The Dante Club had restored life to a friend. And now—now two murders had been committed through the guise of Dante. And, presumably, there could be a third, or a fourth, while they sat by the fire, proof sheets in hand.

“How can we ignore…” James Russell Lowell blurted out before swallowing his thought with a bitter glance at the oblivious Greene, who was jotting a note in the margin of his proof sheet.

Longfellow read and discussed the Ulysses canto, not stopping to acknowledge the miscarried comment. His ever-present smile was strained and faded, as though borrowed from a previous meeting.

Ulysses found himself in Hell among the Evil Counselors as a bodiless flame, waving his tip back and forth like a wagging tongue. Some in Hell were resistant to telling Dante their stories; others were unbecomingly eager. Ulysses was above both vanities.

Ulysses tells Dante how after the Trojan War, as an aged soldier, he did not sail back to Ithaca to his wife and family. He convinced the few remaining members of his crew to continue forward past the line that no mortal should cross, to flout destiny and pursue knowledge. A whirlwind rose up and the sea swallowed them.

Greene was the only one to say much on the topic. He was thinking of the Tennyson poem that was based on this Ulysses episode. He smiled sadly and commented, “I think we should consider the inspiration Dante provides for Lord Tennyson’s interpretation of the scene.”

“ ‘How dull it is to pause, to make an end,’ “ Greene said, daintily reciting the Tennyson poem from memory. “ ‘To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life were all too little, and of one to me’ “—he paused with a visible mist in his eyes—” ‘little remains.’ Let Tennyson be our guide, dear friends, for in his sorrow he lived a bit of Ulysses, of the desire to triumph in the final voyage of life.”

After eager responses by Longfellow and Fields, old Greene’s commentary gave way to high-pitched snores. Having made his contribution, he was spent. Lowell was clutching his proof sheets tightly, his lips clamped together like those of a recalcitrant schoolboy. His frustration at the genteel charade was growing, his temper open to all comers.

When he could find nobody to speak, Longfellow said pleadingly, “Lowell, have you any comments on this tercet?”

A white marble statuette of Dante Alighieri stood over one of the study’s mirrors. The hollow eyes faced them heartlessly. Lowell mumbled, “Did not Dante himself once write that no poetry can be translated? Yet we come together weekly and gleefully murder his words.”

“Lowell, peace!” gasped Fields, who then apologized with his eyes to Longfellow. “We are doing all we must,” the publisher whispered hoarsely in a volume loud enough to chide Lowell but not so loud as to wake Greene.

Lowell leaned forward eagerly. “We need to do something… we need to decide…”

Holmes widened his quick eyes at Lowell and pointed at Greene, or, more precisely, at Greene’s shaggy ear canal. The old man could wake at any moment. Holmes then reeled in his finger and dragged it across his outstretched neck to signal their silence on the subject.

“What would you have us do anyway?” Holmes asked. He meant this to sound ridiculous enough to quash the muted asides. But the rhetorical question arched above the room with the enormity of a cathedral ceiling. “There’s nothing to do, unfortunately,” Holmes murmured now, pulling at his necktie, trying to retrieve his question. Unsuccessfully.

Holmes had unleashed something. This was the challenge waiting to be posed, the challenge that could be avoided only until that moment it was spoken aloud, when all four men were breathing the same air.

Lowell’s face flushed red with a burning need. He stared at George Washington Greene’s rhythmic respiration and his mind was filled simultaneously with all the sounds of their meeting: Longfellow desperately thanking them for coming, Greene croaking Tennyson, Holmes’s wheezing sighs, the majestic words of Ulysses, first spoken from the deck of his doomed ship and then repeated in Hell. All of this rumbled together in his brain and forged something new.

Dr. Holmes watched Lowell clasp his forehead with his strong fingers. Holmes did not know what made Lowell say it at first. He was surprised. Perhaps he expected Lowell to yell and scream to rouse them; perhaps he even hoped for this as one hopes for anything familiar. But Lowell had the exquisite sensibilities of a great poet in times of crisis. He began in a speculative whisper, every tight feature in his red face gradually relaxing. ‘ “My mariners, souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me…’ “ This was a verse from Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses stirring his crew to defy mortality.

Lowell leaned in and, smiling, continued with an earnestness that came as much from his iron-trimmed voice as from the words.

Holmes was stunned, though not at the power of the words, for he had long ago committed Tennyson’s poem to memory. He was overwhelmed at their immediate meaning for him. He felt a tremor inside. This was no recitation: Lowell was talking to them. Longfellow and Fields were also staring with heightened rapture and fear, because they too clearly understood. Lowell had, with a smile as he spoke, just dared them to find the truth behind two murders.

The sheets of cold, howling rain pounded the windows, seeming to land first only on one and then shift their attack clockwise. There was a flash of light, the ancient beckoning of thunder, and a rattling of windowpanes. Before Holmes knew it, Lowell’s voice was drowned out for a moment and he was no longer reciting.

Then Longfellow spoke, seamless in picking up the Tennyson poem in the same imploring whisper:

Then Longfellow spun his head to his publisher with a searching gaze: Your turn now, Fields.

Fields ducked his head at the invitation, his beard nestling in his parted frock coat and rubbing against the guard chain of his waistcoat. Holmes was panicked that Lowell and Longfellow had rushed into the impossible cause, but here was hope. Fields was the guardian angel of his poets and would not lead them headfirst into peril. Fields had stayed clear of trauma in his personal life, never trying to have children and thus sparing himself the sorrow of babes who did not live past their first or second birthday or mothers turned into corpses on their birthing beds. Free of domestic constraints, he devoted his protective energies to his authors. Once, Fields had spent an entire afternoon arguing with Longfellow about a poem that narrated the shipwreck of Hesperus. The argument made Longfellow miss his planned excursion on Cornelius Vanderbilt’s luxury ship, which hours later burned and sank. Likewise, Holmes prayed to himself, this would be a time when Fields would pester and nudge until the danger passed.

The publisher had to know that these were men of letters, not of action (and getting on in years at that). This madness was what they read about, what they versified on for the nourishment of a longing audience, humanity in shirtsleeves, warriors entering into battles they could never win, the stuff of poetry.

Fields’s mouth parted, but then he hesitated, like someone who tries to speak in a troubled dream but cannot. He seemed suddenly seasick. Holmes sighed sympathetically, telegraphing his approval of the demurral. But then Fields, looking with furrowed brow first to Longfellow and then to Lowell, leapt to his feet with a flourish and whispered Tennyson’s poem forward. Accepting what was to come: