by Dan Simmons
“Five dollars, sir.”
“That seems a bit steep.”
“I throw in two boxes of cartridges with the lemon squeezer, sir.”
“Done,” said Holmes.
“Shall I box it and wrap it up, sir?”
“No,” Holmes had said. “I’ll carry it on me.”
* * *
And Holmes was carrying the seemingly hammerless S&W, loaded save for one empty chamber, in one oversized outer pocket of his tweed suit and the two boxes of cartridges in the opposite oversized pocket, a short time later when he called on John Hay. The former diplomat was just sitting down to breakfast when Holmes was shown in and the detective assured him that his visit wouldn’t take more than two minutes and he’d be happy to have some coffee while Hay ate.
As succinctly as possible—and never mentioning the previous night’s adventure in Rock Creek Cemetery or the ominous figure smoking his cigarettes in the dark—Holmes explained that he was moving out of Mrs. Stevens’s boarding house, a necessity, alas, and that he was concerned for Mr. James’s safety.
“Certainly James has no enemies in Washington!” cried Hays.
“I would doubt that Mr. James has enemies anywhere,” said Holmes. “But I have enemies. And it has come to my attention that they may know of my presence in Washington . . . even my current address at Mrs. Stevens’s establishment.”
Hay looked concerned and dabbed a linen napkin at his sharp beard and perfectly trimmed mustache. “But certainly they wouldn’t . . . an innocent such as Harry . . .”
“It is a long shot, as you Americans say,” said Holmes. “A remote possibility. But these particular people are beyond all laws of reason and decency. I would not sleep well imagining them showing up at Mrs. Stevens’s home and coming across Mr. James . . .”
Hay looked sharply at the detective. “Would my family be in danger if Harry stayed here?”
“Not in the least.”
“How can you be so sure, sir?” Hay’s pleasant demeanor had disappeared for a moment into the sharp cross-examining tones of a prosecutor.
“These . . . people . . . may not recognize the extent of Henry James’s literary fame,” said Holmes, “but I am certain that they know your reputation, Mr. Hay, and would do nothing associated with you or your family . . . or your guest . . . that would bring publicity down on their heads.”
“Then I’ll ask Harry to drop by today and insist . . . insist, I tell you . . . that he stay with us again,” said Hay. Holmes loved the tone of a man who could make up his mind in a few seconds.
“Could you ask him to drop by at about five-fifteen?” said Holmes.
“Yes, if you wish.” Hay squinted slightly at the detective. “Is there a special reason for that time?”
“Just that I don’t wish to bump into Mr. James once I’ve moved out of Mrs. Stevens’s pleasant home and I may be in this area earlier in the day.”
“I shall specify five-fifteen,” said Hay and started to rise as Holmes stood.
“No, please, don’t get up, and thank you for this favor,” said Holmes.
“If I need to get in touch with you . . .” began Hay.
Holmes handed him one of his cards with the cigar store address handwritten on the back. “This establishment is open around the clock for some inexplicable reason,” he said. “And they promise to get any message to me as quickly as they can.”
Holmes and Hay had shaken hands and then the detective hurried down the street to catch Henry James before he had his breakfast brought to his room.
10
A Small Bouquet of White Violets
Holmes knocked on Henry Adams’s front door at five p.m., precisely the time he’d suggested in his early-morning note and to which Adams had agreed in his return note that morning.
The door was opened at once and Holmes was confronted with the dour face of an elderly butler; he now knew all of the Hays’ family servants by face and name, but he hadn’t been formally introduced to Henry Adams’s home or staff.
The butler said nothing, closed the door behind the detective, nodded his head to indicate that Holmes should follow, and led him directly up a staircase Holmes had seen only in the darkness of his burgling night. At the upstairs study, the grim-faced butler waited only for Adams to nod from his place behind a full but not cluttered desk before he closed the door behind Holmes. There had been no announcement, no greeting, not even a “Please follow me, sir” from the side-whiskered old retainer, but perhaps Adams had directed his man not to speak to Holmes. At any rate, Holmes did not feel slighted. He looked around the book-lined study with some interest. It was a scholar’s study and illuminated not only by desk and table lamps but by large windows, some leaded with ornate stained glass, others clear. Through the clear windows, Holmes looked directly across the street at the president’s Executive Mansion.
Adams neither rose nor spoke, so Holmes took the initiative of walking across the room to the desk, setting his top hat, gloves, and walking stick on one chair, and sitting on the other one that was opposite Adams across the desk.
“You have put me in an impossible position, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” the bald scholar said softly—but not so softly that Holmes missed the substrate of anger and frustration in Adams’s tone.
Rather than disagree or comment in any way, Holmes merely nodded.
“I made my . . . mystery . . . far too simple, didn’t I?” said Adams. “Too many clues.”
“Actually, just enough clues,” said Holmes. “And not all of them deliberate.”
“Your note this morning said only that you had solved the mystery and looked out at the world from a mourner’s eyes. I presume that means you . . .”
“Went in the monument?” finished Holmes. “Yes.”
Henry Adams looked down at the papers on his desk and for a moment the man’s face—even the flesh of his mostly bare scalp—went so terribly pale that Holmes was concerned that the older man was having a heart attack or stroke. But then Adams looked up, sat up straighter.
“Well, then,” Adams said in an only slightly shaky voice, “you know the greatest secret in my life, Mr. Holmes. I was foolish enough and overconfident enough to give a man . . . like you . . . far too simple clues to the secret and now you know.” Adams’s body twitched suddenly as if he’d been jolted by an electric current. “You didn’t tell James, did you?”
“I’ve spoken neither to Henry James nor to anyone else about this matter last night or this morning,” said Holmes, feeling the lawyerly dodge of his words almost stick in his craw.
Adams nodded. “For that I can be thankful.” The scholar sighed and folded his hands on his desk. “And now what, Mr. Holmes? Do we discuss the concept of money changing hands?”
Holmes could have acted outraged—was tempted to do so—but did not.
“I accept fees for my services as an investigator, Mr. Adams,” he said coolly. “Not payment as a blackmailer.”
Adams’s expression still had not changed. “Then what are your . . . fees as an investigator . . . in this instance, Mr. Holmes?”
“One dollar,” said Holmes. “And already paid—two years ago—by your wife’s late brother, Edward.”
“Ned,” said Adams with a strange, almost pained tone to his voice.
Holmes nodded again.
Suddenly Adams seemed to shake himself out of a haze. “I apologize,” he said, half rising and reaching for a velvet pull rope on the wall. “I haven’t asked you if you would like a cup of tea . . . or coffee . . . or a glass of whisky?”
“Nothing, thank you.”
Adams almost collapsed back into his chair. “You are,” he said very softly, “probably the only man alive who knows what a monster I am.”
“Mourner,” said Holmes. “Not monster. Never monster. A mourner of someone truly loved who has found a unique way to see others mourning his lost love.”
Adams almost laughed. “If you heard some of the comments . . . saw some of their clowning at fi
rst encountering Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture. Heard them guessing at the price of the monument or criticizing its solemnity, or its lack of religious purpose, or its lack of joy in the hope and sure certainty of eternal redemption. We are a strange and inexplicable species, Mr. Holmes.”
“Indeed.”
“What do you want, sir?” asked Henry Adams.
“I want . . . need . . . to discover the truth of your wife Clover’s death more than seven years ago,” said Holmes.
“She drank potassium cyanide and died almost instantaneously,” Adams said briskly. “There is really nothing else to discuss, much less uncover.”
Holmes sighed and leaned forward so that his hands were also folded on Adams’s broad desk. “I apologize for my bluntness, Mr. Adams. And there will be more such bluntness before we are finished. But it is not out of cruelty I make these comments or ask these questions, but out of a need for clarity.”
Adams had sat further back in his chair but met Holmes’s sharp, gray gaze with a steady one of his own.
“Mrs. Adams’s death would have hardly been—near instantaneous,” Holmes said in soft but solid tones. “I have published monographs on more than three hundred poisonous substances and combinations of such—their symptoms, their lethality rated on a scale of one hundred, their odor, their efficacy. Potassium cyanide, in any dose large enough to kill Mrs. Adams, would have burned her tongue and throat. Then this particular poison cuts off the body’s ability to process oxygen—in essence, asphyxiating the victim. But Mrs. Adams would have choked and gasped for air, perhaps ripping off her collar or bodice in an attempt to breathe, for some terrible moments. She would have thrashed about and fallen to the floor, where the poison would have assured more minutes of violent convulsions. Then . . .”
“Enough!” cried Henry Adams, slapping his palm so violently against the top of his desk that the noise sounded like a rifle shot in the room.
Almost instantly, the door was flung open and the aged head butler half-entered. “Sir . . . are you all right? I heard . . .”
Adams was still looking down but nodded and said through a thick voice, “Quite all right, Hobson. You needn’t wait outside any longer.”
“Yes, sir.” The door was closed silently and Holmes could hear what he’d noticed the lack of earlier—the butler’s footsteps receding down the hall and then down the staircase.
Holmes returned his attention to Adams and felt the intensity of the older man’s gaze. If looks were knives, this one would have decapitated and gutted Holmes.
“Why do you tell me these things?” rasped Adams.
Holmes pointed to one of the hundreds of leather-bound volumes on the wall of books behind Adams. “Sedford’s Poisons and Their Effects, Ninth Edition. You know all these details, Mr. Adams. You have researched this poison as carefully as you’ve researched Thomas Jefferson’s administrations. You wanted the truth, no matter how hard it was to bear. So do I.”
“Yes, all right.” The scholar took a deep breath. “The parlor where I found Clover’s body looked as if three sailors had been fighting in it—drapes torn, tables overturned, lamps smashed, pillows slashed by her nails, crystal objects flung down from the mantel. And Clover’s face . . . it was monstrous in its frozen terror and distortion, Mr. Holmes.”
Holmes nodded. After allowing a moment of silence, he said, “You lied to the police and newspapers, Mr. Adams.”
Adams’s head and shoulders snapped backwards. Dim afternoon sunlight glinted on his bald head and clenched fists. For a second or two while studying Adams’s expression, Holmes was reminded of the ki demon masks he’d seen in a Noh play in Kyoto.
But Adams said nothing. Holmes watched the scholar’s clenched right hand drop just above the drawer there and wondered if Henry Adams kept a pistol in that drawer. Holmes’s new lemon squeezer—loaded—was in the right-front pocket of his tweed jacket.
“You told the police and the papers that you had left your wife alone that Sunday morning because you had to visit your dentist,” said Holmes. “That wasn’t true.”
Adams’s small body actually rocked to and fro slightly as if in response to his mental struggle. Finally he said, “No, that wasn’t true.”
“Why did you leave that morning, Mr. Adams?”
“Clover and I had quarreled. Violently.” And then, as if realizing the legal import of that word, he said quickly, “For Clover and me it was ‘violently’—although voices were barely raised. We weren’t a couple who shouts. Ever.”
“But you argued.”
“Yes.”
“Over what?” said Holmes.
“Clover had been distraught—close to despair—and that morning she was in tears, almost hysterics, because Sunday at that hour had always been the time she wrote to her father. Her father who was now dead.”
“You argued about her emotions or about her writing a letter?” said Holmes.
“I insisted she begin a new Sunday routine,” said Adams. “Write a letter to her sister Ellen. Make Sundays a day for something other than melancholy and mourning after those many months.”
“She did write that letter, or a fragment of it, to her sister after you left,” said Holmes. “She told her sister that, and I believe I quote—‘Henry has been more patient and loving than words can express’ and, in the final uncompleted paragraph, ‘Henry has been—and is—beyond all words tenderer and better than all of you even.’ Why do you think she would write such a note just after the two of you had quarreled and you’d stalked out, Mr. Adams?”
Adams looked like a writer forced to watch his entire life’s work burned page by page in a fire. “I don’t know, Mr. Holmes. No more than I know how you got the precise wording of Clover’s letter to Ellen.”
“The police made a copy,” Holmes said, making a gesture with his bare right hand as if batting away something trivial and not worth discussing. He cleared his throat. “It sounds as if,” continued Holmes, “Mrs. Adams was writing a form of suicide note to her sister making sure that you were not in any way to blame.”
Adams only shook his head, whether in negation or confusion, Holmes couldn’t tell.
“Earlier in the letter to her sister,” said Holmes, “Mrs. Adams wrote, and again I believe I can cite it fully from memory—‘If I had one single point of character or goodness, I would stand on that and grow back to life.’ But then the letter ends. Why did you turn around and go home so quickly, Mr. Adams? After only ten minutes or so of walking? I know you had no appointment with your dentist that morning.”
Adams lifted a fountain pen from the table top and held it in both hands as if he were going to snap it. “I became . . . alarmed,” he said at last. “Concerned. I realized that it had been a bastardly thing to do . . . leaving Clover alone in the house on a morning when she was hurting so much.”
“And upon returning to your home then at sixteen-oh-seven H Street—just down the street,” said Holmes. “You told the police that you found Miss Rebecca Lorne waiting outside the front door. You said that she asked your opinion on whether she should go up and visit Clover that day.”
Adams said nothing. His usually almost frighteningly intelligent eyes seemed to have a haze over them—A translucent caul of memory, thought Holmes.
“Why did you lie about that as well, Mr. Adams?” said Holmes.
Adams blinked. “Who said that I lied.”
“I did. You encountered Rebecca Lorne coming out the front door of your house on H Street. She was weeping—as hysterical as Mrs. Adams had been a short time earlier. She had trouble telling you what she had found when she went up to visit Mrs. Adams, didn’t she, Mr. Adams?”
“Yes. I had to take her into the foyer so that no one could see her hysterics . . . it took me a full minute or two to get her calmed down to the point where Miss Lorne could tell me what she’d discovered upstairs.”
“How did she get in?” asked Holmes, leaning forward again.
“What?”
“I’m sure y
ou locked the door behind you when you left to work off your anger in your walk,” said Holmes. “How did Rebecca Lorne gain entry to your home?”
“Oh, Clover had had an extra key made up for Rebecca a month or two earlier,” Adams answered almost distractedly. “We’d hoped to go to New York for some shopping—a vain hope, as it turned out—and Clover had given Miss Lorne the key so that she could drop in to check on the servants and see that the plants were properly watered.”
“Rebecca Lorne discovered Mrs. Adams’s body in the wreckage that had been the parlor, not you,” said Holmes. He did not phrase it as a question and Adams did not answer other than to nod ever so slightly.
Eventually Adams spoke in hollowed-out tones, the voice of a man who has passed through Hell and who knows he must go there again. “In those last months, it was only Rebecca Lorne who seemed to give Clover any surcease of her sorrow over her father’s death. Clover had stopped seeing most of her usual friends. It’s not quite fair to say that she and Miss Lorne were inseparable during those last late-summer and autumn months, but there’s no one whom Clover looked forward to seeing more than Miss Lorne.”
“Hadn’t the two of them paid a call on Mrs. Cameron—Lizzie Cameron—the previous evening?” asked Holmes.
Adams blinked rapidly once again. “Yes, they had. Lizzie had been very ill with . . . the influenza, I believe. Clover visited her and Miss Lorne accompanied her. They brought flowers and a book.”
Holmes removed the untitled publicity photograph of Irene Adler from his upper jacket pocket and handed it across to Henry Adams. “Is this a picture of Rebecca Lorne?”
Adams moved the photograph back and forth to bring it into proper focus. “Well . . . yes, it appears to be Miss Lorne. Her dress here is more . . . ‘showy’ is perhaps the right word . . . and she looks a little younger than when I last saw her, but this appears to be Rebecca.”
Holmes took the photo back. “This is a program advertisement for a certain Irene Adler—American born but European trained.”
“Trained in what?” said Adams.
