Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

“I am, Mr. James.”

“So will you be introduced to Adams as Sherlock Holmes or as Mr. Sigerson?” asked James.

“With luck, by tomorrow morning we’ll have shifted quarters to those nearby rooms to let about which Mr. Hay talked to you. You are certain they will be satisfactory?”

“They were in ’eighty-three when I was here last and Clover Adams arranged for me to stay there,” said James. “Light, clean rooms—and Hay says that we shall each have a corner bed-sitting-room of our own.”

Holmes nodded. “The privacy will help in my investigations.”

James looked out at the countryside passing by, the small white houses and red barns and newly plowed fields and small remaining bits of forest enriched by the warm light of the setting sun and the long shadows. When he turned back, he said, “I take it you would rather meet Henry Adams as yourself—as Holmes.”

“It would simplify much,” said Holmes and they rode in silence for half an hour or so.

“Mr. James,” said Holmes at last, “since we may not have the opportunity for a private conversation for some time to come, allow me to say Mr. Clemens’s reprise of your brother William’s theory of self—of ‘I’ and ‘Me’—was of the greatest interest to me.”

James nodded his appreciation and stifled a sigh. He’d been in his older brother’s shadow for fifty years now and, while he loved William dearly—part of James still wanted to follow William around and be in his presence constantly as he did when he was a small boy—he would, at age fifty, appreciate stepping into the sunshine of praise for his own work, his own achievements, his own life.

“I mention it,” continued Holmes, “because I see the same analysis of the polyphonicdialogic of multiple selves and most especially of the spiritual core, the ‘I’ caught up constantly in the flow of thoughts and events—what your brother so brilliantly labeled as ‘the stream of consciousness’—in your writing, sir. That is, in your stories and novels and characters. It is astounding to me that two brothers, usually separated by an ocean, could so masterfully come to the same impression and explanation of human consciousness—your brother from the scientific side and you, even more powerfully, from the literary.”

For the first time in years, Henry James found himself speechless. Finally he managed to say—“Thank you, sir. You have read my work?” He heard the odd tone in his own voice in that query.

“I’ve read and enjoyed your work for years,” said Sherlock Holmes. “For reasons that may be all too obvious, I found your The Princess Casamassima a wonderful examination of how the working classes in England and America turn to anarchy . . . and thus to terrorism.”

James again nodded modestly toward his interlocutor. The author had been inordinately fond of his The Princess Casamassima . For one thing, the novel was a far cry from Daisy Miller and his many stories about young American women encountering Europe, but the critical response to the book had been muted and mixed.

As if reading his mind again, Holmes said, “I happened to read one review in The Times that criticized the book—and you—for placing so much of the social interaction on Sundays.” Holmes shook his head and smiled. “That reviewer, and perhaps too many of our upper classes, simply don’t realize that for the foreign working class you were describing, Sunday afternoons are the only time they have for any sort of social activity.”

“Exactly,” said James, who had actually researched his novel about the foreign-born working classes more diligently than any other work he’d written. “Thank you for realizing that.”

“The prison so aptly described in your book was Millbank Prison,” said Holmes. “I saw you there—inside the prison—early on a December morning in eighteen eighty-four. You were being led by one of the surlier day wardens, he took you to the women’s wing probably conjecturing that it might seem less oppressive to a renowned author’s sensibilities, but the warden with a small lamp was so far ahead of you that you seemed alone, squeezing up the metal stairs from cell ward to cell ward with your shoulders brushing cold stone.”

“Yes!” cried James, amazed. “But I saw no other gentlemen during my visit. Not even Millbank’s warden with whom I had corresponded, through the kind offices of a friend in Whitehall, to receive permission for the visit. There was only that surly, as you say, and infinitely uncommunicative guard. Where were you, sir? In the process, perhaps, of delivering some fiend you and Dr. Watson had just caught?”

“I was a prisoner,” said Holmes. “I saw you through the tiny Judas hole in my cell’s door—the guards were often too lazy to close it—before you climbed the steps to the women’s ward.”

“A prisoner? ” gasped James. He knew his features were aghast, reflecting the shock he felt.

“I was there for a little more than two months in disguise—if a prison uniform, welts from beatings, and severe malnutrition from the slop Millbank served out can be called a disguise—and my plan was to get close to another inmate whom I was sure was a killer of young women, but I admit, Mr. James, that it crossed my mind more than once that if something were to happen to both Inspector Lestrade and the warden, I might be in Millbank to this day.”

“Who was the killer?” asked James in a soft voice.

“An Oxford-educated barrister named Montague Druitt,” said Holmes, his eyes veiled as he seemed to be looking backward in time. “Druitt was also a schoolmaster with a record of occasional insanities and was found one Sunday outside the school where he taught. He was covered in blood. Inside the school was the dead and vivisected body of a certain Mary O’Brian, one of his students. Druitt was found guilty by a lower court but was in Millbank Prison only a few more days than I was. He had friends in high places, especially among the Inns of Court, and a second trial declared him innocent—they accepted his explanation that he had dropped by the school on a Sunday to pick up his books so that he could prepare his Monday lessons, found Miss O’Brian dead there, and, in his distress, held her body in his arms—thus explaining the copious amounts of blood on him.

“No knife was found on Mr. Druitt’s person or in the vicinity of the crime, so the courts let him go. He was a gentleman, you see,” said Holmes. “But I saw Miss O’Brian’s body before it was moved. She had been dismembered, sir. Her body had been eviscerated and was in pieces—each piece slashed and stabbed until she was turned almost inside out. Even the most compassionate gentleman would not have cradled that dissectionist’s work.”

“So you think he was guilty?” asked James.

“After he was released, I found the knife where he dropped it down a nearby sewer,” said Holmes. “It actually had his initials inscribed on it. And I was in the same terrible cell with him for seven weeks. He never fully confessed to the crime, Watson . . . I’m terribly sorry, Mr. James . . . but, in the privacy of that dark, dank cell along the Thames, Druitt smirked enough to me about no one ever solving the crime that, in my professional opinion, he all but bragged of committing it.”

“Surely Scotland Yard must have arrested him again after you showed them the knife and told them of his demeanor?” said James.

“Scotland Yard misses much, Mr. James—including this knife in their searches just after the crime. Including the family history of Druitt’s bouts of madness. But Scotland Yard does not want to advertise the things and criminals they miss.”

“That’s terrible,” said James, looking at Holmes in a new and strange light. “What happened to Mr. Montague Druitt?”