Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

Holmes was waved into a comfortable open carriage that would carry just him and Drummond back into town.

Remembering the timbre of Irene Adler’s voice, Holmes surprised Drummond by crying, “Drive on, driver!”

Early on the morning of Friday, the twenty-ninth of April, Henry Adams and Henry James rode together to the main railway station to meet the “special train” that Henry Cabot Lodge had laid on for them.

It was a short ride, but Adams used it for what he obviously thought was an important conversation. “Harry,” he said, leaning forward toward the portly writer, “I need to tell you—before we meet up with all the others—how very important your visit has been to me the last two weeks.”

James’s gray eyes came alert. “And to me as well, Henry. I shall always treasure the hospitality and our nightly conversations.”

“And you did get some work done on your play?”

James smiled ruefully. “Some. Then rewrote it. Then rewrote it again. Then I tossed it all out. But I did start to expand a short story I’d written—a slight thing about an impoverished tutor who loves the young child in his care more than do the child’s careless parents.”

“It sounds all too real,” said Adams.

James made a slight gesture with his hand. “I shall see.”

“Thank you for allowing me to speak freely about Clover—her life as well as her death—after my years of silence,” said Adams. “I shall always be grateful to you for that.”

James’s eyes seemed to fill. “The honor and gratitude was all mine, my friend. I assure you.”

Suddenly Adams grinned. “Do you remember what you said to Clover in eighteen eighty-two in what you said was your last letter, from the ship before it sailed? Why you had chosen her to receive what you called ‘my last American letter’?”

“I said that I considered Clover the incarnation of her native land,” said James.

“And do you remember her response to me when she read that? I shared it in a letter to you so many years ago.”

Henry James said, “Clover told you that mine was, I believe her exact words were, ‘a most equivocal compliment’, and that it left her wondering, and I do remember her wording exactly—‘Am I then vulgar, dreary, and impossible to live with?’ ”

Both men laughed heartily.

Adams held out his closed hand. Presuming his friend wanted to shake hands, James held out his hand, but Adams turned it over and dropped something cold and solid into it. James realized that it was his watch, the watch given to him by his father, the watch he’d lost that mad night he and Sherlock Holmes had been hiding in the Saint-Gaudens monument, Henry Adams’s most cherished secret.

James blushed but, when he looked up, Adams was smiling.

“Clover and I will always love you, Harry.”

James quickly lowered his face but could not hide the tears that dripped from his cheeks and chin onto his open hand holding the beloved watch.

Holmes appeared at the Washington railway station at the appointed time and was amazed at what Henry Cabot Lodge’s casually offered “lay on some special private cars” amounted to. It was an entire private train unto itself. After the engine there was a car for servants’ quarters. Then a lavish car just for dining. Then a comfortable car for smoking, conversation, and taking in the passing view. Then no fewer than four even-more-lavish private cars for Lodge and his guests.

Henry Cabot and his wife Nannie had the end suite, half a car at the end of the train. Senator Don Cameron and his beautiful wife Lizzie had an equally spacious suite—an entire suite, complete with water closet, on a railway carriage!—and the Hays had an elaborate compartment which adjoined a smaller one where their daughter Helen slept. Clarence King had chosen not to make the trip, claiming necessary meetings in the West concerning mining interests, but Augustus Saint-Gaudens had accepted Lodge’s invitation. So the three bachelors—Saint-Gaudens, James, and Holmes—had smaller compartments, but each lavishly appointed and equipped with its own private toilet and sink. When told that the three gentlemen would have the constant services of only two valets—the servants’ car was overcrowded as it was—James had sighed and said, “Well, we shall just have to rough it then all the way to Chicago.”

James had received Holmes quite coolly when they’d met after two weeks of separation and silence, but the detective had seemed too distracted by some thought to notice James’s carefully calculated snub. During the first hours of the voyage, James was irritated that he would be forced to break the mutual silence and talk with Holmes privately.

He found his chance after the elaborate dinner when the women went to the common social area on the first half of the fourth carriage and the men went into the smoking-room carriage with brandy and cigars. James pulled the detective into the dining room and told the servants to step out until he said they could enter again.

“What is it?” asked Holmes. The detective still seemed preoccupied with something and had barely spoken during dinner, even though Hay’s daughter Helen had tried to draw him out with half a dozen questions.

“I saw Moriarty,” whispered James. “I sent a note to that effect to your damned cigar store but they sent it back to me unopened with a scrawl saying that you were no longer picking up your mail there.”

“That’s true,” said Holmes. He was applying his fancy modern lighter to a Meerschaum pipe and puffing offending aromatic fumes into the air that still smelled of beef and wine. “I’ve been traveling and wasn’t checking for mail at that cigar store. Where and when did you see Moriarty?”

“On the day I was prepared to leave Chicago for New York,” said James, his temper short. “On the fifteenth. The same day you left for heaven knows where.”

“ Where did you see him, James? And what was he up to?”

The writer thought that Holmes was being damnably offhanded about such a serious topic. “He was at the central Chicago railway station, looking through the carriages. Looking for me , Holmes. He had some thugs helping him search. I barely got away without him seeing me.”

Holmes nodded and puffed. “Why do you think that Professor Moriarty was looking for you , James?”

“Well, you weren’t taking the morning train from Chicago to New York that morning, were you?” demanded James.

Holmes shook his head without removing the stem of the pipe from between his teeth.

“Moriarty and his thugs were there with their eyes full of business,” said James. “And that business was, I am certain, murder. And I was to have been the victim. Somehow . . . from someone you told about my earlier eavesdropping on Moriarty and the anarchists and mobs . . . somehow word got out. He was stalking me, Holmes . I am certain of it.”

“Then it’s a good thing you didn’t get on that particular train,” said Holmes.

James’s jaw dropped. “ That’s all you have to say about this? That’s your response to my news? Where have you been the last two weeks?”

“Oh, here and there,” said Holmes, having to re-light his oversized pipe.

“And what have you been doing about the threat that Moriarty and his anarchists and his criminals pose to Washington, and New York, and Philadelphia, and Chicago, and the other cities I heard him say would suffer uprisings after President Cleveland is assassinated? Is the army involved? Have you spoken to all the mayors and chiefs of police of all those cities? I can think of little else that could warrant your two-week absence and your obvious . . . obvious . . . insouciance in the face of this imminent threat of what amounts to national revolution.”