“If you can’t earn money, I suppose you must make it,” said Holmes.

“Whatever brought him in,” said Longfellow, “it seems Signor Bachi found his way out just in time.”

When Wednesday evening came, Longfellow welcomed his guests from the Craigie House doorstep in the old manner. As they entered, they received a secondary welcome in the form of a yelp from Trap. George Washington Greene confessed how much heartier his health had been after receiving word of a meeting and that he hoped they would now resume their regular schedule. He was as diligently prepared for their assigned cantos as ever.

Longfellow called for the meeting to begin, and the scholars settled down into their places. The host passed out Dante’s canto in Italian and the corresponding proofs of his English translation. Trap watched the proceedings with keen interest. Satisfied with the accustomed orderly seating arrangements and his master’s comfort, the canine sentry settled down in the hollow under Greene’s cavernous armchair. Trap knew the old man harbored special affection for him that manifested itself in food from the supper table and, besides, Greene’s velveteen chair was positioned closest to the deep warmth of the study’s hearth.

“A devil is behind here, who doth cleave us.”

After taking his leave from the Central Station, Nicholas Rey tried to fight drifting off to sleep in the horsecar. It was only now that he felt how little rest he had been getting each night, though he had practically been chained to his desk by Mayor Lincoln’s orders with little to fill his day. Kurtz had found a new driver, a green patrolman from Watertown. In Rey’s brief dream set to the rough motions of the car, a bestial man approached him and whispered, “I can’t die as I’m here,” but even while dreaming, Rey knew that here was not a part of the puzzle left for him to solve on the grounds of Elisha Talbot’s demise. I can’t die as I’m. He was awakened by two men, hanging from the car’s straps, arguing about the merits of women’s suffrage, and then came drowsy decision—and a realization: that the beastly figure in his dream had the face of the leaper, though amplified in size three or four times. Soon the bell tinkled and the conductor shouted, “Mount Auburn! Mount Auburn!”

Having waited for Father to depart for his Dante Club meeting, Mabel Lowell, who had recently turned eighteen, stood over his French mahogany writing desk, which had been demoted to paper storage by Father, who preferred to write on an old pasteboard pad in his corner armchair.

She missed Father’s good spirits around Elmwood. Mabel Lowell had no interest in chasing after Harvard boys or sitting with little Amelia Holmes’s sewing circle and talking of whom they would accept or reject (except for foreign girls, whose rejection required no discussion) as if the whole civilized world were waiting to get into the sewing club. Mabel wanted to read and to travel the world to see in life what she had read about in books, her father’s and those of other visionary writers.

Father’s papers were in a customary disarray that, while decreasing the risk of future detection, necessitated special delicacy, as the unwieldy piles could tip over all at once. She found quills worn down to stumps and many half-completed poems, with frustrating blots of ink trailing off where she wished to read more. Her father often warned her never to write verses, as most turned out bad and the good ones were as unfinishable as a beautiful person.

There was a strange sketch—a pencil sketch on lined paper. It was drawn with the stilted care one devoted, she imagined, to diagramming a map when lost in the woods or, she also imagined, when tracing hieroglyphics—drawn solemnly in an attempt to decode some meaning or guidance. When she was a child and Father traveled, he had always illustrated the margins of letters home with crudely drawn figures of lyceum organizers or foreign dignitaries with whom he had supped. Now, thinking of how those humorous illustrations made her laugh, she at first concluded that the sketch depicted a man’s legs, oversize ice skates on his feet and a flat board of some kind where his waist would otherwise start. Unsatisfied with the interpretation, Mabel turned the paper sideways and then upside down. She noticed that the jagged lines on the feet might represent curls of fire rather than skates.

Longfellow read from his translation of Canto Twenty-eight, where they had left off at their last session. He would be glad to drop off the final proofs of this canto with Houghton and check it off the list kept at Riverside Press. It was physically the most unpleasant section of all Inferno. Here, Virgil has guided Dante into the ninth ditch of a wide section of Hell known as Malebolge, the Evil Pouch. Here were the Schismatics, those who had divided nations, religions, and families in life and now find themselves divided in Hell—bodily—maimed and cut asunder.

“ ‘I saw one,’ “ Longfellow read his version of Dante’s words,” ‘rent from his chin to where one breaketh wind.’ “

Longfellow took a long breath before moving on.

Dante had shown restraint before this. This canto demonstrated Dante’s true belief in God. Only one with the strongest faith in the immortal soul could conceive of such gross torment to the mortal body.

“The filthiness of some of these passages,” said Fields, “would disgrace the drunkenest horse dealer.”

And these were men whom Dante had known! This shade with nose and ear cut off, Pier da Medicina of Bologna, had not harmed Dante personally, though he had fed dissension among the citizens of Dante’s Florence. Dante had never been able to remove his thoughts from Florence as he wrote his journey into the afterworld. He needed to see his heroes redeemed in Purgatory and rewarded in Paradise; he longed to meet the wicked in the infernal circles below. The poet did not merely imagine Hell as a possibility, he felt its reality. Dante even saw an Alighieri relative there among the ones cut apart, pointing at him, demanding revenge for his death.

In the Craigie House basement kitchen, little Annie Allegra crept in from the hall, trying to rub the sleepiness from her eyes.

Peter was feeding a bucket of coal into the kitchen stove. “Miss Annie, didn’t Mistah Longfellow see you to sleep already?”

She struggled to keep her eyes open. “I wish to have a cup of milk, Peter.”

“I’ll bring you one shortly, Miss Annie,” one of the cooks said in a singsong voice as she peeked in on the bread baking. “Happily, dear, happily.”

A faint knock drifted in from the front of the house. Annie excitedly claimed the privilege of answering it, always warming to tasks meant for the help, especially greeting callers. The little girl scrambled up to the front hall and pulled open the massive door.

“Shhhhhh!” Annie Allegra Longfellow whispered before she could even see the handsome face of the caller. He bent down. “Today is Wednesday,” she explained confidentially, cupping her hands. “If you are here to see Papa, you must wait until he is through with Mr. Lowell and the others. Those are the rules, you know. You may stay out here or in the parlor if you like,” she added, pointing out his options.