Rey stepped into the study and surveyed the three gentlemen: walrus-tusked Lowell with his overcoat wrapped around his dressing gown and plaid trousers; the other two in slackened collars and tangled neck cloths. A double-barreled shotgun leaned against the wall; a loaf of bread waited on the table.
Rey rested his eyes on the agitated man with the boyish features, the only one not shielded by a beard. “Dr. Holmes assisted us with an examination this afternoon at the medical college,” Rey explained to Longfellow. “In fact that is the same business which now brings me to Cambridge. Thank you again, Doctor, for your help in that matter.”
The doctor jumped to his feet and gave a wobbly bow from the waist. “Not at all, sir. And if you ever are in need of further assistance, please send for me without hesitation,” he blurted out humbly, then handed Rey his card, forgetting for a moment that he had been of no help whatsoever. Holmes was too nervous to speak wisely. “Perhaps what sounds like a useless Latin prognosis could help in some small way to catch this killer running about our city.”
Rey paused and nodded appreciatively.
The yardman’s son took Longfellow’s arm and pulled him aside. “I’m sorry, Mr. Longfellow,” the boy said. “I didn’t believe he was no policeman. He ain’t got no uniform or anythin’, just a regular day coat. But the other officer there told me the aldermen makes him wear regular clothes so nobody gets mad at him for being a nigger cop and licks him!”
Longfellow dismissed Karl with a promise of sweets on another day.
In the study, Holmes, shifting from one foot to the other as though standing on hot coals, blocked the center table from Rey’s sight. There, a newspaper headlined the Healey murder; there, Longfellow’s English translation of Canto Three, the model for that murder, was next to it; in between was the scrap of paper with Nicholas Rey’s jotting: Deenan see amno atesennone turnay eeotur nodur lasheeato nay.
Behind Rey, Longfellow stepped into the threshold of the study. Rey could feel his quick spurts of breathing. He noticed Lowell and Fields staring oddly at the table behind Holmes.
Swiftly, in a motion almost undetectable, Dr. Holmes stretched his arm, snatching the officer’s notepaper from the table. “Oh, and Officer,” announced the doctor. “Might we return your note to you?”
Rey felt a sudden rush of hope. He said quietly, “Have you…”
“Yes, yes,” Holmes said. “Part of it, anyhow. We’ve run the sounds through every language on the books, my dear officer, and I fear broken English seems our most likely conclusion. Part of it reads”—Holmes took a breath and stared hard, reciting—” ‘See no one tour, nay, O turn no door-latch out today.’ Rather Shakespearean, if a bit of balderdash, don’t you think?”
Rey glanced at Longfellow, who seemed as surprised as him. “Well, I thank you for remembering, Dr. Holmes,” said Rey. “I shall bid you gentlemen goodnight now.”
They flocked to the entryway as Rey vanished down the footpath.
“Turn no doorlatch?” Lowell asked.
“It shall keep him from suspecting anything, Lowell!” cried Holmes. “You could have looked more convinced. It is a good rule for the actor who manages Punch and Judy not to let the audience see his legs!”
“It was pretty good thinking, Wendell.” Fields patted Holmes’s shoulder warmly.
Longfellow started to speak but could not. He went into his study and closed the door, leaving his friends awkwardly stationed in the front hall.
“Longfellow? My dear Longfellow?” Fields knocked gently.
Lowell took his publisher’s arm and shook his head. Holmes realized he was holding something. He threw it down. Rey’s notepaper. “Look here. Officer Rey forgot this.”
They were no longer seeing Rey’s notebook paper. It was the cold, carved stone of colorless iron at the summit of the open gates to Hell, where Dante had stopped reluctantly, Virgil pushing him forward.
Lowell snatched the paper angrily and thrust Dante’s garbled words into the flame of the hall lamp.
VII
Oliver Wendell Holmes was late arriving at the next Dante Club meeting, which he knew would be his last. He wouldn’t accept a ride in Fields’s carriage, though the sky over the city was hooded black. The poet-doctor barely heaved a sigh when the spine of his umbrella cracked in the downpour as he slipped on layers of leaves, the last deposit of autumn, in front of Longfellow’s house. There was too much wrong in the world for him to spar with physical annoyances. In Longfellow’s pristine welcoming eyes there was no comfort, no serenity to impart, no answer to the question tightening the doctor’s stomach: How do we go on with this now?
He would tell them at supper that he was giving up his role in the Dante translation. Lowell might even be too disorientated by recent events to blame him for desertion. Holmes feared being known as a dilettante. But there was no way he could pretend to read Dante as usual with the aroma of the Reverend Talbot’s scorched flesh in the air. He was choking on an indistinct sense that somehow they had been responsible, that they had gone too far, that their readings of Dante each week had released Inferno’s punishments into the air of Boston by virtue of their own blithe faith in poetry.
One man had stomped in a half-hour earlier like an army of thousands.
James Russell Lowell. He was drenched, though he had only walked from around the corner; he ridiculed umbrellas as senseless contraptions. The soft fire of cannel coal with hickory logs radiated from the wide chimney, the heat making the moisture on Lowell’s beard gleam as though from an inner light.
Lowell had pulled Fields aside at the Corner that week and explained that he could not live in this manner. Their silence to the police was necessary– very well. Their good names had to be protected—very well. Dante had to be protected—also very well. But none of this fine rationale erased a plain fact: Lives were at stake.
Fields had said he would try to arrive at a sensible idea. Longfellow had said he did not know what Lowell imagined they could do. Holmes had successfully avoided his friend. Lowell tried his best to arrange for the four men to meet at one time, but until today they had resisted assembling as resolutely as opposing magnets.
Now that they sat in a circle, the same circle they had been sitting around for two and a half years, there was only one reason Lowell did not shake them by the shoulders one after the other. And that reason was crouched delicately in his favorite green easy chair and weighed down by Dante folios: They had all promised not to tell George Washington Greene what they had discovered.
There he was, brittle fingers unfolded out in front, warming himself at the hearth. The others knew that Greene, in fragile health, could not cope with the violent tidings they possessed. So the old historian and retired preacher, complaining lightheartedly about not having enough time to prepare his thoughts because of Longfellow’s last-minute switch of canto assignments, proved the only cheery member this Wednesday evening.
Earlier in the week, Longfellow had sent word to his scholars that they would review Canto Twenty-six, where Dante meets the flaming soul of Ulysses, the Greek hero of the Trojan War. This was a favorite among the group, so there was a hope it would reinvigorate them.
“Thank you, everyone, for coming,” Longfellow said.
Holmes remembered the funeral that, in retrospect, had heralded the start of the Dante translation. When news spread of Fanny’s death, some Boston Brahmins had felt an involuntary touch of pleasure—something they would never acknowledge or admit even to themselves—upon waking one morning to find that misfortune had visited someone so impossibly blessed in life. Longfellow had seemed to arrive at talent and luxury without the slightest strain. If Dr. Holmes had experienced anything less respectable than complete and utter anguish for the loss of Fanny to that terrible fire, it was perhaps a feeling that might be called wonder, or selfish excitement, that he would dare to aid Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in a time when he needed healing.