Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

“Three of us?” repeated James.

To Henry James, the new North railway station was Boston’s celebration of the modern age. The architecture was noble and the layout oozed common sense: rather than wait outside in the cold and damp under a gigantic open shed roof as in London’s great and small stations, here one went down a ramp inside the sprawling structure, and the train came in to you on a warm and well-ventilated lower level.

When they’d arrived, James had said, “I’ll have to go claim my bags for transfer,” but Holmes had taken the handful of baggage check tickets and said, “I’ll find some expert help in getting that done for us” and had disappeared for only a moment into the Grand Lobby crowd before returning.

“Are you sure . . .” began James. His continuing nightmare was having his steamer trunk or other pieces of his baggage, including the portmanteau filled with beginnings of his stories and the long, thrice-bescribbled scripts for his current and future plays, disappear during one of these American railway adventures. How much happier he would have been, he realized, if both he and his luggage were safely aboard the good ship Spree and safely out of sight of land by now.

Holmes led the way through the mob and down the graceful ramps to where signs announced that their train to Chicago would be leaving in fifteen minutes.

“’Ere you are, Mr. ’olmes, Mr. James, sir,” piped up an unmistakably cockney voice.

James was startled at the sight of a short, rail-thin lad whose unselfconscious grin showed where adult teeth had grown in only to be knocked out. The boy was obviously of that group known in London as “street Arabs” since before Charles Dickens’s day. Yet he was dressed well in English spring tweed suit with tailored jacket and waistcoat, proper knicker trousers and quality wool knee socks, and well-polished quality London-made shoes. Even his cap, which he’d swept off when he’d presented Holmes and James with the baggage cart piled high with their luggage, was new and well-made, probably in Scotland.

“Give the tickets to that porter two coaches down and he’ll arrange our luggage properly,” directed Holmes. “Bring back to our compartment Mr. James’s portmanteau—it has his initials on it—and my briefcase and small tan carrying case.”

“Right you are, guv’ner,” said the boy and disappeared in the gathering crowd, pulling the massive baggage cart behind him.

“You trust that strange child?” asked James.

Holmes gave him a strange half-smile. “More than you can know, James,” he said softly. “More than you can know.”

The detective went to a nearby stand to purchase some newspapers and magazines for the trip, so they hadn’t yet boarded when the boy returned, handing James his portmanteau and Holmes two well-traveled pieces of personal luggage along with a new set of baggage-check slips. The boy stared straight at the author with a look that fell just short of insolence but certainly was not appropriately deferential.

“Nice to see you again, Mr. James,” said the boy. James heard the “Misteh Jimes” and could almost name the streets within hearing distance of the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow Church where this young cockney had eked out his living in London.

James thought of all the porters and messengers they’d met or used on this trip, but none matched up with this strangely well-dressed lad—and he was sure he’d never seen the boy before this trip—so he said coolly, “I don’t believe we’ve ever met, young man.”

Again that too-wide, unselfconscious, missing-toothed smile. “But you saw me and I saw you a-seeing me, sir.”

James smiled but shook his head. “I don’t believe so.”

The boarding area had emptied out as most of the rushing passengers up near the first-class cars had already gone aboard to claim their cabins. James and the boy were about ten or twelve feet apart when the youngster walked quickly toward the writer—so quickly and with such a sense of confidence bordering on aggression that James found himself gripping his walking stick with both hands—but the boy stopped only a pace or two in front of James, threw both arms in the air as if he were celebrating something, and, almost faster than the eye could follow, did two arching back handsprings—landing on his hands, flipping even higher to come down on his feet again, and not pausing even an instant there before performing a complete somersault in mid-air, his body descending parallel to the concrete boarding platform in the fraction of a second before Holmes grabbed the spread legs—now wrapped securely around Holmes’s middle—and held the boy poised there horizontally with nothing but Holmes’s powerful fingers and hands keeping him up.

Then Holmes gave a sort of juggler’s cry, the boy put his palms together, arms straight above him as if he were diving into water rather than onto an unyielding concrete platform or iron tracks, and in a display of strength almost beyond James’s comprehension, Holmes gripped the rigid boy’s calves and extended the diver’s form higher than the detective’s or James’s shoulders, then giving another cry—James realized dully that it was one acrobat’s communication with another—he tossed the boy spinning out over the platform, caught him by the ankles, and held the lad there vertically, the boy’s praying hands almost touching the platform.

Then Holmes went to one knee, the boy used that knee as a diving board, and leaped forward in a perfect head-first arc, hugging his knees as he turned in the air, to land lightly on his feet in front of James, arms still over his head.

The movements had jogged James’s memory.

“Good God . . . the two of you . . . the chimney sweeps on the Camerons’ rooftop . . .” gasped James.

Holmes gave one of his quick twitches of a smile.

“ You had a Mohawk strip of orange hair,” accused James, pointing at Holmes. “And you, spikes of green hair,” he said to the boy.

“It’s nice to be ’preciated, guv’ner,” grinned the lad.

James was still blinking like a sun-blinded lizard. He turned toward Holmes again. “Why the ‘Flying Vernettis’?”

“My grandmother on my mother’s side was a Vernet,” said Holmes, giving the name its proper French pronunciation. “The Vernets were artists. I felt that the Flying Vernettis sounded suitably acrobatic.”

“To what possible purpose?” cried James. “All that week, Hay and others told me, the two acrobatic chimney sweeps had done the Cabot Lodges’ home, Don Cameron’s where I saw you perform, even Hay’s house where you’d stayed . . .”

“I needed certain documents,” Holmes said coolly. “Old letters, to be precise, although at least one lady’s diary was included. It’s so nice, after the sweeps have laid down newspapers on every surface in m’lady’s boudoir to keep the soot from covering everything, they lock the door to the room and tell servants to stay clear.”

“Those bedroom fireplaces are tiny things . . .” began James.

“Mr. Henry James,” said Holmes stepping forward, “I take great pleasure in introducing you to Wiggins Two.”

James remembered the telegram from Holmes’s brother Mycroft he’d sneakily read—“Wiggins Two arrived safely in New York today.”

“What happened to Wiggins One?” he heard himself asking.

“Oh, he grew up to where he was of no further use to me,” said Holmes.

“Also,” laughed Wiggins Two, “my brother’s in the clink.”

“For what crime?” asked James.

“Ah . . . the Holy Trinity, sir,” said Wiggins Two. “Breakin’, enterin’, and resistin’ arrest. ’E’ll be there a few years, sir.”