamber, in one oversized outer pocket of his tweed suit and the two boxes of cartridges in the opposite oversized pocket, a short time later when he called on John Hay. The former diplomat was just sitting down to breakfast when Holmes was shown in and the detective assured him that his visit wouldn’t take more than two minutes and he’d be happy to have some coffee while Hay ate.

As succinctly as possible—and never mentioning the previous night’s adventure in Rock Creek Cemetery or the ominous figure smoking his cigarettes in the dark—Holmes explained that he was moving out of Mrs. Stevens’s boarding house, a necessity, alas, and that he was concerned for Mr. James’s safety.

“Certainly James has no enemies in Washington!” cried Hays.

“I would doubt that Mr. James has enemies anywhere,” said Holmes. “But I have enemies. And it has come to my attention that they may know of my presence in Washington . . . even my current address at Mrs. Stevens’s establishment.”

Hay looked concerned and dabbed a linen napkin at his sharp beard and perfectly trimmed mustache. “But certainly they wouldn’t . . . an innocent such as Harry . . .”

“It is a long shot, as you Americans say,” said Holmes. “A remote possibility. But these particular people are beyond all laws of reason and decency. I would not sleep well imagining them showing up at Mrs. Stevens’s home and coming across Mr. James . . .”

Hay looked sharply at the detective. “Would my family be in danger if Harry stayed here?”

“Not in the least.”

“How can you be so sure, sir?” Hay’s pleasant demeanor had disappeared for a moment into the sharp cross-examining tones of a prosecutor.

“These . . . people . . . may not recognize the extent of Henry James’s literary fame,” said Holmes, “but I am certain that they know your reputation, Mr. Hay, and would do nothing associated with you or your family . . . or your guest . . . that would bring publicity down on their heads.”

“Then I’ll ask Harry to drop by today and insist . . . insist, I tell you . . . that he stay with us again,” said Hay. Holmes loved the tone of a man who could make up his mind in a few seconds.

“Could you ask him to drop by at about five-fifteen?” said Holmes.

“Yes, if you wish.” Hay squinted slightly at the detective. “Is there a special reason for that time?”

“Just that I don’t wish to bump into Mr. James once I’ve moved out of Mrs. Stevens’s pleasant home and I may be in this area earlier in the day.”

“I shall specify five-fifteen,” said Hay and started to rise as Holmes stood.

“No, please, don’t get up, and thank you for this favor,” said Holmes.

“If I need to get in touch with you . . .” began Hay.

Holmes handed him one of his cards with the cigar store address handwritten on the back. “This establishment is open around the clock for some inexplicable reason,” he said. “And they promise to get any message to me as quickly as they can.”

Holmes and Hay had shaken hands and then the detective hurried down the street to catch Henry James before he had his breakfast brought to his room.

A Small Bouquet of White Violets

Holmes knocked on Henry Adams’s front door at five p.m., precisely the time he’d suggested in his early-morning note and to which Adams had agreed in his return note that morning.

The door was opened at once and Holmes was confronted with the dour face of an elderly butler; he now knew all of the Hays’ family servants by face and name, but he hadn’t been formally introduced to Henry Adams’s home or staff.

The butler said nothing, closed the door behind the detective, nodded his head to indicate that Holmes should follow, and led him directly up a staircase Holmes had seen only in the darkness of his burgling night. At the upstairs study, the grim-faced butler waited only for Adams to nod from his place behind a full but not cluttered desk before he closed the door behind Holmes. There had been no announcement, no greeting, not even a “Please follow me, sir” from the side-whiskered old retainer, but perhaps Adams had directed his man not to speak to Holmes. At any rate, Holmes did not feel slighted. He looked around the book-lined study with some interest. It was a scholar’s study and illuminated not only by desk and table lamps but by large windows, some leaded with ornate stained glass, others clear. Through the clear windows, Holmes looked directly across the street at the president’s Executive Mansion.

Adams neither rose nor spoke, so Holmes took the initiative of walking across the room to the desk, setting his top hat, gloves, and walking stick on one chair, and sitting on the other one that was opposite Adams across the desk.

“You have put me in an impossible position, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” the bald scholar said softly—but not so softly that Holmes missed the substrate of anger and frustration in Adams’s tone.

Rather than disagree or comment in any way, Holmes merely nodded.

“I made my . . . mystery . . . far too simple, didn’t I?” said Adams. “Too many clues.”

“Actually, just enough clues,” said Holmes. “And not all of them deliberate.”

“Your note this morning said only that you had solved the mystery and looked out at the world from a mourner’s eyes. I presume that means you . . .”

“Went in the monument?” finished Holmes. “Yes.”

Henry Adams looked down at the papers on his desk and for a moment the man’s face—even the flesh of his mostly bare scalp—went so terribly pale that Holmes was concerned that the older man was having a heart attack or stroke. But then Adams looked up, sat up straighter.

“Well, then,” Adams said in an only slightly shaky voice, “you know the greatest secret in my life, Mr. Holmes. I was foolish enough and overconfident enough to give a man . . . like you . . . far too simple clues to the secret and now you know.” Adams’s body twitched suddenly as if he’d been jolted by an electric current. “You didn’t tell James, did you?”

“I’ve spoken neither to Henry James nor to anyone else about this matter last night or this morning,” said Holmes, feeling the lawyerly dodge of his words almost stick in his craw.

Adams nodded. “For that I can be thankful.” The scholar sighed and folded his hands on his desk. “And now what, Mr. Holmes? Do we discuss the concept of money changing hands?”

Holmes could have acted outraged—was tempted to do so—but did not.

“I accept fees for my services as an investigator, Mr. Adams,” he said coolly. “Not payment as a blackmailer.”

Adams’s expression still had not changed. “Then what are your . . . fees as an investigator . . . in this instance, Mr. Holmes?”

“One dollar,” said Holmes. “And already paid—two years ago—by your wife’s late brother, Edward.”

“Ned,” said Adams with a strange, almost pained tone to his voice.

Holmes nodded again.

Suddenly Adams seemed to shake himself out of a haze. “I apologize,” he said, half rising and reaching for a velvet pull rope on the wall. “I haven’t asked you if you would like a cup of tea . . . or coffee . . . or a glass of whisky?”

“Nothing, thank you.”

Adams almost collapsed back into his chair. “You are,” he said very softly, “probably the only man alive who knows what a monster I am.”

“Mourner,” said Holmes. “Not monster. Never monster. A mourner of someone truly loved who has found a unique way to see others mourning his lost love.”

Adams almost laughed. “If you heard some of the comments . . . saw some of their clowning at first encountering Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture. Heard them guessing at the price of the monument or criticizing its solemnity, or its lack of religious purpose, or its lack of joy in the hope and sure certainty of eternal redemption. We are a strange and inexplicable species, Mr. Holmes.”

“Indeed.”

“What do you want, sir?” asked Henry Adams.

“I want . . . need . . . to discover the truth of your wife Clover’s death more than seven years ago,” said Holmes.

“She drank potassium cyanide and died almost instantaneously,” Adams said briskly. “There is really nothing else to discuss, much less uncover.”

Holmes sighed and leaned forward so that his hands were also folded on Adams’s broad desk. “I apologize for my bluntness, Mr. Adams. And there will be more such bluntness before we are finished. But it is not out of cruelty I make these comments or ask these questions, but out of a need for clarity.”

Adams had sat further back in his chair but met Holmes’s sharp, gray gaze with a steady one of his own.

“Mrs. Adams’s death would have hardly been—near instantaneous,” Holmes said in soft but solid tones. “I have published monographs on more than three hundred poisonous substances and combinations of such—their symptoms, their lethality rated on a scale of one hundred, their odor, their efficacy. Potassium cyanide, in any dose large enough to kill Mrs. Adams, would have burned her tongue and throat. Then this particular poison cuts off the body’s ability to process oxygen—in essence, asphyxiating the victim. But Mrs. Adams would have choked and gasped for air, perhaps ripping off her collar or bodice in an attempt to breathe, for some terrible moments. She would have thrashed about and fallen to the floor, where the poison would have assured more minutes of violent convulsions. Then . . .”

“Enough!” cried Henry Adams, slapping his palm so violently against the top of his desk that the noise sounded like a rifle shot in the room.

Almost instantly, the door was flung open and the aged head butler half-entered. “Sir . . . are you all right? I heard . . .”

Adams was still looking down but nodded and said through a thick voice, “Quite all right, Hobson. You needn’t wait outside any longer.”

“Yes, sir.” The door was closed silently and Holmes could hear what he’d noticed the lack of earlier—the butler’s footsteps receding down the hall and then down the staircase.

Holmes returned his attention to Adams and felt the intensity of the older man’s gaze. If looks were knives, this one would have decapitated and gutted Holmes.

“Why do you tell me these things?” rasped Adams.

Holmes pointed to one of the hundreds of leather-bound volumes on the wall of books behind Adams. “Sedford’s Poisons and Their Effects, Ninth Edition. You know all these details, Mr. Adams. You have researched this poison as carefully as you’ve researched Thomas Jefferson’s administrations. You wanted the truth, no matter how hard it was to bear. So do I.”

“Yes, all right.” The scholar took a deep breath. “The parlor where I found Clover’s body looked as if three sailors had been fighting in it—drapes torn, tables overturned, lamps smashed, pillows slashed by her nails, crystal objects flung down from the mantel. And Clover’s face . . . it was monstrous in its frozen terror and distortion, Mr. Holmes.”

Holmes nodded. After allowing a moment of silence, he said, “You lied to the police and newspapers, Mr. Adams.”

Adams’s head and shoulders snapped backwards. Dim afternoon sunlight glinted on his bald head and clenched fists. For a second or two while studying Adams’s expression, Holmes was reminded of the ki demon masks he’d seen in a Noh play in Kyoto.

But Adams said nothing. Holmes watched the scholar’s clenched right hand drop just above the drawer there and wondered if Henry Adams kept a pistol in that drawer. Holmes’s new lemon squeezer—loaded—was in the right-front pocket of his tweed jacket.

“You told the police and the papers that you had left your wife alone that Sunday morning because you had to visit your dentist,” said Holmes. “That wasn’t true.”

Adams’s small body actually rocked to and fro slightly as if in response to his mental struggle. Finally he said, “No, that wasn’t true.”

“Why did you leave that morning, Mr. Adams?”

“Clover and I had quarreled. Violently.” And then, as if realizing the legal import of that word, he said quickly, “For Clover and me it was ‘violently’—although voices were barely raised. We weren’t a couple who shouts. Ever.”

“But you argued.”

“Yes.”

“Over what?” said Holmes.

“Clover had been distraught—close to despair—and that morning she was in tears, almost hysterics, because Sunday at that hour had always been the time she wrote to her father. Her father who was now dead.”

“You argued about her emotions or about her writing a letter?” said Holmes.

“I insisted she begin a new Sunday routine,” said Adams. “Write a letter to her sister Ellen. Make Sundays a day for something other than melancholy and mourning after those many months.”

“She did write that letter, or a fragment of it, to her sister after you left,” said Holmes. “She told her sister that, and I believe I quote—‘Henry has been more patient and loving than words can express’ and, in the final uncompleted paragraph, ‘Henry has been—and is—beyond all words tenderer and better than all of you even.’ Why do you think she would write such a note just after the two of you had quarreled and you’d stalked out, Mr. Adams?”

Adams looked like a writer forced to watch his entire life’s work burned page by page in a fire. “I don’t know, Mr. Holmes. No more than I know how you got the precise wording of Clover’s letter to Ellen.”

“The police made a copy,” Holmes said, making a gesture with his bare right hand as if batting away something trivial and not worth discussing. He cleared his throat. “It sounds as if,” continued Holmes, “Mrs. Adams was writing a form of suicide note to her sister making sure that you were not in any way to blame.”

Adams only shook his head, whether in negation or confusion, Holmes couldn’t tell.

“Earlier in the letter to her sister,” said Holmes, “Mrs. Adams wrote, and again I believe I can cite it fully from memory—‘If I had one single point of character or goodness, I would stand on that and grow back to life.’ But then the letter ends. Why did you turn around and go home so quickly, Mr. Adams? After only ten minutes or so of walking? I know you had no appointment with your dentist that morning.”

Adams lifted a fountain pen from the table top and held it in both hands as if he were going to snap it. “I became . . . alarmed,” he said at last. “Concerned. I realized that it had been a bastardly thing to do . . . leaving Clover alone in the house on a morning when she was hurting so much.”

“And upon returning to your home then at sixteen-oh-seven H Street—just down the street,” said Holmes. “You told the police that you found Miss Rebecca Lorne waiting outside the front door. You said that she asked your opinion on whether she should go up and visit Clover that day.”

Adams said nothing. His usually almost frighteningly intelligent eyes seemed to have a haze over them—A translucent caul of memory, thought Holmes.

“Why did you lie about that as well, Mr. Adams?” said Holmes.

Adams blinked. “Who said that I lied.”

“I did. You encountered Rebecca Lorne coming out the front door of your house on H Street. She was weeping—as hysterical as Mrs. Adams had been a short time earlier. She had trouble telling you what she had found when she went up to visit Mrs. Adams, didn’t she, Mr. Adams?”

“Yes. I had to take her into the foyer so that no one could see her hysterics . . . it took me a full minute or two to get her calmed down to the point where Miss Lorne could tell me what she’d discovered upstairs.”

“How did she get in?” asked Holmes, leaning forward again.

“What?”

“I’m sure you locked the door behind you when you left to work off your anger in your walk,” said Holmes. “How did Rebecca Lorne gain entry to your home?”

“Oh, Clover had had an extra key made up for Rebecca a month or two earlier,” Adams answered almost distractedly. “We’d hoped to go to New York for some shopping—a vain hope, as it turned out—and Clover had given Miss Lorne the key so that she could drop in to check on the servants and see that the plants were properly watered.”

“Rebecca Lorne discovered Mrs. Adams’s body in the wreckage that had been the parlor, not you,” said Holmes. He did not phrase it as a question and Adams did not answer other than to nod ever so slightly.

Eventually Adams spoke in hollowed-out tones, the voice of a man who has passed through Hell and who knows he must go there again. “In those last months, it was only Rebecca Lorne who seemed to give Clover any surcease of her sorrow over her father’s death. Clover had stopped seeing most of her usual friends. It’s not quite fair to say that she and Miss Lorne were inseparable during those last late-summer and autumn months, but there’s no one whom Clover looked forward to seeing more than Miss Lorne.”

“Hadn’t the two of them paid a call on Mrs. Cameron—Lizzie Cameron—the previous evening?” asked Holmes.

Adams blinked rapidly once again. “Yes, they had. Lizzie had been very ill with . . . the influenza, I believe. Clover visited her and Miss Lorne accompanied her. They brought flowers and a book.”

Holmes removed the untitled publicity photograph of Irene Adler from his upper jacket pocket and handed it across to Henry Adams. “Is this a picture of Rebecca Lorne?”

Adams moved the photograph back and forth to bring it into proper focus. “Well . . . yes, it appears to be Miss Lorne. Her dress here is more . . . ‘showy’ is perhaps the right word . . . and she looks a little younger than when I last saw her, but this appears to be Rebecca.”

Holmes took the photo back. “This is a program advertisement for a certain Irene Adler—American born but European trained.”

“Trained in what?” said Adams.

“Opera, acting on the stage, and blackmail,” said Holmes. “Most specially that last skill.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You remember her cousin, a certain Clifton Richards?”

“Of course,” said Adams. “He worked in the photographic section of the State Department.” Adams paused and the haze came over his eyes again. “He’s the one who brought Clover the new developing solution that contained the potassium cyanide.”

“His real name is Lucan,” said Holmes. “Possibly Lucan Adler. Probably Irene Adler’s son.”

Adams shook his head again.

“You didn’t see or talk to Lucan—this Cousin Clifton—on the day you met Rebecca Lorne coming out of your house . . . the day Clover died?”

“No.”

“So he might have been in the house and exited via the back stairs when you ran up the front stairs, and he may have slipped out the back way into the alley,” said Holmes.

“An extraordinary and outrageous supposition,” said Henry Adams. “We have no evidence that her cousin Clifton was with her in my home on that terrible day.”

“No,” said Holmes, “but we know beyond a doubt that ‘Clifton Richards’ was Adler the assassin. And without questioning Irene Adler—your so-called Rebecca Lorne—we simply cannot know the truth of that day. And there was an obituary for Irene Adler in the March eighteen eighty-six London Times.”

Adams shook his head again, but with a negative hand gesture this time, a physical pushing away of Holmes’s words or their import. “No, no . . . this Irene Adler cannot have been the same woman that I knew so well in the year before Clover’s death. I’ve written letters to Miss Lorne, it’s been Mrs. Braxton, of Boston, over the years. And she has always responded.”

“Recently?” said Holmes, his ears metaphorically perking up like a hunting hound’s.

“Her last letter to me was last autumn, I believe,” said Adams. “So you see that your late actress person cannot be Mrs. Rebecca Lorne Braxton of Boston.”

“And her handwriting has stayed the same?” said Holmes.

“Yes, of course,” said Adams. “But I shall show you the letters. You may make your own judgment. Mrs. Braxton has never sent me a typewritten missive such as those accursed annual cards you are so clumsily and invasively investigating.”

“When was Miss Lorne married?”

“About two years after my wife’s death,” said Adams. “Miss Lorne had moved to Boston in January of eighteen eighty-six, only a month after . . . after. She sent me a note of her marriage in August of eighteen eighty-eight. I know only that her husband is somewhat older than she and that he makes a living in the sea trade with India.”

“May I see these letters? Hers to you, I mean. Not yours to her.”

Holmes expected an argument, possibly harsh words, but Adams must have been expecting the request; he pulled a small bundle of envelopes, tied in a pink bow, from the main drawer of his desk.

“Read them, Mr. Holmes. Take them with you as long as you promise to return them. You shall find nothing in Rebecca Lorne Braxton’s letters to me—or in my short notes to her, for that matter, should the lady allow you to read them someday—but normal conversation between an aging widower and his wife’s friend, a friend, like the husband, still deep in mourning after seven years.” Adams’s tone was flat, almost businesslike.

Holmes accepted the bundle of letters in silence.

“Another thing . . . another mystery, if you will, Mr. Holmes,” said Adams.

Holmes held the letters in his lap and waited.

“Every year on December six,” said Adams. “The anniversary of Clover’s death. I have found, or Hay and my other friends have found when I was traveling in the South Seas, a small bouquet of white violets, Clover’s favorite flower, set on my wife’s grave in Rock Creek Cemetery. I am certain that they have been set there every December six by Rebecca Lorne.”

“How can you know this?” asked Holmes. “Did she admit to this?”

“No, I have never mentioned it to her in our occasional correspondence,” said Adams. “I simply know. I have not written to thank her yet, but someday I shall.”

“But you said that Miss Lorne . . . Mrs. Braxton now . . . has lived in Boston these seven years.”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Adams . . . you really believe that Rebecca Lorne Braxton makes the long trip to Washington every December six, never to contact you, but only to leave this bouquet of white violets on your wife’s grave?”

“I do, Mr. Holmes. She has never spoken of it in her letters, but I am certain that particular act of kindness is hers. It matches the personality of the woman I knew in eighteen eighty-five. Rebecca Lorne was and is a kind person, Mr. Holmes. She was my wife’s friend. To even think that she was in any way involved with or, God forbid, responsible for my wife’s death—Clover’s death by melancholy, as I often think of it—is more than a grave error in judgment, Mr. Holmes. It is investigative malpractice. And it is also a callous act of slander.”

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Adams,” said Holmes, standing and retrieving his hat, gloves, and stick. Adams remained seated.

“Are you leaving Washington soon?” asked the scholar.

“I will be doing some traveling in relation to this investigation and . . . another . . . but I can be reached through that cigar store address at any time,” said Holmes.

“I will have no more to say on this matter,” said Adams. “I would appreciate you returning the letters before you begin your travels. You may give them to Hobson when the time comes. There is no further reason for us to meet or speak.”

Holmes nodded. “I’ll find my own way out, Mr. Adams. I thank you for your time and cooperation.” He patted the small bundle of letters in his chest pocket.

But Henry Adams had returned his gaze to the papers on his desk and did not look up.

Holmes paused in the open doorway, sensing but not seeing Hobson hovering somewhere out of sight down the hallway. “One last question, Mr. Adams.”

Adams raised his head. There was no sigh, frown, or rolling of the eyes and, once again, Holmes admired the historian’s self-discipline.

“Your windows there, the clear ones,” said Holmes, “offer an astonishingly good view of the president’s house, especially of that one set of windows.”

Adams said nothing. He did not turn his head to look at the windows Holmes was pointing toward, nor did he have to. Adams had worked in this study and had that view since 1886.

“Do you happen to know, Mr. Adams, which room in the White House those windows serve and—as odd as my query sounds—whether President Cleveland often frequents that room?”

“I can only tell you that when Mrs. Adams and I visited the president’s house during his first term that room was the office and receiving room for the president’s sister, Miss Rose Elizabeth Cleveland, who served as the de facto First Lady of the land until eighteen eighty-six when Mr. Cleveland entered into marriage. I believe that ceremony was the only marriage service ever held on the grounds for a chief executive in the history of the White House. When Mr. Cleveland returned to office and resumed his occupancy there only last month, it is my understanding that his sister did not return to Washington with him. I believe she has become the administrator of some little collegiate institution in Indiana . . . Lafayette, Indiana, to be precise. She has published often on what they now call feministe issues—that is, women’s rights. I’ve read that she took part in the First International Women’s Conference in Paris last year. So, no, I have no idea what the room behind those windows is used for at the present time. Only that the president’s sister will not be there.”

Holmes smiled at the historian’s completeness—if not civil tone—in answering such a silly question, nodded his thanks, and closed the door behind him.

As he hurried to the waiting hansom before Henry James—visiting next door—might glimpse him, Holmes knew that the interview had given up at least one possibly relevant fact: Henry Adams’s study was the perfect location for a Lucan-Adler-type assassin with a rifle.

The Wheel of Time

For the first day or two after Henry James returned to the Hays’ home as an artist whose privacy had to be respected at all times, the writer was relieved and as happy as he’d been since before the turn of the year. His guest suite at the far end of what Americans called the second story was large, comfortable, and private. If James chose to join John and Clara Hay for a meal, his hosts were delighted to have him. If he preferred absolute privacy—which he did for those first days—the servant assigned to him, Gregory, would bring up a menu before each meal and James would choose his own breakfast, lunch, or dinner, with no reference to what his hosts were having.

In those first few days, James celebrated Holmes’s complete absence much in the way he’d quietly celebrated the disappearance of the worst pains of gout that had so hobbled him around Christmas and the New Year in London. There were no more cigarettes stubbed into egg yolks; no more inane conversations about conspiracies and assassinations; no more late-night outings to cemeteries or creeping into memorial sculptures with secret passages. James felt liberated. He was free now, with Holmes gone, free to rest or write or just walk and think. Or to book passage on the next steamship to England if he so wished. Things could not have turned out better.

Then why, he wondered on April 7, the Friday of that first week at the Hays’, did he feel as deeply listless and actively melancholy as he had in March when he’d decided to go to Paris to drown himself in the Seine?

Lying in bed that night, the literary contents of his portmanteau poured out onto the blanket beside him, James looked through his notebooks. His markets for short stories seemed to have dried up and publishers in both England and America had mostly moved away from the long, serialized tale that had—in the spirit of Dickens—kept James busy writing for so many years. His last two novels, The Reverberator and The Tragic Muse, the latter released three years ago in 1890, had sold poorly. As did his story collection published in that same year, The Aspern Papers.

He had three books scheduled to be published later this year: Picture and Text in June, his essays on art; Essays in London to appear later in the summer, essentially a compilation of his tributes to his many friends who had died recently; finally his collection of stories The Private Life and Other Tales.

But none of these were major novels. And his essays and short-story collections had never brought in much money or notice.

It was clear that the literary world had passed Henry James by. Or perhaps, he mused, he had somehow wandered away from it. Thus his resolution last year, the resolution that had come before his resolution to kill himself, to begin a new and far more financially (and, in its way, socially) rewarding career of writing for the theater.

His first play, The American, adapted rather loosely from his novel by the same name (so loosely that he’d first titled the play The Californian), had a run of seventy nights in London and more weeks before and after in the provinces. James had enjoyed the process—reading the four-act play to the actors as a French author-director would, watching them rehearsing it, bringing them chicken and soups and other nourishing lunches during their long rehearsal days. Encouraging them. Bantering with them. Participating. Being accepted. Laughing with others and making them laugh with his droll wit—some of it in new lines written for the play as it evolved and changed.

How different all that had been from his decades of disciplined isolation while writing his scores of stories and overflowing shelf of novels. But all that labor to what purpose? He made enough money to rent the lovely, light-filled apartments at 364 De Vere Gardens—his home since 1886. But even there he was restless. He’d deliberately given up most of the evening and weekend London social life he’d enjoyed so much in past years in order to spend more time writing. Dedicate oneself to one’s work was his new mantra, and to do that one had to stop accepting dinner invitations five nights of the week, endless invitations to join the rich bourgeoisie whom he was invited to amuse at their country houses and Irish estates with his ample supply of small talk, wit, and gossip.

But while he had loved working in isolation, his work was no longer earning him what it should, either in dollars and pounds or in fame.

Oh, not that he’d ever striven after riches or fame! No! The Art had always come first. Always. But he had long imagined that before age 50 his work would have allowed him financial freedom enough to . . . To what? Perhaps to buy himself an English country house by the sea. Just a cottage, of course, a tidy little seasonal home in addition to his flat at De Vere Gardens. A cozy country place at which he would host literary friends and his brother William and his family when they came to England. A place where he could host his younger male friends—Paul Bourget, say, or Edmund Gosse. With privacy.

In the end, after all his work, the theatrical group had totally rewritten James’s “gloomy”—their word—third act to turn The American into a not-very-successful comedy.

Although the Prince of Wales had come to see The American in London and that had prompted the producer to attempt a “second opening” of the shortened and rewritten play at its fiftieth performance, James once again helping to fill the expensive seats and boxes with the author’s literary and high-society friends, audiences remained lackluster until James finally had to agree with the critics. The play into which he and his sister Alice had poured so much of their optimism had been a failure on many levels. He’d frantically abandoned his literary roots, he knew, to achieve a “well-made play” and that eager pandering had turned his serious novel into an absurdly paced melodrama on stage. The highly literate drama critic A. B. Walkley had written of the non-stop busyness of his script—“What, Mr. James? All this ‘between dinner and the suburban trains?’ ” James was sure it had also been Walkley in an anonymous review who’d said that James had offered the public little other than “a stage American, with the local color laid on with a trowel, a strong accent, a fearful and wonderful coat, and a recurrent catch-word.”

Edward Compton, the producer and lead actor, indeed had mastered the American dialect to a fault—in his later viewings of his play, James clearly heard the caricature of American English he’d penned—and the catchword phrase James had given him (after Compton told him that such catchwords were important for characters on stage) had been “That’s what I want t’see”—which, by James’s last viewing of the crippled, hobbled, emasculated play, seemed to be every third line for Compton’s American character.

As for the giant chocolate-colored coat, Compton had coveted the garment during rehearsals and provincial openings. “Gives the audience a sense of this American’s real nature,” the actor-producer had said after the first out-of-London auditions. But, James could see now, it had been an absurd wardrobe choice. One critic wondered in print if all Americans skinned buffalos to wear their entire hairy hide as a coat. Another compared Compton’s giant brown buttons to chocolate-covered cupcakes.

The best thing written by critics about his American leading lady, Miss Elizabeth Robins, was that her acting was “a tad less somnambulistic” in some of the later stagings. In the earlier performances, critics had called her acting—essentially of an inert woman, a listener, an observer—“bordering on the hysterical if not the outright deranged.” The poor actress, James had seen, had been totally miscast in his role for a basically passive and passionless woman, had tried the full spectrum, from deranged, to hysterical, then as somnambulistic as if she’d been drugged with laudanum, and now back to the “tad less somnambulistic”. After her recent successes in playing Hedda and Nora in Ibsen’s strangely popular plays, this critical pillorying of her “Claire” character in The American made her weep after every performance.

James had felt like weeping with her.

An anonymous critic for the Era had summed up Henry James’s first theatrical contribution thusly: “We are as anxious as the critics of the newest school to hail the advent on our stage of literary men, but it is on condition that they bring their literature with them.”

This—the truth of this statement—had hurt James more than he would ever admit. He remembered writing to Henrietta Reubell in 1890, in the early days of his long struggle with The American—“I have written a big (and awfully good) four-act play by which I hope to make my fortune.”

Well, it had been big. But in the end James had to admit that it had not been “awfully good”. In many ways it had been merely awful.

He remembered writing to his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, now on a distant island in the South Pacific—“My zeal in the affair is only matched by my indifference” but in the same letter enthusing “I find the form opens out before me as if it were a kingdom to conquer”. Yet by the end of the same contradictory letter he was telling Stevenson—“A kingdom, yes, but my standards—by our standards, my absent but never-distant friend—a paltry kingdom of ignorant brutes for managers and dense cabotins of actors.”

And more recently, when he was down with gout before deciding to go to Paris, he’d written to Stevenson:

Don’t be hard on me—simplifying and chastening necessity has laid its brutal hand on me and I have had to try to make somehow or the other the money I don’t make by literature. My books don’t sell, and it looks as if my plays might. Therefore I am going with a brazen front to write half a dozen.

On this Friday evening in April of 1893, only a week and day from his 50th birthday, James realized that he never had come to grips with what writing for the theater really entailed. Yet in his portmanteau here at the Hays’ home, he had carried with him to America three completed stage comedies, a drama written specifically for one actress who had aged beyond the role he’d created solely for her, extensive notes on five other possible plays, and the first three sketched-in acts of a serious drama he thought he might call Guy Domville.

In one of his earlier notes was a list of possible names for the eponymous character in this play about the lone scion of a wealthy family being called back from a monastery to choose between Holy Orders and continuing his family’s name through marriage and children. James also had the original notes he’d made years earlier in Venice after hearing an anecdote about the apprentice monk who had been forced to renounce either his family’s continuance or his holy vows. At the time he’d thought it might develop into a short story and had given it the tentative title “The Hero”:

Situation of that once-upon-a-time member of an old Venetian family (I forget which), who had become a monk, & who was taken almost forcibly out of his convent & brought back into the world in order to keep the family from becoming extinct . . . —it was absolutely necessary for him to marry.

James had long ago abandoned The Hero as the title of the play version of this tale, had added several extra dramatic—perhaps melodramatic—layers to the basic decision the hero had to make, and decided that amongst all these possible names for his hero, names filling two full pages in one of the thin notebooks he’d brought with him, he had liked “Domville” the best. It had taken him longer to come up with the eponymous leading character’s first name—at one time he’d toyed with “Boy” just because he liked the sound of it—but for the last few months it had solidified into “Guy”. Guy Domville. Obviously this was no longer a play set in Venice.

But would the male—and very masculine—protagonist’s heroic act consist of consenting to a loveless marriage (a marriage into which a villain with the villainous name of Devenish was trying to ensnare Guy Domville) or would his character resist this temptation and renounce life, love, family, and any future for his noble family’s name by returning to Holy Orders and cold celibacy?

Lying there in John Hay’s guest room in the near-darkness, the small pool of light from his bedside lamp illuminating only his pale hands and the small pile of his notebooks, James imagined that the double-renunciation at the end of the play would bring tears to sensitive souls in the audience. He could imagine his elaborately dressed actor saying loudly—“I’m the last, my lord, of the Domvilles!” Everyone in the theater would either weep or be struck into awed silence.

But would they?

James felt like weeping. He wished Sherlock Holmes would return.

On the next day, Saturday morning, precisely one week before his dreaded birthday, having just finished breakfast—Gregory had whisked the tray away with his usual silent efficiency when James had rung the little bell—and dressed in his finely tailored brown pinstripe suit and waistcoat, Henry James sat in the spring sunlight at the table near the open window of his wonderful guest suite and wrote the following:

Among the delays, the disappointments, the déboires of the horrid theatric trade nothing is so soothing as to remember that literature sits patient at my door, and that I have only to lift the latch to let in the exquisite little form that is, after all, nearest to my heart and with which I am so far from having done. I let it in, the old brave hours come back; I live them over again—I add another little block to the small literary monument that it has been given to me to erect.

James paused and looked at what he had just written. It was hogwash. Sentimental hogwash. He had committed himself to making his fortune writing for the theater and there was no little latch he could lift that would let his cozy—and financially unrewarding—literary efforts come tip-toeing back in.

And what was this self-serving babble about building a “small literary monument” for himself, block by block? Flaubert had answered that conceit rather concisely with his comment—“Books are made not like children but like pyramids and they’re just as useless. And they stay in the desert. Jackals piss at their foot and the bourgeois climb up on them.”

Henry James would soon turn fifty and while he’d sown his literary wild oats with both abandon and determined discipline, at this dark moment he doubted very much if any of his literary children would outlive him. At least by not much more than a few years at best.

Even his attempts to get his peers—or at least his younger literature-oriented male friends—to call him “Master”—Maître—had failed. If they did so, at his actual urgings, they made it into something like a joke. No, there was no “literary monument” out there for him or of him, no monument built “block by block” by his patient workmanship. And for the temporary “monuments” he’d labored so hard to construct, the critic-jackals were indeed pissing on them, the tiresome bourgeois—especially in America—clambering over his blocks and scratching their initials in his oh-so-carefully-cut stones with nails and knives.

Just last year he’d written a story he’d very much liked titled “The Wheel of Time”. In it his main character, yet another reflection of himself as seen through a glass darkly, thinks much about his distant youth while musing on his forty-ninth birthday. About youth . . .

He regretted it, he missed it, he tried to beckon it back; but the differences in London made him feel that it had gone forever. There might perhaps be some compensation in being fifty, some turn of the dim telescope, some view from the brow of the hill; it was a round, gross, stupid number, which probably would make one pompous, make one think one’s self venerable. Meanwhile, at any rate, it was odious to be forty-nine.

But with that round, odious number of 50 now bearing down on him like a freight train in the night—just as impervious, just as terrifying, just as unavoidable—he would pay anything to remain forty-nine forever or, if that was not possible, at least for another few un-passing years.

James realized to his horror that he was close to tears. Maybe that young, pink American pig named Teddy Roosevelt had been right; perhaps he was effeminate in his thoughts and writings.

James was aching to write someone a letter. But he couldn’t, shouldn’t . . . this trip to America was to remain a secret from his friends and epistolary interlocutors.

More hogwash. He was a man of letters in more than the literary sense. Henry James wrote a letter to someone, usually multiple letters to multiple someones, every day of his life. In a real sense, writing and receiving letters was the way he kept in touch with life.

At the moment he felt an overwhelming need to write a letter to Constance Fenimore Woolson about what had happened to him over the past few weeks. He knew that Fenimore had turned fifty-three last month in March—he’d written her a clever letter offering his elliptical birthday wishes—so she might understand his feelings about turning fifty. To his recollection, they’d never discussed the topic of aging. Fenimore—an American writer like James, in self-exile in Europe for decades—was the focus of the closest thing to a romantic relationship with a woman that James had ever felt or allowed.

Of course, he really had no romantic notions about Fenimore, certainly no sensual or sexual ones—the thought of an unclad woman’s body appealed to him only in a very few classical paintings and sculptures. It was the nude male form that moved James in some deep, solid, but uncertain way—ever since that day he walked into his brother William’s Newport art group’s life-drawing class and saw their cousin Gus standing there naked as the model. But at one point, for weeks when both of them were staying in Fenimore’s rented chalet of Bellosguardo high above Venice, Fenimore in her rooms upstairs and James comfortably in his apartment on the lowest floor, he’d had some sense of what it might be like to live with a woman.

To be married.

Of course Fenimore was so masculine in so many ways—fiercely independent, achingly but muscularly ambitious as a writer and poet in her own right, willing to break off even the most delightful conversation with James while sitting on the wide terrace of the Villa Brichieri near Bellosguardo watching a sunset in order to get back to her writing—but she was also a woman with a woman’s mysteries. It had taken James months after Fenimore had left her leased home in Oxford before he realized that she’d come there—to the winter darkness of England which depressed her so, she needed sunlight or her moods would plummet—to be near him while his sister Alice was dying.

Near him. He’d taken her melancholic presence for granted while it was there for so many months. Only when she left Oxford, in something like exasperation if not outright anger, did he notice her by her absence.

Fenimore could be cast in fiction as an amusing eccentric, made more amusing by her hearing problem that she would not acknowledge and which made real conversation all the more difficult, especially in a salon or crowded public place. But James knew that she was no more eccentric than he. Almost certainly less so. At least Fenimore, as far as he knew, was holding no secret at the core of her being.

He had realized the previous year, just as Fenimore was leaving for Switzerland and then Italy again while showing more asperity toward him than ever before, not only that she’d moved to Oxford for all that time to be near him to offer her support during the last months of his sister’s life but that, with Alice now gone, perhaps she had expected more attention from James.

They’d often agreed to meet in European cities and even English towns, rigorously staying in separate hotels, but meeting for walks and dinners together and tours of art galleries or the occasional concert, which Fenimore enjoyed in spite of her hearing problem. Could she possibly have expected more than this?

Could it be possible that she was in love with him?

James had assiduously avoided being seen with her when mutual friends were about. They met in out-of-the-way towns, dined in hotels and restaurants which were nice enough but in which James was close to certain he’d never find any of his friends. He was not ashamed of or embarrassed by her, per se, since Constance Fenimore Woolson was one of the more interesting and sophisticated American writers he knew in Europe. He was, he acknowledged now, simply terrified that a third party would think what sister Alice had, on more than one occasion, written flippantly to William or someone else in his family—“Oh, Harry. He’s off flirting with Fenimore Woolson on the Continent.”

He allowed his dying sister to make such jokes. Having anyone else he knew do so, even—especially—his brother William, would devastate him.

But he had lived with Fenimore in Bellosguardo, lived with her after a fashion and by her terms, comfortable in their strangely similar and formal fellow-bachelors-devoted-to-their-work way, and those weeks had changed him somehow. Mostly, it had made Henry James realize how terribly, terribly lonely he was.

A year ago, in May of 1892, just a month after his forty-ninth birthday, James had visited Fenimore while she was packing to leave Oxford and then gone straight home to write a passage in his unfolding story “The Wheel of Time”. In his story, the 49-year-old main character Maurice Glanvil had, in his twenties, rejected the plain-looking but secretly charming lady friend Fanny Knocker, only to meet her again on the Continent decades later. Maurice’s wife had died, leaving him with few memories of actual love and a rather plain-looking daughter.

When 49-year-old Maurice meets Fanny again, now the widowed Mrs. Tregent, he sees to his astonishment that she has grown into that rare sort of beauty which reaches its apex only in middle age. And she has had a son—a strikingly handsome and dashing son just a little bit older than Maurice’s rather plain and ordinary daughter.

In the story, Fanny’s son repeats Maurice’s earlier betrayal of young Fanny Knocker by rejecting his daughter’s hopes of marriage despite both his and Mrs. Tregent’s efforts to make the match. Maurice’s daughter was simply too plain for the handsome youth.

But the real shock of the story occurs when Maurice learns that he—Maurice—had been the secret passion in Fanny Knocker Tregent’s life for all these years. A love undeclared. Unrealized. But central to her life.

That day in May a year ago, after visiting the strangely irritated and rapidly departing Fenimore, James had gone straight home and written this scene where Maurice is meditating on this unknown passion, a discovery that makes “his pleasure almost as great as his wonder”.

She had striven, she had accepted, she had conformed; but she had thought of him every day of her life. She had taken up duties and performed them, she had banished every weakness and practiced every virtue; but the still hidden flame had never been quenched. His image had interposed, his reality had remained, and she had never denied herself the sweetness of hoping that she would see him again and that she would know him. She had never raised a little finger for it, but fortune had answered her prayer. Women were capable of these mysteries of sentiment, these intensities of fidelity, and there were moments in which Maurice Glanvil’s heart beat strangely before a vision really so sublime. He seemed to understand now by what miracle Fanny Knocker had been beautified—the miracle of heroic docilities and accepted pangs and vanquished egotisms. It had never come in a night, but it had come by living for others. She was living for others still; it was impossible for him to see anything else at last than that she was living for him. The time of passion was over, but the time of service was long.

He had written that scene—published that story—all while smugly and secretly (even to himself) knowing that he was writing about Constance Fenimore Woolson’s long unstated passion for him. He hadn’t fully admitted the power of that connection even to himself last year, but he saw it now.

And he also saw, with his gorge rising in horror, that he might have been writing that passage about himself. About his unacknowledged, never recognized need—not for love, not for passion, never for desire, but still basic and compelling need—for Fenimore to be in his life, to be in his life to relieve his terrible burden of loneliness, to encompass him with her almost masculine understanding and yet persistently feminine presence.

Dear God, thought Henry James on this Saturday morning a week before his fiftieth birthday, I have to get out of here, away from here.

He would go to Boston to leave Alice’s ashes in the marble urn on her grave where Miss Loring had set to rest the majority of Alice’s cremated remains. Then he would go home. Home to England.

One thing was now certain: with Sherlock Holmes gone from his life, the question Holmes had raised as to whether he was real or a fictional character—thus making Henry James an adjunct fictional character if he were merely being used in a work of fiction as Holmes’s Dr. Watson–like assistant made to marvel at Holmes’s powers of deduction—was moot. With Holmes gone, doing whatever he was doing wherever he was doing it, Henry James had returned to being just a living, breathing human being. Albeit a powerfully gifted and talented one.

There was a rapid knock at his door, James said “Enter” without thinking, and Clara Hay fairly danced into the room.

“You must see this, Harry, you simply must!” she cried, as giddy as a girl. She caught his left hand in both of hers and all but lifted him bodily up and out of his chair.

She led the amazed author to the door. “No need for your coat, Harry. It’s as warm as a summer’s day outside. And it’s only a few steps. You simply must see this! It’s too wonderful to miss.”

“See what?” managed James as they hurried down the broad central staircase toward where Benson held the front door open for them.

“The Flying Vernettis!”

The crowd had gathered on the green grass of Lafayette Square Park and were looking up at what Clara reminded him was the Camerons’ huge house. James saw Lizzie Cameron near the front of the crowd (but not her husband, Don, of course—he would be at work), shading her eyes with her hand so that she could see better. James noticed other high-society neighbors, mostly matrons, of the Hays’ and Adamses’ and Camerons’ neighborhood gathered near the east side of the park while more common folk, including some street workers still with their brooms, stood back a bit. Some of the society women—James saw young Helen Hay—were using opera glasses the better to see.

But everyone was looking upward. Clara pointed. James shielded his own eyes and tried to find what they were all gawking at.

There. Along the highest roofline of the huge, steeply roofed house, a man and a boy were walking with exaggerated high steps, crossing the dangerous distance between one cluster of chimney pots and another. The man had a sort of quiver strapped to his back and from that vessel rose various brushes and strangely apportioned brooms.

“Chimney sweeps?” said James, astonished that Clara had dragged him out into the hot sunlight for mere chimney sweeps.

“Watch!” cried Clara Hay.

James saw that there might be some tension in watching the man and boy move carefully along that high, narrow roof beam, since they were almost sixty feet up and the Camerons’ roof was far too steep to stop their fall if either one slipped.

Suddenly James and the crowd gasped as the boy did a forward cartwheel on the narrow ridge and the man, letting the quiver dangle by its strap so the brushes would not fall, did a handstand behind the boy, his hands on the slippery slate slabs on either side of the apex.

The two were odd-looking creatures. Both man and boy—he might have been eleven or twelve, no older—were rail thin and dressed in black sweeps’ clothing that seemed several sizes too small for each of them. That was a deliberate effect, James noticed, since the socks and shirts protruding from the cuffs were red-and-black striped for the skinny man and green-and-black striped for the boy.

The strangeness was enhanced by the fact that the grown chimney sweep had orange hair spiked up into a column, rather like a Mohawk Indian’s vertical queue, while the boy’s spiky hair, stabbing out in all directions, had been dyed a bright, Kendal green. The man’s face had been painted white—a skull—and the eyes were lost to sight in black paint. The boy’s face was painted all white save for the narrowest strip of red on his thin lips. The effect—at least for James—was disturbing.

Suddenly the almost emaciated-looking boy took the quiver of brushes from the scarecrow man and crouched low as the skull-man leaned forward over the boy, tumbling in a perfect somersault along the three-inch-wide ridgeline, and then immediately got to his feet and bent over as the boy jumped up onto his back.

The crowd let out a gasp and low moan and some in the front stepped into those behind them, as if seeking to get out of range for when the man and boy fell.

James felt a sense of unreality fall over him like a cloak as he watched the red-and-black-striped man—his long, white fingers looking truly skeletal—remove the covers to the triple-chimney at the end of the ridgeline. Fingers moving in a blur, working together, orange-haired-man and green-haired-boy used a loose bit of rope to tie those coverings tight at the base of the chimney.

Then the skeletal man—his black shoes looked almost like ballet slippers—leaped straight into the air until his legs were far apart, the shoe-slippers on opposite sides of the four-foot-wide triple chimney.

The crowd gasped again, like a single organism, James thought (he had gasped as well, although not out loud), when the boy simply threw himself into the air sixty feet above the ground, his arms ahead of him like a diver leaping from a cliff into the sea. But there was no water below the boy, only a six-story drop to hard soil, grass, and stone walks.

The tall sweep with orange hair caught the boy in mid-air and held him, the boy’s terribly thin arms still stretched straight forward, his legs rigid behind him, until suddenly the scarecrow adult swung the skinny lad until his arms and head were pointing straight down into the narrow chimney aperture. It was only then that James noticed that the adult sweep and boy sweep were attached at the waist with two strangely knotted ropes, rather like two Alpine climbers roped together on the Matterhorn.

The skull-faced tall sweep let the boy’s torso and legs slide between his long, stick-white fingers until all of the boy save for his lower legs and feet had disappeared down the impossibly narrow chimney. The grown sweep let go of the boy’s ankles and the crowd moaned in unison again until they saw that the skull-faced adult sweep now had both ropes in his hands. The man began lowering the rope, first letting it slide through one hand, then through the other, and all the while he was leaning further back from the vertical on the narrow chimney pot ridge, letting the boy’s slight weight balance him as he continued backward until it seemed impossible that he might ever pull himself upright again.

James turned away.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” asked Clara Hay. “Exhilarating!”

“Extraordinary,” managed James, not wanting to hurt his hostess’s feelings. Those few seconds of watching had given him a sense of vertigo followed by nausea. What an insane species we are, was his only coherent thought.

“They call themselves the Flying Vernettis,” continued Clara, obviously not noticing James’s sudden paleness. “Father and son, Lizzie Cameron thinks. They have been doing their chimney-cleaning this week for only a few of the finest houses, for the finest families, and Lizzie has been impatient all week for them to get to her house.”

“Extraordinary,” James said again, not turning his gaze back to the spectacle as the crowd gasped and groaned again at some new impossibility.

“Lizzie says that they’re ever so efficient,” continued Clara, speaking to James but looking back the other way. “They close every room off before clearing and cleaning the chimneys—and heaven knows some of these older houses need such a clean sweep—and she says they lay newspaper across everything in the closed-off rooms before the actual dusting.”

“Extraordinary,” said James. He focused his gaze on the White House across the street to the south. “I believe I shall take a brief walk,” he continued. “I shall see you later this afternoon or evening, Clara.”

Clara did not respond. Her hands clasped tightly together as if in prayer, her mouth open, she was totally absorbed in whatever death-defying absurdities were occurring high above her on Lizzie Cameron’s rooftop.

Later, even many years later, Henry James could never quite explain, even to himself, exactly why he chose to do all the things he did in the hours that followed. If, he would invariably add to this particular mental query, it was truly I who chose to do those things. It was more the behavior, he felt, of a poorly drawn character in a sensationalist Wilkie Collins or H. Rider Haggard novel.

Luckily he’d brought his silk top hat and walking cane despite Clara’s tugging and urgings when leaving the house, so he did not have to go back to the Hays’ home. James turned east on Pennsylvania Avenue and walked briskly, refusing to turn his head as the crowd on Lafayette Square Park gasped or oohed or aahed.

The Flying Vernettis was precisely the kind of idiotic American showmanship and bread-and-circus nonsense that had kept James in England and Europe all these years. A chimney sweep risking his son’s life, if indeed the boy were his son and not some orphan the sweep had picked up from an orphanage and trained, to perform idiot acrobatics sixty feet in the air for the approval of the likes of the Camerons and Lodges and Hays and the dour Henry Adams. James would not have been surprised if President Grover Cleveland and his wife weren’t on the front lawn of the Executive Mansion and gawking as broadly as the social elite in Lafayette Park.

America was a nation that refused to grow up. It was a perpetual baby, a vast, pink, fleshy toddler, now in possession of some terrible weapons it did not know how to hold properly, much less use properly.

James hailed a hansom cab and told the driver to take him to the closest steamship company.

At the rather lavish steamship headquarters, James ordered the cab to wait while he went inside and paid for reservations from New York to London on the North German Lloyd Line’s new greyhound steamship the Spree, sailing at 7:30 p.m. from New York the following Tuesday, April 11. He would spend his birthday at sea.

It was true, James knew, that this German ship hadn’t quite matched the eastward crossing records of say the City of New York (5 days, 23 hours, and 14 minutes) or the City of Paris (5 days, 23 hours, and 50 minutes), but James knew the Spree to be lavishly comfortable. He also knew that the American and British steamship companies measured their eastward crossings between Sandy Hook Lightship and Roche’s Point, the entrance to Queenstown Harbor; the North German Lloyd Line and the Hamburg-American measured the trips between Sandy Hook Lightship and the Needles, near Southampton.

He would not be in a hurry once he was on the open sea, and he looked forward to a majority of the passengers speaking German, so he would not constantly have to be drawn into conversations (although he was fluent in German).

Satisfied that he would be sailing to England in three days, James went out to his waiting cab and told the cabbie his next destination.

At the railway station, James made reservations for (and paid for) a first-class ticket to New York City, leaving Washington tomorrow—Sunday—afternoon. He also purchased continuing tickets to leave for Boston on Monday morning, returning to New York early on Tuesday afternoon, allowing plenty of time before the Spree’s evening departure.

He then had the cab take him to a telegraph office where he wired reservations for Sunday night at the upscale New York hotel where he’d stayed when he’d arrived in New York, then another reservation for one night in a familiar hotel in Boston. He’d made up his mind that he would not be looking up old friends there and William and his entire family were in Europe. With some discipline, James thought, on his way to the cemetery to deposit Alice’s ashes at her grave, he might avoid walking past the old house in Cambridge where the whole family, Aunt Kate and all, had lived. He also did not want to see brother William’s huge home at 95 Irving Street in Cambridge. He would plan his walk to and from the cemetery accordingly.

But thinking about his older brother, James wrote out a telegram to be sent both to Florence and Lucerne—William should be moving his family from Italy to Switzerland about now, according to the schedule he’d sent James weeks ago—but James knew that his brother moved his family around while on schedule much as their father had: with no respect for schedules whatsoever.

The telegram may have caused the telegraphist to glance at James with curious eyes but even that made the author smile:

That should confuse his always superior-behaving older brother.

Finally, on a whim, James asked if he could pay one of the Western Union lads to deliver a handwritten note within the city—they said he could for only fifteen cents, and they would provide paper and the envelope—so James put the address of the cigar store through which Holmes had said he could be contacted at any time on the envelope, took the white sheet of paper, and started writing, got through “I am leaving Washington tomorrow, Sunday” and stopped. He could think of nothing else pertinent to say. Nor was anything beyond this any of Holmes’s business. He quickly signed his name (for some odd reason, almost adding the “Jr.” that he hadn’t used for more than a decade), added “To Mr. S. Holmes—Personal” on the envelope above the cigar store’s address, paid the Western Union people for the use of their lad and tipped the lad himself ten cents.

Having made all these arrangements, James had the hansom drop him on Constitution Avenue a few blocks northeast of Lafayette Square so that, with luck, he could walk back to the Hays’ home without encountering the crowds still admiring the Flying Vernettis’ dangerous aerial gyrations. All that energy wasted and death or injury invited only to clean a chimney or two. Absurd.

He was walking south when he came to an intersection and froze in his tracks. For an instant he stood in shock, not quite certain, and then he was certain.

Professor James Moriarty—tall white forehead, lank hair over the ears, old-fashioned collar, swallow-tail black coat, and spidery white hands—was walking quickly down the sidewalk on the opposite side of the adjoining street, headed southwest, away from the direction James was walking.

It is none of my business, James thought fiercely. He’s only an aging mathematics and astral physics professor, you already knew he was alive from the photo in the science magazines at the Library of Congress, and it is none of my business.

James mentally repeated this three times, like a mantra, but then he turned right and began following Professor Moriarty from a discreet distance, taking care to stay back and remain on his side of the street.

A Rat. A Fucking Rat

Henry James had never “tailed” anyone before, but he soon found that it was a relatively simple affair. All he had to do, he discovered, was to stay a half block or more behind Professor Moriarty and on the opposite side of the street, hurry a bit to keep him in sight when the professor turned left or right onto some new street, and step back into the shadows of a storefront the few times the professor stopped. It helped that Moriarty never looked over his shoulder or—for that matter—paused to look to his left or right as he walked briskly toward whatever destination he obviously had firmly in mind. Whenever James got close enough to hear the regular tap-tap-tap of the tip of the professor’s silver-headed cane on the pavement, he knew he was following too closely and would fall back thirty yards or so.

After twenty or thirty minutes of this clever following, James realized that he no longer had the slightest idea of where in Washington City he might be. He distinctly remembered walking west toward the afternoon sun at one point, and then following the briskly pacing Moriarty left—south—then west and south again more than one time, but he had no clue what neighborhood he was in. It didn’t help that street signs and even street lamps had disappeared blocks and blocks ago and it was with something of a shock that James looked down and realized that there had been no sidewalk under his feet for some time now.

From stately homes and quaint shops, he’d followed Moriarty into an area of crumbling brick warehouses and the occasional sagging hovel. Even the width of the street had narrowed until he was following the professor down filthy lanes that should more properly be called alleys than streets. There was a strange, unpleasant-smelling green fog that hung low over the rooftops. Odd for Washington, D.C., James knew, but nothing compared to London’s thick fogs. He wondered if he’d followed Moriarty into that part of town that John Hay had called “Foggy Bottom”.

But, strangely—and helpful for his anonymity—there were more people and traffic about in these muddy alleys than had been the case in the nicer parts of town. James realized that most of the people walking here walked in groups and that they were almost all men. Once or twice he noticed a slovenly dressed woman, one obviously and loudly intoxicated, rushing to get out of the way of the striding men and rumbling dray wagons filling the center of the street, but most of the pedestrians were men dressed in working-class rags or large, intimidating “swells” wearing mud-tinged suits that were far too boldly striped and waistcoats of appallingly bright colors.

Still Moriarty walked on without looking left or right. The crowds—mobs, really—of rough men parted for him as if the professor were some unholy Moses and the ruffians mere dark waves on the Red Sea.

Realizing that his clothes and cane and very mannerisms “stuck out” in this part of town, Henry James stopped on the dirt path that passed for a sidewalk and seriously considered turning around and getting back to a decent part of town as quickly as he could.

How? Which way? And what if someone stops me?

As these thoughts sent a chill through him, James noticed three men deliberately approach Professor Moriarty. None of them shook hands—nor offered to—but even from almost a block distant, James could tell that the four men recognized each other. Or rather, that the three large ruffians—poorly dressed from greasy homburgs to their expensive but muddy boots with oddly pointed toecaps—knew Professor Moriarty. The men were big—big-shouldered, big-armed, big-bellied—but Moriarty towered over all three of them. With his skull-like face, protuberant forehead, and bald dome covered with only a few combed-over dark strands, the professor stood out like a well-dressed cadaver looking down at would-be body snatchers.

They exchanged a few words and turned left down a street. Feeling the stares of the clusters of rudely dressed men near him, James made up his mind to stay in the chase and hurried to turn the corner.

Dead end. The street was short and empty of anyone save for Moriarty and his new friends and it ended at a massive warehouse with no windows.

James stepped back around the corner and out of sight mere seconds before one of the men looked over his shoulder at the empty cul-de-sac of mud and brick.

When James dared peek again, two of the men had shoved open a heavy wooden sliding door. The rumble of a large group—whether of men or animals, James could not tell—came through the open door, but then Moriarty followed the first two in, the third man glancing back again but not before James once more dodged out of sight, and then the massive door was rolled shut. There was a regular-sized door—man-door, as it were—about a dozen steps to the right of the sliding door, but it was solid wood and James had no idea if it opened into the same area that Moriarty had entered. It was probably locked.

James stood at the corner and . . . dithered. That was the only word for it, he realized, dithered.

What could he do?

He could get out of this dismal neighborhood—or perhaps he could, he’d not noted all the turns and changes of direction that had gotten him in this area of town—and find some trustworthy lad to carry a second message to Holmes via that cigar shop.

But certainly that wouldn’t be in time for Holmes to arrive before whatever business was detaining Professor Moriarty in the warehouse would be concluded. And Henry James didn’t believe he had the nerve to continue. Besides, Holmes had lied to him and stated flatly that Professor James Moriarty, the presumed criminal mastermind, did not exist; that he had been a figment of Sherlock Holmes’s imagination, dreamed up solely to expedite the ruse of Holmes’s falsified death and subsequent disappearance from the world.

Well, that wasn’t true. James had seen him in the 1892 photograph of mathematicians present at the Conference on Advanced Mathematics and Astronomical Physics, University of Leipzig, and now he’d seen him in person.

But what to do?

He could retreat from this neighborhood and find a policeman. But what crime had Moriarty committed? All James had seen was the professor walking down a public street—or alley now, as the case might be—and everything James knew about the man was that he was a legitimate English mathematician and physicist. The police might put him, James, in jail for inciting a false complaint.

The obvious and sane choice was for him to turn away now and walk—briskly—out of this dangerous neighborhood (James had the sense that walking north and east would at least get him out of this Foggy Bottom area) and return to the Hays’ comfortable home and forget all about Professor James Moriarty for the time being. Should he ever bump into Sherlock Holmes again, he’d share this amusing little story of actually having crossed paths with the real Moriarty in Washington City.

Yes, that was the only sane and safe thing for him to do.

James took two deep breaths and walked down the cul-de-sac toward the warehouse, silently hoping with every pace that the heavy sliding doors wouldn’t open as he approached. What if Moriarty and the three ruffians stepped out just as he reached the door? One could hardly claim to be lost when one has deliberately walked the better part of a city block down a dead-end alley.

The sliding door did not open.

James stepped to the right of it and stopped in front of the solid wood door. Setting his hand on the iron knob, he prayed that it would be locked. It should be locked. It seemed more like an office door than a door to the open, noisy space Moriarty and the thugs had stepped into. When he ascertained that it was locked, James could turn about, leave at a brisk but dignified pace, and know that he’d done everything in his power to find out what Moriarty had been up to.

The door was unlocked.

James opened it further, tensed to turn and flee if he made a noise or if he saw anyone.

It was completely dark inside. The slit of gray light showed only a narrow staircase rising steeply straight ahead. There was a thick film of dust on the steps, so the stairway must not have been regularly used.

James stepped in and let his eyes adjust to the darkness as best they could.

The narrow stairway rose with what seemed an alarming steepness between two dark, moldering walls. The upper part of the steep staircase was invisible in the darkness—it could be missing for all James could tell from here—but once his eyes had adapted, he realized that there was the faintest glow from a gas lamp on the wall at the top of these stairs.

He began tip-toeing up, trying not to make even the slightest sound, dreading the inevitable squeak and creak of the old steps, but he soon realized that at this rate, the climb to the top would take him ten minutes or more. Besides, the steps were solid. They did not squeak or creak. Perhaps the dust helped muffle his steps.

James walked normally—mostly normally, he realized, since he was still putting most of the weight on the toes of his shoes—and when the staircase was at its darkest, he put his hands flat on the walls on either side. There was no railing. He felt each step gingerly with the toe of his right foot before putting any weight on it. Then he was moving into the tepid oval of light from the gas lamp above.

Nothing. Just a narrow landing with the flickering light. No doors or windows of any sort. James looked to his left and realized that a second and equally steep flight of stairs rose high to another dim light.

All in all, there were four such long, steep flights of stairs and three dusty, poorly lit landings before he reached the top. Here there was a door to his right. The top half was glass and the glass was glazed. James looked down; his were the only footsteps in the dust here. He tried the cracked-porcelain doorknob.

The door was locked. James used all the strength he could muster, even putting his shoulder to the door, but it remained locked. He knew that he could use his walking stick to break the glass and gain entry that way, but he did not entertain that thought for more than a second. The sound of smashing glass might bring Professor Moriarty’s entire mob down on him.

He’d turned and was about to start his steep descent back into the darkness when he noticed something on the left wall, the wall opposite the door. Or rather, he heard something from there.

It was the indistinct murmuring as from a loud crowd—perhaps an audience before the beginning of a play. But even the murmurs and half-heard words were coarse. If it was an audience, the play would be a bawdy cockney melodrama.

There was a rectangle in the wooden wall. James crouched low and saw the large wooden flanges near the top corners. He swiveled them to a horizontal position and the rectangular aperture fell back into his hands. The noise was quite audible now and there was light coming up through what seemed to be a floor. James pressed the trap door shut, secured it with a single flange, walked to the gas lamp, and turned the gas off.

Just enough light came through the frosted glass of the doorway across the landing to allow James to find the trap door and its flanges again. Loosening it with exaggerated care, he lowered it to the floor and thrust his head and shoulders into the aperture.

There was no floor, he soon saw, only large, broad beams—the one in front of him at least twenty inches wide—extending out over a great drop. The broad beams were stationed about fifteen feet apart and five or six feet below these major support beams were smaller rafters, mere two-by-four pieces of lumber set narrow-side up. Some sort of cage wire, the kind James associated with chicken coops, was attached to these smaller rafters. Attached to that wire near the walls here was a false floor of some sort of flimsy cardboard or canvas. There was something white, like snow, covering most of this canvas in small heaps and dunes. He was, he realized, in the high attic space of the huge warehouse that Moriarty and the other men had entered.

But about ten feet out, directly ahead of him, the false floor ended and light and noise rose up from below. James heard a deep voice trying to shout the crowd into some sort of attention.

If he were to see anything, James would have to crawl further out on the beam. He set his walking stick in the corner of the landing and began crawling on his hands and knees.

His plan had been to stop before he was over the open drop, but he realized he couldn’t see well from that position, so he lowered himself to the broad beam and kept crawling until only his knees remained in the darkness behind him.

Far below him was a huge space with sawdust on the wooden floor. He must be at least sixty feet above the mobs of men down there, perhaps seventy feet. For a second he clung to the beam with knees and his fingernails, letting a surge of vertigo pass, but there was little chance of his being seen by anyone down there. The space below was brightly illuminated by electric arc lamps in metal shades, but the lamps hung down from the lower rafters on long steel rods. Anything above them would be just a dark blur to the men in the light.

James lay flat, tried to control his breathing, and attempted to make sense of what he was seeing.

There were more than a hundred men sitting on barrels and crates in several distinct groups. To James, they all looked like purse-snatchers and highway thieves, but they clustered in definite groups—tribes—and one group of about thirty men looked more like simple working men. He realized that this group was speaking mostly in German. The other ruffians were bellowing in gutter American English.

All of the groups were facing a raised platform. James saw an abandoned metal scale at the back of this platform, realized that the “snow” he’d seen in the canvas below the rafters further back had been chicken feathers, and decided that the warehouse had once been the final stopping place for thousands of chickens to be processed. That also explained some of the stench that he’d ascribed to the unwashed mobs of men below.

There were two men on the raised platform. Professor James Moriarty was at the rear of the ad hoc stage, sitting in a high-backed chair. The other man, cigar in mouth and a derby cocked at a ruffian’s angle on his squarish head, was the one shouting for silence and attention.

Finally the mobs of men quieted down and focused their attention on the speaker.

“Well, all the important gangs are here and no one’s killed anyone yet,” shouted the thickset man on the platform. “That’s something, at least. We’ve already shown progress.”

No one laughed. Someone in the batch of German-speaking working men was translating for the others.

“Culpepper ain’t here,” shouted someone in the mob.

“Culpepper’s dead!” shouted someone else. “Somebody dropped ’im thirty or forty feet onto that fat head of ’is.”

This did bring laughter. The man on the platform waved them into silence again. “Well, while Culpepper’s people work out who’s going to take his place, we’ll go ahead with our project here and give that gang the word later.”

“What project?” shouted a fat man near the front. “All we heard was big talk about lots and lots of boodle and not one fucking specific.”

Before the man on the platform could speak again, a man in the front row of the German-speaking group cried, “Why are we brought here with these . . . criminals?”

The other hundred or so men now roared with laughter, some hooting “these . . . criminals” back at the German. Several others snicked open their seemingly ubiquitous gravity-blade knives.

The man standing waved them into some sort of order again. “As you’ll hear in a minute, we need the anarchists for . . .”

“Socialists!” cried the German working man who’d just spoken.

“These socialist anarchists,” corrected the man on the platform, “for our plan. They’re necessary. Professor James Moriarty will explain.”

The big man nodded to Moriarty and took his own seat on the platform as the professor slowly stood and took measured steps toward the front of the platform.

“Gentlemen,” began Moriarty, and something about his sunken-eyed skeletal presence brought a deeper silence onto the entire room full of men, “none of you has ever seen me before, but you all know my name. In the last two and a half years, my planning has made more money for each of your . . . organizations . . . than you’ve ever made before.”

There came a low rumble that James realized was one of agreement and approval.

Moriarty held up two fingers. Silence came down like a curtain.

“In the next month,” continued the professor, his voice soft but carrying to every corner of the huge space, “you and I shall make more money . . . more of a true fortune . . . than has ever been realized in the long history of criminal endeavor.”

The silence extended. Finally a shrill, doubting voice shouted, “How?”

“Precisely at noon on the first of May,” said Moriarty, “the President of the United States is going to push a button that shall start every electrical device at the Chicago Columbian Exposition. A hundred thousand people may be watching him. One second after he does that, President Cleveland will be assassinated—shot by a high-velocity rifle wielded by the world’s greatest assassin.”

Somehow the silence deepened.

“In the next fifteen minutes,” continued Moriarty, “the Vice-President of the United States as well as its Secretary of State and Attorney General will also be assassinated. Their demise is expertly planned and guaranteed. Within the next hour, the mayors and chiefs of police of Chicago, Washington, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, and more than eight capital cities in Europe will also be assassinated.”

“How does that earn us one single damned penny?” shouted someone at the back of one of the clusters.

Moriarty smiled. Even from his angle so high above, Henry James could see that terrible smile and it made him shake and cling harder to his beam.

“Our anarchist . . . socialist . . . friends across this country and Europe,” continued Moriarty, holding a hand out toward the German-speaking working men, “will, upon a precise signal, descend upon the police forces in Chicago, Washington, Boston, London, Berlin . . . all the cities I have mentioned and more. The police will be ambushed at predetermined places and times. Our anarchist friends will be better armed than ever before—with rifles as well as pistols, large quantities of dynamite as well as grenades—and the timing shall be as precise as I described. This one hour on the first of May, starting with the public execution of the chief executive of the United States of America, will make Haymarket Square look like the tiny, insignificant rehearsal it was.”

Suddenly James had a terrible urge to sneeze. The chicken feathers behind him on the canvas, others littering the beams above and beside him. He squeezed his nose shut and prayed.

“Where do we . . .” asked one man from the crowd below, his voice low, almost disbelieving.

“Where do you come in?” Moriarty finished for him. Again that cadaver’s smile. Above his squeezing hand, James could see men in the front rows seem to flinch away from the professor.

“When the heads of these serpents of oppressive governments are severed,” said Moriarty. “Cut off . . .” he repeated for the least intelligent among his audience. “With mayors and police chiefs and federal officials murdered, there will be nationwide chaos. And amidst that chaos, you do what you do best . . . you loot. You plunder.” He paused and his tongue licked out like a snake’s. “But not randomly. And not with the usual failure of aforethought. No, you will be looting the finest homes in New York and Chicago and Washington and Boston and all the other cities. The fattest banks. The richest federal and state gold depositories. You will be looting according to a plan I have drawn up and will soon share with you . . . a plan that is foolproof.”

Random talking turned into a roar of approval and excitement.

“It’ll be like the fucking New York draft riots only with no fucking army coming in to shut it down,” shouted one man.

James remembered the draft riots in 1863. Not long after Gettysburg. When the army draft was started in New York City—it had been volunteers up to that time—the street gangs and mobs, mostly Irish, had risen up in civil insurrection that had gone on for days. The homes of some of New York’s richest families had been invaded, women raped, money and paintings and furniture stolen. Entire blocks had been burned down. One Irish gang, for the fun of it, had burned down an orphanage for black children, killing several of them.

“It shall be the New York draft riots times one thousand,” said Moriarty over the noise. “And you are correct . . . this time there will be no U.S. Army sent from battlefields to save the beleaguered and outgunned local police and militia. The spoils shall be . . . yours.”

He turned and went back to his seat.

Suddenly, over the roar of excitement, a man with a shotgun leaped out of his seat and pointed with his free hand upwards, directly toward where Henry James lay cringing and trying to make himself smaller on his beam.

“A rat!” screamed the man, his tone almost delirious. “A fucking rat!”

Before James could even think of scuttling backward, the man raised his shotgun, aimed it directly at James from sixty feet or so below, and fired. Five or six other men with shotguns leaped to their feet and also fired directly at James.

“I’ll Have Lucan Adler Kill Any Man Who Speaks to the Police”

Henry Adams and John Hay both had telephones in their homes. Hay used his all the time, especially related to the consulting he was doing for the State Department. Adams disliked using his, but did so most frequently to call John Hay, who lived in the mansion adjacent to his. Essentially they were just talking through two walls and—due to all the telephonic static and cackling and crossed lines—it would probably have been easier to open windows and shout at one another.

“You’re trying to back out of this evening’s dinner, aren’t you, Henry,” said Hay after listening to Adams for a minute or so. It was already Saturday afternoon.

“Well . . . I didn’t feel that I offered much at your last gathering,” said Adams. “People in perennially low moods should not be allowed to appear at persistently gay high-society gatherings.”

“That would rule out about ninety-three percent of us,” laughed Hay.

“And would improve the quality of conversation exponentially,” said Adams.

“True, Henry, true. But do come tonight. It’s simple fare and stag.”

“What happened to all the lovely ladies, including your daughter Helen?” asked Adams.

“Nannie Lodge, Helen, Clara, and Edith Roosevelt—who’s in town only briefly with her husband—are all pouring coffee at the huge DAR Gala Fundraiser for Our Civil War Veterans,” said Hay.

“Where’s that being held this year?”

“In the Capitol Rotunda,” said Hay.

“They’ll either freeze or swelter,” said Adams.

“Probably both.”

“Is Lizzie Cameron cutting cake for the geezers as well?”

“No, she’s going to the opera tonight,” said Hay.

“With Don?”

Hay laughed. “When was the last time Lizzie was chaperoned to the opera or to any other cultural event by her husband Don?”

“Who then?” asked Adams.

“Her cousin—whatshisname. The old venerable who bored the brass off the andirons at the Vanderbilts’ big do last November.”

“You mentioned Edith Roosevelt, which suggests that the Boy will be one of the stags in attendance tonight,” said Adams. “Are you really going to put Harry and Teedie in the same pit again so soon?”

“The Boy hates it when we call him by his childhood name of ‘Teedie’,” said Hay.

“He hates it when we call him ‘the Boy’, too, but he loves us more than he hates it. Are you really going to put Harry and Teddy at the same table again, Hay?”

“Teddy’s terribly remorseful about what he said and about being boorish at our last dinner gathering,” said Hay.

It was Adams’s turn to laugh. “I’ve never seen Theodore Roosevelt remorseful to anyone over anything he said, did, stabbed, or shot.”

“True,” said Hay. “But upon reflection, probably Edith’s, he realized that words like ‘effeminate’ and ‘coward’ weren’t appropriate when directed at one of America’s finest men of letters.”

“It would have been more fun fifty years ago,” said Adams. “Or even thirty. We would be past the process of selecting seconds by now and they probably would have chosen the dueling ground and oiled and charged the pistols.”

“Harry seems more like a rapier man to me,” said Hay. “And he would have gotten to choose the weapons.”

“Rapier wit,” said Henry Adams. “None sharper or more pointed.”

“But Teddy truly is sorry and has begged for a chance to show that he can behave,” said Hay. “He wants you witness to his good behavior.”

“I was a witness the last time he showed it,” said Adams. “That was in ’seventy-three or ’seventy-four, I believe.”

“Seriously, Henry. This is just us men tonight. We’ll argue politics—politely, of course—scratch when and where we want to, belch ditto, talk like sailors, drink like sailors, and toast the missing fairer sex until Benson and my other men have to carry us to our respective beds. I’ve invited Dr. Granger because . . . well, you know.”

Adams knew. Dr. Elias Granger was older than most of them, in his mid-sixties now, and had been in deep mourning ever since he’d lost his wife four years ago. With just men, Granger could relax and exercise the happiness which had been his hallmark right up to his wife’s death. In mixed company, he rarely spoke when the ladies were present any longer, as if doing so might hurt his dead wife’s feelings. Adams, seven years a widower now, thought he understood. If it hadn’t been for Lizzie Cameron and, to a lesser extent, Nannie Cabot Lodge, he probably wouldn’t be accepting dinner invitations either—at least those with the fairer sex present. As it was, he not only attended such mixed dinners now but had resumed hosting his famous “breakfasts”—held closer to the noon hour than morning—which included Lizzie, Nannie, and other local delights.

“Sounds very nice and I like old Granger,” said Adams, “but . . .”

“Before you get beyond ‘but’,” interrupted John Hay, “I forgot to tell you that Clarence King will be there. With his proverbial bells on, he said, and, knowing Clarence, possibly with real ones.”

“King!” cried Adams. “I thought he had headed off for Mexico or Chile or Patagonia or one of those swarthy-lady places he prefers.”

“I thought so too, Henry, but he’s back in town . . . briefly, as I understand it . . . and would love to dine with us.”

“Who else will be there tonight?” asked Adams.

“Teddy and James, of course, King, Rudyard Kipling taking time out from his Cosmos Club . . .”

“I’d come just to hear Kipling tell a tale,” said Adams, “but every time Teddy’s there and tale-telling, Rudyard just curls his legs up under him like a teenaged girl and listens all night, mesmerized.”

“A great story-teller recognizes a great story-teller,” said Hay. “Cameron can’t make it but Cabot Lodge will be there again . . .”

“While his wife pours coffee and cuts cake under the Great Dome,” said Adams.

“Exactly. And about Harry . . . did I tell you that he’s staying with us again? As long as he’ll be in Washington, I believe.”

“No,” Adams said, his voice low. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“Well, he is,” said Hay. “And tonight should be a rather more unbuttoned social evening than our last dinner turned out to be.”

“Harry James unbuttoned,” muttered Adams. “Now there’s an image that refuses to coalesce in the focal lens of my inner eye.” Adams waited a few seconds and had to clear his throat before speaking again. “Will . . . Mr. Holmes be there again?”

Either not picking up on Adams’s tone or ignoring it, Hay said, “Oh, no. Holmes has disappeared. Definitely left town was the last I heard, possibly gone back to England. Either way, he shan’t be at our table tonight and I’m glad of it.”

“Why?” asked Adams.

“Because my daughter Helen has become besotted by the man,” barked Hay. “She asked me the other day how much a detective earns and if such an income might support a married couple in the comfort to which she’s accustomed. She also wondered if great detectives were regularly knighted by Queen Victoria.”

“Good Lord,” said Adams. “She certainly didn’t phrase it all that way.”

“She might as well have,” said Hay. “Oh, Saint-Gaudens will be there tonight, but he says he must leave early, before brandy and cigars—some senator’s wife he’s chiseling in granite.”

“She poses at night?”

“Whenever the senator is out of town,” said Hay.

“Kipling, our dear Clarence King, Saint-Gaudens, Cabot Lodge without Nannie—he rarely speaks at the table when Nannie’s there but can be rather witty when it’s just other men—and then, of course, a chance at a front row seat for the second round between the Boy and Harry,” said Adams. “I can’t pass this up. I’ll be there tonight.”

“With bells on?”

“I do have a jester cap I can bring and possibly convince myself to wear after we open the fourth bottle,” said Adams.

“Save that jester’s cap for young Theodore . . . just in case,” said Hay.

The two were still chuckling when they hung up their telephones.

The roar of the shotgun blast, though fifty feet below him, was deafening to James. Chicken feathers flew into the air on both sides below him where the canvas covered the thinner rafters. His own higher, thicker beam shook as some sort of shot rattled against its bottom and sides. Cringing into the narrowest straight line the portly James could manage, he still felt a shot—almost certainly bird shot—rip at his left sleeve and stipple his left forearm with pinpricks. He clamped his jaws tight so that he would not cry out.

“You missed him!” shouted one of the gangsters below. “Look out . . . let me . . .” Two shots in rapid succession, each with the sharper, clearer report of a rifle rather than a shotgun blast. James felt at least one of the bullets slam into his beam some six or eight feet in front of him. The entire beam shuddered as if it were a tree taking the first, hard swing of an ax.

“Got it!” shouted the man who’d yelled immediately before the rifle shots. The mob roared.

James dared a peek down the left side of his beam.

Most of the men, save for the anarchists, were out of their chairs now, milling in a circle, slapping each other on the back and laughing, the rigid separation of neighborhood gangs forgotten. A man with a rifle was holding up a large gray rat—quite dead—by the tail and turning in a circle to receive the plaudits of his criminal cohorts.

“SILENCE!” Moriarty’s voice was so loud and commanding that Henry James almost lost his balance and rolled off his beam. The mobs fell silent at once.

“Grogan will visit each of your leaders in the next week with precise instructions on where you’ll muster on May one, what armaments you’ll bring and which will be provided for you, exactly where the killing zones for the police will be, your precise positions for the ambushes, and information on where the anar . . . excuse, me . . . socialists will have already begun their bombing. We’re finished for tonight. But leave in small groups to get back to your own gang areas and beer halls. We don’t want the cops picking any of you up tonight, much less arresting clusters of you. And I’ll have Lucan Adler kill any man who speaks to the police—even if that man is being held in protective custody at police headquarters.”

That seemed to sober the mob into true silence. The man with the rifle tossed away the dead rat. The groups began filing out of the main front and back sliding doors of the old warehouse.

James leaned over to peek again at Moriarty, but the derby-hatted hoodlum named Grogan was the only one still standing on the platform. Moriarty had disappeared.

James continued lying on his side on the high beam until his muscles and bones were in such pain that he thought he might scream. He lay there as the last of the anarchists and gang members walked boldly out into the darkness beyond the sliding doors; he stayed there until the man they’d called Grogan had shut off the lights and been the last to leave. And still he lay there, his left arm hurting, for another hour or more, listening to the scurrying of rats in the rafters near him.

He was sure he would hear heavy footsteps coming up the stairway at any second. He’d pulled the panel up behind him using the peg set on the inside for that purpose but he was sure that anyone coming up the steps would turn the gas lamp back on, see the unlatched top corners of the trap door, and open it behind him.

Eventually he could stand the pain and darkness no longer. James got to his hands and knees, feeling dizzy and not trusting his balance in the darkness, and backed up along his beam until his heels contacted the trap door. He tapped it open with the least force and sound he could manage.

Then he was out on the death-black upper landing and all but unable to stand. He had to pull himself up with his hands on the wall above the trap door until he stood weakly there, still leaning on the wall, his knees and back hurting far more than the lacerations on his right arm under what he could feel as the torn sleeve of his jacket and shirt.

There was no light coming through the frosted glass of the office door on the opposite side of the absurdly narrow landing. Could he possibly have been lying on that beam long enough for it to grow dark outside? He started to raise the strength of the single weak gas lamp on the wall but then thought better of it. If someone was waiting on the dark staircase below, the resumption of light on his landing would make him a perfect target.

He found his hat and walking cane where he’d left them on the floor of the landing.

Remembering how steep and narrow the staircase was, James descended carefully in the darkness, taking each step with care, his arms extended so that he could touch the peeling wall on either side of the staircase, his cane finding each step in the darkness.

At each flickering landing, he expected to encounter someone waiting for him. No one was there. Still, when he reached the bottom of the last flight and was standing at the door through which he’d entered, it took him a minute or two to work up courage to open the door. A terrible thought made him grab the wall again for support: What if they’ve locked this door? Locked me in?

They hadn’t. He stepped out into twilight. The cul-de-sac was empty except for himself, standing there so incongruously, so obviously.

It was about sixty normal paces to the end of the dead-end alley and the beginning of the unpaved street but it felt like half a mile to the aching writer.

He turned right on the unnamed street, trying to remember a general direction back to the civilized parts of town. There were other people on the street—all men as far as he could tell—but most were clustered near the few lighted saloons. James stayed near the dark buildings across the street from these lighted buildings, walking where the sidewalk would be if the muddy lane had been a real street. At least there was less horse manure on the sides.

As he walked, James questioned himself about his reactions during his time clinging to a beam high above thieves, robbers, rapists, arsonists, and Professor James Moriarty in that old chicken warehouse. He had been frightened, to be sure—especially when the man had yelled “Rat!” and the shotgun blast had rattled all around him—but along with the fear had been something unexpected and rather new to Henry James—simple excitement? A sense of thrill? A strange, inexplicable joy at the wild strangeness of it all?

He wondered if his pounding heart and excited sense of everything slowing down during those tensest moments he’d spent above the mob, the moments when he thought he’d been discovered, the rifle shots, if he had been sharing something he thought he would never have the opportunity to experience after having avoided service in the Civil War. Had his brother Wilkie thrilled to such danger in the minutes or hours before receiving his terrible wounds? How else to explain Wilkie’s eagerness to return to his unit months after suffering such undignified, suppurating, and impossibly painful injuries?

And his brother Bob, who had said he’d “enjoyed” life in the army during the war. Could James’s experience that afternoon connect in any way to the simple joy of action that his brothers had written about? James thought of his cousin Gus—that beautiful pale, red-head’s naked body in the afternoon light on the day James had walked in on the life-drawing class—had Gus felt such a thrill of danger and the joy of risk in the months of service before being killed by a sniper, his body never recovered? Had Gus heard the sound of the shot that had taken his young life? The veterans insisted that one never did—never heard the fatal shot since science had shown that the ball or bullet was traveling faster than sound itself—but James remembered hearing the loud rifle shot just before the beam he was lying on reverberated like a struck bell. It had been . . . thrilling.

He walked for what seemed like hours as the last of the light left the skies. His sense of direction all but gone now, James headed for lights reflected from lowering clouds. That way lay street lamps. That way, whichever way it was, must be toward civilization.

Several times men broke off from some group and crossed the street toward him and each time James thought—This shall be it—but no one accosted him. No one even addressed him except for a bizarrely madeup lady of the night—what the Americans called a “crib doxie,” he felt certain, whose place of business was one of the canvas-covered stalls in a reeking alley—whose chalk-white and crimson-rouged face opened to show yellow teeth when she called “Looking for a good time, are you, Mr. Gentleman, sir?”

James nodded toward the apparition and quickly crossed the street.

He had finally reached a cobblestone street—trolley tracks in the center!—with gas lamps at each corner and allowed himself a sigh of satisfaction. There would be street signs here. The slums were behind him.

And just at that moment, three men stepped out of an alley and blocked his way.

“Lost, pal?” asked the tallest one, bearded and filthy. The second man was equally as tall but heavier and had short whiskers rather than a beard. James glimpsed a gold tooth when the light from the corner street lamp briefly touched the first man’s face. Both tall men wore wide-rimmed hats that were soiled with sweat and grime and looked to have been gnawed upon by rats. The third man blocking James’s way could hardly be called a man yet: a boy of sixteen or seventeen, almost as tall as his two mates but infinitely thinner. The boy’s face was mostly nose and with his hair hanging greasily over his eyes and his oversized teeth catching the light, James thought of the rat the gang members had shot off the rafters.

“Let me pass, please,” said James and stepped straight toward the bearded man with the gold tooth.

That man stepped aside but the second big man moved to block James’s way. The three stepped closer, encircling him. James looked over their shoulders but could see no police officers, no pedestrians, no decent folk he might call out to.

“Nice spats,” said the ruffians’ leader. And then he hawked and spit, quite deliberately, a gob of brown tobacco onto James’s left foot.

The second man touched James’s torn right sleeve. “You’re bleedin’, pal. Better come with us so we’s can bandage you up right.”

James tried to step to his left, into the street, but the boy and the first man blocked his way again. They stepped forward aggressively and James realized that he was giving way, backing toward the darkness of the alley from whence they’d stepped. He stopped.

The leader stepped so close that James could smell the whiskey and garlic on his breath when the tall man ran his ragged fingers over James’s jacket and waistcoat front. “Fucking spats, fucking top hat, fucking silver-headed walking stick,” the bearded leader said, “but no fucking watch in your vest. Where is it?”

“I . . . I lost it,” said James.

“Careless sod, ain’t you?” said the second man. “But I bet you didn’t lose your fucking billfold, did you, Mr. Spats?”

James drew himself to his full height, his right hand gripping the cane tightly even though he knew they would be on him before he could lift it in his own defense.

He felt something sharp touch his belly and looked down to see that the youngest man had set a knife point there.

“James!” cried a familiar voice from just across the street.

James and the three thieves turned their heads at the same instant. James had to suppress a giggle—possibly a hysterical one—since the two men he least imagined running into were now hurrying across the empty street toward him. It had been Theodore Roosevelt who had called out and with him, in a finer suit than James had last seen him in, was Clarence King.

As the two men trotted up to the sidewalk, the bearded thief—well over six feet in height—looked at the five-foot-eight Roosevelt and King, two inches shorter than Roosevelt, and said, “I bet you a bottle that they got watches.”

“Not for fucking long,” said his equally tall, brawny, and filthy partner.

As Good as the Boston Beaneaters

The youngest thug pulled the blade back from James’s belly and held the knife down at his side as Roosevelt and King stepped up to the group.

“James!” said Roosevelt again, ignoring the three hoodlums and showing his huge, perfect-toothed grin beneath his gold pince-nez. His blue eyes were very bright, as if in joyous anticipation of something. “How fortunate to bump into you! King and I were hoping to find you . . . we’re headed over to Hay’s home for dinner.”

Clarence King’s hazel eyes were much colder than Roosevelt’s blue gaze. While Roosevelt had no walking stick with him, King was carrying the elaborate one that James had first seen at Hay’s home: the top was of some burnished stone naturally curved almost like a bird’s beak.

The two tallest thugs exchanged glances and the bearded leader nodded. James assumed that they’d just silently agreed to rob and beat—and possibly kill—all three of the “swells” they’d just encountered on the edge of Night Town. James didn’t know if these three thugs had been at Moriarty’s meeting or not . . . and realized it didn’t matter. He’d tried to warn his friends away with not-so-subtle shoving motions of his hands when they were across the street, but now it was too late. The six men were clustered in a rather tight circle here at the entrance to the dark alley.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” young Roosevelt said to the thugs, still smiling that impossible white smile. “Thank you for escorting our friend this far. We shall walk with him from here.”

The two tallest men shifted to their right, blocking any easy retreat for King or Roosevelt. The scrawny young man closest to Henry James had his blade raised and visible again.

The leader flicked his grimy fingertips up and then down Roosevelt’s waistcoated thick torso. “There’s a good watch at the end of that chain, ain’t there, four-eyes?” he said, showing his brown teeth.

“Of course there is,” young Roosevelt said coldly.

“And a billfold in your pocket, too, ain’t there?” added the bearded man.

Theodore’s grin somehow grew broader. “Yes,” he said softly. “And it’s going to stay there. You three go about your business now and no one will get hurt.”

The two largest thugs began laughing at this and the youngest one joined in with his unpleasant cackle.

The leader reached forward. The second man produced a short-bladed knife almost identical to the one the youngest thug was again holding against the curve of Henry James’s belly.

“Do not touch me,” said Roosevelt to the bearded thug. The tall man in the hat must have had twenty pounds and six inches of height to his advantage.

“What’re you going to do when I do touch you, four-eyes?” The broad, filthy hands were poised in front of Theodore’s thick torso and gleaming watch chain.

In fairly fluent German—which James could follow—Roosevelt said, “I shall kick you in the balls, make your teeth eat my knee, and then head butt your paltry brains out.”

James noticed that young Theodore hadn’t been sure of the German word for “butt” and had just used Kopfbütten as an approximate. He’d also used the informal du form which an adult would use with an intimate, a child, or an animal. His intention there was clear when he’d used the fressen form of “to eat”—dogs and other animals fressen—rather than the human essen. Theodore carefully removed his pince-nez by its ribbon, set the glasses in an inner vest pocket, and patted the pocket. His smile was thin now with his huge teeth no longer gleaming.

The tall leader laughed and said, “We got a couple of midget Dutch-men here, boys. Let’s beat the shit out of them.”

The two tall men stepped forward. Roosevelt and King took three hasty steps backward, as if they were preparing to run. The leader widened his stride to cut Theodore off.

Roosevelt opened his arms wide, leaned backward with that massive torso, and kicked the tall man between the legs with the kind of full-force, wound-up, full-legged kick that Henry James had only seen on rugby fields. The polished toe of Theodore’s small, expensive boot all but disappeared in the leader’s vulnerable crotch. The impact was so great that James saw the leader-thug’s feet actually leave the ground.

The big man fell to his knees and started to crumple, his hat falling forward as his head came down. He was using both hands to hold his testicles and the moan that came out of him did not sound human.

As the man’s face arched down, Theodore’s right knee came up more rapidly than it had in the kick. James heard teeth snap and the man’s huge nose break.

The thug’s upper torso rocked back—his face smeared with blood—his eyes closed but now on the same level as Teddy Roosevelt’s blue gaze. Roosevelt grabbed the thug by the shoulders, jerked him toward himself, and smashed that great, square, Roosevelt forehead against the leader’s face and temples so hard it sounded like an ax smashing against thin wood.

The leader went down on his back and did not stir.

The other big thug had not been watching idly. He had his knife out jabbing forward and swinging from left to right even as his long arms went wide as if to encircle Clarence King before stabbing.

King had hefted his heavy cane to his shoulder and now he swung it like a baseball bat. Henry James had never played baseball as a child, but his brother William had . . . and loved it. And during the last two weeks, James had suffered John Hay’s enthusiasm for the sport, so when King made his powerful swing, James guessed that it was more like one of the batters from the Boston Beaneaters—expected to win the pennant this year—than a hitter from the perennially last-place Washington Senators.

The beaked stone at the head of the cane caught the advancing thug full in the face. James saw and heard the cheekbone snap, the nose break, and both he and the youngest thug next to him actually had to jump back to avoid the geyser of blood and teeth that came their direction. The big man dropped his knife and fell to all fours.

Five-foot-six Clarence King had grown a belly but the decades of mountain climbing and mine digging had turned his thighs and arms to powerful engines. He kicked the man in the backside so hard that the thug skidded forward on his ruined face on the alley cinders, his arms and hands trailing palms up.

The boy, who was left-handed, swung away from James and swung his arm back to stab Clarence King in the side.

Henry James had written William just before Christmas that he’d been putting on far too much weight, that he was going forth belly-first into the world these days and it did not please him. He’d told William how he’d hired a fencing coach for three two-hour workouts a week, but also how—while James very much enjoyed the exercise—it hadn’t taken an ounce off his weight.

Now James raised his own walking stick and brought it down on the boy’s wrist as if he were driving a tent peg with a mallet. Surprisingly, his aim was perfect—he heard the head of the cane make loud contact with the scrawny young thug’s wrist bone and the knife dropped to the alley cinders.

The young thug shouted in pain but he was very, very fast. He dropped to one knee to retrieve the knife before James could even get his cane raised again.

King stepped forward and planted his polished but heavy boot on the knife blade. The young thug tugged but the blade snapped off at the hilt.

“Trade knife,” said Roosevelt from where he stood astride the fallen leader. “They give them away to the Indians by the gross out in the Badlands. Not worth a damn.”

King had shifted his cane to his left hand and suddenly, from a coat pocket, he pulled out a jackknife which he flicked open with a snap of his wrist. The blade was enormous for a folding knife—at least seven inches long, James thought, and tapered to a terrifying point.

King set that sharpened point a millimeter under the young thug’s left eye, pushing strongly enough to draw blood and a terrified gasp from the would-be highwayman. James half-expected King to pop the boy’s eye out like a street vender scooping out ice cream on a hot summer night.

“There’s a lesson here, boy,” hissed King. “If you’re coming to a knife fight, bring a knife. Otherwise you’ll end up with a Heidelberg scar.”

King flicked the blade right across the young thug’s cheek and blood geysered.

The boy screamed, clasped both hands to his opened cheek to hold together the bloody flaps now exposing his molars, stood, and ran off into the night.

James could only stare at the two men unconscious on the ground as the sound of the boy’s pounding boots dwindled down the dark alleyway. He jumped slightly when someone touched his elbow, but it was only Roosevelt. “That move of yours was rather neat, Mr. James.”

“Very neat, I thought,” said King, cleaning off the stone head of his cane in the dirt and cinders.

“Your right sleeve is ripped and bloody,” said young Theodore. “Did that young brat do that?”

“No,” said James, astounded at how steady his voice sounded, “I . . . fell when getting off a trolley a short while ago. Just tore it up a bit on the gravel.”

King and Roosevelt exchanged a glance, but said nothing. They stepped away from the two forms on the ground, one moaning and weeping, the other still unconscious.

King twirled his newly cleaned cane. “We really were headed for Hay’s place for dinner. Would you care to accompany us, Mr. James?”

“I would, Mr. King,” said the writer.

Two blocks further—where the street lights were closer together, shops were open, the street was evenly paved, and the true sidewalks began again—they saw a cab passing that was large enough for the three of them and Roosevelt hailed it with a whistle that made the horse jump.

The Panic of ’93

Most of the dinner guests had not yet arrived when Roosevelt, King, and James knocked on the door, but Hay immediately took in Harry’s dishabille and told his head butler Benson and another servant named Napier to help Mr. James up to his room. Dr. Granger, who’d arrived early just so that he could have a whiskey and quiet conversation with his old friend Hay, looked at James’s sleeve and said, “I’d best come up to your room with you and have a look at that.”

“It’s nothing,” said James.

“I’ll just get my bag from John’s man,” said the doctor.

Roosevelt, wearing his pince-nez again, grinned and said, “Dr. Granger brings his medical bag to social occasions?”

“Dr. Granger brings his medical bag everywhere he goes,” said Clarence King.

Upstairs, James kicked off his spats first, and when Napier swept them up and said “I’ll have these cleaned immediately, sir,” James snapped, “No, burn them.” He would always see the contemptuous tobacco stain on the one spat no matter how clean it might be.

“Come into the bathroom where it’s bright,” ordered Dr. Granger. “Imagine, a guest room with its own bathroom, running water, and electric lights. Will wonders never cease?”

The sumptuous bathroom was as bright and sterile as a surgical operating room and, when James had removed his sodden and torn shirt and thrown it in a corner, Dr. Granger looked at the lacerated forearm and said, “How did you say you injured your arm?”

“Jumping off a trolley a bit too soon and falling on cinders,” James said, having to avert his gaze even as he spoke.

Granger’s blue eyes could sometimes be as playful as Teddy Roosevelt’s and he only gave James a glance before saying, “All right, but this particular bit of street or alley appears to have been paved with bird shot.”

Napier had brought a small, curved white pan and Dr. Granger used some sort of tong-like instrument to remove the shotgun pellets one by one, each clanking as the round bit of shot dropped into the pan making James blush yet again. Dr. Granger removed twelve of the pellets and put iodine—or something equally as painful—over the extraction cuts and other lacerations where there had been no shot.

“None touched muscle,” said Dr. Granger. “Most barely penetrated the skin. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you’d been in a slight hunting accident, suffering from a shotgun fired from some distance.”

“I don’t hunt, sir,” said James. He started to pull on the clean white dress shirt Benson had brought from the wardrobe.

“Just a minute,” said Dr. Granger. “You don’t want to get iodine stains all over your shirt sleeve and I don’t want those wounds to get infected. Hold your arm steady . . . there . . . against the wash basin.”

Granger removed a roll of bandage and some scissors from his bag and within a minute James’s entire forearm had been carefully wrapped and taped.

“Feel any better?” asked Dr. Granger.

“I feel like a fool and”—he gestured with the right arm bandaged almost to his elbow—“like an Egyptian mummy.”

“Wait, don’t put on the shirt quite yet,” said the doctor. He was filling a syringe with a dark fluid from a vial.

“Wait, I don’t think . . .” began James but the doctor had already administered the injection in the author’s upper arm. “What was that?”

“Just a little something to help with the pain and to cut down on the chance of tetanus,” said the doctor as he closed the bag.

Damn, thought James. He’d recognized the morphine and should have spoken sooner. Both he and Katharine Loring had been trained in how to administer the liberal doses of morphine to his sister Alice in her last months of dying . . . she’d actually passed away while lost in her morphine dreams . . . and Henry James had vowed never to allow anyone to put the stuff in his own veins. Too late.

And the pain was less. Much less. James thought of Sherlock Holmes and his abominable injections and wondered if this light feeling . . . almost of happiness . . . might be the result of those illicit injections as well.

“If I babble like an idiot during dinner,” said James, “I shall blame it on you and your needle, Dr. Granger.”

“If we’re not all babbling like idiots by the third course,” said the doctor, “we shall have to blame it on Hay for not providing sufficient wine and liquor.”

As the other guests were arriving and just before they repaired to the dining room, Hay saw that James was concerned about something. He gingerly took the author’s left upper arm, led him to the hallway, and said, “What’s wrong, Harry? Can I help?”

James realized that he was biting his lip. “Absurd as it sounds, John,” he said softly, “I find that I simply must get in touch with Mr. Holmes. It’s urgent.”

“Sherlock Holmes?” said his host. “I thought he’d left town.”

“Perhaps he has,” said James, “but I really must communicate something to him. He did leave the address of a cigar store here in town so if perhaps your man could find a boy to carry a message . . .”

“We can do better than that, Harry. We can see if the cigar store has a telephone and contact them directly.”

“Why on earth would a cigar store have a telephone?” said James. He fought down another uncharacteristic urge to giggle aloud.

Hay shrugged as he led the way to his private study. “Strange age we live in, Harry.”

James had noticed the telephone in Hay’s study before, but he’d never seen his host operate it. Now there were several minutes back and forth with someone James understood to be an “operator”—or perhaps general information person—and then Hay grinned, handed the apparatus to James, and said, “Mr. Twill is on the phone. He’s the manager of the cigar store Holmes mentioned and he’s there now.” Hay left the room so that James could have privacy.

“Hello, hello, hello?” said James, feeling rather idiotic.

When he and Mr. Twill had both identified themselves again, James said, “I understand that someone at your store receives and conveys messages to Mr. Sherlock Holmes. It is absolutely imperative . . . urgently imperative . . . that I get in touch with him at once. Or speak to him telephonically if he is there now.”

“Mr. Sherlock Holmes, sir?” squawked Twill’s voice through the rumble and scratching of the phone lines.

“Yes.”

“English gentleman, sir?”

“That’s him!”

“No, he hasn’t been around the store, sir, since the day he paid me for this little service of sending along messages. He has a boy come check two or three times a day.”

James sighed. If he didn’t feel so . . . light . . . at the moment, he realized that his chest would be aching with anxiety at giving Holmes the extraordinary news of what he had seen and heard that afternoon.

“All right,” he said. “Could you please take down this message and get it to Mr. Holmes as quickly as possible?”

“As soon as his boy stops by, sir.”

“All right. The message reads . . . have you paper and pen ready?”

“Pencil poised, sir.”

“The message reads . . .” James had to pause a second to frame it. “ ‘I followed Professor Moriarty to a meeting here in Washington today. I overheard’ . . . yes, yes, I’ll slow down.”

“You can go ahead now, sir. You overheard . . .”

“ ‘I overheard Moriarty sharing his plans about May first with several . . . groups. It’s absolutely imperative that you contact me at once. I leave by train tomorrow . . . that’s Sunday, nine April . . . afternoon. Absolutely urgent that we speak before then. Signed, James’. Can you read that back to me, please?”

Twill did so, James corrected a couple of minor infelicities in the cigar-store keeper’s notes, and then the line was dead and the author was fumbling to hang the hearing apparatus onto the speaking stem and then to get the whole contraption back on its shelf.

Perhaps it was the morphine—if it had been morphine—but the evening’s dinner party was one of the most enjoyable Henry James could ever recall. James could not stop laughing. The day’s events should have been hanging over him like a black shroud, but instead the sharp memories of hiding on the high beam, of Moriarty, of the criminals and anarchists, and of the street confrontation with the ruffians (a bloody confrontation of which neither Teddy Roosevelt nor Clarence King showed the slightest signs either in manner or spatters of this or that on their formal clothing) seemed to buoy James up with a joy and energy he’d not felt for years. He was wearing a fresh shirt and dinner jacket.

Hay sat at one end of the table again, overseeing the conversation and stimulating it when it lagged—which it almost never did with this all-male group. James was given pride of place to the right of their host and to his right was his old acquaintance Rudyard Kipling. James had given away the bride, Miss Carrie Balestier, at Kipling’s 1892 wedding in London and, to complete the bonds of affection, the two men were mutual literary admirers. Why Kipling—who represented so much about Britain, proud and shameful, in his writing—chose to live in America was beyond James’s comprehension.

Henry Adams sat next to Kipling and beyond him was Teddy Roosevelt. This night, Augustus Saint-Gaudens took the chair at the opposite end of the table from John Hay. James admired Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture almost beyond words with which to praise it—he thought the sculpture at Clover Adams’s grave site showed not only consummate skill but tremendous courage, stirring as it did no sense of hope or an afterlife or surcease of sorrow, as James remembered that hack Poe had once phrased it, but only the infinite depths of sorrow and loss.

To Saint-Gaudens’s right on the other side of the table were Clarence King, Dr. Granger, and Henry Cabot Lodge to Hay’s left.

All the men at the table seemed extraordinarily witty this night, but Kipling and Roosevelt stole the show as far as James’s adrenaline- and morphine-muddled perceptions could judge such things. The 27-year-old Kipling, who’d been wintering at their home in snowy Vermont and whose wife Carrie had just had a baby on December 29, was the object of much congratulating and back-slapping. James would someday write—“Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.”

“It was very considerate of Josephine to choose twenty-nine December as her birth date,” the young writer was saying, “since my birthday is on the thirtieth and Carrie’s on the thirty-first. Keeps thing tidy, as it were.”

Dr. Granger—his nose already reddening with drink but his enunciation still perfect—asked if the addition of the baby helped them stay warm up in what the Kiplings had named Bliss Cottage near Brattleboro.

“The dear babe is not big enough to offer much in the way of supportive body heat,” laughed Kipling, “but the exercise of walking back and forth with her on the nights she cries has been very helpful in keeping warm.”

The conversation kept shifting but James could not stop his mind from wandering back to the incredible events of the day and his still urgent need to get in touch with Sherlock Holmes.

Kipling and Roosevelt were queried about their beloved Cosmos Club that sat right across Lafayette Park from Hay’s home, combining the Tayloe House with the Dolley Madison home. Both Kipling and Roosevelt were fanatical about the out-of-doors, and the Cosmos Club, besides being perhaps the most elite and influential men’s club in America, reflected their passions.

“We did start this little organization called the National Geographic Society there five years ago,” said Teddy Roosevelt.

Kipling began laughing himself and when queried, said, “Forgive me, but I remember when friend Theodore first presented himself to the Club with thoughts of joining. Twenty of the older members set out several hundred random fossil-bones on a table in the main dining room and asked Theodore to identify any of them if he could.”

“Could he?” asked Clarence King, obviously very well knowing the answer and already grinning.

Kipling laughed again. James thought it was a pleasant laugh, manly and rich but never caustic at anyone else’s expense. “For the next several hours, Theodore proceeded not only to identify the fossil bones but to separate them into the various living and extinct animals they each represented—he did everything but wire them together, gentlemen—all the while giving a running commentary on the eating, grazing, predatory, and breeding habits of each animal.”

“Teedie’s been a star member of the Cosmos Club ever since,” said Hay, ignoring Roosevelt’s scowl at the use of his childhood name.

Others offered various anecdotes on various topics, even James, but before they’d opened the fourth bottle for the table, Kipling was begging Roosevelt to tell his story about “the grizzly in the bushes out in Dakota.”

Roosevelt grinned and did so. He kept the story short, with just the right amount of detail, but Henry James found it especially humorous. The huge grizzly, it seemed, was old and myopic—almost blind. Roosevelt had lost his glasses during a fast descent on a steep, wooded hillside, so he ended up almost as blind as the bear. His first shot missed. “I missed the heart but caught him in the backside,” said Roosevelt, following the true raconteur’s prime rule of never smiling or laughing at his own tale. “The bear went into a thick mass of high willow bushes, almost too close together for me to push into, and—especially without my glasses—I found myself none too eager to force my way into those bushes where Mr. Grizzly and I could have met up in an instant, long before I could raise my rifle. And the animal was not in the best of moods that morning . . .”

Eventually Roosevelt did get into the bushes to distract the animal. After an hour of trying to lure him out, he finally thwacked his way into the willows using the barrel of his Winchester to clear his way and with a huge Bowie knife in his teeth. That image alone made the others at the table laugh and James laughed along with them.

“The blind stalking the blind,” said Roosevelt. “And in the end, so to speak, the bear was blinder. Or I was luckier.”

James enjoyed the anecdote—and had no doubt that it was true—but it reminded him that none of them—King, Roosevelt, or him—had mentioned the street brawl with the would-be street thieves just forty minutes earlier. Henry James did not know the etiquette involved in discussing violent street fights—perhaps a gentleman was not supposed to mention it if he came out on the winning side—or perhaps King and Roosevelt wanted to save James from embarrassment the same way they had saved him from what certainly would have been a severe beating, if not stabbing, and violent robbery less than an hour earlier. James made a mental note to have his protagonist behave precisely this way if he went straight to a fine dinner with friends directly after such a violent altercation.

But, James admitted to himself, he doubted if any of his characters would ever have such a violent encounter.

The conversation was turning to current events but Henry James’s thoughts kept orbiting his afternoon and what seemed the absolute imperative of telling someone in authority about Professor Moriarty’s plans for presidential assassination, the uprising of the anarchists, and mob warfare.

The other men were discussing finances—specifically the much-ballyhooed but never-quite-arrived “Panic of ’93”—and this gave James a perfect opportunity to become lost in his own thoughts without seeming rude. Everyone at the table, save perhaps for Teddy Roosevelt, knew that Henry James was a writer; he had no finances. One was delightfully liberated from endless male chatter about investments when one could not afford a single investment.

If I don’t hear from Holmes, James was thinking, perhaps I should go to Washington’s major and superintendent of police. Or perhaps to President Cleveland himself. That last thought made him cringe.

It would be possible. Several of his friends at this table—Hay, Cabot Lodge, perhaps young Roosevelt—had dined with the president several times, maybe even Adams who frowned on knowing all recent presidents. James might have an emergency meeting arranged for as soon as tomorrow morning.

To say what? he thought. To report that while I was hiding out in the rafters of a former chicken slaughterhouse, I happened to hear Professor James Moriarty—who is considered a fictional character by most people, even possibly, most probably, his nemesis Sherlock Holmes—planning to assassinate the President of the United States and ten or more other heads of states and perhaps scores of top government officials in America and almost a dozen European nations . . . and not only carry out these assassinations, but simultaneously instigate anarchist uprisings and gang riots in all these scores of cities here and abroad.

“ . . . it can be traced back to the failure of the wheat crop on the Buenos Aires exchange . . .” Cabot Lodge was saying.

Hay waved that supposition away. They were all smoking cigars now, save for Roosevelt, Dr. Granger, and James.

“It’s the railroad speculation, pure and simple,” said Hay.

“Whatever it is or was or will be, you business types were talking about the ‘Panic of ’93’ as long ago as November of ’92. Something had better arrive soon or a lot of speculators selling short will be very disappointed.”

Was this the renowned Sherlock Holmes’s plan? To grab President Grover Cleveland’s massive arm and pull him away from the button that would start every machine at the Columbian Exposition a few seconds after noon on May 1, tugging down the huge president and crying “Get down, you fool!” the way that young Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes was supposed to have done with President Lincoln at Fort Stevens in 1864? James doubted that.

“There was a clear prelude to panic in February when the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad went bankrupt by overextending itself,” said Cabot Lodge.

“I thought Cleveland handled the Treasury crisis rather handily,” said Hay, “by convincing Congress to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act just days after his inauguration.”

“For a Democrat—the only one elected president in my living memory—Cleveland does seem to be a man of action,” said Dr. Granger.

“He could have taken on my grizzly bare-handed,” said Roosevelt. “They would have weighed in the same before the bout.”

“Now Theodore,” said Henry Adams.

I can’t delay leaving tomorrow, thought James. If I stay, I’ll never see the end of these conspiracies or complications. There’s simply no other choice but to get word of Professor Moriarty’s meeting with the gangs and the anarchists and to repeat what the . . . what had The Times of London called him after Reichenbach Falls? . . . the Napoleon of Crime had said about the planned assassinations, uprisings, and lootings.

I’ve been caught up in one of the romance-adventure novels I so despise—something less even than H. Rider Haggard’s overly violent, overly specific potboilers—and the only way I can escape is to walk away from everything I’ve seen and heard today . . . everything I’ve seen and heard the last few weeks since the Seine. That way lies reality. Or at least literature. Anything is better than this penny-dreadful tale I’ve found myself in.

“The Free Silver Movement is the wild card in this game,” said Hay. “Especially with the American farmers supporting it.”

“If people and failing banks start demanding gold for their notes . . .” Henry Adams said as if he were thinking aloud.

“In the West and Midwest, more than three hundred banks have already closed,” said Roosevelt.

“In the West and Midwest,” said Hay, gesturing to his servant to pass a new bottle of wine around, “anyone with two barrels, a plank, and a cigar box full of quarters can declare themselves a bank.”

I have to leave tomorrow, thought James with a sudden pain in his chest and left arm. I must leave tomorrow. Buy a garden trowel along the way so I can bury the snuffbox with Alice’s ashes securely inside it. I was tempted to go to Newport where she and Miss Loring seemed so happy after Alice had the house on the point built for them, but I think Katharine Loring has had just about enough of Alice’s company. No, my dear, darling, caustic, death-desiring Alice needs to lie in the same soil as our parents and Aunt Kate.

And then I have to rush to make that noon train to New York. I can’t miss that German steamship’s—the Spree wasn’t it?—departure time on Tuesday morning. Once aboard I can relax, I can think, I can take the time and energy to sort out what has been reality and what illusion over these past weeks. Mr. Sherlock Holmes will simply have to fend for himself in this multifaceted mess of a mystery. One thing is certain—I’ll never be his adoring Boswell the way Dr. Watson is, if he is a real person or even if he’s a product of Conan Doyle’s literary imagination, faithfully chronicling the detective’s triumphs. It’s a poverty of triumphs I’ve seen him produce.

A servant slipped in with a slip of paper on a silver tray. The young man whispered to Hay who nodded and gestured toward James.

It was a telegram. James could not wait until later to open it—it had to be Holmes’s response to his news about Moriarty and his urgent plea—so he slit it open and read it as he held it below the plane of the table. The telegram was moderately succinct:

God Might Envy Him

Sherlock Holmes rang Henry Adams’s new-fangled electrical doorbell button in late morning, about an hour after James’s train had left for New York and then Boston. The tall head butler, Hobson, answered the door and seemed no happier to see Holmes than he’d been during their last encounter.

“Mr. Adams is still in his bath,” said Hobson, making ready to close the door in Holmes’s face.

“That’s all right,” said Holmes, handing his hat and stick to the tall man as he brushed past him, “I shall be happy to wait for Mr. Adams in his study.”

While the flustered Hobson sought out his bathing master, Holmes stepped into the study, poured himself a healthy dose of Scotch with a whisper of water, and sprawled in the chair opposite the infinite expanse of Adams’s green leather desktop.

He lined up two fingers in a straight line with the Executive Mansion window of what had once been the office of President Cleveland’s sister—before she had been replaced by a 21-year-old bride, Miss Frances Folsom. Since Cleveland was 49 on the day of the marriage, the public might have been shocked by the more than 27-year age difference—or, failing that, disconcerted a bit by the fact that his marriage was unusual, since Cleveland had been the executor of his friend, and Frances’s father, Oscar Folsom’s estate, supervising Frances’s upbringing after her father’s death; he’d bought her yellow baby carriage when she was a few days old and he still seemed to be giving her bright things.

Holmes had met with the Steamboat Inspection Committee that Sunday morning—minus former Major and Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police William G. Brock though his place was filled by Chief Daniel O’Malley, head of the 27-man White House Police Force—and while Mr. Rockhill, the State Department Liaison, was complaining that he had to miss church, Holmes was asking Vice-President Adlai E. Stevenson where he planned to be on May first, around noon, just about the time President Cleveland was scheduled to push the button that started everything at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition.

Vice-President Stevenson had to think a minute and then refer to a pocket record-keeper, but finally he said, “Oh, I’ll be in the Executive Mansion from ten thirty a.m. until mid-afternoon. Meeting and lunching with delegates from the current regime in the Philippines and then taking part in a formal signing of a Letter of Agreement with them.”

“Where will the meeting and signing take place, Mr. Vice-President?” asked Holmes.

Stevenson had to think about that for a minute but then remembered. “Oh, that will be in what we now call the Small Treaty Room.”

“Would that happen to be the north-facing room whose window one can see directly across the park there? The one directly across from Mr. Henry Adams’s home?” asked Holmes. “The room that was President Cleveland’s sister’s office and reception room during Mr. Cleveland’s first term?”

“Why, yes, I believe that’s the same room,” said Vice-President Stevenson.

Holmes turned to Mr. Drummond, the highly intelligent Chief of the Secret Service branch of the Treasury Department and to Daniel O’Malley. O’Malley had not struck Holmes as especially bright during the short time he’d been conversing with him that morning. “We have reliable indications that an attempt will be made upon Vice-President Stevenson’s life at or around the same time that the president is scheduled to be assassinated in Chicago. The Small Treaty Room is in a direct line to various windows in Mr. Henry Adams’s home less than two hundred yards to the north.”

“Shall we request permission for the event to be moved to another room?” asked Chief O’Malley.

“I would suggest that you keep the vice-president—and his guests—out of the White House for all of that day,” said Holmes. “Perhaps choose an inside room at the State Department and make sure that the change of venue and location remains a tightly held secret.”

Drummond of the Secret Service nodded and Holmes knew that it would be done.

“You see how someone could use a good rifle to make a clear shot into the Small Treaty Room from one of the windows on the Adamses’ home?” asked Holmes, pointing.

“Mr. Adams would never allow that,” said White House Police Chief O’Malley.

“Next to Adams’s house is the home of Colonel John Hay,” Washington P.D. Major and Superintendent Moore informed Holmes. “We can’t be bothering such important people just because of their . . . proximity . . . to the Executive Mansion.”

“Of course not,” said Sherlock Holmes.

“I’ll look into it and talk to you in the next week,” said Andrew Drummond.

Holmes understood that to mean that the Adamses’ house would be thoroughly searched, the best shooting angles analyzed by marksmen, and that the head of the Secret Service—a department with no constitutional responsibilities to protect the president—would have men there on May 1.

Chief O’Malley,” said Holmes, “are you still detaching two of your White House Police to travel with the president as is sometimes the custom?”

“Ahhhh,” said O’Malley and looked around the room as if someone could give him the correct answer. “I could send more men or less men.”

“Fewer,” corrected Holmes. He had the same reaction to hearing the English language abused as he did to watching horses or dogs beaten with no reason. And he was not especially a sentimentalist when it came to horses or dogs. But he had once told Watson that the “less or fewer” issue, along with the use of “I” in such sentences as “He gave the money to Sheila and I”, inflicted on the public by people who considered themselves well-educated, could be drastically reduced in frequency—if not actually abolished—by a few well-aimed pistol shots and an explanatory note that would be pinned to the victims’ chests.

“Think I should send less than the usual two?” asked Chief O’Malley.

Here Vice-President Stevenson stepped in with what might have been the briefest of winks at Holmes. “We know there’s a threat against the White House, Chief O’Malley. And Colonel Sebastian Moran is a famed marksman and soldier of fortune as opposed to these . . . phantoms . . . that the others are looking for. It might be wisest to retain all twenty-seven of your excellent roster of White House police officers on that day. After all, you were trained to protect the Executive Mansion from intrusion, not follow the president around to protect him.”

“True,” said O’Malley. “And it’s the Chicago Police Department’s job to protect the president. The host city always assumes that responsibility.”

“Only partially the responsibility of the Chicago P.D.,” said the Secret Service chief.

Holmes looked at Drummond. No one else had brought this up at any of their meetings.

“What do you mean?” asked Washington’s Major and Superintendent Moore.

In a private moment before the group assembled, Holmes had asked Drummond if he thought that Chicago had the honor of hosting the most corrupt police department in the country. Finally Chief Drummond had nodded. “Now that the last of the Tweed ring is out of New York and the new corrupters haven’t yet taken their place, Chicago is the most corrupt. It runs in their veins like the booze they consume. But there are good men on the force there and very few out of the hundreds who’d aid and abet in the murder of a president.”

Holmes had nodded.

Now Chief O’Malley said loudly, “What do you mean when you say that the Chicago Police Department won’t be responsible for President Cleveland’s safety?”

“From the door of the Lexington Hotel until he reaches the Exposition grounds—the so-called White City down in Jackson Park—the C.P.D. will be the responsible agency,” said Holmes. “But once the procession enters the sacrosanct grounds of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the group directly responsible for the safety of the President of the United States—not to mention the forty or fifty other dignitaries there that day, the President of Brazil, I’m told, being the people’s favorite—shifts to the Columbian Guard.”

“What the hell is the Columbian Guard?” asked O’Malley.

Drummond answered, “It’s the private police force that Daniel Burn-ham put together just for the World’s Fair.”

“No Chicago police?” said Moore.

“None,” said Secret Service Chief Drummond. “On the fairgrounds, the Columbian Guard have the power to detain, interrogate, and arrest—there’s a nice little Columbian Guard jail just off the Midway Plaisance, but mostly of course they will be rounding up lost children, giving directions, intervening before private drunkenness becomes a public problem, and being courteous to hundreds of thousands of customers who’ve come to the Exposition to have a wonderful time.”

“How many of these Columbian Guardsmen are there?” asked Vice-President Stevenson.

Holmes answered, “Just over two thousand, Mr. Vice-President.”

“Two thousand!” exploded Washington P.D. Major and Superintendent Moore. “That’s an army.”

“That, I believe,” said Holmes, “was Daniel Burnham’s intention. The so-called White City will be electrified far beyond the current dreams of Chicago, New York, Washington, or any other major American city. Pleasant street lights and glowing electrical ‘lanterns’ and radiant store fronts and searchlights and lighting from huge windows and path lights illuminating more than six hundred acres of World’s Fairgrounds—combined with the highest percentage of trained police officers, uniformed and plainclothes alike, to the number of citizens—will make the White City the safest urban environment in the world.”

“As long as it’s safe for President Cleveland during the hours he shall be there,” said Vice-President Stevenson.

“What kind of weapons do these Columbian Guardsmen carry?” asked Moore.

Holmes smiled. “Most of them carry a whistle and a short sword in a scabbard.”

Henry Adams came into his study wearing his dressing gown and slippers. He frowned at the detective, who remained seated. “I see you’ve made yourself comfortably at home, Mr. Holmes.”

Holmes smiled and nodded.

“And no doubt taken the time to ransack my drawers and cabinets.”

“Only to the extent of pouring myself a drink for the long wait, Mr. Adams. An excellent whiskey.”

“I hadn’t planned on ever seeing you again,” said Adams.

Holmes nodded.

Adams went around to his side of the desk, hesitating as if debating whether he would acknowledge Holmes’s presence more by sitting or by standing. He sat.

“I thought that I had made it abundantly clear at our last meeting, Mr. Holmes,” said Adams, “that it was our last meeting. That we have nothing more to discuss, either in public or private.”

Holmes removed one of the small She-was-murdered cards from his pocket and set it on Adams’s green leather desk blotter.

“This has nothing to do with me,” said Adams. He tore the card into shreds and dropped them into his wastebasket.

“Ned Hooper hired me to find out who was sending out these cards to you and survivors of the Five Hearts each year, and since he’s now also dead, you were the closest relative, through your late wife, to whom I could report,” said Holmes.

“By your own admission,” said Adams, “you met my wife’s late brother for less than an hour some two years ago. That hardly gives you the right, Mr. Holmes, to call Edward ‘Ned’ as his family and friends did. If you must refer to him, you may use ‘Mr. Fowler.’ ”

Holmes nodded. “I was paid by Mr. Fowler to use my skills to discover who was sending these cards—and also, in his very words, ‘To see if Clover actually died by her own hand or by some means more sinister’—so in Mr. Fowler’s absence, I shall report to you.”

Adams had turned his face toward the windows but now he shot a glance at Holmes. “You know who’s been sending those cards the last seven years?”

“Yes.”

A charred log collapsed in Adams’s small fireplace. Even on warming spring days, he evidently kept a small fire burning in his study. Holmes wondered if the widower historian suffered from a permanent chill.

After a stretch of silence, Adams snapped, “Well, are you going to tell me or not?”

“No,” said Holmes.

Henry Adams’s face flushed even while his lips grew whiter. “You said that because your client, Ned, took his own life in December, you were duty bound to report to me. Now you say you won’t tell me the identity of this person who has been hounding and harassing the four of us these past six years? Such insolence! If I were a few years younger, Mr. Holmes . . .”

Holmes nodded as if he could see such a prospect as scholarly Henry Adams giving the detective a beating. “I’ve deduced who the person is who typed and sent those cards,” he said, “but I require a private, personal interview with that person. Such an interview isn’t possible right now, but will be carried out by the first week in May.”

“In other words,” spat Adams, “you’re guessing!”

“I never guess,” said Sherlock Holmes. He’d steepled his long, pale fingers under his chin and his gaze seemed fixed on something very far away. His expression, which so often seemed impassive when not in the throes of excitement or strong intellectual emotion, now looked stern. That sternness was not directed at Henry Adams, but it still made the historian uneasy.

“I don’t suppose you’ve discovered anything about the rest of this ‘mystery’ of my poor wife’s death . . . which was never a mystery,” said Adams. It had been a clumsy sentence and Adams, the constant writer and consummate editor, frowned at it.

Holmes seemed to return from wherever his thoughts had taken him. “Oh, yes,” he said almost off-handedly, “I’ve confirmed beyond doubt that Clover . . . Mrs. Adams . . . was murdered.”

Adams’s bearded jaw dropped and, although he quickly shut his mouth and attempted to control his expression, it was thirty seconds or more before he could speak. “Murdered? How? By whom? And for what possible reason?”

“I expect to have the answer to all three of your new questions before the fortnight is out,” said Holmes. “As to the ‘how’, there is no doubt that her death resulted from the administration of arsenic from her own photographic developing liquids. But the question stays on the list because we’re not certain of how that poison was administered.”

“So, in truth, you’re still blindly guessing about everything,” said Adams.

“I never guess, sir.”

“Do you even have . . . what are they called in your cheap mystery tales? . . . suspects?”

“I know the murderer was one of three people,” said Holmes, “with your name being the third on that list of possibilities.”

“Me!” cried Adams, jumping to his feet. “You have the insulting, insufferable . . .” Words failed him and Adams reached for his walking stick propped behind him.

“You had the time, the knowledge of and access to the poison, and, as for motives, murders of a spouse always have the most complicated, personal, and opaque of motives,” said Holmes. “In this case, everyone around you knows that your wife had always had a melancholy streak—she herself had written letters home during your long honeymoon in Egypt and elsewhere in which she admitted to her father that she’d been too . . . ‘overcome by my old nemesis of melancholy’ was how she put it, I believe . . . even to speak to you, her new husband, or to anyone else for almost two weeks. Such melancholy, always hovering nearby over the years, grows wearing on a spouse and you yourself have described how more deeply lost in unhealthy sadness she’d been for much of that last year after the death of her father in March of eighteen eighty-five.”

Henry Adams gritted his teeth so hard that the grinding of molars was louder than the cracklings of the fireplace. He lifted the heavy walking stick like a club, his knuckles white from the intensity of his grip.

Holmes did not stir or try to protect himself as Henry Adams leaned over the desktop toward him, the cane raised and shaking from the man’s fury. Holmes’s own stick was propped against another chair some six feet away. He made no motion toward it, but remained seated, his eyes on Adams’s face, his hands calmly folded on his lap.

Adams dropped the cane onto the Persian carpet and collapsed into his chair, slumping down and shielding his eyes with one hand. After a moment, he said, “You must know that I did not . . . kill . . . my beloved Clover.”

“Oh, I know you did not,” said Holmes, now resting his chin on his folded fingers, propping his elbows on the polished wooden arms of his chair. “But any competent police officer, much less a competent and ambitious district attorney, could have—and probably should have, since you were investigated so shallowly primarily due to your station in society and your wealth—ended with you condemned to the gallows by a jury of your peers.”

Adams’s jaw dropped again and this time he did not soon think to close his mouth. He peered through his fingers at Holmes the way a child might peep through her fingers at a possible monster in a dark closet.

“You had the time, you knew where Mrs. Adams kept her deadly arsenic, and no servants on duty that morning saw you leave for this sudden Sunday-morning appointment with your dentist. Since you never saw your dentist that morning, you could have been waiting half a block down the street along the park’s edge, waiting until you saw Rebecca Lorne come to your doorway. She was, in a sense, your alibi.”

“If you think all this,” rasped Adams, “then why do you not believe me to be guilty of this murder?”

Holmes walked over to the open secretary where the bottles were kept, replenished his Scotch whiskey, and poured a stiff drink of brandy for Adams, setting it in front of him on the desk rather than handing it to him.

“I know you are innocent not merely because of your obvious qualities,” said Holmes, “but because you did not see Rebecca Lorne waiting at the front door of your home, pondering whether to knock and go up, as you testified to the police. Rather, you saw Miss Lorne come rushing out of your home, flinging the door wide, in a state of near-hysteria. It had been she, not you, who first discovered Mrs. Adams’s body.”

“How do you know that?” demanded Adams and took a long drink of brandy.

“You yourself ran two blocks to your doctor’s home—and returned on the run with him—and Dr. Charles E. Hagner later reported to the press that the vial of potassium cyanide sat, still opened and venting its terrible fumes, on a table across the room from where Mrs. Adams’s body had fallen to the floor in front of her favorite chair, and that an empty water glass lay on the carpet beside her,” said Holmes. “Dr. Hagner also mentioned that Miss Rebecca Lorne was waiting in the room adjoining Mrs. Adams’s bedroom when the two of you arrived and that Miss Lorne was so upset that he had to administer a tranquilizing drug to her. The police report, done under the investigation of Lieutenant Hammond—who arrived with two men some twenty minutes after you and Hagner did but who remained only a few minutes before you demanded absolute isolation with your wife’s body—mentioned the position of the body and the vial of cyanide, now corked again, but made no mention of the water glass on the carpet.”

“The scene is forever branded into my brain,” said Adams, “but I remember no water glass on the floor.”

“The bottle of poison was on a table some distance from where Mrs. Adams had lain on the carpet before you carried her body to the couch,” said Holmes, tapping his lips with two steepled forefingers. “All agree on that. And yet there had been a spill of the chemical near where your wife’s body had been lying. Your housekeeper commented that the lethal liquid had discolored the edge of the carpet and a bit of the polished floor. Her people had cut the carpet’s nap and re-finished the floor-board to get rid of the stains, she said.”

Adams’s temples and cheeks grew flushed again. “My housekeeper had the temerity to talk to you about . . .”

Holmes held up both hands, palms outward. “There was not much of a police investigation, sir, but the servants did have to give statements to the police while you were in your darkest hours of mourning. I understand that you spent two days and nights alone with the body and did not later announce the time or fact of Mrs. Adams’s funeral on December nine so your surviving Three Hearts friends could attend. At any rate, this information about the stained carpet and floorboard were in Lieutenant Hammond’s notes.”

“What’s the importance of any of this?” shouted Adams.

“There was, lying near Mrs. Adams’s body, a water glass that had obviously been the vessel from which she drank the poison, still lying there when Dr. Hagner arrived with you,” said Holmes. “The stains on the carpet and floorboard must have come from the residue of the terrible liquid that remained in the glass when Mrs. Adams dropped it. Yet the glass was gone when Detective Hammond arrived about half an hour later.”

Holmes leaned forward, his gray eyes as piercing as a predator’s. “Someone removed that glass in that half-hour interim,” he said softly. “Your housekeeper, Mrs. Soames, told the police three days after the death that there were only eleven small water glasses in the cupboard off the kitchen where they were usually kept. The glass had come from a set of twelve.”

Adams finished the brandy. “Who? If not the servants, who would have removed the glass . . . the mythical glass I do not even remember seeing? The police?”

“They say they did not, sir.”

“I don’t . . . I don’t understand the significance of a water glass or . . . or the vial of cyanide,” managed Adams. “Why does it make any difference?”

“It would be easier to make someone drink from the glass than from a vial,” Holmes said.

Adams’s dark eyes seemed to recede in their sockets. “Make them drink? Someone might have forced Clover to drink that terrible, corrosive, painful, deadly poison?”

“Yes,” said Holmes. “More than that, there is the time involved. Were there usually water glasses left in her bedroom?”

“No,” said Adams, his voice totally flat. “Clover hated rings on the furniture.”

“In the adjoining bathroom?”

“No,” repeated Adams. “There are glasses in our bathrooms, but not those small water glasses. And Clover’s was . . . still there . . . when I looked in her bathroom some days later.”

“From the time you left to see your dentist to the time you turned around and came back because of the commotion Miss Lorne was making as she came out of your front door”—began Holmes and noticed when Adams did not interrupt or contradict him—“it would have been very difficult for Mrs. Adams to go downstairs through the annex to the kitchen where the water glasses were stored . . . and to avoid being noticed by Mrs. Ryan, your chief cook, who was working in the kitchen at the time . . . and then to carry it upstairs and then to walk the length of the second floor to her darkroom and the special locked cupboard where she kept her photographic developing chemicals, then to return to her bedroom to take the poison.”

Adams shook his head like a man in a bad dream. “You’re suggesting that . . . someone else had carried up the glass and poison vial and was waiting somewhere upstairs, hiding nearby, listening, waiting for her to be alone even while I was talking to Clover before I left to see my dentist?”

“It is a distinct possibility,” said Holmes.

“And it must have been Rebecca Lorne, whom Clover liked and trusted and who I also relied upon in the days after . . . after . . .” rasped Adams. “It would have to be Rebecca Lorne because she would have been the only one who could have taken the glass between the visits of the doctor and the police lieutenant.”

“She almost certainly took the glass away with her,” said Holmes, “but she is not the only suspect if it was murder rather than suicide. There is another.”

Adams stared so hard at Holmes that the detective felt almost burned by the historian’s gaze.

“Clifton Richards, Miss Lorne’s . . . cousin . . . may have been involved,” said Holmes. “He may have been in the house and gone down the back way, the servants’ stairs, and out of the house even as Rebecca Lorne rushed up the main stairway to warn Mrs. Adams.”

“To warn her,” Adams repeated dully. He managed to focus his eyes on Holmes’s face. “Who killed my wife, Mr. Holmes? I beg of you . . . if you know, tell me.”

“I’ll know for a certainty in the next few weeks, Mr. Adams. Which is why I need to ask a favor of you.”

Adams may have nodded an infinitesimal bit.

“I’ve convinced John Hay and Cabot Lodge to move the visit to the Chicago World’s Fair up a couple of weeks for the actual opening on May first, arriving in his private car perhaps a day or two early,” said Holmes. “And Senator Cameron has his private yacht . . . the Great Lakes Yacht, I believe they call it . . . ready to anchor just off the pier of the Exposition.”

“Going to the wretched Exposition will help reveal my Clover’s murderer and bring him or her to justice?” said Adams.

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll go along with Cameron, Hay, the Lodges, and the rest. Although I saw the Philadelphia World’s Fair and it was a monumental bore.”

Holmes actually smiled.

As he prepared to leave, Adams gripped his arm and said, “But why would they kill Clover? Why would anyone want to harm that witty, sad, lonely, darling woman?”

Holmes settled back into his seat, sighed, and reached into his upper inside jacket pocket to pull out a small blue envelope still tied in pink ribbon. It had been opened. Holmes removed the handwritten letter and held it so that Adams could put on his glasses and read it across the wide desk.

Henry Adams read his own handwriting for half a moment and then let out an inarticulate noise and lunged for the letter.

“No,” said Holmes, folding it, and putting it back into his jacket pocket. “I can’t allow you to tear this up the way you did the card earlier.”

“That’s my property!” snarled the small historian.

Holmes nodded. “Legally it is, sir. Even though it was in the possession of another person.”

“Why would Lizzie . . . how did you . . . why would she give you that most intimate of letters? My greatest folly?”

“She didn’t give it to me,” said Holmes. “She doesn’t know I have it. I had to borrow it. When my investigations are done, I shall return it to where she kept it hidden.”

“Investigations . . .” hissed Adams in contempt. “Reading other people’s most private mail. Sneaking into boudoirs in the night. Stealing . . .”

“I assure you that I shall return it in the next few weeks,” said Holmes. “Mrs. Cameron shall never know that I had taken the letter from its hiding place. I simply needed to know for sure what Rebecca Lorne and the so-called Clifton Richards were using to blackmail Mrs. Adams.”

“Blackmail?” It sounded as if Henry Adams were going to start laughing wildly. “Then I did kill Clover Adams. I was the cause, alpha and omega, of my darling’s death.”

“No,” said Holmes. “It was my duty in solving this case to find and read this letter, Mr. Adams, but I assure you that I took no pleasure in doing so. And I found no evil there. It was a note from a terribly sad man who had been essentially abandoned by a wife lost to melancholy not merely in the previous months but for years . . . a midnight love letter to another woman, one he knew well and admired much. It was folly, Mr. Adams, but exquisitely human and understandable folly.”

“We went to the Camerons’ house on the evening of December fourth,” said Adams, speaking as if mesmerized, his eyes unfocused. “Two days before Clover . . . before her death. Lizzie Cameron had been ill and Clover had been unusually distraught about the illness. She knew . . . we all knew . . . that a major source of Lizzie’s illness lay in the travesty of her marriage to Don. Clover felt bad about that as well. That night we took Rebecca Lorne with us . . . it was warm, I remember, not feeling like December at all.

“To cheer Lizzie up, Clover had brought along a large bouquet of yellow Marechal Niel roses—not easy to find in December in Washington—and she and Rebecca took the roses up to Lizzie’s sickroom. Do you know the language of flowers, Mr. Holmes?”

“Only bits of it.”

Adams smiled with no humor. “In the language of flowers so popular these days, the yellow roses signified ‘I’m yours, heart and soul.’ This is what she gave Lizzie Cameron less than forty-eight hours before her death.”

“She was giving that message to you,” Holmes said softly.

Adams shook his head. “If Clover knew about my . . . my mad, impulsive letter to Lizzie of the previous July . . . that letter . . .” He pointed at Holmes’s breast pocket. “And begged to know if it was true . . . if Rebecca Lorne had tantalized her with the knowledge of that letter, or even of the possibility of its existence . . . and if Lizzie did not deny it . . .”

Holmes reached across the desk and touched Adams’s forearm, squeezing it very softly. “Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Adams. You know Clover’s good heart. Her flower-language expressions to her sick friend were almost certainly just that—an act of love and generosity.”

But Holmes knew that there had been a confrontation of sorts over the letter from Henry Adams that night. Clover had asked Lizzie Cameron if it was true . . . if such a letter from “my Henry” existed. Lizzie had been sick and in a foul mood and, while ridiculing the entire idea, had also gone out of her way not to deny. She even teased Clover and Rebecca Lorne for wanting to see “such a curious document”. Holmes knew all this because, besides liberating that letter from Lizzie Cameron’s hiding place of letters taped to the bottom of her dresser drawer, he’d also borrowed her private 1885 diary long enough to read entries from the first week of December. The diary had been put back in place—at some risk to Holmes’s agent in these matters—but he would keep the July letter, and other letters taken from other homes by the same dirty means, until events of the next few weeks were settled.

Holmes could see and feel Adams approaching his personal breaking point. This was the man who, after his wife’s death, had fled to the South Seas with an artist friend for three years and more than 30,000 miles of aimless wandering. This was the man who had sworn the great sculptor Saint-Gaudens to secrecy and then had him build that mausoleum for the living inside the extraordinary memorial not to his wife’s memory—but to the memory of his own grief.

Standing, his hat and cane in hand, Holmes paused and removed another slip of paper from his jacket. “Hay gave me this, although all your friends know it, Adams. Clover . . . Mrs. Adams . . . began a letter to her sister Ellen shortly after you left that Sunday morning to visit your dentist. I know you remember the words but it might help find perspective to hear them again:

If I had one single point of character or goodness I would stand on that and grow back to life. Henry is more patient and loving than words can express. God might envy him—he bears and hopes and despairs hour after hour . . . Henry is beyond all words tenderer and better than all of you even.

Holmes folded the note and set it away next to the blue-paper letter. “She wrote that note, Mr. Adams, after she had learned of the possible existence of your July letter to Lizzie Cameron. She had already forgiven you.”

Adams stood and turned his unfathomable gaze toward the detective. “When must I see you next, Mr. Holmes? What new hell awaits me . . . all of us?”

“Chicago,” said Holmes. He let himself out quietly without calling for Hobson the butler.