Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

James saw at once that the dining room was larger, more elegant, and certainly furnished with a finer taste than the one he had seen in photographs of the dining room in Mr. Cleveland’s White House. In every room they had been in or passed by, James had noticed the elaborately and beautifully sculpted stone fireplaces. The walls boasted art masterpieces interspersed with ancient tapestries and the occasional framed light sketch—the signs of high taste combined with a gifted collector’s eclecticism.

The “light repast” consisted of a groaning sideboard loaded with a freshly baked turkey, half a Virginia ham, salads, steaming vegetables, and a second buffet gleaming with wines, clarets, whiskeys, waters, and various liqueurs. The long table had been set and lighted by candelabra for three at the far end.

“We are all bachelors tonight,” laughed Hay. “We shall have to feed and fend for ourselves.”

They did this, of course, by pointing and having Hay’s Benson and two under-butlers fill their plates with their choices.

When they were seated in the circle of candlelight and after Hay had toasted their safe arrival in America, they set to. James was astonished to find that despite his nausea during the drive from the huge railway station, he was indeed famished.

“Harry,” said Hay, addressing James, “I’m sorry to tell you that Adams is not yet returned from some southern lark to Cuba with Phillips. He was scheduled to return home last week but somewhere down there he ran into Alexander Agassiz and since then he’s thrown schedules to the wind—quite literally—and has been geologizing on coral reefs with Agassiz. Evidently they drifted north to further relax with the Camerons at the Coffin Point retreat on St. Helena. I must say that Adams is not exactly rushing home to spend time with me or his other friends here.”

“Shall I miss him then?” asked James, shocked to hear some audible sound of relief in his own voice.

“Oh, no, I think not!” cried Hay with a laugh. “I believe that Adams will show up in the first week of April . . . just days away now. You can enjoy the comparative sanity with us until he does arrive.”

Hay turned to Sherlock Holmes. “Is your repast edible after the ardors of your crossing and non-express Colonial Express traveling, Mr. Sigerson?”

“Delicious,” said Holmes, and James noticed that the detective actually had taken a few forkfuls of ham. “Quite perfect, Mr. Hay.”

“Good, good,” boomed John Hay. “And we shall do everything in our modest powers to make all the rest of your stay with us here in Washington equally as pleasant.” Hay turned back to James. “Oh, Harry, another bonus—I’ve just learned today that Clarence King will be arriving in Washington tomorrow, on the way to or from some Mexican gold mine no doubt, but he’s agreed to join us for dinner on Sunday night. That is the night when King Oskar the Second’s diplomatic emissary is dining with us. Clarence will be so delighted to see you after all these years.”

James looked at Holmes and allowed himself a small but secretly wicked smile. “You are in great luck, Sigerson,” he said. “Not only will the ambassador from the King of Sweden and Norway be here on Sunday, but so shall one of the world’s most famous and best-informed explorers . I am sure that each of them will have many questions to put to you.”

Holmes looked up from sipping his wine, smiled thinly, and nodded without comment.

Hay had said that breakfast would be served in the smaller dining room—the one with so many windows looking out into their garden area—at 7:30, so Holmes allowed himself to sleep until 7:00 a.m. He slept well but awoke with joint pains and an incipient sense of panic. Going into the resplendent bathroom that was, amazingly, part of his guest suite, Holmes unfolded a soft leather bag and removed the dark vial and syringe from their leather pockets. After holding the syringe’s needle for a moment in alcohol that had come from a small stone bottle in an adjacent pocket, Holmes filled the syringe to the proper level, tapped it to remove any air bubbles, removed a short length of flexible chemist’s tubing that was folded into the leather travel “sponge bag”, tied it tightly around his upper left arm—increasing the tension by gripping the tubing firmly by his teeth and tugging sharply—and then he injected the morphine into the vein at the crook of his inner arm. There were dark marks and scabs showing many, many earlier injections there.

Holmes sat on the edge of the bathtub until the morphine began to work on his pain and panic. For the first time he noticed that the bathtub-rim and walls surrounding the tub were of a beautiful blue-and-white Delft pattern.

He took his time bathing—marveling at the truly hot water that flowed instantly from the tap after only a slight turn of the silver spigot by Holmes’s amazingly prehensile toes and then shaved with his straight razor while looking down from the mirror frequently to throw suspicious glances at what looked to be a secondary and much smaller Delft bathtub permanently set into the floor near the corner of the wash basin. Holmes’s incredible deductive powers told him that this must be some bizarre American instrument for bathing one’s feet. (At the very least it was far too low to serve as a bidet—a French invention and toilette -related custom that Holmes, for all of his interest in staying clean, had always found disgusting.)

Bathed and shaved, Holmes touched up his Sigerson-hair with a darkening agent, made the darkened hair wilder and more vertical with some patented hair crème and attacks from two hairbrushes, ran a mustache comb under Sigerson’s nose, and dressed in a bit-too-wooly-thick green tweed suit for his day in the city.

Then Holmes found his way down the huge stairway where a servant immediately led him to the breakfast room.

Wait a minute.

The reader needs to pardon this interruption as the narrator makes a comment here.

Perhaps it slipped your notice, although I doubt it (since it is dangerous for a narrator ever to underestimate the intelligence and observation powers of readers), but at this point we have shifted point-of-view in the narrative. Up until now I have kept our perceptions focused on what writers and professors call either “a limited third-person point-of-view”, the third person in this instance being Mr. Henry James, or at most I have indulged in a very limited “limited omniscient point-of-view”. In truth, there has been a distinct lack of omniscience throughout this manuscript.

As the narrator in question, I may further alienate you from your suspension of disbelief vis-à-vis the current narration by telling you that I dislike shifting points-of-view in a tale. I find a narrator’s presumed ability to hop from mind-to-mind both presumptuous and unrealistic. Worse than that, it is so often simply inelegant.

As literature has descended into mere entertainment via a deliberate vandalism and diminishment of our once-proud language, authors also have begun leaping around between and into their characters’ minds for no other reason than that they can .

Regarding my shift to Sherlock Holmes’s point-of-view, I could give a dozen convincing explanations as to why I make this shift at this time: i.e., Henry James later learned this information and I, as narrator, am somehow receiving the intelligence from him retroactively in time. Neither will Dr. John Watson, M.D., ever hear the details of this 1893 American adventure, so I would be lying to claim the overused doctor as my source of information.

Or perhaps this narrator could say that he has, through the usual arcane means involving opened bank vaults or misplaced trunks found in attics, come across a long-lost manuscript (discovered, perhaps, alongside Holmes’s equally lost volumes titled The Whole Art of Detection ?) which conveniently included encrypted notes from these days in question, notes which somehow allow us to perceive things from the detective’s point-of-view for this part of the tale. Surely more apparently miraculous things have happened in real life than this “discovery” of long-lost notes by the beekeeping retired gentleman who lived out the last years of his life in “a small farm upon the [Sussex] downs five miles from Eastbourne.”