Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  Holmes’s father had lost the church during a split in his congregation with members who wished to have Unitarian ministers as occasional guest preachers at their pulpit. The reverend had refused, and the small number of his remaining faithful moved with him to a new meetinghouse. The Unitarian chapels were all the fashion in those days, for there was shelter under the “new religion” from the doctrines of inborn sin and human helplessness propounded by Reverend Holmes and his more fire-eating brethren. It was in one of those churches that Dr. Holmes, too, had left behind his father’s beliefs and found yet another kind of shelter, in reasoned religion rather than fear of God.

  There was also shelter beneath the floorboards, thought Holmes, when the abolitionists were mixed in—at least, that was what Holmes had heard: Under many Unitarian chapels they dug tunnels to hide runaway Negroes when Chief Justice Healey’s court upheld the Fugitive Slave Act and forced escaped Negroes into hiding. What would the Reverend Abiel Holmes have thought of that . . .

  Holmes had returned to his father’s old meetinghouse every summer for the Harvard commencement, where the ceremony was held. Wendell Junior, in the year of his college graduation, as class poet. Mrs. Holmes had cautioned Dr. Holmes not to add to the pressure on Junior by advising him or critiquing his poem. As Junior took his place, Dr. Holmes sat in the meetinghouse, the chapel that had been stripped away from his father, an unsteady smile fixed on his face. All eyes were on him, to see his reaction to his son’s poem, written by Junior while he was drilling for the war his company would soon join. Cedat armis toga, thought Holmes—let the scholar’s gown give way to the soldier’s arms. Oliver Wendell Holmes, wheezing with nervousness as he watched Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, wished that he might dive down into those fairy-tale tunnels supposedly running under the churches, for what use were those rabbit holes now that the Secesh traitors would be shown what to do with their slavery laws with bayonet and Enfield?

  Holmes shot to attention in the empty pew. Why, the tunnels! That was how Lucifer had eluded all detection, even when the police had been out in full force! That was why the prostitute saw Teal disappear in the fog near a church! That was why the jittery sexton of Talbot’s church had not seen the killer enter or leave! A chorus of hallelujahs lit up Dr. Holmes’s soul. Lucifer does not walk or ride the cars while dragging Boston into Hell, Holmes cried to himself. He burrows!

  Lowell anxiously departed Elmwood for their Craigie House rendezvous and was the first to greet Longfellow. Lowell did not notice, on the way, that the police guards in front of Elmwood and Craigie House were nowhere to be seen. Longfellow was just finishing reading a story to Annie Allegra. He excused her to the nursery.

  Fields arrived soon after.

  But twenty minutes passed without word of Oliver Wendell Holmes or Nicholas Rey.

  “We shouldn’t have left Rey’s side,” Lowell muttered into his mustache.

  “I can’t understand why Wendell wouldn’t have come by now,” said Fields nervously. “I stopped at his house on my way, and Mrs. Holmes said he had already departed.”

  “It hasn’t been very long,” said Longfellow, but his eyes did not move from his clock.

  Lowell dropped his face into his hands. When he peered out between them, another ten minutes were gone. When he closed himself in again, he was suddenly hit by a chilling thought. He rushed to the window. “We must find Wendell at once!”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Fields, alarmed at the look of horror on Lowell’s face.

  “It’s Wendell,” Lowell said, “I called him a traitor at the Corner!”

  Fields smiled gently. “That is long forgotten, my dear Lowell.”

  Lowell grabbed his publisher’s coat sleeve for balance. “Don’t you see? I had my row with Wendell at the Corner the day Jennison was found shredded, the night Holmes walked out from our project. Teal, or rather Galvin, was just coming down the hall. He must have been listening in on us the whole time, just as he would have done at Harvard’s board meetings! I chased Holmes into the hall from the Authors’ Room to yell after him—don’t you remember what I said? Can’t you hear the words still? I told Holmes he was betraying the Dante Club. I said he was a traitor!”

  “Brace yourself, please,” said Fields.

  “Greene preached to Teal, and Teal followed up with murders. I condemned Wendell as a traitor: Teal was the vigilant audience for my little sermon!” cried Lowell. “Oh, my dear friend, I’ve done him in. I’ve murdered Wendell!”

  Lowell rushed into the front hall for his coat.

  “He’ll be here any moment, I’m sure,” said Longfellow. “Please, Lowell, let us wait for Officer Rey at least.”

  “No, I’m going to find Wendell right now!”

  “But where do you mean to find him? And you can’t go alone,” said Longfellow. “We’ll come.”

  “I’ll go with Lowell,” Fields said, gathering up the police rattle left by Rey and shaking it to show that it worked well. “I’m sure everything’s fine. Longfellow, will you wait here for Wendell? We’ll send the patrol officer to fetch Rey at once.”

  Longfellow nodded.

  “Come then, Fields! Now!” roared Lowell, on the verge of crying.

  Fields tried to keep up with Lowell as he ran down the front walkway to Brattle Street. There was no sign of anyone.

  “Now, where in the deuce is that patrolman?” Fields asked. “The street looks entirely empty . . .”

  A rustling noise sounded in the trees behind Longfellow’s high fence. Lowell put a finger to his lips to signal Fields for quiet and crept closer to the sound, where he waited frozen in suspense.

  A cat sprang into view at their feet and then raced off, dissolving into the darkness. Lowell let out a sigh of relief, but just then a man came hurtling down over the fence and struck a crashing blow to Lowell’s head. Lowell collapsed all at once, like a sail whose mast had cracked in two; the poet’s face was so inconceivably motionless on the ground as to be almost unrecognizable to Fields.

  The publisher backed away, then looked up and met the gaze of Dan Teal. They moved in tandem, Fields backward and Teal forward in a curiously gentle dance.

  “Mr. Teal, please.” Fields’s knees bent inward.

  Teal stared impassively.

  The publisher tripped over a fallen branch, then turned and launched into a clumsy run. He puffed his way down Brattle, faltering as he went, trying to call out, to scream, but only producing a rough, hoarse caw lost in the frigid winds shrieking in his ears. He looked back, then he drew the police rattle from his pocket. There was no longer any sign of his pursuer. As Fields turned to look over his other shoulder, he felt his arm being grabbed, and he was flung hard through the air. His body went tumbling to the street, the rattle slipping into the bushes with a soft jingle, soft as a bird’s chirp.

  Fields stretched his neck toward Craigie House with excruciating stiffness. A warm gaslight glow escaped Longfellow’s study windows, and Fields seemed instantly to know the whole purpose of his assassin.

  “Only, don’t hurt Longfellow, Teal. He’s left Massachusetts today—you’ll see. I vow to you on my honor,” Fields blubbered like a child.

  “Have I not always done my duty?” The soldier raised his bludgeon high over his head and struck.

  Reverend Elisha Talbot’s successor had completed some meetings with deacons at the Second Unitarian Church of Cambridge several hours before Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, armed with his ancient musket and a kerosene lantern he had secured from a pawnshop, stepped into the church and sneaked into the underground vault. Holmes had debated with himself whether to share his theory with the others, but decided to confirm it first for himself. If Talbot’s underground vault was indeed connected to an abandoned fugitive-slave tunnel, this could lead the police right to the killer. It would also explain how Lucifer had entered the burial vault in advance, murdered Talbot, and fled without witnesses. Dr. Holmes’s intuition had launched the Dante Club into its murder inquiries, although it req
uired the urging of Lowell to follow through; why shouldn’t he be the one to point them to an end?

  Holmes descended into the vault and fondled the walls of the tomb for any sign of an opening into another tunnel or chamber. He did not find the passageway with his searching hands but with the toes of his boot, which by sheer accident kicked into a hollow gap. Holmes bent down to examine it and found a narrow space. His compact body fit snugly into the hollow, and he dragged his lantern in after him. After he had spent some time on hands and knees, the height of the tunnel increased and Holmes could stand up quite comfortably. He would return at once to proper ground, he decided. Oh how the others would smile at his discovery. How swiftly their adversary would now see defeat! But the sharp turns and slopes of the labyrinth left the little doctor disoriented. He rested a hand on his coat pocket, on the handle of his musket, to feel safe, and had begun to regain his inner compass when a voice scattered all his senses.

  “Dr. Holmes,” said Teal.

  XIX

  Benjamin Galvin enlisted at Massachusetts’s first call for soldiers. At twenty-four, he had already considered himself a soldier for some time, having helped conduct fugitive slaves through the city’s network of shelters, sanctuaries, and tunnels during the years before war officially came upon them. He was also among those volunteers who escorted anti-slavery speakers in and out of Faneuil Hall and other lyceums, serving as one of the human shields against rock-hurling, brick-tossing mobs.

  Galvin, admittedly, was not political in the manner of other young men. He could not read the heavy broadsides and newspapers on whether this or that political scalawag should be voted out or how this or that party or state legislature had cried secession or conciliation. But he understood the stump speakers who declared that an enslaved race must be made free and the guilty parties submitted to rightful punishment. And Benjamin Galvin understood simply enough, too, that he might not return home to his new wife: If he did not come back holding the Stars and Stripes, the recruiters promised, he’d come back wrapped in it. Galvin had never been photographed before, and the one picture taken upon enlistment disappointed him. His cap and trousers appearing ill-fitting; his eyes seeming unaccountably frightened.

  The earth was hot and dry when Company C of the 10th Regiment was sent from Boston to Springfield to Camp Brightwood. Dust clouds crusted the soldiers’ new blue uniforms so completely as to make them the same dull gray color of the enemy’s. The colonel asked if Benjamin Galvin wished to be the company adjutant and record casualty lists. Galvin explained that he could write out his alphabet but could not write or read correctly; he had tried learning many times, but the letters and marks got tangled up in the wrong direction in his head and crashed and turned into each other on the page. The colonel was surprised. Illiteracy was not at all unusual among the recruits, but Private Galvin always seemed to be in such deep thought, taking in everything with such big, quiet eyes and a completely still expression, that some of the men had called him Possum.

  When they were encamped in Virginia, the first excitement came when a soldier from their ranks was found in the woods one day, shot in the head and bayoneted, maggots filling his head and mouth like a swarm of bees settling on their hive. It was said that the Rebels had sent one of their blacks over to kill a Yank for amusement. Captain Kingsley, a friend of the dead soldier’s, made Galvin and the men swear no sympathy when the day came to whip the Secesh. It seemed they would never have the chance to engage in the combat all men itched for.

  Galvin, though he had worked outdoors most of his life, had never seen the sorts of creeping things that filled this part of the country. The company adjutant, who woke an hour before bugle each morning to comb his thick hair and record lists of the sick and the dead, would let no one kill one of these crawling creatures; he cared for them like children even though Galvin saw, with his own eyes, four men from another company die from the white worms that infested their wounds. This happened while Company C marched to the next camp—nearer, it was rumored, to a live battleground.

  Galvin had never imagined that death could come so easily to people around him. At Fair Oaks, in a single burst of noise and smoke, six men would lie dead before him, their eyes still staring as though with interest in what would come for the rest. It was not the number of dead but the number of men who survived that day that was a great wonder to Galvin, as it did not seem possible, or even right, for a man to live through. The inconceivable number of dead bodies and dead horses were collected together like cordwood and burned. Every time Galvin closed his eyes to sleep after that, he could hear shouts and explosions inside his spinning head, and could permanently smell the odor of ruined flesh.

  One evening, returning to his tent with a ravenous pang, Galvin found a portion of his hardtack missing from his sack. One of his tentmates said he had seen the company chaplain take it. Galvin did not believe such wickedness possible, for all of them had the same gnawing hunger and same empty stomach. But it was hard to blame a man. When the company was marching through pouring rain or blazing heat, the rations inevitably diminished to only crackers infested with weevils, and not nearly enough of them, either. Worse than anything, a soldier could not stop for a night without “skirmishing,” stripping off his clothes and digging out the bugs and ticks. The adjutant, who seemed to know about these things, said the way the insects got on them was when they stood still, so they should keep moving ahead always, always moving.

  Wriggling creatures also populated the drinking water, a result of dead horses and rotten meat sometimes piled up into fords by soldiers. From malaria to dysentery, all maladies were known as camp fever, and the surgeon could not distinguish between the sick and the pretenders, and so usually thought it best to assume one belonged with the latter. Galvin once vomited eight times in one day, bringing up nothing but blood the final time. Every few minutes while he was waiting for the surgeon, who put him on quinine and opium, the surgeons would throw an arm or leg out the window of the makeshift hospital.

  When they were encamped, there was always disease, but at least there were also books. The assistant surgeon collected the ones that were sent to the boys from home to keep in his tent, and he acted as librarian. Some of the books had illustrations that Galvin liked to look at, other times the adjutant or one of Galvin’s tentmates would read a story or poem aloud. Galvin found in the assistant surgeon’s library a shiny blue-and-gold copy of Longfellow’s poetry. Galvin could not read the name on the cover, but recognized the engraved portrait on the frontispiece from one of his wife’s books. Harriet Galvin always said that each of Longfellow’s books found a way to light and happiness for its characters when they were faced with hopeless paths, like Evangeline and her beau, separated in their new country only to find each other when he was dying of fever and she was a nurse. Galvin imagined that was him and Harriet, and it reassured him as he watched men drop all around him.

  When Benjamin Galvin first came from his aunt’s farm to help the abolitionists in Boston after hearing a traveling lyceum speaker, he was knocked out by two hollering Irishmen who were trying to break up the abolitionist meeting. One of the organizers took Galvin home to recover, and Harriet, a daughter of this organizer, fell in love with the poor boy. She had never met anyone, even among her father’s friends, so simply certain of the rightness and wrongness of things without a corrupting concern for politics or influence. “Sometimes I think you love your mission more than you can love other people,” she said while they were courting, but he was too forthright to think of what he did as a mission.

  She was heartbroken to hear from Galvin how his parents had died of the black fever when he was young. She taught him to write his alphabet by making him copy it out on slates; he already knew how to write his name. The day he decided to volunteer to fight the war, they married. She promised to teach him enough to read a whole book on his own when he returned from the war. That was why, she said, he must come back alive. Galvin would crawl under his blanket, lying on his ha
rd board, thinking of her steady, musical voice.

  When shelling began, some of the men would laugh uncontrollably or shriek as they fired, their faces blackened by the powder from tearing open cartridges with their teeth. Others would load and fire without aiming, and Galvin thought these men truly insane. The deafening cannons thundered across the earth so terribly that rabbits fled their holes, their little bodies trembling with fright as they hopped across the dead men sprawled all over the ground, which steamed with blood.

  Survivors rarely had strength left to dig sufficient graves for their comrades, resulting in entire landscapes of protruding knees and arms and the tops of heads. The first rain would uncover all of it. Galvin watched his tentmates scribble letters home telling of their battles, and he wondered how they could put to words what they had seen and heard and felt, for it was beyond all words he had ever heard. According to one soldier, the arrival of support lines for their last battle, which had massacred nearly a third of their company, had been called off on the orders of a general who wished to embarrass General Burnside in hopes of securing his removal. The general later received a promotion.

  “Is it possible?” Private Galvin demanded of a sergeant from another company.

  “Two mules and another soldier killed,” Sergeant LeRoy chuckled gruffly to the still-green private.

  The campaign would prove only second in horrors and human flesh to Napoleon’s Russian campaign, the bookish adjutant warned Benjamin Galvin sagaciously.