Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

The four women bustled out of the dining room. The eight men headed toward the library at a more leisurely pace. Only Sherlock Holmes was smiling as they left the dining room.

Monday morning, April 3, was the beginning of what promised to be an almost perfect spring day. The air was cool and fresh after night-time showers but the warming sun promised temperatures in the low seventies. Every street showed trees leafing in, cherry and dogwood blossoms, and flowerbeds coming into color.

James and Holmes were waiting outside Mrs. Stevens’s home when Adams showed up in his beautiful old open carriage pulled by two large, perfectly groomed horses. A footman jumped down from the box and held the half-door as Holmes and James stepped in and sat opposite Adams, who had both hands resting on his walking cane. He was smiling. “I’m so glad you were both free to do this with me today.” To the driver, he said, “Back around Lafayette Square, please, Simon.”

Holmes exchanged a glance with James. Lafayette Square was only a few blocks away. Was Adams taking them back to his home—or Hay’s—for some reason?

No. When they reached Lafayette Square, the driver kept going, the clop-clop of their horses’ massive hooves echoing back from the buildings surrounding the wooded and open space. The grass in the square looked very green today. Holmes glanced at the equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson in the center of the square.

Adams saw the direction of the detective’s gaze and said, “My wife, Clover, always referred to that statue as ‘Jackson on his rocking horse’. She wasn’t far from the truth . . . it was the first bronze statue ever cast in America and the first equestrian statue to have a horse rearing back on its hind legs. Alas, the sculptor, a certain Clark Mills, had never seen an equestrian statue before and I fear that this shows in the finished product.”

Holmes smiled but was aware of a quick look from Henry James. It was well known that Henry Adams never—ever—spoke of his dead wife, yet he just had.

“Actually,” continued Adams, “I asked Simon to bring us back this way before we head out to Rock Creek Park and the cemetery because I didn’t know whether Hay had told you the history of some of these homes facing the square, Mr. Holmes. The events here might be interesting to someone from your profession.”

“No,” said Holmes. “No one’s mentioned the other homes besides yours and Mr. Hay’s.”

“This narrow house here . . .” said Adams, pointing with his cane, but subtly, the point of the cane never rising above the height of the carriage door. “It was rented by General George McClellan during the Civil War. John Hay tells the interesting story of one night when President Lincoln—with twenty-three-year-old Hay in tow—went over to confer with the general . . . Little Bonaparte, he liked to be called . . . but McClellan was out. Lincoln and Hay sat down in the parlor to wait. Almost an hour later, the diminutive General—diminutive in stature only, I assure you, since McClellan felt that he should be Dictator and had the habit of referring to Lincoln as the ‘Original Gorilla’—came in, saw Lincoln waiting, and went up the stairs. About half an hour passed, according to Hay, and Lincoln finally asked a servant when General McClellan might be coming back down. ‘Oh, the General’s gone to bed, sir,’ reported the servant.”

“Incredible,” said Henry James.

Adams smiled. “That’s what Hay said to President Lincoln as they were walking back to the White House in the dark and rain. He suggested that Lincoln—that no President of the United States—should tolerate such insolence. Mr. Lincoln’s response to John was—‘I would hold the man’s reins if he can win this war for us.’ ”

“Fascinating,” said Holmes, “although I’m not sure I see the connection to my profession.”

“True,” said Adams. “But here . . .” The cane pointed to another house just a few doors down. “Here lived Colonel Henry Rathbone who was stabbed by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre on the same night that the president was assassinated there.” Adams paused and looked at Holmes. “I thought that might interest you, Mr. Holmes, since you seem especially interested in assassinations.”

“Did the colonel survive?” asked Holmes.

“Yes, yes . . . yes, he did. Colonel Rathbone wrestled with Booth after the actor had shot the president in the back of the head, but Booth had come equipped with a dagger as well as his pistol and the assassin slashed Rathbone cruelly in the arm and head before he—Booth—leaped to the stage and shouted his melodramatic ‘Sic semper tyrannis’ .”

“Didn’t I read somewhere about Colonel Rathbone blaming himself for not stopping Booth?” said James.

“Precisely,” said Adams. “His wounds healed, but his agony at not preventing the assassination weighed heavily on poor Rathbone. A decade ago, when he was serving as U.S. consul in Germany, the colonel killed his wife Clara—both shooting and stabbing her multiple times—and would have killed their three children if someone hadn’t arrived in time to stop him. He told the police that he was innocent, that the real murderer was hiding, along with others, behind the pictures on the walls.”

“Where is he now?” asked Holmes.

“In an asylum for the insane in Hildesheim, Germany,” said Adams. The black cane pointed again. “This brick house was the home of Secretary of State William Seward and, on the night of Lincoln’s assassination, Seward was attacked in his bed by his own would-be assassin, a mentally deficient giant of a man named Louis Paine, who got into the house—at almost the same moment the president was being shot at Ford’s Theatre—by saying that he was bringing medicine for the patient and had to deliver it in person.”

“Patient?” said Holmes.

“Seward had recently been in a serious carriage accident, and among his other injuries was a broken jaw that was set in a metal splint. Paine stabbed Seward’s son and then leaped like a demon on poor bed-bound Seward, stabbing him with a huge knife, stabbing repeatedly in the face, neck, chest, and arm . . . and kept stabbing at him even after Seward had fallen down in the narrow gap between his bed and the wall. But it seems that the metal jaw splint, the plaster casts, and the thickness of the bandages saved Seward’s life that night.”

“His son?” said Holmes.

“He also survived, but with terrible scars,” said Adams. “They hanged Paine, of course . . . with the other conspirators. Now you see that tree there . . .”

Adams allowed his cane to rest on the carriage door as they approached a tree set into its little circle of dirt along the sidewalk. “Right there is where Congressman Daniel Sickles—notorious for being a rake, a gambler, and a liar even above the usual level of congressional mendacity—shot and murdered young Philip Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key, the fellow who gave us the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’, in February of eighteen fifty-nine. Sickles had married, after seducing, a rather exotic fifteen-year-old lady named Teresa Bagioli and their five years of marriage were . . . shall we say ‘explosive’? Even though Sickles was carrying on multiple liaisons with other women at the time—he took a known prostitute named Fanny White with him to England and introduced her to Queen Victoria, all this while poor Teresa was pregnant—when he learned that Key was his wife’s lover, he intercepted the poor man . . . there, right there at that tree . . . and shot him multiple times.”

“I know of this case,” said Holmes. “Sickles was found not guilty due to . . . what did they call it? . . . a temporary insanity brought on by his wife’s unfaithfulness. I noted it in my files because it was the first time, in any English-speaking country, as far as I know, that ‘temporary madness’ served as a reason for acquittal in a murder trial.”