But Dante resisted mechanical intrusions, and withheld himself, demanding patience. Whenever translator and poet came to this impasse, Longfellow would pause and think: Here Dante laid down his pen—all that follows was still a blank. How shall it be filled up? What new figures shall be brought in? What new names written? Then the poet resumed his pen—and, with an expression of joy or indignation upon his face, wrote further in his book—and Longfellow now followed without timidity.

A small scratching sound, like fingers on a chalkboard, caught the attention of Trap’s triangle ears while he was wound in a ball by Longfellow’s feet. It sounded like ice scraping against a window in the wind.

Longfellow was still translating at two o’clock in the morning. With furnace and fire in full blast, he could not make the mercury climb its little ladder higher than the sixtieth round, when it would go down, discouraged. He placed a candle at one window and looked out through another at the lovely trees, all feathered and plumed with snow. The air was motionless, and in their illumination they looked like one great aerial Christmas tree. As he was closing up shutters, he noticed some unusual marks in one window.

He pulled the shutters open again. The sound of scraping ice had been something else: a knife slicing into the glass. And he had been just a few feet from their rival. At first the words cut into the window were unintelligible:

Longfellow could decipher it almost immediately, but still he put on his hat, shawl, and coat and went outside, where the threat could be read clearly as he traced the sharp edges of the words with his fingers.

“MY TRANSLATION.”

XII

Chief Kurtz announced on the Central slate that he was leaving by train in a few hours on a lyceum tour of all New England, to address city committees and lyceum groups on new methods of policing. Kurtz explained to Rey. “To salvage our city’s reputation, quoth the aldermen. Liars.”

“Then why?”

“To get me far away, far away from the detectives. By resolution I’m the only officer of the department with authority over the detective bureau. Those rogues shall have free rein. This investigation falls completely to them now. There will be no one here with the power to stop them.”

“But, Chief Kurtz, they are looking in the wrong place. They only want an arrest for show.”

Kurtz stared up at him. “And you, Patrolman, you must stay here as ordered. You know that. Until this is completely cleared up. That could be in many moons.”

Rey blinked. “But I have much to tell, Chief…”

“You know I must instruct you to share with Detective Henshaw and his men anything you know or think you know.”

“Chief Kurtz…”

“Anything, Rey! Should I take you to Henshaw myself?”

Rey hesitated, then shook his head.

Kurtz extended his hand to Rey’s arm. “Sometimes the only satisfaction is to know there’s nothing more you can do, Rey.”

When Rey walked home that evening, a cloaked figure stepped next to him. She brought her hood down, breathing fast, the vapor of her breath crashing through her dark veil. Mabel Lowell cast off her veil and glared at Patrolman Rey.

“Patrolman. You remember me from when you came looking for Professor Lowell? I have something I think you should look at,” she said, pulling out a thick package from under her cloak.

“How did you find me, Miss Lowell?”

“Mabel. Do you think it is so difficult to find the one mulatto police officer in Boston?” She closed her statement with a curled smirk.

Rey paused and looked at the package. He removed some sheets of paper, “I don’t think I’ll take this. Does it belong to your father?”

“Yes,” she said. These were the proofs of Longfellow’s Dante translation, which were overrun with Lowell’s marginal notes. “I think that Father has discovered some aspects of Dante’s poetry in those strange murders. I do not know the details that you must, and could never speak to him about this without him growing terribly warm, so please don’t say you’ve seen me. It took much work, Officer, sneaking around Father’s study hoping he would not notice.”

“Please, Miss Lowell.” Rey sighed.

“Mabel.” Faced with the honest glow in Rey’s eyes, she could not bring herself to show her desperation. “Please, Officer. Father tells Mrs. Lowell little, and me even less. But I know this: His Dante books are scattered at all times. When I hear him with his friends these days, it is all they speak about—and with such a tone of duress and anguish inappropriate to men in a translating society. Then I found a sketch of a man’s feet burning, with some newspaper clippings about Reverend Talbot: His feet, some say, were charred when he was found. Haven’t I heard Father review that canto of the nefarious clerics with Mead and Sheldon only a few months ago?”

Rey led her into the courtyard of a nearby building, where they found a vacant bench. “Mabel, you must tell nobody else that you know this,” the patrolman told her. “It shall only confuse the situation and cast a dangerous shadow on your father and his friends—and, I fear, on yourself. There are interests involved that would take advantage of this information.”

“You knew about this already, didn’t you? Well, you must be planning to do something to stop this madness.”

“I don’t know, to be honest.”

“You can’t stand by and watch, not while Father… please.” She placed the package of proof sheets in his hands again. Her eyes filled up, in spite of herself. “Take these. Read through them before he misses this. Your visit to Craigie House that day must have had something to do with all this, and I know you can help.”

Rey examined the package. He had not read a book since before the war. He had once consumed literature with alarming avidity, especially after the deaths of his adoptive parents and sisters: He had read histories and biographies and even romances. But now the very idea of a book struck him as offensively contained and arrogant. He preferred newspapers and broadsides, which had no chance to dominate this thoughts.

“Father is a hard man sometimes—I’m aware how he can seem,” Mabel continued. “But he has been through much strain in his life, inside and out. He lives in fear of losing his ability to write, but I never thought of him as a poet at all, only as my father.”

“You don’t have to worry about Mr. Lowell.”

“Then you are going to help him?” she asked, placing a hand on his arm. “Is there anything I can do to assist? Anything to make certain Father is safe, Patrolman?”

Rey remained silent. Passersby glared at the two of them, and he looked away.

Mabel smiled sadly and withdrew to the far side of the bench. “I understand. You are just like Father then. I must not be trusted with real matters, I suppose. On some fancy, I thought you’d feel differently.”

For a moment Rey felt too much empathy to answer. “Miss Lowell, this is a matter not to get involved in, if one can choose.”

“But I can’t choose,” she said, and returned her veil to its place as she headed toward the horsecar station.

Professor George Ticknor, an old man in decline, instructed his wife to send up his caller. His instructions were accompanied by an odd smile on his large and peculiar face. Ticknor’s once-black hair was grizzled down the back of his neck and along his muttonchops, and pitifully thin below his skullcap. Hawthorne had once called Ticknor’s nose the reverse of aquiline, not quite pug or snub.

The professor had never had much imagination and was thankful for the fact—it protected him from the vagaries that had beset fellow Bostonians, fellow writers especially, in times of reform thinking things would change.