“If Clifton was this . . . Lucan,” said Hay, his perfectly manicured fingers still surrounding the photograph on his desktop, “then who was Rebecca Lorne?”
“Lucan’s mother, whom he murdered shortly after I believe they worked together to arrange the death of Clover Adams,” said Holmes.
He took the photograph from Hay and carefully set it away in his jacket. “This is an earlier photograph—I’ve had it for years, gentlemen—of Lucan’s mother, the late American-born opera diva and actress and successful blackmailer named Irene Adler.”
CHAPTER 19
Holmes was following his man on the afternoon train from Washington to New York City.
The detective this afternoon was the perfect image of a poorly paid, mid-level bureaucrat or office worker: his dark suit was presentable, but only just; his shoes were shined but down at the heel; his homburg was brushed, but showing its age; his battered old briefcase was overstuffed with folders, papers, and pens. This particular bureaucrat was red-headed, with a mop of unruly curls escaping from the homburg on every side and red cheek-whiskers—what the Americans had called “sideburns” ever since a Civil War general named Burnside had made them popular—coming almost to the corner of his mouth. Prominent, yellowed, and somewhat carious teeth gave the clerk a rabbity look (and Holmes knew that people tended to look away, or at least not look carefully, at faces where prominent and poorly cared for teeth were on display). His cheeks were red not with a flush but with what seemed to be a permanent—and unhealthy looking—reddish-pink rash.
Another reason not to stare too closely.
This bureaucrat or clerk was reading the mid-day Washington paper and every time Holmes’s prey looked back from where he was sitting near the front of this railway carriage, all the man would have seen was the raised paper.
Holmes really did not want to spend this afternoon of March 27—the same Monday on which he’d spent part of the morning revealing his identity to John Hay and Clarence King—tailing this man to New York, but he realized that it might be now or never. There was a complex spiderweb woven around the death of Clover Adams, and Holmes knew that before he could penetrate it, he would have to follow several of the strands—at least those of Clover’s closest friends near the time of her death—to wherever they might lead.
This one might well lead nowhere and Holmes would rather have been spending his afternoon organizing the years of typewritten envelopes and correspondences that Hay had promised him. He also had to break into Henry Adams’s mansion next door to the Hays. This would have to wait until after dark tomorrow night, Tuesday. Clara Hay had told him that Adams’s servants, who’d been permitted a few days of holiday this extended weekend during Mr. Adams’s extended absence, would be returning on Wednesday afternoon, the 29th of April, to begin the process of opening up and airing out the house in preparation for their master’s return on Friday, the first day of May.
So it was now or possibly never concerning following his man, and Holmes peered over the top of his raised newspaper and watched the broad back and head of short-cropped blond hair. It was quite possible that his quarry might bolt out of the carriage at one of the many stops on this line to New York and Holmes must be prepared to follow him at a second’s notice. And to do so while looking casual about it.
After almost two full years away, Holmes missed London. He missed his rooms at 221 B Baker Street and he missed Mrs. Hudson—and even Watson—but mostly he missed the city. At one point, to prepare for his future profession as Consulting Detective, Holmes had spent a year driving a London hansom cab. He rather flattered himself that he knew every street, boulevard, thoroughfare, and alley in the City. More than that, Holmes had set his goal to memorize every business and manufactory and warehouse and noble townhouse in the City—a Herculean task, made even more impossible by the fact that, since the 1870’s, Old London was being torn down, torn up, and rebuilt in a crazed hurry like no other city on earth. Business establishments that may have stayed at the same address for a century and a half were suddenly out of business or moved to much lesser surroundings because of the hurtling cost of rent as the “trendier” neighborhoods in the city were fruitful and multiplied.
Most importantly, Holmes knew the trains and times in general in England and specifically in London. He and Watson had each worn out their respective Bradshaw’s. Mycroft Holmes—to the detective’s chagrin, since his portly brother never really went anywhere—had memorized the national Bradshaw’s Guide and could give any timetable for any railway at any time of the day or night for any connections.
Sherlock Holmes felt that Mycroft’s little trick rather amounted to showing off.
But at least in England, Holmes always had his yellow-covered Bradshaw’s in his pocket or portmanteau. Here in America, he’d found nothing comparable to the great Bradshaw’s Guide . . . only untrustworthy timetables for this specific railway company or that one. He could only hope that this train actually was going to New York City.
While they rumbled north, Holmes thought about Henry Adams, the late Clover Adams, Clarence King, John Hay, and Clara Hay. They all held secrets relevant to Holmes’s investigation, even Clover Adams. The dead, Holmes knew, hug their secrets tightly in the grave, but not as tightly as the living.
He was aware that Henry James had known Clover Adams a long time, even before she had married Henry Adams. And Holmes had met few men in his life and career who hugged their secrets closer than did Henry James. But he already knew the secret-of-secrets that James would die to protect.
They hadn’t discussed it, of course, but both Sherlock Holmes the detective and Henry James the writer were celibate. Holmes had given up any plans for a romantic or a sexual life so that he could devote one hundred percent of his time and vital energies to his career. If pressed, James would—Holmes knew—claim the same; and he’d already written that now, as an “old bachelor”, he should never marry because he was already married to his art.
But Holmes knew that there was more to the story. There had been many attractive young women and men on the ship coming over from France—the men and women often walking the promenade deck arm-in-arm, men with men, women with women.
The detective didn’t know whether James played whist or poker or bridge or any other card game where concealment was a great part of the game, but he knew that James’s impassive countenance would be an asset in such a competition. He showed little reaction, even to surprising statements or revelations. But once, unaware that Holmes was even looking his way, Henry James’s gaze had paused for no more than a second on two loud, laughing, carefree young American men, walking arm-in-arm along the deck in the way American men do so freely, and Holmes caught the complex flicker of reactions in James’s gaze: envy, wistfulness, longing, and—again—that vague hunger. The hunger had not seemed primarily sexual in nature to Holmes’s trained eye but it was most certainly an emotional reaction.
Holmes didn’t care about this fact, only that it was James’s deepest secret—that and some hidden shame about his health and back pains and relationship to his older brother William—and what made Holmes care even less was that it could not have any direct bearing on either the serious business that had brought the detective to America or on this odd little case of Clover Adams’s death.
* * *
After far too many suburban stops, the train from Washington finally pulled into New York’s Grand Central Depot at the junction of 42nd Street and Park Avenue. This three-story Victorian pile was not the new six-story “Grand Central Station” that both Holmes and James would see after the turn of the century, much less the “Grand Central Terminal” that would stand at the same spot from 1913 on for a century into the future.
This “Grand Central Depot”, Holmes could see, was a hodge-podge wedding-cake of a place with dark portals opening for more rails that would allow a few horse-drawn trains to continue toward downtown Manhattan and oversized signs for the NEW YORK AND HARLEM, NEW YORK AND NEW HAVEN, and NEW Y
ORK AND HUDSON RIVER lines.
Holmes’s man, obviously familiar with the maze of connections here, hurried out of the stopped carriage, up flights of stairs, across a crowded open space, and outside, where he ran to catch a horse-drawn trolley headed down Park Avenue. There was nothing Holmes could do but run even harder—a solid sprint with his side whiskers flying and one hand holding his homburg in place—and leap onto the trolley at the last second.
If his prey looked back, he would be most obvious. But Holmes could see that the man he was following had already settled into a seat far forward on the trolley and was paying no attention to anything but the newspaper he’d opened in front of him.
Holmes knew that his man belonged to several rather elite (for Americans) clubs, including two where he kept a room—the Union Club at 69th Street and Park Avenue and the Century Club at 42 East 15th Street. The man also had a permanent room at the Brunswick Hotel at Madison Square at Fifth Avenue and 25th Street.
Holmes knew that the Union Club was not the immediate destination, because his target stayed on the slow trolley as the horses took it further south on Park Avenue. The Union Club’s 69th St. and Park Avenue address obviously would mean that Holmes’s man would have gone north from Grand Central Terminus at 42nd Street. The same applied to his quarry’s rooms at the Century Club, since that elite institution had recently moved to 7 West 43rd Street, which would also have required a turn north from the terminal.
If the man he was following was heading toward the Brunswick Hotel—where Holmes knew he kept a permanent room—he should get off the trolley no further south than 25th Street, since the Brunswick was two blocks east where Fifth Avenue crossed 25th St.
But the man, hunched over slightly and seeming lost in the afternoon edition of the New York paper he’d picked up at Grand Central, stayed on the trolley past both the 25th and then 23rd Street stops. So the destination wasn’t the Union Club, the Century Club, or his much-frequented Brunswick Hotel.
At Union Square, the trolley took the slight jog to avoid the transition from Park Avenue to Broadway and followed 4th Avenue for five blocks to Lafayette Street. Holmes’s man showed no interest in getting off anywhere along these blocks just above and below Canal Street. When Lafayette Street merged with Centre Street, and City Hall came within view, the man stood on the running board to hop off the trolley. Holmes let the horses plod on another half block before he also jumped off and doubled back through the throng of pedestrians, keeping his target’s head and shoulders in view at all times.
Holmes immediately saw their destination and was a little surprised. He’d imagined that if they were going to cross the East River, his quarry would take one of the ferries. The fact that they weren’t going to a ferry landing pleased Holmes; he’d been in New York City several times since the Brooklyn Bridge was finished a decade earlier in 1883, but he’d never had reason or opportunity to cross it before. As with Henry James a week and a half earlier, a ferry had always seemed a more reasonable way to make the switch of railway connections from Manhattan to Staten Island or Brooklyn.
He watched his man pay his toll at the ornamental iron tollbooth and climb the broad iron stairway to the waiting platform. Half a dozen heads behind him in the queue, Holmes paid his nickel and joined the crowd on the platform. The train cars crossing the bridge followed their course in the center of the span with the pedestrian walkway above it and the roadbeds for carriages and other conveyances running along on either side, and Holmes knew that the trains made no stops on the bridge. Thus he felt perfectly comfortable taking a seat and relaxing in the rear of the car his man had entered, his back to his quarry. He could see reflections of the front of the car in nearby windows, but it would be difficult—not to mention senseless—for his target to jump from one of the train cars in mid-span.
Holmes noted for future reference—although he doubted he’d ever have a case concerning the Brooklyn Bridge railway cars—that the cars were very much like the newest and most luxurious cars on New York’s elevated trains: double-sliding doors opening from open platforms decorated with elaborately worked wrought-iron, comfortable rows of seats, and large windows.
New Yorkers and Brooklynites had long since grown accustomed to the fact that the cars had no engines pulling or pushing them, but the occasional tourist exclaimed when their car began moving smoothly away from the station, seemingly under its own power. Holmes knew that down under the rails there was an ever-moving steel traction cable that the cars hooked onto for motivation. Holmes knew that San Francisco had a much more elaborate web of cable cars and that the grades were much steeper there. Still, one could feel this Brooklyn Bridge car climbing up the visible grade of the suspended roadways and superstructure.
Sherlock Holmes was not a man who usually went out of his way to be impressed either by works of nature or works of man. The latter he found largely irrelevant to his work except for the layouts of interior murder scenes and the like; the former he always considered ephemeral in terms of the expanse of time and mankind’s tiny part in it. Holmes had studied his Darwin when he was a boy and it had left him not only with the feeling that he and everyone he might know had their place in the world, and then would know it no more, in a blink of an eye, but even the Pyramids and other “great works” were as ephemeral as a castle of sand on the beach at Brighton.
So cathedrals and great buildings of any age did not move Sherlock Holmes to any level of emotion—with the few exceptions such as London Bridge or Big Ben, the latter heard more often than seen through the City’s deadly fogs. They were touchstones of the city he worked in and, in his own rigidly controlled way, loved.
But now, looking up, Holmes had to admit that the stone towers of the Brooklyn Bridge—they were just passing under the first one set out in the river—were impressive indeed. For many decades, the tallest structure in New York City had been the spire of Trinity Church at 284 feet. Just three years earlier, New York’s World Building, at the corner of Park Row and Franklin Street, became the tallest structure in the city at 309 feet. And while this stone arch in the tower that the train was presently passing through was only 117 feet and the height of the towers only 159 feet above the roadways and rail tracks, 276 and a half feet above the river itself, the sheer stone-Gothic strength of the towers impressed the unimpressionable Holmes to some degree.
Holmes knew that remembering such precise numbers was just a waste of his precious mental attic space—remembering the heights of the arches and towers and roadway of this bridge would almost certainly never help him in a case—but he’d encountered the information during one of his many sleepless nights spent reading one of the twenty-five volumes of his newer, 1889, 9th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Watson had called that purchase a foolish waste of money since Holmes already owned the 6th and 8th Editions, but Holmes treasured his 9th Edition. Unfortunately—and although his brother Mycroft was the one with the amazing mathematical abilities—once Sherlock Holmes was exposed to facts in the form of numbers, he found it all but impossible to forget them.
This seemingly miraculous bridge supported by cables descending from two stone towers that rose 276 feet above the river.
America, he thought, and not for the first time, is a nation with huge dreams and not infrequently the ability to realize them.
Meanwhile, the car descended the grade beyond the second tower and slowed as it approached the Brooklyn terminal, even more of an elaborate and painted iron structure than on the New York side, with a gentle release of the ingenious “Paine’s grip” device freeing them from the cable. Holmes knew about Colonel W. H. Paine’s gripping-releasing device only because he’d been hired in the mid-1880’s by one of Paine’s executives to look into a patent infringement of the grip, then in use only in San Francisco, by a would-be cable-car company in Paris.
Holmes followed his man down onto the street and then to a short series of horse-drawn trolley rides, finally walking half a block behind the man as he strolled southe
ast down a rough cobblestoned extension of Flatbush Avenue. His target never looked back over his shoulder or paused at a window front to check in the reflection to see if he was being followed.
Brooklyn, Holmes vaguely knew, had once been—save for Irish and Negro areas along the river to the north—a wealthy and self-satisfied city of wide, leaf-shaded avenues and many stately homes. The neighborhood they were in now, not that far from where they had demolished so many old structures to allow for the approaches to the Bridge, was far from stately. An apparently self-respecting three-story home, its trim and siding brightly painted in the most popular current colors of rose or aqua or mint green or sunset orange, might have on either side of it a rundown old structure whose inhabitants had abandoned all efforts at repair or upkeep.
It was at one of the nicer homes on Hudson Street that Holmes’s man bounded up the four front steps, unlocked the front door, shouted something that Holmes could not quite hear from his place more than half a block away, and was immediately engulfed in hugs from two little girls and a woman with a babe in arms.
The girls and babe and woman were Negroes—the woman especially ebony in color. The two girls in clean, white shifts were lighter shades of tan in complexion but had kinky hair carefully brushed, braided, and tied up in fresh ribbons. There was no doubt that this was an affectionate homecoming. This surprised Holmes a bit. The man Holmes had been tailing all day was white.
* * *
“Yeah, they got three children. The two older ones are girls,” said Mrs. Banes, the woman with a missing front tooth.