The Fifth Heart (30 page)

The simple lock took Holmes less than a minute and then he was in the windowless inner archives room, re-lighting his louvered hand lamp and looking at the drawer upon drawer of photographic prints and plates.

He trusted in Henry Adams’s famous neatness and efficiency and was not disappointed. It had been Adams who had inventoried and archived most of Clover’s photographic images after her suicide in December of 1885. It took Holmes only a few minutes to find both the inventory journal—most of it typed out, some still in Henry Adams’s neat hand—and then the key to the specially constructed archival file cabinets.

Vol. 7—p. 24—#50.23—“R. Lorne, Feb., 1884”, the caption in Clover’s tighter script—“Rebecca Lorne, standing, in Roman costume”.

Holmes found and removed the photo and crouched low to prevent any escape of light as he played the beam of his hand-lantern over it.

The woman’s pose was awkward, the “Roman costume” amateurly made, and her face was turned two-thirds away from the camera. But there was no doubt at all that “Rebecca Lorne” was the woman Sherlock Holmes had known as Irene Adler. He set this photograph back in place.

Vol. 7—p. 9—#50.9—“R. Lorne”, no date given, caption in Clover’s hand—“Rebecca Lorne with banjo”. And also in Clover Adams’s hand—
“Very good”
.

Holmes turned the narrow beam on the image. It
was
a very good photograph of Irene Adler/Rebecca Lorne. The woman was older than Holmes remembered, but Adler was still quite attractive. Clover Adams had posed the woman in the corner of a room near a window, holding her banjo as if she were playing it. Holmes had seen that banjo before. Lorne’s/Adler’s face was turned toward the window and tilted slightly forward, catching the soft light. Clover had used a wide-angle lens—Holmes guessed it to be the Dallmeyer lens, new to photography about the time Clover died—and had achieved an image poised somewhere between a portrait and capturing an instant of everyday life.

Vol. 7—p. 10—#50.10—“R.H., Feb. 8, 1884”, date and the identical caption to the first photo Holmes had seen, also written in Clover’s hand—“Rebecca Lorne, standing, in Roman costume”. Again the face was turned mostly away from the camera. Holmes set it back.

Vol. 9—p. 17—#50.106—“Old Sweet Springs, Virginia, June, 1885, Rebecca Lorne, her cousin Clif Richards, H.A.”—“On piazza of house”.—The writing was all in Henry Adams’s careful hand.

Holmes removed his small magnifying glass and studied the image. Rebecca Lorne was looking at the camera with only the upper part of her face hidden by her bonnet, but her “cousin Clifton Richards” had lowered his head so that the brim of his hat hid all of his face. The form of the man was athletic-enough looking to be Lucan Adler, but one would never be sure. He put the photograph back in its archival setting.

Vol. 9—p. 21—#50.108—“Old Sweet”—captions written in Henry Adams’s hand—“View of house with people on piazza”. Again, part of “Rebecca Lorne’s” face was visible, but the man, still Clifton Richards from the clothing and hat, had turned his face full away.

Holmes swore under his breath. There was only one more photograph in this series.

Vol. 9—p. 23—#50.109—“Old Sweet Springs, June, 1885, Rebecca Lorne and Cousin”—all in Henry Adams’s careful script—“Standing in meadow with house in background”.

Clover had obviously taken this photograph with no warning to her subjects. The two figures stood in high grass that rose almost to their waists. “Rebecca Lorne’s” head and shoulders were a blur as she turned her head to hear something spoken by the man standing next to her and slightly behind her.

The man’s face—unaware that Clover was taking a photo—was in perfect focus. It was the single finest and clearest image of young Lucan Adler ever captured in a photograph.

Holmes’s heart was pounding. There were two identical prints in the archival sleeve. Holmes removed one of them, checked with his narrow-beam lantern to make sure that the face was as clear as in the top print, and put that photograph in his inner pocket above his heart. He set the other image back in the proper file and closed and locked the long archival drawers.

He was just leaving the room when he heard voices downstairs.

* * *

“ . . . rousting me out of bed in the middle of the night . . .” a man was saying in an angry voice.

“Not his fault the weather turned rough on the Atlantic . . .” another man, an older man, was saying.

“ . . . home two days early with no warning . . .” groused a third and younger man.

“Have to change the linens in the master bedroom, air everything out, check the towels and . . .” a woman was saying to another woman who kept interrupting with complaints about the late hour.

“The cable didn’t say what time in the morning Mr. Adams will be arriving,” came the older man’s deep voice again. “Let us have everything ready tonight and have everyone back and ready for inspection at seven in the morning. I’ve ordered Martin to deliver messages to the rest of the staff.”

“Damn,” whispered Holmes without actually saying the word aloud. He shut off his tiny lantern and tip-toed toward the rear staircase.

The servants—almost certainly the head butler and two other male under-butlers, the housekeeper and at least two of her staff—were coming up the main staircase. Obviously Henry Adams was returning several days early and his diligent staff was making sure everything would be ready for him in the morning.

“Damn,” Holmes mouthed again and slipped up the narrow servants’ staircase to the rear of the high third floor. With no carpet, the ancient wooden stairs creaked under his weight.

“Hear that?” one of the under-butlers cried from downstairs.

“If it’s a burglar, he’s going to get an unwelcome surprise,” came the head butler’s deep voice.

“Shall I send for the police?” asked the head housekeeper.

“No,” said the head butler. “William, Charles, get two pokers from the fireplace. Bring one for me. Come with me, William, and we’ll check the back rooms and rear staircase.”

Most of the third floor was given over to servants’ rooms. Holmes had to feel his way in the dark until he found the final staircase—almost steep enough to qualify as a ladder—and as the men stomped and climbed to the second and then third floor below him, calling to one another as they checked rooms, Holmes tip-toed up to the attic. The door to the attic was locked and it took him precious minutes, working in the near absolute darkness, to use his burglar wires and tools to pick that lock. He stepped into the musty attic.

The men had checked all the rooms on the second floor and were converging on the third floor beneath him. Holmes had to risk a light as he shined his lantern in the attic packed with old steamer trunks, a dressmaker’s form rising in front of him like a headless corpse, more suitcases, an empty birdcage. He tip-toed away from the door even as the voices grew louder below him and someone started climbing the steep stairway to the attic. Holmes had been playing his narrow beam across the steeply sloped ceiling until he found the inevitable trap door to the roof.

Luckily it was directly above two tall trunks that he clambered up like a ladder. He put his back into lifting the trap door and hoped that the crashing footfalls below would drown out the slight noise it made as it creaked up on hinges.

Then Holmes was outside on the steep and slippery rooftop.

The trap door had opened onto the back side of the sloping roof that faced the backyards and the stables. Giving silent thanks for H. H. Richardson’s elaborate care with the quality of the building—thick floorboards that had not transmitted his crepe-soled steps, this triple-thick roof with sturdy tiles—Holmes moved quickly toward the taller pitches and chimneys and gables of John Hay’s home.

From H Street and the front of the Adamses’ house, the two grand brick homes looked to be contiguous, but in reality Richardson had separated the east wall of Adams’s house from the west wall of the Hays’ house by a gap of about eighteen inches. Holmes prepared to jump that gap—a narrow black abyss that fell more than fifty feet to the street level—with the full knowledge that the Hays’ roof was slightly higher than the Adamses’ roof he was jumping from.

Hearing noises at the trap door far behind him, Holmes shut down his imagination and leaped. He slid back down the steep, gabled surface, slipping toward the sheer drop-off to blackness, but stopped his descent by spread-eagling his body and using his toes and fingers and his body’s friction against the tiles.

Men were emerging from the trap door in the Adamses’ roof.

Holmes slid two feet to his right. The main chimney handling a dozen outlets to Adams’s many fireplaces on the east side of his huge house was at this east edge of Adams’s rooftop and it was easily twenty feet tall. Holmes kept it between himself and the trap door in order to hide himself from the view of the men emerging onto the Adamses’ roof as he scrambled up the much steeper roofline of the north-south gable on the Hays’ home. He rolled over the ridgeline of that gable and ducked low just as the head butler and his two assistants reached the east end of the Adamses’ roofline and shined their bright lantern along the empty west slopes of the Hays’ gables. Part of the tall, triangular façade that faced H Street and Lafayette Square and the White House hid Holmes from view of anyone out there in the night.

When Adams’s servants had convinced themselves that no burglar was on their rooftop, they carefully—holding hands at one point—made their way back to and down through the trap door into Adams’s attic.

Moving on tip-toe again, only occasionally using his fingertips on the terrible steep rooftop, Holmes went up to the ridgeline and then north along it to where the Hays’ rooftop gabled up to its highest point, the highest ridgeline almost seventy feet above the sidewalk level.

Rather than two massive chimney structures—one west, one east—as on the Adamses’ home, the Hays’ rooftop sprouted six varying brick chimneys.

Holmes allowed himself to slide down the steep upper roof until he’d planted his rubber-crepe soles against a tall, thin chimney only about a third of the way up on the northwest roofline. He rested there a minute, panting softly, and listened to the lonely clop-clop of a single carriage going down Sixteenth Street.

Someone was moving horses into the Adamses’ stables. Holmes had no idea where they’d been stabled during Henry Adams’s weeks of traveling, but here were grooms or stable boys returning them to their stalls at two a.m. Various lanterns and at least one glaring electric light illuminated the stable yards, garden, and the entire west rooftop and west side of the chimney behind which Holmes was hiding. He checked his watch and sighed softly.

This had not been his first or second plan for egress from the presumably empty Adams home and return to his own room. But at least he’d
made
a Plan C. While the grooms got the horses settled below, trying to keep their work as quiet as possible, Holmes removed the thick loop of rope from his burglar bag.

It would be embarrassing if he’d not estimated the length of the rope properly. Embarrassing and—from this height—most probably fatal.

Eventually the Adamses’ horses were back in their stalls, the lanterns extinguished, and even the glow of light onto the backyard from Adams’s kitchen had grown dark, although Holmes guessed that the butlers, housekeeper, and the few other servants there so late tonight were in their rooms sleeping.

Holmes checked his watch again with the briefest flicker of his hand lantern.

Almost four a.m. The Hays’ domestics would be rising soon to start their interminable days.

Holmes tapped the photo secure over his heart, secured the lantern in his burglar bag, and then made sure the bag was clasped shut and its strap secured over his head and shoulder. There were two coils of rope, one short and one long and heavy. Years ago, he’d learned the basic art of rappelling in the Alps. Now he looped the shorter strand of rope around the fireplace, tied it off securely with double fisherman knots backed up by overhand knots, and ran his longer rope through this anchor sling at mid-point. Running the double rope between his legs, just under his backside, and out to his right hand in what his first Alpine climbing guide had called the
dulfersitz
.

Firmly holding the doubled line of rope that led to the anchor strap around the chimney in his left hand and the dangling longer strand of doubled rope that made his uncomfortable
dulfersitz
, he carefully let himself down the steep gable to the west edge of the long drop to the Hays’ backyard.

That morning—the previous morning, he realized now—and again that afternoon, he’d walked to the rear and sides of the Hays’ backyard, nominally to smoke his pipe and think but actually to look up and measure the alignment of this thinnest of the six chimneys directly above his second-floor (by American reckoning) room. Now he had to trust to his estimated measurement even while trusting again that no servant, wandering the halls after midnight, had felt a draft in the hallway and been brazen enough to go into his guest room and shut and latch the window he’d left open. Someday, some repairman on the roof would find his anchor sling, but that was of no concern to Holmes this night. Leaning far back, almost to the horizontal, letting the rappel rope shuffle through his left hand as he wrapped the other length of rope around his right wrist, Holmes walked himself down the side of John Hay’s huge brick home, hopping the four feet over the dark window on the third floor that Holmes had ascertained earlier to be an empty servant’s bedroom currently being used for storage.

Eventually he was at the second-story window and he bounced far over the upper glass pane—not wanting to have to explain how his own bedroom window was broken in the night—and, after tapping his crepe soles on the lower windowsill, swung himself far enough into his own room to grab the headboard of the heavy brass bed and steady himself.

First setting the photograph of Irene Adler and Lucan Adler carefully on his bedside table, Holmes went back to the open window and pulled the long length of rappel rope down, taking care that it did not strike a lower window when it dangled. Then he pulled it up, coiled it carefully, and set it back in his black burglar bag. The well-tied short length of anchor rope would remain up there.