Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  Two strawberry-specked horses with albino hooves were storming toward him, both hauling rickety wagons. Holmes cringed, falling to his knees; he gripped his ankles and looked up in time to see Fanny Longfellow—fiery blossoms flying from her loose hair and her wide bosom—at the reins of one of the horses, and Junior in secure control of the other, as though he had been riding from the day he was born. When the figures swept by either side of the little doctor, it did not seem possible to keep his balance, and he slipped into darkness.

  Holmes pushed off from the armchair and stood up, his knees inches from the grate of the crackling wood fire. He looked up. The chandelier drops were rattling overhead. “What hour is it?” he asked when he realized he had been dreaming. Lowell’s clock answered: fifteen minutes till six. Lowell, eyes peering open like a groggy child’s, stirred in his easy chair. He asked if something was the matter. The bitterness inside his mouth made it difficult to pry open.

  “Lowell, Lowell,” Holmes said, pulling back all the curtains. “A pair of horses.”

  “What?”

  “I think I heard a pair of horses outside. No, I’m fairly sure of it. They raced by your window only seconds ago, near as you please and speeding along. It was definitely two horses. Patrolman Rey has only one horse at present. Longfellow said that Teal stole two from Manning.”

  “We fell asleep,” Lowell responded with alarm, blinking himself to life, seeing through the windows the light that had begun to break.

  Lowell roused Longfellow and Fields, and then snatched his spyglass and flung his rifle over his shoulder. As they reached the door, Lowell saw Mabel, wrapped in her dressing gown, come into the front hall. He paused, expecting a reprimand, but she merely stood with a remote stare. Lowell reversed his course and embraced her hard. When he heard himself whisper “Thank you,” she had already called out the same words.

  “Now, you must be careful, Father. For Mother and for me.”

  Moving from the warmth into the frigid air outside brought on Holmes’s asthma full force. Lowell ran ahead, following fresh hoof marks, as the other three maneuvered circumspectly through the stripped elms that reached naked branches for the heavens.

  “Longfellow, my dear Longfellow . . .” Holmes was saying.

  “Holmes?” the poet answered kindly.

  Holmes could still see vividly dreamt fragments before his eyes, and he trembled to look at his friend. He was frightened that he might blurt out: I just saw Fanny come for us, I did! “We forgot the police rattle at your house, didn’t we?”

  Fields put a reassuring hand on the doctor’s small shoulder. “An ounce of pluck just now is worth a king’s ransom, my dear Wendell.”

  Up ahead, Lowell dropped to one knee. He scanned the pond ahead of them with his glass. His lips were trembling with fear. At first he thought he saw some boys ice fishing. But then, as he turned the spyglass, he could see the sallow face of his student Pliny Mead: only his face.

  Mead’s head was visible from a narrow opening cut into the lake of ice. The rest of his naked body was concealed by the ice water, under which his feet were bound. His teeth chattered violently. His tongue was curled up in the back of his mouth. Mead’s bare arms were stretched forward on the ice and bound tightly by some rope, which extended from his wrists to Dr. Manning’s carriage, which was hitched nearby. Mead, half-conscious, would have slipped down the hole to his death if not for this bondage. At the back of the parked carriage, Dan Teal, shiny in his military uniform, dipped his arms underneath another nude figure, lifted it, and started to walk over the treacherous ice. He carried the flaccid, white body of Augustus Manning, his beard hovering unnaturally over his sprout-thin chest, his legs and hips bound by rope, his body quivering as Teal crossed the slick pond.

  Manning’s nose was a dark ruby; a thick layer of dried brown blood had gathered beneath it. Teal slipped Manning feet first into another aperture in the frozen lake, about a foot away from Mead’s. The shock of the freezing water pounded Manning to life; he splashed and groped madly. Teal now untied Pliny Mead’s arms, so the only force that could possibly prevent the two naked men from sliding into their respective holes was a furious attempt, instinctually comprehended and instantaneously begun by both, to grasp each other’s outstretched hands.

  Teal stepped onto the embankment to watch them struggle, and then a gunshot rang out. It cracked the bark of a tree behind the murderer.

  Lowell charged ahead, gripping his weapon and sliding wildly across the ice. “Teal!” he shouted. His rifle was poised for another shot. Longfellow, Holmes, and Fields all scrambled behind him.

  Fields yelled, “Mr. Teal, you must stop this!”

  Lowell could not believe what he saw over the barrel of his gun. Teal was remaining perfectly still.

  “Shoot, Lowell, shoot!” Fields yelled.

  Lowell always liked to take aim on hunting trips but never to fire. The sun now rose to a perfect height, unfurling over the vast crystalline surface.

  For a moment the men were blinded by the reflection. By the time their eyes adjusted, Teal had vanished, the soft sounds of his running echoing in the woods. Lowell fired into the thicket.

  Pliny Mead, shivering uncontrollably, went entirely limp, his head drooping against the ice and his body slowly sinking into the deadly water. Manning struggled to maintain a grip on the boy’s slick arms, then his wrists, then his fingers, but the weight was too much. Mead sank down into the water. Dr. Holmes dived, sliding across the ice. He plunged both arms into the hole, catching Mead by the hair and ears, and pulling, pulling until he grabbed hold of his chest, and then pulling some more until he lay on top of the ice. Fields and Longfellow heaved Manning by the arms, sliding him to the surface before he could fall under. They untied his legs and feet.

  Holmes heard the crack of a whip and looked up to see Lowell on the driver’s box of the abandoned carriage. He urged the horses into the woods. Holmes jumped up and ran toward him. “Jamey, no!” Holmes cried. “We must get them into the warmth or they’ll die!”

  “Teal will escape, Holmes!” Lowell stopped the horses and stared at the pathetic figure of Augustus Manning, clumsily thrashing on the frozen pond like a fish yanked from water. Here was Dr. Manning nearly undone and Lowell could make himself feel nothing but sympathy. The ice bent under the weight of the Dante Club members and the would-be murder victims, and water bubbled up through new holes as they walked. Lowell bounded down from the carriage just as one of Longfellow’s overshoes crashed through a weak strip of ice. Lowell was there to catch him.

  Dr. Holmes stripped off his gloves and hat, then his overcoat and frock coat, and began piling them over Pliny Mead. “Wrap them up in everything you have! Cover their heads and necks!” He ripped off his cravat and tied it around the boy’s neck. Then he kicked off his boots and his socks, slipping them onto Mead’s feet. The others watched Holmes’s dancing hands carefully and imitated him.

  Manning tried to speak, but what emerged was a slurred humming, a faint song. He tried to raise his head from the ice but was entirely confused as Lowell forced his hat onto him.

  Dr. Holmes shouted, “Make sure to keep them awake! If they fall asleep, we’ll lose them!”

  With difficulty, they carried the frigid bodies into the carriage. Lowell, stripped down to his shirtsleeves, returned to the driver’s box. As instructed by Holmes, Longfellow and Fields rubbed the victims’ necks and shoulders and raised their feet for circulation.

  “Hurry, Lowell, hurry!” Holmes called out.

  “We’re moving as fast as we can manage, Wendell!”

  Holmes had known at once that Mead had the worst of it. A terrible gash at the back of his head, presumably left there by Teal, was an ill ingredient to mix with the deadly exposure. He frantically jolted the boy’s blood circulation on the short ride back to town. In spite of himself, Holmes heard echoing in his mind his poem he recited to his students to remind them how to treat their patients.

  If the poor victim must be p
ercussed,

  Don’t make an anvil of his aching bust;

  (Doctors exist within a hundred miles

  Who thump a thorax as they’d hammer piles;)

  So of your questions: don’t in mercy try

  To pump your patient absolutely dry;

  He’s not a mollusk squirming on a dish,

  You’re not Agassiz, and he’s not a fish.

  Mead’s body was so cold that it hurt him to touch it.

  “The boy was lost before we arrived at Fresh Pond. There was no way to do more. You must believe that, my dear Holmes.”

  Dr. Holmes was sliding Longfellow’s Tennyson inkwell back and forth between his fingers, ignoring Fields, his fingertips blackening with ink spots.

  “And Augustus Manning owes you his life,” said Lowell. “And me my hat,” he added. “In all seriousness, Wendell, the man would be returned to the dust without you. Don’t you see? We’ve thwarted Lucifer. We’ve plucked a man from the jaws of the Devil. We’ve won this time because you gave yourself completely, my dear Wendell.”

  The three Longfellow girls, dressed elaborately for outdoor play, knocked at the study door.

  Alice was the first inside. “Papa, Trudy and all the other girls are sledding on the hill. Can’t we go?”

  Longfellow looked to his friends, who were fixed in armchairs all around the room. Fields shrugged.

  “Other children will be there?” Longfellow asked.

  “All of Cambridge!” announced Edith.

  “Very well,” said Longfellow, but then studied them as he was overcome with second thoughts. “Annie Allegra, perhaps you’ll stay here with Miss Davie.”

  “Oh please, Papa! I have my new shoes to wear!” Annie kicked up her evidence.

  “My dear Panzie,” he said, smiling. “I promise just this once.” The other two skipped out, and the little girl went into the hall to find her governess.

  Nicholas Rey arrived in full-dress army uniform, with a blue coat and tunic. He reported that nothing had been found. But Sergeant Stoneweather had now raised several squads of men to search for Benjamin Galvin. “The board of health announced that the worst of the distemper has passed and is releasing several dozen horses from quarantine.”

  “Excellent! Then we’ll get a team and start searching,” said Lowell.

  “Professor, gentlemen,” Rey said as he sat down. “You men have discovered the identity of the murderer. You saved a life, and perhaps others we will never know.”

  “Only, it was because of us that they were in danger in the first place.” Longfellow sighed.

  “No, Mr. Longfellow. What Benjamin Galvin found in Dante he would have found elsewhere in his life. You have called down none of these horrors. But what you have accomplished in their shadow is undeniable. Still, you are fortunate to be safe after all this. You must let the police finish this now, for everyone’s safety.”

  Holmes asked Rey why he was wearing his army uniform.

  “Governor Andrew is holding another of his soldiers’ banquets today at the State House. Clearly, Galvin has continued to wed himself to his service in the army. He might well appear.”

  “Officer, we don’t know how he’ll answer to having been stopped from this last murder,” said Fields. “What if he tries again to enact the punishment of the Traitors? What if he returns to Manning?”

  “We have patrolmen guarding the houses of all members of the Harvard Corporation and the overseers, including Dr. Manning. We’re also stopping at every hotel for Simon Camp in case Galvin targets him as another Traitor against Dante. We have several men in Galvin’s neighborhood, and we’re watching his house closely.”

  Lowell walked to the window and looked down Longfellow’s front walkway, where he saw a man in a heavy blue overcoat pass the gate and then return from the other direction. “You’ve a man here, too?” Lowell asked.

  Rey nodded. “At each of your houses. From his choice of victims, it seems that Galvin believes himself to be your guardian. So he may think to consort with you about what to do after such a rapid turn of events. If he does, we’ll take him in.”

  Lowell pitched his cigar to the fire. Suddenly his self-indulgence disgusted him. “Officer, I think this is a shabby piece of business. We can’t just sit in this same room helplessly all day!”

  “I don’t suggest that you do, Professor Lowell,” Rey replied. “Return to your own houses, spend time with your families. The duty of protecting this city is on me, gentlemen, but your presence is strongly missed elsewhere. Your life must begin to return to normal from this point on, Professor.”

  Lowell looked up, stunned. “But . . .”

  Longfellow smiled. “A great part of the happiness of life consists not in fighting battles, my dear Lowell, but in avoiding them. A masterly retreat is in itself a victory.”

  Rey said, “Let us all meet here again this evening. With a little good fortune, I shall have happy tidings to report. Fair enough?”

  The scholars conceded with mixed expressions of regret and great relief.

  Patrolman Rey continued recruiting officers that afternoon; many of them had silently avoided Rey’s path in the past out of prudence. But he had known who they were from afar. He knew instantly when a man looked at him simply as another man and not as a black or mulatto or nigger. His straight gaze into their eyes necessitated little additional persuasion.

  He posted a patrolman at the front gardens of Dr. Manning’s house. As Rey was speaking with the patrolman under a maple tree, Augustus Manning charged out from his side door.

  “Yield!” Manning shouted, showing a rifle.

  Rey turned. “We’re police—police, Dr. Manning.”

  Manning shivered as though still locked in the ice. “I saw your army uniform through my window, Officer. I thought that madman . . .”

  “You needn’t worry,” said Rey.

  “You’ll . . . you’ll protect me?” Manning asked.

  “Until it is no longer needed,” said Rey. “This officer shall watch over your house. Well-armed.”

  The other patrolman unbuttoned his coat and showed his revolver.

  Manning offered a frail nod of acceptance and extended his arm hesitantly, allowing the mulatto policeman to escort him inside.

  Afterward, Rey drove his carriage to the Cambridge Bridge. He came into sight of a stopped coach blocking the way. Two men were hunched over one of the wheels. Rey steered to the side of the road and stepped down, walking to the stranded party to help. But as he reached them, the two men rose to their full height. Rey heard noises behind him and turned to see that another carriage had pulled behind his own. Two men in flowing overcoats emerged onto the street. The four men stood in a square around the mulatto policeman and remained motionless for nearly two minutes.

  “Detectives. May I be of some help?” Rey asked.

  “We thought we’d have a word with you at the station house, Rey,” one of them said.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t time just now,” Rey said.

  “It’s been brought to our attention that you’re looking into a matter without proper authorization, sir,” another said as he stepped forward.

  “I don’t believe that’s your province, Detective Henshaw,” said Rey after a pause.

  The detective rubbed two fingers together. A detective moved closer to Rey menacingly.

  Rey turned to him. “I am an officer of the law. If you strike me, you strike the Commonwealth.”

  The detective landed a fist in Rey’s abdomen and then crashed another into his jaw. Rey doubled over, nestled in his coat collar. Blood spilled from his mouth as they dragged him into the back of their carriage.

  Dr. Holmes sat in his big leather rocker, waiting to leave for their appointed meeting at Longfellow’s. A partially opened blind threw a dim, religious light onto the table. Wendell Junior was rushing up to the second floor.

  “Wendy, my boy,” Holmes called after him. “Where are you going?”

  Junior slowly backtracked
down the stairs. “How are you, Father? Didn’t see you.”

  “Can’t you sit for a minute or two?”

  Junior perched on the edge of a green rocker.

  Dr. Holmes asked about law school. Junior answered perfunctorily, waiting for the usual barb about the law, but none came. He could never get under the skin of the law, Dr. Holmes said of himself, when he gave it a try after college. The second edition improves on the first, he supposed.

  The calm clock dial counted out their silence in long seconds.

  “You were never frightened, Wendy?” Dr. Holmes said into the silence. “In the war, I mean.”

  Junior peered at his father from under his dark brow, and grinned warmly. “It’s rank folly, Dadkins, pulling a long mug every time one might fight or be killed. There’s no poetry in a fight.”

  Dr. Holmes excused his son to go to his work. Junior nodded and resumed his trip upstairs.

  Holmes had to be on his way to meet the others. He decided to take his grandfather’s flintlock musket, which had last been used in the Revolutionary War. This was the only weapon Holmes allowed in his house, storing it as a piece of history in his basement.

  The horsecars were still shut down. Drivers and conductors had tried to pull the cars by hand without success. The Metropolitan Railroad also attempted to use oxen to pull the cars, but their feet were too tender for the hard pavement. So Holmes traveled by foot, walking through the crooked streets of Beacon Hill, missing by only a few seconds Fields’s carriage as the publisher drove to Holmes’s house to see if he wanted a ride. The doctor took the West Bridge over the partially frozen Charles, through Gallows Hill. It was so cold that people were clapping their hands to their ears and hoisting their shoulders and running. Holmes’s asthma made the walk feel twice as long as it was. He found himself passing the First Meeting House, the old Cambridge church of the Reverend Abiel Holmes. He slipped into the empty chapel and had a seat. The pews were the usual oblong ones, with a ledge before the parishioners to support hymn books. There was a lavish organ, something the Reverend Holmes never would have allowed.