by Dan Simmons
Henry James knew immediately the more general meaning of what the hearts signified. He had no clue as to what the empty heart or the single line of print below the hearts—a single sentence that looked to have been added by a typewriting machine—might mean.
She was murdered.
“When he visited me asking for help two years ago, Edward Hooper, Clover’s brother, said that he had received exactly this card every six December—every anniversary of his sister’s death—since the first anniversary of her odd death in eighteen eighty-six,” said Holmes. “And I notice, Mr. James, that you instantly recognized the significance of the five embossed hearts on the card. Mr. Hooper told me that the four surviving members of the Five Hearts also annually received such a card. This, he said he knew for a certainty, included Mr. Henry Adams, although Adams had never spoken to the others about it.”
“Ned Hooper was not one of the Five Hearts,” James said numbly.
Holmes nodded. “No. And he believed that he was the only person who was not one of the Five Hearts who annually received this note. But, of course, he could not be certain of that.”
“Clover Adams’s death was by her own hand,” repeated Henry James. “It is of no one’s business except her husband’s, and Henry Adams does not speak of that time or that event. He came close to death himself from sheer grief after . . . her actions.”
“What of her brother’s suspicions?” asked Holmes.
“They are misplaced,” said James. “These . . . cards . . . if they are or were actually being sent, are an example only of someone’s sick and perverted sense of humor. As I said, melancholy—and perhaps some not-infrequent sense of persecution—runs in the Hooper family. I have not met Mr. Edward Hooper—I always heard him referred to as ‘Ned’—but I am sure that he was—and remains—mistaken.”
“Mr. Edward Hooper is dead,” said Sherlock Holmes.
“Dead?” James could hear how small the single syllable sounded amidst the carriage and pedestrian background bustle of Paris’s joyous Rue de la Paix at night.
“He attempted suicide this past December—the day after the December-six anniversary of his sister’s so-called suicide—by throwing himself from a third-story window of his home on Beacon Street, in Boston,” said Sherlock Holmes. “Although badly injured, he survived and was taken to a Boston asylum. Hooper appeared to be recovering, both mentally and physically, but two weeks ago he came down with pneumonia. The disease carried him off.”
“This is terrible,” muttered James. “Horrible. Henry did not write me of these events. How is it that you, Mr. Holmes, who say that you have been in the wilderness of the far-flung Empire for these last two years, should be aware of such recent events in America when I am not?”
“Every good Englishman is behind The Times,” said Sherlock Holmes.
James blinked either his lack of understanding or his disgust at hearing the ancient joke in this context. Perhaps he meant to signal both.
“I have read my London newspapers even when, as in India, they were weeks out of date,” elaborated Holmes. “Here in Paris, they are quite current. And the choice of American newspapers here—including the newspaper from Boston which carried the news of Edward Hooper’s suicide attempts and final death by pneumonia—is very extensive indeed.”
James took a ragged breath and looked back toward the beckoning lights of his hotel.
Holmes took a half step closer until he gained James’s full attention again. “You see why I owe it to Ned Hooper to fulfill my promise of taking up the case of his sister’s death.”
“There is no ‘case’,” James said again. “There was only the tragedy of her suicide more than seven years ago. The ‘case’, as you so melodramatically call it, is closed.”
“Do you remember the cause of Mrs. Adams’s death?” asked Holmes.
Henry James knew that he should turn away at that point, go into his hotel, and never talk to this madman again. But he did not move.
“At the depths of her melancholy, when she was alone for a few moments one Sunday, Clover drank a potion that was part of her photographic developing chemical apparatus,” James said at last rather than continue suffering the silence. “It contained arsenic. Death was instantaneous.”
“Death from that type of arsenic, potassium cyanide, is relatively quick but rarely instantaneous,” Holmes said calmly, as if he were discussing railroad timetables. “She would have eventually asphyxiated but only after long moments of the most exquisite agony.”
James raised his free hand as if he could shield himself from such words and images.
“Who found her body?” persisted Holmes.
“Her husband . . . Henry . . . I am certain,” said James, coming very close to stammering. He suddenly felt very confused. Part of his consciousness wished that he had been alone to do what he had planned to do on the sidewalk along the Seine.
“Yes. The police report said it was Henry Adams who discovered her—‘on the floor and comatose before the fireplace’,” agreed Holmes. “This was at a certain time of the morning on Sunday, six December. Does that time of the day and week bear any significance for you, Mr. James?”
“No. None at all. Other than . . . do you mean because it was the time each Sunday that Clover had for years set aside to write to her father, especially during his illness?”
Holmes did not answer. Instead, he took another half step closer and whispered, “Henry Adams had told friends that he never left his wife alone at that hour, on those Sundays, precisely because he feared that her melancholia would overpower her reason. And yet on that Sunday the sixth of December seven years ago, she was alone. At least for several moments.”
“I believe that Henry was on his way out to see his dentist about a tooth that was giving him . . . are you interrogating me, Mr. Holmes?”
“Not at all, Mr. James. I’m explaining why your presence during this investigation is of the utmost importance.”
“I will not betray a friend, Mr. Holmes.”
“Of course not,” said the detective. “But would it not be a case of betraying both your friend Henry Adams and your former friend Clover Adams if it were murder and if no one even bothered to look into it?”
“It . . . was . . . not . . . murder,” James said for what he vowed to be the last time. “Clover was one of the first—and I would venture to say the preeminent—female American photographers of her era. Her work was ethereal. Other worldly. But that very quality of other-worldliness added to her inherited tendency toward terrible melancholy. On this particular winter day, that tendency must have overwhelmed her and she drank some of the easily accessible chemicals from her photographic laboratory—a mixture which, she must have known, contained arsenic.”
“And who gave her those specific developing chemicals?” asked Holmes.
“I assumed she purchased them herself,” snapped James. “If you are again hinting of any shade of guilt accruing to my good and honest friend Henry Adams . . .”
Holmes held up a gloved hand. “Not at all. I happen to know that it was a stranger who provided those chemicals to Mrs. Adams. A brother of a female ‘friend’, a certain Miss Rebecca Lorne, whose acquaintance Mrs. Adams had made quite accidentally in Washington. That friend, Miss Lorne, was there waiting . . . according to police reports and newspaper accounts given to me by Ned Hooper two years ago . . . when Henry Adams returned from his dental errand. Miss Lorne told Adams that she had dropped in to see Mrs. Adams and asked if she was receiving. Mr. Adams said he would run upstairs to see if his wife felt up to seeing a visitor and then he found her body on the floor.”
“Again, you seem to be insinuating . . .” began James, showing the fiercest scowl he could manage. Usually even a much lower-wattage version of that scowl served to silence any presumptuous or personally trespassing interlocutors. Not so this night with Holmes.
“I am insinuating nothing,” said Holmes. “I am merely explaining why you and I will be catching the early express
train to Marseilles at six quarter seven tomorrow morning and be boarding a steamship to New York by tomorrow night.”
“There is no power, means, force, blackmail, inducement, or other method of persuasion—in this lifetime or in any other possible variation of this life—that you could use to persuade me to travel with you tomorrow to Marseilles, much less to America, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Henry James.
CHAPTER 6
The two men were alone in a first-class carriage compartment on the express train to Marseilles, which was some comfort to Henry James, and for the first three hours of the trip neither man spoke. James was pretending to read a novel. Holmes was behind The Times.
Suddenly, with neither warning nor prelude, Holmes lowered his paper and said, “You had a beard then as well.”
James looked up and stared. “I beg your pardon.” Eventually, he would get used to Sherlock Holmes’s sudden changes of topic or seemingly irrelevant announcements from the blue, but not this day. Not yet.
“Four years ago,” said Holmes. “When I was introduced to you at Mrs. T. P. O’Connor’s garden party. You wore a full beard then as well.”
James said nothing. He’d had that full beard since the Civil War.
“It is partially how I recognized you in the dark along the Seine,” said Holmes and returned to his paper.
Finally, seeing a way to irritate his irritating compartment-mate, James did speak. “I would think that the world’s most famous consulting detective might rely upon more points of physiognomy for recognition than a man’s beard.”
Holmes laughed. “Of course! I see the physiognomy of men, not their added facial-hair accouterments. I am, for instance, somewhat of an expert on ears.”
“You didn’t even remember we had been introduced,” said James, ignoring the absurd comment about ears.
“Not true, sir,” laughed Holmes. “I remember at the time that when I’d heard the American Mr. James was to be at the garden party, I’d hoped that it would be your brother, the psychologist, with whom I looked forward to discussing several things.”
“William hadn’t yet published his Principles of Psychology in eighteen eighty-eight,” groused James. “He was—to all intents and purposes—unknown to the world. How could you have known you wanted to talk to him? Your memory serves you poorly, Mr. Holmes.”
“Not a bit of it,” chuckled the detective. “Friends in America—friends who shared, in some way, my own peculiar vocation—had sent me copies of your older brother’s various papers on psychology, years before his full book appeared. But the primary reason I was distracted upon meeting you at Mrs. O’Connor’s garden party, Mr. James, was that at that precise moment I was watching my suspect—the jewel thief—ply his trade. We caught him, as Watson would say, red-handed. Although I admit to having never learned where that silly phrase—‘red-handed’—came from.”
“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.