Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

Holmes looked directly into James’s eyes, the detective’s fathomless gaze meeting James’s frightened but deeply curious and unblinking gray gaze in return.

“Trust me that I have more reasons for finding Lucan Adler than I can share at this time,” said Holmes. “He needs to be put to death. But I hope to speak with him first.”

Henry Adams awoke in his own bed in his Lafayette Square mansion and for a moment he was disoriented. The air seemed too cool. The bed too familiar. The morning light too soft. And the floor was not moving.

Adams had enjoyed his last two months of lounging in Havana with a friend, then spending a fortnight at Senator Don Cameron’s place at Coffin Point on St. Helena Island, and—most of all—he’d enjoyed “geologizing on the coral reefs” with the zoologist Alexander Agassiz, son of the famous geologist Louis Agassiz, on Agassiz’s comfortable yacht Wild Duck .

But now he was home—a place he’d mostly preferred not to be in the seven years since his wife’s suicide—and after his bath he found his clothes laid out for him by his own valet rather than by one of Don Cameron’s people.

Having been so emotionally solitary in the past seven years, Adams had expected to feel some sense of relief when his shay—he’d been met at the station, as requested, only by his driver—had pulled up in front of his home on H Street next to the Hays’ similar mansion fronting on Sixteenth Street, if for no other reason than his constant daily socializing, first with Phillips in Havana, then with the Camerons, then with Agassiz, and finally with the Camerons yet again, would be at an end.

But instead he’d felt a wall of depression wash over him as he approached the familiar arches of his front door.

Clover hadn’t died in this house, of course, or he’d never have returned to it. They’d been planning to move in on New Year’s Day 1886 after the two years of elaborate work inside and out was finished but Clover had drunk her developing-chemicals poison on December six.

But the damned cross she’d insisted on, without his approval, was there above the elaborately scrolled stonework above the arches.

He and Clover had been at Beverly Farms that July when the cross—the damned cross—had been added to the façade of the stonework. Henry had asked his friend from the State Department Library, Ted Dwight, to oversee that important bit of stonework and engraving and he’d written to Dwight—“If you see workmen carving a Christian emblem, remonstrate with them like a father.”

The place between the windows above the main pillars needed something decorative, insisted their architect, H. H. Richardson, so Henry had suggested to Clover that a peacock be carved there since—to his way of thinking—the entire new mansion complete with its beautiful art, furniture, and contents was a way of showing off for a Washington society he and Clover had snubbed at the best of times. Richardson had argued for a lion, roaring and rampant. Perhaps, Henry Adams thought, because the huge architect had been forced to put up with so many of Henry’s roars and complaints over the course of building this impressive mausoleum for the living.

But it turned out that, secretly (from Henry’s point-of-view), Clover had ordered an elaborate stone cross to be carved into the brick space there between the windows. By the time Adams at Beverly Farms had heard the news of the cross, the stonework was a done deed. It had bothered him deeply. Neither he nor Clover were religious in any way. They’d often made light fun of their less-than-pious Washington acquaintances who’d managed to work Christian symbols into the stonework or interior carvings of their expensive new homes.

When Ted Dwight had written to inform him that the cross had been added by artisans under Richardson’s supervision at Mrs. Adams’s insistence, Henry had written what he hoped had been a lighthearted-sounding letter in which he said—“Your account of the cross and the carving fills my heart with sadness and steeps my lips with cocaine.” And he’d added, “Never fear, Ted, we shall plaster over it with cement soon enough.”

But of course, they never had. So he’d also written to Dwight—“It’s a done thing, a fait accompli in stone, so I can neither revolt nor complain, though the whole thing seems to me bad art and bad taste. I have protested in vain and must henceforth hold my tongue.” But he’d also asked Ted not to tell anyone else about the cross yet, since “Washingtonians chatter so much that one is forced to deny them food for gossip.”

Goodness knows that Clover had provided them all with years of food for gossip within six months of that cross going up—she a December suicide, lying dead on the carpet of their living room at the Little White House at 1607 H Street.

The cross, rising between two arches, was a backdrop for a carved medallion showing off a slightly indefinable winged beast. Certainly not Pegasus. Not quite a griffon, nor a dragon—though Adams had wished it might have been. Whatever Clover had in mind when she ordered Richardson to add that design remained a mystery to this day, but even in the summer and autumn of that fateful 1885, Henry had written to friends that the “d— —d cross and its winged creature was prophetic of the future” and that they filled him “with terror.”

They still did. He had no idea, save for his peripatetic absence at the mansion being more common than his solitary presence in the past seven years, why he hadn’t gotten rid of the cross and winged monstrosity after Clover’s death.

To Adams, that entire horrible year had been filled with omens. That spring of 1885, when the minister was trying to impress upon Clover—with the utmost care, sympathy, and gentleness—that her father was indeed dying, Adams had heard her say, “No, no, no . . . everything seems unreal. I hardly know what we are saying or why we are here. And if it seems so unreal, it must be. Or at least I must be.”

And during that hot, miserable, endless, and pointless summer at Beverly Farms while Richardson was obeying Clover’s secret orders to carve that abomination into the front of their staggeringly expensive new home, Adams had—upon more than one occasion—heard his wife cry out to her sister, “Ellen, I am not real. Oh, make me real. For God’s sake, make me real. You . . . all of you . . . are real. Make me real as well.”

As Adams breakfasted alone that morning—he had frequently break-fasted, had lunch, and dined alone for the past seven years as long as he was in this house and not traveling—he thought of the damned cross on the wall and of that sick, hot summer at Beverly Farms and of Clover’s growing melancholia and . . . yes . . . insanity.

Then he put all of that firmly out of his mind and went into his study to go over his pile of recent unforwarded and shamefully unanswered correspondence.

It was late morning when his head butler knocked softly, entered, and said, “Mr. Holmes is here to see you, sir.”

“Holmes!” cried Adams. “Good heavens.” He put down his pen, buttoned his jacket, and hurried out to the foyer where Holmes had just handed his hat and coat to the second butler.

“My dear Holmes!” cried Adams, stepping forward to shake his friend’s hand with the special holding-the-elbow-with-his-left-hand handshake that he reserved for old friends with whom he really wasn’t that close. “I had no idea you were in town,” continued Adams. “Please come in! Can you stay for luncheon?”