“It must be because of the wounds,” said James. “Those terrible gunshot wounds inflicted upon you by Lucan Adler.”
Incredibly, inexplicably, Sherlock Holmes smiled. He flung his long black scarf around his neck in the flamboyant manner James had become accustomed to, while cocking his head back, chin jutting strongly beneath that odd, almost lighthearted, smile.
“Not at all,” said Holmes. “The wounds are a price of my profession. But it’s true I seek out Lucan Adler for a deeper reason than an attempt to save untold public figures from the world’s most terrible anarchical assassin. You see, Mr. James, Sebastian Moran took the small child Lucan away from Irene Adler, claiming him and raising him as his bastard even though he never gave the boy his last name. He trained Lucan in every dark art of murder that he knew, and young Lucan, no older than twenty-one years of age, learned even more on his own, surpassing Moran as both a marksman and an assassin.”
Holmes looked directly into James’s eyes, the detective’s fathomless gaze meeting James’s frightened but deeply curious and unblinking gray gaze in return.
“Trust me that I have more reasons for finding Lucan Adler than I can share at this time,” said Holmes. “He needs to be put to death. But I hope to speak with him first.”
PART 2
The Damned Cross in the Stonework
Henry Adams awoke in his own bed in his Lafayette Square mansion and for a moment he was disoriented. The air seemed too cool. The bed too familiar. The morning light too soft. And the floor was not moving.
Adams had enjoyed his last two months of lounging in Havana with a friend, then spending a fortnight at Senator Don Cameron’s place at Coffin Point on St. Helena Island, and—most of all—he’d enjoyed “geologizing on the coral reefs” with the zoologist Alexander Agassiz, son of the famous geologist Louis Agassiz, on Agassiz’s comfortable yacht Wild Duck.
But now he was home—a place he’d mostly preferred not to be in the seven years since his wife’s suicide—and after his bath he found his clothes laid out for him by his own valet rather than by one of Don Cameron’s people.
Having been so emotionally solitary in the past seven years, Adams had expected to feel some sense of relief when his shay—he’d been met at the station, as requested, only by his driver—had pulled up in front of his home on H Street next to the Hays’ similar mansion fronting on Sixteenth Street, if for no other reason than his constant daily socializing, first with Phillips in Havana, then with the Camerons, then with Agassiz, and finally with the Camerons yet again, would be at an end.
But instead he’d felt a wall of depression wash over him as he approached the familiar arches of his front door.
Clover hadn’t died in this house, of course, or he’d never have returned to it. They’d been planning to move in on New Year’s Day 1886 after the two years of elaborate work inside and out was finished but Clover had drunk her developing-chemicals poison on December six.
But the damned cross she’d insisted on, without his approval, was there above the elaborately scrolled stonework above the arches.
He and Clover had been at Beverly Farms that July when the cross—the damned cross—had been added to the façade of the stonework. Henry had asked his friend from the State Department Library, Ted Dwight, to oversee that important bit of stonework and engraving and he’d written to Dwight—“If you see workmen carving a Christian emblem, remonstrate with them like a father.”
The place between the windows above the main pillars needed something decorative, insisted their architect, H. H. Richardson, so Henry had suggested to Clover that a peacock be carved there since—to his way of thinking—the entire new mansion complete with its beautiful art, furniture, and contents was a way of showing off for a Washington society he and Clover had snubbed at the best of times. Richardson had argued for a lion, roaring and rampant. Perhaps, Henry Adams thought, because the huge architect had been forced to put up with so many of Henry’s roars and complaints over the course of building this impressive mausoleum for the living.
But it turned out that, secretly (from Henry’s point-of-view), Clover had ordered an elaborate stone cross to be carved into the brick space there between the windows. By the time Adams at Beverly Farms had heard the news of the cross, the stonework was a done deed. It had bothered him deeply. Neither he nor Clover were religious in any way. They’d often made light fun of their less-than-pious Washington acquaintances who’d managed to work Christian symbols into the stonework or interior carvings of their expensive new homes.
When Ted Dwight had written to inform him that the cross had been added by artisans under Richardson’s supervision at Mrs. Adams’s insistence, Henry had written what he hoped had been a lighthearted-sounding letter in which he said—“Your account of the cross and the carving fills my heart with sadness and steeps my lips with cocaine.” And he’d added, “Never fear, Ted, we shall plaster over it with cement soon enough.”
But of course, they never had. So he’d also written to Dwight—“It’s a done thing, a fait accompli in stone, so I can neither revolt nor complain, though the whole thing seems to me bad art and bad taste. I have protested in vain and must henceforth hold my tongue.” But he’d also asked Ted not to tell anyone else about the cross yet, since “Washingtonians chatter so much that one is forced to deny them food for gossip.”
Goodness knows that Clover had provided them all with years of food for gossip within six months of that cross going up—she a December suicide, lying dead on the carpet of their living room at the Little White House at 1607 H Street.
The cross, rising between two arches, was a backdrop for a carved medallion showing off a slightly indefinable winged beast. Certainly not Pegasus. Not quite a griffon, nor a dragon—though Adams had wished it might have been. Whatever Clover had in mind when she ordered Richardson to add that design remained a mystery to this day, but even in the summer and autumn of that fateful 1885, Henry had written to friends that the “d— —d cross and its winged creature was prophetic of the future” and that they filled him “with terror.”
They still did. He had no idea, save for his peripatetic absence at the mansion being more common than his solitary presence in the past seven years, why he hadn’t gotten rid of the cross and winged monstrosity after Clover’s death.
To Adams, that entire horrible year had been filled with omens. That spring of 1885, when the minister was trying to impress upon Clover—with the utmost care, sympathy, and gentleness—that her father was indeed dying, Adams had heard her say, “No, no, no . . . everything seems unreal. I hardly know what we are saying or why we are here. And if it seems so unreal, it must be. Or at least I must be.”
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 ke
y 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.