Matthew Pearl: The Dante Club

“The chambermaid who took the body into the house,” Kurtz explained. “She was trying to clear the insects from the wound and she thought she saw, I daresay I don’t know how…”

Barnicoat coughed for Kurtz to get on with it.

“She heard Judge Healey moan before dying,” Kurtz said. “That’s what she says, Mr. Barnicoat.”

“Oh, very like!” Barnicoat laughed lightheartedly. “Maggots of blowflies can live only on dead tissue, Chief.” Which was why, he explained, the female flies looked for wounds on cattle to nest on, or spoiled meat. If they happened to find themselves in a wound of a living being who was unconscious or otherwise incapable of removing them, the maggots could ingest only the dead portions of tissue—which did little harm. “This head wound looks to have doubled or tripled from its original circumference, meaning that all the tissue was dead, meaning that the chief justice was quite finished by the time the insects had their feast.”

“So the blow to the head,” Kurtz said, “that caused the original wound– that’s what killed him?”

“Oh, very like, Chief,” said Barnicoat. “And hard enough to knock his teeth out at that. You say he was found in their yard?”

Kurtz nodded. Barnicoat speculated that the killing had not been intentional. An assault with the purpose of murder would have included something to guarantee the enterprise beyond a blow, like a pistol or ax. “Even a dagger. No, this seems more likely an ordinary breaking-in then. The rogue clubs the chief justice on the head in the bedchamber, knocks him out cold, then drops him outside to get him out of the way while he ransacks the house for valuables, probably never once thinking that Healey would have been so hurt,” he said, almost sympathetic to the misguided thief.

Kurtz looked right at Barnicoat with an ominous stare. “Only, nothing was taken from the house. Not merely that. The chief justice’s clothes were removed and folded up neatly, even down to his drawers.” He caught his voice creaking, as if it had been stepped on. “With his wallet, gold chain, and watch all left in a stack by his clothes!”

One of Barnicoat’s lobster eyes shot wide open at Kurtz. “He was stripped? And nothing at all was taken?”

“This was plain madness,” Kurtz said, the fact hitting him anew for the third or fourth time.

“Think of that!” exclaimed Barnicoat, looking around as though to find more people to tell.

“You and your deputies are to keep this completely confidential, by order of the mayor. You know that, right, Mr. Barnicoat? Not a word outside these walls!”

“Oh, very like, Chief Kurtz.” Then Barnicoat laughed quickly, irresponsibly, like a child. “Well, old Healey would have been an awfully fat man to haul about. At least we can trust it was not the grieving widder .”

Kurtz made every plea to logic and emotion when he explained, at Wide Oaks, why he needed time to look into the matter before the public could know what had happened. But Ednah Healey gave no response as her upstairs girl arranged the bedcovers around her.

“You see—well, if there’s a circus about us, if the press savages our methods as they do, what can be discovered?”

Her eyes, usually darting and judgmental, were sadly immobilized. Even the maids, who feared her fierce look of reprimand, cried for her current state as much as for the loss of Judge Healey.

Kurtz shrank back, almost ready to surrender. He noticed that Mrs. Healey closed her eyes tightly when Nell Ranney came into the room with tea. “Mr. Barnicoat, the coroner, says that your chambermaid’s belief that the chief justice was alive when she found him is scientifically impossible– a hallucination. For Barnicoat can tell by the number of maggots that the chief justice had already passed on.”

Ednah Healey turned to Kurtz with a quizzical open look.

“Truly, Mrs. Healey,” Kurtz continued with new self-assurance. “The flies’ maggots by their nature only eat dead tissue , you see.”

“Then he could not have suffered while he was out there?” Mrs. Healey pleaded with a broken voice.

Kurtz shook his head firmly. Before he left Wide Oaks, Ednah called in Nell Ranney and forbade her ever to repeat that most horrific portion of her story again.

“But, Mrs. Healey, I know I…” Nell trailed off, shaking her head.

“Nell Ranney! You shall heed my words!”

Next, to repay the chief, the widow agreed to conceal the circumstances of her husband’s death.

“But you must do this,” she said, gripping his coat sleeve. “You must vow to find his murderer.”

Kurtz nodded. “Mrs. Healey, the department is beginning everything that our resources and current state…”

“No.” Her colorless hand clung, immovable, to his coat, as though if he left the room now it would still hang there quite undaunted. “No, Chief Kurtz. Not to begin. To finish. To find. Vow to me.”

She left him little choice. “I vow we will, Mrs. Healey.” He did not mean to say anything more, but the pounding doubt in his chest made him speak its voice too. “Some way.”

J. T. Fields, publisher of poets, was squeezed into the window seat of his office at the New Corner, studying the cantos Longfellow had selected for the evening, when a junior clerk interrupted with a visitor. The slim figure of Augustus Manning materialized from the hall, imprisoned in a stiff frock coat. He drifted into the office, as though he had no idea how he had come to find himself on the second floor of the newly renovated mansion on Tremont Street that now housed Ticknor, Fields & Co.

“The space looks grand, Mr. Fields—grand. Though you shall always be to me the junior partner huddled behind your green curtain at the Old Corner, preaching to your little authorial congregation.”

Fields, now the senior partner and the most successful publisher in America, smiled and moved to his desk, extending his foot swiftly down onto the third of four pedals—A, B, C, and D—that sat in a row under his chair. In a distant room of the offices, a little bell marked c gave a slight note, startling a messenger boy. Bell C signified that the publisher was to be interrupted in twenty-five; bell B, ten minutes; bell A, five. Ticknor & Fields was the exclusive publisher of official Harvard University texts, pamphlets, memoirs, and college histories. So Dr. Augustus Manning, the puller of all the institution’s purse strings, on this day received a most generous C.

Manning removed his hat and passed a hand over the bare ravine between waves of frothy hair that crashed down from either side of his head. “As the treasurer of the Harvard Corporation,” he said, “I must present to you word of a potential problem that has been lately brought to our attention, Mr. Fields. You understand that a publishing house engaged by Harvard University must boast nothing less than an unimpeachable reputation.”

“Dr. Manning, I daresay there are no houses with reputations as unimpeached as our own.”

Manning braided his crooked fingers together into a steeple and emitted a long, scratchy sigh or cough, Fields could not tell which. “We have heard of a new literary translation you plan to publish, Mr. Fields, by Mr. Longfellow. Of course, we cherished Mr. Longfellow’s years of contribution at the College, and his own poems are first-rate indeed. Yet we have heard something of this project, of its subject matter, and have some concerns that this type of drivel…”

Fields composed a cold stare, at which Manning’s steepled fingers slid apart. The publisher lowered with his heel the fourth, most urgent, knob of request. “You do know, my dear Dr. Manning, how society values the work of my poets. Longfellow. Lowell. Holmes.” The triumvirate of names reinforced his position of strength.