“Visit the leg?” said Sherlock Holmes.
“Yes, when they amputated it at the army’s surgical tent that same afternoon of July second, eighteen sixty-three, Sickles insisted that they keep his leg and he had a little coffin-shaped box made for it. He gave it as a gift to the Army Medical Museum—just a few blocks from here—where it’s been on display in a glass case to this day, along with a small cannonball that Sickles insisted was the size of the one that shattered his leg. Dan Sickles makes annual pilgrimages every July to visit his leg . . . often he’s in the company of attractive young women. Stop the carriage please, Simon.”
The carriage stopped again and Adams pointed to an attractive brick home facing the square—it could be called a mansion—and said, “This is the house—Benjamin Tayloe’s house in eighteen fifty-nine—to which they carried the mortally wounded Philip Barton Key. He died on the living room floor and they say that his bloodstain is still soaked into the wood under the beautiful Persian carpet there now. Both the Tayloes and the current residents swear that Key’s ghost still haunts the house to this day.”
“Who are the current residents?” asked Holmes.
“Senator Don Cameron and his wife Lizzie bought the house in eighteen eighty-six,” said Henry Adams. He touched the driver’s back with his cane. “Drive on to Rock Creek Cemetery, Simon.”
* * *
Adams had said that it was about five miles from Lafayette Square to the cemetery and he and Henry James chatted most of the way: middle-aged men’s gossip, inquiring after mutual friends and various artists or writers. The sun was quite warm now, the pace slow, the clop-clop of the huge horses’ hooves almost metronomic, and Holmes pulled down the brim of his hat not only to shade his eyes but to think in peace.
He was amazed at Henry James’s calmness in the face of last night’s savage attack during dinner by Theodore Roosevelt. In the previous century, or the earlier decades of this century, words like “effeminate” and “emasculated” would have required the principals to meet at dawn, seconds standing by, pistols loaded and ready. Holmes had been astonished that James had stayed for brandy and cigars; he would have guessed that the writer would have excused himself early to walk back to Mrs. Stevens’s boarding house alone. But it was young Roosevelt, obviously ill at ease in Hay’s library after behaving so poorly during dinner, who was the first to say good night and leave. Holmes did so not long after that—it must have been around midnight—and was astonished again that James still stayed to talk.
Holmes had to keep reminding himself that James, Hay, and Adams were old friends. Still, it was hard for the detective to imagine how any friendship could survive such public insults—or why James showed such calmness and restraint in the company of two of those friends who not only had invited the insulting party to dinner, but who had said nothing to defend James.
Their carriage continued up 14th Street N.W., jogged east onto Harvard Street for a few blocks, then left again onto Sherman Avenue and then northwest on New Hampshire Avenue. Holmes allowed the lassitude that sometimes came with his morning injection of heroin to spread until he balanced there on the edge of sleep, his mind working at a furious rate despite the somnolence creeping over him. He knew that he would have to solve the riddle of Clover Adams and the sender of the annual cards in the next week or so, since he had to be in Chicago before the middle of April. He had exactly four weeks until the Columbian Exposition was to open on May 1 with President Cleveland still scheduled to throw the opening switch that would light electric lights, activate some device to pull the covering off Saint-Gaudens’s huge statue, and start all the hundreds if not thousands of pieces of machinery at the Fair.
And cables from Mycroft continued to say that the anarchists’ hired assassin, Lucan Adler, would be there to kill the president.
Holmes realized that Adams had said something to him. “I’m sorry,” he said, sitting up straighter and pushing up the brim of his silk top hat. “I was half-dozing and didn’t hear you.”
“I was just pointing out that rooftop and cupola ahead there on the right,” said Adams. “It was the Soldiers’ Home where President and Mrs. Lincoln used to go for a little cool air and relaxation during the summers of the Civil War.”
“Of course,” said Adams, “in the three decades since the War, Washington has sprawled out and around the Soldiers’ Home, Rock Creek Park, and Rock Creek Cemetery not far ahead. It was all countryside when Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln used to come here to escape the heat.”
“And did Mr. Hay come with the president?” asked Holmes.
Adams chuckled. “Very rarely. Lincoln left John and Nicolay in the sweltering White House to catch up on paperwork. Hay was especially good at forging Mr. Lincoln’s signature and he wrote many of the letters supposedly from President Lincoln himself. You’d be surprised at how many of Lincoln’s more famous letters were actually written by young John Hay.”
Holmes made that seal-barking noise that often passed for a laugh with him. “The Gettysburg Address, perhaps?” he said. “Rumor has it that it was scribbled on the back of an envelope.”
“Not that particular document, I think,” said Adams, possibly smiling as much at the unusual form and force of Holmes’s laugh as at the idea of Hay writing the Address.
Henry James, who had covered his bald pate with a straw hat, said, “You must have been very bored last night, Mr. Holmes, at all that talk of Red Indians, as you English call them.”
“Not really. I’ve long had an interest in the various tribes and nations of Indians on this continent.”
“Have you ever had a chance to see an Indian in person? In the flesh, so to speak?” asked Adams. “Perhaps when Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show visited London?”
“In slightly more interesting circumstances than that,” said Holmes. “In fact, I was taught by some Oglala Sioux how to speak a modest bit of the Lakota language.” He was sorry that he’d said anything almost as soon as the words were out.
“Really?” said Henry James with unfeigned curiosity. “Could you tell how this came about?”
Silently cursing himself for revealing too much, Holmes weighed whether he could avoid telling the story altogether but decided he could not.
“When I was in my early twenties,” he said as the carriage rolled on, “I was stagestruck and wanted to be an actor. A troupe I was with—one with mostly a Shakespearean repertoire—came to America for an eighteen-month tour, and I came with them.
“We performed in Denver and in more crowded Colorado Territory gold towns such as Cripple Creek and Central City when the director of our troupe decided that, before heading to San Francisco, we should perform in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, since that was ‘just next door’ in the Black Hills. Of course, ‘just next door’ amounted to five days of travel in a convoy of no fewer than six stagecoaches to accommodate our people and props. Twice we all had to get out to swim swollen rivers that were in our way. They floated the stagecoaches across.
“At any rate, we arrived in Deadwood on June twenty-ninth, eighteen seventy-six . . .”
“Four days after they massacred Custer,” said Adams.
“Exactly. There were no roads open going east, west, north, or south—and the railroad hadn’t yet come to the Black Hills—so our troupe was stuck in Deadwood for five weeks. We gave performances five evenings a week and a matinee on Saturday, but I soon started riding down out of the hills in the morning to spend my time with a small band of Oglala Sioux that was camping near Bear Butte, a tall hill out on the plains that was sacred to them.”
“One would think that the American cavalry would have rounded up those Sioux . . . or worse,” said Henry James.
Holmes nodded. “This band of Sioux were mostly women, children, and old men. In fact, the old men were mostly medicine men—what the Sioux called wičasa wakan—who’d come to Bear Butte weeks before Custer would be rubbed out at the Little Big Horn, what they called the Greasy Grass, in order to speak to a sort of immort
al medicine man, a myth surely, named Robert Sweet Medicine. Supposedly this Robert Sweet Medicine lived in a cave somewhere on Bear Butte. But yes, even though the band was harmless enough to start with, the local cavalry stationed at Belle Fourche had taken all of the old men’s weapons. The band of about fifty Sioux was dependent upon the cavalry providing beef and they were starving, emaciated.”
“But one or more of them took time to teach you some of their language,” said Adams.
“Yes. And I would bring food to them every time I visited. The adults would immediately give it to the children.”
“I’m curious,” said James. “What did you learn from the cowboys, drunks, mule skinners, buffalo hunters, Indian fighters, bandits, cavalry deserters, and gold miners during your troupe’s five weeks in Deadwood?”
Holmes smiled thinly. “That they much prefer Hamlet or Macbeth over As You Like It. But by far their favorite was Titus Andronicus.”
The carriage turned right off the broad and dusty New Hampshire Avenue onto Allison Street. The stone and wrought-iron welcoming arch of Rock Creek Cemetery was just ahead.
* * *
As the carriage rolled through the green landscape, moving into tree shadow and then out again, Adams explained that the 86 acres of Rock Creek Cemetery had been planned in the “rural garden style” so popular not long before the Civil War. Interest in classical Greek and Roman cemeteries had led to modern cemeteries such as this being laid out to serve both as a final resting place and as a public park. People would bring their children to picnic and hike in Rock Creek Cemetery on Sundays, according to Adams.
“Clover was a dedicated equestrian,” said Adams, “and we rode in this park many times. I’m sure that we must have ridden directly over the ground in which she now lies buried.” Adams looked away and fell silent after that.
They passed no other carriages or pedestrians. Holmes knew that the cemetery must have a small army of gardeners to keep the acres of grass so neatly clipped, the beautiful flowerbeds weeded and watered, but they saw no one working. Halfway around a long, sweeping curve where the cemetery road ran between two grassy areas festooned with trees and headstones, the carriage stopped.
“If you’ll follow me, gentlemen,” said Henry Adams.
* * *
There were swatches of open grass separating sections with headstones so one did not have the feeling of walking upon graves, but Adams led them to an asphalted path that meandered under some trees and then crossed more open spaces. The visible headstones were all tastefully done. Holmes realized that Adams was leading them to what looked like a solid green wall of high hedge intermixed with densely planted holly trees, or some deciduous American version of holly which almost certainly stayed green all year round.
Adams led them around to the side where a granite column about ten feet tall rose on a two-tiered stone base. The leaves from the closely planted trees overlaid part of the column in creeping frondescence.
“This is the important side of the monument,” said Adams, touching a carved emblem of two overlapping rings set into the granite. Each ring was about twelve inches across, both were inscribed with faint leaves like laurel rings, and Holmes saw that they were entwined. There was the faintest of depressions in the granite around each ring.
Without stopping, Adams led them around the side of the leafy square. The trees rose in a solid green wall about twenty feet high, opening to a narrow gap amidst the greenery.
“Watch your step,” said Adams as he entered the break in the trees. It was good advice since, although there was gravel underfoot, that gravel was bisected by a cement ridge that separated the planting areas.
The three men stepped through the leafy doorway, stepped up and onto a higher level of stone edge and gravel base, and stopped in their tracks.
“Good heavens,” said Henry James.
Sherlock Holmes, who had little interest in funerary objects or sculptures from any era, nonetheless felt the breath leave his chest.
They were standing on a raised hexagon twenty-some feet across. On three sides rose a stone bench—the stone not made of the granite of the monument across from it—and the arms at the end of each bench were in the form of griffon’s wings with carved stone talons seizing a ball at the base.
But the focus of the hexagon was the monument and sculpture opposite the three benches.
Upon a raised granite base and set back against the high granite block, capped in classical style, was the larger-than-life bronze figure of a man or woman in a robe. The robe rose over the figure’s head like a cowl and other than the face in shadow, only a bare right arm and hand were visible.
Holmes stepped closer and so did Henry James.
“Henry,” said James, “you sent me photographs, but I had no idea . . .”
“No, photographs do not do it justice,” said Adams. “Lizzie Cameron sent me photos when I was in the South Seas, but it was not until I saw the monument in person a year ago this February that I realized its power. Many is the time in the past two years that I’ve sat and watched and listened, without being watched or listened to, as people encounter this piece for the first time. Their comments run the gamut from interesting to cruelly puerile.”
The visible parts of the human form in the massive bronze sculpture were androgynous. The raised forearm was strong, the fingers folded under the cheek and chin, but the figure might have been either male or female. There was a Pre-Raphaelite perfection to the firm descent of the cheek, the solid chin, and the straight line of the nose, but it was the eyes—almost but not quite closed in contemplation, the eyelids lowered as if in sorrow—that brought the figure out of any era or school of art, classical or otherwise.
“It’s as if his . . . or her . . . face beneath that cowl is lost in a cave of thought,” said James.
“When John La Farge and I returned from Japan in eighteen eighty-six, we all but buried Saint-Gaudens in photographs and images of Buddhas, trying to inspire him,” Adams said softly. “During my long wanderings in the South Seas, I would refer to the sculpture—not yet created by Saint-Gaudens—as ‘my Buddha’, but this is no Buddha.”
It’s true, thought Holmes. The Buddhas he’d seen in the Far East gave off a sense of calm and repose; this figure conveyed to the viewer the deepest possible sense of loss, absence, thought, pain, and even sorrow—all the emotions that the Buddha and those who followed him to enlightenment had left behind.
Holmes made a mental note that the massive robed figure was seated on an indistinct bench or boulder which lay against the upright granite block. The figure’s feet—invisible beneath the shadows of robe—rested upon a large, flat stone some three feet across, the stone in turn on the horizontal hearthstone of granite coming out from the vertical block.
As one moved to the left or right, the figure’s eyes—as cowled as the sculpture’s head—seemed to follow the viewer. The folds of the robe lay heavy between the bronze sculpture’s covered knees, which were already slightly shiny from the touch of human hands.
“Does the piece have a name?” asked Holmes, still moving to the left and right and sensing the shadowed eyes following him.
Adams sat on the bench opposite the form. He folded one leg over the other. “I want to call it ‘The Peace of God’,” he said. “But that isn’t quite right, is it? There is something beyond peace—or short of it—in this sculpture. My artist friend La Farge calls it ‘Kwannon’ after the counterpart we saw in Japan to the Chinese Kuan Yin. Petrarch would say: ‘Siccome eternal vita è veder Dio.’ I would think that a real artist—or deep soul—would be very careful to give it no name that the public could turn into a limitation of its nature.”
“The benches?” asked James, turning to look in Adams’s direction.
“Oh, Stanford White designed the benches and plantings, and obviously fell even further from my wish for the Oriental than did Saint-Gaudens. White’s workers had the site covered by a tent for more than a month in the winter of ’ninety. But
the griffon wings . . . not exactly in the Sakyamuni tradition that La Farge and I had in mind when we returned from Japan. Although this sculpture is, I think, the ultimate Saint-Gaudens—the most anyone could ask for or receive from this great artist’s core of being.”
Turning back to look again at the sculpture, James said, “Does Saint-Gaudens have a name for it?”
“Several,” said Adams. “His favorite—the last time I heard anyone ask—is The Mystery of the Hereafter—but he knows that is not adequate. Saint-Gaudens’s native language is stone, not words.”
“ ‘I am the doubter and the doubt’,” said James.
“Yes,” said Adams.
“I don’t recognize the reference,” said Holmes.
“The poem ‘Brahma’ by Emerson,” said Henry James and recited:
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near,
Shadow and sunlight are the same,
The vanished gods to me appear,
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
Holmes nodded.
“When I was in India, trying to meditate beneath the sacred bo tree . . . which was as small as a twig now in modern times,” said Adams, “I wrote my own poem in which I attempted to summarize the truly transcendental moment. I failed even worse than Emerson had.”