Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

James made a noncommittal sound.

“So you really must stay,” repeated Hay. “I need your advice and ready counsel, old friend. It will be a very sensitive thing when Adams gets home.”

“It will indeed,” said James. “You have no intention of . . .”

“Of telling him that the English detective Sherlock Holmes is investigating Clover’s suicide?” finished Hay. “Certainly not. You know as well as I that Henry will never agree to discuss that terrible December day. Adams would be outraged and appalled at the very idea of a detective poking around amidst the burned rubble of his painful memories.”

“We can only hope,” said James, “that what Adams does not know doesn’t end up somehow hurting him anyway. Lies and omissions have a way of getting out, especially among close friends.”

Hay frowned at this in silence for a long moment but finally said, “The real question is whether to tell Clara about all this. By odd coincidence, she’s a great collector of the published tales of our new friend’s so-called adventures.”

“Tell Clara about what? ” asked Clara Hay from the door that had been quietly opened while the two men had been so loudly debating.

Leaving his room locked, James took his umbrella—despite the fact that the skies were perfectly blue this warming Tuesday in March—and set off on what Hay had told him was a walk of about two miles to the U.S. Capitol and its Library of Congress. Hay had added that if Harry wanted to see the beautiful new Thomas Jefferson Building currently under construction to house the enlarged Library in a few years, he might add a block or so to his walk to view the rising front façade facing 2nd Street N.E.

James felt bad telling his friend Hay that he simply wanted to get in some exercise and a spot of sight-seeing when, in truth, he had a much more sinister reason for visiting the Library of Congress installed in the Capitol Building.

The previous afternoon, Henry James had done what was almost certainly the least-gentlemanly act of his adult life.

The maids were cleaning “Mr. Sigerson’s” room when James went upstairs that afternoon. They were carrying out sheets and fetching new ones while airing out the room of a visible miasma of pipe smoke and they’d left the door ajar.

James had paused and peered in. Holmes had bustled out earlier, working to hide his appearance with a derby pulled low and a macintosh collar tugged high, but almost certainly had been in some disguise. There was no telling when he might return. His room, the bedding being dealt with first by the maids, was a mess—clothes flung on the floor, books strewn everywhere, ashes spilled on the Hays’ expensive bedside tables and sitting-area tables, maps of Washington and New York lying open on the floor atop discarded socks and shoes. A messy young boy intent upon outraging his parents with his slovenliness could hardly have done worse.

But there, hung over the back of a chair not three feet inside the room, was the jacket that Holmes had been wearing yesterday morning when he’d spoken to Hay, King, and James in Hay’s study.

Glancing guiltily over his shoulder, seeing no one but realizing that he would have only a few seconds in which to spy and pry, James stepped quickly into the room and felt in the inside breast pocket of that jacket. Holmes had taken out four photographs at the beginning of his talk and eventually shown them three of them—Colonel Sebastian Moran, the blurred image of young Lucan Adler, and an old photograph of the woman he said was Irene Adler before she pretended to be Clover Adams’s friend Rebecca Lorne.

The fourth photograph, he’d never shown them.

James did not expect to find anything, so he was surprised when he pulled out the small pack of four photos and a telegram flimsy. Three of the images were indeed the ones shared with the other men on Monday, but the fourth photograph—quite formal, the man wearing a long-tailed black suit and old-fashioned high collars, the single image obviously snipped with scissors from a larger photograph—was of a man in his forties or fifties, clean-shaven and strangely hollow-cheeked, his penetrating gaze peering out from under a commanding (and balding at the top) brow. A few loose strands of both dark and graying hair hung down over the man’s oddly lupine ears.

There was something professorial in the man’s dress and slightly hunched manner, but also something predatory in the way the sharp-featured face protruded forward with the black shoulders rising behind it. As formal as the man’s pose was, James thought he could see a strange glimpse of the man’s tongue caught in the act of flicking out over just-visible small, disturbingly sharp teeth.

The telegram was addressed to Sherlock Holmes to be picked up in a nearby Washington Western Union office, had the previous day’s date on it, and was brief:

CONFIRMED THAT MORIARTY HAS ADVANCED NETWORKS WORKING IN FRANCE GERMANY ITALY AND GREECE STOP ALSO NETWORKS FUNDING AND SUPPORTING CRIMINALS AND ANARCHISTS IN WASHINGTON NEW YORK BALTIMORE AND CHICAGO STOP PROCEED WITH CAUTION STOP MYCROFT

James set the four photos and folded telegram back in the jacket pocket and hurried out into the hall just as one of the maids carrying fresh linens turned the corner.

She stepped aside to let James pass toward his own room and the author detected no recognition of his quick trespass in her properly downturned eyes.

James crossed the small park and walked east on Pennsylvania Avenue, occasionally glancing without much interest through the iron fence across the north lawn of the Executive Mansion on its open acres of grass. At the corner he turned south on 15th St. N.W. and walked a little more than four blocks that way before he turned southeast onto a more southerly extension of Pennsylvania Avenue N.W.

After a brisk mile on Pennsylvania Avenue, James had to wait a moment before he could cross between carriages and heavy horse-drawn carts to follow Constitution Avenue a little more than a half mile due east. He’d decided to get a glimpse of the new Thomas Jefferson Building, if only to tell Hay later that he had.

Three blocks walking south on 2nd Street brought him to the construction site—three stories of the imposing new home for the Library had risen, but the shell was still hollow and the façades festooned with cranes, ropes, nautical-looking arrangements of block and tackle, and wood-and-iron lattices making rigid the empty areas between the high pillars up on that third-story level. The entire city block surrounding the rising structure was littered with numbered blocks of granite, pallets of lumber protected from the weather with rubber-canvas wrappings, loaded carts, workmen, and even more cranes, pulleys, and cables.

James could have continued walking south and then back to the Capitol via Independence Avenue, but he chose to turn around, retrace his steps to East Capitol Street, and pass through a muddy expanse of nothingness which might have been unkempt gardens—making sure to stay on the narrow paved path—before climbing the stairs to the east entrance of the nation’s Capitol.

That morning when James and Hay had been overheard by Clara, the author expected either a row or for his friend John to lie, but neither occurred. Hay confessed everything to his wife. Instead of being outraged at being misled, Clara Hay had been delighted that their guest “Jan Sigerson” was actually the detective Sherlock Holmes in disguise. James guessed that Hay had revealed all this to his wife because he was uncertain about when Holmes himself might appear before Clara and the servants sans the Sigerson disguise.

“Oh, he’s a master of disguise!” Clara had gushed, clapping her hands together as if in prayer. “What an honor to have the World’s First and Foremost Consulting Detective as a guest here in our home. I cannot wait to tell Marie and Ellen and . . .”