The Fifth Heart (6 page)

Henry James wanted to object again—on various obscure personal grounds as well as logical ones—but he could not yet find the words.

“The chief thief’s name was Germond,” continued Holmes. “Robert Jacob Germond. A rather aging corporal who had served as the General’s—Lord Wolseley’s—batman and even valet on various campaigns and in both the Irish military camps and at Lord Wolseley’s estate on that green isle. One has to say that Corporal Germond did not look the role of a jewel thief—he had a long, rather basset-hound face with the accompanying luminous, sad, and sensitive eyes—but one look at the record of thefts within Lord Wolseley’s regimental garrisons in Ireland over the years, and then amongst the homes of Lord W.’s friends in Ireland, and then again in England during his and Lady Wolseley’s various visits home, and the identity of the mastermind—although I admit that it is far too grand to call him by that title—of this jewel-theft ring was immediately obvious to even the least deductive mind. At the very moment you and I were meeting at the garden party, Mr. James, I was covertly watching Corporal Germond go about his actual thieving. He was very smooth.”

James felt himself blushing. He’d come to know several of Lord and Lady Wolseley’s primary servants over the years—most of them former military men under the General—but Germond had been assigned as his own personal servant during James’s only visit so far to Ireland and Lord Wolseley’s estate there. James had felt a strange . . . affinity . . . for the soft-spoken, sad-eyed personal valet.

* * *

James was not pleased that he and Holmes had to share a stateroom on the
Paris
, even though it was in first class and adequate to their needs. The booking had been so close to sailing time, Holmes had explained, that only a cancellation of this two-bed single stateroom had been available. “Unless,” he had added, “you would have preferred traveling in steerage . . . which, I know from personal experience, has its peculiar charms.”

“I do not wish to be traveling on that ship . . . or any ship . . . at all,” had been James’s rejoinder.

But save for the sleeping hours, the two saw little of each other. Holmes never went to breakfast, was rarely seen partaking of the rather good
petit déjeuner
in the morning dining area, was never glimpsed at lunch times, and only occasionally filled his assigned seat at the captain’s table where, every evening in his black tie and tails, James tried to converse with the French aristocrats, German businessmen, ship’s white-bearded captain (who seemed primarily interested in his food at any rate), and the single Englishwoman at the table—an almost-dotty dowager who insisted on calling him “Mr. Jane”.

James spent as much of each day at sea as he could either browsing the ship’s modest library—none of his works were there, even in translation—or pacing the not-terribly-spacious deck, or listening to the occasional desultory piano recital or small concert arranged for the passengers’ amusement.

But twice Henry James had accidentally caught Sherlock Holmes in powerfully personal and embarrassing moments.

The first time he’d surprised Holmes—who showed no surprise or embarrassment either time—had been after breakfast when James was returning to the shared stateroom in order to change his clothes. Holmes was lying, still in his nightshirt, on his bed, some sort of strap wrapped around the upper bicep of his left arm, and was just in the process of removing the needle of a syringe from the soft flesh at his inner elbow joint. On the bedside table—the table they had
shared
, the table on which James set his book when it came time to extinguish the lights—there was a vial of dark liquid that James had to assume was morphine.

Henry James was not unacquainted with the delivery and effects of morphine. He had watched his sister Alice float off on its golden glow, away from all humanity (including her own), for months before her death. Katharine Loring had even been instructed by Alice’s physician on how to administer the proper syringe-amount of morphine should no one else be available. James had never been required to give his dying sister the injection, but he had been prepared to. Alice, in her final months the year before, had also received regular sessions of hypnosis, along with the morphia, in the concerted efforts to lessen her seemingly endless pain.

But Sherlock Holmes was in no physical pain that Henry James knew of. He was simply now a morphine addict, after having been a cocaine-injection addict for many years. And he’d already stated that he was eager to find and use this new “heroic” drug of Mr. Bayer’s since it was so available in the United States.

Holmes had not been embarrassed—he’d simply looked up at James under heavy eyelids and calmly set away the bottle, syringe, and other apparatus in a small leather case James had already seen him carrying (and assumed to be his shaving kit)—and then smiled sleepily.

Disgusted and making no efforts to hide that reaction, James had turned on his heel and left the room, despite the fact that he had not changed into his deck-walking clothes.

* * *

Another painfully intimate moment came when James entered the stateroom after a perfunctory knock late on the fourth night out from Dublin only to find Holmes standing naked in front of the nightstand that held their water basin and small mirror. Again, Holmes showed no appropriate embarrassment and did not hurry to pull on his nightshirt, despite his stateroom-mate’s obvious discomfort.

Henry James had seen grown men naked before. He tended to react in complicated ways to the naked male form, but his primary reaction was to think of death.

When Henry James had been a toddler, he’d followed his brother William—older by just a year—everywhere William went. Henry couldn’t (and did not wish to) keep up with William during his brother’s rough-and-tumble years of outdoor play, but later, when William decided that he would become an artist, Henry decided that he would also become an artist. As many times as he could, he would join William in the drawing and painting classes their father paid for.

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.