Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

Adams nodded. “Sickles hired the best lawyers in this city of lawyers, including Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s future Secretary of War, and a certain James T. Brady, who came up through Tammany Hall as Sickles did.”

“Wasn’t Sickles injured during the war?” asked James, who seemed to be enjoying this rather unusual sight-seeing tour.

“Yes, he lost a leg at Gettysburg,” said Adams. “But that didn’t stop Sickles from rushing back to Washington the day after his injury and amputation, July fourth, so that he could be the first man, outside of the president’s military telegraphers, to tell the story of the battle. It seems he had made a mess of things as a brigadier general and wanted to get his side of the story out first . . . which he did. Sickles was a great friend of Mrs. Lincoln and spent much time visiting her. You can visit the leg if you wish.”

“Visit the leg?” said Sherlock Holmes.

“Yes, when they amputated it at the army’s surgical tent that same afternoon of July second, eighteen sixty-three, Sickles insisted that they keep his leg and he had a little coffin-shaped box made for it. He gave it as a gift to the Army Medical Museum—just a few blocks from here—where it’s been on display in a glass case to this day, along with a small cannonball that Sickles insisted was the size of the one that shattered his leg. Dan Sickles makes annual pilgrimages every July to visit his leg . . . often he’s in the company of attractive young women. Stop the carriage please, Simon.”

The carriage stopped again and Adams pointed to an attractive brick home facing the square—it could be called a mansion—and said, “This is the house—Benjamin Tayloe’s house in eighteen fifty-nine—to which they carried the mortally wounded Philip Barton Key. He died on the living room floor and they say that his bloodstain is still soaked into the wood under the beautiful Persian carpet there now. Both the Tayloes and the current residents swear that Key’s ghost still haunts the house to this day.”

“Who are the current residents?” asked Holmes.

“Senator Don Cameron and his wife Lizzie bought the house in eighteen eighty-six,” said Henry Adams. He touched the driver’s back with his cane. “Drive on to Rock Creek Cemetery, Simon.”

Adams had said that it was about five miles from Lafayette Square to the cemetery and he and Henry James chatted most of the way: middle-aged men’s gossip, inquiring after mutual friends and various artists or writers. The sun was quite warm now, the pace slow, the clop-clop of the huge horses’ hooves almost metronomic, and Holmes pulled down the brim of his hat not only to shade his eyes but to think in peace.

He was amazed at Henry James’s calmness in the face of last night’s savage attack during dinner by Theodore Roosevelt. In the previous century, or the earlier decades of this century, words like “effeminate” and “emasculated” would have required the principals to meet at dawn, seconds standing by, pistols loaded and ready. Holmes had been astonished that James had stayed for brandy and cigars; he would have guessed that the writer would have excused himself early to walk back to Mrs. Stevens’s boarding house alone. But it was young Roosevelt, obviously ill at ease in Hay’s library after behaving so poorly during dinner, who was the first to say good night and leave. Holmes did so not long after that—it must have been around midnight—and was astonished again that James still stayed to talk.

Holmes had to keep reminding himself that James, Hay, and Adams were old friends. Still, it was hard for the detective to imagine how any friendship could survive such public insults—or why James showed such calmness and restraint in the company of two of those friends who not only had invited the insulting party to dinner, but who had said nothing to defend James.

Their carriage continued up 14th Street N.W., jogged east onto Harvard Street for a few blocks, then left again onto Sherman Avenue and then northwest on New Hampshire Avenue. Holmes allowed the lassitude that sometimes came with his morning injection of heroin to spread until he balanced there on the edge of sleep, his mind working at a furious rate despite the somnolence creeping over him. He knew that he would have to solve the riddle of Clover Adams and the sender of the annual cards in the next week or so, since he had to be in Chicago before the middle of April. He had exactly four weeks until the Columbian Exposition was to open on May 1 with President Cleveland still scheduled to throw the opening switch that would light electric lights, activate some device to pull the covering off Saint-Gaudens’s huge statue, and start all the hundreds if not thousands of pieces of machinery at the Fair.

And cables from Mycroft continued to say that the anarchists’ hired assassin, Lucan Adler, would be there to kill the president.

Holmes realized that Adams had said something to him. “I’m sorry,” he said, sitting up straighter and pushing up the brim of his silk top hat. “I was half-dozing and didn’t hear you.”

“I was just pointing out that rooftop and cupola ahead there on the right,” said Adams. “It was the Soldiers’ Home where President and Mrs. Lincoln used to go for a little cool air and relaxation during the summers of the Civil War.”

“Of course,” said Adams, “in the three decades since the War, Washington has sprawled out and around the Soldiers’ Home, Rock Creek Park, and Rock Creek Cemetery not far ahead. It was all countryside when Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln used to come here to escape the heat.”

“And did Mr. Hay come with the president?” asked Holmes.

Adams chuckled. “Very rarely. Lincoln left John and Nicolay in the sweltering White House to catch up on paperwork. Hay was especially good at forging Mr. Lincoln’s signature and he wrote many of the letters supposedly from President Lincoln himself. You’d be surprised at how many of Lincoln’s more famous letters were actually written by young John Hay.”

Holmes made that seal-barking noise that often passed for a laugh with him. “The Gettysburg Address, perhaps?” he said. “Rumor has it that it was scribbled on the back of an envelope.”

“Not that particular document, I think,” said Adams, possibly smiling as much at the unusual form and force of Holmes’s laugh as at the idea of Hay writing the Address.

Henry James, who had covered his bald pate with a straw hat, said, “You must have been very bored last night, Mr. Holmes, at all that talk of Red Indians, as you English call them.”

“Not really. I’ve long had an interest in the various tribes and nations of Indians on this continent.”

“Have you ever had a chance to see an Indian in person? In the flesh, so to speak?” asked Adams. “Perhaps when Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show visited London?”

“In slightly more interesting circumstances than that,” said Holmes. “In fact, I was taught by some Oglala Sioux how to speak a modest bit of the Lakota language.” He was sorry that he’d said anything almost as soon as the words were out.

“Really?” said Henry James with unfeigned curiosity. “Could you tell how this came about?”

Silently cursing himself for revealing too much, Holmes weighed whether he could avoid telling the story altogether but decided he could not.

“When I was in my early twenties,” he said as the carriage rolled on, “I was stagestruck and wanted to be an actor. A troupe I was with—one with mostly a Shakespearean repertoire—came to America for an eighteen-month tour, and I came with them.

“We performed in Denver and in more crowded Colorado Territory gold towns such as Cripple Creek and Central City when the director of our troupe decided that, before heading to San Francisco, we should perform in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, since that was ‘just next door’ in the Black Hills. Of course, ‘just next door’ amounted to five days of travel in a convoy of no fewer than six stagecoaches to accommodate our people and props. Twice we all had to get out to swim swollen rivers that were in our way. They floated the stagecoaches across.