Authors: Dan Simmons
“Shall you tell me the nature of the mystery you’ve given me?”
“No,” said Adams, his voice flat. “If you’re the marvel of observation and deduction that your . . . fictional stories . . . say you are, you’ll be able to find the mystery and solve it by tomorrow afternoon. If you
are
not, if you
can
not, then you must say good-bye and leave me alone.”
Holmes lifted his cane and tapped it on his right shoulder for a moment. Finally he said, “I cannot return to London until other work of mine is finished, but I will agree to leaving Washington and to dropping the case of your wife’s death.”
Adams again nodded tersely. “Discover the mystery and solve it by five o’clock tomorrow afternoon or leave Washington and leave me alone. We are agreed.”
The two men remained silent for several moments, looking at each other but seeing little, when Henry James came back through the foliage and startled both of them.
“Did I miss something?” said James.
H
enry James was very curious.
It was obvious when he returned to the hedged-in area in front of Clover’s monument that something had happened between Sherlock Holmes and Henry Adams, but neither man would say what had occurred . . . or admit that anything had, for that matter. But Holmes and Adams were also silent during the entire ride back, Adams saying only “So long for now, my friends” as his carriage dropped Holmes and James off at Mrs. Stevens’s boarding house.
When pressed there at their temporary lodgings, Holmes still would say no more. When James asked the detective if he’d like to go out for an early dinner together that evening, Holmes said only, “Thank you, but I may not eat dinner tonight.” And then he’d gone into his room.
James spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening sitting in the window seat in his own room, smoking, looking at pages of a novel without being able to concentrate on them, and keeping watch out the window that looked out above the front entrance and short walkway to the house.
When Holmes emerged at last, about an hour before darkness would fall, dressed in a too-heavy tweed wool traveling coat with cape and matching-wool soft cap with ribbon tie-up earflaps and carrying a small canvas bag, James grabbed his own cane and top hat and hurried down to follow the detective. Holmes was certainly dressed like a gentleman, but James thought that the canvas bag made him look like some plumber or craftsman coming home from work.
Assuming that Holmes would spot him sooner or later, James was willing to bluster it out by saying that he was only out for a little evening constitutional of his own. But Holmes did not look back over his shoulder or appear to notice James striding along a half block behind and across the street.
First Holmes went three blocks and stepped into a telegraph office. James stepped into the shadows of a closed haberdasher’s front entrance and looked at ties through one of the windows, all the while watching the reflection and waiting for Holmes to emerge, which he did after only a few minutes.
Holmes walked quickly, whistling as he walked, occasionally twirling his cane, and within a few minutes was nearing the intersection of 12th Street N.W. and Pennsylvania Avenue where the old Kirkwood House hotel was in its last months before being torn down. James waited for a break in the busy carriage and occasional auto traffic to make his way across Pennsylvania Avenue, and when he reached the safety of the opposite sidewalk, Holmes had simply disappeared. James continued up the street, but more slowly, wondering if Holmes had stepped into one of these commercial buildings. The shadows were growing longer, the sun very close to setting, when James crossed a narrow alley only to have Holmes step out and block his way. James saw the sharp steel of Holmes’s sword-cane for an instant before the detective pushed the sword back in its sheath and clicked the silver cane-head tight.
“James,” said Holmes and laughed softly. “I thought it was a bit early for Lucan Adler.”
James blinked at this. Was Holmes expecting the anarchist-assassin to be stalking him? Was that one of the reasons Holmes had acceded to attending the Hays’ dinner party the previous evening . . . to widen the news that Sherlock Holmes was in Washington so that his enemies could attack him?
Stepping out of the alley, Holmes whistled and gestured to get the attention of one of the cabbies on his box on one of the several hansom cabs lined up at the curb outside the Kirkwood House hotel.
Once they were settled in, Holmes gave the driver directions to go two blocks west and then to turn right.
“Are we going somewhere?” asked James, realizing even as he spoke how absurd the question was. Of course, they might be going back to Mrs. Stevens’s—although west was the wrong direction for that.
“I need to think and I often find that a long hansom ride is conducive to serious thinking,” said Holmes. “Haven’t you also found this to be true, Mr. James?”
James made a noncommittal sound. In truth, he couldn’t remember ever having done any deep creative thinking while in a cab. In a railway carriage when traveling alone, yes, and—first and foremost—when in the bath or when taking a morning walk, but not in a cab. James made little note of which direction they were heading as Holmes called up directions—“Right here, driver”, “Left, driver”, “Straight along here until I tell you, driver.”
“Do you have some compelling reason to think about something?” asked James. “Or something new that we should both be thinking about?”
He knew that he was taking a risk asking the question so directly—a risk of rebuff or active embarrassment—but James was very curious and had been since he’d returned to the Saint-Gaudens memorial and found Adams and Holmes sitting there in such distracted silence.
“Yes,” said Holmes, “but it could be very personal . . . to Adams, to your other friends here . . . so are you certain you want to hear about it?”
James did not have to think about this for long. “I’m certain.”
* * *
Holmes succinctly described his graveyard conversation and agreement with Henry Adams.
“But you don’t even know what the mystery
is?
” asked James, feeling both shocked at Holmes’s decision and relieved that the detective soon would be leaving his friends alone.
“No idea,” said Holmes.
“Did you interrogate Adams about it . . . receive even a clue?”
“No,” said Holmes. “You know Henry Adams, Mr. James—and I do not, other than what Ned and you have said about him and impressions he made upon me last night at dinner and today—do you think he is being honest about there being a mystery?”
James thought about that for a while as the hansom clopped along, the cabbie receiving another “Turn right here, driver” order from Holmes. The passing scenery looked like so much of Washington—glimpses of fine homes, then rare commercial blocks, then empty fields, then more trees and homes.
“Yes,” James said at last. “Adams can be . . .
playful
is the word that comes to mind . . . especially when he is with Hay and Clarence King or Sam Clemens . . . and he guards his privacy as zealously as a dragon guards his gold, but if there were no mystery whatsoever, he would never have come up with this absurd . . . game. He would have just insisted you leave him and his friends alone.”
Holmes, who had been passing his black gloves through his other hand over and over, nodded distractedly. “You don’t have a clue as to what the mystery might be, do you, James?”
“Beyond the one you came here for—the death of his wife seven years ago—I do not,” said James. “But, then, for the past decade, my contact with Adams has been either epistolary or when he is visiting London or when we see each other somewhere on the Continent.”
“I’m convinced that this mystery he speaks of lies here, now,” said Holmes. “Not some conundrum he brushed up against in London or elsewhere.”
“Do you have a guess as to what the mystery might be?” said James.
Holmes slapped his gloves against his open palm, frowned, and said sharply, “I
never
guess, James. Never.”
“Then, have you ever had a case like this before?” asked James.
“How do you mean, sir?”
“I mean a case where to solve a mystery you must first figure out if and where there
is
a mystery.”
“In roundabout ways,” said Holmes. “Often I’m asked to consult on something little more than a curiosity—why a father might ask his grown daughter to change bedrooms after she’s heard something in the night, that sort of thing—and only then discover that the curiosity is wrapped in a true mystery. But I’ve never been given the task of searching out a mystery, pulling it from the background of the entire world, as it were, before having only twenty-four hours . . .” He glanced out at the long shadows and fading sunlight. “Less now . . . in which to solve it. Stop here, driver.” Holmes thumped the box above them with his cane.
Outside in the last of the evening light, James looked around but did not recognize the place.
“Here’s an incentive to wait for us for as long as it takes us to return,” Holmes was saying to the driver, giving the man what James thought was an absurd number of gold coins. The driver grinned and touched his beaver top hat.
“Come, James,” said Holmes and began walking briskly down the tree-lined side street running off the main avenue they’d come up.
It was only when he saw the arched entrance twenty yards or so ahead to the left of the street that he realized they had returned to Rock Creek Cemetery.
* * *
“Do you expect to find your mystery to solve here?” asked James as they walked along the paved lane that curved through the huge cemetery.
“Not necessarily,” said Holmes. “But if we want to walk while we think about this problem, this is certainly a contemplative place in which to stroll.”
“It will soon be a
dark
contemplative place,” said James.
It was true. The sun sat on the western horizon, a red orb perfectly balanced on the horizon glimpsed through the trees and various headstones and monuments. The trees in the cemetery had thrown out ever-lengthening shadows until those shadows had touched and coalesced into growing patches of darkness. It would soon be too dark to read the inscriptions on the headstones that were giving off their last warm glows of sunlight for this day.
“I brought a dark lantern should we need it,” said Holmes, jiggling the canvas bag he was carrying. He busied himself with lighting his pipe. Normally, Henry James enjoyed the smell of burning pipe tobacco, but Holmes’s choice of tobaccos was so cheap and so strong that now James changed places as they walked abreast so that he would be upwind of it.
“James, do you remember any mysteries being embedded in Mr. Adams’s conversation at dinner last night?”
“I’m afraid that due to Mr. Roosevelt’s extended and repeated efforts to be boorish, much of the dinner’s conversation was lost on me,” said James.
Holmes stopped walking and gave the writer a sharp glance through the pall of pipe smoke. “
Nothing
is ever lost on you, James. You know it and I know it.”
James said nothing and they resumed their walk. The sun had disappeared and much of the three-dimensionality of their surroundings disappeared in the pleasant twilight. Trees, monuments, lower headstones, and grassy knolls all took on a flatter aspect without their glow and shadows to set them off.
“There was the mystery of the canvasback ducks,” said James. “But Clara Hay brought up that subject when she explained we were having teal, and it was her husband who said that the disappearance of canvasbacks in the restaurants and shops was a bit of a mystery.”
“And Henry Adams solved that mystery,” said Holmes. “The Jews were behind the disappearance . . . just as they are behind
so many
nefarious plots.”
Holmes’s tone was not lost on James and he started to speak to explain his friend, to say that Adams was usually a most liberal person but had this blind spot when it came to the Jews.
Holmes interrupted the apologia with a swing of his cane. “It’s no matter, James. Many Englishmen share this reflexive mistrust and hatred of Jews, but in this country, of course, it is overshadowed by the Americans’ treatment of more than eight million Negroes as something less than citizens or full human beings.”
James almost said
Not here in the North
but remembered that they were in Washington, D.C., and that had never really been part of the North. He had a sudden and almost overpowering memory of a beautiful spring day in 1863—May 23—when James had deliberately chosen not to go watch his brother Wilkie parading down Beacon Street with his regiment, the famous black 54th Massachusetts Regiment then under the command of the young (and, of course, white) Colonel Shaw. Henry James had been wasting his time at Harvard, paying almost no attention to his courses in law and using his time to read fiction, but on that day when classes were canceled so that all the young Harvard men could go cheer on the departing Massachusetts regiments, James had stayed in his rented room and read. Later, he found out that his older brother William—also at Harvard—had done the same. James was certain that William could no more explain why he hadn’t joined family, friends, and strangers in seeing the regiment off than young “Harry” could.
For a moment, James felt guilt at using the wounding of his brothers Wilkie and Bob in his retort to Theodore Roosevelt the previous night. Wilkie’s wounds had been so terrible, his agony so great while lying for day after day on the moldy and bloody cot set near the front door where they had carried him in, and Wilkie’s courage so profound in later returning to active duty with his regiment, that the experience had changed something in the writer forever. He rebuked himself now for using Wilkie’s suffering as part of his argument.
But he also knew that if he had that May 23, 1863, to do over again, he still would not go to Beacon Street to watch Wilkie’s regiment parade, in all their radiant and masculine health and high spirits and bannered glory, to the train station on their way to war.