One day James entered the Newport drawing studio to find his orphaned cousin Gus Barker posing nude for the life-drawing class. Shocked to his marrow by the beauty of his red-headed cousin—that paleness of skin, the flaccid penis so vulnerable, Gus’s nipples so femininely pink against that white skin—James had pretended to an artist’s professional interest only, scowling down at William’s and others’ drawings as if preparing to seize paper and stroke some lines of charcoal of his own to capture such an ineffable power of nakedness. But mostly young Henry James, the incipient writer in him rising more certainly than any specific sexual consciousness, was fascinated with his own layered and troubled response to his male cousin’s calmly displayed body.
Young Gus Barker was the first of their close circle of family and friends to die in the Civil War, cut down by some Confederate sniper’s bullet in Virginia. For decades after that, Henry James could not think of his first shock of admiring the naked male form without thinking of that very form—the copper stippling of Gus’s pubic hair, the veins on his muscled forearms, the strange power of his pale thighs—lying and rotting under the loam in some unknown Virginia field.
After Henry James’s youngest brother Wilkie was badly wounded during the Massachusetts 54th black regiment’s ill-planned and disastrous attack on South Carolina’s Fort Wagner, he had been in such terrible condition when he’d been brought home—found among the dying in an open army surgical station in South Carolina and saved purely by the coincidence of family friend Cabot Russell there looking for his missing dead son on the battlefield—that they’d had to leave Wilkie on his filthy stretcher in the hallway entrance by the door for weeks. James had been with both his father and mother when they’d bathed their mutilated youngest child, and Wilkie’s naked body was a different sort of revelation for young Henry James, Jr.: a terrible wound in the back from which the Confederate ball had not yet been removed and a sickening wound to the foot—they’d roughly operated on the boat bringing Wilkie north to remove that ball—that showed both decay and the early conditions of gangrene.
The first time Henry had watched his brother naked on the cot, being turned and touched so gingerly by his mother after Wilkie’s filthy-smelling uniform had been cut off, he had marveled at how absolutely vulnerable the male human body was to metal, fire, the blade, disease. In many ways, especially when turned—screaming—onto his stomach so that they could bathe his back and legs, with both wounds now visible, Wilkie James looked more like a week-old corpse than like a living man. Than like a brother.
Then there was the other “Holmes” whom James had seen naked. Near the end of the war, James’s childhood friend—only two years older than Henry but now aged decades by his war experiences—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had come to visit James in Boston and then traveled with him to North Conway, where James’s cousin Minnie Temple and her sisters had lived. For the first night of that North Conway visit, this other Holmes and young James had been forced to share an absurdly spartan room and single sagging bed—before they found a more suitable rental the next day—and James, already in his pajamas and under the covers, had seen Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., standing naked in the lamplight in front of a wash basin and mirror just as Sherlock Holmes was this night somewhere in the tossing North Atlantic on the Paris.
The young James had once again marveled at the beauty of the lean and muscled male body when Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had stood there in the lamplight that night, but once again there had been the all-too-visible connection with Death: terrible scars radiating like white spiderwebs across Oliver’s back and sides and upper leg. Indeed, that other Holmes—James’s Holmes—had also been terribly wounded in the war and was so proud of the fact that he would talk about it, in detail not usually allowed in front of ladies, for decades afterwards. That other Holmes, eventually to be the famous jurist, insisted on keeping his torn and bloody Union uniform, still smelling of gunpowder and blood and filth just as Wilkie’s cot and blanket and cut-away uniform had, in his wardrobe for all these decades to follow. He would take it out upon occasion of cigars and conversation with his fellow men of name and fortune and show them the blood long dried-brown and the ragged holes that so paralleled the white-webbed ragged holes James had glimpsed scarring his childhood friend’s bare body.
For James, it had been another glimpse not only at the beauty of the naked male form but at the mutilating graffiti of Death trying to claim the mortality of that form.
So, even in his shock, Henry James was not surprised to see in the stateroom’s dim lamplight that Mr. Sherlock Holmes—leaner even than Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had been at an age fifteen years Sherlock’s junior—also had scars across his back. These looked as raw as the bullet wounds James had seen in Wilkie’s and Oliver’s flesh, but those wounds radiated outward like some zealot flagellant’s self-inflicted lashes that had cut through skin and flesh.
“Excuse me,” James had said, still standing in the open door to the stateroom. “I did not . . .” He did not know what he “did not” so he stopped there.
Holmes turned and looked at him. There were more white scars on his pale chest. James had time to note that despite the tall man’s extreme thinness—his flanks were all but hollowed in the way of some runners and other athletes whom James had seen compete—Mr. Sherlock Holmes, whose flesh in the lamplight glowed almost as white as James’s cousin Gus Barker’s had been, was a mass of corded muscles which seemed just waiting to be flexed and used in some urgent circumstance.
“Excuse me,” James had said again and had gone back out through the door. He stayed in the First Class Lounge that night, smoking and reading some irrelevant magazine, until he was certain that Holmes would be in bed asleep before he himself returned to the stateroom.
* * *
The Paris, far behind its own rather unambitious schedule, came into New York Harbor in early evening when part of the city’s oldest skyline was backlit by the setting sun. Most of the transatlantic liners James had taken back from Europe over the years, if arriving in New York, did so early in the morning. He realized that this evening arrival was not only more aesthetically pleasing—although James could no longer tolerate the aesthetics of New York City—but also seemed somehow more appropriate to their covert mission.
Holmes had joined him, uninvited, at the railing where James had been watching the scurry of tug boats and flurry of harbor traffic, listening to the hoots and bells and shouts of one of the world’s busiest harbors.
“Interesting city, is it not?” asked Holmes.
“Yes,” was James’s only response. When he’d left New York and America ten years earlier in 1883, he’d vowed never to return. Safely back in Kensington, he had written essays about his American and New York impressions. The city itself—where James had enjoyed years of what he thought was a happy childhood in their home near Washington Square Park—had changed, James observed, beyond all recognition. Between the 1840’s and the 1880’s, he said, New York had become a city of immigrants and strangers. The civilities and certainties of the semi-rural yet still pleasantly urban Washington Square years had been replaced by these hurtling verticalities, these infusions of strange-smelling, strange-speaking foreigners.
At one point, James had compared the Jews in their ghettoes of the Lower East Side to rats and other vermin—scurrying around the feet of their distracted and outnumbered proper Anglo-Saxon predecessors—but he also admired the fact that these . . . immigrants . . . put out more daily newspapers in Hebrew than appeared in the city in English; that they had created a series of Yiddish theaters that entertained more people nightly—however boorishly and barbarically—than did the Broadway theaters; that the Jews—and the Italians and other lower orders of immigrants, including most of the Irish—had made such a niche for themselves in the new New York that Henry James was certain that they could never, having attached themselves like limpets to that proud Dream of America shared by so many of its inhabitants, be displaced.
It had made Henry James feel like a stranger in his own land, in his own city, and his essays had returned to that theme again and again and again.
He said nothing of that now as he and Holmes silently watched the final preparations for the old liner to be nudged into its proper berth along the busy docks.
“You will want to know how I knew that night along the Seine that you were carrying your sister Alice’s ashes,” Holmes said very softly. People were shoving and milling to lean along the long railing now, but there nonetheless seemed to be a bubble of privacy around the two men.
“I want to know nothing of the kind,” returned James with equal softness but much more intensity. “Your wild and inaccurate speculations do not interest me in the least, Mr. Holmes.”
“I had been there in the dark longer than you,” continued Holmes, his eyes on the surrounding ships and fireboats and rowboats and busy mayhem, “and my eyes had much better adapted to the dark than had yours. I saw you remove the small ivory snuffbox several times . . . hold it in a way that almost might be called prayerful—return it to your inner pocket, then retrieve it again. I knew it was an ivory snuffbox—only ivory gleams that way in such low light—and I also knew at once that you did not take snuff.”
“You know nothing of my habits, sir.” James’s voice could not have been colder nor more dismissive of this uninvited conversation. But because of the crowd behind them, he could not simply turn and walk away. He shifted his gaze away from Holmes instead.
“I do, of course,” said Holmes. “A user of snuff, even an occasional user, has telltale nicotine stains on his thumb and second finger. You did not. Also, someone using a snuffbox to retrieve pinches of snuff does not carefully and permanently join the various openings of the box with sealing wax.”
“There is no way you could have seen such things in those seconds, in that darkness,” said James. His heart was pounding against his ribs.
“I could. I did,” said Sherlock Holmes. “And then, as we were leaving, I contrived to light my pipe to confirm my earlier observations. You were not aware of it—holding the snuffbox obviously had become a nervous habit with you, Mr. James, especially in extremis, as it were—but you had removed it briefly several times after we’d walked away from the river. I could see that it was more than a mere talisman for you; it was sacred.”
James turned angrily to stare at the intruder and was shocked to see that Holmes had removed the blue lenses that had altered his true eye color. Now Henry James’s coldly angry gray-eyed stare met the calm gray-eyed gaze of Sherlock Holmes.
“While I was in India, I’d read in The Times of your sister’s death in March of eighteen ninety-two and, later, a notice of Miss James’s funeral and cremation at Woking and the mention that your sister’s companion, Miss Katharine Peabody Loring, would be returning the ashes to Cambridge, America, for interment there at the family plot.”
James said nothing. He continued to glare. He was glad he was leaning on a ship’s railing because he thought he might be sick.
“I could tell at once that night along the Seine that—with Miss Loring’s and your family’s knowledge or, more likely, without it—you had appropriated some of your sister’s ashes, made them safe in that absurdly expensive ivory snuffbox, and were transporting them . . . somewhere. But where? Certainly not just to the bottom of the Seine.”
James could not remember ever being insulted in quite this intimate fashion before. If he were his brother William, he knew, he would strike this Holmes in the face as brutally and bruisingly as possible. But Henry James was not William; he had never in his life coiled his fist in real expectation of striking another boy or man. He did not do so now. He continued to glare.
“I think perhaps,” concluded Holmes, “that you were considering a voyage back to America anyway. Before your melancholy overtook you in Paris, I mean. I believe that earlier thought of a voyage to America is why you finally changed your mind last night about joining me on this mission. Perhaps you thought to scatter your sister’s ashes at some spot important . . . sacred to both of you? It is not, of course, any of my business. But I respect your bereavement, sir, and I shall not raise this subject again. I did so now primarily to acquaint you with some of the simpler methods of my powers of observation and ratiocination.”
“I am not impressed, sir,” said James when at last he could speak. But he was. Despite himself, he was very impressed.
The old ship was being settled up against the wharf like a matron being led to a groaning buffet. French sailors fore and aft made ready to toss the ropes that would precede the massive cables that would soon pull them tight to America.
“You’ll pardon me, Mr. Holmes. I forgot something in the stateroom. I shall meet you when you clear Customs inspection.”
Holmes nodded, seemingly lost in his own thoughts. James knew that Holmes—as Jan Sigerson, traveling on what he presumed to be a false Norwegian passport—would be held up for some time in line while Henry James, expatriate at heart but still traveling on his American passport, would pass through with only the most cursory inspection.
Still, he trundled quickly back to the stateroom in the hopes that the porters they’d given orders to had not yet taken down the bags and steamer trunks. They had not.
James locked the door to the stateroom behind him, unlocked his steamer trunk, removed a mahogany box from a recessed area, and opened it carefully. The interior was custom-lined in velvet with an indentation cut to his prescribed dimensions.
James withdrew the snuffbox from his waistcoat pocket, set it carefully within the mahogany box, locked the box, locked the steamer trunk again, made sure he had his passport and papers ready in his briefcase, and left the stateroom just as the porters arrived to haul away the luggage. They touched their caps as they passed and Henry James nodded in return.
CHAPTER 7
I had planned on describing to you Holmes’s and James’s one evening, night, and morning in New York City, but I could find no record of where they stayed. I have the records of both of them clearing Customs by 7 p.m. Thursday evening, 23 March, 1893—Holmes under his J. Sigerson Norwegian national’s passport, James under his own name—but lost track of them in the hours after that. Based on the dialogue I know they had on the train to Washington the next day, it’s possible that they did not dine together that night or even stay in the same hotel. It appears as if they hadn’t spoken since Holmes’s intrusive “explanation” along the rail of the French steamship Paris as they were docking.
I had also assumed that they would have taken one of the Washington, D.C.–bound trains from the conveniently located Grand Central Depot that Friday the 24th of March, but it turns out that Holmes—who had been in charge of all their rushed travel arrangements—had booked them on the Boston–Washington, D.C., express called the Colonial or sometimes the Colonial Express, a service provided jointly by the Pennsylvania Railroad and New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad. But in 1893 the Colonial did not yet come into Manhattan or connect to Grand Central Depot—that change would be made after the Titanic sank in 1912—and Holmes and James would have had to have arisen early and taken one of several early ferries to Jersey City, there to board the Colonial that would take them down the Pennsylvania main line to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and finally Washington. It was the fastest express available to them on that Friday, but not the most convenient for someone who had spent the night in Manhattan.
I did confirm that Henry James had sent John Hay a hurried cable from Marseilles stating only that he was coming back to America “for private and personal reasons, please tell no one except perhaps Henry A.” and gave the date and rough time of his arrival in Washington and told his old friend that he and “a Norwegian explorer whom I have befriended and who is temporarily traveling with me” would find lodging in a Washington hotel. James received, upon arrival in New York, a cable from John Hay saying, in full:
Nonsense. You and your traveling companion must stay with us for the dura
tion of your visit. Clara and I insist. There shall be room and food and wine and conversation enough for all. Adams is currently away traveling but will be thrilled that you have decided to visit your home country again. By great good coincidence, the diplomatic attaché from King Oskar II, King of Sweden and Norway, is scheduled to be our dinner guest on Sunday night. We all look forward to meeting your intrepid explorer friend!
James showed Holmes the cable on their way to the Jersey City terminal and could not resist a grim smile. “A bit of a problem, perhaps?”
“What is that, my dear fellow?” said Holmes as they waited at the front of the ferry.
“Does the disguise of Mr. Jan Sigerson include a native’s facility with the Norwegian language?” James asked most pointedly. “Perhaps you had better stay at a Washington hotel, visit Hay and Adams only upon careful occasion, and be indisposed this coming Sunday evening.”
“Nonsense,” said Holmes and smiled. “It is a great advantage to stay with the Hays. You said that their home was near that of Henry Adams’s?”
“Next door and contiguous,” said James. “Just like Sweden and Norway.”
“There you have it then,” said Holmes. “We shall leave the representative of King Oskar the Second of Sweden and Norway to sort things out for himself on Sunday.”
* * *
Their rail tickets were nominally “first class” but there was nothing resembling a private compartment. Luckily, the first-class carriage was not crowded this Friday morning and, while sitting across the aisle from each other, Holmes and James could lean forward and converse in private when they wished. James also noticed that while the disgusting American male habit of constant expectoration had not disappeared, there seemed to be somewhat fewer spittoons visible everywhere than there had been in the early 1880’s during his last visit and the red runner down the aisle of the first-class carriage was not so spongily porous with liquified tobacco as so many rugs and carpets had been ten years earlier. James had decided in 1883 that he could never again live in—and possibly never again visit—America if it was only because of the universal spitting.