“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 Dante, 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.

“ ‘Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create se non etterne, e io etterno duro, lasciate ogne,’ “ Lowell recited to Fields. “From the inscription over the gates of Hell, this is just a fragment of it! ‘Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.’ “

Lowell snapped his eyes closed as he translated:

The leaper, also, had seen this sign appear before him at the Central Police Station. He had seen the Neutrals: Ignavi. They swatted helplessly in the air and then swatted their own bodies. Wasps and flies circled their white, naked forms. Gross maggots crawled out from rotted gaps in their teeth, gathering in heaps below, sipping up their blood mixed with salt of their tears. The souls followed a blank banner ahead of them as a symbol of their pointless paths. The leaper felt his own skin alive with flies, flapping up and down with globs of gnawed flesh, and he had to escape… at least to try.

Longfellow found his proof for the corrected translation of Canto Three and laid it on the table for comparison.

“Heavens above,” Holmes wheezed, clinging to Longfellow’s sleeve. “Why, that mulatto officer was at the inquest of the Reverend Talbot. And he came to us with this after Judge Healey’s death! He must know something already!”

Longfellow shook his head. “Remember, Lowell is the College’s Smith Professor. The patrolman wished to identify an unknown language, which we were all too blind at the time to decipher. Some students directed him to Elmwood on the night of our Dante Club session, and Mabel directed him here. There is no reason to believe he knows anything at all of the Dantesque nature of these crimes or that he knows about our translation project.”

“How could we not have seen it right away?” Holmes asked. “Greene thought it might be Italian, and we ignored him.”

“Thank heavens,” Fields exclaimed, “or the police would have been on us right then and there!”

Holmes continued in a refreshed panic: “But who would have recited the portal’s inscription to the patrolman? This cannot be an entire coincidence of timing. It must have something to do with these murders!”

“I suspect that’s right.” Longfellow nodded calmly.

“Who could have said this?” Holmes pressed, turning the piece of paper over again and again in his hand. “That inscription,” Holmes continued. “The gates to Hell—it comes in Canto Three, the same canto where Dante and Virgil walk among the Neutrals! The model for Chief Justice Healey’s murder!”

Footfalls multiplied up the Craigie House walkway and Longfellow opened the door for the yardman’s son, who rushed in, his obtrusive teeth chattering. Looking out onto the front step, Longfellow found himself facing Nicholas Rey.

“He made me take him along, Mr. Longfellow sir,” Karl whinnied, seeing Longfellow’s surprise, then looking up at Rey with a sour grimace.

Rey said, “I was at the Cambridge station house on another matter when this boy arrived to report your trouble. A local officer is looking outside.”

Rey could almost hear the heavy silence that set in from the study at the sound of his voice.

“Would you come in, Officer Rey?” Longfellow did not know what else to say. He explained the source of his scare.

Nicholas Rey was back among the George Washington troop in the front hall. With his hand in his trousers pocket, he stroked the gobs of paper that had been scattered about the underground vault, still moist from the damp burial clay. Some of the scraps of paper had one or two letters on them; others were smudged beyond recognition.