“I do apologize for the intrusion, Miss Longfellow,” Nicholas Rey said.

Annie Allegra nodded prettily and, fighting back the renewed weight of her eyelids, slouched up the angled stairs, forgetting why she had made the long trip down.

Nicholas Rey stood in the front hall of Craigie House among Washington’s portraits. He removed the bits of paper from his pocket. He would plead their help once more, this time showing them the scraps he had picked up from the ground around Talbot’s death site in hopes that there was some connection they might see that he could not. He had found several foreigners around the wharves who had recognized the likeness of the leaper; this reinforced Rey’s conviction that the leaper was foreign, that it was some other language that had been whispered in his ear. And this conviction could not help but remind Rey that Dr. Holmes and the others knew something more than they could tell him.

Rey started toward the parlor but stopped before he made it out of the front hall. He turned in astonishment. Something had snagged him. What had he just heard? He retraced his steps, then moved nearer to the study door.

“ ‘Che le ferrite son richiuse prima ch’altri dinanzi li rivada…’ “

Rey shuddered. He counted out three more soundless steps to the door of the study. “ ‘Dinanzi li rivada.’ “ He tore out a notepaper from his vest and found the word: Deenanzee. The word had taunted him since the beggar crashed through the station house window, spelling itself out in his dreams and the pumping of his heart. Rey leaned against the study door and pressed his ear flush with the cool white wood.

“Here Betrand de Born, who severed a son’s ties with a father by instigating war between them, holds aloft his own dissevered head in his hand like a lantern, speaking to the Florentine pilgrim from his detached head and mouth.” That was the soothing voice of Longfellow.

“Like Irving’s Headless Horseman.” The unmistakable baritone laugh of Lowell.

Rey flipped over the paper and wrote what he heard.

Contrapasso? A soft nasal drone. Snoring. Rey became self-conscious and quieted his own breathing. He heard a scratchy symphony of scribbling nibs.

“Dante’s most perfect punishment,” said Lowell.

“Dante himself might agree,” replied another.

Rey’s thoughts were too snowed under for him to continue trying to distinguish the speakers, and the dialogue fell together into a chorus.

“…It is the one time Dante calls such explicit attention to the idea of contrapasso–a word for which we have no exact translation, no precise definition in English, because the word in itself is its definition… Well, my dear Longfellow, I would say countersuffering… the notion that each sinner must be punished by continuing the damage of his own sin against him… just as these Schismatics are cut apart…”

Rey stepped backward all the way to the front door.

“School is done, gentlemen.”

Books were snapped shut and papers rustled, and Trap began barking, unnoticed, out the window.

“And we have earned some supper for our labors…”

“What a very fat pheasant this is!” James Russell Lowell, with agitated zeal, was prodding a strange skeleton’s wide body and oversize flat head.

“There is no beast whose insides he hasn’t taken apart and put together again,” Dr. Holmes remarked laughingly, and, Lowell thought, a bit snidely.

It was early the morning after their Dante Club meeting, and Lowell and Holmes were in the laboratory of Professor Louis Agassiz at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. Agassiz had greeted them and glanced at Lowell’s wound before returning to his private office to finish some business.

“Agassiz’s note sounded interested in the insect samples, at least.” Lowell tried to appear nonchalant. He was certain now that the insect from Healey’s study had in fact bitten him, and he was deeply worried about what Agassiz would say of its terrible effects: “Ah, there’s no hope, poor Lowell, what a peety.” Lowell did not trust Holmes’s contention that this sort of insect could not sting. What kind of insect worth a dime does not sting? Lowell waited for the fatal prognosis; it would be almost a relief to hear it spoken. He had not told Holmes how much the wound had grown in size over the last few days, how often he felt it throb violently inside his leg, and how he could trace the pain hour by hour permeating all his nerves. He would not be so weak in front of Holmes.

“Ah, do you like that, Lowell?” Louis Agassiz came in with the insect samples in his meaty hands, which always smelled of oil, fish, and alcohol, even after extensive washing. Lowell had forgotten that he was standing next to the skeleton display, which looked like a hyperbolic hen.

Agassiz said proudly, “The consul at Mauritius brought me two skeletons of the dodo while I was traveling! Isn’t it a treasure?”

“Do you think it was good to eat, Agassiz?” Holmes asked.

“Oh yes. What a peety we could not have the dodo at our Saturday Club! A good dinner has always been humanity’s greatest blessing. What a peety. All right then, are we ready?”

Lowell and Holmes followed him to a table and sat down. Agassiz carefully removed the insects from vials of alcohol solution. “First business, tell me. Where you did find these special leetle critters, Dr. Holmes?”

“Lowell did, actually,” Holmes answered cautiously. “Near Beacon Hill.”

“Beacon Hill,” Agassiz echoed, though they sounded like entirely different words in his thick Swiss-German accent. “Tell me, Dr. Holmes, what do you think of these?”

Holmes did not like the practice of asking questions intended to produce wrong answers. “ ‘Tis not my line. But they are blowflies, right, Agassiz?”

“Ah yes. Genus?” Agassiz asked.

“ Cochliomyia,” Holmes said.

“Species?”

“Macellaria.”

“Ah-ha!” Agassiz laughed. “They do look like that if you listen to books, don’t they, dear Holmes?”

“So they’re not… that?” Lowell asked. It looked as though all blood had drained from his face. If Holmes was wrong, then the flies might not be harmless.

“The two flies are physically almost identical,” Agassiz said, then gasped in a way that cut off any response. “Almost.” Agassiz made his way over to his bookshelves. His broad features and plenteous figure made him seem more successful politician than biologist and botanist. The new Museum of Comparative Zoology was the culmination of his entire career, for finally he would have the resources to complete his classification of the world’s myriad unnamed species of animals and plants. “Let me show you something. There are about twenty-five hundred species of North American flies we know how to name. Yet from my estimation there are now ten thousand fly species living among us.”

He laid out some drawings. They were crude, rather grotesque depictions of men’s faces, their noses replaced by bizarre, darkly scribbled holes.

Agassiz explained. “A few years ago, a surgeon in the French Imperial Navy, Dr. Coquerel, was called to the colony on Devil’s Island in French Cuiana, South America, just north of Brazil. Five colonists were in the hosnital with severe and unidentifiable symptoms. One of the men died soon after Dr. Coquerel arrived. When he flushed the body’s sinuses with water, three hundred blowfly larvae were found inside.”

Holmes was baffled. “The maggots were inside a man—a living man?”