“You’re not here!” Lowell muttered, and a thought rang in his head: If he had not initially been so certain of Bachi’s guilt, if he possessed a measure of Holmes’s nervous skepticism, they might have found the murderer and Phineas Jennison might be alive. And then, before he could ask for a glass of water from one of the street’s storekeepers, he saw ahead of him a shining white coat and tall white silk hat gliding joyfully away on the strength of a gold-trimmed walking stick.

Phineas Jennison.

Lowell rubbed his eyes, conscious enough of his state of mind to distrust his eyes, but he could see Jennison bumping shoulders with some passersby while others avoided him with strange looks. He was corporeal. Flesh and blood.

He was alive…

Jennison! Lowell tried to cry out but was too parched. The sight told him to run and at the same time tied his legs. “Oh, Jennison!” At the same time as he found his strong voice, his eyes began to pump tears. “Phinny, Phinny, I’m here, I’m here! Jemmy Lowell, you see? I haven’t lost you yet!”

Lowell rushed through pedestrians and spun Jennison around by the shoulder. But the hybrid that faced him was cruel. It was Phineas Jennison’s tailor-made hat and coat, his brilliant walking stick, but stuck inside them was an old man in tattered vests, face smeared with dirt, unshaven and misshapen. He was shaking in Lowell’s grasp.

“Jennison,” Lowell said.

“Don’t turn me in, sir. I needed to stay warm…” The man explained: He was the vagrant who had discovered Jennison’s body after swimming to the abandoned fort from a nearby island occupied by an almshouse. He had found some beautiful clothes folded neatly in a pile on the floor of the storage room where Jennison’s body hung and had helped himself to a few items.

Lowell remembered and felt sharply the solitary maggot now removed from him, alone on its steep, savage path, eating into his insides. He felt a hole had been left, releasing everything that was caught up in his gut.

Harvard Yard was gagged with snow. Fruitlessly, Lowell searched the campus for Edward Sheldon. Lowell had sent him a letter on Thursday evening, after seeing Sheldon with the phantom, demanding the student’s immediate presence at Elmwood. But Sheldon had not responded. Several students who knew Sheldon said they had not seen him in a few days. Some students passing Lowell reminded him of his lecture, for which he was late. When he entered his lecture room in University Hall, a spacious room formerly housing the College chapel, he gave his usual greeting. “Gentlemen and fellow students…” This was followed by the usual practiced laugh of students. Fellow sinners–that’s how the Congregationalist ministers from his childhood used to begin. His father, to a child the voice of God. Holmes’s father, too. Fellow sinners. Nothing could shake Lowell’s father’s sincere piety, his trust in a God who shared his strength.

“Am I the right sort of man to guide ingenuous youth? Not a bit of it!” Lowell heard himself speak these words a third of the way through a lecture on Don Quixote. “And then, on the other hand,” he speculated, “my being a professor isn’t good for me—dampens my gunpowder, as it were, so my mind, when it takes fire at all, crawls off in an unwilling fuse instead of leaping to meet the first spark.”

Two concerned students tried to take him by the arm when he almost fell over. Lowell wobbled to the window and extended his head outside, eyes closed. Instead of feeling the cool brush of air he hoped for, there was an unexpected stroke of heat, as though Hell were tickling his nose and cheeks. He rubbed his mustache tusks, and they felt warm and moist too. Opening his eyes, he saw a triangle of flames down below. Lowell scrambled out of the classroom and down the stone stairs of University Hall. Down in Harvard Yard, a bonfire crackled voraciously.

Surrounding it, a semicircle of august men stared down at the flames with great attention. They were feeding books from a large pile to the fire. There were local Unitarian and Congregationalist ministers, fellows from the Harvard Corporation, and a few representatives of the Harvard Board of Overseers. One picked up a pamphlet, crushed it, and flung it like a ball. Everyone cheered as it hit the flames. Rushing forward, Lowell got down on one knee and pulled it out. The cover was too charred to read, so he opened the seared title page: In Defense of Charles Darwin and His Evolutionary Theory.

Lowell couldn’t hold it any longer. Professor Louis Agassiz stood across from him on the other side of the fire, his face blurred and bent by fumes. The scientist waved amiably with both hands. “How fares your leg, Mr. Lowell? Ah, this—this is a must, Mr. Lowell, though a peety to waste good paper.”

From a steam-filled window of the grotesquely Gothic granite Gore Hall, the College library, Dr. Augustus Manning, treasurer of the Corporation, looked down over the scene. Lowell rushed toward the massive entrance and through the nave, thankful for the composure and reason that came with each giant tread. No candles or gaslights were permitted in Gore Hall because of the danger of fire, so the library alcoves and the books were dim as the winter.

“Manning!” Lowell bellowed, educing a reprimand from the librarian.

Manning lurked on the platform above the reading room, gathering several books. “You have a lecture now, Professor Lowell. Leaving the students unsupervised shan’t be deemed acceptable conduct by the Harvard Corporation.”

Lowell had to wipe his face with a handkerchief before climbing to the platform. “You dare burn books in an institution of learning!” The copper tubes of Gore Hall’s pioneering heating system always leaked steam, filling the library with billowing vapor that condensed into hot droplets on the windows, the books, and the students.

“The religious world owes us, and owes especially your friend Professor Agassiz, a debt of gratitude for triumphantly combating the monstrous teaching that we are descended from monkeys, Professor. Your father certainly would have agreed.”

“Agassiz is too smart,” Lowell said as he reached the top of the platform, breaking through the vapor. “He shall abandon you yet—count on it! Nothing that keeps thought out will ever be safe from thought!”

Manning smiled, and his smile seemed to cut inward into his head. “Do you know, I raised a hundred thousand dollars for Agassiz’s museum through the Corporation. I daresay Agassiz will go exactly where I tell him.”

“What is it, Manning? What makes you hate other men’s ideas?”

Manning looked at Lowell sideways. As he answered, he lost the tight control of his voice. “We have been a noble country, with a simplicity of morals and justice, the last orphan child of the great Roman republic. Our world is strangled and demolished by infiltrators, newfangled notions of immorality coming in with every foreigner and every new idea against all the principles America was built upon. You see it yourself, Professor. Do you think we could have warred against ourselves twenty years ago? We have been poisoned. The war, our war, is far from over. It is just beginning. We have released demons into the very air we breathe. Revolutions, murders, thievery begin in our souls and move into the streets and our houses.” This was the closest to being emotional that Lowell had ever seen Manning. “Chief Justice Healey was in my graduating class, Lowell—he was one of our finest overseers—and now he has been done in by some mere beast whose only knowledge is the knowledge of death! The minds in Boston are under constant assault. Harvard is the last fortress for the protection of our sublimity. And that is under my charge!”

Manning capped his sentiment: “You, Professor, have the luxury of rebellion only in absence of responsibility. You are truly a poet.”