by Dan Simmons
“By all means,” said Holmes.
Clemens smashed the white ball into a random cluster of waiting balls. Three of those he’d struck with his ball or which had been struck in ricochet went into three of the pockets. Clemens straightened up and put chalk on the end of his cue as Howells frowned and leaned over the table.
“In billiards, that’s called nigger luck,” said Clemens.
“Did you keep a guest book from eighteen eighty-five until you began your travels?” asked Holmes.
“Yes,” said Clemens. “I don’t believe we packed them away and John and Alice Day keep their own guest book. There’s a drawer in that table at which you’re sitting, Mr. Holmes—yes, just lift up that tablecloth a bit . . .”
Holmes removed four leather-bound 8 x 12 journals or ledgers.
“May I . . .” began the detective.
Clemens nodded.
Howells struck the white ball and it caromed off two other balls and two of the side cushions before being the only ball to go in a pocket. “Heck and spit and damnation,” muttered the former editor.
“I’ll rack them up properly and we’ll start again,” Clemens said to Howells. “I don’t know why I’ve come to enjoy pocket billiards more than the carom billiards that stole so much of my youthful time, energy, and fortune. Most of the tables in England and Europe don’t even have pockets.”
While Clemens retrieved the white ball and shoved the others toward the point on the table where a wooden triangle waited, Holmes said, “Mr. Clemens, you and your family had many hundreds of visitors . . . per year it looks like.”
“Yes, well . . . .” said Clemens and just trailed off in whatever he was going to say. “I have nothing to hide, Mr. Holmes. I am serene in knowing that I have stealthily excised the pages on which Madame Lafarge and Her Writhing Pack of Belly-Dancing Virgins have written their names and left their comments on the visit.”
Holmes looked up from the four books filled with their hundreds of scrawls. “Perhaps, if it might be possible . . .”
“Yes, yes,” said Clemens. “Those four guest books cover eighteen eighty-five until we all sailed in June of eighteen ninety-one. All the names of all our overnight guests are there. Take the books with you, but make sure that Hay returns them to me in pristine condition. For I am certain, you see, that someday my biographers will have much need to refer to those guest books after they’re done with the immediate task of blotting the spot where I leave off.”
“Thank you,” muttered Holmes, “but I won’t need to borrow the guest books. Merely memorize the December ’eighty-five pages and all of the eighteen eighty-six.” Holmes began flipping through the pages of names and comments, running his finger down each page.
“You can memorize those hundreds of signatures and comments merely by looking at them once?” asked Clemens. His tone sounded dubious to James’s ear.
Holmes’s finger paused and he looked up at the others. “Unfortunately, my memory has been like this since I was a small boy. If I see something, I can call it back at any time. It is more of a curse than gift.”
“But it must be wonderfully handy in your line of work,” said Howells.
“At times, quite so,” said Holmes. “But it took me years to learn how to deliberately forget things which were of no use to me.”
“Remind me never to play poker with you, Mr. Holmes,” said Sam Clemens.
But Holmes had immersed himself in the 1886 guest book again, his finger rapidly sliding down page after page.
Clemens shrugged and gestured toward Howells, who leaned forward, got the white ball in his sights, and rocketed it into the triangle of clustered spheres. Balls rolled and caromed everywhere. One went in. Howells continued—sinking a second, then third before failing to get any in a hole on his fourth attempt.
“I presume we are playing eight ball, Sam,” Howells said.
“Ah hah!” said Clemens, flicking ash into a waiting bowl. “Assumptions are dangerous, Howells! In truth we’re shooting straight pool—fifteen points wins.”
“What can you tell me about billiards technique based on what I have seen so far?” asked Henry James as Clemens lined up his next shot.
“Well,” said Clemens, “from observing both Howells and me, you can see that if your ball glides along in the intense and immediate vicinity of the object ball, and a score seems exquisitely imminent, you must lift one leg; then one shoulder; then squirm your body around in sympathy with the direction of the moving ball; and at the instant when the ball seems on the point of colliding, you must throw up both your arms violently. Your cue will probably break a chandelier and then catch fire from the exposed gas jet, as Howells has demonstrated here in this very room so many times, but no matter; you have done what you could to help the final score.”
* * *
The game proceeded, Clemens evidently winning, when suddenly Holmes finished scanning the thick guest book, slammed it shut, and said, “You had Rebecca Lorne and her cousin as guests in February of ’eighty-six!”
“Lorne? Lorne?” said Clemens, his head snapping up with its lion’s mane of white hair. “Oh, yes, I remember the woman and her shy cousin . . . what was his name? Carlton? No . . . Clifton. ‘Clif’ with one ‘f’ as Miss Lorne called him. I couldn’t have told you that it was in February of ’eighty-six, not so soon after Clover Adams’s suicide.”
“How did you know them?” asked Holmes.
“Oh, I’d met Miss Lorne the previous summer . . . no, early autumn, just after Congress had convened . . . while I was staying with Hay and Adams for a few days as I lobbied before a congressional committee for my copyrights. She was spending quite a bit of time with Mrs. Adams . . . with Clover . . . as I recall. Henry Adams was beside himself with worry about Clover’s unhappiness . . . it’s why I shifted my visit from his home to Hay’s . . . and it seemed as if Rebecca Lorne was the only friend who visited her on a regular basis during that dark time.”
“But how did she and her cousin Clifton end up spending a night with you here in Hartford two months after Clover’s death?” asked Holmes. “Had you struck up a separate friendship or habit of correspondence with Miss Lorne and her cousin?”
“Heavens no!” said Clemens. “As I remember, the two simply dropped by one Sunday to pay their respects. A Sunday in the middle of the month as I recall.”
“The fourteenth of February,” said Holmes, whose gray-eyed stare was so intense that it might have frightened Clemens if the humorist-writer hadn’t been staring into space as he tried to remember Rebecca Lorne and her visit.
“That’s right,” said Clemens. “But you must remember, Detective, that this was more than seven years ago. Miss Lorne and her cousin Clifton stopped by to pay their respects since they, or at least Rebecca Lorne, were aware that I’d known Clover Adams for years and they ended up having to spend the night because of a terrible snowstorm that swept in that afternoon. I remember that Livy insisted they stay with us rather than try to get to the train station. I believe they were going to Boston at the time . . . not just visiting, as I recall, but in the process of moving there from Washington.”
Clemens leaned on his cue stick, getting blue rosin on his cuff, and fixed Holmes with a stare almost as intense as the gaze the detective had shown only a moment earlier. “Why this interest in Miss Lorne, Mr. Holmes? Is she a . . . suspect . . . in this investigation of yours?”
“She is an unknown factor, Mr. Clemens,” said Holmes, not shrinking from the writer’s formidable gaze. “Mrs. Adams . . . Clover . . . had known Rebecca Lorne for only a year, yet they seemed the most intimate of friends in the weeks and months before Mrs. Adams’s apparent suicide.”
“Apparent suicide?” barked Clemens. “How could it be anything but suicide, Mr. Holmes? Henry Adams himself found her body, still warm after drinking the cyanide from her photographic developing potions.”
“With Miss Rebecca Lorne waiting outside the house,” said Holmes. “Miss Lorne may have been the last pe
rson to see Clover Adams alive.”
“You are misinformed, Mr. Holmes,” barked Clemens, his face growing dark above the white mustache. “I have it from Henry Adams himself that he encountered Miss Lorne waiting outside their house at sixteen-oh-seven H Street because she had come to visit Clover but had been waiting to go up because no one answered the bell.”
Holmes nodded. “You have it from Henry Adams himself that the woman who called herself Rebecca Lorne said that she had been waiting outside when no one answered the bell. But there remains the possibility that Miss Lorne had visited Clover Adams during the few minutes that Henry Adams was gone and was coming out of the home at sixteen-oh-seven H Street rather than waiting outside it.”
“Preposterous,” cried Clemens.
“Possibly,” said Holmes.
“And what do you mean by saying ‘the woman who called herself Rebecca Lorne’, sir? Who else might she be?”
“Indeed,” said Holmes.
James had been watching this exchange with the utmost interest and now he looked to Holmes to give his theory about Lorne being the woman Holmes had known as Irene Adler.
Instead, Holmes asked the humorist, “During Miss Lorne’s brief visit here in Hartford or during your earlier encounters with her in Washington, did she give you the sense of having ever been familiar with theatrical life?”
“Theatrical life,” repeated Clemens, lighting a new cigar. “I don’t know what you . . . wait. Wait. Now that you mention it, I remember telling Livy after their visit—‘This woman has been on the stage’. Yes, by God, I remember now.”
“Did she say as much?” asked Holmes.
“No, no, not in the least,” laughed Clemens. “But once when her cousin Clifton took the wrong chair at dinner—next to her, not what couples or guests do at another’s table—she’d said, ‘You’ve missed your mark.’ And another time, we were playing billiards that evening—Mrs. Lorne, or whoever she might be, was deucedly good at the game—turned to her cousin as he was ready to take a shot and she said, ‘Break a leg’. Now, as far as I know, those terms are little known outside the theater.”
“Do you actually think that Rebecca Lorne might have been upstairs with Clover Adams when she . . . when the poison was taken?” asked William Dean Howells, the billiards cue still in his hand. It had been so long since Howells had said anything that all heads turned toward him.
“It’s possible,” said Holmes. “It is more likely that the woman taking the name Rebecca Lorne had been posted outside to make noise should Henry Adams return early . . . which he did.”
James blinked. He’d not heard this part of Holmes’s surmising before and it made a terrible dark sense.
“Make noise . . .” said Clemens, clearly not seeing the implications.
“So that the man she called her cousin Clifton would not be interrupted in whatever he was doing upstairs with Clover,” said Holmes.
“But Adams went straight upstairs,” said Howells, his face white with horror. “He saw only Clover’s body on the floor.”
“Even though the Adamses’ old house was much smaller than Henry Adams’s current home, it also had a rear servants’ staircase,” said Holmes. “I inquired.”
Sam Clemens exhaled blue smoke. “So he could have come quietly down that rear stairs while poor Adams went up the main stairs,” he rasped. “And out the back door, no doubt.” Clemens turned to Holmes. “Do you know the true identity of this ‘cousin Clifton’?”
“I do,” Holmes said softly and with not the least tone of triumph or superiority. “There was no record of Clifton Richards in Washington or Boston save for the six months previous to Clover’s death, when this ‘Clifton’ worked in the photographic supplies department in the Department of State. It was he who provided the new developing solution—with the cyanide—to Clover Adams. He resigned—and disappeared—in January of ’eighty-six, just a few weeks after Mrs. Adams’s death. His true identity—absolutely confirmed by me only yesterday—is that of Lucan Adler, an international anarchist and deadly assassin.”
“My God!” cried Clemens, sending the billiards cue crashing onto the green baize table. “Livy and I hosted a murderess and murderer. We could have been poisoned at our own table. Stabbed in the night. Smothered to death in our own bed!”
Holmes smiled thinly. “Possible, but not probable. It was not you they were after but, rather, Clover Adams. They closed their circle around her for months.”
“But why?” asked Clemens. “Clover offended some members of the Washington establishment, but certainly no one disliked her to the point of wanting to kill her.”
“That is what I am looking into,” said Holmes. “At this moment, I fear that a former actress and adventuress named Irene Adler and her son Lucan Adler arranged Mrs. Adams’s death primarily in order to bring me to the States.”
The other three men could only stare at the detective. Finally James said, “Bring you here to America in December of ’eighty-five or the winter of ’eighty-six, you mean?”
“No,” said Holmes. “To bring me here after Ned Hooper brought me the evidence of the She-was-murdered cards. To bring me here now.”
For a moment no one said anything. Then Clemens took Howells’s cue, set it against the wall with his own, and said, “Come with me please, gentlemen.”
* * *
James had assumed that Clemens was going to show them out of the house—the brougham and driver were still waiting in the driveway—but instead their host led them out onto a covered second-story porch. It was a wide porch with a wonderful view, and seven rocking chairs waited there in the shade.
“Please be seated, gentlemen,” said Clemens. “You may choose any rocker save for this one.” He had his hands on the back of a mustard-yellow rocker with well-dented cushions. “And God bless John and Alice Day for keeping everything here where it should be.”
When they were all seated, Howells and James lit cigarettes. Holmes worked to get his pipe drawing properly. Clemens found yet another cigar in a pocket, bit off the end, spit the shred over the railing, and lit the cigar with a satisfied grunt. James had smoked cigars but he did not pretend to be an aficionado of the many brands. He only knew from the smoke that Clemens’s cigar was a cheap cigar.
Clemens caught his gaze. “I used to smoke cigarettes as you do, Mr. James. But Olivia told me that it was a dirty habit and certainly no benefit to my health. So, on the principle that the only way to break one bad habit was by replacing it with an even worse habit, I began smoking cigars.”
Howells guffawed at this, although he must have heard it many times before.
“But I do follow Livy’s admonitions to moderation, Mr. James,” continued Clemens. “I rarely smoke more than one cigar at a time.”
“Have you ever tried to break the habit, Mr. Clemens?” asked Holmes.
James immediately thought of Holmes’s syringe and his addiction to whatever he was daily injecting into himself. Holmes also smoked constantly, varying between cigarettes and his pipes. Was Holmes really curious about whether Twain had found a way to break his addiction to tobacco?
“Oh, of course,” laughed Clemens. “It’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done it hundreds of times.”
James saw Howells smile and Holmes nod recognition of the tiny clench. They were, James knew, bits and pieces of prepared and rehearsed lines that had flowed from the podium and over footlights many times, but James was not offended by being turned into yet another audience. Clemens seemed to require an audience at all times.
But for several moments Clemens fell silent and no one else spoke. The only sound was the unsynchronized creaking of their four rocking chairs and ambient bird sounds and leaves stirring in the wind. James wondered if the great elms and chestnut trees and maples might be further along in their stately process of leafing out than usual for the end of March. The smaller dogwoods were in their glory. Henry James remembered winter surrendering its sovereignty in Cambridge with frigid and snowy rearguar
d actions deep into April in some late springs, including the year a decade ago when his parents died and he had stayed behind to sort out insurance and moneys owed and moneys promised. He remembered how he and Alice James—the other Alice James, William’s wife—had begged William by letter not to return home from his sabbatical in England. His presence would have only made the confusion—of money going to Wilkie and others, of Henry forsaking his own share of their father’s modest fortune by signing it over to their sister Alice, of Aunt Kate’s and sister Alice’s part in all this—hopeless. William had stayed in England and Europe, but not without threatening a hundred times that he would board the next ship U.S.-bound.
That had been a sad but deeply satisfying few months for Henry James. For once he was undoubtedly and indisputably in charge of the family—its finances, its security, its future with both parents now gone—and he had liked the feeling. He had liked being free and separate from the shadow of the all-powerful older brother William.
The wind rustled leaves again and James enjoyed the view from this high porch. He could see the white gazebo, needing paint now, where Clemens had spent starry nights talking with Harriet Beecher Stowe. Or so he had said. James had read that the old lady, in her 80’s, was almost an invalid now. And no longer interested in life or ideas since her husband had died.
James remembered reading the novel—Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly—only a year or two after it had been published in 1852. Henry James, Jr., was only 10 years old but he had instantly seen the crude melodrama of the novel as the propaganda broadside it was meant to be, filled with stereotypes and unartistic exaggerations: not drawn from life. But he had also sensed the flame of fury and indignation that had driven the author and—even then at 10 years of age—Henry James had known for a certainty that he would never write anything or paint anything or create anything from any similar boundless passion. His work, he knew even before he had known what direction his work in life might take him, would all be minded—carefully thought out and planned, deliberate, well-chewed.
