The Fifth Heart (39 page)

And during that hot, miserable, endless, and pointless summer at Beverly Farms while Richardson was obeying Clover’s secret orders to carve that abomination into the front of their staggeringly expensive new home, Adams had—upon more than one occasion—heard his wife cry out to her sister, “Ellen, I am not real. Oh, make me real. For God’s sake, make me real. You . . . all of
you
. . . are real. Make me real as well.”

As Adams breakfasted alone that morning—he had frequently break-fasted, had lunch, and dined alone for the past seven years as long as he was in this house and not traveling—he thought of the damned cross on the wall and of that sick, hot summer at Beverly Farms and of Clover’s growing melancholia and . . . yes . . . insanity.

Then he put all of that firmly out of his mind and went into his study to go over his pile of recent unforwarded and shamefully unanswered correspondence.

* * *

It was late morning when his head butler knocked softly, entered, and said, “Mr. Holmes is here to see you, sir.”

“Holmes!” cried Adams. “Good heavens.” He put down his pen, buttoned his jacket, and hurried out to the foyer where Holmes had just handed his hat and coat to the second butler.

“My dear Holmes!” cried Adams, stepping forward to shake his friend’s hand with the special holding-the-elbow-with-his-left-hand handshake that he reserved for old friends with whom he really wasn’t that close. “I had no idea you were in town,” continued Adams. “Please come in! Can you stay for luncheon?”

“I can stay for only a minute,” said Holmes. “I need to catch my train back to Boston in an hour. But I would happily sit in your study with you for a few moments and would heartily welcome a cup of coffee.”

Adams gave orders for the coffee to be brewed fresh and led Holmes to his study. At five-foot-six, Henry Brooks Adams had never felt tall—even among the shorter Americans of the nineteenth century—but he always felt especially short next to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Holmes was still “Jr.”, even at age fifty-two, because his famous father was still alive. He’d not yet struck off the mildly subordinating appellation as Henry James had a decade earlier upon the death of
his
father. But with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., even the “Junior” seemed to add to his appropriate grandeur.

Even while standing in the foyer with Holmes, Adams had realized that his old acquaintance was becoming
more
handsome in his fifties—tall, erect, the high collar trying to hide his one flaw (a neck that some said was too long), with his perfectly curved mustache only beginning to go gray and his perfectly parted hair contrasting boldly with Henry Adams’s bald pate. (And not only bald, Adams knew, but still peeling from the various sunburns he’d suffered on St. Helena and on Agassiz’s yacht, despite constantly wearing yachting caps and straw hats.)

As the steaming coffee came, Adams realized that even though he was only fifty-five, three years older than Holmes, it was his destiny to continue to grow balder and fatter and, yes, shorter, while Holmes would almost certainly keep his erect, tall, parade-ground-proud posture into his nineties and would probably reach the apogee of his male beauty in his eighties.

“What brings you to Washington, Wendell?” asked Adams. “Down to see Chief Justice Fuller perhaps?”

“Yes, Justice Fuller and President Cleveland,” said Holmes, carefully sipping his coffee. He did not offer to explain why he would be seeing the president, and Adams pointedly did not ask.

Holmes had been serving as an associate justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Court since 1883 and most astute observers Adams knew expected him to be Chief Justice of that state before long. Others would lay odds that before another decade was out, Holmes would be on the U.S. Supreme Court, although Adams had his private doubts about that.

“Well, how is Mrs. Holmes?” asked Adams. “Well, I hope.”

“Fanny is quite well, thank you.” It had been John Hay who had once commented privately to Adams about the slightly dismissive tone that always was present when Wendell mentioned his wife. Hay and Adams were in silent agreement that if ever there were a purely companionate marriage, the Holmeses’ was such.

Holmes set down his cup and saucer on a trivet the butler had placed on the top of a low bookcase next to his chair. “I stopped by to ask you about these rumors,” said Holmes in his old, somewhat abrupt manner.

“Rumors?” Adams felt his heart race when he knew he shouldn’t be alarmed. Lizzie Cameron would never reveal the contents of their personal letters—especially not Adams’s last and most personal letter to her, from Scotland to Paris, just a couple of months earlier. Still, his pulse pounded with anxiety.

“About the Hays’ visitors,” said Holmes.

Adams let his eyebrows rise. “I wasn’t aware that John and Clara had any visitors of special note, but, then, I’ve been traveling awhile now.”

“So Hay told me when I stopped by next door a few minutes ago,” said Holmes. “But your service staff must be buzzing about the visitors . . . mine certainly are.”

“Your servants in
Boston
are buzzing about the Hays’ visitors?” Adams cried with a smile.

“Of course not, but I’ve been here in Washington several days now and I always bring my personal valet and cook along.”

Adams folded his hands under his chin and smiled openly. “I’ve not had time to hear my servants whispering. By all means, Holmes, tell me the gossip.”

Holmes made a flicking motion with his hand—Adams noticing the long, tapering, perfectly manicured fingers—and said, “It’s certain that Henry James is back. He was staying with the Hays for the past week or so . . . I just missed him, evidently. He’s taken up lodgings nearby. At Mrs. Stevens’s place, I believe.”

“Clover arranged for Harry to stay there ten years ago, the last time he was here,” said Adams in a low voice.

Holmes nodded impatiently. “I stopped by Mrs. Stevens’s place before coming back here, but both James and his fellow lodger—the Hays’ other guest this past week and more—were out.”

“I wonder what Harry came back for,” mused Adams. Just before Henry James had left America in 1883 after his parents’ deaths and all the problems created by his father’s will and properties in Albany, Adams had heard him swear that that would be his last visit to America. His home now was in England and Europe, their old friend had said.

“Whatever brought him back, he’s trying to keep the visit confidential,” said Holmes.

Adams steepled his fingers and tapped his bearded chin. “Why would Harry want to do that? Unless . . . but William is in good health and away with his family to Italy or Switzerland or somewhere the last I heard, and I believe there were no complications last year with Harry’s sister Alice’s will. Miss Loring brought the poor girl’s ashes home last year to be interred in the family plot in Cambridge.”

“Perhaps the confidentiality relates to James’s companion—or, rather, companions—on this trip,” Holmes said softly, leaning forward over the desk. “Two men. Both rather strange, from what I hear.”

Adams allowed his steepled fingers to tap his lips. If Wendell’s gossip was about some physical liaison that Harry finally allowed to occur with some other man—on his encounters with Harry in England and the Continent, Adams had sensed the almost-perfectly-hidden infatuation that James felt toward some of his younger male artist friends—Adams most assuredly did not want to hear about it. He hoped that his expression and posture, while seemingly neutral, conveyed this message to the often too-blunt and sometimes indiscreet Wendell.

“Who are these traveling companions?” Adams asked with no great show of curiosity. “Certainly they must be above reproach if Harry is introducing them to the Hays.” Rumors of Oscar Wilde’s private behavior crossed his mind but he smiled away such an absurd thought about Henry James. Harry, while loving gossip as much as the rest of their male epistolary circle, was perhaps the most essentially private person Adams had ever known.

“Certainly, certainly,” Holmes was muttering. “But one of the guests—Hay says that he left some days ago—was supposedly the Norwegian, or perhaps it was Swede, Jan Sigerson you may have read about in the past year or two. An explorer of some sort.”

Adams dropped his small hands to his lap. “Sigerson . . . Sigerson . . . yes, I vaguely recall the name. Norwegian, I believe. He was in the news briefly a year or two ago for climbing some mountain or finding some pass in the Himalayas, wasn’t it? Or spending some time in Tibet perhaps. That
is
unusual.” Adams was speaking as a veteran world traveler. After Clover’s death, he’d wandered around the South Seas for almost a year with the artist John La Farge. It had been a telegram from Paris . . . from Lizzie Cameron . . . that had brought him rushing back around the planet like a fool.

Adams set that out of his mind.

“Yes, I remember something about a Jan Sigerson,” he said again. “So the explorer has come to America with Harry. Odd, but I fail to see any reason for Harry to keep his presence in America secret from old friends, unless Mr. Sigerson desperately wishes to avoid publicity, and Harry was waiting for him to depart before notifying the rest of us.”

“It’s Hay’s second guest, also James’s traveling companion, that has the servants buzzing,” said Holmes, who brought out his watch from where it was set in his vest pocket next to his Phi Beta Kappa key and checked the time. It was a short ride to the train station from Adams’s home and Henry had noticed that Holmes had his cab waiting.

“Do you want me to guess the second gentleman’s name?” asked Adams with another friendly smile.

“You wouldn’t in a hundred years,” said Associate Justice Holmes with heavy, measured tones. “It is Sherlock Holmes.”

Adams laughed heartily, actually slapping his knees under the desk.

“You laugh,” observed Holmes. Adams’s old acquaintance—they had known each other for more than thirty years—had never been known for his sense of humor, certainly not in the way John Hay and Clarence King might have been, but since he had taken up his black robes of the Massachusetts court, he seemed especially humorless to Adams.

“But isn’t Sherlock Holmes a fictional character,” said Adams, not really making it a question. “A creation of Arthur Conan Doyle? Did Harry bring Mr. Doyle on a visit to Washington?”

“No, he brought Sherlock Holmes,” repeated Holmes. “I almost got John Hay to admit it, although he seemed bound to confidence. Not only have his servants been whispering about the London detective being a guest in the house, but Clara Hay, after making her friends take an absolute oath of secrecy, has told about a hundred of those friends of Sherlock Holmes’s days in the house.”

“Perhaps an English relative of yours?” asked Adams, his mischievous smile back.

“Certainly not that I know of,” said Holmes, who was looking at his watch again. “I must go if I’m to get my luggage sorted out at the station before boarding.”

But before he stood, Adams said, “Was this Sherlock Holmes the second lodger at Mrs. Stevens’s home that you attempted to see along with Harry this morning?”

“Yes,” said Holmes, already moving with much longer strides with Henry toward the foyer, where the head butler, Addison, stood waiting with the justice’s coat, hat, and cane.

“What would you like me to do?” Adams said softly as the two men stood in the open doorway. The late-March morning air was still chill. “Watch out my window and send you a report on whether this Sherlock Holmes looks fictional or not?”

“You still do not dine out all that much, do you, Henry?” Holmes asked bluntly.

“Not really,” said Adams. In the seven years since Clover’s death, he’d come to be known as a recluse and now the invitations—save from Clarence King when he was in town or John Hay next door, old members of the Five of Hearts—no longer came in. “You know how it is in this town,” Adams heard himself saying. “If you accept someone’s dinner invitation, then the favor must be returned. I dine here now usually with the occasional fellow old widower or young bachelor.”

“Well, you’ll be invited by Hay to dine Sunday evening with a young widower whom we both know well and, since this Mr. Sherlock Holmes is reputed to be one of the other guests, I had hoped you’d write me about
that
.”

“A young widower whom we both know well . . .” began Adams as he walked Holmes outside under the arches and that damned cross. “You don’t mean . . .”

“I
do
mean,” said Holmes, almost crossly to Adams’s sensitive ear. “The Boy.”

“The Boy . . . oh, dear me,” was all that Adams could muster.

He waved to Holmes’s carriage—knowing full well that Wendell never looked back—until it disappeared around the corner.

“The Boy,” muttered Adams, feeling that he had made a great mistake in coming home several days sooner than he’d originally planned. “Oh dear me.”

H
olmes much preferred their new living areas in Mrs. Stevens’s home to being a guest at the home of John and Clara Hay. It was true that even here at this boarding house, Henry James was still residing in the same
house
as Holmes, but the door to James’s bed-sitting-room was down a long hallway and they no longer had to see each other constantly or to share each meal. But first and foremost in importance was his freedom—the second story had its own outside door and wooden staircase and each tenant received a key to that door. Holmes was free now to come and go whenever he pleased—and in whatever guise he chose—without scrutiny by Henry James or the Hays’ servants.

This morning he was in no disguise; he wore his London-tailored suit, waistcoat, top hat and gloves, long black scarf, and was carrying his cane sheathing a three-sided razor-sharp 30-inch sword.

Across Lafayette Square, Holmes hailed a hansom cab and told the driver to take him to the Metropolitan Police Department Headquarters at the corner of Fifth and Louisiana. Once there he had the driver park across the street from the old rundown precinct house.