by Dan Simmons
“Opera, acting on the stage, and blackmail,” said Holmes. “Most specially that last skill.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You remember her cousin, a certain Clifton Richards?”
“Of course,” said Adams. “He worked in the photographic section of the State Department.” Adams paused and the haze came over his eyes again. “He’s the one who brought Clover the new developing solution that contained the potassium cyanide.”
“His real name is Lucan,” said Holmes. “Possibly Lucan Adler. Probably Irene Adler’s son.”
Adams shook his head again.
“You didn’t see or talk to Lucan—this Cousin Clifton—on the day you met Rebecca Lorne coming out of your house . . . the day Clover died?”
“No.”
“So he might have been in the house and exited via the back stairs when you ran up the front stairs, and he may have slipped out the back way into the alley,” said Holmes.
“An extraordinary and outrageous supposition,” said Henry Adams. “We have no evidence that her cousin Clifton was with her in my home on that terrible day.”
“No,” said Holmes, “but we know beyond a doubt that ‘Clifton Richards’ was Adler the assassin. And without questioning Irene Adler—your so-called Rebecca Lorne—we simply cannot know the truth of that day. And there was an obituary for Irene Adler in the March eighteen eighty-six London Times.”
Adams shook his head again, but with a negative hand gesture this time, a physical pushing away of Holmes’s words or their import. “No, no . . . this Irene Adler cannot have been the same woman that I knew so well in the year before Clover’s death. I’ve written letters to Miss Lorne, it’s been Mrs. Braxton, of Boston, over the years. And she has always responded.”
“Recently?” said Holmes, his ears metaphorically perking up like a hunting hound’s.
“Her last letter to me was last autumn, I believe,” said Adams. “So you see that your late actress person cannot be Mrs. Rebecca Lorne Braxton of Boston.”
“And her handwriting has stayed the same?” said Holmes.
“Yes, of course,” said Adams. “But I shall show you the letters. You may make your own judgment. Mrs. Braxton has never sent me a typewritten missive such as those accursed annual cards you are so clumsily and invasively investigating.”
“When was Miss Lorne married?”
“About two years after my wife’s death,” said Adams. “Miss Lorne had moved to Boston in January of eighteen eighty-six, only a month after . . . after. She sent me a note of her marriage in August of eighteen eighty-eight. I know only that her husband is somewhat older than she and that he makes a living in the sea trade with India.”
“May I see these letters? Hers to you, I mean. Not yours to her.”
Holmes expected an argument, possibly harsh words, but Adams must have been expecting the request; he pulled a small bundle of envelopes, tied in a pink bow, from the main drawer of his desk.
“Read them, Mr. Holmes. Take them with you as long as you promise to return them. You shall find nothing in Rebecca Lorne Braxton’s letters to me—or in my short notes to her, for that matter, should the lady allow you to read them someday—but normal conversation between an aging widower and his wife’s friend, a friend, like the husband, still deep in mourning after seven years.” Adams’s tone was flat, almost businesslike.
Holmes accepted the bundle of letters in silence.
“Another thing . . . another mystery, if you will, Mr. Holmes,” said Adams.
Holmes held the letters in his lap and waited.
“Every year on December six,” said Adams. “The anniversary of Clover’s death. I have found, or Hay and my other friends have found when I was traveling in the South Seas, a small bouquet of white violets, Clover’s favorite flower, set on my wife’s grave in Rock Creek Cemetery. I am certain that they have been set there every December six by Rebecca Lorne.”
“How can you know this?” asked Holmes. “Did she admit to this?”
“No, I have never mentioned it to her in our occasional correspondence,” said Adams. “I simply know. I have not written to thank her yet, but someday I shall.”
“But you said that Miss Lorne . . . Mrs. Braxton now . . . has lived in Boston these seven years.”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Adams . . . you really believe that Rebecca Lorne Braxton makes the long trip to Washington every December six, never to contact you, but only to leave this bouquet of white violets on your wife’s grave?”
“I do, Mr. Holmes. She has never spoken of it in her letters, but I am certain that particular act of kindness is hers. It matches the personality of the woman I knew in eighteen eighty-five. Rebecca Lorne was and is a kind person, Mr. Holmes. She was my wife’s friend. To even think that she was in any way involved with or, God forbid, responsible for my wife’s death—Clover’s death by melancholy, as I often think of it—is more than a grave error in judgment, Mr. Holmes. It is investigative malpractice. And it is also a callous act of slander.”
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Adams,” said Holmes, standing and retrieving his hat, gloves, and stick. Adams remained seated.
“Are you leaving Washington soon?” asked the scholar.
“I will be doing some traveling in relation to this investigation and . . . another . . . but I can be reached through that cigar store address at any time,” said Holmes.
“I will have no more to say on this matter,” said Adams. “I would appreciate you returning the letters before you begin your travels. You may give them to Hobson when the time comes. There is no further reason for us to meet or speak.”
Holmes nodded. “I’ll find my own way out, Mr. Adams. I thank you for your time and cooperation.” He patted the small bundle of letters in his chest pocket.
But Henry Adams had returned his gaze to the papers on his desk and did not look up.
Holmes paused in the open doorway, sensing but not seeing Hobson hovering somewhere out of sight down the hallway. “One last question, Mr. Adams.”
Adams raised his head. There was no sigh, frown, or rolling of the eyes and, once again, Holmes admired the historian’s self-discipline.
“Your windows there, the clear ones,” said Holmes, “offer an astonishingly good view of the president’s house, especially of that one set of windows.”
Adams said nothing. He did not turn his head to look at the windows Holmes was pointing toward, nor did he have to. Adams had worked in this study and had that view since 1886.
“Do you happen to know, Mr. Adams, which room in the White House those windows serve and—as odd as my query sounds—whether President Cleveland often frequents that room?”
“I can only tell you that when Mrs. Adams and I visited the president’s house during his first term that room was the office and receiving room for the president’s sister, Miss Rose Elizabeth Cleveland, who served as the de facto First Lady of the land until eighteen eighty-six when Mr. Cleveland entered into marriage. I believe that ceremony was the only marriage service ever held on the grounds for a chief executive in the history of the White House. When Mr. Cleveland returned to office and resumed his occupancy there only last month, it is my understanding that his sister did not return to Washington with him. I believe she has become the administrator of some little collegiate institution in Indiana . . . Lafayette, Indiana, to be precise. She has published often on what they now call feministe issues—that is, women’s rights. I’ve read that she took part in the First International Women’s Conference in Paris last year. So, no, I have no idea what the room behind those windows is used for at the present time. Only that the president’s sister will not be there.”
Holmes smiled at the historian’s completeness—if not civil tone—in answering such a silly question, nodded his thanks, and closed the door behind him.
As he hurried to the waiting hansom before Henry James—visiting next door—might glimpse him, Holmes knew that the interview had given u
p at least one possibly relevant fact: Henry Adams’s study was the perfect location for a Lucan-Adler-type assassin with a rifle.
11
The Wheel of Time
For the first day or two after Henry James returned to the Hays’ home as an artist whose privacy had to be respected at all times, the writer was relieved and as happy as he’d been since before the turn of the year. His guest suite at the far end of what Americans called the second story was large, comfortable, and private. If James chose to join John and Clara Hay for a meal, his hosts were delighted to have him. If he preferred absolute privacy—which he did for those first days—the servant assigned to him, Gregory, would bring up a menu before each meal and James would choose his own breakfast, lunch, or dinner, with no reference to what his hosts were having.
In those first few days, James celebrated Holmes’s complete absence much in the way he’d quietly celebrated the disappearance of the worst pains of gout that had so hobbled him around Christmas and the New Year in London. There were no more cigarettes stubbed into egg yolks; no more inane conversations about conspiracies and assassinations; no more late-night outings to cemeteries or creeping into memorial sculptures with secret passages. James felt liberated. He was free now, with Holmes gone, free to rest or write or just walk and think. Or to book passage on the next steamship to England if he so wished. Things could not have turned out better.
Then why, he wondered on April 7, the Friday of that first week at the Hays’, did he feel as deeply listless and actively melancholy as he had in March when he’d decided to go to Paris to drown himself in the Seine?
Lying in bed that night, the literary contents of his portmanteau poured out onto the blanket beside him, James looked through his notebooks. His markets for short stories seemed to have dried up and publishers in both England and America had mostly moved away from the long, serialized tale that had—in the spirit of Dickens—kept James busy writing for so many years. His last two novels, The Reverberator and The Tragic Muse, the latter released three years ago in 1890, had sold poorly. As did his story collection published in that same year, The Aspern Papers.
He had three books scheduled to be published later this year: Picture and Text in June, his essays on art; Essays in London to appear later in the summer, essentially a compilation of his tributes to his many friends who had died recently; finally his collection of stories The Private Life and Other Tales.
But none of these were major novels. And his essays and short-story collections had never brought in much money or notice.
It was clear that the literary world had passed Henry James by. Or perhaps, he mused, he had somehow wandered away from it. Thus his resolution last year, the resolution that had come before his resolution to kill himself, to begin a new and far more financially (and, in its way, socially) rewarding career of writing for the theater.
His first play, The American, adapted rather loosely from his novel by the same name (so loosely that he’d first titled the play The Californian), had a run of seventy nights in London and more weeks before and after in the provinces. James had enjoyed the process—reading the four-act play to the actors as a French author-director would, watching them rehearsing it, bringing them chicken and soups and other nourishing lunches during their long rehearsal days. Encouraging them. Bantering with them. Participating. Being accepted. Laughing with others and making them laugh with his droll wit—some of it in new lines written for the play as it evolved and changed.
How different all that had been from his decades of disciplined isolation while writing his scores of stories and overflowing shelf of novels. But all that labor to what purpose? He made enough money to rent the lovely, light-filled apartments at 364 De Vere Gardens—his home since 1886. But even there he was restless. He’d deliberately given up most of the evening and weekend London social life he’d enjoyed so much in past years in order to spend more time writing. Dedicate oneself to one’s work was his new mantra, and to do that one had to stop accepting dinner invitations five nights of the week, endless invitations to join the rich bourgeoisie whom he was invited to amuse at their country houses and Irish estates with his ample supply of small talk, wit, and gossip.
But while he had loved working in isolation, his work was no longer earning him what it should, either in dollars and pounds or in fame.
Oh, not that he’d ever striven after riches or fame! No! The Art had always come first. Always. But he had long imagined that before age 50 his work would have allowed him financial freedom enough to . . . To what? Perhaps to buy himself an English country house by the sea. Just a cottage, of course, a tidy little seasonal home in addition to his flat at De Vere Gardens. A cozy country place at which he would host literary friends and his brother William and his family when they came to England. A place where he could host his younger male friends—Paul Bourget, say, or Edmund Gosse. With privacy.
In the end, after all his work, the theatrical group had totally rewritten James’s “gloomy”—their word—third act to turn The American into a not-very-successful comedy.
Although the Prince of Wales had come to see The American in London and that had prompted the producer to attempt a “second opening” of the shortened and rewritten play at its fiftieth performance, James once again helping to fill the expensive seats and boxes with the author’s literary and high-society friends, audiences remained lackluster until James finally had to agree with the critics. The play into which he and his sister Alice had poured so much of their optimism had been a failure on many levels. He’d frantically abandoned his literary roots, he knew, to achieve a “well-made play” and that eager pandering had turned his serious novel into an absurdly paced melodrama on stage. The highly literate drama critic A. B. Walkley had written of the non-stop busyness of his script—“What, Mr. James? All this ‘between dinner and the suburban trains?’ ” James was sure it had also been Walkley in an anonymous review who’d said that James had offered the public little other than “a stage American, with the local color laid on with a trowel, a strong accent, a fearful and wonderful coat, and a recurrent catch-word.”
Edward Compton, the producer and lead actor, indeed had mastered the American dialect to a fault—in his later viewings of his play, James clearly heard the caricature of American English he’d penned—and the catchword phrase James had given him (after Compton told him that such catchwords were important for characters on stage) had been “That’s what I want t’see”—which, by James’s last viewing of the crippled, hobbled, emasculated play, seemed to be every third line for Compton’s American character.
As for the giant chocolate-colored coat, Compton had coveted the garment during rehearsals and provincial openings. “Gives the audience a sense of this American’s real nature,” the actor-producer had said after the first out-of-London auditions. But, James could see now, it had been an absurd wardrobe choice. One critic wondered in print if all Americans skinned buffalos to wear their entire hairy hide as a coat. Another compared Compton’s giant brown buttons to chocolate-covered cupcakes.
The best thing written by critics about his American leading lady, Miss Elizabeth Robins, was that her acting was “a tad less somnambulistic” in some of the later stagings. In the earlier performances, critics had called her acting—essentially of an inert woman, a listener, an observer—“bordering on the hysterical if not the outright deranged.” The poor actress, James had seen, had been totally miscast in his role for a basically passive and passionless woman, had tried the full spectrum, from deranged, to hysterical, then as somnambulistic as if she’d been drugged with laudanum, and now back to the “tad less somnambulistic”. After her recent successes in playing Hedda and Nora in Ibsen’s strangely popular plays, this critical pillorying of her “Claire” character in The American made her weep after every performance.
James had felt like weeping with her.
An anonymous critic for the Era had summed up Henry James’s first theatrical contribution thusly: “We are a
s anxious as the critics of the newest school to hail the advent on our stage of literary men, but it is on condition that they bring their literature with them.”
This—the truth of this statement—had hurt James more than he would ever admit. He remembered writing to Henrietta Reubell in 1890, in the early days of his long struggle with The American—“I have written a big (and awfully good) four-act play by which I hope to make my fortune.”
Well, it had been big. But in the end James had to admit that it had not been “awfully good”. In many ways it had been merely awful.
He remembered writing to his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, now on a distant island in the South Pacific—“My zeal in the affair is only matched by my indifference” but in the same letter enthusing “I find the form opens out before me as if it were a kingdom to conquer”. Yet by the end of the same contradictory letter he was telling Stevenson—“A kingdom, yes, but my standards—by our standards, my absent but never-distant friend—a paltry kingdom of ignorant brutes for managers and dense cabotins of actors.”
And more recently, when he was down with gout before deciding to go to Paris, he’d written to Stevenson:
Don’t be hard on me—simplifying and chastening necessity has laid its brutal hand on me and I have had to try to make somehow or the other the money I don’t make by literature. My books don’t sell, and it looks as if my plays might. Therefore I am going with a brazen front to write half a dozen.
On this Friday evening in April of 1893, only a week and day from his 50th birthday, James realized that he never had come to grips with what writing for the theater really entailed. Yet in his portmanteau here at the Hays’ home, he had carried with him to America three completed stage comedies, a drama written specifically for one actress who had aged beyond the role he’d created solely for her, extensive notes on five other possible plays, and the first three sketched-in acts of a serious drama he thought he might call Guy Domville.
