Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  Smugly, Pliny Mead chose the most comfortable place to sit, in the center of the Mannings’ molehair settee.

  “I thank you for agreeing to meet at an evening hour, Mr. Mead, away from the College,” Manning said.

  “Well, sorry I’m late. Your secretary’s message said this is about Professor Lowell. Our Dante class?”

  Manning passed his hand over the bare ravine between his two cresting tufts of white hair. “Right, Mr. Mead. Pray, did you speak with Mr. Camp about the class?”

  “Guess I did,” said Mead. “For a few hours at that. He wanted to know just about everything I could tell him on Dante. He said he was asking on your account.”

  “He was indeed. Yet since then it doesn’t seem he wishes to speak to me. I wonder why.”

  Mead crinkled his nose. “Now, how should I know your business, sir?”

  “You shouldn’t, my son, of course. But I thought perhaps you could help me nonetheless. I thought that we could marry our information and understand what he might have come upon that would prompt such a shift in his behavior.”

  Mead stared blandly, disenchanted by the fact that the meeting held little benefit or enjoyment for him. A box of pipes sat on the mantel. He cheered at the idea of smoking at the fireside of a Harvard fellow. “Those look A1, Dr. Manning.”

  Manning nodded pleasantly and prepared a pipe for his guest. “Here, unlike at our campus, we can smoke openly. We can speak openly as well, our words coming out as freely as our smoke. There are some other strange happenings of late, Mr. Mead, that I would like to bring into the light. A policeman came to see me and started asking questions about your Dante class, then stopped himself, as though he had wished to tell me something important but changed his mind.”

  Mead closed his eyes and puffed out luxuriously.

  Augustus Manning had been patient enough. “I wonder, Mr. Mead, if you’re aware what a dead slide your class ranking has taken presently.”

  Mead bolted upright, a grammar school child ready to be ferruled. “Sir, Dr. Manning, believe me it is not for any reason other—”

  He interrupted. “I know, my dear boy. I know what happens. Professor Lowell’s class last term—that is to blame. Your brothers have always been first scholars in their commencement classes. Haven’t they?”

  Bristling with humiliation and anger, the student looked away.

  “Perhaps we can see to it that some adjustments are made to your class number to bring your standing more in line with your family honor.”

  Mead’s emerald green eyes came to life. “Truly, sir?”

  “Perhaps I shall have a smoke now.” Manning grinned, rising from his chair and scrutinizing his beautiful pipes.

  Pliny Mead’s mind raced to find what it was Manning might be after to make such a proposition. He relived his meeting with Simon Camp moment by moment. The Pinkerton detective had been trying to collect negative facts about Dante to report to Dr. Manning and the Corporation, to boost their position against re-forming and opening the curriculum. In the second meeting, Camp had seemed excessively interested, now that Mead thought of it. But he did not know what the private detective could have been thinking. Nor did it stand to reason that Boston policemen would ask questions about Dante. Mead thought about recent public events, the insanity of violence and fear that had enveloped their city. Camp had seemed particularly interested in the punishment of the Simoniacs when Mead mentioned it in a long list of examples. Mead thought about the many rumors he had heard about Elisha Talbot’s death; several, although details differed, involved the minister’s charred feet. The minister’s feet. Then there was poor Judge Healey, found naked and covered in . . .

  Why, darn them all! Jennison too! Could it be? And if Lowell knew, wouldn’t that explain his sudden cancellation of their Dante class without real explanation? Could Mead have unwittingly prompted Simon Camp to comprehend it all? Had Lowell concealed his knowledge from the College, from the city? He could be ruined for that! Damn ’em!

  Mead sprang to his feet. “Dr. Manning, Dr. Manning!”

  Manning succeeded in lighting a match, but then put it out, suddenly dropping his voice to a whisper. “Did you hear something from the entry?”

  Mead listened, shook his head. “Mrs. Manning, sir?”

  Manning hooked a long, crooked finger to his mouth. He glided from the parlor to the hallway.

  After a moment, he returned to his guest. “My imagination,” he said, locking eyes squarely with Mead. “I only want you to be assured that our privacy is complete. In my heart, I know that you will have something important to share tonight, Mr. Mead.”

  “I might indeed, Dr. Manning,” taunted Mead, having organized his strategy in the time Manning had taken to prove their privacy. Dante is a damned murderer, Dr. Manning. Oh yes, I might indeed share something. “Let us talk about class rankings first,” Mead said. “Then we can move on to Dante. Oh, I think what I have to say shall interest you greatly, Dr. Manning.”

  Manning beamed. “Why don’t I fix some refreshment to accompany our pipes?”

  “Sherry for me, if you please.”

  Manning brought over the requested stimulant, which Mead downed in a single gulp. “How about another, dear Auggie? We’ll make a wet night of it.”

  Augustus Manning, hunching over his sideboard to prepare another drink, hoped for the student’s sake that what he had to say was important. He heard a loud thump, signifying, he knew without looking, that the boy had broken a precious object. Manning looked back over his shoulder with irritation. Pliny Mead was sprawled senseless on the settee, his arms hanging limply off either side.

  Manning spun around, the decanter slipping out of his grasp. The administrator stared into the face of a uniformed soldier, a man he had seen almost daily along the corridors of University Hall. The soldier had a fixed stare and chewed sporadically; when his lips parted, soft white dots floated on his tongue. He spat and one of the white dots landed on the rug. Manning could not help but look; there seemed to be two letters printed on the wet bit of paper—L and I.

  Manning rushed to the corner of the room, where a hunting rifle was posed decoratively on the wall. He climbed a chair to reach it, but then stuttered, “No. No.”

  Dan Teal plucked the gun away from Manning’s trembling hands and pummeled his face with its butt in one effortless motion. Then he stood there and watched, watched as the Traitor, cold to the core of his heart, flailed and crumpled to the floor.

  XVII

  Dr. Holmes scrambled up the long staircase to the Authors’ Room. “Hasn’t Officer Rey come back?” he asked, panting.

  Lowell’s knitted eyebrows expressed his frustration.

  “Well, perhaps Blight . . .” Holmes began. “Perhaps he does know something, and Rey will come with good tidings. What of your return visit to the University Hall records room?”

  “I’m afraid we might not have one,” Fields said, sighing into his beard.

  “Why not?” Holmes asked.

  Fields was silent.

  “Mr. Teal has not shown himself this evening,” Longfellow explained. “Perhaps he has taken ill,” he added quickly.

  “Not likely,” Fields said, crestfallen. “The books show that young Teal hasn’t missed a shift in four months. I’ve called some trouble down on the poor boy’s head, Holmes. And after he volunteered his loyalty again and again.”

  “What folly . . .” Holmes began.

  “Is it? I oughtn’t have involved him! Manning might have found out that Teal helped us break in and had him arrested. Or that blasted Samuel Ticknor might have taken revenge on Teal for stopping his shameful games with Miss Emory. In the meantime, we’ve been talking with all my men who fought in the war. None admit to ever using a soldiers’-aid home, and none reveal anything remotely worth knowing.”

  Lowell paced back and forth with an extra long shuffle, inclining his head toward the cold window and glaring down at the dim landscape of snowbanks. “Rey believes Captain Blight was
merely another soldier who enjoyed Greene’s sermons. Blight is likely to tell Rey nothing of others, even after he’s calmed himself—he may know nothing of the other soldiers at the home! And without Teal, we have no hope of breaking into the Corporation Room. Shan’t we ever stop pumping at dry wells!”

  A knock at the door brought in Osgood, who reported that two more employee-veterans were awaiting Fields in the cafeteria. The senior clerk had given him the names of all former soldiers in the employ of Ticknor & Fields. There were twelve men: Heath, Miller, Wilson, Collins, Holden, Sylvester, Rapp, Van Doren, Drayton, Flagg, King, and Kellar. One former employee, Samuel Ticknor, had been drafted but, after two weeks in uniform, had paid the mandated three hundred dollars to buy a substitute.

  Predictable, thought Lowell, who said, “Fields, give me Teal’s address and I will look for him myself. There’s nothing we can do until Rey comes back, in any case. Holmes, will you come along?”

  Fields instructed J. R. Osgood to remain in the clerks’ quarters in case he was needed. Osgood threw himself into an easy chair with a tired sigh. To occupy his time, he selected a Harriet Beecher Stowe book from the nearest shelf, and when he opened it, he found that bits of paper, about the size of snowflakes, had been torn from the cover page, which was inscribed by Stowe to Fields. Osgood flipped through and found the same sacrilege had been committed on several pages. “How queer!”

  Down at the stables, Lowell and Holmes discovered to their horror that Fields’s mare was writhing on the ground, unable to move. Her companion looked on sadly and kicked at anyone who dared approach. The horse distemper had completely disabled public modes of transportation citywide, so the two poets were forced to trudge on foot.

  The meticulously scrawled number on Dan Teal’s employment form matched that of a modest house in the southern quarter of the city.

  “Mrs. Teal?” Lowell pressed his hat to the careworn woman at the door. “My name is Mr. Lowell. And may I make you acquainted with Dr. Holmes.”

  “Mrs. Galvin,” she said, and put a hand to her chest.

  Lowell checked the number of the house against his paper. “There’s someone boarding here named Teal?”

  She looked at them with sad eyes. “I’m Harriet Galvin.” She repeated this with slow elocution, as though her callers were children or simpletons. “I live here with my husband, and we’d take no boarders. I’ve never heard of this Mr. Teal, sir.”

  “Have you moved here recently, then?” asked Dr. Holmes.

  “Five years now.”

  “More old wells,” Lowell mumbled.

  “Madam,” Holmes said. “Would you kindly allow us a few moments inside to find our bearings?”

  She led them inside and Lowell’s attention was drawn immediately to a tintype portrait on the wall.

  “Ah, might I trouble you for a glass of water, my dear?” Lowell asked.

  When she left, he bolted to the framed portrait of a soldier, freshly suited in oversize army rags. “Daughter of Phoebus! That’s him, Wendell! As I stand here, that’s Dan Teal!”

  It was. “He was in the army?” Holmes asked.

  “He wasn’t on any of Osgood’s lists of soldiers that Fields has been interviewing!”

  “And here’s why. ‘Second Lieutenant Benjamin Galvin,’” Holmes read the name engraved underneath. “Teal is an assumed name. Quickly, while she’s busy.” Holmes stole into the next cramped room, which was filled with wartime accoutrements, carefully arranged and displayed, but one object drew his attention immediately: a saber, dangling from the wall. Holmes felt a chill run through his bones and he called Lowell. The poet appeared and his whole body trembled at the sight.

  Holmes waved away a circling gnat, which came right back.

  “Forget the bug!” Lowell said, and smashed it dead.

  Holmes delicately removed the weapon from the wall. “It is precisely the sort of blade . . . these were ornaments to our officers, reminders of the world’s more civilized forms of combat. Wendell Junior has one and dandled it like a baby at that banquet . . . This blade might have mutilated Phineas Jennison.”

  “No. It’s spotless,” Lowell said, approaching the shining instrument cautiously.

  Holmes ran a finger along the steel. “We cannot know with our naked eyes. Such carnage does not wash away lightly after only a few days, not in all Neptune’s waters.” Then his eyes rested on the blood smear on the wall, all that remained of the gnat.

  When Mrs. Galvin returned with two glasses of water, she saw Dr. Holmes handling the sword and demanded that he stop. Holmes, ignoring her, marched through the entry and out the front door. She professed her outrage that they would come into her house to smuggle away her property and threatened to send for the police.

  Lowell inserted himself between them and stalled. Holmes, hearing her protests in the recesses of his mind, stood on the front sidewalk and raised the heavy saber in front of him. A tiny gnat spun onto the blade like a chip of iron to a charged magnet. Then, within a blink, another appeared, and two more, and then three together in a mindless clump. After a few seconds had passed, an entire flock was scuttling and humming over the deep-set blood on the blade.

  Lowell stopped in mid-sentence at the sight.

  “Send for the others at once!” Holmes shouted.

  Their frantic demands to see her husband alarmed Harriet Galvin. She slipped into a stunned silence watching Holmes and Lowell alternate gesticulations and explanations, like two buckets in a well, until a knock at the door suspended them. J. T. Fields presented himself, but Harriet fixated on the slender and leonine figure behind this plump and solicitous one. Framed by the silver whiteness of the sky, nothing was purer than his look of perfect calm. She raised a trembling hand as if to touch his beard and, indeed, as the poet followed Fields inside, her fingers brushed against his locks. He retreated a step. She pleaded that he come inside.

  Lowell and Holmes looked at each other. “Perhaps she had not yet recognized us,” Holmes whispered. Lowell agreed.

  She tried her best to explain her wonderment: explained how she read Longfellow’s poetry before going to sleep each night; how when her husband was bedridden from the war she would recite Evangeline aloud to him; and how the gently palpitating rhythms, the legend of faithful but uncompleted love, would soothe him even in his sleep—even now sometimes, she said sadly. She knew every word of “A Psalm of Life,” and had taught her husband to read it as well; and whenever he left home, those verses were her only release from fear. But mostly her explanation came out as a repetition of the question “Why, Mr. Longfellow . . .” she pleaded again and again before giving in to heaving sobs.

  Longfellow said softly, “Mrs. Galvin, we are in dire need of help that only you can provide. We must find your husband.”

  “These men seem to wish him harm,” she said, meaning Lowell and Holmes. “I don’t understand. Why would you . . . Why, Mr. Longfellow, how could you know Benjamin at all?”

  “We haven’t time to explain satisfactorily, I’m afraid,” Longfellow said.

  For the first time, she looked away from the poet. “Well, I don’t know where he is, and I am ashamed for that. He hardly comes home anymore, and when he does, barely speaks. He’s away days at a time.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?” Fields asked.

  “He had been here briefly today, a few hours before you.”

  Fields pulled out his watch. “Where was he going from here?”

  “He used to take care of me. I am a mere ghost to him now.”

  “Mrs. Galvin, this is a matter of . . .” Fields began.

  Another knock. She dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief and smoothed her dress. “Surely another creditor come here to vex me.”

  As she passed into the hall, the group leaned toward one another with furious whispers.

  Lowell said, “He’s been gone a few hours, did you hear! And he’s not at the Corner, we know that—there’s no doubt what he’ll do if we don’t find him!”


  “He could be anywhere in the city, though, Jamey!” Holmes replied. “And we still must return to the Corner to wait for Rey. What can we do on our own?”

  “Something! Longfellow?” Lowell said.

  “We haven’t even a horse to travel with now . . .” Fields complained.

  Lowell’s attention snapped as he heard something from the front hall.

  Longfellow studied him. “Lowell?”

  “Lowell, are you listening?” Fields asked.

  A barrage of words escaped from the front door.

  “That voice,” Lowell said, stunned. “That voice! Listen!”

  “Teal?” Fields demanded. “She may be warning him to run, Lowell! We’ll never find him!”

  Lowell sprang into motion. He charged through the hall to the doorway, where a man’s weary bloodshot glare awaited. The poet lunged forward with a cry of capture.

  XVIII

  Lowell enfolded the man in his arms and dragged him into the house. “I have him!” Lowell cried. “I have him!”

  “What are you doing?” Pietro Bachi screamed.

  “Bachi! What are you doing here?” Longfellow said.

  “How did you find me here? Tell your dog to take his hands from me, Signor Longfellow, or I shall see what manner of man he is!” Bachi snarled, jabbing his elbows futilely into his sturdy captor.

  “Lowell,” Longfellow said. “Let us speak with Signor Bachi privately.” They ushered him into another room, where Lowell demanded that Bachi tell them his business.

  “It is not with you,” Bachi said. “I am going back to speak with the woman.”

  “Please, Signor Bachi,” Longfellow said, shaking his head. “Dr. Holmes and Mr. Fields presently are asking her some questions.”

  Lowell continued, “What kind of plan have you concocted with Teal? Where is he? Don’t play the deuce with me. You come back like a bad shilling whenever there’s trouble.”

  Bachi pulled a sour face. “Who is Teal? I am the one who is owed answers for this sort of handling!”