by Dan Simmons
“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.
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 aroun
d 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?”
