Fields squinted in confusion. “Did Manning send you to speak to Lowell directly?”

“I am not under his wing, sir. This is my case. I make my own judgments,” Camp answered haughtily. “You’re just fortunate I’ve slowed up on my trigger finger, Professor Lowell.”

“Oh, what a row I shall call down on Manning!” Lowell jumped up and leaned over Simon Camp. “You came here to see what I say, did you, sir? You shall cease with this witch-hunt at once! That’s what I say!”

“I don’t care a brass farthing, Professor!” Camp laughed in his face. “This is the case I have been given, and I shall not stand down for anyone—not for that Harvard swell and not for an old cuss like you! You may shoot me down if you like, but I take my cases to the end!” He paused, then added, “I am a professional.”

With Camp’s careless inflection on this last word, Fields seemed to know at once what he had come for. “Perhaps we can work something else out,” the publisher said, removing some gold pieces from his wallet. “What say you enter an indefinite respite from this case, Mr. Camp?”

Fields dropped several coins into Camp’s open hand. The detective waited patiently, and Fields dropped two more, prompting a stiff smile. “And my gun?”

Fields returned the revolver.

“I daresay, gentlemen, now and then a case works out for everyone involved.” Simon Camp bowed and made his way down the front stairs.

“To have to pay off a man such as that!” Lowell said. “Now, how did you know he would take that, Fields?”

“Bill Ticknor always said people like the feel of gold in their hands,” Fields remarked.

His face pressed against his garret window, Lowell watched with steady anger as Simon Camp crossed the brick footpath to the gates, happy-go-lucky as could be, jiggling the gold pieces, staining Elmwood with his snow prints.

That night, Lowell, overcome with exhaustion, sat still as a statue in his music room. Before entering it, he had hesitated in the doorway, as though he would find the real owner of the room sitting in his chair before the fire.

Mabel peered in from the archway. “Father? Something is the matter. I wish you would speak about it with me.”

Bess, the Newfoundland pup, galloped in and licked Lowell’s hand. He smiled, but it saddened him beyond measure to recall the lethargic greetings of Argus, their old Newfoundland, who had ingested a fatal amount of poison from a neighboring farm.

Mabel pulled Bess away to try to maintain some seriousness. “Father,” she said. “We’ve spent so little time together recently. I know…” She restrained herself from completing her thought.

“What’s that?” Lowell asked. “You know what, Mab?”

“I know something’s troubling you and gives you no peace.”

He grabbed her hand lovingly. “I am tired, my dear Hopkins.” That had always been Lowell’s name for her. “I shall go to bed and feel better. You’re a very good girl, my dear. Now, salute your progenitor.”

She complied by giving him a mechanical kiss on his cheek.

Upstairs in his bedchamber, Lowell plowed his face into his lotus-leaf pillow, not looking at his wife. But soon he tucked his head in Fanny Lowell’s lap and cried without pause for nearly a half-hour, every emotion he had ever known coursing through and spilling out into his brain; and he could see projected on the closed lids of his eyes Holmes, devastated, sprawled on the floor of the Corner and the carved-up Phineas Jennison crying out for Lowell to save him, to deliver him from Dante.

Fanny knew her husband would not talk about what was upsetting him, so she just ran a hand through his warm auburn hair and waited for him to rock himself to sleep amidst his sobs.

“Lowell. Lowell. Please, Lowell. Wake up. Wake up.”

As Lowell’s eyes creaked open, he was stunned by the sunlight. “What, what is it? Fields?”

Fields sat at the edge of the bed, a folded newspaper gripped close to his chest.

“All right, Fields?”

“All wrong. It’s noon, Jamey. Fanny says you’ve been sleeping like a top all day—turning round and round. Are you unwell?”

“I feel much better.” Lowell focused immediately on the object that Fields’s hands seemed to want to hide from his view. “Something’s happened, hasn’t it?”

Fields said bleakly, “I used to think I knew just how to deal with any situation. Now I’m as rusty as an old nail, Lowell. Why, look at me, won’t you? I’ve grown so terribly fat that my oldest creditors would hardly know me.”

“Fields, please…”

“I need you to be stronger than I am, Lowell. For Longfellow, we must…”

“Another murder?”

Fields passed him the newspaper. “Not yet. Lucifer has been arrested.”

The sweat box in the Central Station was three and a half feet wide and seven feet long. The inside door was iron. On the outside was another door, of solid oak. When this second door was closed, the cell became a dungeon, without the slightest trace of or hope for light. A prisoner could be kept inside for days at a time, until he could no longer endure the darkness and would do whatever he was asked.

Willard Burndy, Boston’s second-best safecracker behind Langdon W. Peaslee, heard a key turning in the oak door and a blinding plane of gaslight stunned him. “Keep me here ten year an’ a day, grunter! I ain’t pleadin’ to no murders I didn’t pull!”

“Cheese it, Burndy,” the guard snapped.

“I swear, ‘pon my honor…”

“Upon your-what?” The guard laughed.

“Upon the honor of a gentleman!”

Willard Burndy was led in shackles through the hall. The watching eyes of those in the other cells knew Burndy by name if not by his appearance. A Southerner who had moved to New York to reap the wartime affluence in the North, Burndy had migrated to Boston after a long stretch in the New York Tombs. Burndy gradually learned that among the ranks of the underworld, he had earned a reputation for targeting the widows of wealthy Brahmins, a pattern that he himself had not even noticed. He had little desire to be known as an assailant of old fossocks. He had never considered himself a louse. Burndy had been quite cooperative whenever a reward was offered for stolen heirlooms and jewelry, returning a portion of the goods to a fair-minded detective in return for some of the cash.

Now, a guard twisted and pulled Burndy into a room and then pushed him down into a chair. He was a red-faced, wild-haired man with so many lines crisscrossing his face that he resembled a Thomas Nast caricature.

“What’s your game?” Burndy drawled to the man sitting across from him. “I would extend a hand, but you see I’m barnacled. Hold… I read about you. The first Negro policeman. An army hero in the war. You was at the show-up when that vag jumped out the window!” Burndy laughed at the memory of the broken leaper.

“The district attorney wants you to hang,” Rey said quietly, tearing the smile off Burndy’s face. “The die is cast. If you know why you’re here, tell me.”

“My game is safe-blowing. The best in Boston, I say, better than that dog nipper Langdon Peaslee on any day! But I didn’t kill no beak, and I didn’t jam no brother of the cloth neither! I’ve got Squire Howe coming in from New York and, you’ll see, I’ll beat this in the courts!”

“Why are you here, Burndy?” Rey asked.

“Those fakers, the detectives, they’re planting evidence at every stop!”

Rey knew this was likely. “Two witnesses saw you the night Talbot’s house was robbed, the day before he was murdered, looking into the reverend’s house. They’re legitimate, aren’t they? That’s why Detective Henshaw chose you. You have just enough sin in you to take the blame.”

Burndy was about to refute this, but hesitated. “Why should I trust a moke?”

“I want you to look at something,” Rey said, watching carefully. “It may help you, if you can understand.” He passed a sealed envelope across the table.