murder victim, stroll into view.
"If Webster must die today," Holmes said to his publisher, "he shan't die without praise." He pressed forward toward the scaffold. But as he took in the hangman's noose, he stopped cold and emitted a choking wheeze. This was the first time he had been in sight of that unearthly loop since boyhood, when Holmes had snuck his younger brother John to Gallows Hill in Cambridge just as a condemned man was writhing in his final suffering. It was this sight, Holmes always believed, that had made him both doctor and poet.
A hush swept the crowd. Holmes locked eyes with Webster, who was ascending the platform with a wobbly step, his arm held tightly by a jailer.
As Holmes took a step backward, one of the Webster daughters appeared before him clutching an envelope to her chest.
"Oh, Marianne!" Holmes said, and hugged the little angel tight. "From the governor?"
Marianne Webster held out her delivery at arm's length. "Father wished you to have this before he's gone. Dr. Holmes."
Holmes turned back to the gallows. A black hood was being fitted over Webster's head. Holmes opened the flap of the envelope.
My dearest Wendell,
How dare I strive to express my gratitude with mere sentences for all you have done? You have believed in me without a shadow of doubt on your mind, and I shall always have that feeling to support me. You alone have remained true to my character since the police snatched me from my home, when others have one by one fallen away from my side. Imagine how it feels when those of your own society, with whom you have banqueted at table and prayed at chapel, stare at you with awful dread. When even the eyes of my own sweet daughters unwillingly reveal second thoughts about their poor Papa's honor.
Yet for all this I am beholden to tell you, dear Holmes, that I did it. I killed Parkman and hacked up his body, then incinerated it in my laboratory furnace. Understand, I was an only child, much indulged, and I have never secured the control over my passions that I ought to have acquired early; and the consequence is - all this! All the proceedings in my case have been just, as it is just that I should die upon the scaffold in accordance with that sentence. Everybody is right and I am wrong, and I have this morning sent full and true accounts of the murder to the several newspapers and to the brave janitor whom I so shamefully accused. If the yielding up of my life to the injured law will atone, even in part, that is a consolation.
Tear this up directly without another look. You have come to watch my time pass in peace, so do not dwell on what I write so tremblingly, for I have lived with a lie in my mouth.
As the note floated down from Holmes's hands, the metallic platform supporting the black-hooded man dropped away, hitting the scaffold with a clang. It was not so much that Holmes had no longer believed in Webster's innocence at that moment, but rather that he knew they could have all been guilty if put in the same circumstance of desperation. As a doctor, Holmes had never stopped appreciating how roundly defective was the design of humankind.
Besides, could not there be a crime that was not a sin?
Amelia stepped into the room, smoothing her dress. She called her husband. "Wendell Holmes! I'm talking to you. I can't understand what's come over you lately."
"Do you know the things put in my mind as a boy, Melia?" Holmes said as he flung into the fire a set of proof sheets he had saved from Longfellow's Dante Club meetings.
He had kept a box of all documents related to the club: Longfellow's proofs, his own annotations, Longfellow's reminders for him to be there on Wednesday evenings. Holmes had thought that one day he might write a memoir of their meetings. He had mentioned this in passing once to Fields, who immediately began planning who might write a puff for Holmes's work. Once a publisher, always a publisher. Holmes now threw another batch into the fire. "Our country-bred kitchen servants would tell me that our shed was full of demons and black devils. Another bucolic lad informed me that if I wrote my name in my own blood, the prowling agent of Satan, if not the Evil One himself, would pocket it, and from that day forth