Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

“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 front 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.”