“Pray calm yourself, Lowell. I didn’t mean to raise my voice. I didn’t mean that.”

“I suppose you should know better than us what we should be doing. We are merely poets after all! I suppose you should know precisely how someone has traced our translation schedule!”

“Now what could that imply, Mr. Lowell?”

“Simply this: Who besides us is intimately aware of the activities of our Dante Club? The printer’s devils, the plate makers, the binders—all of them aligned with Ticknor and Fields?”

“I say!” Fields was flabbergasted. “Don’t turn the tables on me!”

The door connecting the library to the study opened.

“Gentlemen, I’m afraid I must interrupt,” Longfellow said as he brought in Nicholas Rey.

A look of horror ran across the faces of Lowell and Fields. Lowell blurted out a litany of reasons why Rey could not turn them in.

Longfellow merely smiled.

“Professor Lowell,” Rey said. “Please, I’m here to ask you gentlemen for leave to assist you now.”

Immediately, Lowell and Fields forgot their argument and greeted Rey excitedly.

“Now, understand, I am doing this to stop the killing,” Rey made clear. “Nothing else.”

“That is not our only goal,” said Lowell after a long pause. “But we cannot complete this without some assistance, and neither can you. This scoundrel has left the sign of Dante on everything he touches, and it is downright deadly for you to take a step in his direction without a translator by your side.”

Leaving them in the library, Longfellow returned to the study. He and Greene were on their third canto of the day, having started at six in the morning and worked through the high hump of noontime. Longfellow had written Holmes a note asking that he aid in the translating, but received no response from 21 Charles. Longfellow had asked Fields whether Lowell could be convinced to reconcile with Holmes, but Fields recommended giving both time to calm themselves.

Throughout the day, Longfellow had to turn away an inordinate number of odd requests from the usual assortment of people who came to call. A Westerner brought an “order” for a poem that he wished Longfellow to write about birds, for which he would pay roundly. One woman, a regular caller, brought baggage to the door, explaining that she was Longfellow’s wife, who had returned home. A purportedly wounded soldier came to beg money; Longfellow felt sorry and gave him a small amount.

“Why, Longfellow, that man’s ‘stump’ was merely his arm tucked into his shirt!” Greene said after Longfellow had closed the door.

“Yes, I know,” Longfellow replied as he returned to his chair. “But, my dear Greene, who will be kind to him if I am not?”

Longfellow reopened his materials to Inferno, Canto Five, of which he had postponed completion for many months. This was the circle of the Lustful. There, unceasing winds toss the sinners aimlessly, just as their unrestrained wantonness tossed them about aimlessly in life. The pilgrim asks to speak with Francesca, a beautiful young woman who had been killed when her husband found her embracing his brother, Paolo. She, with the silent spirit of her illicit lover beside her, floats to Dante’s side.

“Francesca is not content to suggest that she and Paolo simply yielded themselves to their passions as she tells her story weeping to Dante,” Greene remarked.

“Right,” Longfellow said. “She tells Dante that they were reading of Guinevere and Lancelot’s kiss when their eyes met over the book, and she says coyly, That day we read no further.’ Paolo takes her in his arms and kisses her, yet Francesca places the blame for their transgression not on him but on the book that drew them together. The writer of the romance is their betrayer.”

Greene closed his eyes, but not because he was asleep, as he so often was during their meetings. Greene believed a translator should forget himself in the author, and this is what he did in trying to help Longfellow. “And so they receive their perfect punishment—to be together forever but never to kiss again or to feel the excitement of courtship, only to feel torment side by side.”

As they talked, Longfellow saw the golden locks and serious face of Edith leaning into the study. After her father’s glance, the girl stole into the hall.

Longfellow suggested to Greene that they pause. The men in the library had also stopped their discussions so that Rey could examine the investigative journal Longfellow had been keeping. Greene stretched his legs in the garden.

As Longfellow put some books away, his thoughts traveled to other times in the house, times before his own. In this study, General Nathanael Greene, grandfather of their own Greene, had discussed strategy with General George Washington when news came of the British arrival, sending all the generals in the room rushing to find their wigs. In this study, too, according to one of Greene’s histories, Benedict Arnold had lowered himself to one knee and sworn his allegiance. Putting this last episode of the history of his house out of his mind, Longfellow went into the parlor, where he found his daughter Edith curled up in a Louis XVI armchair. Her chair was pulled close to the marble bust of her mother, Fanny’s creamy countenance always there when the girl needed her. Longfellow could never look at a likeness of his wife without the thrill of pleasure that had come over him from the earliest days of their awkward courtship. Fanny had never left a room without leaving him with the feeling that something of the light went with her.

Edith’s neck curved like a swan’s to hide her face. “Well, dear heart.” Longfellow smiled gently. “How is my little darling this afternoon?”

“I’m sorry for spying, Papa. I wished to ask you something and could not help but listen. That poem,” she said, timid but probing, “speaks of the saddest things.”

“Yes. Sometimes the Muse calls for that. It is the poet’s duty to tell of our most difficult times with equal honesty as we tell of the gay times, Edie, for only in coming through the darkest moments, sometimes, is light found. Thus does Dante.”

“That man and woman in the poem, why must you punish them so for loving each other?” A tear blotted her sky-blue eyes.

Longfellow sat down on the chair, rested her on his knees, and made her a throne of his arms. “The poet of that work was a gentleman christened Durante but changed in childish playfulness to Dante. He lived some six hundred years ago. He was struck by love himself—that is why he writes so. You have noticed the marble statuette above my study mirror?”

Edith nodded.

“Well, that’s Signor Dante.”

“That man? He looks to have the whole world’s weight on his mind.”

“Yes.” Longfellow smiled. “And deeply in love with a girl he met long ago, when she was, oh, not much younger than you, my darling—about little Panzie’s age—Beatrice Portinari. She was nine when he first saw her, at a festival in Florence.”

“Beatrice,” Edith said, imagining the spelling of the word and considering the dolls for whom she had not yet found a name.

“Bice—that is what her friends called her. But never Dante. He only called her by her full name, Beatrice. When she came near, such modesty took possession of his heart that he could not raise his eyes or return her salutation. Other times, he would ready himself to speak and she would simply walk by, barely noticing him. He would hear the townspeople whisper of her, ‘This is no mortal. She is one of God’s blessed.’ “

“They said that of her?”

Longfellow laughed lightly. “Well, that is what Dante heard, for he was deeply in love, and when you are in love, you hear townspeople praising the one you praise.”

“Did Dante ask for her hand?” Edith inquired hopefully.

“No. She only spoke to him once, to say hello. Beatrice married another Florentine. Then she became sick with a fever and died. Dante married another woman and they started a family. But he never forgot his love. He even named his daughter Beatrice.”