Authors: Dan Simmons
So if Moriarty were alive today, if he hadn’t died in 1891 at Reichenbach Falls, how old would he be—47 or 44?
The next shock for James was when he found the copyright date of
The Dynamics of an Asteroid
, published by an imprint he’d never heard of in London—1890. Even if Moriarty had been born at the later date given, he would have been 41 years old in the year the book was published. Old, from the little that Henry James understood, for a mathematician’s first major publication. Some don at Oxford had once told James, in passing, that mathematicians such as Charles Dodgson, known to the world as Lewis Carroll, usually published their best work when they were younger than thirty.
Thumbing through the literal hieroglyphics—to James—of the mathematical equations of
The Dynamics of an Asteroid
, he found himself muttering aloud, “If I only had the vaguest idea of what this volume is about . . .”
“I’ve heard some of the visiting scientists discuss it,” said Miss Miller, thinking that he had addressed her with the question. “It seems that the asteroid in question creates what is known to astronomers and mathematicians as a Three-Body-Problem. Take any two celestial bodies, and their gravitational attraction, tidal effect on the other, tumbling, three-dimensional orientations, and so forth can be plotted with both modern and classical mathematical techniques. But add a third body . . . evidently then the tumbling, orientation, and even trajectory of an asteroid becomes all but incalculable. Professor James Moriarty’s great renown in this book came, if I understand the scientists and mathematicians correctly, from pointing out what cannot be calculated.”
“Very interesting,” said James, although her summary of others’ analysis was useless to him. After a moment he spoke again, “So it appears that there is no chance of finding a photograph of Professor Moriarty.”
“Please come with me, Mr. James.” Miss Miller—James tried not to think of her unfortunate first name—marched ahead of him with elbows pumping, a soldier going off to war.
They had to climb into what had to be the dusty attic of the Capitol (although not under the great dome as far as James could tell) and Miss Miller had to unlock three more doors before they came to a room filled with thousands of carefully filed journals.
“Mathematics . . . European . . . conferences . . .” muttered Miss Miller to herself, gesturing behind her back for James to take the only seat available in the room. A low chair at what seemed to be a student’s desk in the center of the impossibly cluttered room. James was certain that he would have nightmares about this Library for years to come.
“Here!” she cried at last and brought a German journal with a title too long and umlauted and Fraktured for James to bother trying to decipher. She opened to page thirty-six and stabbed her finger down at a line of eight middle-aged men standing in a line facing the camera. The caption, in German, beneath the photograph said “Conference on Advanced Mathematics and Astronomical Physics, University of Leipzig, July, 1892.”
The names were listed under each man, but James didn’t need to read them. He saw Moriarty at once, on the far right—the same balding head, straggling dark hair, reptilian forward thrusting of his neck, and hint of tongue showing between the thin, pale lips. It was precisely the photograph that he’d illicitly taken from Holmes’s jacket and peeked at that very morning. Holmes must have torn it out of a copy of this very journal.
“Professor James N. Moriarty, London.” No university affiliation given. But the date of the conference—July, 1892. More than a full year after Holmes and the newspaper accounts recorded Moriarty as dying at Reichenbach Falls in May of 1891!
Satisfied that he would find out no more about this particular Lazarus at the Library of Congress, James went through the motions of taking a few notes and assured the apologetic Miss Miller that no, no, despite the apparent paucity of information available, she had been of inestimable help to him.
Inestimable
.
He stood and turned to go then but could not even find his way through the attic to the stairs. Miss Miller inquired as to which exit from the Capitol he wished to use.
“The main . . . front . . . entrance, I believe,” said James.
“Wonderful,” said the helpful Miss Miller. “You’ll get some glimpses of the actual Capitol.”
She was his Aeneas down several flights of stairs, around endless stacks of books that would have stopped him in his tracks, through the long, high, cluttered corridors, and then out into the formal marble vaults and under the majestic dome of the United States Capitol Building itself. Henry James was impressed not by the colossal Roman size of the structure, but by its almost Grecian white purity. And the early afternoon light shining down onto the marble floors was lovely.
Out under the high portico and with the grand columns framing a view back toward the Executive Mansion less than a mile away, James turned to the librarian. “Once again, Miss Miller, I must thank you most sincerely for your inestimable help on my little research errand.”
He tipped his hat and started to descend but stopped and turned back when Miss Miller called his name.
“Mr. James, I . . .” She was wringing her hands and blushing. “I may not get another chance, so I hope you will not think it impertinent of me if I take this opportunity to thank you so much for writing what I consider such a lovely and wise novel about a woman’s
mind
.”
Daisy Miller
?
thought James.
The poor lady has so much to learn about life
. He’d certainly had when he wrote that popular but shallow confection so many years earlier.
“Thank you, Miss Miller,” he said smoothly. “But the eponymous title pales in comparison to its namesake’s true beauty and wisdom.”
“Eponymous . . .” repeated Miss Daisy Miller and then blushed an even deeper crimson. “No, Mr. James . . . I did not mean your novel
Daisy Miller
. That was adequate as an . . . entertainment. No, I was referring to your wonderful
The Portrait of a Lady
.”
“Ahhh, so kind,” murmured James through his beard and tipped his hat again and bowed slightly and then turned to umbrella-tap his way down the wide, white stone steps.
Adequate as an entertainment?
Who did this homely prune of a spinster think she was?
* * *
It was already mid-afternoon. Not ready to return to the Hays’ home, James hunted for a place near the Capitol where he might have a light luncheon. He’d imagined a bistro or charcuterie, but managed to find only a delicatessen sort of place—obviously the kind of establishment attuned to the needs of busy government workers and clerks with only a brief break time for their luncheons—that served only rude sandwiches and tepid coffee. But it had empty tables outside at this after-luncheon hour and he was glad to sit in the shade and sip his coffee and think about the import of what he’d seen and learned in the Library of Congress.
Until this afternoon, James had been determined to say good-bye to the Hays, preferably before Henry Adams returned home later in this week, and to return to London on his own. Whatever wave of despair had driven him to Paris and the bank of the Seine at night had passed over, dissipated, and he only wanted to extricate himself from this sticky web of disguises and assumed identities that this Holmes-person, whoever he really was, had entangled him in.
But now, knowing beyond a doubt that Holmes—by whatever name—had lied to him about inventing Professor James Moriarty just so that he could “die” with him at Reichenbach Falls, and after seeing the photograph of the real Moriarty both from Holmes’s jacket pocket and the European journal covering mathematicians and astronomy physicists, James felt a grim new determination to stay with his friends, the Hays and Henry Adams, until this “Sherlock Holmes” was completely exposed as the fraud and humbug he was.
Reinvigorated by this new resolve, James took the scenic route back to Lafayette Square and John and Clara’s front door.
Hay, in a state of some excitement, rushed down the stairs to escort him up to the study the minute a servant had let him in.
“He’s just now revealing it,” Hay said. “He wouldn’t until you returned, Harry.”
“Reveal . . .” said James. He felt the shadow of dread that came over him every time this Holmes-person “revealed” anything.
Hay’s study was a mess—typewritten cards and envelopes turned out of their boxes and files and strewn everywhere. James was surprised to see Clara there along with her husband and Holmes not wearing his Sigerson disguise.
“Clara,” said James, somewhat bewildered, “you are a part of this . . .”
“Oh, yes, yes!” cried Clara Hay, the respectable Washington society matron, while squeezing his hand like a school girl with one hand while fluttering two copies of
Harper’s Weekly
with her other hand. “And Mr. Holmes has given me his impressions of both ‘Silver Blaze’ and ‘The Yellow Face’ and . . .”
“Silence!” shouted John Hay. The diplomat renowned for his unflappability was beside himself with excitement. “We’re just about to hear, for the first time, the results of the typewriter font comparisons.”
Sherlock Holmes obviously had the spotlight and he reveled in it, holding up the original She-was-murdered cards along with various envelopes and typed notes.
“I have the typewriter behind these annual anonymous cards, if not the man,” said Holmes, showing the aspects of the typefaces that matched up “beyond any doubt”.
“For heaven’s sake!” cried John Hay. “Who is it, man?”
Holmes peered up from examining the font on different notes under a hand lens. “Who,” he asked, holding up matching typewritten fonts, “is this . . . Samuel Clemens?”
H
olmes waited restlessly for the Hay household to go to sleep. He smoked pipe after pipe in his room, cracking the door occasionally to listen. Still, the last shufflings and whispers of the servants continued long after both the Hays and Henry James had gone to their respective bedrooms.
Finally it was silent. Opening wide the window of his room—a window that looked out upon the dark backyard of the large house here at the junction of H Street and Sixteenth Street—Holmes took his heavy shoulder-bag of burglary tools and slipped out of the room and down the stairway. He wore a black sweater under a soft black jacket, workman’s black trousers, and black shoes with crepe soles Holmes had ordered made specially for him by Charles F. Stead & Company, a tannery in the north of England. He tip-toed through the kitchen, opened the door without a noise, slipped out, and used one of his breaking-and-entering tools to lock the door behind him.
The Hays’ backyard, mostly garden, faced the Adamses’ backyard and shared a tall brick wall separating the two. Holmes tossed a rope with a small grapple, tested it, then climbed the wall and dropped to the other side in ten silent seconds. The garden here was little more than a gesture and the back of the Adamses’ property was dominated by a stable designed by the same architect who had done both homes—but an empty stable this night.
As Henry James had told him, Henry Hobson Richardson had designed and built both the Adams and Hay houses at roughly the same time, but the designs were different. Holmes had spent a long tea with Clara Hay this Tuesday afternoon showing more than a polite interest in the layout of both grand homes. Now he moved toward the Adams house with the floor plan in his mind.
Henry Adams no longer kept a dog. The house was dark save for a few gas pilot lamps burning. The stables were a tall, dark mass behind him. Holmes had made note that all of the first-floor windows of the Adams house were covered with wrought-iron grilles.
The kitchen rear door was the best place to enter and Holmes knew that the easiest way to do that would be to cut a circle of glass from a pane—the iron grille there would be no hindrance to his instrument—but this would leave a sign of his illegal entrance. Holmes placed a soft cloth on the ground outside that door and went to one knee. He could manage the door lock in less than a minute, but the kitchen door had been bolted at two places from the inside before the last servants had left for the night. He would have to dismantle the entire lock, reach in with a rigid piece of wire he could bend to his purposes, pull back those bolts, get in, and then reconstruct the entire lock in its proper place. It would take the better part of an hour, but since he did not plan to leave via this same kitchen door, it would only have to be done once.
Holmes glanced at the stars. It was not yet one a.m. He had time.
Once inside the kitchen, Holmes squatted for several minutes of absolute silence—controlling his breathing so that even he could not hear it—and did nothing but listen to the house. He’d heard both John and Clara Hay mention that Adams’s people were off at play for these final three days before they would regather and regroup to prepare the house for Henry Adams’s return on Friday, and Holmes’s instincts told him that the huge house was indeed empty.
He lit a hand lamp no larger than his palm and closed the upper and lower louvers so that it cast the dimmest of lights and that only straight ahead in a narrow beam. In a few minutes he’d reassembled the entire lock and doorknob apparatus, locked and bolted the back door from the inside again, and was stealing silently up the narrow steps of the servants’ rear staircase.
Although both houses had been designed in the so-called Romanesque style, Adams’s home had a different feeling on the inside and different proportions on the outside. Holmes had noted to James the profusion of towers, turrets, gables, and huge chimneys on the Hays’ home; the Adamses’ abode—dwelt in only by the widower and his staff now, of course—was simpler, more modern-looking from the outside, set off architecturally only by the twin white arches of its entrance.
Both homes were four stories tall, but the Adams house had a flat front. One of these rooms on the second floor was Henry Adams’s private study and Holmes found the locked door to it in no time. Next to the study, door also locked, was a room that had been Clover Adams’s combination darkroom and small photographic workshop and which now—according to Clara Hay—had been converted to archives for the dead woman’s carefully inventoried photographs.