“So you . . . and your brilliant brother Mycroft . . . invented Professor James Moriarty, went to great pains to give him a believable mathematical background, turned him into the Napoleon of Crime, and then had the fictional villain kill you at Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, to free you up, I presume, to spend three years running around in your little Moriarty disguise enlisting burglars and anarchists.”
“Yes,” said Holmes. “That is about it. I did ask for six months of my own time after my death at Reichenbach Falls so I could visit Tibet and ask some questions of the Dalai Lama. But that became a rather longer stay due to young Lucan’s skill with a rifle.”
“Three bullets through you,” Henry James said softly. “I saw the size of those rounds . . . cartridges . . . bullets . . . whatever you call them, when I worked the bolt-action of that Mauser and one ejected. It was huge. How could you not have died?”
“Perhaps I did,” said Holmes.
“To hell with this metaphysical tommyrot you’ve been shoveling onto me since we met,” snapped James, standing suddenly. “You can go spend the rest of your life . . . if it is a life . . . asking yourself and everyone you meet if you’re real. Sooner or later some drunk in some pub smelling of urine and sweat will give you a definitive answer.”
“I’ve already received a good answer,” Holmes said softly. “Just a few days ago.”
James said nothing.
“Have you ever heard of singing yourself into existence?” asked Holmes. “Or others singing someone—perhaps you—into existence by telling stories about them? Passing the stories along? Is that what you’re doing with your writing, Henry James . . . singing yourself into greater existence every day you work at your craft?”
James ignored all that twaddle. “Why,” he said sharply, “were you and a bunch of thugs at the central Chicago railway station that Saturday morning when I was trying to get to New York?”
“Looking for you, James. And the ‘thugs’ were some of Colonel Rice’s men he loaned me . . . there were too many carriages for me to check in the short time before your scheduled train left.”
“Why were you, as Professor Moriarty, looking for me when I was trying to get out of all this . . . leave this fever dream . . . and go home to England?”
Holmes stood. “I was going to show you my Moriarty disguise that morning and ask you not to leave yet. To see our shared mystery through.”
“Shared mystery,” repeated James, pouring scorn into every syllable. “You never even solved poor dead Ned Hooper’s question of who sends those typed cards every December six. ‘She was murdered’, remember?”
“The game’s not over yet,” said Holmes. His bandaged right hand and broken wrist obviously were hurting him and he shifted his arm in its black sling.
“Do you want to know what I think about your precious game?” asked Henry James.
“I do, very much, yes,” said Holmes.
Henry James had never done this in his life, not even as a boy wrestling with William or Wilkie, not even at his angriest, but now he turned his right hand into the most solid fist he could and hit the Great Consulting Detective Sherlock Holmes on his pointed chin as hard as he could.
Holmes flew backward onto the bed, totally surprised. When he could sit up, he used his good left hand to rub his jaw. “I deserved that, I guess,” he said softly. “I’m sorry, James. Especially since I’ve come to think of you as a friend and I really have no friends.”
James turned and left his own compartment and walked forward through carriages until he reached the ladies’ common area where he sat and listened to them for a while, pretending to be the tame cat that he often longed to be.
* * *
Holmes waited until a stop in Albany where John Hay and most of the others got out to stretch their legs before he approached Clara Hay, who had stayed behind with one of her headaches.
“May I speak to you privately, Mrs. Hay?”
She smiled wanly and touched her temple. “I have a bursting headache right now, Mr. Holmes. Perhaps later?”
“Now is a better time, Mrs. Hay,” said Holmes and walked into her compartment and sat on a straight-backed chair.
“Well, I’ll call for some tea,” said Clara Hay. When the serving girl hurried in with a tray of hot tea and plates of scones and biscuits, Holmes said, “You may step out now and close the door behind you, Sally.”
Shocked at the man in Mrs. Hay’s compartment giving her orders, Sally looked to Clara Hay to see what to do. Mrs. Hay also looked shocked, or at least nonplussed, but she nodded for Sally to leave. Then she sat in her overcushioned embroidering chair, about as far away from Holmes as she could get in a train compartment. Even a luxury train compartment.
“What is it, Mr. Holmes?” she asked in a tiny voice. “Shouldn’t John be here to be part of this discussion?”
“No,” said Holmes. He picked up his cup of tea and saucer, added a bit of cream, and drank the steaming liquid. Clara Hay remained very, very still and watched him as if she had found herself in a room with a rattlesnake.
“I know that you typed and delivered all the ‘She was murdered’ cards, Clara,” said Holmes. “You should probably stop doing that now.”
“That is the most offensive and ridiculous thing that I have ever . . .” began Clara Hay, raising both hands to her cheeks.
“You and Mr. Hay stayed three days at Mr. Clemens’s Hartford home in the year after Clover Adams died,” said Holmes. “You were often alone and Clemens even remembered you asking how to operate his new typing gadget.”
“Ridiculous . . .” managed Clara Hay, but could say no more than that.
“I tracked down two of Mr. Clemens’s servants who remembered the sound of typing coming down from the billiards room when Clemens and Hay had gone out for a walk and you were alone in the house all afternoon, Clara,” said Holmes. “But in the end it was the money, Mrs. Hay, that tipped me off to your involvement.”
“Money?”
“In the spring of eighteen ninety-one, shortly before I had to leave for the Reichenbach Falls charade, Clover’s brother Ned asked me to come to America to investigate the ‘mystery cards’ that appeared each year on the anniversary of Clover’s death. I’ve told people the truth, that I took one dollar from him so that I would be on retainer and get to the puzzle when I could . . . too late for poor Ned, I’m sorry to say . . . but he offered me three thousand dollars to come to America right then and to solve this disturbing card case before I went on to anything else.”
“Ned never had three thousand dollars in his life,” whispered Clara Hay.
“Precisely what your husband and Henry Adams said when I mentioned the sum,” said Holmes. “They insisted that Ned had fantasized that amount of money, Mrs. Hay. But Ned showed me the three thousand dollars in my room at two-twenty-one-B Baker Street. He begged me to take it and to follow him back to America immediately where, he said, there would be more money if I did my job correctly. I sensed even then that Ned Hooper had never even had the funds to travel to England alone. It was someone else’s money. Someone else’s need for a detective.”
Clara Hay looked Holmes in the eye with a bold defiance that he never thought she could muster. “Are you asking for the three thousand dollars now, Mr. Holmes? Now that you have . . . how does Dr. Watson put it in the story magazines? . . . Now that you have ‘cracked’ this insoluble case? Or do you want more to keep your silence? My private checkbook is here.” She actually removed it and a pen from a drawer in the nearby secretary.
“All I want to know is why, Mrs. Hay? Why seven years of making sure that all the four survivors of the Five of Hearts received that note every December sixth?”
“Because I knew something was wrong,” said Clara with a near growl of defiance. “I never even liked Clover Adams that much, Mr. Holmes. I thought she was arrogant and condescending and often acting above her real station. We had the Five of Hearts, Mr. Holmes, but in the five p.m. conversations and tea in fron
t of the Adamses’ fireplace every evening, Clover was always the First Heart . . . Henry Adams and my own John have referred to her that way ever since her suicide . . . and I wasn’t even the Fifth Heart. The men used to joke with Clarence King that he needed to marry one of his swarthy South Seas women so that we could have a Sixth Heart, but I was already the Sixth Heart. Never fast enough with a witty rejoinder. Never witty enough when I did say something. Never knowledgeable enough about any of their fast-moving discussion topics at the right time . . .” She did not so much stop talking as she just ran down like a wind-up toy. She had been pointing the pen at Holmes like a stiletto or a pistol, but now she capped it and put it back on the secretary with her oversized checkbook. “I knew that when that Rebecca Lorne went out of her way to make friends with poor lonely, miserable Clover Adams that someone—most probably Rebecca or her hideous cousin Clifton—was up to something. Something harmful. Something that would be too much for Clover to handle. I still believe in my heart that this was the reason for Clover’s suicide, if suicide it actually was.”
The two sat in deep silence for several minutes.
Finally Holmes said softly, “But that’s not the real reason you sent Ned Hooper over to London to hire me with that fortune to investigate things about the Five Hearts.”
She jerked and then sat absolutely upright. She was almost unable to get her next words out through her tightened throat.
“What can . . . you . . . possibly . . . mean . . . Mr. Holmes?”
The detective reached into his jacket pocket and brought out four letters, each still in its mauve envelope and addressed in John Hay’s bold, manly hand.
“I’ve seen you at dinners, Mrs. Hay,” Holmes said softly. “I watch people and observe. While you were always the perfect hostess, you were also busy observing every word your husband said to the women at the table, every way he spoke to them, observing his every glance and move. Especially toward Nannie Lodge, who had these letters from Mr. Hay hidden in her bedroom.”
Clara audibly gasped. “How could you possibly . . . stealing someone’s private correspondence . . . breaking and entering . . .”
“Not at all,” Holmes said with a smile. “I just had a small and wiry confederate with spiky green hair and instructions on where to look in the places where married women hide love letters from married men not their husbands. These letters—and others, but these were the important ones as I suspect you know—were taped to the bottom of Nannie Lodge’s lingerie drawer.”
The same place Lizzie Cameron’s love letters from Henry Adams were hidden in her boudoir, thought Holmes. Women are conniving, but I think too much like them to allow them to outsmart me. Then he had to smile. All save for Irene Adler.
“Here,” said Holmes and handed her the four letters. She accepted them as Cleopatra must have accepted the serpent that was going to nurse Death from her breast.
“If I read them . . .” she began hesitantly.
“You’ll never forget some of the wording and images,” said Holmes. “But you need to know that these are always the words and images that men suddenly encountering middle-age and their own mortality use in their foolish love letters. It is pure insanity. And purely male insanity.”
Clara Hay spoke as if Holmes were not even there. “John used to send me love letters. And wonderful poetry I’d never heard of. And flowers. But then . . . as I got heavier after the children . . . I came home from church one Sunday and heard John laughing with that lout Samuel Clemens about how I . . . this is the way my darling husband put it . . . ‘Clara didn’t get out of the hotel much during our Chicago visit but she certainly tucked into her victuals with enthusiasm.’ ”
She looked at Holmes as if first noticing his presence. “I love John more than life . . . I’ve given my life to John and the children . . . but at that minute I could have shot both him and that idiot Clemens dead on our parlor rug.”
Holmes nodded and said nothing.
Clara kept staring at the letters, holding the envelopes away from her as if they could strike like serpents. “Won’t Nannie Lodge notice that these are missing?” she whispered.
“Oh, yes,” said Sherlock Holmes and allowed himself his rare grin. “She shall. I promise you she shall. And then . . . well, the concern about where those particular letters might have gone will be very great. I think you will see a change both in Nannie Lodge’s behavior and in your husband’s. Perhaps a permanent one.”
“Then I don’t really have to read these after all,” she whispered.
“No,” said Holmes and held out his hands, cupped slightly, palms up, as if he were ready to give or accept some Holy Communion.
He saw the recognition ignite in Clara Hay’s eyes and, holding one envelope after another over his hands, she tore each into tiny shreds and had Holmes use his fancy cigarette lighter to burn each scrap above an oversized crystal ashtray. Soon Sherlock Holmes’s hands were filled with tiny confetti—despite the bandage on his right hand, he’d not let one scrap of torn paper escape the flames—and now he used his good left hand to put that confetti into his jacket pocket.
“I’m going to go now, Mrs. Hay,” he said, standing. “Go into the men’s room in this station and flush some unwanted and useless scraps of paper down the toilet.”
She stared at Holmes with luminous eyes, then touched her checkbook again. “The . . . money . . . ?”
“I never came to America for money’s sake,” said Holmes. “I did so for Ned’s sake. And, I think, for yours. Good afternoon, Mrs. Hay. We may not have the chance to talk again until I leave the train in New York.”
* * *
The revelers gave Henry James a raucous bon voyage party, both at a fine restaurant on 32nd Street and then again at the wharf where the great S.S. United States was making final preparations to shove off. The tugs were already pushing their netted snouts into position.
“Funny that Holmes didn’t come to dinner or stop to say good-bye,” mused James when all the farewells fell silent for a moment.
“Perhaps he forgot the time,” said Henry Cabot Lodge. “He’s always struck me as a preoccupied fellow.”
“Perhaps his injuries were bothering him,” said young Helen.
“Or more likely he had another case to solve,” said John Hay.
“Well,” said Senator Don Cameron, his arm around his wife Lizzie who was smiling at Adams, “we had about enough of that man’s company for one year. But you, Harry, you must hurry back to visit again.”
James shook his head. “You need to come to London or Paris or Italy to see me.”
Cameron and Lodge exchanged odd glances. “With the bank and Wall Street panic that we think is coming like a tsunami,” said Henry Cabot Lodge, “I suspect that most of New York’s, Boston’s, and Washington’s better families will be living on the cheap in Europe by July or August, leaving their servants here to fend for themselves and their great houses shut up until this particular storm is past. Then they’ll come wandering home in a year, or two, or three. Those that survive the storm, I mean.”
“Now stop it, darling!” cried Lizzie Cameron, pretending to hit her husband on the shoulder. “No gloomy talk while we’re wishing Harry bon voyage.”
“It’s not gloomy if it means you’ll be in London to see me soon,” said James and lifted his hat as he walked up the gangplank at the ship’s final all-passengers-aboard, all-visitors-ashore whistle of steam. “Adieu!” he called over the scream of escaping steam.
Epilogue
Henry James hated epilogues and refused to use them in his fiction. He said that life granted us no “epilogues”, so why should art or literature? Life, as he knew all too well, was just one damned thing after another. And there were no real summings up in life and definitely no curtain calls.
I feel much the same way about epilogues—as you may also—but this one is here and we have to deal with it.
* * *
By his last evening on the high seas—the steamer United State
s was scheduled to touch at Portsmouth but then go on to Genoa, where James had decided to start the last leg of his trip to see William and his wife Alice and their children in Lucerne—Henry James was bored.
The weather was perfect and the seas so calm that all the experienced travelers and even the crew kept commenting on it. James didn’t care to play backgammon or the other silly games going in the common areas, so he read—either in his pleasant cabin or on his pleasant lounge chair, a blanket across his legs and lap, or while lunching alone. He’d been set at a table of important people for every evening’s meal, but the men’s “importance” was in business, and Henry James listened and nodded politely but had little if anything to say on the subject. He thought a lot about his play and about these days he was wasting when he should be writing.
It was sunset of that fourth evening when James was leaning on the mahogany railing in the first-class section, looking behind the ship at its wake and the beautiful sunset into the Atlantic, when he realized that another man had moved very close and was leaning on the rail next to him.
“Holmes!” he cried, then looked around to see if anyone had noticed his absurd shout. The detective was no longer wearing his sling but his right hand was still bandaged.
“Why are you here?” asked James. “Where are you going?”
“I believe the ship is headed to Portsmouth and then on to Genoa,” Holmes said softly. He looked thinner and much more pale than he had in America.
“Why didn’t you tell me . . .”
“That I’d booked passage on the same ship you were taking back to Europe?” said Holmes with that thin, fast flick of a smile. “I didn’t think you’d be overjoyed to hear the news. I planned to make the entire crossing, no matter how far you were going, without letting you know I was aboard.”
“But where have you been hiding yourself?” asked James.