CANTICLE
TWO
VIII
In the low world of Boston, much was the same on the week the Reverend Talbot’s body was discovered. Unaltered was the triangle of streets where slums and public houses and brothels and cheap hotels had driven out those residents who could afford being driven out, where chalky steam gushed from pipes bending outward from glass- and ironworks, where sidewalks were littered with orange peels and filled with mirthful singing and dancing at odd hours. Hordes of black people were coming and going on the public horsecars: young ladies, laundresses and household servants, whose hair was caught up loudly in colored handkerchiefs, whose dangling jewelry made brash music; a black soldier or sailor in uniform might be seen, still a jarring sight. So too was a certain mulatto walking with notable poise along the streets, ignored by some, laughed at by others, glared at by the more wizened blacks, who in their wisdom knew that Rey was a policeman and thus unlike them in that regard as well as in his mixed race. Blacks had been safe in Boston, were even permitted schooling and public transportation alongside whites, and therefore they kept quiet. Rey, however, would stir up hatred if he made a wrong move or crossed the wrong person in his duties. The blacks had exiled him from their world for these reasons, and because these reasons were right, no explanation or regret was ever delivered to him.
Several chattering young women holding baskets on their heads paused to look sideways at him, his beautiful bronze skin seeming to absorb all the lamplight as he went and carry it away. On the other side of the street, Rey recognized a bulky man loitering at the corner, a Spanish Jew, a notorious thief sometimes brought in for questioning to the Central Station. Nicholas Rey mounted the narrow stairs of his rooming house. His door faced the second-floor landing, and although the lamp was broken, he could see from the shadows that someone was blocking the way to his room.
The week’s events had been unrelenting. When Rey first drove Chief Kurtz to see the Reverend Talbot’s body, the sexton had ushered Kurtz and some sergeants to the steps that led below. Kurtz had stopped and surprised Rey by turning back. “Patrolman.” He had motioned Rey to follow. Inside the burial vault, Patrolman Rey had required a moment of staring at the display, the body stuffed wrong side up into an uneven hole, before even noticing the protruding feet: inflamed, blistered, and distorted. The sexton told them what he had seen.
The toes were ready to break off and fall from the pink, skinless, and misshapen extremities, making it difficult to distinguish between the ends of the feet that held the toes and the ends that, anatomically, would have to be called the heels. This detail—the burned feet, revelatory to the Danteans mere blocks away—was to the policemen merely insane.
“Only the feet were set on fire?” Patrolman Rey asked, squinting, delicately touching, with just a fingertip, the charred, crumbling flesh. He pulled back at the smoldering heat still baking the flesh, half expecting his finger to be singed. He wondered how much heat the human body could conduct before losing its physical form entirely. After two sergeants carried away the body, Sexton Gregg, in his tearful daze, remembered something.
“The paper,” he said, grabbing Rey, who was the only policeman left below. “There’s bits of paper along the tombs. They ain’t supposed to be there. He shouldn’t have been there! I shouldn’t have let him in!” He wept uncontrollably. Rey lowered his lantern and saw the trail of letters like remorse left unspoken.
The newspapers would speak of both terrible murders—Healey’s and Talbot’s—so frequently that they became partners in the public mind—often referred to in street corner conversation as the Healey-Talbot murders. Had the public’s syndrome exposed itself in Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s queer remark at Longfellow’s house the night Talbot was discovered? Holmes had been offering his expertise to Rey as nervously as a medical student. “Perhaps what sounds like a useless Latin prognosis can help catch this killer running about our city.” The word pierced Rey: killer. Dr. Holmes was assuming that the murders were executed by the same party. Yet there was nothing obvious to tie them into one, besides their respective brutishness. There was also the nakedness of the bodies and the neatly folded clothes stripped from them—but that had not yet been reported in the papers when Rey heard Holmes speak. Perhaps it was a slip of the tongue on the part of the conceited little doctor. Perhaps.
The papers supplemented the headlining murders with healthy doses of other senseless violence: garrotings, hold-ups, safe blowing, a prostitute found half-strangled steps away from a police station, a child discovered beaten to a living pulp in a Fort Hill boardinghouse. And there was the strange incident of a vagrant brought for questioning to the Central Station, who was permitted by the police to throw himself to his death through the window, in plain sight of the helpless Chief Kurtz. The papers clamored: “Do the Police have any responsibility for the safety of citizens?”
In the dark well of his rooming house, Rey had come to a stop mid-stair and made sure nobody was behind him. Hand on his billy club underneath his coat, he proceeded. “Only a poor beggar, good sir.” The man from whom these words emerged at the top of the stairs was easily recognizable once the angle revealed a pair of stringy trousered legs growing out from iron-heeled shoes: Langdon Peaslee, safecracker, nonchalantly buffing his diamond breast-pin with the wide cuff of his shirt.
“Why, Lily White.” Peaslee grinned, showing a beautiful set of teeth sharp as stalagmites. “Have a shake.” He grabbed Rey’s hand. “Ain’t seen that prize phiz of yours since that show-up. Say, this wouldn’t be your room up here?” He pointed behind him innocently.
“Hello, Mr. Peaslee. I understand you robbed the Lexington bank two nights ago.” Nicholas Rey said this to demonstrate that he had just as much information as the thief.
Peaslee had left no evidence that would survive his lawyers in court and had thoroughly selected and fenced only untraceable valuables. “Why, tell me, who’s crack enough these days to heave a bank all alone?”
“You, I’m certain. Have you come to turn yourself in?” Rey said with a serious face.
Peaslee laughed sneeringly. “No, no, dear boy. But I do think these restrictions they put on you—what are they? No uniform, can’t arrest white men, so on—well, they are unfair, unfair indeed. But there are some conciliatory factors. You’ve become such close pals with Chief Kurtz, and that can go a ways to bringing someone to justice. Like the murderers of Judge Healey and Reverend Talbot, rest their souls. I hear the deacons of Talbot’s church are even now building up a subscription for a reward.”
Rey started for his room with an uninterested nod. “I’m tired,” he said quietly. “Unless you have someone specific who must be brought to justice at the moment, you’ll excuse me.”
Peaslee twirled a hand into Rey’s scarf and held him still. “Policemen cannot accept rewards, but a just citizen, like myself, most certainly would. And if some finds its way to a deserving copper’s door . . .” There was no reaction in the mulatto’s face. Peaslee showed his irritation, turned off his charm. He pulled the scarf tight like a dropped noose. “This is how that dumb beggar at the show-up met Old Grim, now, isn’t it? Listen close. There’s a fool about our city who can be made very guilty for killing Talbot, my dear prigger-napper. I’ll jacket him easily. Help me see to it, half the boodle will be yours,” he said bluntly. “Thick enough to choke a hog, then you can go your own way as you please. The floodgates are opened: Everything’s going to change in Boston. The war lined this whole place with money. These times are too dusty to walk alone.”
“You’ll excuse me, Mr. Peaslee,” Rey repeated with stoic equanimity.
Peaslee waited a moment, then lapsed into a defeated laugh. He brushed some imaginary lint from Rey’s tweed coat. “Just as well, Lily White. I should’ve known by looking that you wear a Joseph’s coat. It’s only I feel sorry for you, my friend, very sorry. The darkies hate you for being white and everyone else hates you for being black. Me, I judge a bloke by whether this is up to snuff.” He pointed to the side of his head. “Once I found myself in a country town in Louisiana, Lily White, where you could see the white blood in half the Negro children. The streets were full of hybrids. I imagine you’ve wished you lived somewhere like that, haven’t you?”
Rey ignored him and reached for the latchkey in his pocket. Peaslee said he would do the honors. He pushed Rey’s door open with a single arachnid finger.
Rey looked up, alarmed for the first time in their encounter.
“Locks are my game, understand,” Peaslee said, cocking his hat boastfully. Then he pretended to surrender, turning up his wrists. “You can bag me for trespass, Patrolman. Oh, no, no, you can’t, can you?” A departing grin.
Nothing was missing from the apartment. That last trick had just been a show of power by the great safecracker, in case any unwise notions ever visited Nicholas Rey.
It was strange for Oliver Wendell Holmes being out with Longfellow like this, to see him pass among the common faces and sounds and wonderful, terrible scents of the streets, as though he were part of the same world as the man driving a horse team with a sprinkling machine to clean the street. Not that the poet had never left Craigie House the last few years, but his outside activities were concise, confined. Dropping off proof sheets at Riverside Press, dining with Fields at an unpopular hour at the Revere or Parker House. Holmes felt ashamed for having been the first one to stumble on something that could so inconceivably break Longfellow’s peaceful suspension. It should have been Lowell. He would never think to feel guilt at forcing Longfellow into the bricked-up, soul-confusing Babylon of the world. Holmes wondered whether Longfellow resented him for it—whether he was capable of resentment or whether he was, as he was with so many unsavory human emotions, immune.
Holmes thought of Edgar Allan Poe, who had written an article entitled “Longfellow and Other Plagiarists,” accusing Longfellow and all the Boston poets of copying every writer, living and dead, including Poe himself. This was at a time when Longfellow was helping keep Poe alive through loans. An infuriated Fields forever banned any of Poe’s writings from appearing in Ticknor & Fields publications. Lowell barraged newspapers with letters conclusively demonstrating the New York scribbler’s outrageous errors. Holmes became consumed with the idea that every word he wrote was indeed a theft from some better poet before him, and in his dreams it was not uncommon for the ghost of some old dead master to appear to demand his poetry back. Longfellow, for his part, said nothing publicly, privately attributing Poe’s acts to the irritation of a sensitive nature chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong. And remarkably enough to Holmes, Longfellow genuinely mourned Poe’s melancholy death.
Both men were carrying flower bouquets under their arms while they traveled into the part of Cambridge that was less a village, more a town. They walked around Elisha Talbot’s church, looking with each step for the location of the terrible demise of Talbot, stooping under trees and feeling the ground between grave markers. Several passersby asked for autographs on handkerchiefs or inside hats—often from Dr. Holmes, always from Longfellow. Though the nighttime would have granted welcome anonymity, Longfellow had decided it would be best if they appeared as mourners visiting the churchyard rather than overdressed resurrection-men looking for a body to steal.
Holmes was thankful that Longfellow had assumed leadership in the days since they had agreed to . . . What had they agreed to do, with Ulysses’ fiery words singeing their tongues? Lowell said investigating (always with an outward-thrust chest). Holmes preferred calling it “making inquiries,” and did so pointedly when speaking to Lowell.
There were of course the few Danteans besides themselves who had to be accounted for. Several were spending time in Europe, on either a temporary or permanent basis, including Longfellow’s neighbor Charles Eliot Norton, another former student of the poet’s, and William Dean Howells, a young acolyte of Fields’s, appointed envoy to Venice. Then there was Professor Ticknor, seventy-four, holed up in his library for three decades of solitude; and Pietro Bachi, who had been an Italian tutor under both Longfellow and Lowell before being fired by Harvard; and all of the past students of Longfellow’s and Lowell’s Dante seminars (and a handful more from Ticknor’s time). Lists would be made and private meetings scheduled. But Holmes prayed they would uncover an explanation before they made fools of themselves in front of people whom they respected and who had, at least up to the present, respected them in return.
If there had been a death scene on the outside grounds of the Second Unitarian Church of Cambridge, it was not to be found today. Then again, if their speculations were accurate and there had been a hole in the yard where Talbot was buried, the church deacons would have covered it up with fresh grass hurriedly. A dead preacher set upside down out front would not provide the best advertisement for a congregation.
“Now, let us look inside,” Longfellow suggested, seemingly at peace with their complete lack of progress.
Holmes followed closely in Longfellow’s steps.
In the rear vestry, where the offices and changing rooms were located, there was an oversize slate door against one wall, but it did not connect to another room, and there was no other wing of the church.
Longfellow removed his gloves and ran a hand over the cold stone. A bitter chill was behind it.
“Yes!” Holmes whispered. The chill crept inside of him when he opened his mouth to speak. “The vault, Longfellow! The vault down below . . .”
Until three years ago, many of the area’s churches had maintained interments underground. There were lavish private vaults that could be purchased by families, as well as inferior public ones housing any member of the congregation for a minimal fee. For years, these burial vaults were considered a prudent use of space for crowded cities with spreading churchyards. But when Bostonians dropped dead by the hundreds from yellow fever, the Board of Public Health declared the cause the proximity of decaying flesh, and new vaults beneath church grounds were strictly prohibited. Families with enough money to do so relocated casketed loved ones to Mount Auburn and other newly fashioned bucolic resting places. But tucked away beneath the ground, the “public”—or poorer—portions of the vaults were teeming. Rows of unmarked coffins, decrepit tombs, subterranean potter’s fields.
“Dante finds the Simoniacs within the pietra livida, the livid stone,” said Longfellow.
A quivering voice interrupted. “Help you, gents?” The church sexton, who had first come upon Talbot roasting, was a tall, thin man in a long black robe, with white hair, or, more accurately, bristles, standing out in all directions like a brush. His eyes appeared to be staring wide, so that he looked permanently like the picture of a man seeing a ghost.
“Good morning, sir.” Holmes approached, flipping his hat up and down in his hands. Holmes wished Lowell were there, or Fields, both natural authority mongers. “Sir, my friend and I must request leave to enter your interment vault below if we can trouble you for admittance.”
The sexton made no indication of entertaining the idea.
Holmes looked back. Longfellow was standing with hands folded over walking stick, placid, as though he were an uninvited bystander.
“Now, as I was saying, my good sir, you see it is quite important that we . . . well, I’m Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. I have a chair in Anatomy and Physiology at the Medical College—really more a settee than a chair, for the breadth of its subjects. Probably you’ve read some of my poems in . . .”
“Sir!” The squeaky sting in the sexton’s voice approximated a shriek of pain when raised. “Do you not know, guvnor, that our minister was of late found . . .” he stammered in horror and then recoiled. “I tended the grounds, and not a soul came in-er-out! Upon the Eternal, if it happened on my watch, I own it was a demon spirit without the need of physical convey’nce, not a man!” He stopped himself. “The feet,” he said with a glazed stare, and looked as though he could not go on.
“His feet, sir,” Dr. Holmes said, wanting to hear it, though he knew precisely the destined lot of Talbot’s feet—knew of it firsthand. “What of them?”
The four members of the Dante Club sans Mr. Greene had collected all newspaper accounts available on Talbot’s death. Whereas the true circumstances of Healey’s death had been concealed for several weeks before their revelation, in the newspaper columns Elisha Talbot was slain in every conceivable manner, with a sloppiness that would have made Dante, for whom every punishment was ordained by divine love, wince. Sexton Gregg, for his part, did not need to know Dante. He was a witness to and a carrier of the truth. In this way, he had the strength and simplicity of an old prophet.
“The feet,” the sexton continued after a long pause, “were aflame, guvnor; they were chariots of fire in the dark vaults. Please, gents.” His head hung in dejection, and he gestured for them to leave.
“Good sir,” Longfellow said softly. “It is the Reverend Talbot’s passing which brings us here.”
The sexton’s eyes relaxed at once. It was not clear to Holmes whether the man recognized the silver-bearded visage of the beloved poet or whether he was calmed like the wild beast by the stirring quiet of Longfellow’s organ voice. Holmes realized that if the Dante Club were to make any progress with this endeavor, it would be because Longfellow had the same celestial ease over people through his presence that he had over the English language through his pen.
Longfellow went on: “Though we possess only our words of promise to prove ourselves to you, dear sir, we ask for assistance. I pray you have faith without further evidence on our part, for I fear we may be the only ones who can truly make sense from what has occurred. More than that we must not reveal.”
The vast, blank chasm stewed with mist. Dr. Holmes was fanning away the fetid air that stung his eyes and ears like pepper dust as they marched with small, cautious steps down to the narrow vault. Longfellow breathed more or less freely. His sense of smell was, advantageously, limited: It allowed him the pleasure of spring flowers and other agreeable aromas but screened out anything noxious.
Sexton Gregg explained that the public vault extended underneath the streets for several city blocks in both directions.
Longfellow shone a lantern against the slate columns, then lowered the light to examine the plain stone coffins.
The sexton started to make a remark about the Reverend Talbot but hesitated. “You mustn’t think poorly of him, guvnors, if I tell you, but our dear reverend would walk along this vault passage for, well, not for church business, to be candid.”
“Why would he come here?” Holmes asked.
“A shorter route to get to home. Didn’t like it so much, m’self, say sooth.”
One of the scattered paper bits, with the letters a and h, missed by Rey, was trampled under Holmes’s boot and sank into the thick soil.
Longfellow asked whether someone else could have entered the vault from above the street, the place where the minister would have exited.
“No,” said the sexton definitively. “That door can only be opened from the inside. The police checked all the same, found no tamperin’. And there was no sign that the Reverend Talbot ever reached the door leading to the streets on that last evening he came through here.”
Holmes pulled Longfellow back, out of earshot of the sexton. He talked in hushed tones. “Do you not think it significant that Talbot would use this as a shortcut? We must question the sexton some more. We still do not know Talbot’s simony, and this could be an indication!” They had found nothing to suggest Talbot was anything but the good shepherd to his flock.
Longfellow said, “I think it is safe to say that walking through a burial vault does not qualify as a sin, inadvisable as it may be, don’t you? Besides, we know that simony must do with money—taking it or paying it. The sexton is as enamored of Talbot as the congregation, and too many questions about the minister’s habits would only dry up any information he has to volunteer. Remember, Sexton Gregg like all Boston, believes Talbot’s death to have been exclusively a product of someone else’s sin, not of his own.”
“So how did our Lucifer gain his entry here? If the vault exit to the street only opens from the inside . . . and the sexton says he was in the church and saw nobody come through the vestry . . .”
“Perhaps our rogue waited for Talbot to climb the stairs and exit the vault and then pushed him back underground from above the street,” Longfellow speculated.
“But to dig a hole deep enough in the ground for a man to fit in so quickly? It seems more likely that our villain ambushed Talbot—dug the hole, waited, and then grabbed him, pushed him in the hole, doused the kerosene on his feet . . .”
Ahead of them, the sexton came to a sudden stop. Half his muscles locked up and the other half shook violently. He tried to speak, but only a dry, mournful whimper emerged. By the extension of his chin he managed to indicate a thick slab sitting on the dirt carpeting the vault floor. The sexton ran back for the sanctuary of the church.
The place was at hand. It could be sensed and smelled.
Longfellow and Holmes together heaved with all their strength, to remove the slab. In the dirt was a round hole, big enough for a body of medium build. Stored by the slab and released by its removal, the smell of burning flesh attacked the air like the stench of rotted meat and fried onions. Holmes smothered his face with his neck cloth.
Longfellow knelt and cupped a handful of dirt from around the hole. “Yes, you are right, Holmes. This hole is deep and well formed. It must have been dug in advance. The killer must have been waiting when Talbot entered. He gains entry, somehow eluding our jittery friend the sexton, and knocks Talbot cold,” Longfellow theorized, “positions him headfirst in the hole, and then performs his horrible act.”
“Imagine the sheer torment! Talbot must have been conscious of what was happening before his heart gave in. The feeling of your flesh burning alive . . .” Holmes nearly swallowed his tongue. “I don’t mean, Longfellow . . .” He cursed his mouth for speaking so much and then for not taking a mistake quietly. “You know, I only meant . . .”
Longfellow did not seem to hear. He let the dirt slide through his fingers. He gingerly lowered the bright flower bouquet to a spot near the hole. “‘Stay here, for thou art justly punished,’” Longfellow said, quoting a verse from Canto Nineteen as though he were reading it from the air in front of him. “That is what Dante cries to the Simoniac he speaks to in Hell, Nicholas the Third, my dear Holmes.”
Dr. Holmes was ready to leave. The thick air was nourishing a revolt in his lungs, and his misspoken words had broken his own heart.
Longfellow, however, directed the halo of his gas lantern above the hole, which had been left undisturbed. He was not through. “We must dig deeper, below what we can see of the hole. The police would never think of it.”
Holmes stared incredulously at him. “Nor would I! Talbot was put in the hole, not below it, my dear Longfellow!”
Longfellow said, “Recall what Dante says to Nicholas as the sinner thrashes around in the wretched hole of his punishment.”
Holmes whispered some verses to himself. “‘Stay here, for thou art justly punished . . . and keep safe guard over your ill-gotten loot—’” He stopped short. “Keep safe guard over your loot. But isn’t Dante just displaying some of his not uncommon sarcasm, taunting the poor sinner for his moneygrubbing actions in life?”
“Indeed, that is how I happen to read the line,” said Longfellow. “But Dante might be read to mean the statement literally. It could be argued that Dante’s phrase actually reveals that part of the contrapasso of the Simoniacs is that they are buried upside down with the money they immorally accumulated in life below their heads. Surely Dante could have been thinking of Peter Magus’s words to Simon in Acts: ‘May thy money go to destruction with thee.’ In this interpretation, the hole which holds Dante’s sinner becomes his eternal purse.”
Holmes offered a medley of guttural sounds at the interpretation.
“If we dig,” said Longfellow with a slight smile, “your doubts might be proven unnecessary.” He extended his walking stick to reach the bottom of the hole, but the pit was too deep. “I cannot fit, I suppose.” Longfellow gauged the size of the hole. Then he looked at the little doctor, who was wriggling with asthma.
Holmes stood stock-still. “Oh but, Longfellow . . .” He looked down the hole. “Why did nature not ask me my advice about my features?” There was no point in arguing. Longfellow could not be argued with properly; he was too invincibly tranquil. If Lowell were here, he would have been digging in the hole like a rabbit.
“Ten to one I crack a fingernail.”
Longfellow nodded appreciatively. The doctor pinched his eyes closed and slid feet first down the hole. “It is too narrow. I cannot bend down. I do not think I can squeeze myself in to dig.”
Longfellow helped Holmes climb out of the hole. The doctor reentered the narrow opening, this time headfirst, with Longfellow holding on to his gray trousers at the ankles. The poet had the easy grasp of a puppet master.
“Careful, Longfellow! Careful!”
“You can see well enough?” asked Longfellow.
Holmes barely heard him. He raked at the earth with his hands, the moist dirt rising under his fingernails, at once sickeningly warm and cold and hard as ice. The worst was the odor, the festering stench of burning flesh that had been preserved in the tight abyss. Holmes tried holding his breath, but this tactic, coupled with his heaving asthma, made his head feel light, as if it might drift off like a balloon.
He was where the Reverend Talbot had been; upside down, like him. But instead of punishing fire at his feet he felt the unflinching hands of Mr. Longfellow.
Longfellow’s muffled voice floated down, a concerned question. The doctor could not hear inside his vague sensation of faintness and wondered idly whether a loss of consciousness would cause Longfellow to release his ankles and if he, in the meantime, might send himself tumbling through the core of the earth. He suddenly felt the danger they had put themselves in by trying to fight a book. The floating pageant of thoughts seemed to go on endlessly before the doctor hit something with his hands.
With the feel of a material object, hard clarity returned. A piece of clothing of some sort. No: a bag. A glazed cloth bag.
Holmes shuddered. He tried to speak, but the stench and the dirt were terrible obstacles. For a moment he was frozen in panic, then sanity returned and he kicked his legs frantically.
Longfellow, understanding this was a signal, lifted his friend’s body from the cavity. Holmes gasped for air, spitting and sputtering as Longfellow tended to him solicitously.
Holmes wriggled to his knees. “See what it is, for God’s sake, Longfellow!” Holmes pulled the drawstring wrapped around the discovery and tore open the dirt-encrusted pouch.
Longfellow watched as Dr. Holmes released a thousand dollars of legal-tender notes over the hard burial-vault ground.
And keep safe guard over your ill-gotten loot . . .
At grand Wide Oaks, the estate of the Healey family for three generations, Nell Ranney led two callers through the long entrance hall. They were strangely withdrawn, their bodies forcibly businesslike but their eyes rapid and mobile. Making them stand out even more in the maid’s mind were their fashions, for two such outlandishly conflicting styles were rarely seen.
James Russell Lowell, with a short beard and drooping mustache, wore a rather shabby double-breasted sack coat, an unbrushed silk hat made into a mockery by the casual suit, and in his necktie, done up in a sailor-knot, a type of pin that was no longer fashionable in Boston. The other man, whose massive russet beard cascaded in thick wiry rolls, removed his gloves, which were of a violent color, and pocketed them in his impeccably tailored Scottish tweed frock coat, below which was tightly strung, around his green-vested belly, like a Christmas ornament, a sparkling gold watch chain.
Nell was slow to leave the room even while Richard Sullivan Healey, the eldest son of the chief justice, greeted his two literary guests.
“Forgive my chambermaid’s behavior,” Healey said after ordering Nell Ranney away. “She was the one who found Father’s body and took him inside the house, and since then, I’m afraid she examines every person as though he could be responsible. We worry that she imagines almost as many demonish things as Mother does these days.”
“We were hoping to see dear Mrs. Healey this morning if you please, Richard,” said Lowell very politely. “Mr. Fields thought we might discuss with her a book of memorial tributes to the chief justice that could be made up by Ticknor and Fields.” It was customary for relatives, even distant cousins, to make personal calls to the family of the recently deceased, but the publisher required a pretense.
Richard Healey bunched his bulky mouth into an amiable curve. “I fear a visit with her won’t be possible, cousin Lowell. Today is one of her bad days. She is confined to bed.”
“Why, do not say she is ill.” Lowell leaned forward with a trace of morbid curiosity.
Richard Healey hesitated with a series of heavy blinks. “Not physically, or so according to the doctors. But she has developed a mania that I fear has worsened over the last weeks, so it may as well be physical. She feels a constant presence on her. Pardon me to speak vulgarly, gentlemen, but a crawling across her very flesh for which she insists she must scratch and dig into her skin, no matter how many diagnose imagination as the culprit.”
“Is there anything we might do to assist her, my dear Healey?” asked Fields.
“Find Father’s murderer.” Healey chuckled sadly. He noticed with some unease that the two men responded to this with steely looks.
Lowell wished to see where the body of Artemus Healey had been discovered. Richard Healey balked at this strange request, but attributing Lowell’s eccentricities to his poetic sensibilities, he escorted the two visitors outside. They went out the back doors of the mansion, past the flower gardens and into the meadows that led down to the riverbank. Healey noticed that James Russell Lowell walked with a surprisingly quick, athletic stride for a poet.
A strong wind blew particles of fine-grain sand into Lowell’s beard and mouth. With the rough taste on his tongue, a catch in his throat, and the image of Healey’s death in his mind, Lowell was transported by a vivid idea.
The Neutrals of Dante’s third canto choose neither good nor evil and thus are despised by Heaven and Hell alike. So they are placed in an antechamber, not even Hell proper, and here these cowardly shades float naked following a blank banner, for they had refused to follow a course of action in life. They are stung incessantly by gadflies and wasps, their blood mingles with the salt of their tears, and all this is mopped up at their feet by loathsome worms. This putrid flesh gives rise to more flies and worms. Flies, wasps, and maggots were the three types of insects found on Artemus Healey’s body.
To Lowell, it showed something about their killer that made him real.
“Our Lucifer knew how to transport these insects,” Lowell had said.
It had been a gathering at Craigie House the first morning of their investigation, the small study inundated with newspapers and their fingers spotted with ink and blood from turning too many pages. Fields, reviewing the notes Longfellow had been compiling in a journal, wanted to know why Lucifer, as Lowell had named their adversary, would choose Healey for the Neutrals.
Lowell pulled thoughtfully on one of his walrus tusks. He was in full pedagogical mode when his friends became his audience. “Well, Fields, the only shade Dante singles out in this group of the Lukewarm, or ‘Neutrals,’ is the one who made the great refusal, he says. This must be Pontius Pilate, for he made the greatest refusal—the most terrible act of neutrality in Christian history—when he neither authorized nor stopped the crucifixion of the Savior. Judge Healey, likewise, was asked to deal a grave blow to the Fugitive Slave Act but instead did nothing at all. He sent the escaped slave Thomas Sims, barely a boy, back to Savannah, where he was whipped until he bled and then paraded with his wounds before the town. And old Healey growled all the while that it was not his place to overturn Congress’s law. No! In the name of God, it was the place of us all.”
“There is no known solution to the puzzle of this gran rifuto, the great refusal. Dante does not give a name,” Longfellow chimed in, brushing away the thick smoke tail from Lowell’s cigar.
“Dante cannot give a name to the sinner,” insisted Lowell passionately. “These shades who ignored life, ‘who never were alive,’ as Virgil says, must be ignored in death, pestered without end by the most insignificant vile creatures. That is their contrapasso, their eternal punishment.”
“A Dutch scholar has suggested this figure is not Pontius Pilate, my dear Lowell, but rather the young man in Matthew 19:22 who is offered eternal life and refuses it,” said Longfellow. “Mr. Greene and I both favor reading the great refusal as having been made by Pope Celestine the Fifth, another man who took a neutral path by turning down the papal throne, giving way to the rise of the corrupt Pope Boniface, who led ultimately to Dante’s exile.”
“That is too much confining Dante’s poem to the borders of Italy!” protested Lowell. “Typical of our dear Greene. This is Pilate. I can almost see him before us scowling as Dante must have.”
Fields and Holmes had remained silent during this exchange. Now Fields said kindly but reproachfully that their work must not become a club session. They had to find a better way to understand these murders, and for that they would have to not merely read the cantos that gave rise to the deaths but cross into them.
At that moment, Lowell was scared for the first time of what might come of all this. “Well, what do you suggest?”
“We must see firsthand,” Fields said, “where Dante’s visions came to life.”
Now, making his way through the Healey estate, Lowell grabbed his publisher’s arm. “‘Come la rena quando turbo spira,’” he whispered.
Fields did not understand. “Say again, Lowell?”
Lowell sped ahead and stopped where the dark dirt lining gave way to a circle of smooth, light sand. He bent down. “Here!” he said triumphantly.
Richard Healey, trailing slightly behind, said, “Why, yes.” When his mind caught up, he looked flabbergasted. “How did you know that, cousin? How did you know this is where my father’s body was found?”
“Oh,” Lowell said disingenuously. “It was a question. You seemed to be slowing your walk, so I asked, ‘Is it here?’ Was he not slowing?” He turned to Fields for help.
“I believe so, Mr. Healey.” Fields, puffing for breath, nodded eagerly.
Richard Healey did not think he had been slowing. “Ah well, the answer then is yes,” he said, making a point not to hide the fact that he was impressed with, and wary of, Lowell’s intuition. “This is precisely where it happened, cousin. At the most demonish ugly portion of our yard, too,” he said bitterly. It was the one patch in the meadow where nothing at all could grow.
Lowell traced his finger in the sand. “It was here,” he said as though caught in a trance. For the first time, Lowell began to feel real and quickening sympathy for Healey. Here he had been sprawled naked and left to be devoured. The worst part was that he had met an end he would never understand, even in the ever after, nor would his wife or his sons.
Richard Healey thought Lowell was on the verge of tears. “He always kept a soft place in his heart for you, cousin,” he said, and knelt beside Lowell.
“What?” Lowell demanded, his sympathy quickly broken.
Healey recoiled at the brusque response. “The chief justice. You were one of his favorite relations. Oh, he read your poetry with great praise and admiration. And whenever the new number of The North American Review would come, he would fill his pipe and read it from beginning to end. He said he felt you had a higher sense for things of truth.”
“He did?” Lowell asked with some bewilderment.
Lowell avoided his publisher’s smiling eyes and muttered a strained compliment about the chief justice’s fine judgment.
When they returned to the house, a hired man appeared with a bundle from the post office. Richard Healey excused himself.
Fields pulled Lowell aside quickly. “How the devil did you know where Healey was killed, Lowell? We had not discussed that in our meetings.”
“Well, any decent Dantean would savor the proximity of the Charles River to the Healeys’ yard. Remember, the Neutrals are found only a few rods from Acheron, the first river of Hell.”
“Yes. But the newspaper reports were not at all specific as to where in the yard he was found.”
“The newspapers were not fit to light a cigar on.” Lowell balked, delaying his answer to enjoy Fields’s anticipation. “It was the sand that led me.”
“The sand?”
“Yes, yes. ‘Come la rena quando turbo spira.’ Remember your Dante,” he rebuked Fields. “Imagine entering the circle of Neutrals. What do we see as we look upon the mass of sinners?”
Fields was a material reader and tended to recall quotes by page numbers, the weight of paper, the layout of the type, the smell of the calf leather. He could feel the gilded corners of his edition of Dante graze his fingers. “‘Accents of anger,’”—Fields sounded out the poetry carefully as he translated in his mind—“‘words of agony, and voices high and hoarse . . .’” He could not remember. What he would give to remember what was next, to understand whatever it was Lowell now knew that made the situation less uncontrollable. He had brought along a pocket edition of Dante in Italian and began thumbing through.
Lowell pulled this away. “Further along, Fields! ‘Facevano un tumulto, il qual s’aggira sempre in quell’ aura sanza tempo tinta, come la rena quando turbo spira’: ‘Made up a tumult that goes whirling on/Forever in that dark and timeless air,/Even as the sand doth, when the whirlwind breathes.’”
“So . . .” Fields digested this.
Lowell exhaled impatiently. “The meadows behind the house are largely billowing grass, or of dirt and rock. But a very different, fine grain of loose sand was blowing in our faces, so I followed it. The punishment of the Neutrals occurs in Dante’s Hell accompanied by a tumult like sand when a whirlwind blows. That metaphor of loose sand is not idle language, Fields! It is the emblem of the shifting and unstable minds of these sinners, who chose to do nothing when they had the power to act and so in Hell lose that power!”
“Hang it, Jamey!” Fields said a little too loudly. The chambermaid was running a feather duster along an adjacent wall. Fields didn’t notice this. “Hang it all! Sand like a whirlwind! The three types of insects, the flag, the nearby river, that’s quite enough. But the sand? If our fiend can stage even such a minute metaphor of Dante’s into his acts . . .”
Lowell nodded somberly. “He truly is a Dantean,” he said with a tinge of admiration.
“Sirs?” Nell Ranney appeared next to the poets, and they both jumped back.
Lowell demanded ferociously to know whether she had been listening.
She shook her sturdy head in protest. “No, good sir, I vow it. But I wonder if . . .” She looked over one shoulder nervously, then the other. “You gentlemen are different than the others who come to pay their respects. The way you’ve looked over the house . . . and the yard where . . . Won’t you come back another time? I must . . .”
Richard Healey returned and, in mid-sentence, the chambermaid crossed over to the other side of the massive entrance hall, master of the household art of disappearance.
He sighed heavily, deflating half the bulk of his large barrel chest. “Since the posting of our reward, each morning I am taken in by the foolish revival of hope, leaping headfirst into the letters, truly thinking somewhere the truth waits to be shared.” He moved to the fireplace and tossed in the latest pile. “I can’t say whether people are cruel or merely crazy.”
“Pray, my dear cousin,” said Lowell. “Do not the police have any information that can assist you?”
“The venerated Boston police. Might I tell you, cousin Lowell. They brought in every demonish criminal they could find to the station house, and do you know what came of it?”
Richard was actually waiting for an answer. Lowell replied, hoarse with suspense, that he did not.
“Well, I’ll tell you then. One of them jumped out a window to his death. Can you imagine? The mulatto officer who supposedly tried to save him said something of him whispering words that could not be understood.”
Lowell sprang forward and grabbed Healey as though to shake more from him. Fields yanked Lowell’s coat. “A mulatto officer, you say?” Lowell demanded.
“The venerated Boston police,” Richard repeated with restrained bitterness. “We would hire a private detective,” Healey said, frowning, “but they are nearly as demonish corrupt as the city’s.”
Moans came from a room above, and Roland Healey ran halfway down the stairs. He told Richard that their mother was having another fit.
Richard broke away. Nell Ranney started toward Lowell and Fields, but Richard Healey noticed this on his way up. He leaned over the wide banister and commanded her. “Nell, finish the work in the basement, won’t you.” He waited until she had descended before continuing upstairs.
“So Patrolman Rey was investigating Healey’s murder when he heard the whisper,” Fields said when he and Lowell were alone.
“And now we know who it was that whispered—whoever died that day at the station house.” Lowell thought for a moment. “We must see what has frightened that chambermaid so.”
“Mind, Lowell. You’ll have her in hot water if the Healey boy sees you.” Fields’s concern held Lowell in place. “He said she’s been imagining things, in any case.”
Just then, there was a loud bang from the nearby kitchen. Lowell made sure they were still alone and then headed for the kitchen door. He knocked lightly. No answer. He pushed in the door and could hear a residual noise to the side of the stove: the vibration of the dumbwaiter. It had just bounced up from the basement. He opened the wood-paneled door to the dumbwaiter car. It was empty but for a piece of paper.
He hurried past Fields.
“What is it? What’s the matter?” Fields asked.
“We cannot call that a dumb waiter. I need to find the study. You stay and watch, make certain the Healey boy doesn’t return yet,” Lowell said.
“But, Lowell!” Fields said. “What shall I do if he comes?”
Lowell did not answer. He handed the publisher the note.
The poet rushed through the halls, peering into open doors until he saw one blocked by a settee. Pushing it out of the way, he stepped lightly inside. The room had been cleaned, but just barely, as though in the middle of the process it had become too painful a prospect for Nell Ranney, or one of the younger servants, to stay. And not just because this was where Healey had died but because of the memories of Judge Healey that lived on, sustained in the fragrance of old book leather.
From above, Lowell could hear Ednah Healey’s moaning climb to a terrible crescendo, and he tried to ignore that they were in a deadhouse all around.
Left standing in the hall, Fields read the note written by Nell Ranney: They tell me I must keep this to myself, but I cannot, and know not who to tell. When I took Judge Healey into his study, he groaned in my arms before dying. Won’t someone help?
“Oh good Lord!” Fields involuntarily crumbled the note. “He was still alive!”
In the study, Lowell knelt down and put his head close to the floor. “You were still alive,” he whispered. “The great refuser. That’s why you were done in.” He broke it to Artemus Healey gently. “What did Lucifer say to you? You were trying to tell your maid something when she found you. Or were you trying to ask something?” He saw specks of blood still on the floor. He saw something else along the edges of the rug: squashed wormlike maggots, strange insect parts Lowell did not recognize, the wings and trunks of a few of the fire-eyed insects Nell Ranney had torn to pieces over the body of Judge Healey. He rummaged through Healey’s overflowing desk until he found a pocket lens and passed it over the insects. They, too, were traced with his blood.
Suddenly, from underneath piles of paper behind the desk, four or five fire-eyed flies shot out and bolted in a line toward Lowell.
He gasped foolishly and stumbled over a heavy chair, banged his leg hard against a cast-iron umbrella stand and fell over.
Lowell, with a thirst for revenge, brought down a ponderous law book methodically against each of the flies. “Do not think you can scare off a Lowell.” Then he felt a slight tingle above his ankle. A fly had slipped inside, and when Lowell lifted his pants leg, the fly, disoriented, twisted out and tried to get away. Lowell smashed it into the rug with his boot heel with childish pleasure. That was when he noticed a red abrasion just above his ankle where he had hit the umbrella stand.
“Damn you,” he said to the dead infantry of flies. He stopped cold, noticing how the heads of the flies seemed to have the expressions of dead men.
Fields murmured from outside to hurry. Lowell, breathing in irregular spurts, ignored the warnings until footsteps and voices could be heard from above.
Lowell took out his handkerchief, embroidered with JRL by Fanny Lowell, and scooped up the insects he had just killed, as well as the other insect parts he could find. Stuffing the cargo into his coat, he ran out of the study. Fields helped him wheel the settee back into place as the voices of his beleaguered cousins grew closer.
The publisher was parched for knowledge. “Well? Well, Lowell? Did you find anything?”
Lowell patted the handkerchief in his pocket. “Witnesses, my dear Fields.”