Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

“I can stay for only a minute,” said Holmes. “I need to catch my train back to Boston in an hour. But I would happily sit in your study with you for a few moments and would heartily welcome a cup of coffee.”

Adams gave orders for the coffee to be brewed fresh and led Holmes to his study. At five-foot-six, Henry Brooks Adams had never felt tall—even among the shorter Americans of the nineteenth century—but he always felt especially short next to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Holmes was still “Jr.”, even at age fifty-two, because his famous father was still alive. He’d not yet struck off the mildly subordinating appellation as Henry James had a decade earlier upon the death of his father. But with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., even the “Junior” seemed to add to his appropriate grandeur.

Even while standing in the foyer with Holmes, Adams had realized that his old acquaintance was becoming more handsome in his fifties—tall, erect, the high collar trying to hide his one flaw (a neck that some said was too long), with his perfectly curved mustache only beginning to go gray and his perfectly parted hair contrasting boldly with Henry Adams’s bald pate. (And not only bald, Adams knew, but still peeling from the various sunburns he’d suffered on St. Helena and on Agassiz’s yacht, despite constantly wearing yachting caps and straw hats.)

As the steaming coffee came, Adams realized that even though he was only fifty-five, three years older than Holmes, it was his destiny to continue to grow balder and fatter and, yes, shorter, while Holmes would almost certainly keep his erect, tall, parade-ground-proud posture into his nineties and would probably reach the apogee of his male beauty in his eighties.

“What brings you to Washington, Wendell?” asked Adams. “Down to see Chief Justice Fuller perhaps?”

“Yes, Justice Fuller and President Cleveland,” said Holmes, carefully sipping his coffee. He did not offer to explain why he would be seeing the president, and Adams pointedly did not ask.

Holmes had been serving as an associate justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Court since 1883 and most astute observers Adams knew expected him to be Chief Justice of that state before long. Others would lay odds that before another decade was out, Holmes would be on the U.S. Supreme Court, although Adams had his private doubts about that.

“Well, how is Mrs. Holmes?” asked Adams. “Well, I hope.”

“Fanny is quite well, thank you.” It had been John Hay who had once commented privately to Adams about the slightly dismissive tone that always was present when Wendell mentioned his wife. Hay and Adams were in silent agreement that if ever there were a purely companionate marriage, the Holmeses’ was such.

Holmes set down his cup and saucer on a trivet the butler had placed on the top of a low bookcase next to his chair. “I stopped by to ask you about these rumors,” said Holmes in his old, somewhat abrupt manner.

“Rumors?” Adams felt his heart race when he knew he shouldn’t be alarmed. Lizzie Cameron would never reveal the contents of their personal letters—especially not Adams’s last and most personal letter to her, from Scotland to Paris, just a couple of months earlier. Still, his pulse pounded with anxiety.

“About the Hays’ visitors,” said Holmes.

Adams let his eyebrows rise. “I wasn’t aware that John and Clara had any visitors of special note, but, then, I’ve been traveling awhile now.”

“So Hay told me when I stopped by next door a few minutes ago,” said Holmes. “But your service staff must be buzzing about the visitors . . . mine certainly are.”

“Your servants in Boston are buzzing about the Hays’ visitors?” Adams cried with a smile.

“Of course not, but I’ve been here in Washington several days now and I always bring my personal valet and cook along.”

Adams folded his hands under his chin and smiled openly. “I’ve not had time to hear my servants whispering. By all means, Holmes, tell me the gossip.”

Holmes made a flicking motion with his hand—Adams noticing the long, tapering, perfectly manicured fingers—and said, “It’s certain that Henry James is back. He was staying with the Hays for the past week or so . . . I just missed him, evidently. He’s taken up lodgings nearby. At Mrs. Stevens’s place, I believe.”

“Clover arranged for Harry to stay there ten years ago, the last time he was here,” said Adams in a low voice.

Holmes nodded impatiently. “I stopped by Mrs. Stevens’s place before coming back here, but both James and his fellow lodger—the Hays’ other guest this past week and more—were out.”

“I wonder what Harry came back for,” mused Adams. Just before Henry James had left America in 1883 after his parents’ deaths and all the problems created by his father’s will and properties in Albany, Adams had heard him swear that that would be his last visit to America. His home now was in England and Europe, their old friend had said.

“Whatever brought him back, he’s trying to keep the visit confidential,” said Holmes.

Adams steepled his fingers and tapped his bearded chin. “Why would Harry want to do that? Unless . . . but William is in good health and away with his family to Italy or Switzerland or somewhere the last I heard, and I believe there were no complications last year with Harry’s sister Alice’s will. Miss Loring brought the poor girl’s ashes home last year to be interred in the family plot in Cambridge.”

“Perhaps the confidentiality relates to James’s companion—or, rather, companions—on this trip,” Holmes said softly, leaning forward over the desk. “Two men. Both rather strange, from what I hear.”

Adams allowed his steepled fingers to tap his lips. If Wendell’s gossip was about some physical liaison that Harry finally allowed to occur with some other man—on his encounters with Harry in England and the Continent, Adams had sensed the almost-perfectly-hidden infatuation that James felt toward some of his younger male artist friends—Adams most assuredly did not want to hear about it. He hoped that his expression and posture, while seemingly neutral, conveyed this message to the often too-blunt and sometimes indiscreet Wendell.

“Who are these traveling companions?” Adams asked with no great show of curiosity. “Certainly they must be above reproach if Harry is introducing them to the Hays.” Rumors of Oscar Wilde’s private behavior crossed his mind but he smiled away such an absurd thought about Henry James. Harry, while loving gossip as much as the rest of their male epistolary circle, was perhaps the most essentially private person Adams had ever known.

“Certainly, certainly,” Holmes was muttering. “But one of the guests—Hay says that he left some days ago—was supposedly the Norwegian, or perhaps it was Swede, Jan Sigerson you may have read about in the past year or two. An explorer of some sort.”

Adams dropped his small hands to his lap. “Sigerson . . . Sigerson . . . yes, I vaguely recall the name. Norwegian, I believe. He was in the news briefly a year or two ago for climbing some mountain or finding some pass in the Himalayas, wasn’t it? Or spending some time in Tibet perhaps. That is unusual.” Adams was speaking as a veteran world traveler. After Clover’s death, he’d wandered around the South Seas for almost a year with the artist John La Farge. It had been a telegram from Paris . . . from Lizzie Cameron . . . that had brought him rushing back around the planet like a fool.

Adams set that out of his mind.

“Yes, I remember something about a Jan Sigerson,” he said again. “So the explorer has come to America with Harry. Odd, but I fail to see any reason for Harry to keep his presence in America secret from old friends, unless Mr. Sigerson desperately wishes to avoid publicity, and Harry was waiting for him to depart before notifying the rest of us.”