The Fifth Heart (52 page)

“I’m not very hungry this morning,” lied James, pushing his own plate forward and preparing to leave. “I wish you luck in your new habitations . . .”

“Wait, sir. Wait,” said Holmes, actually putting his long violinist’s fingers on James’s lower sleeve as if ready to physically restrain him if the author attempted to rise and leave. “There’s more I need to tell you.”

James waited but with growing anxiety as the cigarette Holmes was smoking burned itself shorter and the runny yellow-orange egg yolk sat there amidst the debris of the eaten breakfast like a leaking bull’s-eye. He was waiting because he wanted to know where Holmes would be . . . if this was indeed the last of their absurd adventure together.

“Are you going to tell me where you’ve moved?” said James, shocked at his own rude bluntness.

“No, it would be better for everyone if you didn’t know, James.”

Say nothing
, James commanded himself. Several times in the last few days, he’d already stepped out of the character of “Henry James, Author” that he’d created over almost fifty years. Time to come back to himself again. The watcher, not the initiator. The wary listener, not the yammering fool. Still, he heard himself saying—“Will you be leaving Washington then? I’m asking just in case Hay or Adams or . . . someone . . . might need to know.”

“If you need to get in touch with me,” said Holmes, “send a note to this establishment.” Holmes clicked open his retracting mechanical pencil and wrote quickly on the back of one of his own business cards.

James looked at the address. It was a cigar shop on Constitution Avenue.

“You’re residing at a cigar store?” James couldn’t help saying.

Holmes made that abrupt, almost barking sound that served him as a laugh. “Not at all, my dear James. But the proprietor there will forward any message sent to me by dispatching a boy either to my new place of residence or to send a cable. For some reason known only to Americans, the cigar shop is open twenty-four hours a day, so feel free to contact me at any time.”

James nodded, slipped Holmes’s card into his wallet, set the wallet back in his jacket, and was about to rise again when Mrs. Stevens appeared in the doorway with a young boy in tow.

“He has a message for you, Mr. James.” She paused, perhaps reading James’s expression, and added, “I know the lad. His name is Thomas. He carries messages between some of the best homes and families around Lafayette Park. If you wish to send a reply message, I’m sure it will be safe and secure in his keeping—and unread until it reaches its source.”

James nodded, interpreting her final comment to mean that young Thomas couldn’t read. He beckoned the boy forward.

Unfolding the paper, he saw that it was on John Hay’s private stationery.

Mrs. Stevens had thoughtfully brought a small stationery pad should James wish to respond. He did. Shielding his writing from Holmes’s view, he accepted Hay’s invitation and said that he would be there promptly at 5:15 p.m.—a rather specific time, James thought, but then John Hay was a man who’d devoted his life to specifics since he’d been secretary to President Abraham Lincoln.

James handed the note and a coin to the boy, saying, “Deliver this into the hand of the person who sent this message, son.”

Thomas might not be able to read, but there was intelligence in his eye as he nodded.

“Oh, you don’t need to pay the boy, Mr. James,” Mrs. Stevens was saying. “I’m sure the person who sent the message already did that.”

“Nonetheless,” said James and waved Thomas away on his errand.

At that moment two other lads were shown in by Mrs. Stevens’s daughter, who looked confused at the sudden invasion of messengers. One was a boy about Thomas’s age although less-well dressed, the other a young man in his late teens who was wearing the livery of a Western Union delivery boy.

“Message for Mr. Holmes,” said the ragged lad.

“Telegram for Mr. Holmes,” said the older boy.

James still thought and felt as if he were on the verge of leaving, but stayed seated out of sheer curiosity. With Holmes moved away—God knows where—he might not see the detective again. All of the tantalizing events of the past couple of weeks might forever remain a mystery.

Holmes stubbed his cigarette out right in the center of the egg yolk and James looked away to control his rising nausea.

Holmes quickly read his telegram, set the flimsy on the table next to his napkin, said, “No reply” to the Western Union lad who touched his cap and left, and then waved forward the other boy with the private message. This he read quickly, clutched the pad that James had used for his own reply, and said, “I shall be back in one minute, James. I’ll only walk our young Mercury here to the door as I scribble a reply.”

Mrs. Stevens and her daughter had already left. The telegram boy was gone. Alone, James could clearly hear the footsteps of Holmes and the second messenger on the parquet floor of the foyer beyond the parlor, and then the squeak of the front door hinges as they stepped out onto the porch. The obscene cigarette butt still rose from the center of the bleeding yolk.

Beside it lay the telegram Holmes had forgotten near his napkin.

No
, thought James.
Absolutely not
.

He stood as if heading for the stairway up to his room, turned right instead of left, and opened the top fold of the telegram with his left hand.

James quickly let the top fold of the telegram drop into place and he walked to the stairway on the opposite side of the room as he heard Holmes’s usual brisk steps on the parquet and then on the boards and braided rug in the parlor. He was standing on the first step with one foot raised to the second step when Holmes bustled back in. Holmes noticed the telegram, folded it, and set it in his hacking jacket’s pocket with the other message without showing any signs of concern at it being read.

“So, you’re heading back up to your room now,” said Holmes.

“Egad, Holmes,” said Henry James, feeling a need to put this imitation gentleman in his place. “Your powers of deduction . . . how
do
you do it?”

Instead of showing anger or embarrassment, Holmes merely made that semi-bark of a laugh again, raised his walking stick—the one with the sword in it, James knew—and said, “Well, then, it’s cheerio for the time being, although I fully trust that our paths shall cross again before too much time goes by.”

“I’m thinking of sailing for England very soon,” said James. He wasn’t sure why he said it, since he’d not made up his mind about any such thing. He absently touched his waistcoat pocket where the ivory snuffbox containing his sister Alice’s ashes was as firmly embedded as a tumor.

“Ah, well, then perhaps we shan’t see each other again,” Holmes said, almost lightly, almost
merrily
, thought James with an inward glower. “Ta-ta,” said Holmes and turned his back and walked briskly out of the room and to the front door, whistling some cheap music-hall tune that sounded vaguely familiar to James. Something he’d heard at the Old Mo on Drury Lane.

James realized that he had been standing there for almost a full minute after he’d heard the front door slam shut, one foot still raised to the second step, standing like a statue of a man turned to stone by the Gorgon’s stare. Worse than that, he realized that he was waiting for Holmes to come back to say that he’d changed his mind, he wasn’t moving out after all.

Mrs. Stevens came into the breakfast room to clear the dishes, saw James standing there frozen on the stairway with the odd look on his face, and she was clearly startled. “Is everything all right, Mr. James? Do you need something?”

“Everything is fine, Mrs. Stevens. I was just heading up to my room to do some writing. A good day to you, madam.”

“And a good day to you, Mr. James.” She craned her neck to watch him climb the steep steps as if she’d been hired by Holmes . . . or Mycroft . . . or Moriarty . . . or Lucan Adler . . . to spy on him.

* * *

James started to knock at the Hays’ front door—that is, raised his knuckled fist to knock, but decided to push the new-fangled electrical doorbell button instead—promptly at 5:15 p.m.

It had been a hard morning and afternoon. He had tried to write—working with pencil and pad on the new play he’d promised the popular actor-manager George Alexander—but while Mrs. Stevens’s boarding house was a relatively pleasant place, it was still a boarding house. Noises, loud conversations with workmen and the dull-witted daughter, the sounds of two men looking at and loudly appraising Holmes’s now-vacant bed-sitting-room, even Mrs. Stevens humming as she ironed in the little room off the kitchen or, when his window was open, when she was hanging wash on the clothesline below after the rain had stopped, all had conspired to distract the strangely anxious and irritable Henry James. A hundred times that afternoon he had unconsciously touched the hard bulge of the ivory snuffbox in his waistcoat pocket and wondered what he would do next. Go straight back to England? Go to the family burial plots in Cambridge outside of Boston and finally carry out his self-appointed duty of burying the last of his sister’s ashes there? Go to join William and his family in Florence or Geneva or wherever they were off to at the moment? He could talk to William—sometimes. Well, rarely. In truth, almost never.

In the meantime, he was happy to have this invitation from John Hay. James felt like a man who, in leaning over a ship’s railing to get a better view of something below, has fallen overboard. This invitation had felt like a life ring, complete with attached line to pull him in, tossed to him with happy, expert aim.

Benson answered the bell and, after silently directing a footman to take James’s wet coat, top hat, and walking cane, led the writer directly to Hay’s now-familiar study. Upon looking up from a formidable stack of papers to see James standing in his doorway after being announced, John sprang to his feet, was around the desk in a minute, and used one hand to shake James’s while clasping the author firmly on the shoulder with his other hand. It came close to being a hug—which, of course, would have horrified and appalled Henry James—but now it made him feel that glow of good feeling that he’d been certain he had lost.

“I am
so
happy to see you, Harry,” said Hay as he escorted James to the comfortable chair just opposite Hay’s across the broad desk. Hay had kept in literal contact, holding James by the elbow as he walked the few paces to the chair. When James had taken his seat, Hay perched on the corner of his desk—amazingly spry for a man who would turn 55 in October, was James’s thought (and not his first on that subject about Hay)—and cried, “Well, it’s quarter past the old Five of Hearts’ tea time, always precisely at five y’know, but we can have tea anyway—Clover’s ghost would not object although we may hear a disembodied rap or two from the table there—or perhaps some really good whisky instead.”

James hesitated. It was far too early for such a strong drink for him, he rarely touched whisky anyway, but this rainy afternoon, with the fire crackling and popping in John Hay’s study’s fireplace, he found the idea of a strong drink attractive—almost compelling.

“Is this an honest Scotch whisky, with no ‘e’ in the word?” asked James. “Or one of your American sour-mash whiskeys with the ‘e’ inserted?”

Hay laughed. “Oh, Scotch whisky, I assure you, Harry. I’d never offend your Anglicized sensibilities with either sour mash or a sneaky, unwanted ‘e’.” Hay gestured to Benson who seemed more to dissolve in thin air than step away.

“I have a twelve-year-old single-malt Cardhu from Speyside, matured in oak casks, that I find better than most twenty-one-year-old single-malt whiskeys,” continued Hay, going around the desk to take his place in the high-backed and leather-tufted chair there. “Its only drawback is that one can purchase it only at Speyside, so I must either travel there each time I’m in England or constantly be paying a man to travel to Speyside, purchase it, pack it, and ship it.”

“I look forward to tasting it,” said James, knowing that he’d sipped 12-year-old Cardhu single malts with Paul Joukowsky and even in Lady Wolseley’s salon, the latter thanks to the tastes of her husband, Field Marshal Viscount Wolseley, the inspiration for the “very model of a modern major general” in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta
The Pirates of Penzance
.

Even before Hay began speaking again, Benson was back with a silver tray holding the decanter of Cardhu, crystal whisky glasses, a spritzer of soda water, a pitcher of regular water, and a short stack of leather coasters with John Hay’s crest on them. When Benson turned toward the writer and raised one eyebrow, James said, “Neat please.”

“The usual dash of water for me, Benson,” said Hay.

When they had their whisky glasses and Benson had left, silently closing the study door behind him, each man raised his glass—the desk was too broad for any clinking of crystal—and Hay said,
“Amicus absentibus.”

James was surprised by the toast—to which absent friends, exactly, would they be drinking?—but he nodded and drank some of the amber whisky. It was excellent. James knew enough about judging whiskies to know that the palate on this one was smooth and well-balanced, the finish bringing out some lingering, sweet smoke in the aftertaste, but never overpowering. Never “showing off” as so many single malts had the tendency to do.