“Excellent! Then we’ll get a team and start searching,” said Lowell.

“Professor, gentlemen,” Rey said as he sat down. “You men have discovered the identity of the murderer. You saved a life, and perhaps others we will never know.”

“Only, it was because of us that they were in danger in the first place.” Longfellow sighed.

“No, Mr. Longfellow. What Benjamin Galvin found in Dante he would have found elsewhere in his life. You have called down none of these horrors. But what you have accomplished in their shadow is undeniable. Still, you are fortunate to be safe after all this. You must let the police finish this now, for everyone’s safety.”

Holmes asked Rey why he was wearing his army uniform.

“Governor Andrew is holding another of his soldiers’ banquets today at the State House. Clearly, Galvin has continued to wed himself to his service in the army. He might well appear.”

“Officer, we don’t know how he’ll answer to having been stopped from this last murder,” said Fields. “What if he tries again to enact the punishment of the Traitors? What if he returns to Manning?”

“We have patrolmen guarding the houses of all members of the Harvard Corporation and the overseers, including Dr. Manning. We’re also stopping at every hotel for Simon Camp in case Galvin targets him as another Traitor against Dante. We have several men in Calvin’s neighborhood, and we’re watching his house closely.”

Lowell walked to the window and looked down Longfellow’s front walkway, where he saw a man in a heavy blue overcoat pass the gate and then return from the other direction. “You’ve a man here, too?” Lowell asked.

Rey nodded. “At each of your houses. From his choice of victims, it seems that Galvin believes himself to be your guardian. So he may think to consort with you about what to do after such a rapid turn of events. If he does, we’ll take him in.”

Lowell pitched his cigar to the fire. Suddenly his self-indulgence disgusted him. “Officer, I think this is a shabby piece of business. We can’t just sit in this same room helplessly all day!”

“I don’t suggest that you do, Professor Lowell,” Rey replied. “Return to your own houses, spend time with your families. The duty of protecting this city is on me, gentlemen, but your presence is strongly missed elsewhere. Your life must begin to return to normal from this point on, Professor.”

Lowell looked up, stunned. “But…”

Longfellow smiled. “A great part of the happiness of life consists not in fighting battles, my dear Lowell, but in avoiding them. A masterly retreat is in itself a victory.”

Rey said, “Let us all meet here again this evening. With a little good fortune, I shall have happy tidings to report. Fair enough?”

The scholars conceded with mixed expressions of regret and great relief.

Patrolman Rey continued recruiting officers that afternoon; many of them had silently avoided Rey’s path in the past out of prudence. But he had known who they were from afar. He knew instantly when a man looked at him simply as another man and not as a black or mulatto or nigger. His straight gaze into their eyes necessitated little additional persuasion.

He posted a patrolman at the front gardens of Dr. Manning’s house. As Rey was speaking with the patrolman under a maple tree, Augustus Manning charged out from his side door.

“Yield!” Manning shouted, showing a rifle.

Rey turned. “We’re police—police, Dr. Manning.”

Manning shivered as though still locked in the ice. “I saw your army uniform through my window, Officer. I thought that madman…”

“You needn’t worry,” said Rey.

“You’ll… you’ll protect me?” Manning asked.

“Until it is no longer needed,” said Rey. “This officer shall watch over your house. Well-armed.”

The other patrolman unbuttoned his coat and showed his revolver.

Manning offered a frail nod of acceptance and extended his arm hesitantly, allowing the mulatto policeman to escort him inside.

Afterward, Rey drove his carriage to the Cambridge Bridge. He came into sight of a stopped coach blocking the way. Two men were hunched over one of the wheels. Rey steered to the side of the road and stepped down, walking to the stranded party to help. But as he reached them, the two men rose to their full height. Rey heard noises behind him and turned to see that another carriage had pulled behind his own. Two men in flowing overcoats emerged onto the street. The four men stood in a square around the mulatto policeman and remained motionless for nearly two minutes.

“Detectives. May I be of some help?” Rey asked.

“We thought we’d have a word with you at the station house, Rey,” one of them said.

“I’m afraid I haven’t time just now,” Rey said.

“It’s been brought to our attention that you’re looking into a matter without proper authorization, sir,” another said as he stepped forward.

“I don’t believe that’s your province, Detective Henshaw,” said Rey after a pause.

The detective rubbed two fingers together. A detective moved closer to Rey menacingly.

Rey turned to him, “I am an officer of the law. If you strike me, you strike the Commonwealth.”

The detective landed a fist in Rey’s abdomen and then crashed another into his jaw. Rey doubled over, nestled in his coat collar. Blood spilled from his mouth as they dragged him into the back of their carriage.

Dr. Holmes sat in his big leather rocker, waiting to leave for their appointed meeting at Longfellow’s. A partially opened blind threw a dim, religious light onto the table. Wendell Junior was rushing up to the second floor. “Wendy, my boy,” Holmes called after him. “Where are you going?”

Junior slowly backtracked down the stairs. “How are you, Father? Didn’t see you.”

“Can’t you sit for a minute or two?”

Junior perched on the edge of a green rocker.

Dr. Holmes asked about law school. Junior answered perfunctorily, waiting for the usual barb about the law, but none came. He could never get under the skin of the law, Dr. Holmes said of himself, when he gave it a try after college. The second edition improves on the first, he supposed.

The calm clock dial counted out their silence in long seconds.

“You were never frightened, Wendy?” Dr. Holmes said into the silence. “In the war, I mean.”

Junior peered at his father from under his dark brow, and grinned warmly. “It’s rank folly, Dadkins, pulling a long mug every time one might fight or be killed. There’s no poetry in a fight.”

Dr. Holmes excused his son to go to his work. Junior nodded and resumed his trip upstairs.

Holmes had to be on his way to meet the others. He decided to take his grandfather’s flintlock musket, which had last been used in the Revolutionary War. This was the only weapon Holmes allowed in his house, storing it as a piece of history in his basement.

The horsecars were still shut down. Drivers and conductors had tried to pull the cars by hand without success. The Metropolitan Railroad also attempted to use oxen to pull the cars, but their feet were too tender for the hard pavement. So Holmes traveled by foot, walking through the crooked streets of Beacon Hill, missing by only a few seconds Fields’s carriage as the publisher drove to Holmes’s house to see if he wanted a ride. The doctor took the West Bridge over the partially frozen Charles, through Gallows Hill. It was so cold that people were clapping their hands to their ears and hoisting their shoulders and running. Holmes’s asthma made the walk feel twice as long as it was. He found himself passing the First Meeting House, the old Cambridge church of the Reverend Abiel Holmes. He slipped into the empty chapel and had a seat. The pews were the usual oblong ones, with a ledge before the parishioners to support hymn books. There was a lavish organ, something the Reverend Holmes never would have allowed.