Lowell paced back and forth with an extra long shuffle, inclining his head toward the cold window and glaring down at the dim landscape of snowbanks. “Rey believes Captain Blight was merely another soldier who enjoyed Greene’s sermons. Blight is likely to tell Rey nothing of others, even after he’s calmed himself—he may know nothing of the other soldiers at the home! And without Teal, we have no hope of breaking into the Corporation Room. Shan’t we ever stop pumping at dry wells!”

A knock at the door brought in Osgood, who reported that two more employee-veterans were awaiting Fields in the cafeteria. The senior clerk had given him the names of all former soldiers in the employ of Ticknor & Fields. There were twelve men: Heath, Miller, Wilson, Collins, Holden, Sylvester, Rapp, Van Doren, Drayton, Flagg, King, and Kellar. One former employee, Samuel Ticknor, had been drafted but, after two weeks in uniform, had paid the mandated three hundred dollars to buy a substitute.

Predictable, thought Lowell, who said, “Fields, give me Teal’s address and I will look for him myself. There’s nothing we can do until Rey comes back, in any case. Holmes, will you come along?”

Fields instructed J. R. Osgood to remain in the clerks’ quarters in case he was needed. Osgood threw himself into an easy chair with a tired sigh. To occupy his time, he selected a Harriet Beecher Stowe book from the nearest shelf, and when he opened it, he found that bits of paper, about the size of snowflakes, had been torn from the cover page, which was inscribed by Stowe to Fields, Osgood flipped through and found the same sacrilege had been committed on several pages. “How queer!”

Down at the stables, Lowell and Holmes discovered to their horror that Fields’s mare was writhing on the ground, unable to move. Her companion looked on sadly and kicked at anyone who dared approach. The horse distemper had completely disabled public modes of transportation citywide, so the two poets were forced to trudge on foot.

The meticulously scrawled number on Dan Teal’s employment form matched that of a modest house in the southern quarter of the city.

“Mrs. Teal?” Lowell pressed his hat to the careworn woman at the door. “My name is Mr. Lowell. And may I make you acquainted with Dr. Holmes.”

“Mrs. Galvin,” she said, and put a hand to her chest.

Lowell checked the number of the house against his paper. “There’s someone boarding here named Teal?”

She looked at them with sad eyes. “I’m Harriet Galvin.” She repeated this with slow elocution, as though her callers were children or simpletons. “I live here with my husband, and we’d take no boarders. I’ve never heard of this Mr. Teal, sir.”

“Have you moved here recently, then?” asked Dr. Holmes.

“Five years now.”

“More old wells,” Lowell mumbled.

“Madam,” Holmes said. “Would you kindly allow us a few moments inside to find our bearings?”

She led them inside and Lowell’s attention was drawn immediately to a tintype portrait on the wall.

“Ah, might I trouble you for a glass of water, my dear?” Lowell asked.

When she left, he bolted to the framed portrait of a soldier, freshly suited in oversize army rags. “Daughter of Phoebus! That’s him, Wendell! As I stand here, that’s Dan Teal!”

It was. “He was in the army?” Holmes asked.

“He wasn’t on any of Osgood’s lists of soldiers that Fields has been interviewing!”

“And here’s why. ‘Second Lieutenant Benjamin Galvin,’ “ Holmes read the name engraved underneath. “Teal is an assumed name. Quickly, while she’s busy.” Holmes stole into the next cramped room, which was filled with wartime accoutrements, carefully arranged and displayed, but one object drew his attention immediately: a saber, dangling from the wall. Holmes felt a chill run through his bones and he called Lowell. The poet appeared and his whole body trembled at the sight.

Holmes waved away a circling gnat, which came right back.

“Forget the bug!” Lowell said, and smashed it dead.

Holmes delicately removed the weapon from the wall. “It is precisely the sort of blade… these were ornaments to our officers, reminders of the world’s more civilized forms of combat. Wendell Junior has one and dandled it like a baby at that banquet… This blade might have mutilated Phineas Jennison.”

“No. It’s spotless,” Lowell said, approaching the shining instrument cautiously.

Holmes ran a finger along the steel. “We cannot know with our naked eyes. Such carnage does not wash away lightly after only a few days, not in all Neptune’s waters.” Then his eyes rested on the blood smear on the wall, all that remained of the gnat.

When Mrs. Galvin returned with two glasses of water, she saw Dr. Holmes handling the sword and demanded that he stop. Holmes, ignoring her, marched through the entry and out the front door. She professed her outrage that they would come into her house to smuggle away her property and threatened to send for the police.

Lowell inserted himself between them and stalled. Holmes, hearing her protests in the recesses of his mind, stood on the front sidewalk and raised the heavy saber in front of him. A tiny gnat spun onto the blade like a chip of iron to a charged magnet. Then, within a blink, another appeared, and two more, and then three together in a mindless clump. After a few seconds had passed, an entire flock was scuttling and humming over the deep-set blood on the blade.

Lowell stopped in mid-sentence at the sight.

“Send for the others at once!” Holmes shouted.

Their frantic demands to see her husband alarmed Harriet Galvin. She slipped into a stunned silence watching Holmes and Lowell alternate gesticulations and explanations, like two buckets in a well, until a knock at the door suspended them. J. T. Fields presented himself, but Harriet fixated on the slender and leonine figure behind this plump and solicitous one. Framed by the silver whiteness of the sky, nothing was purer than his look of perfect calm. She raised a trembling hand as if to touch his beard and, indeed, as the poet followed Fields inside, her fingers brushed against his locks. He retreated a step. She pleaded that he come inside.

Lowell and Holmes looked at each other. “Perhaps she had not yet recognized us,” Holmes whispered. Lowell agreed.

She tried her best to explain her wonderment: explained how she read Longfellow’s poetry before going to sleep each night; how when her husband was bedridden from the war she would recite Evangeline aloud to him; and how the gently palpitating rhythms, the legend of faithful but uncompleted love, would soothe him even in his sleep—even now sometimes, she said sadly. She knew every word of “A Psalm of Life,” and had taught her husband to read it as well; and whenever he left home, those verses were her only release from fear. But mostly her explanation came out as a repetition of the question “Why, Mr. Longfellow…” she pleaded again and again before giving in to heaving sobs.

Longfellow said softly, “Mrs. Galvin. we are in dire need of help that only you can provide. We must find your husband.”

“These men seem to wish him harm,” she said, meaning Lowell and Holmes. “I don’t understand. Why would you… Why, Mr. Longfellow, how could you know Benjamin at all?”

“We haven’t time to explain satisfactorily, I’m afraid,” Longfellow said.

For the first time, she looked away from the poet. “Well, I don’t know where he is, and I am ashamed for that. He hardly comes home anymore, and when he does, barely speaks. He’s away days at a time.”

“When was the last time you saw him?” Fields asked.

“He had been here briefly today, a few hours before you.”

Fields pulled out his watch. “Where was he going from here?”

“He used to take care of me. I am a mere ghost to him now.”

“Mrs. Galvin, this is a matter of…” Fields began.