by Dan Simmons
“I remember one night,” said Clemens between blue puffs, “when she listed her aches and pains, sure that they must signify imminent mortality . . . the darling lady was almost as hypochondriacal as I was . . . when I was amazed to hear that her problems exactly matched a recent list of my own . . . and a list of pains and symptoms of which I had just been cured!”
Holmes folded his arms. The dray wagons were past and now their brougham turned onto a paved lane that curved up a gentle hill.
“I told her . . .” continued Clemens. “I told her . . . ‘Harriet,’ I said . . . ‘my doctor just cured me of precisely those ailments. Precisely!’ ‘What medicine did he prescribe?’ asked little Mrs. Stowe. ‘Why, no medicines at all!’ says I. ‘My doctor just told me to take a two-month sabbatical from my habits of heavy drinking, constant smoking, and exploding into wild bouts of profanity in irregular but frequent intervals.’ I told her, ‘Harriet, you give up cussin’, drinkin’, and smokin’ for a couple of months and you’ll be right as rain.’ ”
Clemens peered at them through the smoke, making sure that they were still absorbed in his tale.
“ ‘Mr. Clemens!’ cried she. ‘I have never partaken of any of those terrible behaviors.’ ‘Never?’ says I, and I can tell you, gentlemen, I was shocked. ‘Never,’ says Harriet Beecher Stowe, gathering her shawl around her because the night was nippy. ‘Well then, my dear lady,’ I broke it to her with infinite sadness, ‘there is no hope for you. You are a balloon going down and you have no ballast to cast overboard. You have neglected your vices.’ ”
The brougham stopped at the crest of a rise and there was Samuel Clemens’s former home. Although he still owned it, he explained, for the last two years he and Livy had leased it to a certain John Day and his wife Alice, the daughter of Isabella Hooker, for a much-needed two hundred dollars a month. Clemens said that he’d cabled ahead and John and Alice would be out this afternoon; the house was theirs for the time-being.
Stepping out of the carriage, Holmes looked at the house. The sunlight created a rich mixture of shade and colors on three stories of salmon-colored bricks. The steeply pitched gables along with five balconies gave the large home a bit of a castle look. Its main window was on a two-story tower and overlooked the porte cochère over the driveway.
Clemens saw where the detective was gazing. “Some have written or said that I wanted that bit to resemble a riverboat’s pilot house,” he said, stubbing his last cigar out on the curb. “But I didn’t. That wasn’t the plan at all. It’s just, as they say, a happy coincidence.”
Clemens fetched a key from a flower pot on the front porch, unlocked the door, and swept it open for them to enter.
A few yards down the hallway they could peer into the main rooms and Holmes knew that it was a home dedicated to good taste and quality items. Sherlock Holmes’s bachelor bedroom and sitting room at 221 B Baker Street might be a toss-about mess—was a toss-about mess when Mrs. Hudson wasn’t interfering—with everything thrown and dropped rather than folded and placed, but Holmes knew attractive domestic order when he saw it. He was seeing it now.
“Nineteen rooms, seven bathrooms,” Clemens was saying as if he were a real estate man intent upon selling the house to them. “All the bathrooms with flush toilets, which was a curiosity in its day. Speaking tubes so that anyone can talk to anyone from any floor. In this parlor—enter, gentlemen—you see Hartford’s first telephone in its particular little niche there. Since I was one of the first to install the infernal device, there were precious few other telephonic interlocutors I might talk to.
“Here’s the drawing room . . . the stencil designs on the walls were from Lockwood de Forest.”
“A partner in the firm begun by Mr. Tiffany,” added Howells.
“This little solar conservatory area was where my girls would put on their plays,” said Clemens, gesturing to an area filled with plants. “You see how the drapes can be drawn across here like a theater curtain.” Clemens paused and then seemed to look at the room and peer into the adjoining rooms for the first time.
“This is . . . strange,” he said in a choked voice. “For the first year or so we were abroad, Livy and I had all the furniture, carpets, vases, beds, knick-knacks in storage, but when John and Alice leased the place, rather than have the young couple furnish such a large house, we got everything out of storage for them . . . for a small additional fee. But . . .”
Clemens walked into the library and returned to the drawing room. Above the broad, carved mantel in front of them was a window looking out onto the yard from above the fireplace. Clemens patted it. “This was my idea. Few things are cozier than sitting inside on a winter day with one’s family, watching the snow fall just above the crackling fire.” He touched little carvings and vases set along the mantel and atop the bookcases on either side.
“John and Alice have placed everything just as we had it,” he said in that strange voice. “Every vase and carpet that Livy and I had purchased on our early travels. Every beloved-by-the-children carving and knick-knack.” He touched one of the carved pieces on the mantel. “You see, every Saturday, Susy and Jean and Clara would demand stories about various ornaments and paintings that stood on these top shelves and on this mantelpiece. At one end of the procession, you see, was a framed oil painting of a cat’s head; at the other end was a head of a beautiful young girl, life size, called Emmeline, an impressionist watercolor. Between the one picture and the other there were twelve or fifteen of the bric-a-brac things . . . oh, and also an oil painting by Elihu Vedder, the Young Medusa. So my little girls required me to construct a romance—always impromptu—not a moment’s preparation permitted—and into that romance I had to get all that bric-a-brac and the three pictures. I had to start always with the cat and finish with Emmeline. I was never allowed the refreshment of a change, end for end. It was not permissible to introduce a bric-a-brac ornament into the story out of its place in the procession. These bric-a-bracs were never allowed a peaceful day, a reposeful day, a restful Sabbath. In their lives there was no Sabbath. In their lives there was no peace. They knew no existence but a monotonous career of violence and bloodshed. In the course of time the bric-a-brac and the pictures showed wear. It was because they had had so many and such violent adventures in their romantic careers.”
“Good practice for a writer,” chuckled Howells.
“The stories often included a circus,” said Clemens. He hadn’t seemed to have heard Howells. He didn’t seem to remember that the other men were in the room with him.
“The girls truly loved stories about a circus and so I usually wove a circus into . . .”
Clemens seemed stunned. He took a few staggering steps and collapsed more than sat in a flowery chair.
“Sam?” said Howells.
“I’m all right,” said Clemens, shielding his eyes with his hand as if hiding tears. “It’s just that . . . it is only, you see, that everything is in its proper place.”
The others stood without knowing what to say.
“I promised Livy that even though I had to see old Hartford friends about investing in some of my endeavors, I would not get close enough to the Farmington Avenue house even to see its high chimney. But as soon as I entered the front door here I was seized with a furious desire to have my entire family in this house again . . . and right away . . . and never go outside the grounds of here and Nook Farm anymore forever. Certainly never again to Europe.”
Clemens lowered his hand and looked around him as if in a dream.
“Everything in its place. Everything that Livy and I so treasured and shopped for and debated purchasing and celebrated in what now feels like our youth. When the girls were babies or toddlers or wee ones.”
He turned and looked directly into the eyes of Howells, then James, and finally Holmes.
“How ugly, tasteless, repulsive are all the domestic interiors I have ever seen in Europe, gentlemen. Compare that baroque awfulness with the perfect taste of this ground floor, w
ith its delicious dream of harmonious color and its all-pervading spirit of peace and serenity and deep, deep contentment. This is simply nothing more than the loveliest home that ever was.”
“It is beautiful, Sam,” said Howells.
It was as if Clemens hadn’t heard him speak. “Somehow, through some dark, malevolent enchantment, I had wholly forgotten our home’s olden aspect,” he said softly, speaking to himself. “This . . . this . . .” Clemens simultaneously slapped his palms on the arms of his chair and brought his polished shoes down hard on the floor, although he meant to signify neither in its isolation. “This place, to me, gentlemen, is bewitchingly bright and splendid and homelike and natural and it seems at this moment as if I have just burst awake out of a long and hellish dream. It is, gentlemen, as if I have never been away and that I will turn my head . . .”
He did so toward the stairway.
“ . . . and see my dearest Livy drifting down out of those dainty upper regions with the little children tagging after her.” He looked at them each in turn again. “But I feel in my heart that it is not to be. That it is never to be.”
No one spoke after this.
Clemens passed his hands over his eyes again and stood abruptly. “Enough of this nonsense,” he said, voice harsh. “Let us get up to the billiards room on the third floor where I kept my typewriter . . . that instrument of the Devil around which Mr. Holmes’s murder investigation pivots so ingeniously.”
CHAPTER 24
James and Howells were trailing behind Clemens and Holmes and on the second-story landing, Howells touched James’s sleeve to bring him to a stop.
“That was Sam and Livy’s bedroom,” whispered Howells, pointing to a door at the far end of the hall as Clemens and Holmes climbed out of sight to the third floor. “In Italy they’d bought this amazingly large bed with such an intricately carved headboard that Sam and Livy always put their pillows at the footboard end so, Sam would say, that staggeringly expensive headboard would be the last thing they’d see at night and the first thing they’d see in the morning. John and Alice Day provided their own bed, so Sam and Livy’s carved wonder is still in storage.”
James nodded, but Howells’s soft grip on his forearm continued.
Using his free hand to point to another door far down the hallway, Howells whispered, “That was always my room when I visited. Many’s the time that I would awake to some stealthy sound at one, two, even three o’clock in the morning only to peer out and see Sam in his nightshirt carrying a billiards cue . . . walking the halls in search of a playmate as it were.”
“Did you accommodate him?” whispered James.
“Almost always,” said Howells with a soft chuckle. “Almost always.”
Clemens’s voice suddenly roared down the stairway—“Are you two coming up, or are you busy ransacking through drawers down there in search of treasure? I need someone to play billiards with. The World’s Foremost Consulting Detective doesn’t know how to play the game and refuses to be taught!”
* * *
Henry James made mental notes of the American writer’s billiards room. The inward-sloping walls—this room was at the top of the tallest tower rising from the home—had been painted a light red that bordered on pink. The room was dominated by the five-foot-by-ten-foot billiards table, and James noticed that it was one of the more recently designed pocket-billiards tables with the six holes and external pockets of gold cloth and tassels at each corner and halfway down each long side. The billiards pockets gave a sense of Christmas-stocking celebration to the room, and the sloping ceilings made it feel like what it was—a playroom in a high attic.
The floor was completely carpeted over with a Persian rug that boasted patches of more (and brighter) red amongst its intricate designs. A brick fireplace on the far wall was offset from the center of the table and room and James could imagine how cozy this small, high room could be in the winter or on a chilly and stormy summer night. Next to the fireplace was a rough-hewn and open-faced storage cabinet rising about five feet high. There were still a few stacks of papers and books in it.
A few feet beyond the far end of the billiards table was a table with an oil lamp on it, but actual lighting at night would be provided by the four large, upward-opening gas lamps suspended low over the table on a four-spoke brass chandelier. Beyond both the billiards table and writing table was a door opening out to one of the balconies; sunlight poured in through the fan light over that door, through the tall lights on either side of it, and through smaller square windows low to the floor.
There was no door on the wall to James’s left as he entered, but the tall, fan-light-topped windows there were of stained glass with its central design showing crossed pool cues, a smoldering cigar between the cues, and a foam-topped glass mug of beer above the center of the crossed cues.
“My family crest,” said Clemens, who had already lighted a fresh cigar and was pacing back and forth between the fireplace and the billiards table, a cue stick in his hand. “Shakespeare’s family crest boasted only a sort of sickly looking pen against what Ben Jonson called a mustardy background. Mine is better, I think.”
James noticed that the theme of crossed cue sticks was also repeated on the painted ceiling. In the far left corner, in front of one of the low, square windows, was a smaller table with the typewriter and what looked to be some lead typesetting slugs on it. Holmes was already there.
“May I put this machine on that table and try it out?” asked Holmes.
Clemens just flicked a fast glance to his left. “By all means.” He removed the cigar and stared at Howells and James. “Now, Mr. James, would you join me in a fast game of pocket billiards to decide who is the Anglo-American Literary Billiards Champion of the World?”
“Alas,” demurred James, “I do not play. Have never played. I would never risk vandalizing that perfect field of green baize by attempting to learn to play today.”
“No?” said Clemens, audibly disappointed. “Are you sure, sir? In all of its many versions, billiards is most amusing and satisfactory you see, and when I play badly and lose my temper it shall almost certainly amuse you. Unless, of course, you are one of those blue-light Methodist preacher sorts who find oaths, epithets, blasphemies, and inventive obscenities objectionable.”
James held his hand up, palm out, and seemed to underline his rejection by taking a step backward. He noticed the mismatched furniture in the room: a few more small tables, wicker chairs, rocking chairs, and a couple of what he thought of as Wild West Saloon Chairs. He chose one of the few upholstered chairs to his left and sat.
“Very well,” exhaled Clemens with a cloud of smoke. “Howells, old foe, dear friend, fine foil, it is just you and me . . . again.”
Howells went around to choose a cue stick from where they were propped against the wall to the left of the fireplace.
“Please observe,” said Sherlock Holmes, “that the blank, white card I am placing in the typewriter is identical in size, texture, and cotton content to the one received by Henry Adams, the Hays, and Clarence King every December on the anniversary of Clover Adams’s death. Ned Hooper also received one each year before his untimely death this last December.”
“How do you know it’s the same cotton content and all that?” asked Clemens.
“I took the liberty of analyzing the card under my microscope and with some portable chemical apparatus I’d brought to Washington with me,” said the detective.
Holmes centered the card and typed a few words. For a moment, everyone gathered behind him.
She was murdered.
The detective had set out six of the cards received by the Hays and one on loan from Clarence King and now he set the new card flush below each of the old ones.
“You see,” said Holmes, “this chip in the ‘a’, this tendency in each card for the ‘r’ to be above the bottom alignment, the shape and increasing murkiness within the closed loop of the ‘d’, and the common opacity within the angles of the ‘w’.”
No one said anything. Now that his attention had been brought to the small imperfections, James could see them as a product of this machine. He also noticed that each small problem was more distinct on the card Holmes had just typed.
Holmes seemed to read his mind. “Use has somewhat exaggerated these nicks and alignment problems,” said the detective. “Since the original seven cards we have here look exactly the same, I would deduce that they were all typed at the same time, necessarily at least seven years ago since the Hays, King, and presumably Mr. Adams all received their first card on six December eighteen eighty-six.”
Clemens thrust out his fists, wrists close together as if awaiting hand manacles. “I confess. I will go peacefully.”
Holmes twitched an impatient shadow of a smile. “I presume, Mr. Clemens, that it would not have been difficult, say during the daytime, for one of your house guests to come into your billiards room and spend a few minutes typing a few dozen cards?”
“Certainly it’s possible,” said Clemens, putting the cigar between his teeth and striding back to the billiards table. “Even at night, no one save for me would have noticed the sound of typing and been curious.”
James cleared his throat. “You had no need for your typewriting machine while you have been in England and Europe the last few years?” he asked.
“Obviously not,” said Clemens, leaning forward over the edge of the table and positioning his cue in that odd but graceful sprawl of arms and elbows. “The last few years in Europe, I have written longhand once again and—in the few instances I wanted a typed version of any of my manuscripts—I hired a stenographer who provided the machine along with his or her note-taking skills.”
“Could I impose upon you, Mr. Clemens,” said Holmes, “to provide me with the names and last-known addresses of all the servants who worked for you here in eighteen eighty-six?”
“The list will be somewhere here in the house,” grumbled Clemens. “I shall find it for you before we leave today. May we resume our game now?”
