Free The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons Page A

his thoughts as he finished his trout and sipped the last of his less-than-mediocre white wine.
    Holmes had ordered only tea and then let the poor American imitation of his choice sit unsipped in its Pennsylvania and New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad–crested cup. James was not certain that he’d seen the detective actually
eat
anything since their dinner in Paris on the evening of March 13, now eleven days in the past, and was beginning to wonder how the gaunt detective stayed alive.
    “We were talking about Mrs. Clover Adams,” Holmes said so suddenly that it startled James.
    “Were we? I thought we had moved on to her husband and other members of the Five of Hearts.” James made sure that no one was seated in their half of the emptying dining car or any waiter within earshot before he spoke. And even then he spoke very softly.
    “You mentioned that Clover made enemies, partially through excluding people from her salon, but also with her wit . . . perhaps you said because of her ‘sharp tongue’,” said Holmes. “Can you give me some examples of her saying or writing specific things that hurt specific people?”
    James dabbed at his lips with the linen napkin as he thought about this. Then, in a choice so rare as to be all but unique, he chose to share a story in which
he
had been the butt of the joke.
    “The last time I was here in America,” he said, “a decade ago, I wrote to Clover before boarding my ship back to England and in that missive I explained to her that I had chosen her to receive my last note from our common country because I considered that she—Clover—how did I put it? ‘Because I consider you the incarnation of your native land’ is the precise wording, I think. Clover wrote back at once, saying that she considered my gesture ‘a most equivocal compliment’ and, she continued, ‘Am I then vulgar, dreary, and impossible to live with?’ ”
    James looked up at Holmes but the detective showed no response. Finally Holmes said, “So the lady did have wit and a sharp tongue. Do you have another example?”
    James quenched a sigh. “What good do such stories do now, sir?”
    “Clover Adams was a victim of a murder,” said Holmes. “Or at least of someone’s cruel hoax that she was murdered. In either case, learning who the lady’s enemies were—even enemies created by the sharpness of her own acerbic wit—is the obvious way to approach this case.”
    “Unless, of course, as was the case in this instance, it was not murder at all but rather a suicide,” said James. “In which case your list of suspects in the so-called ‘case’ is quickly narrowed to one name. Elementary, my dear Mr. Holmes.”
    “Not always,” Holmes said cryptically. “I have investigated obvious suicides that were the result of other people’s murderous schemes. But please continue.”
    James did sigh now. “My other friends in the Five of Hearts had, for years, expressed their admiration, if not outright adoration, of my fiction,” he said. “Henry Adams, John Hay, Clarence King, even Clara Hay, were genuinely enthusiastic about my stories and novels. Clover Adams was always . . . more reserved. At one point, an interlocutor who . . . shall we say . . . knew the lady well said that in an argument with her husband and John Hay on the literary merits, or lack of same, of a certain Henry James, Clover was quoted as saying, ‘The problem with Harry’s fiction isn’t that he doesn’t chaw what he bites off, but, rather, that he chaws more than he bites off.’ ”
    “Droll,” said Holmes. “And I presume the American colloquial dialect was meant to be part of the humor.”
    James said nothing.
    “I am surprised that someone close to both of you chose to report that particular
bon mot
to you,” said Holmes.
    James remained silent. It had been told to him in one of the finest of London’s clubs by no less than Charles F. Adams, Henry Adams’s brother—a man whom Henry James had always