“He must have gone to the harbor!” Fields said.

Pike picked up the pace once more and ousted his passengers. The trio pushed against the grain of cheerers and wavers, who were watching various ships disappear into the fog while Godspeeding with waving handkerchiefs.

“Most of the ships this time of day are toward Long Wharf,” said Longfellow. In earlier years, he had frequently walked to the wharves to see the grand vessels coming in from Germany or Spain and to hear the men and women speak their native tongues. There was in Boston no greater Babylon of languages and skin tones than the wharves.

Fields had trouble keeping up. “Wendell?”

“Up here, Fields!” Holmes cried from inside a throng of people.

Holmes found Longfellow describing Bachi to a black stevedore who was loading barrels.

Fields decided to question passengers in the other direction, but soon stopped to rest on the edge of a pier.

“You there in the fancy suit.” A bulky pier master with a greasy beard grabbed Fields’s arm roughly and pushed him away. “Stand aside from these comin’ on board if you hain’t got a ticket.”

“Good sir,” Fields said. “I am in need of immediate assistance. A small man in a rumpled blue frock coat, with bloodshot eyes—have you seen him?”

The pier master ignored him, occupied with organizing the line of passengers by class and compartment. Fields watched as the man removed his cap (too small for his mammoth head) and twirled a sharp hand through his tangled hair.

Fields closed his eyes as though entranced, listening to the man’s strange, excitable commands. Into his mind came a dim room with a little taper of restless energy burning on a mantel. “Hawthorne,” Fields gasped, almost involuntarily.

The pier master paused and turned to Fields. “What?”

“Hawthorne.” Fields smiled, knowing he was right. “You are an avid admirer of Mr. Hawthorne’s novels.”

“Well, I say…” The pier master prayed or swore under his breath. “How did you know that? Tell me at once!”

The passengers he was organizing into categories stopped to listen, too.

“No matter.” Fields felt a rush of elation that he had retained his skills of reading people that had profited him so many years earlier as a young bookseller’s clerk. “Write your address on this slip of paper and I shall send you the new Blue and Gold collection of all Hawthorne’s great works, authorized by his widow.” Fields held out the paper, then withdrew it into his palm. “If you assist me today, sir.”

The man, suddenly superstitious of Fields’s powers, complied.

Fields propped himself on his toes and spotted Longfellow and Holmes coming in his direction. He called out. “Check that pier!”

Holmes and Longfellow flagged down a harbormaster. They described Bachi.

“And who might you be?”

“We’re good friends of his,” Holmes cried. “Pray tell us, where has he gone to?” Fields now caught up with them.

“Well, I seen him coming into the harbor,” the man answered with a frustratingly meandering tempo. “I believe he ran aboard there, as anxious as could be,” he said, pointing to a small boat at sea that could not have held more than five passengers.

“Good, that little bark can’t be going very far. Where is it headed?” Fields asked.

“That? That’s just a water transport, sir. The Anonimo is too big to fit in this pier. So it’s waiting all the way out downstream. You see?”

Its outline was barely visible in the fog, disappearing and then reappearing, but it was as gigantic a steamer as they had ever seen.

“Oh, your friend was quite eager to get on, I guess. That little boat he’s on is just taking the last shipment of passengers who were late coming. Then it’s off.”

“Off to where?” Fields asked, his heart sinking.

“Why, across the Atlantic, sir.” The harbormaster glanced at his slate. “A stop at Marseilles, and, ah, here we are, then on to Italy!”

Dr. Holmes made it to the Odeon with more than enough time to deliver a roundly well-received lecture. His audience thought him all the more important a speaker for having been delayed. Longfellow and Fields sat attentively in the second row next to Dr. Holmes’s younger son, Neddie, the two Amelias, and Holmes’s brother, John. For the second of a three-part sold-out lecture series arranged by Fields, Holmes examined medical methods in relation to the war.

Healing is a living process, Holmes told his audience, greatly under the influence of mental conditions. He told them how it was often found that the same wound received in battle would heal well in the soldiers that have prevailed but would prove fatal in those who were just defeated. “Thus emerges that middle region between science and poetry that sensible men, as they are called, are very shy of meddling with.”

Holmes looked out at the row of family and friends and at the empty seat reserved in case Wendell Junior had shown up.

“My oldest boy received more than one of these wounds during the war, being sent home by Uncle Sam with a few new buttonholes in his congenial waistcoat.” Laughter. “There were a good many hearts pierced in this war, too, that have no bullet mark to show.”

After the lecture, and the necessary amount of praise bestowed on Dr. Holmes, Longfellow and Holmes accompanied their publisher back to the Authors’ Room at the Corner to wait for Lowell. There, it was decided that a meeting of their translation club should be arranged at Longfellow’s house for the following Wednesday.

The planned session would serve a dual purpose. First, it would allay any concerns of Greene’s as to the state of the translation and the odd behavior he and Houghton had witnessed, and so would minimize the risk of further interference of the kind that had cost them whatever information Bachi might have possessed. Second, and perhaps more important, it would allow further progress on Longfellow’s translation. Longfellow intended to keep his promise to have Inferno ready to send to the year’s final Dante Festival in Florence for the six-hundredth anniversary of the poet’s birth in 1265.

Longfellow had not wanted to admit that he was unlikely to finish before the close of 1865 unless their investigations came upon some miraculous advance. Still, he had begun to work on his translations at night, alone, entreating Dante privately for wisdom in seeing through the baffling ends of Healey and Talbot.

“Is Mr. Lowell about?” said a small voice, accompanied by a knock at the Authors’ Room door.

The poets were exhausted. “I’m afraid not,” Fields called back with undisguised annoyance to the invisible questioner.

“Excellent!”

Boston’s merchant prince, Phineas Jennison, dapper as always in white suit and hat, slid inside and slammed the door behind him without ruffling a feather. “One of your clerks said you could be found here, Mr. Fields. I wish to speak freely about Lowell and would just as soon the old boy not be present.” He tossed his long silk hat onto Fields’s iron rack, his shiny hair going off to the left in a superb sweep, like the handrail of a banister. “Mr. Lowell’s in trouble.”

The visitor gasped upon noticing the two poets. He nearly stooped down on one knee as he clasped the hands of Holmes and Longfellow, handling them like bottles of the rarest and most sensitive vintages.

Jennison enjoyed spreading his vast wealth by patronizing artists and by refining his appreciation of belles lettres; and had never ceased to be overwhelmed by the geniuses he knew only because of his riches. Jennison helped himself to a seat. “Mr. Fields. Mr. Longfellow. Dr. Holmes,” he said, naming them with exaggerated ceremony. “You are all dear friends of Lowell’s, dearer than is my own privilege of acquaintance, for only through genius is genius truly known.”