One of the men present asked Dr. Holmes if he was unwell. He had a gentle, striking face and shining eyes, and he looked to be mulatto. He spoke with a touch of familiarity, and in his daze Holmes remembered: The officer who had come to see Lowell at the Dante Club meeting.
“Professor Holmes? Do you concur with the assessment of Professor Haywood?” Chief Kurtz then asked, perhaps in a polite attempt to include him in the proceeding, as Holmes had gone nowhere near enough to the body to make any but the most presumptuous medical assessment. Holmes tried to think whether he had noted Haywood’s dialogue with Chief Kurtz and seemed to recall Haywood remarking that the deceased had been alive while his feet were set aflame, that he must have been in a position helpless to stop the torture, and that from the look of the face and the absence of other injuries, it was not unlikely that he had died from shock to the heart.
“Why, of course,” Holmes remarked. “Yes, of course, Officer.” Holmes stepped backward to the door as though in escape from a deadly peril. “Perhaps you gentlemen could carry on without me for a spell?”
Chief Kurtz continued his catechism with Professor Haywood, and with that Holmes reached the door, the hall, and soon the outside courtyard, taking in as much air as possible in every quick, desperate breath.
As the violet hour was overtaking Boston, the doctor, wandering through the rows of pushcarts, walking aimlessly past the seedcakes, the jugs of ginger beer, the white-smocked oyster– and lobstermen holding out their monstrosities, could not suffer the thought of his behavior at the side of Reverend Talbot’s corpse. Out of embarrassment, he had not yet unburdened himself of the knowledge that Talbot had been killed, had not yet rushed to share the sensational tidings with Fields or Lowell. How could he, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, doctor and professor of medical science, renowned lecturer and medical reformer, shiver so at the sight of a corpse as if it were a ghost in some sentimental set-novel? Wendell Junior would be particularly bemused by his father’s chickenhearted stumbling. The younger Holmes made no secret of his feeling that he would have made a better doctor than the elder, as well as a better professor, husband, and father.
Though not yet twenty-five, Junior had been in the battlefield and had seen bodies shredded, whole gaps in his ranks mowed down by cannon fire, limbs dropping off like leaves and amputations, performed with ax-saws, by amateur surgeons while screamers were held down on doors used for operating tables by volunteer nurses splattered in blood. When his cousin asked why Wendell Junior could easily grow a mustache while his own attempt could not move past the earliest stages, Junior had replied curtly, “Mine was nourished in blood.”
Now Dr. Holmes mustered all he had ever known about the process of baking the best quality of bread. He summoned all the tips known to him for finding the finest-quality vendors in a Boston marketplace by clothing or demeanor or nativity. He grabbed and squeezed the wares of the vendors harshly, absently, but with the commanding touch of a doctor’s hand. His forehead soaked his handkerchief as he dabbed it. At the next provision stall, some horrid older women poked their fingers into the salt-meat. The distractions of the task at hand could not last.
As he reached the stall of an Irish matron, the doctor realized that his tremors at the medical college had been deeper than they had first seemed. It was not caused merely by his distaste for the distorted body and its silent tale of dread. And it was not only because Elisha Talbot, as much a fixture in Cambridge as the Washington Elm, had been done in, and so brutally. No– something in the murder had been familiar, so familiar.
Holmes purchased a warm brown loaf of bread and started home. He considered whether he could have dreamt about Talbot’s death in some strange brush with prescience. But Holmes did not believe in such bugbears. He must have once read a description of this gruesome act, the details of which then flooded back to him without warning when he saw Talbot’s body. But what text would contain such a horror? Not a medical journal. Not the Boston Transcript, certainly, for the murder had just happened. Holmes stopped in the middle of the street and envisioned the preacher kicking his flaming feet in the air, while the flames moved…
“ ‘Dai calcagni a le punte,’ “ Holmes whispered aloud: From their heels to their toes—that’s where the corrupt clerics, the Simoniacs, burn forever in their craggy ditches. His heart sank. “Dante! It’s Dante!”
Amelia Holmes centered the cold game pie on the fully set dining room table. She passed some directions to the help, smoothed her dress, and leaned out on the front step to look for her husband. She was certain she had seen Wendell turning onto Charles Street from the upstairs window not five minutes ago, presumably with the bread she had asked him to bring for her supper hosting several friends, including Annie Fields. (And how could a hostess live up to the salon of Annie Fields without everything perfect?) But Charles Street was empty save for the dissolving shadows of its trees. Perhaps it was another short man in a long tailcoat she had seen through the window.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow tested the notepaper left by Patrolman Rey. He prodded the jumble of letters, copied out the text several times on a separate sheet, anagrammatizing the words at different junctions to form new scrambles, buttressing himself from thoughts of the past. His daughters were visiting his sister’s family in Portland and his two sons were traveling abroad separately, so there would be days of solitude, which he relished more in idea than in practice.
That morning, the same day on which the Reverend Talbot was killed, the poet had sat up in his bed just before dawn without the faintest consciousness of having slept at all. It was his usual routine. Longfellow’s sleeplessness was not caused by frightful dreams or traumatized by tossing or turning. In fact, he would describe the haze he entered during the night as rather peaceful, something analogous to sleeping. He was grateful that even after the long insomniac watches of the night he could still feel rested at daybreak from having laid himself down for so many hours. But sometimes, in the pale nimbus of the night lamp, Longfellow thought he could see her gentle face staring at him from the corner of the bedchamber, here in the room where she died. At these times, he would jump with a start. The sinking of the heart that followed his half-formed joy was a terror worse than any nightmare Longfellow could remember or invent, for whatever phantom image he might see during the night, he would still rise in the morning alone. As Longfellow slipped into his calamanco dressing gown, the flowing silver tresses of his beard felt heavier than when he had put himself to bed.
When Longfellow made his way down the back stairway, he was wearing a dress coat, with a rose in his buttonhole. He did not like to be at all untidy, even at home. At the bottom landing was a print of Giotto’s portrait of the young Dante, with one eye replaced by a blank hole. Giotto’s fresco had been painted in the Bargello at Florence but over the centuries had been whitewashed and forgotten. Now only a lithograph of the damaged fresco remained. Dante had sat for Giotto before the pains of exile, his war with fate, had overtaken him; he was still the silent suitor of Beatrice, a young man of medium stature, with a dark, melancholy, thoughtful face. His eyes are large, his nose aquiline, his underlip projecting, with an almost feminine softness in the lines of the face.