Dante Club, Page 2

  Returning downstairs to put on her shoes, the chambermaid only now noticed the splashes of blood on the banister and camouflaged by the plush red carpet that covered the stairs. Out the parlor’s large oval window, beyond the immaculate garden, where the yard sloped into meadows, woods, dry fields, and, eventually, the Charles River, she saw a swarm of blowflies. Nell went outdoors to inspect.

  The flies were collected over a pile of rubbish. The tremendous scent caused her eyes to tear as she approached. She secured a wheelbarrow and, as she did, recalled the calf the Healeys had permitted the stableboy to raise on the grounds. But that had been years ago. Both the stableboy and the calf had outgrown Wide Oaks and left it to its eternal sameness.

  The flies were of that new fire-eyed variety. There were yellow hornets, too, which had taken some morbid interest in whatever putrid flesh was underneath. But more numerous than the flying creatures were the masses of bristling white pellets crackling with movement—sharp-backed worms, wriggling tightly over something, no, not just wriggling, popping, burrowing, sinking, eating into each other, into the . . . but what was supporting this horrendous mountain, alive with white slime? One end of the heap seemed like a thorny bush of chestnut and ivory strands of . . .

  Above the heap stood a short wooden staff with a ragged flag, white on both sides; it was flapping with the undecided breeze.

  She could not help knowing the truth about what lay in that heap, but in her fear she prayed she’d find the stableboy’s calf. Her eyes could not resist making out the nakedness, the wide, slightly hunched back sloping into the crack of the enormous, snowy buttocks, brimming over with the crawling, pallid, bean-shaped maggots above the disproportionately short legs that were kicked out in opposite directions. A solid block of flies, hundreds of them, circled protectively. The back of the head was completely swathed in white worms, which must have numbered in the thousands rather than hundreds.

  Nell kicked away the wasps’ nest and stuffed the judge into the wheelbarrow. She half wheeled and half dragged his naked body through the meadows, over the garden, through the halls, and into his study. Throwing the body on a mound of legal papers, Nell pulled Judge Healey’s head into her lap. Handfuls of maggots rained down from his nose and ears and slack mouth. She began tearing out the luminescent maggots from the back of his head. The wormy pellets were moist and hot. She also grabbed some of the fire-eyed flies that had trailed her inside, smashing them with the palm of her hand, pulling them apart by the wings, flinging them, one after another, across the room in empty vengeance. What was heard and seen next made her produce a roar loud enough to ring straight through New England.

  Two grooms from the stable next door found Nell crawling away from the study on her hands and knees, crying insensibly.

  “But what is it, Nellie, what is it? By Jesus, you ain’t hurt now?”

  It was later, when Nell Ranney told Ednah Healey that Judge Healey had groaned before dying in her arms, that the widow ran out and threw a vase at the chief of police. That her husband might have been conscious for those four days, even remotely aware, was too much to ask her to permit.

  Mrs. Healey’s professed knowledge of her husband’s killer turned out to be rather imprecise. “It was Boston that killed him,” she revealed later that day to Chief Kurtz, after she had stopped shaking. “This entire hideous city. It ate him alive.”

  She insisted Kurtz bring her to the body. It had taken the coroner’s deputies three hours to slice out the quarter-inch spiraled maggots from their places inside the corpse; the tiny horny mouths had to be pried off. The pockets of devoured flesh left in their wake spanned all open areas; the terrible swelling at the back of the head still seemed to pulse with maggots even after their removal. The nostrils were now barely divided and the armpits eaten away. With the false teeth gone the face sagged low and loose like a dead accordion. Most humiliating, most pitiable, was not the broken condition, not even the fact that the body had been so maggot-ridden and layered in flies and wasps, but the simple fact of the nakedness. Sometimes a corpse, it is said, looks for all the world like a forked radish with a head fantastically carved upon it. Judge Healey had one of those bodies never meant to be seen naked by anyone except his wife.

  In the stale chill of the coroner’s rooms Ednah Healey took in this view, and knew in that instant what it meant to be a widow, what an ungodly jealousy it produced. With a sudden jerk of her arm, she swiped the coroner’s razor-edged shears from a shelf. Kurtz, remembering the vase, stumbled backward into the confused, cursing coroner.

  Ednah kneeled down and tenderly snipped a clump from the judge’s wild crown of hair. Crumpling to her knees, her voluminous skirts spreading to every corner of the small room, a tiny woman unfolded across a cold, purple body, with one gauze-gloved hand clenching the blades and the other caressing the plundered tuft, thick and dry as horsehair.

  “Well, I’ve never seen a man so cleaned out by worms,” Kurtz said with a tenuous voice at the deadhouse after two of Kurtz’s men escorted Ednah Healey home.

  Barnicoat, the coroner, had a shapeless and small head cruelly punctured by lobster eyes. His nostrils were stuffed to double capacity with cotton balls.

  “Maggots,” Barnicoat said, grinning. He picked up one of the wriggling white beans that had fallen to the floor. It struggled against his meaty palm before he flung it into the incinerator, where it fizzled black and then popped into smoke. “Bodies aren’t as a practice left to rot out in a field. Still, it is true that the winged mob our Judge Healey attracted is more common to sheep or goat carcasses left outdoors.” The truth was that the sheer number of maggots that had bred inside Healey for the four days he was left in his yard was astounding, but Barnicoat did not possess knowledge enough to admit this. The coroner was a political appointee, and the position required no special medical or scientific expertise, only a tolerance for dead bodies.

  “The chambermaid who took the body into the house,” Kurtz explained. “She was trying to clear the insects from the wound and she thought she saw, I daresay I don’t know how . . .”

  Barnicoat coughed for Kurtz to get on with it.

  “She heard Judge Healey moan before dying,” Kurtz said. “That’s what she says, Mr. Barnicoat.”

  “Oh, very like!” Barnicoat laughed lightheartedly. “Maggots of blowflies can live only on dead tissue, Chief.” Which was why, he explained, the female flies looked for wounds on cattle to nest on, or spoiled meat. If they happened to find themselves in a wound of a living being who was unconscious or otherwise incapable of removing them, the maggots could ingest only the dead portions of tissue—which did little harm. “This head wound looks to have doubled or tripled from its original circumference, meaning that all the tissue was dead, meaning that the chief justice was quite finished by the time the insects had their feast.”

  “So the blow to the head,” Kurtz said, “that caused the original wound—that’s what killed him?”

  “Oh, very like, Chief,” said Barnicoat. “And hard enough to knock his teeth out at that. You say he was found in their yard?”

  Kurtz nodded. Barnicoat speculated that the killing had not been intentional. An assault with the purpose of murder would have included something to guarantee the enterprise beyond a blow, like a pistol or ax. “Even a dagger. No, this seems more likely an ordinary breaking-in then. The rogue clubs the chief justice on the head in the bedchamber, knocks him out cold, then drops him outside to get him out of the way while he ransacks the house for valuables, probably never once thinking that Healey would have been so hurt,” he said, almost sympathetic to the misguided thief.

  Kurtz looked right at Barnicoat with an ominous stare. “Only, nothing was taken from the house. Not merely that. The chief justice’s clothes were removed and folded up neatly, even down to his drawers.” He caught his voice creaking, as if it had been stepped on. “With his wallet, gold chain, and watch all left in a stack by his clothes!”

  One of Barnicoat’s lobste
r eyes shot wide open at Kurtz. “He was stripped? And nothing at all was taken?”

  “This was plain madness,” Kurtz said, the fact hitting him anew for the third or fourth time.

  “Think of that!” exclaimed Barnicoat, looking around as though to find more people to tell.

  “You and your deputies are to keep this completely confidential, by order of the mayor. You know that, right, Mr. Barnicoat? Not a word outside these walls!”

  “Oh, very like, Chief Kurtz.” Then Barnicoat laughed quickly, irresponsibly, like a child. “Well, old Healey would have been an awfully fat man to haul about. At least we can trust it was not the grieving widder.”

  Kurtz made every plea to logic and emotion when he explained, at Wide Oaks, why he needed time to look into the matter before the public could know what had happened. But Ednah Healey gave no response as her upstairs girl arranged the bedcovers around her.

  “You see—well, if there’s a circus about us, if the press savages our methods as they do, what can be discovered?”

  Her eyes, usually darting and judgmental, were sadly immobilized. Even the maids, who feared her fierce look of reprimand, cried for her current state as much as for the loss of Judge Healey.

  Kurtz shrank back, almost ready to surrender. He noticed that Mrs. Healey closed her eyes tightly when Nell Ranney came into the room with tea. “Mr. Barnicoat, the coroner, says that your chambermaid’s belief that the chief justice was alive when she found him is scientifically impossible—a hallucination. For Barnicoat can tell by the number of maggots that the chief justice had already passed on.”

  Ednah Healey turned to Kurtz with a quizzical open look.

  “Truly, Mrs. Healey,” Kurtz continued with new self-assurance. “The flies’ maggots by their nature only eat dead tissue, you see.”

  “Then he could not have suffered while he was out there?” Mrs. Healey pleaded with a broken voice.

  Kurtz shook his head firmly. Before he left Wide Oaks, Ednah called in Nell Ranney and forbade her ever to repeat that most horrific portion of her story again.

  “But, Mrs. Healey, I know I . . .” Nell trailed off, shaking her head.

  “Nell Ranney! You shall heed my words!”

  Next, to repay the chief, the widow agreed to conceal the circumstances of her husband’s death.

  “But you must do this,” she said, gripping his coat sleeve. “You must vow to find his murderer.”

  Kurtz nodded. “Mrs. Healey, the department is beginning everything that our resources and current state . . .”

  “No.” Her colorless hand clung, immovable, to his coat, as though if he left the room now it would still hang there quite undaunted. “No, Chief Kurtz. Not to begin. To finish. To find. Vow to me.”

  She left him little choice. “I vow we will, Mrs. Healey.” He did not mean to say anything more, but the pounding doubt in his chest made him speak its voice too. “Some way.”

  J. T. Fields, publisher of poets, was squeezed into the window seat of his office at the New Corner, studying the cantos Longfellow had selected for the evening, when a junior clerk interrupted with a visitor. The slim figure of Augustus Manning materialized from the hall, imprisoned in a stiff frock coat. He drifted into the office, as though he had no idea how he had come to find himself on the second floor of the newly renovated mansion on Tremont Street that now housed Ticknor, Fields & Co.

  “The space looks grand, Mr. Fields—grand. Though you shall always be to me the junior partner huddled behind your green curtain at the Old Corner, preaching to your little authorial congregation.”

  Fields, now the senior partner and the most successful publisher in America, smiled and moved to his desk, extending his foot swiftly down onto the third of four pedals—A, B, C, and D—that sat in a row under his chair. In a distant room of the offices, a little bell marked C gave a slight note, startling a messenger boy. Bell C signified that the publisher was to be interrupted in twenty-five; bell B, ten minutes; bell A, five. Ticknor & Fields was the exclusive publisher of official Harvard University texts, pamphlets, memoirs, and college histories. So Dr. Augustus Manning, the puller of all the institution’s purse strings, on this day received a most generous C.

  Manning removed his hat and passed a hand over the bare ravine between waves of frothy hair that crashed down from either side of his head. “As the treasurer of the Harvard Corporation,” he said, “I must present to you word of a potential problem that has been lately brought to our attention, Mr. Fields. You understand that a publishing house engaged by Harvard University must boast nothing less than an unimpeachable reputation.”

  “Dr. Manning, I daresay there are no houses with reputations as unimpeached as our own.”

  Manning braided his crooked fingers together into a steeple and emitted a long, scratchy sigh or cough, Fields could not tell which. “We have heard of a new literary translation you plan to publish, Mr. Fields, by Mr. Longfellow. Of course, we cherished Mr. Longfellow’s years of contribution at the College, and his own poems are first-rate indeed. Yet we have heard something of this project, of its subject matter, and have some concerns that this type of drivel . . .”

  Fields composed a cold stare, at which Manning’s steepled fingers slid apart. The publisher lowered with his heel the fourth, most urgent, knob of request. “You do know, my dear Dr. Manning, how society values the work of my poets. Longfellow. Lowell. Holmes.” The triumvirate of names reinforced his position of strength.

  “Mr. Fields, it is in the name of society that we speak. Your authors hang on to the skirts of your coat. Advise them properly. Do not mention this meeting if you like, and neither shall I. I know you wish your house to be held in esteem, and I do not doubt that you would consider all the repercussions of your publication.”

  “Thank you for that faith, Dr. Manning.” Fields breathed into his wide spade of a beard, struggling to maintain his famous diplomacy. “I have considered the repercussions thoroughly and look forward to them. If you do not wish to proceed with the university’s pending publications, I shall happily return the plates to your possession at once without cost. You know, I hope, that you shall offend me if you say aught disparaging about my authors to the public. Ah, Mr. Osgood.”

  Fields’s senior clerk, J. R. Osgood, shuffled in and Fields ordered a tour of the new offices for Dr. Manning.

  “Unnecessary.” The word seeped out from Manning’s stiff patrician beard, durable as the century, as he stood. “I suppose you anticipate a good many pleasant days to come in this place, Mr. Fields,” he said, throwing a cold glance at the shining black walnut paneling. “There will be times, remember, when even you shall not be able to protect your authors from their ambitions.” He bowed super-politely and started down the stairwell.

  “Osgood,” Fields said, and pushed the door closed. “I want you to place a gossip bit in the New York Tribune for the translation.”

  “Ah, is Mr. Longfellow done already?” Osgood asked brightly.

  Fields pursed his full, overbearing lips. “Did you know, Mr. Osgood, that Napoleon once shot a book peddler for being too aggressive?”

  Osgood considered this. “No, I hadn’t heard that, Mr. Fields.”

  “The happy advantage of a democracy is that we are free to puff our books as hard as we can manage and be perfectly safe of any harm. I want no family of any respectability to sleep unapprised by the time we go to the binders.” And anyone within a mile of his voice would believe he would make that happen. “To Mr. Greeley, New York, for immediate inclusion in the ‘Literary Boston’ page.” Fields’s fingers were plunking and strumming the air, a musician playing a remembered piano. His wrist cramped when he wrote, so Osgood was a surrogate hand for most of the publisher’s writing, including his fits of poetry.

  It came together in his mind in almost finished form. “‘WHAT THE LITERARY MEN ARE DOING IN BOSTON: It is rumored that a new translation is in the press of Ticknor, Fields and Co., which will attract considerable attention in many qua
rters. The author is said to be a gentleman of our city, whose poetry has for many years inspired public adoration on both sides of the Atlantic. We understand furthermore that this gentleman has recruited help from the finest literary minds of Boston . . .’ Hold there, Osgood. Make that ‘of New England.’ We don’t want old Greene to simper, do we?”

  “Of course not, sir,” Osgood managed to reply between scribblings.

  “‘. . . the finest minds of New England to manage the task of revising and completing his new and elaborate poetical translation. The content of the work is at this time unknown, except to say that it has never before been read in our country, and shall transform the literary landscape.’ Et cetera. Have Greeley mark it ‘Anonymous Source.’ Have you got all that?”

  “I shall send it by the first post in the morning,” said Osgood.

  “Wire it to New York.”

  “For printing next week?” Osgood thought he had misheard.

  “Yes, yes!” Fields threw up his hands. The publisher was rarely flustered. “And, I tell you, we’ll have another ready the week after!”

  Osgood turned back cautiously as he reached the door. “What was Dr. Manning’s business here this afternoon, Mr. Fields, if I might ask?”

  “Nothing to think of.” Fields blew a long sigh into his beard that contradicted this. He returned to the fat cushion of stacked manuscripts on his window seat. Below them was the Boston Common, where pedestrians still clung to summer linens, even a few straw hats. As Osgood started to leave again, Fields felt the desire to explain. “If we go ahead with Longfellow’s Dante, Augustus Manning will see to it that all publishing contracts between Harvard and Ticknor and Fields are canceled.”