“Wasn’t his wife angry?” the little girl asked indignantly.

Longfellow reached for one of Fanny’s soft brushes and ran it through Edith’s hair. “We don’t know much about Donna Gemma. But we do know that when the poet met with some troubles in the middle of his life, he had a vision that Beatrice, from her home in Heaven, sent a guide to help him pass through a very dark place to reach her again. When Dante trembles at the idea of this trial, his guide reminds him: ‘When you see her beauteous eyes again, you will know your life’s journey once more.’ You understand, dear?”

“But why did he love Beatrice so much if he never spoke with her?”

Longfellow continued brushing, surprised by the difficulty of the question. “He once said, dear, that she excited such feelings in him that he could not find any words to describe them. For Dante, the poet that he was, what could capture him more than a feeling that defied his rhymes?”

Then, he recited softly, caressing her hair with the brush, “ ‘You, my little girl, Are better than all the ballads / That ever were sung or said; / For ye are a living poem, /And all the rest are dead.’ “

The poem produced its usual smile from the recipient, who then left her father to his thoughts. Following the sound of Edith’s footsteps up the stairs, Longfellow remained in the warm shadow of the creamy marble bust, suffused with his daughter’s sadness.

“Ah, there you are.” Greene appeared in the parlor, his arms out wide either side. “I believe I dozed off on your garden bench. No matter, I’m quite ready to return to our cantos! Say, where have Lowell and Fields disappeared?”

“Out for a ramble, I believe.” Lowell had apologized to Fields for growing warm, and they had set off to get some air.

Longfellow realized how long he had been sitting. His joints clicked audibly when he stirred from his chair.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, looking at the watch he removed from his waistcoat, “they’ve been gone for some time.”

Fields tried keeping up with Lowell’s long strides on their way down Brattle Street.

“Perhaps we should return now, Lowell.”

Fields was thankful when Lowell came to an abrupt stop. But the poet was staring ahead with a frightful look. Without warning, he yanked Fields behind the trunk of an elm. He whispered to look ahead. Fields watched across the way as a tall figure in a bowler hat and checkered waistcoat turned a corner.

“Lowell, calm down! Who is he?” asked Fields.

“Merely the man I saw watching me in Harvard Yard! And then meeting Bachi! And then again in heated talk with Edward Sheldon!”

“Your phantom?”

Lowell nodded triumphantly.

They followed surreptitiously, Lowell directing his publisher to keep a distance from the stranger, who was turning onto a side street.

“Daughter of Eve! He’s heading for your house!” said Fields. The stranger started through the white fence of Elmwood. “Lowell, we must go speak with him.”

“And let him have the upper hand? I have a much better plan for this blackguard,” said Lowell, leading Fields around the carriage house and barn and through the back entrance into Elmwood. Lowell ordered his chambermaid to welcome the visitor who was about to ring at the front door. She was to bring him to a specified room on the third floor of the mansion, then to close the door. Lowell snatched his hunting rifle from the library, checked it, and brought Fields up the narrow servants’ stairs in the back.

“Jamey! What in God’s name do you think you’re going to do?”

“I’m going to see to it that this phantom does not slip away this time—not until I am satisfied with what we know,” said Lowell.

“Has your knot come loose? We’ll send for Rey instead.”

Lowell’s bright brown eyes flared gray. “Jennison was my friend. He supped in this very house—there, in my dining room, where he took my napkins to his lips and drank from my wineglasses. Now he’s cut to pieces! I refuse to float timidly around the truth any longer, Fields!”

The room at the top of the stairs, Lowell’s childhood bedroom, was unused and unheated. From the window of his boyhood garret, the view in winter was a wide one, taking in even a part of Boston. Now, Lowell looked out and could see the familiar long curve of the Charles and the wide fields between Elmwood and Cambridge, the flat marshes beyond the river smooth and silent with glittering snow.

“Lowell, you’ll kill someone with that! As your publisher, I order you to put that gun away at once!”

Lowell put his hand over Fields’s mouth and gestured at the closed door to watch for any movement. Several minutes of silence passed before the two scholars, squatting behind a sofa, heard the tread of the maid leading the guest up the front stairs. She did as instructed, showing the caller into the chamber and immediately closing the door behind him.

“Hullo?” said the man to the empty, morbidly cold room. “What kind of parlor is this? What’s the meaning of this?”

Lowell rose up from his place behind the sofa, aiming his rifle squarely at the man’s checkered waistcoat.

The stranger gasped. He thrust his hand into his frock coat and drew out a revolver, pointing it at the barrel of Lowell’s rifle.

The poet did not flinch.

The stranger’s right hand shook violently, the excess leather of his gloved finger rubbing the trigger of his revolver.

Lowell, across the room, raised the rifle above his walrus-tusk mustache, which showed itself a dark black in the insufficient light, and closed one eye, looking with the other straight down the nose of the rifle. He spoke through clenched teeth. “Try me, and whatever happens, you shall lose. Either you send us to Heaven,” he added as he cocked his gun, “or we shall send you to Hell.”

XIII

The stranger held out his revolver for another moment and then flung it down to the rug. “This job ain’t worth such bosh!”

“Collect his pistol please, Mr. Fields,” Lowell said to his publisher, as if this were their daily occupation. “Now, you rascal, you’ll tell us who you are and what you have come for. Tell us what you have to do with Pietro Bachi and why Mr. Sheldon was giving you orders on the street. And tell me why you’re in my house!”

Fields lifted the gun from the floor.

“Put up your weapon, Professor, or I say nothing,” the man said.

“Do listen to him, Lowell,” Fields whispered, to the satisfaction of the third party.

Lowell lowered his gun. “Very well, but I pray for your own sake that you are straight with us.” He carried over a chair for their hostage, who repeatedly pronounced the whole scene to be “bosh.”

“I don’t believe we had the chance to be presented before you put a rifle to my head,” the visitor said. “I’m Simon Camp, a detective from the Pinkerton Agency. I was hired by Dr. Augustus Manning of Harvard College.”

“Dr. Manning!” Lowell cried. “For what purpose?”

“He wished me to look into these courses taught on this Dante character, to see whether it could be demonstrated as likely to produce a ‘pernicious effect’ on the students. I am to look into the matter and report back my findings.”

“And what have you found?”

“Pinkerton assigns me the whole Boston area. This trifling case wasn’t my highest priority, Professor, but I’ve done my fair share of work. I did call on one of the old teachers, a Mr. Bakee, to meet me on campus,” said Camp. “I interviewed several students, too. That insolent young man Mr. Sheldon was not giving orders to me, Professor. He was telling me what to do with my questions, and his language was a sight too smart to repeat in the company of such fine velvet-collared coats.”

“What did the others say?” Lowell demanded.

Camp scoffed. “My work is confidential, Professor. But I did think it was time I speak to you face-to-face, ask your own opinion on this Dante. That is why I’ve come here today to your house. And what a welcome!”