by Dan Simmons
“The littlest one, the baby’s a boy. They had a boy before, he was their first, but he died,” said Mrs. Youngfeld, an older woman with gray hair. It was her house across the street on Hudson. “They named the first boy, the one who died, LeRoy.”
Le roi, thought Holmes. The king.
Holmes had lost the excessive facial hair, wig, and prominent front teeth, and parted his own hair in the middle with a generous use of hair crème. He now wore thick but frameless spectacles. There were seven pencils visible in his left jacket pocket. From his briefcase he had produced an oversized ledger filled with what looked to be official forms.
It was late and several homes on Hudson Street had not responded to his knocking—a white man knocking in what was obviously a colored neighborhood—but Mrs. Youngfeld and her visitor and good friend from down the street, Mrs. Banes, had peeked through the sidelights and decided that the prissy-looking Holmes was not a threatening character.
They’d had no interest when Holmes had explained that his name was Mr. Williams and he was taking a “local census” so that the Brooklyn Benevolent Neighborhood Association could upgrade local parks and facilities, but when he’d brought out the two dollars he’d pay each of them in return for their brief time answering a few questions about their neighbors, they warmed to him.
“And the family’s name is Todd?” said Holmes, pursing his lips and fussing with the complex form of boxes and printed lines on the leaves of paper in his ledger.
“That’s right,” said Mrs. Youngfeld. “James and Ada Todd. You want the children’s names too?”
“I don’t believe that will be necessary,” said Holmes. “But you say there are the two girls and one baby boy in the household.”
“Another baby on the way,” said Mrs. Banes. “Ada told me that their old house there is getting too small for them.”
“Would you happen to know their ages? Approximate ages will suffice.” Holmes was speaking with a slight whistling lisp through his permanently pursed lips. He was a government bureaucrat who liked being a government bureaucrat. (A charge he’d once, in pique, leveled at his brother Mycroft, who had responded at once in his slow, unexcitable drawl—“But, Brother, I do not work for the British Government. At times I am the British Government.”)
“Mr. Todd, he about fifty-one, fifty-two. Ada’s going to be thirty-two this coming April nine,” said Mrs. Youngfeld.
Holmes made no comment on the disparity of ages. He’d seen that with his own eyes in the failing light of evening.
“And would you have any idea of when they were married?” asked Holmes, pursing and whistling ever so slightly. Just another line to fill. Just another box to check.
“What’s it matter to the Benevolent Whatever of Brooklyn when a legally married couple got married?” demanded Mrs. Banes. Her hands were now fists and her fists were on her bony hips.
“September twenty-two, eighteen eighty-eight,” said Mrs. Youngfeld.
Mrs. Banes turned a wide-eyed stare on her friend. “Ella, how . . . do . . . you . . . know . . . that? The exact date that Ada got hitched? I can’t even remember my own anniversary.”
“I remember numbers and dates,” said Mrs. Youngfeld. “Totty, your anniversary is on December fourteen . . . not that it matters since Henry run off four years ago.”
Mrs. Banes looked away and stomped her foot.
“Ada told me that she and James got married over in New York at her aunt’s place on West Twenty-fourth Street,” Mrs. Youngfeld continued to Holmes, who scribbled quickly to keep up. “She said they brought a colored Methodist minister down from a church on Eighty-fifth Street to do the ceremony. They had an organ brought in to play and a cake with white icing.”
Mrs. Banes stared daggers at her friend but said nothing.
“Almost done here,” said Holmes. “Mr. James Todd’s occupation . . . he is employed by the gas works?”
“No, you got that wrong!” laughed Mrs. Banes. “Ada’s man James is a railroad porter, ’riginally from Baltimore. A head porter. He works for the New York Central Railroad, but . . . poor Ada . . . the railroad keeps sending him all over the place: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Massachusetts . . . even up into some places in Canada.”
“Ontario and Quebec,” said Mrs. Youngfeld.
“Wherever they send him, he’s gone a whole bunch of the time,” said Mrs. Banes, clearly exasperated at her friend and neighbor’s vast store of information. “Ada’s home alone, expecting again, alone all by her own self with the two girls and the baby boy to take care of most of the time. That man may make good money as a chief porter, but he’s not home two days out of fifty.”
“I shan’t take up any more of your time, ladies,” said Holmes, putting away his ledger and adjusting his glasses on his nose. “You’ve been most helpful. Your census information on the Todds and other neighbors may well enable the Brooklyn Benevolent Neighborhood Association to fund a fine playground near here.”
“The childrens got plenty of empty lots ’round here to play in,” said Mrs. Banes. “What we really could use is a nice, clean, respectable saloon like the ones that used to be up on Flatbush Avenue before the Bridge squashed everything.”
“Oh, hush up, Totty,” said Mrs. Youngfeld. Looking Holmes in the eye, she said, “She doesn’t mean that, Mr. Williams.”
Holmes nodded, raised his hat, backed down to the sidewalk level, made as if to turn away, but then turned back to the two women. “You’ll forgive me if this question is insensitive . . . it is supposed to be part of the neighborhood census, but I rarely have to ask it . . .”
The two ladies waited.
“Coincidentally, I have had the occasion to see Mr. James Todd without having the pleasure of actually making his acquaintance,” Holmes said softly, showing visible signs of embarrassment. “The gentleman has blue eyes, blond hair—not much left, but definitely blond—and a very fair complexion . . .”
Mrs. Banes laughed heartily. “So he fooled you, too,” she said, the missing tooth even more visible in an otherwise perfect wide expanse of white teeth.
“Fooled . . .” began Holmes.
“James Todd is passing,” said Mrs. Youngfeld. She also sounded embarrassed. “He told Ada that he’s been passing since he was a boy.”
“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Banes, still laughing. “James Todd, he good at passing.”
“Passing?” said Holmes. “You mean, passing as . . .”
“White,” said Mrs. Youngfeld. “James Todd doesn’t look black, but his wife Ada told us a dozen times that his grandpa and mama were field slaves down in Carolina. Lots of ’scegenation going on with those field slaves and lots of children of those ’scegenations trying to pass up here. Though not many looks as white as James Todd.”
“At least he kept to his own kind in marryin’,” said Mrs. Banes.
Holmes tipped his hat a final time. “Thank you again, ladies.”
* * *
On the late-night train back to Washington, Holmes realized he was very tired. Tomorrow would be busy because he would have the mystery of who sent the annual She-was-murdered cards solved by afternoon and he would have to break into Henry Adams’s mansion after dark—always a delicate proposition in such a swanky and well-policed area as the Hays and Adamses had chosen to live in.
He knew one of the original Five of Hearts secrets now—Mr. Clarence King, “America’s most eligible bachelor” according to his friend John Hay and an editorial writer in Century Magazine, had been married to a colored woman named Ada Copeland since September, 1888. There seemed no doubt—at least to his neighbors—that the two girls, living baby boy, deceased baby boy named LeRoy, and baby on the way were all his. And Holmes himself had noticed how light-skinned the baby and one of the girls had been, especially when compared to their attractive ebony mother.
Uncovering one such secret of the Five of Hearts was a start, Holmes knew, but there remained secrets he would have to ferret out of John and Clara Hay’s lives,
of Henry Adams, and even of the late Clover Adams.
Every man or woman alive, Holmes knew, had secrets. Most, like Clarence King—deliberately misleading his closest friends with his boisterous talk of being attracted only to “swarthy South Sea Island beauties”—had secrets within secrets.
A few, like Henry James and Holmes himself, had secrets within secrets within secrets.
One of Holmes’s small secrets had asserted itself before he left Brooklyn. It had been too many hours since that early morning’s injection of the heroic drug, and before Holmes took a ferry across the river back to Grand Central Terminus, he found an empty shed in Brooklyn in which he could cook-up his little solution of heroin and inject it with some privacy. He’d been in pain, both physical and psychological, for the entire afternoon, and the relief in the moment after the injection was heavensent.
Now Holmes closed his eyes and literally nodded off as the train rushed south through the night.
CHAPTER 20
My dear Harry,” cried John Hay, “you simply cannot desert me now!”
“Not deserting, surely,” said Henry James. “Merely drawing a polite boundary to my intrusion, despite your and Clara’s generous and obviously boundary-less hospitality. You remember that you helped find a room for me to rent near here in eighteen eighty-three when I was here last and visiting the Adamses.”
“But that’s quite different!” said Hay. Both men were standing in Hay’s study this Tuesday morning. Hay had informed James that the servants had reported “Mr. Sigerson”—hat brim low and collars high—coming in and retiring to his room not long before dawn.
“We have Holmes and his mysteries now,” continued Hay. “This is all simply too fascinating to face alone. You must share this excitement with us.”
“I apologize again for bringing the detective here in disguise and under false pretenses . . .” began James.
“Nonsense,” cried Hay, waving away the apology with his long, elegant fingers. “It’s a profoundly exciting experience and one that I wouldn’t have missed for the world. Look at what he’s had my secretaries doing all yesterday afternoon and this morning.”
James looked at the boxes of envelopes and cards which covered every desk and table surface in the study.
“Surely you are not going to allow this . . . stranger . . . to read your personal and business correspondence,” said James. He was unable to keep his sense of shock out of his voice.
Hay laughed. “Of course not, my dear Harry. These are envelopes and cards with typed addresses only, although he will be comparing the first line or so of some harmless correspondence to the ominous cards all of us in the Five of Hearts receive annually. All these addresses and notes have been typewritten, you see. Holmes told me yesterday morning that, and I believe I quote him correctly—‘A typewriter has really quite as much individuality as a man’s handwriting’.”
James made a noncommittal sound.
“So you really must stay,” repeated Hay. “I need your advice and ready counsel, old friend. It will be a very sensitive thing when Adams gets home.”
“It will indeed,” said James. “You have no intention of . . .”
“Of telling him that the English detective Sherlock Holmes is investigating Clover’s suicide?” finished Hay. “Certainly not. You know as well as I that Henry will never agree to discuss that terrible December day. Adams would be outraged and appalled at the very idea of a detective poking around amidst the burned rubble of his painful memories.”
“We can only hope,” said James, “that what Adams does not know doesn’t end up somehow hurting him anyway. Lies and omissions have a way of getting out, especially among close friends.”
Hay frowned at this in silence for a long moment but finally said, “The real question is whether to tell Clara about all this. By odd coincidence, she’s a great collector of the published tales of our new friend’s so-called adventures.”
“Tell Clara about what?” asked Clara Hay from the door that had been quietly opened while the two men had been so loudly debating.
* * *
Leaving his room locked, James took his umbrella—despite the fact that the skies were perfectly blue this warming Tuesday in March—and set off on what Hay had told him was a walk of about two miles to the U.S. Capitol and its Library of Congress. Hay had added that if Harry wanted to see the beautiful new Thomas Jefferson Building currently under construction to house the enlarged Library in a few years, he might add a block or so to his walk to view the rising front façade facing 2nd Street N.E.
James felt bad telling his friend Hay that he simply wanted to get in some exercise and a spot of sight-seeing when, in truth, he had a much more sinister reason for visiting the Library of Congress installed in the Capitol Building.
The previous afternoon, Henry James had done what was almost certainly the least-gentlemanly act of his adult life.
The maids were cleaning “Mr. Sigerson’s” room when James went upstairs that afternoon. They were carrying out sheets and fetching new ones while airing out the room of a visible miasma of pipe smoke and they’d left the door ajar.
James had paused and peered in. Holmes had bustled out earlier, working to hide his appearance with a derby pulled low and a macintosh collar tugged high, but almost certainly had been in some disguise. There was no telling when he might return. His room, the bedding being dealt with first by the maids, was a mess—clothes flung on the floor, books strewn everywhere, ashes spilled on the Hays’ expensive bedside tables and sitting-area tables, maps of Washington and New York lying open on the floor atop discarded socks and shoes. A messy young boy intent upon outraging his parents with his slovenliness could hardly have done worse.
But there, hung over the back of a chair not three feet inside the room, was the jacket that Holmes had been wearing yesterday morning when he’d spoken to Hay, King, and James in Hay’s study.
Glancing guiltily over his shoulder, seeing no one but realizing that he would have only a few seconds in which to spy and pry, James stepped quickly into the room and felt in the inside breast pocket of that jacket. Holmes had taken out four photographs at the beginning of his talk and eventually shown them three of them—Colonel Sebastian Moran, the blurred image of young Lucan Adler, and an old photograph of the woman he said was Irene Adler before she pretended to be Clover Adams’s friend Rebecca Lorne.
The fourth photograph, he’d never shown them.
James did not expect to find anything, so he was surprised when he pulled out the small pack of four photos and a telegram flimsy. Three of the images were indeed the ones shared with the other men on Monday, but the fourth photograph—quite formal, the man wearing a long-tailed black suit and old-fashioned high collars, the single image obviously snipped with scissors from a larger photograph—was of a man in his forties or fifties, clean-shaven and strangely hollow-cheeked, his penetrating gaze peering out from under a commanding (and balding at the top) brow. A few loose strands of both dark and graying hair hung down over the man’s oddly lupine ears.
There was something professorial in the man’s dress and slightly hunched manner, but also something predatory in the way the sharp-featured face protruded forward with the black shoulders rising behind it. As formal as the man’s pose was, James thought he could see a strange glimpse of the man’s tongue caught in the act of flicking out over just-visible small, disturbingly sharp teeth.
The telegram was addressed to Sherlock Holmes to be picked up in a nearby Washington Western Union office, had the previous day’s date on it, and was brief:
CONFIRMED THAT MORIARTY HAS ADVANCED NETWORKS WORKING IN FRANCE GERMANY ITALY AND GREECE STOP ALSO NETWORKS FUNDING AND SUPPORTING CRIMINALS AND ANARCHISTS IN WASHINGTON NEW YORK BALTIMORE AND CHICAGO STOP PROCEED WITH CAUTION STOP MYCROFT
James set the four photos and folded telegram back in the jacket pocket and hurried out into the hall just as one of the maids carrying fresh linens turned the corner.
She stepp
ed aside to let James pass toward his own room and the author detected no recognition of his quick trespass in her properly downturned eyes.
* * *
James crossed the small park and walked east on Pennsylvania Avenue, occasionally glancing without much interest through the iron fence across the north lawn of the Executive Mansion on its open acres of grass. At the corner he turned south on 15th St. N.W. and walked a little more than four blocks that way before he turned southeast onto a more southerly extension of Pennsylvania Avenue N.W.
After a brisk mile on Pennsylvania Avenue, James had to wait a moment before he could cross between carriages and heavy horse-drawn carts to follow Constitution Avenue a little more than a half mile due east. He’d decided to get a glimpse of the new Thomas Jefferson Building, if only to tell Hay later that he had.
Three blocks walking south on 2nd Street brought him to the construction site—three stories of the imposing new home for the Library had risen, but the shell was still hollow and the façades festooned with cranes, ropes, nautical-looking arrangements of block and tackle, and wood-and-iron lattices making rigid the empty areas between the high pillars up on that third-story level. The entire city block surrounding the rising structure was littered with numbered blocks of granite, pallets of lumber protected from the weather with rubber-canvas wrappings, loaded carts, workmen, and even more cranes, pulleys, and cables.
James could have continued walking south and then back to the Capitol via Independence Avenue, but he chose to turn around, retrace his steps to East Capitol Street, and pass through a muddy expanse of nothingness which might have been unkempt gardens—making sure to stay on the narrow paved path—before climbing the stairs to the east entrance of the nation’s Capitol.
* * *
That morning when James and Hay had been overheard by Clara, the author expected either a row or for his friend John to lie, but neither occurred. Hay confessed everything to his wife. Instead of being outraged at being misled, Clara Hay had been delighted that their guest “Jan Sigerson” was actually the detective Sherlock Holmes in disguise. James guessed that Hay had revealed all this to his wife because he was uncertain about when Holmes himself might appear before Clara and the servants sans the Sigerson disguise.
