The Dante Club
Page 13
The doctor grabbed Lowell’s hand and shook it urgently, more thankful he was there than he would have admitted. “I was about to send to Elmwood for you, my dear Lowell,” Holmes said.
“Holmes, did you say something of police?” Longfellow asked.
“Longfellow, everyone, please—into the study. You must promise to lock away all I am about to tell you in the strictest of confidence.”
Nobody objected. It was unusual to see the little doctor so serious; his role of aristocratic jester had long been crystallized—much to Boston’s joy and to Amelia Holmes’s chagrin. “There was a murder discovered today,” Holmes announced in a tenuous whisper, as if to test the house for eavesdroppers or to shield his dreadful story from the crowded shelves of folios. He turned away from the fire, genuinely afraid the talk could go up through the chimney. “I was at the medical college,” he finally began, “making headway on some work, when the police arrived to commission one of our rooms for an inquest. The body they brought in was covered with dirt, you understand?”
Holmes paused, not for rhetorical effect but to catch his breath. In the commotion, he had neglected the whirring signs of his asthma.
“Holmes, what has this to do with us? Why did you have me rush over from John’s game?” Fields asked.
“Hold,” Holmes said with a sharp wave of his hand. He put aside Amelia’s loaf and fished out his handkerchief. “The body, the dead man, his feet . . . God help us!”
Longfellow’s eyes lit up bright blue. He had not said much but had paid the closest attention to Holmes’s demeanor. “A drink, Holmes?” he asked gently.
“Yes. Thank you,” Holmes agreed, wiping his watery brow. “My apologies. I hastened here with the speed of an arrow, too restless to ride in a hackney cab, too impatient and fearful of encountering anyone in the horsecars!”
Longfellow walked serenely to the kitchen. Holmes waited for his drink. The other two men waited for Holmes. Lowell shook his head with grave piety at his friend’s jumpiness. Their host reappeared with a glass of brandy choked by ice, which was how Holmes preferred it. Holmes grabbed for it. It coated his throat.
“Though a woman tempted man to eat, my dear Longfellow,” said Holmes, “you never hear of Eve having to do with his drinking, for he took to that of his own notion.”
“Come on, then, Wendell,” Lowell urged.
“Very well. I saw it. You understand? I saw the corpse close, as close as I am to Jamey right now.” Dr. Holmes closed in on Lowell’s chair. “That body had been buried alive, upside down, his feet straight up into the air. And the soles of both feet, gentlemen, were horribly burned. They were toasted to a crisp that I shan’t ever . . . well, I shall remember it till nature has tucked me up well under the yearly violets!”
“My dear Holmes,” Longfellow said, but Holmes would not pause yet, not even for Longfellow.
“His clothes were off. I don’t know if the police had removed the clothes—no, I believe he was found that way by some things they said. I saw his face, you see.” Holmes reached for another dose of his drink but found only a trace left. He clamped his teeth onto a piece of ice.
“He was a minister,” said Longfellow.
Holmes turned with an incredulous stare and cracked the ice on his back teeth. “Yes. Exactly.”
“Longfellow, how did you know about this?” Fields turned, suddenly very confused at a story he still felt had nothing to do with him. “This couldn’t have been in any papers yet if Wendell just witnessed . . .” But then Fields realized how Longfellow had known. Lowell realized, too.
Lowell stormed up to Holmes as if to strike him. “How could you know the body had been left upside down, Holmes? Did the police tell you?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“You have been searching out a reason for us to stop the translation so that you don’t have to worry about Harvard bringing down trouble. It’s all conjecture.”
“Nobody need tell me what I saw,” Dr. Holmes snapped back. “Medicine is a subject none of you have studied. I have devoted the best part of my life in Europe and America to the study of my profession. Now, if you or Longfellow should begin to talk about Cervantes, I should feel my ignorance—well, no, I am respectfully informed about Cervantes, but I should listen to you because you have given your time to the study of it!”
Fields saw how truly nervous Holmes was. “We understand, Wendell. Please.”
If Holmes had not stopped for a breath, he would have fainted. “That corpse had been put on his head, Lowell. I saw the streaks of the tears and sweat that had rolled up his forehead—hear me: up his forehead. The blood was locked in his face. It was when I saw the horror fixed upon the face that I recognized the Reverend Elisha Talbot.”
The name surprised them all. The old tyrant of Cambridge mounted on his head, imprisoned, blinded by dirt, helpless to move at all except perhaps to kick his flaming feet in despair, just like one of Dante’s Simoniacs, the clerics who accepted money to misuse their titles . . .
“There’s more if you need it.” Holmes was chewing his ice with great celerity now. “A policeman at the inquest said he was found at the Second Unitarian Church burial ground—that’s Talbot’s church! The body was covered in dirt, from the waist up. But there was not a speck below the waist. He was buried naked, upside down, with his feet sticking up in the air!”
“When did they find him? Who was there?” Lowell demanded.
“For God’s sake,” Holmes cried. “How could I know such particulars!”
Longfellow watched the thick hand of his leisurely ticking clock slouch for eleven. “Widow Healey announced a reward in the evening paper. Judge Healey did not die a natural death. She believes it was a murder as well.”
“But Talbot’s isn’t just a murder, Longfellow! Must I spell out what is as plain as print? It’s Dante! Someone has used Dante to kill Talbot!” Holmes cried out, frustration painting his cheeks red.
“You’ve read the late edition, my dear Holmes?” Longfellow asked patiently.
“Of course! I think so.” He had, in fact, glanced only briefly at the paper in the entrance hall of the medical college on his way to prepare anatomical drawings for Monday’s class. “What did it say?”
Longfellow found the newspaper. Fields took it and read it aloud. “‘New revelations regarding the uncanny death of Chief Justice Artemus S. Healey,’” Fields read after opening a pair of square eyeglasses from his waistcoat pocket. “Typical printer’s error. Healey’s middle name was Prescott.”
Longfellow said, “Fields, please pass over the first column. Read how the body was found—in the meadows behind the Healey home, not far from the river.”
“‘Bloody . . . stripped fully of his suit and underclothes . . . found immoderately swarmed in . . .’”
“Go on, Fields.”
“Insects?”
Flies, wasps, maggots—those were the particular insects cataloged by the newspaper. And nearby in the yard of Wide Oaks was found a flag that the Healeys could not explain. Lowell wanted to deny the thoughts that were being passed around the room with the paper, but instead he fell back into a reclining position in the easy chair, his bottom lip quivering as it did when he could not think of what to say.
They exchanged searching glances, hoping there would be one among them smarter than the next who could explain it all away as coincidence with a well-placed allusion or a clever quip, one who could banish the conclusion that the Reverend Talbot had been roasted with the Simoniacs and Chief Justice Healey thrown in among the Neutrals. Every detail further confirmed what they could not deny.
“It fits together,” said Holmes. “It all fits together for Healey: the sin of neutrality, the punishment. For too long he had refused to act on the Fugitive Slave Act. But what of Talbot? I have never heard even a whisper that he abused the power of his pulpit—help me, Phoebus!” Holmes jumped when he noticed the rifle leaning against the wall. “Longfellow, why in the land is that out here?”
“A burglar?” Holmes asked.
“A phantasm.” Longfellow shook his head.
Fields stomped on the rug with a graceless leap to his feet. “Well, perfect timing!” He turned to Holmes. “My dear Wendell, you shall be remembered as a good citizen for this. When the policeman arrives, we explain that we have information on these crimes and instruct him to return with the chief of police.” Fields had mustered his greatest tone of authority, yet he tapered off with a glance to Longfellow for endorsement.
Longfellow did not move. His stone-blue eyes stared ahead into the richly cracked spines of his books. It was not clear whether he’d remained a part of the conversation. This infrequent, remote look, when he sat silently running his hand through the locks of his beard, when his invincible tranquillity turned cool, when his maiden complexion seemed a bit dusky, put all his friends ill at ease.
“Yes,” Lowell said, trying to project something like collective relief at Fields’s statement. “Of course we’ll inform the police of our suppositions. This shall no doubt prove vital information to the unriddling of such a mess.”
“No!” Holmes gasped. “No, we mustn’t tell anyone. Longfellow,” the doctor said with desperation. “We must keep this to ourselves! Everyone in this room must keep the matter dark, as promised, though the heavens cave in!”
“Come, Wendell!” Lowell leaned over the diminutive doctor. “This is not a time to put your hands in your pockets! Two people have been killed, two men of our own set!”
“Yes, and who are we to meddle in such horrendous business?” Holmes pleaded. “The police are investigating, to be sure, and they will find whomever is responsible without our interference!”
“Who are we to meddle!” Lowell repeated mockingly. “There’s no chance the police will think of this, Wendell! They must be chasing their tails even as we sit here!”
“Would you rather they chase our wild tales, Lowell? What do we know of such a matter as a murder?”
“Why did you bother coming to us with this then, Wendell?”
“So we know to protect ourselves! I’ve done us all a good turn,” Holmes said. “This could put us in a dangerous way!”
“Jamey, Wendell, please . . .” Fields stood between them.
“If you go to the police, you can just count me out of this,” Holmes added with a treble voice as he took a seat. “Do it over my principled objection and my stated refusal.”
“Observe, gentlemen,” Lowell said with a demonstrative flick of his hand at Holmes, “Dr. Holmes in his usual position when the world needs him—sitting on his arse.”
Holmes looked around the room, hoping someone would speak up in his support, then sank deeper into his chair, meekly removing his gold chain, tangled with his Phi Beta Kappa key, and checking his watch against Longfellow’s mahogany clock, half certain that any moment all the timepieces of Cambridge would tick to a dead stop.
Lowell was at his most persuasive when he spoke with soft assertiveness as he did when turning to Longfellow. “My dear Longfellow, when the officer arrives, we should have a note prepared, addressed to the chief of police, explaining what we believe to have discovered here tonight. Then we can put this behind us as our dear Dr. Holmes wishes to do.”
“I’ll begin.” Fields reached for Longfellow’s stationery drawer. Holmes and Lowell began their argument again.
Longfellow breathed a small sigh.
Fields halted with his hand in the drawer. Holmes and Lowell shut their mouths.
“Pray, do not leap in the dark. First tell me,” Longfellow said. “Who in Boston and Cambridge knows about these murders?”
“Well, there’s a question.” Lowell was frightened enough to be impolite even to the one man, after his late father, whom he worshipped. “Everyone in the blessed city, Longfellow! One’s on the front page of every paper”—he grabbed the headlining page on Healey’s death—“and Talbot’s will follow suit before the cock crows. A judge and a preacher! You might as well try to lock up the beef and beer as to keep that away from the public!”
“Very well. And who else in the city knows about Dante? Who else knows how le piante erano a tutti accese intrambe? How many are strolling down Washington and School Streets peering into the shops or stopping in at Jordan, Marsh for the latest fashion in hats, thinking to themselves that rigavan lor di sangue il volto, che, mischiato di lagrime and imagining the fright of those fastidiosi vermi—the loathsome worms?
“Tell me, who in our city—no, who in America today—knows the words of Dante in his every work, in his every canto, his every tercet? Enough to even begin to think how to turn the entrails of Dante’s punishments in Inferno into models of murder?”
Longfellow’s study, holding New England’s most sought after conversationalists, fell uncannily silent. Nobody in the room thought to answer the question, because the room was the answer: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Professor James Russell Lowell; Professor Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes; James Thomas Fields; and a small cross-section of friends and colleagues.
“Why, dear God,” Fields said. “There’s only a handful of people who would be able to read Italian, not to speak of Dante’s Italian, and, even of those who might make some of it out with a heap of grammar books and dictionaries, most have never beheld a copy of Dante’s works!” Fields should know. The publisher made it his business to know the reading habits of every litterateur and scholar in New England and everyone who counted outside it. “That is to say,” he continued, “will never behold one until there’s a completed translation of Dante to be published in all corners of America . . .”
“Like the one we’re working on?” Longfellow held up the proofs for Canto Sixteen. “If we do disclose to the police the precision with which these murders have been drawn from Dante and carried out, whom could they possibly single out with knowledge sufficient to commit these crimes?
“We will not only be their first suspects,” Longfellow said. “We will have to be their prime suspects.”
“Come now, my dear Longfellow,” Fields said with a desperately serious laugh. “Let us get our heads out from under this excitement, gentlemen. Look around the room: professors, leading citizens of the Commonwealth, poets, the frequent hosts and guests of senators and dignitaries, bookmen—who would really think us involved in a murder? I do little to inflate our status by reminding us that we are men of great standing in Boston, men of society!”
“As was Professor Webster. The gallows tell us there’s no law against stringing up a Harvard man,” Longfellow replied.
Dr. Holmes grew whiter yet. Although he was relieved that Longfellow had taken his side, this last comment pierced him.
“I had just been at my post at the medical college a few years,” Holmes said, staring ahead glassily. “At first, every teacher and staff hand in the school was a suspect—even a poet like me.” Holmes tried to laugh, but it came up dry. “I was put on their list of possible assailants. They came to the house to question me. Wendell Junior and little Amelia were just children, Neddie not more than a baby. It was the worst fright of my life.”
Longfellow said calmly, “My dear friends, pray agree, if you can, on this point: Even if the police wanted to trust us, even if they did trust and believe us, we would be under suspicion until the killer is caught. And then, even with the killer caught, Dante would be tainted with blood before Americans saw his words, and in a time when our country can bear no more death. Dr. Manning and the Corporation already wish to bury Dante to preserve their curriculum, and this would be an iron coffin. Dante would fall under the same curse in America he did in Florence, for a thousand years to come. Holmes is right: We tell no one.”
Fields turned to Longfellow in astonishment.
“We’ve vowed to protect Dant
e, under this very roof,” Lowell said quietly at the sight of his publisher’s tightened face.
“Let us make certain we protect ourselves first, and our city, or there shall be nobody left standing with Dante!” said Fields.
“Protecting ourselves and Dante is one and the same now, my dear Fields,” Holmes stated matter-of-factly, tempted by the vague feeling that he had been right all along that trouble would come. “One and the same. It would not be we alone who would be blamed if all this was known but the Catholics as well, the immigrants . . .”
Fields knew his poets were right. If they went to the police now, their standing would be in limbo, if not in actual jeopardy. “Heaven help us. We’d be ruined.” He exhaled. It was not the law Fields was thinking about. In Boston, reputation and rumor could do in a gentleman far more efficiently than the hangman. As beloved as his poets were, the public always harbored an unhealthy pinch of jealousy against its celebrities. News of even the slightest association with such scandalous murder would spread quicker than the telegraph could carry it. Fields had been disgusted to see unblemished reputations eagerly dragged through the mire of the streets on the basis of mere gossip.
“They may be getting close already,” said Longfellow. “You remember this?” He removed a slip of paper from the drawer. “Shall we take a look now? I think it shall reveal itself.”
Longfellow flattened Patrolman Rey’s paper with the palm of his hand. The scholars leaned in to examine the scrawled transcription. The firelight gleamed streaks of crimson across their astonished faces.
Rey’s Deenan see amno atesennone turnay eeotur nodur lasheeato nay stared back at them from under the shadow of Longfellow’s leonine beard. “It’s in the middle of a tercet,” Lowell whispered. “Yes! How could we have missed that?”
Fields snatched up the paper. The publisher was not ready to admit he could not yet see it; his head was too dizzied by all that had happened to access his Italian. The paper shook in Fields’s hand. He delicately laid it back on the table and drew his fingers away.