The Fifth Heart (2 page)

After a wet, cold day walking in the Jardin de Tuileries and a dismal, lonely dinner—given his resolve, he’d made no effort to contact any of his Parisian friends or other acquaintances who might have been passing through Paris—Henry James drank a final glass of wine, tugged on his woolen overcoat, made sure that the sealed snuffbox was still in his pocket, and, with the bronze tip of his still-folded umbrella tapping on wet cobblestones, set off in the drizzle and darkness for his chosen final destination near Pont Neuf. Even at his portly gentleman’s gait it was less than a ten-minute walk.

The ultimate man of the written word left no note behind.

T
he place James had chosen from which to leave this life was on the north side of the river less than sixty yards from the broad, well-lighted bridge of le Pont Neuf, but it was dark there below the bridge, even darker on the promontory along the lowest level of walkways where the black, cold waters of the Seine swirled around the base of moss-darkened stone. Even in the daylight, this promontory was little used. Prostitutes, James knew, sometimes frequented the place at night, but not on a cold and drizzling March night such as this; tonight they stayed close to their hotels in Pigalle or stalked their furtive patrons in the narrow lanes on either side of the glowing Boulevard Saint Germain.

By the time James had umbrella-clacked his way to the narrow esplanade promontory that he’d picked out in the daylight—it had been just as he’d remembered it from earlier trips to Paris—he could no longer see to find his way. Distant street lamps across the Seine were ornamented with ironic halos by the rain. The barges and water taxis were few this night. James found his way down the final steps to the esplanade more by feel than by sight and tapped his way slowly beyond them like a blind man with a cane. Somewhere seemingly very far above, the usually distinctly pronounced sounds of carriage wheels and horses’ hooves were muffled and made more distant, almost less real, by the worsening rain and deeply puddled thoroughfares.

James could sense and hear and smell the river’s imminence rather than see it in the near-total darkness. Only the rather shocking emptiness of the point of his umbrella suddenly finding a void where pavement should be ahead brought him to a stop at the edge of what he knew to be the short, curved promontory. There were no steps going down to the river here, he knew: only a six- or seven-foot drop to the swirling black waters. The Seine ran fast and deep and wicked here. Now he could take one step forward into emptiness and it would be done.

James removed the small ivory snuffbox from his inner pocket and stood running his fingers across it for a moment. The motion made him remember a squib in
The Times
the previous year that claimed that the Eskimaux of the Arctic made no artwork to view, but shaped certain smooth stones to enjoy by touch during their many months of northern night. This thought made James smile. He felt he had spent enough of his own months in the northern night.

When he’d purloined a few pinches of his sister’s ashes the previous year—Katharine Loring waiting just outside the door at the crematorium where she’d come to claim the urn she would take back to Cambridge and the Jameses’ corner of the cemetery there—it had been with the sincere plan of spreading them at the place his younger sister had been most happy. But as the months passed, James had realized the impossibility of that idiot’s mission.
Where?
He remembered her brittle happiness when they were both much younger and had traveled in Switzerland with their Aunt Kate, a lady as literal as Hamlet’s by-the-card Grave Digger. Alice’s already pronounced penchant for hysterical illnesses had receded somewhat during those weeks free from her larger family and American home—and his first thought for his fiftieth birthday was to travel to Geneva and spread her ashes where he and she had laughed and matched wits, with poor Aunt Kate understanding none of their ironic wordplay, happily teasing each other and Aunt Kate as they walked the formal gardens and lakeside promenades.

But, in the end, Geneva did not feel right to James. Alice had been play-acting her “recovery” from her destined life of invalidism during that trip, just as he had been play-acting his collusion with her brittle high spirits.

The point of land near Newport, then, where she’d built her little house and lived in apparent health and happiness for a year or so.

No. That had been her early days with Miss Loring and, James felt more grimly in every month that had passed since Alice’s death, Miss Katharine P. Loring had had enough time and way with his sister. Not Newport.

So in the end he could think of no place to spread these few pitiful ashes where Alice had truly been happy. Perhaps she had glimpsed happiness, never really seized it, only during those months or years in Newport and then Cambridge, before what she called that “terrible summer” when her oldest brother William and Alice Gibbens were married on July 10, 1878. For years her brother William, her father, her brother Harry, brothers Bob and Wilkie, and an endless succession of visitors to their homes had kept up the joke that William would marry
her
—Alice James. Alice had always acted irritated at the running joke, but now—after her years of self-imposed invalidism and death—Henry James realized that she’d begun to believe in that marriage to William and had been all but destroyed when he married someone else. And someone else named, with cruel irony, Alice.

As she’d once put it to Henry James, that summer of William’s marriage had been when she “went down to the deep sea, and the dark waves clouded over her.”

So now, this night, this final night, James decided that he would merely hold tight to the snuffbox with its remnants of Alice’s tentative existence as he stepped forward and fell into the black water and oblivion. To do this, he knew, he would have to shut his author’s imagination down: no wondering in the second it will take to step forward as to whether the water will be freezing cold or whether, as the filthy water of the Seine began to fill his lungs, his atavistic urge for survival would cause him to thrash around, try to swim to the unclimbable mossy stone of the promontory.

No, he had to think of nothing but leaving his pain behind. Empty his mind of everything—always the hardest thing he’d ever tried to do.

James moved one foot forward, beyond the edge.

And suddenly realized that a dark shape he’d taken for a post was really the outline of a man standing not two feet from him. Seeing the dim outline of the soft hat pulled low and the silent figure’s aquiline profile half-hidden by the turned-up collar of a traveler’s cape-coat, James could now hear the man’s soft breathing.

* * *

With a stifled gasp, James took two clumsy steps backward and to the side.

“Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur. Je ne t’ai pas vu là-bas,”
he managed to say. It was the truth. He
hadn’t
seen the man standing there.

“You’re English,” said the tall form. The man’s English had a Scandinavian accent. Swedish? Norwegian? James was not sure which.

“Yes.” James turned to go back up the steps and away from this spot.

At that moment a rare—for the season—Bateaux Mouches, part water taxi steamer, part tour-boat—passed by, and by the sudden light from the boat’s starboard lanterns, James could clearly see the tall man’s face.

“Mr. Holmes,” he said almost involuntarily. In his surprise he stepped backward toward the river, his left heel went over the edge, and he would have ended up in the water after all if the tall man’s right arm hadn’t shot out with lightning speed. Long fingers grasped James’s coat front in an amazingly firm grip and with one jerk the man pulled Henry James back onto the promontory.

Back to his life.

“What name did you just call me by?” asked the man, still tightly gripping James’s coat front. The Scandinavian accent was gone now. The voice was distinctly upper-class British and nothing else.

“I am sorry,” stammered James. “I must have been mistaken. I apologize for intruding upon your solitude here.” At that second, Henry James not only knew the identity of the tall man—despite blacker hair than when he’d met him four years earlier, fuller hair somehow, now raised to odd spikes rather than slicked back, and a thick mustache that had been lacking four years ago, combined with a nose slightly altered with actor’s putty or somesuch—but also knew that the man had been on the verge of throwing himself into the Seine when James had interrupted him with his arrival in the darkness announced by the tap-tap-tap of his ferule.

Henry James felt the fool at that moment, but he was a man on whom nothing was ever lost. Once he’d seen a face and learned its name, he never forgot.

He tried to move away, but the powerful fingers still gripped the front of his coat.

“What name did you call me by?” demanded the man again. His tone was as chill as iron in winter.

“I thought you were a man I’d met named Sherlock Holmes,” gasped James, wanting only to get away, wanting only to be back in his bed in the comfortable hotel on the Rue de la Paix.

“Where did we meet?” demanded the man. “Who are you?”

James answered only the second part. “My name is Henry James.” In his sudden panic, he’d almost added the long-abandoned “Jr.”

“James,” said Mr. Sherlock Holmes. “The younger brother of the great psychologist William James. You are the American scribbler who lives in London much of the time.”

Even in his intense discomfort of being held and touched by another man, James felt an even stronger resentment at being identified as being the younger brother of the “great” William James. His older brother had not even been known, outside of small, tight Harvard circles, until he’d published his
The Principles of Psychology
three years earlier in 1890. The book, for reasons somewhat lost on Henry, had catapulted William to international fame among intellectuals and other students of the human mind.

“Please be so kind as to release me at once,” said James in as stern a tone as he could muster. His outrage at being handled made him forget that Holmes—he was certain it was Sherlock Holmes—had just saved his life. Or perhaps that salvation was another mark against this hawk-nosed Englishman.

“Tell me when we met and I shall,” said Holmes, still gripping the front of James’s overcoat. “My name is Jan Sigerson. I am a Norwegian explorer of some renown.”

“A thousand apologies then, sir,” said James, feeling absolutely no apology in his heart. “I am obviously mistaken. For a second here, in the darkness, I thought you to be a gentleman I met four years ago at a tea-party benefit in Chelsea. The party was given by an American lady of my acquaintance, Mrs. T. P. O’Connor. I arrived with Lady Wolseley, you see, along with some other writers and artists of the stage—Mr. Aubrey Beardsley, Mr. Walter Besant . . . Pearl Craigie, Marie Corelli, Mr. Arthur Conan Doyle, Bernard Shaw, Genevieve Ward. During the tea, I was introduced to Mrs. O’Connor’s house guest for the weekend, a certain Sherlock Holmes. I see now that there is . . . no real resemblance.”

Holmes released him. “Yes, I remember now. I was there at Mrs. O’Connor’s estate briefly while solving a series of country home jewel thefts. It was the servants, of course. It always is.”

James straightened the front of his overcoat, arranged his cravat, firmly planted the tip of his umbrella, and resolved to leave Holmes’s presence without another word.

Ascending the dark steps, he realized with a shock that Holmes was walking beside him.

“It’s amazing, really,” said the tall Englishman in the slight Yorkshire accent James had heard at Mrs. O’Connor’s tea party in 1889. “I’ve used this Sigerson disguise for the past two years and passed close by—in daylight!—personages I’ve known for years, without their recognizing me. In New Delhi, in broad daylight in a sparsely populated square and for more than ten minutes, I stood next to Chief Inspector Singh, a man with whom I’d spent two months solving a delicate murder in Lahore, and the trained professional never glanced at me twice. Right here in Paris, I have passed by old English acquaintances and asked directions of my old friend Henri-August Lozé, the recently retired Prefect of Police for Paris with whom I’d worked on a dozen cases. With Lozé was the new Prefect de la Somme, Louis Lépine, with whom I have also had a close working relationship. Yet neither man recognized me. And yet you did. In the dark. In the rain. When you had nothing but self-murder on your mind.”

“I
beg
your pardon,” said James. He stopped out of sheer shock at Holmes’s effrontery. They were on the street level now and the rain had subsided a bit. But the numerous street lamps there still held their halos.

“Your secret is safe with me, Mr. James,” said Holmes. He was trying to light his pipe despite the damp. When the match finally flared, James could see even more easily that this was the “consulting detective” whom he’d met at Mrs. O’Connor’s tea party four years earlier. “You see,” continued Holmes, speaking now between puffs on the pipe, “I was there for the same purpose, sir.”

James could think of no reply to that. He turned on his heel and headed west along the sidewalk. Holmes caught up to him with two strides of his longer legs.

“We need to go somewhere for a late meal and wine, Mr. James.”

“I prefer to be alone, Mr. Holmes. Mr. Sigerson. Whomever you are pretending to be this night.”

“Yes, yes, but we need to talk,” insisted Holmes. He did not seem angered or perturbed by being found out. Or frustrated that his own suicide-by-Seine had been interrupted by the writer’s arrival. Only fascinated that James had seen through his disguise.

“We have absolutely nothing to discuss,” snapped James, trying to walk more quickly but only making himself look foolish in a portly way as the tall Englishman easily kept pace.

“We could discuss why you were ending your life with your sister Alice’s ashes in a snuffbox clenched so tightly in your right hand,” said Holmes.