Junior shouldn’t have told Father anything of his companionship with Lowell. Of course, he had kept to himself the sudden and disruptive praise Lowell would often break into about Dr. Holmes. “He not only named the Atlantic, Junior,” Lowell said, relating the time Father suggested the name of the Atlantic Monthly, “he made it with the Autocrat.” Father’s gift for christening was not surprising—he was expert at categorizing the surface of things. How many times had Junior been compelled to listen in the presence of guests to the story of how Father had named anesthesia for the dentist who invented it? Despite all this, Junior wondered why Dr. Holmes could not have done better than Wendell Junior’s own name.
Dr. Holmes knocked as a formality, then threw himself inside with a wild glow in his eyes.
“Father. We’re a bit occupied.”
Junior remained plain-faced at the too respectful greetings of his friends.
Holmes cried, “Wendy, I must know something at once! I must know whether you understand anything of maggots.” He spoke so fast that he sounded like a buzzing bee.
Junior puffed on his cigar. Would he never grow used to his father? After thinking about it, Junior laughed loudly and his friends joined in. “Did you say maggots, Father?”
“What if it is our Lucifer sitting in that cell, playing dumb?” Fields asked anxiously.
“He didn’t understand the Italian—I saw that in his eyes,” assured Nicholas Rey. “And it infuriated him.” They were gathered in the Craigie House study. Greene, who had assisted with translating all afternoon, had been returned to his daughter’s home in Boston for the evening.
The short message on the note Rey had passed along to Willard Burndy—“a te convien tenere altro viaggio se vuo’ campar d’esto loco selvaggio”—could be translated as “it behooves you to go by another way, if you want to escape from this savage place.” They were Virgil’s words to Dante, who was lost and threatened by beasts in the dark wilderness.
“The message was merely a last precaution. His history chimes with nothing we had come upon in our profile of the killer,” said Lowell, tapping his cigar out Longfellow’s window. “Burndy had no education. And we’ve found no other connections in any of our inquiries to any of the victims.”
“The papers made it sound like they are amassing evidence,” said Fields.
Rey nodded. “They have witnesses who saw Burndy lurking around Reverend Talbot’s house the night before he was killed, the night Talbot’s safe was robbed of the thousand dollars. These witnesses were interviewed by good patrolmen. Burndy wouldn’t talk to me very much. But this fits the detectives’ practice: They find a circumstantial fact to build their false case around. I have no doubt Langdon Peaslee is leading them by their beaks. He rids himself of his prime rival for Boston’s safes, and the detectives slip him a large part of the reward money. He tried to suggest such an arrangement with me when rewards were announced.”
“But what if we are missing something?” Fields lamented.
“Do you believe this Mr. Burndy could be responsible for the murders?” Longfellow inquired.
Fields pushed out his handsome lips and shook his head. “I suppose I only want some answers so we may return to our lives.”
Longfellow’s servant announced a Mr. Edward Sheldon of Cambridge at the door, looking for Professor Lowell.
Lowell scrambled into the front hall and led Sheldon into Longfellow’s library.
Sheldon had his hat pulled tight over his head. “I beg your pardon for bothering you here, Professor. But your note sounded urgent and at Elmwood they said you might be found here. Tell me, are we ready to start the Dante class again?” he asked with an artless smile.
“I sent that note almost a week ago now!” Lowell shouted.
“Ah well, you see . . . I did not get your note until today.” He looked to the floor.
“Very likely! And you’ll take off your hat when you’re in a gentleman’s house, Sheldon!” Lowell knocked away Sheldon’s hat. A purple swelling could be seen around one of his eyes, and he had a puffed jaw.
Lowell was immediately repentant. “Why, Sheldon. What has happened to you?”
“A frightful heap, sir. I was about to explain that my father sent me to recuperate with near relations in Salem. Perhaps a punishment, too, to think well of my actions,” Sheldon said with a demure smile. “That is why I did not receive your note.” Sheldon stepped into the light to collect his hat, then noticed the horror-struck look on Lowell’s face. “Oh, it’s gone down very much, Professor. My eye hardly hurts in the least.”
Lowell sat. “Tell me how this came to be, Sheldon.”
Sheldon looked down to the floor. “I couldn’t help it! You must know of this horrid fellow Simon Camp roaming around. If not, I shall tell you. He stopped me in the street. Said he was doing a survey on behalf of the Harvard faculty on whether your Dante course might produce negative repercussions on the character of its students. I almost punched him in the face, don’t you know, for such an insinuation.”
“Did Camp do this to you?” Lowell asked with a fierce tremor of paternalism.
“No, no, he slithered away as fits his type. You see, the next morning I happened upon Pliny Mead. A traitor if I’ve ever known one!”
“How so?”
“He said with pleasure how he sat down with Camp and told him of the ‘horrors’ of Dante’s spleen. I worry, Professor Lowell, that any hint of scandal would be perilous for your class. Clearly enough, the Corporation has not relented in its fight. I told Mead he’d best call on Camp and take back his awful comments, but he refused and shouted a bloody oath at me, and, well, he cursed your name, Professor, and wasn’t I mad! So we had a row right there on the old burial yard.”
Lowell smiled proudly. “You started a fight with him, Mr. Sheldon?”
“I started it, sir,” said Sheldon. He frowned, soothing his jaw with his hand. “But he finished.”
After escorting Sheldon out with abundant promises that they would begin their Dante hours again soon, Lowell rushed back toward the study, but there was another quick knock on the door.
“Blast it, Sheldon, I’ve told you we’ll meet for class any day now!” Lowell threw open the door.
In his excitement, Dr. Holmes was standing on his toes.
“Holmes?” Lowell’s laughter had such unrestrained jubilance that it brought Longfellow running into the hall. “You’ve come back to the club, Wendell! We’ve missed you like thunder!” Lowell shouted to the others in the study. “Holmes has come back!”
“Not only that, my friends,” Holmes said, stepping inside, “but I think I know where we shall find our killer.”
XIV
The rectangular shape of Longfellow’s library had made an ideal officers’ mess for General Washington’s staff and in later years provided a banquet hall for Mrs. Craigie. Now, Longfellow, Lowell, Fields, and Nicholas Rey sat at the well-polished table while Holmes circled them and explained.
“My thoughts come too quickly to govern. Only listen to all my reasons before agreeing or dissenting helter-skelter”—he said this mostly to Lowell, and everyone but Lowell understood it was meant for him—“for I believe that Dante has been telling us the truth all the while. He describes his feeling as he prepares for his first steps into Hell, trembling and insecure. ‘E io sol,’ and so on. My dear Longfellow, how did you translate?”
“‘And I the only one made myself ready to sustain the war./Both of the way and likewise of the woe,/Which unerring memory shall now retrace.’”
“Yes!” Holmes said proudly, remembering his own similar translation. This was not the time to pause on his talents, but he wondered what Longfellow would think of his rendition. “It is a war—a guerra—for the poet on two fronts. First, the hardships of the physical descent through Hell, and also the challenge to the poet to tap into his memory to turn experience into poetry. The images of Dante’s world run loose in my mind, without a halter.”
Nicholas Rey listen
ed carefully and opened his memorandum book.
“Dante was no stranger to physical engagements of war, my dear officer,” Lowell said. “At five and twenty, the same age as many of our boys in blue, he fought at Campaldino with the Guelfs, and that same year in Caprona. Dante draws on these experiences throughout Inferno to describe the frightful torments of Hell. In the end, Dante was exiled not by his rival Ghibellines but due to an internal split among the Guelfs.”
“The aftermath of Florence’s civil wars inspires his vision of Hell and his search for redemption,” Holmes said. “Think, too, how Lucifer takes up arms against God and how in his fall from the heavens the once-brightest angel becomes the fountain of all evil from Adam down. It is Lucifer’s physical fall to earth after he is expelled from above that hollows an abyss in the ground, the cellar of earth that Dante discovers is Hell. So war created Satan. War created Hell: guerra. Dante’s choice of words is never happenstance. I shall suggest that the events of our own circumstances point overwhelmingly to a single hypothesis: Our murderer is a veteran of the war.”
“A soldier! The chief justice of our state supreme court, a prominent Unitarian preacher, a rich merchant,” Lowell said. “A defeated Reb soldier’s revenge on the instruments of our Yankee system! Of course! We’re damned fools!”
“Dante has no mechanical loyalty to one or another political label,” said Longfellow. “He is perhaps most indignant against those who shared his views but failed their obligations, the traitors—just as a Union veteran might be. Remember that each murder has shown our Lucifer’s great and natural familiarity with the layout of Boston.”
“Yes,” Holmes said impatiently. “That is precisely why my thought is not simply of a soldier but a Billy Yank. Think of our soldiers who still wear their army uniforms in the street and mart. I am often puzzled when seeing these great specimens: Has he come home again, yet still wears the vestments of the soldier? For whose war has he been commissioned now?”
“But does this fit with what we know of the murders, Wendell?” urged Fields.
“Quite neatly, I think. Start with Jennison’s murder. It occurs to me in this new light precisely the weapon that could have been used.”
Rey nodded. “A military saber.”
“Right!” Holmes said. “Just the sort of blade consistent with the injuries. Now, who is trained at such usage? A soldier. And Fort Warren, the choice of locale for that killing—a soldier who trained there or had been stationed there would know it well enough! There’s more: The deadly hominivorax maggots that feasted on Judge Healey—from somewhere outside Massachusetts, somewhere hot and swampy, Professor Agassiz insists. Perhaps brought back by a soldier as souvenirs from the deepest marshes of the South. Wendell Junior says flies and maggots were a constant presence on the battlefield and among the thousands of wounded left for a day or night.”
“Sometimes maggots would have no effect on the wounded,” Rey said. “At other times, they would seem to destroy a man, leaving the surgeons helpless.”
“Those were the hominivorax, though the war surgeons wouldn’t know them from a family of beetles. Somebody familiar with their effects on injured men brought them from the South and used them on Healey,” Holmes went on. “Now, we have again and again marveled at Lucifer’s great physical strength in carrying the bulky Judge Healey down to the riverside. But how many comrades must a soldier have carried in his arms from battle without thinking twice of it! We have also witnessed Lucifer’s easy strength in subduing Reverend Talbot, and in shredding with apparent ease the robust Jennison.”
Lowell exclaimed, “You may have found our open-sesame, Holmes!”
Holmes continued, “All the murders are acts committed by one familiar with the trappings of the siege and the kill—the wounds and suffering of battle.”
“But why should a Northern boy target his own people? Why should he target Boston?” Fields asked, feeling there was a need for someone to serve as doubter. “We were the victors. And victors for the side of right.”
“This war was like no other since the Revolution in the confusion of feelings,” Nicholas Rey said.
Longfellow added, “It was not like our country’s battle with the Indians or the Mexicans, which stand as little more than conquests. Soldiers who cared to think of why they were fighting were provided the notion of the honor of the Union, the freedom of a race of enslaved people, the restoration of proper order to the universe. Yet what do the soldiers return home to? Profiteers, who once sold shoddy rifles and uniforms, now riding in broughams down our streets and prospering in oak-fronted Beacon Hill mansions.”
“Dante,” said Lowell, “who was banished from his home, populated Hell with people of his own city, even his own family. We have left many soldiers hanging on to nothing but our stirring lyrics of morality, and bloodstained uniforms. They are exiles from their former lives—like Dante, they become parties unto themselves. And consider how close on the heels of the end of the war these murders began. Just months! Yes, it seems to fall into place, gentlemen. The war sought an abstract moral—freedom—yet the soldiers fought their battles on very specific fields and fronts, organized into regiments and companies and battalions. The very movements in Dante’s poetry have something swift, decisive, almost military in their nature.” He stood up and embraced Holmes. “This vision, my dear Wendell, is from Heaven.”
There was a collective sense of accomplishment rising in the room, and everyone waited for Longfellow’s nod, which came with a quiet smile.
“Three cheers for Holmes!” Lowell cried out.
“Why don’t you give me three times three?” Holmes asked with a whimsical pose. “I can stand it!”
Augustus Manning positioned himself over his secretary’s desk tapping his fingers on the edge. “Still, that Simon Camp has not responded to my request for an interview?”
Manning’s secretary shook his head, “No, sir. And the Marlboro Hotel says he is no longer staying with them. No forwarding address was left behind.”
Manning was livid. He had not entirely trusted the Pinkerton detective, but he had not thought he was an outright crook, either. “Do you not think it queer that first a police officer comes to ask about Lowell’s class and then the Pinkerton man I paid to find more on Dante stops responding to my calls for him?”
The secretary did not respond, but then, seeing it was expected, assented anxiously.
Manning turned and faced the window framing Harvard Hall. “Lowell has been up to something in all this, I daresay. Tell me again, Mr. Cripps. Who is enrolled in Lowell’s Dante class? Edward Sheldon and . . . Pliny Mead, isn’t it?”
The secretary found the answer in a sheaf of papers. “Edward Sheldon and Pliny Mead, exactly right.”
“Pliny Mead. A high scholar,” Manning said, smoothing his stiff beard.
“Well, he was, sir. But he has had a fall in the last rankings.”
Manning turned to him with great interest.
“Yes, he has dropped some twenty spots in the class,” the secretary explained, finding documentation and proudly proving the fact. “Oh yes, dropped quite precipitously, Dr. Manning! Chiefly, it seems, from Professor Lowell’s mark from last term’s course in French.”
Manning took the papers from his secretary and read them. “What a shame for our Mr. Mead,” Manning said, smiling to himself. “A terrible, terrible shame.”
Late evening in Boston, J. T. Fields called on the law offices of John Codman Ropes, a hunchbacked lawyer who had made the war of the rebellion an area of expertise after his brother perished in battle. It was said he knew more about the battles than the generals who fought them. As befitted a genuine expert, he unostentatiously answered Fields’s questions. Ropes listed many soldiers’-aid homes—charitable organizations that had been established, some at churches, others in abandoned buildings and warehouses, to feed and clothe veterans who were poor or struggling to return to civilian life. If one sought troubled soldiers, these homes would be the place to
look.
“There’s nothing like a directory of their names, of course, and I’d say these poor souls cannot be discovered unless they wish to be, Mr. Fields,” Ropes said at the end of their meeting.
Fields walked briskly up Tremont Street toward the Corner. He had for weeks devoted only the fraction of his usual time to business, and worried that his ship would run aground if he were absent much longer from its tiller.
“Mr. Fields.”
“Who’s that?” Fields stopped and retraced his steps to an alleyway. “Addressing me, sir?”
He could not see the speaker in the dimming light. Fields advanced slowly between the buildings, into the smell of sewage.
“That’s right, Mr. Fields.” The tall man stepped out of the shadows and removed his hat from his gaunt head. Simon Camp, Pinkerton detective, grinned at him. “You don’t have your professor friend to wave his rifle at me this time, do you?”
“Camp! What gall you have. I’ve paid you more than I should have to go away—now, shoo.”
“You did pay me, didn’t you. To tell you the truth, I had looked at this case as an annoyance, a fly in my teacup, mere bosh. But you and your friend got me thinking. What would have swells like you so excited that you’d be willing to shell out gold so I don’t look into Professor Lowell’s little literature course? And that would cause Professor Lowell to interrogate me as though I might have shot Lincoln?”
“A man like you would never understand what literary men prize, I’m afraid,” Fields said nervously. “This is our business.”
“Oh, but I do understand. Now I understand. I remembered something about that pismire Dr. Manning. He had mentioned a policeman visiting him to ask about Professor Lowell’s Dante course. The old man was in a frenzy about it. Then I started considering: What are the Boston police busy doing of late? Well, there is the small matter of these murders going around.”
Dante Club Page 32
