by Dan Simmons
“Amazing growth spurt,” laughed Hay. “Del’s over six feet tall now and weighs more than two hundred pounds. And he’s become quite the athlete at St. Paul’s. He’s going to Yale in the autumn and plans to go out for football. Football, Harry. American football, where one rarely uses one’s feet.”
“Football?” James said blankly. The name, in an American context, rang only the faintest of bells. “But not what we call soccer?”
“No, an entirely new game,” said Hay. “Evidently it was invented—or, rather, adapted from European football and rugby, mostly rugby, I think, and its rules laid down—a dozen or so years ago by a Yale undergraduate at the time, a certain Walter Camp, who became general athletic director and . . . head football coach . . . whatever that means. Football is all the rage at Ivy League colleges now, Harry. It seems that Harvard and Yale have been in a deadly annual football competition for some years. Last year, a Harvard chess master named Lorin Deland introduced a devastating new play or maneuver or move or . . . something . . . called ‘the Flying Wedge’—no clue as to what that means—but Yale still managed to win, six to zero. Del can’t wait to play under Walter Camp’s tutelage.”
“And Helen will also be here tomorrow night?” said James. He would have stabbed himself in both eyes with a dull knife if that is what it would have taken to get off the subject of sports. “She must be . . . eighteen?”
“Yes,” said Hay. “And she’s very dedicated these days to writing poetry and even some short fiction. Don’t let her corner you, Harry.”
“In London last, she was a lovely and invigorating interlocutor at age thirteen,” said James. “I can only imagine how pleasant it would be now to be ‘cornered’ by her to pursue the discussion of all things literary.”
“Adams needs to meet Sherlock Holmes,” said Hay, his voice suddenly serious. “That’s the primary reason for this gathering . . . not that Adams wouldn’t have arranged to see you at the earliest possible opportunity, Harry. He was distraught at having missed your first week here. But I wasn’t sure what to tell him about . . . the whole Holmes thing. Do you think it will be Sherlock Holmes or Jan Sigerson who will appear tomorrow night?”
“To whom did you address the invitation?” asked James.
“To Mr. Holmes.”
“Then I wager that it will be Mr. Holmes who appears.”
“Oh . . . I almost forgot,” said Hay as he walked James through the foyer to the door. “We’ve also invited . . . as Adams and Wendell always call him . . . the Boy.”
“The Boy,” mused James. “Oh, you mean . . . oh! Oh, my. Oh, dear. I keep forgetting that he’s in Washington these days.”
“I made him promise to be on his best behavior,” said Hay.
James’s smile was three parts irony to two parts anticipation. “We shall see. We shall see.”
* * *
Sherlock Holmes had been invited as “Mr. Sherlock Holmes” to the 8 p.m. Hays’ Sunday dinner gathering so he arrived as Mr. Sherlock Holmes. His second and third steamer trunks had caught up to him via the British Embassy in Washington, so he wore the latest London fashion in white tie and black tails, soft pumps so highly polished that they could be used as a signaling mirror in an emergency (but not the overly flexible Capezio black jazz oxfords so popular with the younger set for a long night of dancing), a crimson-lined black cape, the silkiest of silk, six-and-a-half-inch-tall top hat, a formal vest with lapels and scooped front, a brilliantly white formal shirt with a stand-up rather than wing collar, and—since it was a dinner, not a ball—no white gloves.
The other men were dressed similarly—no sign of the less formal (and, to Holmes, definitely déclassé) new “tuxedo jacket”—and, upon their introduction by Hay, Holmes had to award Henry Adams the laurels for oldest, most worn, and by far most beautiful jacket of the evening, although Henry Cabot Lodge’s shining new threads must have cost five times the price of Adams’s time-worn perfection. The only man there that night who did not look to have been born into his clothes was Hay’s heavily muscled and bull-necked teenaged son, Del, who seemed to be bursting out of his formalwear even as they all watched.
The ladies, with only a few missed cues, were also upholding the highest standards of modern French-American design.
The group had only a few minutes for introductions and polite conversation before they were called into the dining room.
Holmes had to admit to a feeling of admiration. He’d dined with the Prince of Wales, the King of Scandinavia, and more elite and sophisticated hosts in England, France, and around the world, but he couldn’t remember a more beautiful room, chandelier, or table. Realizing that this dining room might comfortably seat fifty at a State Department banquet, Holmes marveled at how Clara Hay had arranged it to perfection for the twelve of them—four women and eight men.
The dinner was lopsided in terms of gender, but Clara and John Hay had made up for that in careful placement of their guests and beautiful but low centerpieces that hid no one’s face from anyone else. After they found their seats—there seemed to be a white-tie-and-tails servant behind every chair to help them with the extreme effort of scooting in or scooting out—Holmes took a minute to appreciate the seating arrangements.
At the head of the table was not John Hay, as one would expect in the man’s own home, but Henry Adams. The placement emphasized the “Welcome home, Henry” aspect of the dinner, but Holmes also suspected that the chair provided to Adams had a little higher seat, a little extra cushion, and thus put the short, bald man at eye height with everyone else.
Down the right side of the table—Holmes’s side—was first the newly sworn-in Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (perfectly groomed down to his perfectly cropped beard and mustache, but cold of eye—very cold of eye), then the stolid but animated Clara Hay (whose gown of royal-blue silk blended with satin and a design of garnet-colored peacock feathers with sleeves and trim of garnet-colored silk-satin and velvet would have been absolutely breathtakingly original if it hadn’t been featured in that March’s issue of Harper’s Bazaar), and then Pennsylvania Senator James Donald Cameron (whose dark eyes seemed as sadly drooping as his thick mustache), then Sherlock—who found himself sitting directly across the table from Henry James and who knew at once that this was no accident, since at mid-table both of them could then field questions from both ends of the table—and to Sherlock’s left, young “Del” Hay smiling and ham-fisted but obviously comfortable with formal dining in such elite company as Henry Adams, Senator J. Donald Cameron, author Henry James, and the ice-eyed congressman-billionaire only this month turned U.S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.
At the end of the table to Holmes’s left was seated the other “special guest” of the evening, Civil Service Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. Other than hearing from Henry James that Adams and Hay and Clarence King and the late Clover Adams had sometimes referred to young Roosevelt whom they’d known for many years as “the Boy”, Holmes knew little about the man.
But Holmes was interested in what he saw. Merely in the act of helping young Helen Julia Hay, to his left, into her seat and then taking his own chair and beaming down both sides of the table, Theodore Roosevelt radiated aggression. With small eyes squinting out from behind pince-nez, a military-trimmed mustache, and rows of teeth that seemed strangely aligned top and bottom, a horse’s teeth, a fierce stallion’s pre-breeding grimace, and a powerful, coiled, compact body that made athlete Del Hay’s tall form seem to shrink by comparison, the grinning Theodore Roosevelt seemed prepared to attack everyone at the table.
Or eat them whole, thought Holmes.
John Hay’s 18-year-old daughter Helen Julia sitting to the Rooseveltcreature’s left was, to Holmes’s always objective eye for such things, one of those rare beautiful female creatures who actually lived up to the image of the new “Gibson Girl”—long, white neck, her hair swept back close to that perfect head until it rolled most naturally into a gay Gibson Girl puff, her soft chiffon dress emphasizing th
e modern ideal of a woman as tall and slender yet with ample bosom and hips, all while giving off a sense of high intelligence mixed with an athlete’s glow.
Then across the table from Holmes was Henry James, his balding dome seeming to give off an extra beneficial glow in the candlelight. Holmes could see in an instant that James was in his native element, even at an extraordinary table such as this at which sat two senators, a man who was a grandson and great-grandson of Presidents of the United States, several of the wealthiest men in America, no fewer than four famous historians, three of the most beautiful women Holmes had seen in years, and an energetic young cannibal flashing his tombstone-sized teeth.
The Hays obviously had given James the gift of beauty on either side—Helen Julia Hay to his right and Nannie Lodge to his left.
Nannie Lodge sitting between Henry James and John Hay was lovely in the usual Gilded Age ways—slim, fair, wasp-waisted, with lovely hands and a sweet disposition—but the most outstanding aspect of the 43-year-old aging beauty were her eyes . . . eyes which Holmes’s friend Watson would have immediately described as “bewitching” and which Margaret Chanler described in writing as “the color of the sky when stars begin to twinkle.”
No such poetic phrases entered Holmes’s mind on Sunday, April 2, 1893, as he paused a second to study those eyes—Nannie was turned to her left toward John Hay and was not aware of the detective’s brief but intense appraisal—so he filed away the odd, soft intensity of Mrs. Cabot Lodge’s eye color and was reminded of it years later only when his new friend, the painter John Singer Sargent, lamented never having had the chance to paint Nannie Lodge, saying, “I had such an unqualified regard for her that the odds were in favor of my succeeding in getting something of that kindness and intelligence of her expression and the unforgettable blue of her eyes.”
Perhaps.
Beyond Nannie Lodge and the smiling, laughing John Hay, at the corner of the table near Mr. Adams, was the true beauty at the table—Lizzie Cameron.
The doleful-looking Senator Cameron’s wife was, according to Henry James’s whisper as they walked to the Hays’ home that evening, the loveliest and most-sought-after woman in all of Washington society. In his cool, distant way, Sherlock Holmes saw why at once. Lizzie Cameron’s dress was simultaneously the simplest and most daring of any of the perfectly dressed women’s at the table. Her shoulders were bare and white. Her arms were long, perfectly white, and ended in long-fingered hands that looked as though they’d been designed by God to caress men’s faces and hair. She had a long neck unadorned by jewelry or cloth bands and a sharply oval face. Lizzie’s hair this night was gathered up on both sides and rose in a bun in the back but looked impossibly natural.
She did not smile much, Holmes had already noted, and yet with those arching brows, deep, dark eyes, and perfectly shaped mouth, Elizabeth Sherman Cameron was that rarest object of her sex—a woman whose entire beauty could shine through when she was not smiling or even when she looked actively severe.
In the few minutes they’d been seated, Holmes had seen enough of the almost imperceptible glances, nearly invisible reactions to tell him that Henry Adams, at age 55 some 22 years older than Lizzie Cameron, was in love with her; that their host John Hay, without ever looking directly at his table partner to the left, said with his entire body’s balance and tension that he was madly in love with Lizzie Cameron.
Henry James, Holmes could see (and would have predicted), admired Lizzie’s beauty the way a cat might admire a bowl of milk it had no intention of sipping from. Henry Cabot Lodge took his wife’s friend’s beauty as a given of their station in life, young Del Hay had known Lizzie Cameron for most of his life and was obviously looking at her as one of his parents’ friends, and Theodore Roosevelt bestowed his giant, menacing grin upon her with a happily married man’s innocent benevolence. Senator James “Don” Cameron—who would be 60 in two months—looked as miserable as if he’d been actively cuckolded by all the scores and hundreds of men who had dreamt of achieving that blissful goal with the beautiful Lizzie Cameron.
Holmes felt—knew—that Lizzie Cameron teased, teased, tempted, and teased, but did not actually bestow her favors. Not on poor Adams who, Holmes would soon learn, had rushed 10,000 miles around the world from the South Seas to come to Lizzie’s beckoning telegram from Paris only to be shunned by her once he’d arrived. Not on poor John Hay, who—Holmes sensed at once—had yet to declare his physical love for the lady but who, after his inevitable rebuff, would join Henry Adams and a mist-shrouded legion of gray others who had been relegated to the role of “tame cat” in Lizzie Cameron’s life.
And Holmes also felt—knew—that Lizzie Cameron was a dangerous and treacherous person. Certainly, Holmes exempting himself and since neither Professor Moriarty nor Lucan Adler appeared to be present this evening, the most dangerous and treacherous person in the room.
The oysters arrived and the dinner officially began.
A Shocking Shortage of Canvasbacks
While guests had been milling prior to this dinner, Henry James had stepped into the kitchen to say hello to Hay’s chef for this meal, a man named Charles Ranhofer who had served, for a while, as the personal chef for William Waldorf Astor—the richest man in America until he moved to England in 1891. Chef Ranhofer was preparing to publish a cookbook, which ran to more than 1,000 pages, called The Epicurean. It would sell more copies worldwide than any novel Henry James ever published.
James had first met Ranhofer when he was a guest at Lansdowne House, Astor’s rented London mansion, and often heard of the chef’s reputation at Delmonico’s restaurant on Fifth Avenue.
This evening, the famous chef was too busy filling Hay’s oversized kitchen and extended staff with commands, orders, and ultimatums to pause to chat, so James simply wished him well . . . but not before he caught a glimpse of Charles’s menu for the evening—
Menu
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Huîtres en coquille Ruedesheimer
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Potage tortue verte Amontillado
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Caviare sur canapé Médoc
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Homard à la Maryland Royal Charter
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Ris de veau aux champignons
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Selle de mouton
Pommes parisiennes Haricots verts
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Suprème de volaille
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Pâté de foie-gras, Bellevue [Illegible]
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Sorbet à la romaine
Cigarettes
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Teal duck, celery mayonnaise Clos de Vougeot
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Fromage Duque Port Wine
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Glacée à la napolitaine Château Lafite
Old Reserve Madeira
The “cigarettes” had been crossed out, which James wholly approved of, especially in mixed company, but also because it had become déclassé in most upper-class English and Continental meals to include smoking as a formal menu item.
* * *
The oysters were followed by soup, a light dish which James paid little attention to because of the conversation with the beautiful women on each side of him, then a fish course.
The first ten minutes of conversation were mostly taken up by questions—almost exclusively from the ladies at the table—to Sherlock Holmes. Was he really a consulting detective? What did a consulting detective do? Were his adventures as exciting as they read in The Strand and Harper’s Weekly?
“I can’t answer that last question, I fear,” said Holmes in his clipped, formal but friendly English accent. “It’s only been the last year or two that these so-called chronicles of my cases have been published by Dr. Watson, and I honestly haven’t had the time or opportunity t
o read any of them.”
“But they’re based on truth?” asked Helen Julia Hay.
“Quite possibly,” said Holmes. “But my friend Dr. Watson—and his editor and agent Mr. Doyle—are pledged to entertain the reader. And, in my experience, the hard truth and entertainment rarely co-exist peacefully.”
“But what about Silver Blaze?” asked Clara, her voice small but determined. “That case was true, was it not?”
“Who or what is Silver Blaze?” asked Holmes.
Clara grew a little flustered but managed—“The case . . . the name of the race horse that was stolen . . . that ran away . . . the story in last month’s Harper’s Weekly.”
“I confess that I’ve never heard of an English race horse named Silver Blaze, Mrs. Hay,” said Holmes.
“You see, Clara,” said John Hay. “I told you it was fiction. I lose a fortune at the track when I’m in England, and I’d never heard of a colt named ‘Silver Blaze’ either.”
Holmes smiled at that. “I did have a minor case involving a horse named Seabreeze in eighteen eighty-eight—he won the Oaks and St. Leger in that year—but his ‘disappearance’ amounted to little more than his wandering away one night. The neighboring farmer found him and I worked to the limits of my detecting ability to follow clear hoofprints in the mud to the neighboring farmer’s home.”
The group chuckled but Clara persisted. “So the trainer wasn’t found dead?” she asked.
“He was, actually,” said Holmes. “But it was a mere accident. The poor lad was taking Seabreeze for his evening walk, evidently had noticed some possible problem with the colt’s right rear hoof, had knelt behind the filly—never a good idea at the best of times—and lit a match in the failing light even before raising the hoof for inspection. Seabreeze kicked once, purely out of instinct, and the poor fellow’s head was . . .” Holmes glanced around the shining table at the shining faces. “That is, he died instantly of a head injury. But no foul play.”