Throughout the many volumes of his journal, Phineas Jennison expressed his burning desire to secure a spot on the board of the Harvard Corporation. There, mused the businessman, he would finally achieve the respect that had passed him by for not having attended Harvard, for not having come from a Boston family. To be a fellow meant to be welcomed into a world that had been locked away from him his whole life. And what other-wordly power Jennison seemed to find in the notion of holding sway over Boston’s finest minds, just as he had over its commerce!
Some friendships would be strained—or sacrificed.
In the last months, on his many visits to University Hall—for he was a considerable financial patron of the College and often had business there—Jennison would privately entreat the fellows to prevent the teaching of such rubbish as was being advanced by Professor James Russell Lowell and that would soon be disseminated to the masses by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Jennison promised key members of the board of overseers his full financial support for a campaign to reorganize the Department of Living Languages. At the same time, Lowell recalled bitterly as he read the journals, Jennison had been urging Lowell to fight the escalating efforts of the Corporation to smother his activities.
Jennison’s journals revealed that for over a year, he had toyed with plans to empty a seat on one of the university’s governing boards. Building a controversy among the College’s administrators would create casualties and resignations that would have to be filled. He was smoldering mad, after Judge Healey’s death, when a businessman with half his worth and a quarter of his savvy was elected to the empty overseer seat—only because this other man was a Brahmin aristocrat by heritage, and an inconsequential Choate, of all things. Phineas Jennison knew the unspoken policy had been enforced by one person above all others: Dr. Augustus Manning.
At what exact point Jennison heard about Dr. Manning’s consuming determination to emancipate the university from its connection to the Dante projects was unclear, but at that moment he found his opportunity to finally secure a seat in University Hall.
“There was never a jar between us,” Lowell said sadly.
“Jennison spurred you on to fight the Corporation and spurred the Corporation to fight you. A battle would wear Manning down. Whatever the final outcome, seats would be emptied, and Jennison would look like a hero for having lent his support to the cause of the College. It was his objective all along,” said Longfellow, trying to assure Lowell he had done nothing to lose Jennison’s friendship.
“I cannot get it through my skull, Longfellow,” Lowell said.
“He helped split you and the College, Lowell, and was split apart in return,” Holmes said. “That was his contrapasso.”
Holmes had appropriated Nicholas Rey’s preoccupation with the scraps of paper found near Talbot’s and Jennison’s bodies, and they had sat together for hours sharing possible combinations. Holmes was now composing words or partial words with hand copies of Rey’s letters. No doubt others had been left with the body of Chief Justice Healey as well but were taken away by the river breeze in the intervening days between the murder and discovery. Those missing letters would have completed whatever message the murderer wanted them to read, Holmes was certain. Without them, it was but a broken mosaic. We cant die without it as im upon…
Longfellow turned to a fresh page in their investigative journal. He drenched his pen in ink but sat staring ahead so long that the tip dried. He could not write down the necessary conclusion of all this: Lucifer had meted out his punishments for their sake—for the sake of the Dante Club.
The gated entrance to the Boston State House stood high on Beacon Hill; higher still was the copper dome capping it, with its short, sharp tower watching over the Boston Common like a lighthouse. Towering elms, stripped naked and whitened by the December frost, guarded the state’s municipal center.
Governor John Andrew, his black curls coiling out from under a black silk hat, stood with all the dignity his pear shape would allow as he greeted politicians, local dignitaries, and uniformed soldiers with the same inattentive politician’s smile. The governor’s small, solid gold-framed spectacles were his only sign of material indulgence.
“Governor.” Mayor Lincoln bowed slightly as he escorted Mrs. Lincoln up the steps to the entrance. “It looks to be the finest soldiers’ gathering yet.”
“Thank you, Mayor Lincoln. Mrs. Lincoln, welcome—please.” Governor Andrew motioned them inside. “The company is more prestigious than ever.”
“They’re saying even Longfellow has been added to the list of attendees,” Mayor Lincoln said, and passed a complimentary pat on the shoulder to Governor Andrew.
“It is a fine thing you do for these men, Governor, and we—the city, I mean—applaud you.” Mrs. Lincoln held up her dress with a slight rustle as she took a queenly step into the foyer. Once inside, a low-hung mirror provided her and the other ladies a view of the nether regions of their dresses, in the event that the garment had repositioned itself inappropriately along the way to the reception; a husband was wholly useless for such purposes.
Mingling in the massive parlor of the mansion were seventy to eighty soldiers from five different companies, garbed splendidly in their full-dress uniforms and capes, alongside twenty or thirty guests. Many of the most active regiments being honored had only a small number of survivors. Although Governor Andrew’s counselors had urged that only the most upstanding representatives of the soldierly core be included at the gatherings—some soldiers, they remarked, had grown troubled since the war—Andrew had insisted that the soldiers should be feted for their service, not their level of society.
Governor Andrew walked through the center of the long parlor with a staccato march, enjoying a surge of self-importance as he surveyed the faces and felt the ringing of the names of those with whom it had been his good fortune to become familiar during the war years. More than once during those wrenching times, the Saturday Club had sent a cab to the State House and forcibly removed Andrew from his office for an evening of gaiety in Parker’s hot rooms. All time had been separated into two epochs: before the war and after the war. In Boston, Andrew thought as he melted seamlessly into the white cravats and silk hats, the tinsel and gold lace of the officers, the conversations and compliments of old friends, we have survived.
Mr. George Washington Greene positioned himself across from a glowing marble statue that showed the Three Graces leaning delicately against one another, faces cold and angelic, eyes filled with calm indifference.
“How could a veteran from the soldiers’-aid home who heard Greene’s sermons also know the minute details of our tension with Harvard?”
This question had been posed inside the Craigie House study. Answers were proposed, and they knew that to find this answer would mean to find a killer. One of the young men consumed by Greene’s sermons could have had a father or uncle in the Harvard Corporation or the board of overseers who innocently related his stories over supper, not knowing the effect they might have in the shattered mind of someone occupying the next seat.
The scholars would have to determine exactly who was present at the various board meetings involving the roles of Healey, Talbot, and Jennison in the College’s position against Dante; this list would be compared with the names and profiles of as many soldiers from the soldiers’-aid home as they could collect. They would require Mr. Teal’s help once more to access the Corporation Room; Fields would coordinate the plan with his shop boy once the night workers arrived at the Corner.