Authors: Dan Simmons
“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.”
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.
“At any rate, we arrived in Deadwood on June twenty-ninth, eighteen seventy-six . . .”
“Four days after they massacred Custer,” said Adams.
“Exactly. There were no roads open going east, west, north, or south—and the railroad hadn’t yet come to the Black Hills—so our troupe was stuck in Deadwood for five weeks. We gave performances five evenings a week and a matinee on Saturday, but I soon started riding down out of the hills in the morning to spend my time with a small band of Oglala Sioux that was camping near Bear Butte, a tall hill out on the plains that was sacred to them.”
“One would think that the American cavalry would have rounded up those Sioux . . . or worse,” said Henry James.
Holmes nodded. “This band of Sioux were mostly women, children, and old men. In fact, the old men were mostly medicine men—what the Sioux called
wičasa wakan
—who’d come to Bear Butte weeks before Custer would be rubbed out at the Little Big Horn, what they called the Greasy Grass, in order to speak to a sort of immortal medicine man, a myth surely, named Robert Sweet Medicine. Supposedly this Robert Sweet Medicine lived in a cave somewhere on Bear Butte. But yes, even though the band was harmless enough to start with, the local cavalry stationed at Belle Fourche had taken all of the old men’s weapons. The band of about fifty Sioux was dependent upon the cavalry providing beef and they were starving, emaciated.”
“But one or more of them took time to teach you some of their language,” said Adams.
“Yes. And I would bring food to them every time I visited. The adults would immediately give it to the children.”
“I’m curious,” said James. “What did you learn from the cowboys, drunks, mule skinners, buffalo hunters, Indian fighters, bandits, cavalry deserters, and gold miners during your troupe’s five weeks in Deadwood?”
Holmes smiled thinly. “That they much prefer
Hamlet
or
Macbeth
over
As You Like It
. But by far their favorite was
Titus Andronicus
.”
The carriage turned right off the broad and dusty New Hampshire Avenue onto Allison Street. The stone and wrought-iron welcoming arch of Rock Creek Cemetery was just ahead.
* * *
As the carriage rolled through the green landscape, moving into tree shadow and then out again, Adams explained that the 86 acres of Rock Creek Cemetery had been planned in the “rural garden style” so popular not long before the Civil War. Interest in classical Greek and Roman cemeteries had led to modern cemeteries such as this being laid out to serve both as a final resting place and as a public park. People would bring their children to picnic and hike in Rock Creek Cemetery on Sundays, according to Adams.
“Clover was a dedicated equestrian,” said Adams, “and we rode in this park many times. I’m sure that we must have ridden directly over the ground in which she now lies buried.” Adams looked away and fell silent after that.
They passed no other carriages or pedestrians. Holmes knew that the cemetery must have a small army of gardeners to keep the acres of grass so neatly clipped, the beautiful flowerbeds weeded and watered, but they saw no one working. Halfway around a long, sweeping curve where the cemetery road ran between two grassy areas festooned with trees and headstones, the carriage stopped.
“If you’ll follow me, gentlemen,” said Henry Adams.
* * *
There were swatches of open grass separating sections with headstones so one did not have the feeling of walking upon graves, but Adams led them to an asphalted path that meandered under some trees and then crossed more open spaces. The visible headstones were all tastefully done. Holmes realized that Adams was leading them to what looked like a solid green wall of high hedge intermixed with densely planted holly trees, or some deciduous American version of holly which almost certainly stayed green all year round.