and knelt beside Lowell.
"What?" Lowell demanded, his sympathy quickly broken.
Healey recoiled at the brusque response. "The chief justice. You were one of his favorite relations. Oh, he read your poetry with great praise and admiration. And whenever the new number of The North American Review would come, he would fill his pipe and read it from beginning to end. He said he felt you had a higher sense for things of truth."
"He did?" Lowell asked with some bewilderment.
Lowell avoided his publisher's smiling eyes and muttered a strained compliment about the chief justice's fine judgment.
When they returned to the house, a hired man appeared with a bundle from the post office. Richard Healey excused himself.
Fields pulled Lowell aside quickly. "How the devil did you know where Healey was killed, Lowell? We had not discussed that in our meetings."
"Well, any decent Dantean would savor the proximity of the Charles River to the Healeys' yard. Remember, the Neutrals are found only a few rods from Acheron, the first river of Hell."
"Yes. But the newspaper reports were not at all specific as to where in the yard he was found."
"The newspapers were not fit to light a cigar on." Lowell balked, delaying his answer to enjoy Fields's anticipation. "It was the sand that led me."
"The sand?"
"Yes, yes. 'Come la rena quando turbo spira.' Remember your Dante," he rebuked Fields. "Imagine entering the circle of Neutrals. What do we see as we look upon the mass of sinners?"
Fields was a material reader and tended to recall quotes by page numbers, the weight of paper, the layout of the type, the smell of the calf leather. He could feel the gilded corners of his edition of Dante graze his fingers. " 'Accents of anger,' " - Fields sounded out the poetry carefully as he translated in his mind - " 'words of agony, and voices high and hoarse...' " He could not remember. What he would give to remember what was next, to understand whatever it was Lowell now knew that made the situation less uncontrollable. He had brought along a pocket edition of Dante in Italian and began thumbing through.
Lowell pulled this away. "Further along, Fields! 'Facevano un tumulto, il qual s'aggira sempre in quell' aura sanza tempo tinta, come la rena quando turbo spira': 'Made up a tumult that goes whirling on/Forever in that dark and timeless air, /Even as the sand doth, when the whirlwind breathes.' "
"So..." Fields digested this.
Lowell exhaled impatiently. "The meadows behind the house are largely billowing grass, or of dirt and rock. But a very different, fine grain of loose sand was blowing in our faces, so I followed it. The punishment of the Neutrals occurs in Dante's Hell accompanied by a tumult like sand when a whirlwind blows. That metaphor of loose sand is not idle language, Fields! It is the emblem of the shifting and unstable minds of these sinners, who chose to do nothing when they had the power to act and so in Hell lose that power!"
"Hang it, Jamey!" Fields said a little too loudly. The chambermaid was running a feather duster along an adjacent wall. Fields didn't notice this. "Hang it all! Sand like a whirlwind! The three types of insects, the flag, the nearby river, that's quite enough. But the sand? If our fiend can stage even such a minute metaphor of Dante's into his acts..."
Lowell nodded somberly. "He truly is a Dantean," he said with a tinge of admiration.
"Sirs?" Nell Ranney appeared next to the poets, and they both jumped back.
Lowell demanded ferociously to know whether she had been listening.
She shook her sturdy head in protest. "No, good sir, I vow it. But I wonder if..." She looked over one shoulder nervously, then the other. "You gentlemen are different than the others who come to pay their respects. The way you've looked over the house... and the yard where... Won't you come back another time? I must..."
Richard Healey returned and, in mid-sentence, the chambermaid crossed over to the other side of the massive entrance hall, master of the household art of disappearance.
He sighed heavily, deflating half the bulk of his large barrel chest. "Since the posting of our reward, each morning I am taken in by the foolish revival of hope, leaping headfirst into the letters, truly thinking somewhere the truth waits to be shared." He moved to the fireplace and tossed in the latest pile. "I can't say whether people are cruel or merely crazy."
"Pray, my dear cousin," said Lowell. "Do