“Oh, he’s a master of disguise!” Clara had gushed, clapping her hands together as if in prayer. “What an honor to have the World’s First and Foremost Consulting Detective as a guest here in our home. I cannot wait to tell Marie and Ellen and . . .”
“You must tell no one, my dear,” interrupted Hay, holding one finger up in stern admonition. “Mr. Holmes is here in disguise on what I take to be a very serious mission indeed, and one in which his life may be in danger if the news of his presence in America were to become known. This is a good part of the reason that Harry has asked us to keep his visit with Holmes confidential as well.”
“Oh, yes, of course . . . I understand . . . but after the adventure is over,” said Clara Hay, her steepled fingers moving to her lips as if sealing them for the time being. She was still smiling broadly. “I must bring down the January issue of Harper’s Weekly with the shocking story ‘The Cardboard Box’ in it! Oh, and the February Harper’s with the ‘Yellow Face’ tale in it. We must ask Mr. Holmes’s opinion on Dr. Watson’s chronicling of these adventures!”
Hay took his wife’s hands in his own. “Clara, darling, we must not make our guest feel self-conscious. Mr. Holmes is not the author of these . . . published adventures . . . you must remember. There might be elements of exaggeration or other possibly embarrassing parts to the tales that Mr. Holmes may feel uncomfortable about.”
“Of course, of course,” said Clara. But she was still smiling. And James was sure, as he hurried upstairs to fetch his umbrella so he could leave before Holmes awoke, that the copies of Harper’s Weekly would make their way downstairs and into Holmes’s sphere of attention before the day was out.
* * *
When James had told Hay that “I might drop in at the Library of Congress” to browse a bit, Hay had insisted on writing “a little note of introduction”. James hadn’t thought that a note of introduction would be needed to use what he understood was a public library, but he’d tucked the note in his jacket pocket and not thought about it until stopped by some minor librarians just inside the door of the cluttered Library part of the Capitol Building.
Naturally, Hay being Hay, the “note of introduction” was to the Librarian of Congress, a certain Ainsworth Rand Spofford. The lowly librarians at the entrance desk had leaped out of their seats upon reading the note from Hay, fluttered like startled pigeons, and then the chief amongst these lowly workers personally led Henry James up two flights of stairs to the Librarian of Congress’s office.
Spofford himself was a thin, sickly looking old fellow with a scraggly gray beard and long, lank hair that fell away from a part that was more bald pate than part. His face was dominated by a nose that James thought might be up to chiseling stone over at the Library’s new site.
The Librarian came around his huge desk to shake James by the hand, although it was more a limp offering of a dead, white, boneless thing than a handshake. “Welcome, Mr. James, welcome indeed. The Library of Congress is honored to have you visit us. How can we be of service today?”
James was, for the instant, a bit nonplussed. He’d imagined his research here as being anonymous, invisible.
“Looking in on our collection of your own wonderful novels and collections perhaps?” prompted Ainsworth Rand Spofford. He was still standing next to James and seemed to be feeling out of his element when not sitting behind his huge desk.
“Oh, gracious, no, no,” demurred James. “Just a few minutes of . . . research . . . one might generously call it.”
“Of course!” cried Spofford, rubbing his bony hands together as if the two men had just consummated a major business deal. The Librarian touched an elaborate gadget on his desk, and a second later a hidden door in a wall of books to one side opened and a tall, thin lady entered silently.
“This is Miss Miller, my chief librarian assistant,” said Spofford. “Our honored guest today, Miss Miller, the famous American writer Henry James.”
Since Miss Miller had stopped three yards away, too far for even an American gender-egalitarian handshake, the famous American writer Henry James bowed slightly.
Miss Miller, James saw, was a newspaper cartoonist’s caricature of a librarian. Tall, thin to the point of visible boniness, hair done up in an unattractive bun, dressed in an ugly brown cotton shift with what looked to be a man’s shirt buttoned beneath it, tiny Benjamin Franklin bifocals perched on the end of her long nose, and with a name tag on the slight bump of what could be her left breast under the burlap-looking fabric of her shift. D. MILLER.
D. Miller, thought James. Please, God, no.
“Miss Miller’s first name is Daisy, so the two of you should be well-acquainted,” said Librarian Ainsworth Rand Spofford with a graveled bark that must have been some form of laughter.
Miss Miller blushed mightily. James looked down at his shoes, which had picked up some unsightly dust during his walk from the construction site.
“Mr. James would like to conduct some research, Miss Miller,” Spofford was saying. “If you need any additional help, Mr. James, please call upon me at once . . .” And the limp hand was offered again.
James touched the relic and followed Miss Miller out through the door in the bookcase.
The mere librarian . . . no capital “L” with her . . . led him through a warren of book-cluttered small offices and then out into a narrow, three-story-high corridor which James, with a sense of shock, realized was the Library of Congress itself. Or part of it. Books not only filled every available shelf but were stacked on the main floor, behind the iron railings on each mezzanine, and on each available table, desk, and surface.
Miss Miller caught his shocked gaze.
“When Librarian Spofford assumed his post in eighteen sixty-four, appointed by President Lincoln himself,” she said in a surprisingly sensual voice, “the Library of Congress had fewer than sixty thousand volumes, much of the collection based upon Thomas Jefferson’s original gift of his private library. Now we have almost four hundred thousand . . . passing the Boston Public Library as the richest library-source in America . . . and Librarian Spofford fully intends for the Library to have one million volumes by the time we move to the new Thomas Jefferson Building in three years.”
“Commendable,” James heard himself murmur as they moved down the crowded corridor, dodging piles of books. “Most commendable. Wonderful.”
They paused at a junction of corridors. More heaps of books visible everywhere below the narrow, vaulted corridor ceiling three stories above.
“How may I help you, Mr. James?”
“Ah . . . I was thinking . . .” stammered the famous author. “That is, I wondered if you might have a copy of a rather obscure book of physics or mathematics titled The Dynamics of an Asteroid?”
Miss Miller laughed softly and her laugh was as pleasant and melodious as her superior’s had been grating. “Professor Moriarty’s book! Of course, we have it, though you are right, Mr. James . . . it is very rare. But Librarian Spofford has continued the Library’s original goal of advancing its collection of science and mathematical references.”
James put both hands on his umbrella handle and nodded, trying to hide how startled he’d been by her quick recognition of the volume’s author.
“It’s good you asked for assistance, sir,” said Miss Miller. “For we’ve had to put The Dynamics of an Asteroid on a restricted viewing basis.”
“Really? For such an obscure and technical title? Why is that, Miss Miller?”
“Why, after the Reuters News Agency story two years ago—as well as the story The New York Times reprinted from the London Times—of Professor James Moriarty’s disappearance at Reichenbach Falls with the English detective Sherlock Holmes, we’ve had far too many requests by common visitors to the Library to see this valuable book. We were afraid that without supervision, someone would pilfer it for novelty value if nothing else.”
“Ahhh,” said James.
“This way, Mr. James.” Miss Miller led him toward a stai
rcase with only a narrow aisle on the iron steps between more unruly stacks of books.
* * *
The next two hours were an odd education for Henry James.
He would have never found Professor James Moriarty’s works or any references to him had he been left to his own devices, as he’d planned so furtively to be, but Miss Miller tracked down everything the United States Library of Congress had on the now famous—or infamous—professor.
The first two books she brought him were the much-mentioned The Dynamics of an Asteroid—two hundred and nine pages of impenetrable equations with very few words, just as advertised—and then a thinner book, the 68-page A Treatise on the Binomial Theorem. The latter had been published way back in 1871, the same year, according to a brief note in the back, that James Nolan Moriarty received his twin degrees, in mathematics and applied physics, from University College, Dublin. The book had been released by a small Dublin publishing house which James had never heard of and was dedicated to Carl Gottfried Neumann, a professor at the University of Leipzig.
James had never heard of Professor Neumann, but Miss Miller assured him that he was an important figure, mentioned frequently in German and other foreign journals of mathematics, and even brought him Neumann’s book Das Dirichtlet’sche Prinzip in seiner Anwendung auf die Reimann’schen Flächen to prove it.
James might have paused to wonder why a student at Trinity College in Dublin was so advanced that he dedicated his first book of mathematical theory to a professor in Leipzig, but instead he explained to Miss Miller that he was primarily interested in biographical information about Professor Moriarty—and any photographs of the professor, if those were handy.
He could see the curiosity in her eyes, but Miss Miller was far too much the professional to inquire Are you thinking of writing a book about the man who killed Sherlock Holmes? She hurried off to find more references in various science sections of the maze of stacks, shelves, and locked rooms that was the Library of Congress.
In less than an hour, James had every reference the Library had on the man Sherlock Holmes, in print, had called the Napoleon of Crime and, in person, had insisted was a figment of his imagination.
Even dates and places of birth did not agree. One Who’s Who in European Mathematics from 1884 stated that Professor James Moriarty—no middle name given—author of the Treatise on the Binomial Theorem, had been born in Dublin in 1846. A reference book for the University College, Dublin, which showed a Professor James N. Moriarty as being a professor of mathematics there from 1872 until 1878, gave the man’s year of birth as 1849 and the place of birth as Greystones, which Miss Miller helped James look up in an atlas of Ireland and which turned out to be a small village between Dublin and Wicklow.
So if Moriarty were alive today, if he hadn’t died in 1891 at Reichenbach Falls, how old would he be—47 or 44?
The next shock for James was when he found the copyright date of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, published by an imprint he’d never heard of in London—1890. Even if Moriarty had been born at the later date given, he would have been 41 years old in the year the book was published. Old, from the little that Henry James understood, for a mathematician’s first major publication. Some don at Oxford had once told James, in passing, that mathematicians such as Charles Dodgson, known to the world as Lewis Carroll, usually published their best work when they were younger than thirty.
Thumbing through the literal hieroglyphics—to James—of the mathematical equations of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, he found himself muttering aloud, “If I only had the vaguest idea of what this volume is about . . .”
“I’ve heard some of the visiting scientists discuss it,” said Miss Miller, thinking that he had addressed her with the question. “It seems that the asteroid in question creates what is known to astronomers and mathematicians as a Three-Body-Problem. Take any two celestial bodies, and their gravitational attraction, tidal effect on the other, tumbling, three-dimensional orientations, and so forth can be plotted with both modern and classical mathematical techniques. But add a third body . . . evidently then the tumbling, orientation, and even trajectory of an asteroid becomes all but incalculable. Professor James Moriarty’s great renown in this book came, if I understand the scientists and mathematicians correctly, from pointing out what cannot be calculated.”
“Very interesting,” said James, although her summary of others’ analysis was useless to him. After a moment he spoke again, “So it appears that there is no chance of finding a photograph of Professor Moriarty.”
“Please come with me, Mr. James.” Miss Miller—James tried not to think of her unfortunate first name—marched ahead of him with elbows pumping, a soldier going off to war.
They had to climb into what had to be the dusty attic of the Capitol (although not under the great dome as far as James could tell) and Miss Miller had to unlock three more doors before they came to a room filled with thousands of carefully filed journals.
“Mathematics . . . European . . . conferences . . .” muttered Miss Miller to herself, gesturing behind her back for James to take the only seat available in the room. A low chair at what seemed to be a student’s desk in the center of the impossibly cluttered room. James was certain that he would have nightmares about this Library for years to come.
“Here!” she cried at last and brought a German journal with a title too long and umlauted and Fraktured for James to bother trying to decipher. She opened to page thirty-six and stabbed her finger down at a line of eight middle-aged men standing in a line facing the camera. The caption, in German, beneath the photograph said “Conference on Advanced Mathematics and Astronomical Physics, University of Leipzig, July, 1892.”
The names were listed under each man, but James didn’t need to read them. He saw Moriarty at once, on the far right—the same balding head, straggling dark hair, reptilian forward thrusting of his neck, and hint of tongue showing between the thin, pale lips. It was precisely the photograph that he’d illicitly taken from Holmes’s jacket and peeked at that very morning. Holmes must have torn it out of a copy of this very journal.
“Professor James N. Moriarty, London.” No university affiliation given. But the date of the conference—July, 1892. More than a full year after Holmes and the newspaper accounts recorded Moriarty as dying at Reichenbach Falls in May of 1891!
Satisfied that he would find out no more about this particular Lazarus at the Library of Congress, James went through the motions of taking a few notes and assured the apologetic Miss Miller that no, no, despite the apparent paucity of information available, she had been of inestimable help to him. Inestimable.
He stood and turned to go then but could not even find his way through the attic to the stairs. Miss Miller inquired as to which exit from the Capitol he wished to use.
“The main . . . front . . . entrance, I believe,” said James.
“Wonderful,” said the helpful Miss Miller. “You’ll get some glimpses of the actual Capitol.”
She was his Aeneas down several flights of stairs, around endless stacks of books that would have stopped him in his tracks, through the long, high, cluttered corridors, and then out into the formal marble vaults and under the majestic dome of the United States Capitol Building itself. Henry James was impressed not by the colossal Roman size of the structure, but by its almost Grecian white purity. And the early afternoon light shining down onto the marble floors was lovely.
Out under the high portico and with the grand columns framing a view back toward the Executive Mansion less than a mile away, James turned to the librarian. “Once again, Miss Miller, I must thank you most sincerely for your inestimable help on my little research errand.”
He tipped his hat and started to descend but stopped and turned back when Miss Miller called his name.
“Mr. James, I . . .” She was wringing her hands and blushing. “I may not get another chance, so I hope you will not think it impertinent of me if I take this opportunity to thank you so much for writin
g what I consider such a lovely and wise novel about a woman’s mind.”
Daisy Miller? thought James. The poor lady has so much to learn about life. He’d certainly had when he wrote that popular but shallow confection so many years earlier.
“Thank you, Miss Miller,” he said smoothly. “But the eponymous title pales in comparison to its namesake’s true beauty and wisdom.”
“Eponymous . . .” repeated Miss Daisy Miller and then blushed an even deeper crimson. “No, Mr. James . . . I did not mean your novel Daisy Miller. That was adequate as an . . . entertainment. No, I was referring to your wonderful The Portrait of a Lady.”
“Ahhh, so kind,” murmured James through his beard and tipped his hat again and bowed slightly and then turned to umbrella-tap his way down the wide, white stone steps. Adequate as an entertainment? Who did this homely prune of a spinster think she was?
* * *
It was already mid-afternoon. Not ready to return to the Hays’ home, James hunted for a place near the Capitol where he might have a light luncheon. He’d imagined a bistro or charcuterie, but managed to find only a delicatessen sort of place—obviously the kind of establishment attuned to the needs of busy government workers and clerks with only a brief break time for their luncheons—that served only rude sandwiches and tepid coffee. But it had empty tables outside at this after-luncheon hour and he was glad to sit in the shade and sip his coffee and think about the import of what he’d seen and learned in the Library of Congress.
Until this afternoon, James had been determined to say good-bye to the Hays, preferably before Henry Adams returned home later in this week, and to return to London on his own. Whatever wave of despair had driven him to Paris and the bank of the Seine at night had passed over, dissipated, and he only wanted to extricate himself from this sticky web of disguises and assumed identities that this Holmes-person, whoever he really was, had entangled him in.