Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

“A mere servant you said last night,” said James, looking back down at the hieroglyphics of the novel on his lap. He was too upset to read, which was a very rare occurrence for Henry James.

“A mere servant, but one in the rather intimate employ of your very own Lady Wolseley,” said Holmes.

James almost dropped his book. “One of Lord and Lady Wolseley’s servants responsible for jewelry thefts!” he cried. “Impossible. Absurd.”

“Not at all,” said Holmes. “Lord Wolseley had paid me to solve the series of crimes that were plaguing his friends with such lovely country houses, but he needn’t have bothered coming to me. A moderately competent village constable could have solved that simple crime. I knew who it was—or had narrowed the very small category containing the obvious culprit—within hours of taking the case. You see, the thefts had begun in various high English houses in Ireland. All the major English houses, in fact, save for Lord Wolseley’s and a few English aristocrats there who were out of favor with Lord and Lady Wolseley.”

Henry James wanted to object again—on various obscure personal grounds as well as logical ones—but he could not yet find the words.

“The chief thief’s name was Germond,” continued Holmes. “Robert Jacob Germond. A rather aging corporal who had served as the General’s—Lord Wolseley’s—batman and even valet on various campaigns and in both the Irish military camps and at Lord Wolseley’s estate on that green isle. One has to say that Corporal Germond did not look the role of a jewel thief—he had a long, rather basset-hound face with the accompanying luminous, sad, and sensitive eyes—but one look at the record of thefts within Lord Wolseley’s regimental garrisons in Ireland over the years, and then amongst the homes of Lord W.’s friends in Ireland, and then again in England during his and Lady Wolseley’s various visits home, and the identity of the mastermind—although I admit that it is far too grand to call him by that title—of this jewel-theft ring was immediately obvious to even the least deductive mind. At the very moment you and I were meeting at the garden party, Mr. James, I was covertly watching Corporal Germond go about his actual thieving. He was very smooth.”

James felt himself blushing. He’d come to know several of Lord and Lady Wolseley’s primary servants over the years—most of them former military men under the General—but Germond had been assigned as his own personal servant during James’s only visit so far to Ireland and Lord Wolseley’s estate there. James had felt a strange . . . affinity . . . for the soft-spoken, sad-eyed personal valet.

James was not pleased that he and Holmes had to share a stateroom on the Paris , even though it was in first class and adequate to their needs. The booking had been so close to sailing time, Holmes had explained, that only a cancellation of this two-bed single stateroom had been available. “Unless,” he had added, “you would have preferred traveling in steerage . . . which, I know from personal experience, has its peculiar charms.”

“I do not wish to be traveling on that ship . . . or any ship . . . at all,” had been James’s rejoinder.

But save for the sleeping hours, the two saw little of each other. Holmes never went to breakfast, was rarely seen partaking of the rather good petit déjeuner in the morning dining area, was never glimpsed at lunch times, and only occasionally filled his assigned seat at the captain’s table where, every evening in his black tie and tails, James tried to converse with the French aristocrats, German businessmen, ship’s white-bearded captain (who seemed primarily interested in his food at any rate), and the single Englishwoman at the table—an almost-dotty dowager who insisted on calling him “Mr. Jane”.

James spent as much of each day at sea as he could either browsing the ship’s modest library—none of his works were there, even in translation—or pacing the not-terribly-spacious deck, or listening to the occasional desultory piano recital or small concert arranged for the passengers’ amusement.

But twice Henry James had accidentally caught Sherlock Holmes in powerfully personal and embarrassing moments.

The first time he’d surprised Holmes—who showed no surprise or embarrassment either time—had been after breakfast when James was returning to the shared stateroom in order to change his clothes. Holmes was lying, still in his nightshirt, on his bed, some sort of strap wrapped around the upper bicep of his left arm, and was just in the process of removing the needle of a syringe from the soft flesh at his inner elbow joint. On the bedside table—the table they had shared , the table on which James set his book when it came time to extinguish the lights—there was a vial of dark liquid that James had to assume was morphine.

Henry James was not unacquainted with the delivery and effects of morphine. He had watched his sister Alice float off on its golden glow, away from all humanity (including her own), for months before her death. Katharine Loring had even been instructed by Alice’s physician on how to administer the proper syringe-amount of morphine should no one else be available. James had never been required to give his dying sister the injection, but he had been prepared to. Alice, in her final months the year before, had also received regular sessions of hypnosis, along with the morphia, in the concerted efforts to lessen her seemingly endless pain.

But Sherlock Holmes was in no physical pain that Henry James knew of. He was simply now a morphine addict, after having been a cocaine-injection addict for many years. And he’d already stated that he was eager to find and use this new “heroic” drug of Mr. Bayer’s since it was so available in the United States.

Holmes had not been embarrassed—he’d simply looked up at James under heavy eyelids and calmly set away the bottle, syringe, and other apparatus in a small leather case James had already seen him carrying (and assumed to be his shaving kit)—and then smiled sleepily.

Disgusted and making no efforts to hide that reaction, James had turned on his heel and left the room, despite the fact that he had not changed into his deck-walking clothes.

Another painfully intimate moment came when James entered the stateroom after a perfunctory knock late on the fourth night out from Dublin only to find Holmes standing naked in front of the nightstand that held their water basin and small mirror. Again, Holmes showed no appropriate embarrassment and did not hurry to pull on his nightshirt, despite his stateroom-mate’s obvious discomfort.

Henry James had seen grown men naked before. He tended to react in complicated ways to the naked male form, but his primary reaction was to think of death.

When Henry James had been a toddler, he’d followed his brother William—older by just a year—everywhere William went. Henry couldn’t (and did not wish to) keep up with William during his brother’s rough-and-tumble years of outdoor play, but later, when William decided that he would become an artist, Henry decided that he would also become an artist. As many times as he could, he would join William in the drawing and painting classes their father paid for.

One day James entered the Newport drawing studio to find his orphaned cousin Gus Barker posing nude for the life-drawing class. Shocked to his marrow by the beauty of his red-headed cousin—that paleness of skin, the flaccid penis so vulnerable, Gus’s nipples so femininely pink against that white skin—James had pretended to an artist’s professional interest only, scowling down at William’s and others’ drawings as if preparing to seize paper and stroke some lines of charcoal of his own to capture such an ineffable power of nakedness. But mostly young Henry James, the incipient writer in him rising more certainly than any specific sexual consciousness, was fascinated with his own layered and troubled response to his male cousin’s calmly displayed body.