Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

It had made Henry James feel like a stranger in his own land, in his own city, and his essays had returned to that theme again and again and again.

He said nothing of that now as he and Holmes silently watched the final preparations for the old liner to be nudged into its proper berth along the busy docks.

“You will want to know how I knew that night along the Seine that you were carrying your sister Alice’s ashes,” Holmes said very softly. People were shoving and milling to lean along the long railing now, but there nonetheless seemed to be a bubble of privacy around the two men.

“I want to know nothing of the kind,” returned James with equal softness but much more intensity. “Your wild and inaccurate speculations do not interest me in the least, Mr. Holmes.”

“I had been there in the dark longer than you,” continued Holmes, his eyes on the surrounding ships and fireboats and rowboats and busy mayhem, “and my eyes had much better adapted to the dark than had yours. I saw you remove the small ivory snuffbox several times . . . hold it in a way that almost might be called prayerful—return it to your inner pocket, then retrieve it again. I knew it was an ivory snuffbox—only ivory gleams that way in such low light—and I also knew at once that you did not take snuff.”

“You know nothing of my habits, sir.” James’s voice could not have been colder nor more dismissive of this uninvited conversation. But because of the crowd behind them, he could not simply turn and walk away. He shifted his gaze away from Holmes instead.

“I do, of course,” said Holmes. “A user of snuff, even an occasional user, has telltale nicotine stains on his thumb and second finger. You did not. Also, someone using a snuffbox to retrieve pinches of snuff does not carefully and permanently join the various openings of the box with sealing wax.”

“There is no way you could have seen such things in those seconds, in that darkness,” said James. His heart was pounding against his ribs.

“I could. I did,” said Sherlock Holmes. “And then, as we were leaving, I contrived to light my pipe to confirm my earlier observations. You were not aware of it—holding the snuffbox obviously had become a nervous habit with you, Mr. James, especially in extremis, as it were—but you had removed it briefly several times after we’d walked away from the river. I could see that it was more than a mere talisman for you; it was sacred.”

James turned angrily to stare at the intruder and was shocked to see that Holmes had removed the blue lenses that had altered his true eye color. Now Henry James’s coldly angry gray-eyed stare met the calm gray-eyed gaze of Sherlock Holmes.

“While I was in India, I’d read in The Times of your sister’s death in March of eighteen ninety-two and, later, a notice of Miss James’s funeral and cremation at Woking and the mention that your sister’s companion, Miss Katharine Peabody Loring, would be returning the ashes to Cambridge, America, for interment there at the family plot.”

James said nothing. He continued to glare. He was glad he was leaning on a ship’s railing because he thought he might be sick.

“I could tell at once that night along the Seine that—with Miss Loring’s and your family’s knowledge or, more likely, without it—you had appropriated some of your sister’s ashes, made them safe in that absurdly expensive ivory snuffbox, and were transporting them . . . somewhere. But where? Certainly not just to the bottom of the Seine.”

James could not remember ever being insulted in quite this intimate fashion before. If he were his brother William, he knew, he would strike this Holmes in the face as brutally and bruisingly as possible. But Henry James was not William; he had never in his life coiled his fist in real expectation of striking another boy or man. He did not do so now. He continued to glare.

“I think perhaps,” concluded Holmes, “that you were considering a voyage back to America anyway. Before your melancholy overtook you in Paris, I mean. I believe that earlier thought of a voyage to America is why you finally changed your mind last night about joining me on this mission. Perhaps you thought to scatter your sister’s ashes at some spot important . . . sacred to both of you? It is not, of course, any of my business. But I respect your bereavement, sir, and I shall not raise this subject again. I did so now primarily to acquaint you with some of the simpler methods of my powers of observation and ratiocination.”

“I am not impressed, sir,” said James when at last he could speak. But he was. Despite himself, he was very impressed.

The old ship was being settled up against the wharf like a matron being led to a groaning buffet. French sailors fore and aft made ready to toss the ropes that would precede the massive cables that would soon pull them tight to America.

“You’ll pardon me, Mr. Holmes. I forgot something in the stateroom. I shall meet you when you clear Customs inspection.”

Holmes nodded, seemingly lost in his own thoughts. James knew that Holmes—as Jan Sigerson, traveling on what he presumed to be a false Norwegian passport—would be held up for some time in line while Henry James, expatriate at heart but still traveling on his American passport, would pass through with only the most cursory inspection.

Still, he trundled quickly back to the stateroom in the hopes that the porters they’d given orders to had not yet taken down the bags and steamer trunks. They had not.

James locked the door to the stateroom behind him, unlocked his steamer trunk, removed a mahogany box from a recessed area, and opened it carefully. The interior was custom-lined in velvet with an indentation cut to his prescribed dimensions.

James withdrew the snuffbox from his waistcoat pocket, set it carefully within the mahogany box, locked the box, locked the steamer trunk again, made sure he had his passport and papers ready in his briefcase, and left the stateroom just as the porters arrived to haul away the luggage. They touched their caps as they passed and Henry James nodded in return.

Ihad planned on describing to you Holmes’s and James’s one evening, night, and morning in New York City, but I could find no record of where they stayed. I have the records of both of them clearing Customs by 7 p.m. Thursday evening, 23 March, 1893—Holmes under his J. Sigerson Norwegian national’s passport, James under his own name—but lost track of them in the hours after that. Based on the dialogue I know they had on the train to Washington the next day, it’s possible that they did not dine together that night or even stay in the same hotel. It appears as if they hadn’t spoken since Holmes’s intrusive “explanation” along the rail of the French steamship Paris as they were docking.

I had also assumed that they would have taken one of the Washington, D.C.–bound trains from the conveniently located Grand Central Depot that Friday the 24th of March, but it turns out that Holmes—who had been in charge of all their rushed travel arrangements—had booked them on the Boston–Washington, D.C., express called the Colonial or sometimes the Colonial Express , a service provided jointly by the Pennsylvania Railroad and New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad. But in 1893 the Colonial did not yet come into Manhattan or connect to Grand Central Depot—that change would be made after the Titanic sank in 1912—and Holmes and James would have had to have arisen early and taken one of several early ferries to Jersey City, there to board the Colonial that would take them down the Pennsylvania main line to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and finally Washington. It was the fastest express available to them on that Friday, but not the most convenient for someone who had spent the night in Manhattan.