Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

Or at least to Clemens it would seem a higher level.

As if reading Holmes’s thoughts, Clemens removed the cigar from his mouth and leaned forward into the circle of men facing each other. “What about you, Mr. James? What do you think of seeking one’s fortune by writing for mere actors?”

James smiled. “I have friends who would say that such money is tainted.”

“By Jove, it is tainted!” cried Clemens in a loud voice while slapping his knee. All of the boy’s embarrassment and guilt was gone now, replaced by a boy’s enthusiasm. “The kind of wealth being made these days by writing for the stage by, say, that Irishman Oscar Wilde is twice tainted!”

“Twice tainted?” echoed Henry James.

“Twice tainted,” repeated Clemens. “Tain’t yours, and certainly tain’t mine.”

Hartford was a dreary one-business town—insurance companies on every other dreary corner and no civic architecture of any significance—but by the time the brougham carrying the four men to Nook Farm turned onto Farmington Avenue, Holmes and James could see the beauty of Mark Twain’s old neighborhood.

The houses were large but distinct from one another, obviously designed by architects with their particular clients’ dreams and desires in mind. Each lot covered several acres and, while a house might put an iron fence around some of the front yard to separate it from the paved and gently curving avenue, the larger properties themselves tended to blend together in forest and glade with no proprietary fencing.

“See that gazebo?” said Clemens, pointing into the trees between two fine homes. “Harriet Beecher Stowe and I shared the expense of building that since it sits right on the invisible line between our properties. She and I would meet there often on a warm summer day or brisk autumn morning to swap yarns and discuss the inevitable decline of Western Civilization.”

“Is she still living?” asked Holmes. Uncle Tom’s Cabin had run on the stage in London literally for decades since his boyhood.

“Oh, yes,” said Clemens. “Almost eighty-two now, I believe, and still as gracious and cussed as ever. The little woman, as President Lincoln said upon first meeting her, whose book started the great war.”

Their brougham paused to let two builders’ wagons slowly pass and since they were still gazing at the gazebo amidst the trees, Clemens went on, “Some nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d steal out to sit on the railing in the gazebo and smoke and admire the stars or moonlight. Often I’d find Mrs. Stowe already there. We’d talk ’til almost dawn, two happy insomniacs.”

“One must wonder,” said Henry James, “what two writers of such major accomplishment and diverse talents would discuss in the starlight or moonlight. The nature of evil? The past and future of the black race in America? Thoughts on literature or dramaturgy?”

“Mostly,” said Clemens, taking the cigar from his mouth, “we talked about our aches and pains. Especially before Mr . Stowe died in ’eighty-six. She’d tell me hers; I’d tell ’er mine.”

Holmes saw Howells smile at this. Obviously some Sam Clemens story was imminent while they waited for the dray wagons to rumble past.

“I remember one night,” said Clemens between blue puffs, “when she listed her aches and pains, sure that they must signify imminent mortality . . . the darling lady was almost as hypochondriacal as I was . . . when I was amazed to hear that her problems exactly matched a recent list of my own . . . and a list of pains and symptoms of which I had just been cured!”

Holmes folded his arms. The dray wagons were past and now their brougham turned onto a paved lane that curved up a gentle hill.

“I told her . . .” continued Clemens. “I told her . . . ‘Harriet,’ I said . . . ‘my doctor just cured me of precisely those ailments. Precisely!’ ‘What medicine did he prescribe?’ asked little Mrs. Stowe. ‘Why, no medicines at all!’ says I. ‘My doctor just told me to take a two-month sabbatical from my habits of heavy drinking, constant smoking, and exploding into wild bouts of profanity in irregular but frequent intervals.’ I told her, ‘Harriet, you give up cussin’, drinkin’, and smokin’ for a couple of months and you’ll be right as rain.’ ”

Clemens peered at them through the smoke, making sure that they were still absorbed in his tale.

“ ‘Mr. Clemens!’ cried she. ‘I have never partaken of any of those terrible behaviors.’ ‘Never?’ says I, and I can tell you, gentlemen, I was shocked. ‘Never,’ says Harriet Beecher Stowe, gathering her shawl around her because the night was nippy. ‘Well then, my dear lady,’ I broke it to her with infinite sadness, ‘there is no hope for you. You are a balloon going down and you have no ballast to cast overboard. You have neglected your vices .’ ”

The brougham stopped at the crest of a rise and there was Samuel Clemens’s former home. Although he still owned it, he explained, for the last two years he and Livy had leased it to a certain John Day and his wife Alice, the daughter of Isabella Hooker, for a much-needed two hundred dollars a month. Clemens said that he’d cabled ahead and John and Alice would be out this afternoon; the house was theirs for the time-being.

Stepping out of the carriage, Holmes looked at the house. The sunlight created a rich mixture of shade and colors on three stories of salmon-colored bricks. The steeply pitched gables along with five balconies gave the large home a bit of a castle look. Its main window was on a two-story tower and overlooked the porte cochère over the driveway.

Clemens saw where the detective was gazing. “Some have written or said that I wanted that bit to resemble a riverboat’s pilot house,” he said, stubbing his last cigar out on the curb. “But I didn’t. That wasn’t the plan at all. It’s just, as they say, a happy coincidence.”

Clemens fetched a key from a flower pot on the front porch, unlocked the door, and swept it open for them to enter.

A few yards down the hallway they could peer into the main rooms and Holmes knew that it was a home dedicated to good taste and quality items. Sherlock Holmes’s bachelor bedroom and sitting room at 221 B Baker Street might be a toss-about mess— was a toss-about mess when Mrs. Hudson wasn’t interfering—with everything thrown and dropped rather than folded and placed, but Holmes knew attractive domestic order when he saw it. He was seeing it now.

“Nineteen rooms, seven bathrooms,” Clemens was saying as if he were a real estate man intent upon selling the house to them. “All the bathrooms with flush toilets, which was a curiosity in its day. Speaking tubes so that anyone can talk to anyone from any floor. In this parlor—enter, gentlemen—you see Hartford’s first telephone in its particular little niche there. Since I was one of the first to install the infernal device, there were precious few other telephonic interlocutors I might talk to.

“Here’s the drawing room . . . the stencil designs on the walls were from Lockwood de Forest.”

“A partner in the firm begun by Mr. Tiffany,” added Howells.

“This little solar conservatory area was where my girls would put on their plays,” said Clemens, gesturing to an area filled with plants. “You see how the drapes can be drawn across here like a theater curtain.” Clemens paused and then seemed to look at the room and peer into the adjoining rooms for the first time.

“This is . . . strange,” he said in a choked voice. “For the first year or so we were abroad, Livy and I had all the furniture, carpets, vases, beds, knick-knacks in storage, but when John and Alice leased the place, rather than have the young couple furnish such a large house, we got everything out of storage for them . . . for a small additional fee. But . . .”