by Dan Simmons
It would be embarrassing if he’d not estimated the length of the rope properly. Embarrassing and—from this height—most probably fatal.
Eventually the Adamses’ horses were back in their stalls, the lanterns extinguished, and even the glow of light onto the backyard from Adams’s kitchen had grown dark, although Holmes guessed that the butlers, housekeeper, and the few other servants there so late tonight were in their rooms sleeping.
Holmes checked his watch again with the briefest flicker of his hand lantern.
Almost four a.m. The Hays’ domestics would be rising soon to start their interminable days.
Holmes tapped the photo secure over his heart, secured the lantern in his burglar bag, and then made sure the bag was clasped shut and its strap secured over his head and shoulder. There were two coils of rope, one short and one long and heavy. Years ago, he’d learned the basic art of rappelling in the Alps. Now he looped the shorter strand of rope around the fireplace, tied it off securely with double fisherman knots backed up by overhand knots, and ran his longer rope through this anchor sling at mid-point. Running the double rope between his legs, just under his backside, and out to his right hand in what his first Alpine climbing guide had called the dulfersitz.
Firmly holding the doubled line of rope that led to the anchor strap around the chimney in his left hand and the dangling longer strand of doubled rope that made his uncomfortable dulfersitz, he carefully let himself down the steep gable to the west edge of the long drop to the Hays’ backyard.
That morning—the previous morning, he realized now—and again that afternoon, he’d walked to the rear and sides of the Hays’ backyard, nominally to smoke his pipe and think but actually to look up and measure the alignment of this thinnest of the six chimneys directly above his second-floor (by American reckoning) room. Now he had to trust to his estimated measurement even while trusting again that no servant, wandering the halls after midnight, had felt a draft in the hallway and been brazen enough to go into his guest room and shut and latch the window he’d left open. Someday, some repairman on the roof would find his anchor sling, but that was of no concern to Holmes this night. Leaning far back, almost to the horizontal, letting the rappel rope shuffle through his left hand as he wrapped the other length of rope around his right wrist, Holmes walked himself down the side of John Hay’s huge brick home, hopping the four feet over the dark window on the third floor that Holmes had ascertained earlier to be an empty servant’s bedroom currently being used for storage.
Eventually he was at the second-story window and he bounced far over the upper glass pane—not wanting to have to explain how his own bedroom window was broken in the night—and, after tapping his crepe soles on the lower windowsill, swung himself far enough into his own room to grab the headboard of the heavy brass bed and steady himself.
First setting the photograph of Irene Adler and Lucan Adler carefully on his bedside table, Holmes went back to the open window and pulled the long length of rappel rope down, taking care that it did not strike a lower window when it dangled. Then he pulled it up, coiled it carefully, and set it back in his black burglar bag. The well-tied short length of anchor rope would remain up there.
The night air was cool and he left the window open until the sheen of perspiration he’d worked up in all the climbing, jumping, and rappelling dried off.
Then Holmes took off his burglar clothes—folding them away neatly—washed himself at the basin, got into his nightclothes, and set his watch to tap its small rod against the open cover at nine a.m. He and Henry James were leaving for New York City on the 10:42 a.m. train.
Holmes had left his palm-torch out on the table next to his bed and before falling asleep he activated it and played its narrow beam one last time on the photo marked by Henry Adams as “Old Sweet Springs, June, 1885, Rebecca Lorne and Cousin—Standing in meadow with house in background.”
Staring most intensely at the young man’s face, Holmes thought at him—Why did you kill your mother?
CHAPTER 22
So I had stopped by the office of the Century on a whim after our ship docked and was sitting there on their horsehair sofa reading over some early galleys for my new book, Pudd’nhead Wilson,” said Clemens, “and what do I discover but that some pragmatical son of a bitch had been mucking about with my punctuation. My punctuation, gentlemen! The punctuation which I had so carefully thought out and laboriously perfected! I sat there seeing more of this vandalism until my hot fury turned itself loose and I had a comment for every publisher, editor, secretary, and errand boy in the Century’s office. I found as I shouted that the fury had turned itself into a volcano and the words I was using . . . well, they were not suited to any Sunday school.”
“So what happened to the edited copy?” asked Howells.
Clemens lowered his head and peered out from under his bushy eyebrows. “It was explained to me, as one would explain the lower multiplication tables to a drooling idiot, that the culprit proofreader was peerless, imported from no less than Oxford University, and that his word around the Century was considered, and I quote, ‘sacred, final, and immutable’.”
Howells was smiling openly. James showed a hint of a smile and had lowered his chin to his bosom. Holmes sat with his head cocked at a slight angle of polite anticipation.
“So did you have a chat with this just-down-from-Oxford don whose copyedits are ‘sacred, final, and immutable’?” asked Howells, who obviously had played straight man to Clemens many times before this.
They were between courses and Clemens was puffing away at a cigar, his brow was furrowed, his bushy eyebrows almost coming together in his anger, his chin firmly set, and upper body imitating that of a bull ready to charge the toreador. He removed the cigar from beneath a full mustache that was turning white.
“I did,” said Clemens. “I confronted him in the publisher’s office, using the poor man as a witness should an actual homicide occur. I was a volcano. And such an angry volcano that not a single poor wretch in the Century’s offices escaped without being scorched. The publisher and his Oxford proofreader were Pompeii and Herculaneum to my Vesuvius.”
“What did you say to your punctuation culprit?” Henry James asked in soft tones.
Clemens shifted his fierce stare to the other writer.
“I told both men that I didn’t care a fig leaf in Hell if the Oxford Marvel was an Archangel imported directly from heaven, he still could not puke his ignorant impudence over my punctuation. I said I wouldn’t allow it for a moment. I said I couldn’t stand or sit in the same room, in the presence of a single proofreader sheet where that brainless blatherskite had left his chicken-manured tracks. By this time, both Herculaneum and Pompeii had backed up all the way to the windows and I had a hunch they were ready to throw themselves out those twelve-story-high portals. So I literally buttonholed the Archangel before he attempted to fly and explained that all this . . . stuff . . . must be set up again and my punctuation restored exactly as I had typed it. Then I promised to return there tomorrow, that is today, precisely at noon to read the deodorized proof.”
Howells was laughing loudly now. James was smiling as broadly as Holmes had ever seen him. Holmes allowed himself a thin smile.
When the laughter at the table subsided—nearby diners looking over at the table and then murmuring amongst themselves, obviously the curly-haired author now burying his teeth into the Cuban cigar—Howells said, “When did you leave Europe, Sam? And from which port?”
“From Genoa,” said Clemens. “On the steamship Lahn. Got in, as I said, yesterday morning.”
“That was a very rapid crossing,” said James.
“The captain said that he knew of a short cut,” said Clemens, exhaling rich smoke. “And—by dander—so he did!”
Howells, usually a serious man, Henry James knew, was still laughing and still eager to play the straight man.
“A short cut across the North Atlantic,” laughed Howells. “Can you tell us what secret route y
our captain of the Lahn took?”
Clemens leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “I fear that I cannot. A small group of perspicacious passengers—with me as their leader, of course—plotted to steal an officer’s sextant and thus learn our latitude and longitude.”
“Did you carry out your plot?” asked Holmes.
“Indeed we did, sir,” answered Clemens. “We simply forgot that none of us knew how to use the device. So after several hours of messing with the clumsy thing, we had succeeded only in pinpointing our precise location either in central Africa or, equally improbable, Saskatchewan.”
Howells was howling now, but Clemens never relinquished his bushy-browed scowl.
“There were no clues as to the nature or direction of this trans-Atlantic short cut?” asked James, allowing himself a quick glance at Holmes when he said the word “clues”.
“None,” said Clemens. “None, I should say, save for the time my fellow passengers and I noticed penguins dancing and frolicking in the ice floes that the Lahn was bullying her way through.”
“Penguins!” cried Howells and laughed all the harder. Henry James suddenly understood that the serious and often melancholy author, deadly serious editor, and mature citizen who was William Dean Howells used Samuel Clemens’s presence as an excuse to become a boy again.
“Naturally we assumed that the penguins were the ship’s waiters and doormen, still in their formal attire,” said Clemens, “allowed out by the captain for a short period to frolic on the ice.”
“No!” cried Howells with tears running down his cheeks. The loud negative seemed more related to an earnest request that Clemens give him a moment to catch his breath.
“Alas, the knowledge of their penguintude was too late,” Clemens said in a remorseful tone. “I had given generous tips to three of them. At least one of them had the decency to hide his face under his upper flipper, or wing, or whatever that thing is called.”
Howells continued to laugh.
The waiters were bringing their main courses.
* * *
On the previous day, Tuesday, March 28, when Holmes had announced to the small group in John Hay’s study that the typewriter that had produced the She-was-murdered cards over the past seven years was the same machine that had typed addresses and cards to the Hays from someone named Samuel Clemens, the room had erupted in babble and surprise. It was Hay who explained that Samuel Clemens was the real name for the famous author who wrote under the nom de plume of Mark Twain.
“I must interview him at once,” Holmes had said. “Either Hay or James shall accompany me.”
“I fear that will not be possible,” said Henry James. “I’ve read over the past few years in the London papers that Mr. Twain . . . Mr. Clemens . . . has been, en famille, on an extensive tour of Europe—Germany, Switzerland, Italy—since eighteen ninety-one, I believe. Something to do with debts, persistent American creditors, and the strength of the dollar on the Continent. The last I read, Clemens and his family had moved on from Florence and to Bad Neuheim, with Mr. Clemens occasionally taking the baths for his rheumatism.”
Holmes looked crestfallen until John Hay said brightly, “Actually, we’re in luck. I received a letter from Sam . . . from Mr. Clemens . . . only two weeks ago in which he said he’d be sailing from Italy on the twenty-second of this month, bound for New York, to carry out several business meetings. I believe he was eventually going to Chicago, to meet with someone there and to get a preview of the Columbian Exposition, before returning to Europe six weeks from now.”
“He’ll be in New York?” Holmes asked.
“He should be there—or on the point of arriving there—even as we speak,” said Hay.
“We must leave at once,” said the detective.
Clara Hay gave her husband a sharp glance and Hay held up his hands. “Alas, I’m too busy this week—socially and otherwise—to take time out for a trip to New York. But I’m sure Harry would enjoy accompanying you. I don’t believe that he and Clemens have met yet. And Harry . . . Sam wrote me that he planned to dine with Howells as soon after he reached New York as he could. Perhaps you could join them.”
“Who is Howells?” asked Sherlock Holmes.
“William Dean Howells,” said Hay. “He’s an old friend of Harry’s as well as of Sam’s, an author of some renown in his own right, but also a well-known critic. Howells was fiction editor of The Atlantic Monthly from ’seventy-one to ’eighty-one—helping not only to publish friends such as Harry and Sam, but to promote them—and wrote a column for Harper’s Weekly until ’eighty-two.”
“Good,” said Holmes. “James can introduce me when the three old literary colleagues are chatting and we can ease our way into the Clover Adams business. If you shall be so kind as to cable Howells of our arrival, we shall leave today for New York.”
“But . . .” said James but could come up with no reason for his not going other than his not wanting to do so.
“Clemens might well have taken the typewriter to Europe with him,” said Hay.
“Not important,” Holmes had said. “The important thing is for Clemens to tell us who had access to his typewriter between December six, eighteen eighty-five, and December six, eighteen eighty-six.”
“But that . . .” began Clara Hay and then stopped. “I see. If the cards were all typed at the same time, you think it must have been between Clover’s death and the first anniversary of her death . . . the first time we all received the typewritten cards.”
“Surely you’re not considering Samuel Clemens . . . Mark Twain . . . as a suspect!” said John Hay.
“Only his typewriter,” replied Holmes. “And before we go any further, we must know who had access to it after Clover Adams’s death.”
“Someone could have typed those cards before her death,” said Clara Hay.
Holmes had smiled thinly at his hostess. “Perhaps. But that person would also have been her murderer. All the more reason to speak to this Twain-Clemens person as soon as possible.” Turning to Henry James, Holmes cried, “Quick, James. Pack some things in your Gladstone bag and let’s be off. The game is afoot!”
* * *
“What brings you back to the States, Sam?” Howells was asking.
“Business,” growled the man between bites of his prime rib. “All business. Money, debt, and business. Business, debt, and money. Last night I had dinner with Andrew Carnegie.”
James, who paid little attention to millionaires or their comings and goings, was still impressed.
“How did that dinner go?” asked Howells.
“Just dandy,” said Clemens. “Carnegie wanted to talk to me about yachting, about the price of gold, about the British royal family, about libraries, about my family’s experience living in Europe the past few years, about Swiss tutors, and especially—at great length I might say—about his harebrained scheme for the United States to absorb Canada, Ireland, and all of Great Britain into a single American Commonwealth. I, on the other hand, wanted to talk about him lending me some money . . . or I should say, investing some capital in marvelous and foolproof ventures.”
“I trust your conversations were productive,” said James.
Clemens’s brows came down. “I explained to Carnegie my own investments in Kaolatype, in various other sure-to-be-hits inventions and games, in my publishing house, and especially in Mr. Paige’s typesetting machine, which, by itself, to date, for only the Paige typesetter investment, I have poured something like one hundred and ninety thousand dollars into without ever seeing the godda . . . without seeing the blasted thing work properly for more than two minutes at a time.”
“What did Mr. Carnegie say to these investment possibilities?” asked Howells.
“He leaned forward and whispered to me his secret of getting and staying rich,” Clemens said in a low, conspiratorial tone of voice.
The three other men at the table, even Holmes, also leaned forward conspiratorially to hear the secret from no less an expert t
han Andrew Carnegie.
“Carnegie said,” whispered Clemens, “and I quote him exactly . . . ‘M’boy, put all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket.’ ”
While Howells and James laughed and Holmes allowed himself a smile, Sam Clemens continued to scowl. “He was serious,” Clemens growled into the laughter.
“Perhaps the Paige typesetter is your basket,” said Howells.
Clemens grunted. “If it is, it’s a basket without a bottom or handles.”
“Why don’t you just . . . how do you Americans put it? . . . cut your losses and get out?” asked Holmes.
“I’ve invested too much,” growled Clemens. “As a businessman, I give the word ‘fool’ a bad name. Livy says so. My muscular Christian minister friend Joe Twichell says so. All my friends who are not earlobe-deep in debt say so. But I still hope this Paige machine will be the avenue to my own fortune and to my family’s security. The thing not only sets type brilliantly, you see, it automatically justifies . . . something that no typesetting device on the planet can do. The good news is that forty or fifty of Paige’s miracle typesetters are in the process of being produced and The Chicago Tribune is going to give one a trial by fire. Before this trip is over, I plan to make the eight-hundred-mile trip to Chicago to talk to Paige. My goal was to dissolve our partnership during that conversation . . .”
“But James Paige can be very convincing in person,” suggested Howells.
“Convincing!” cried Clemens loud enough that a few other diners looked toward his table. “Why, every time I arrange it so that Paige’s doomsday moment is nigh, the termination of my investment irrevocable, and my lawsuits against the man shatteringly inevitable, the inventor pitches another bravura performance that would put Edwin Booth to shame—tears, earnest promises, heartfelt assurances, injured dignity, a list of facts and figures that would put a certified accountant into a coma, and all while showing a woeful, profoundly hurt expression that would put a basset hound with hemorrhoids to shame. Why, James Paige could persuade a fish to come out and take a walk with him. No matter how much resolve and determination I stockpile ahead of time for the encounter, whenever I am with Paige I believe him. I can’t help it. Livy says that the man is a mesmerist, not an inventor. I say that he is one of the most daring and majestic liars ever to bilk a hard-earned fortune out of a hard-working author. One ends up giving him another fifteen or twenty or fifty thousand dollars just for the quality of his performance.”
