Lowell smiled proudly. “You started a fight with him, Mr. Sheldon?”
“I started it, sir,” said Sheldon. He frowned, soothing his jaw with his hand. “But he finished.”
After escorting Sheldon out with abundant promises that they would begin their Dante hours again soon, Lowell rushed back toward the study, but there was another quick knock on the door.
“Blast it, Sheldon, I’ve told you we’ll meet for class any day now!” Lowell threw open the door.
In his excitement, Dr. Holmes was standing on his toes.
“Holmes?” Lowell’s laughter had such unrestrained jubilance that it brought Longfellow running into the hall. “You’ve come back to the club, Wendell! We’ve missed you like thunder!” Lowell shouted to the others in the study. “Holmes has come back!”
“Not only that, my friends,” Holmes said, stepping inside, “but I think I know where we shall find our killer.”
XIV
The rectangular shape of Longfellow’s library had made an ideal officers’ mess for General Washington’s staff and in later years provided a banquet hall for Mrs. Craigie. Now, Longfellow, Lowell, Fields, and Nicholas Rey sat at the well-polished table while Holmes circled them and explained.
“My thoughts come too quickly to govern. Only listen to all my reasons before agreeing or dissenting helter-skelter”—he said this mostly to Lowell, and everyone but Lowell understood it was meant for him—”for I believe that Dante has been telling us the truth all the while. He describes his feeling as he prepares for his first steps into Hell, trembling and insecure. ‘E io sol’ and so on. My dear Longfellow, how did you translate?”
“ And I the only one made myself ready to sustain the war. /Both of the way and likewise of the woe, /Which unerring memory shall now retrace.’ “
“Yes!” Holmes said proudly, remembering his own similar translation. This was not the time to pause on his talents, but he wondered what Longfellow would think of his rendition. “It is a war—a guerra–for the poet on two fronts. First, the hardships of the physical descent through Hell, and also the challenge to the poet to tap into his memory to turn experience into poetry. The images of Dante’s world run loose in my mind, without a halter.”
Nicholas Rey listened carefully and opened his memorandum book.
“Dante was no stranger to physical engagements of war, my dear officer,” Lowell said. “At five and twenty, the same age as many of our boys in blue, he fought at Campaldino with the Guelfs, and that same year in Caprona. Dante draws on these experiences throughout Inferno to describe the frightful torments of Hell. In the end, Dante was exiled not by his rival Ghibellines but due to an internal split among the Guelfs.”
“The aftermath of Florence’s civil wars inspires his vision of Hell and his search for redemption,” Holmes said. “Think, too, how Lucifer takes up arms against God and how in his fall from the heavens the once-brightest angel becomes the fountain of all evil from Adam down. It is Lucifer’s physical fall to earth after he is expelled from above that hollows an abyss in the ground, the cellar of earth that Dante discovers is Hell. So war created Satan. War created Hell: guerra. Dante’s choice of words is never happenstance. I shall suggest that the events of our own circumstances point overwhelmingly to a single hypothesis: Our murderer is a veteran of the war.”
“A soldier! The chief justice of our state supreme court, a prominent Unitarian preacher, a rich merchant,” Lowell said. “A defeated Reb soldier’s revenge on the instruments of our Yankee system! Of course! We’re damned fools!”
“Dante has no mechanical loyalty to one or another political label,” said Longfellow. “He is perhaps most indignant against those who shared his views but failed their obligations, the traitors—just as a Union veteran might be. Remember that each murder has shown our Lucifer’s great and natural familiarity with the layout of Boston.”
“Yes,” Holmes said impatiently. “That is precisely why my thought is not simply of a soldier but a Billy Yank. Think of our soldiers who still wear their army uniforms in the street and mart. I am often puzzled when seeing these great specimens: Has he come home again, yet still wears the vestments of the soldier? For whose war has he been commissioned now?”
“But does this fit with what we know of the murders, Wendell?” urged Fields.
“Quite neatly, I think. Start with Jennison’s murder. It occurs to me in this new light precisely the weapon that could have been used.”
Rey nodded. “A military saber.”
“Right!” Holmes said. “Just the sort of blade consistent with the injuries. Now, who is trained at such usage? A soldier. And Fort Warren, the choice of locale for that killing—a soldier who trained there or had been stationed there would know it well enough! There’s more: The deadly hominivorax maggots that feasted on Judge Healey—from somewhere outside Massachusetts, somewhere hot and swampy, Professor Agassiz insists. Perhaps brought back by a soldier as souvenirs from the deepest marshes of the South. Wendell Junior says flies and maggots were a constant presence on the battlefield and among the thousands of wounded left for a day or night.”
“Sometimes maggots would have no effect on the wounded,” Rey said. “At other times, they would seem to destroy a man, leaving the surgeons helpless.”
“Those were the hominivorax, though the war surgeons wouldn’t know them from a family of beetles. Somebody familiar with their effects on injured men brought them from the South and used them on Healey,” Holmes went on. “Now, we have again and again marveled at Lucifer’s great physical strength in carrying the bulky Judge Healey down to the riverside. But how many comrades must a soldier have carried in his arms from battle without thinking twice of it! We have also witnessed Lucifer’s easy strength in subduing Reverend Talbot, and in shredding with apparent ease the robust Jennison.”
Lowell exclaimed, “You may have found our open-sesame, Holmes!”
Holmes continued, “All the murders are acts committed by one familiar with the trappings of the siege and the kill—the wounds and suffering of battle.”
“But why should a Northern boy target his own people? Why should he target Boston?” Fields asked, feeling there was a need for someone to serve as doubter. “We were the victors. And victors for the side of right.”
“This war was like no other since the Revolution in the confusion of feelings,” Nicholas Rey said.
Longfellow added, “It was not like our country’s battle with the Indians or the Mexicans, which stand as little more than conquests. Soldiers who cared to think of why they were fighting were provided the notion of the honor of the Union, the freedom of a race of enslaved people, the restoration of proper order to the universe. Yet what do the soldiers return home to? Profiteers, who once sold shoddy rifles and uniforms, now riding in broughams down our streets and prospering in oak-fronted Beacon Hill mansions.”
“Dante,” said Lowell, “who was banished from his home, populated Hell with people of his own city, even his own family. We have left many soldiers hanging on to nothing but our stirring lyrics of morality, and bloodstained uniforms. They are exiles from their former lives—like Dante, they become parties unto themselves. And consider how close on the heels of the end of the war these murders began. Just months! Yes, it seems to fall into place, gentlemen. The war sought an abstract moral—freedom—yet the soldiers fought their battles on very specific fields and fronts, organized into regiments and companies and battalions. The very movements in Dante’s poetry have something swift, decisive, almost military in their nature.” He stood up and embraced Holmes. “This vision, my dear Wendell, is from Heaven.”