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“You’re not here!” Lowell muttered, and a thought rang in his head: If he had not initially been so certain of Bachi’s guilt, if he possessed a measure of Holmes’s nervous skepticism, they might have found the murderer and Phineas Je
Phineas Je
Lowell rubbed his eyes, conscious enough of his state of mind to distrust his eyes, but he could see Je
He was alive…
Je
Lowell rushed through pedestrians and spun Je
“Je
“Don’t turn me in, sir. I needed to stay warm…” The man explained: He was the vagrant who had discovered Je
Lowell remembered and felt sharply the solitary maggot now removed from him, alone on its steep, savage path, eating into his insides. He felt a hole had been left, releasing everything that was caught up in his gut.
Harvard Yard was gagged with snow. Fruitlessly, Lowell searched the campus for Edward Sheldon. Lowell had sent him a letter on Thursday evening, after seeing Sheldon with the phantom, demanding the student’s immediate presence at Elmwood. But Sheldon had not responded. Several students who knew Sheldon said they had not seen him in a few days. Some students passing Lowell reminded him of his lecture, for which he was late. When he entered his lecture room in University Hall, a spacious room formerly housing the College chapel, he gave his usual greeting. “Gentlemen and fellow students…” This was followed by the usual practiced laugh of students. Fellow si
“Am I the right sort of man to guide ingenuous youth? Not a bit of it!” Lowell heard himself speak these words a third of the way through a lecture on Don Quixote. “And then, on the other hand,” he speculated, “my being a professor isn’t good for me—dampens my gunpowder, as it were, so my mind, when it takes fire at all, crawls off in an unwilling fuse instead of leaping to meet the first spark.”
Two concerned students tried to take him by the arm when he almost fell over. Lowell wobbled to the window and extended his head outside, eyes closed. Instead of feeling the cool brush of air he hoped for, there was an unexpected stroke of heat, as though Hell were tickling his nose and cheeks. He rubbed his mustache tusks, and they felt warm and moist too. Opening his eyes, he saw a triangle of flames down below. Lowell scrambled out of the classroom and down the stone stairs of University Hall. Down in Harvard Yard, a bonfire crackled voraciously.
Surrounding it, a semicircle of august men stared down at the flames with great attention. They were feeding books from a large pile to the fire. There were local Unitarian and Congregationalist ministers, fellows from the Harvard Corporation, and a few representatives of the Harvard Board of Overseers. One picked up a pamphlet, crushed it, and flung it like a ball. Everyone cheered as it hit the flames. Rushing forward, Lowell got down on one knee and pulled it out. The cover was too charred to read, so he opened the seared title page: In Defense of Charles Darwin and His Evolutionary Theory.
Lowell couldn’t hold it any longer. Professor Louis Agassiz stood across from him on the other side of the fire, his face blurred and bent by fumes. The scientist waved amiably with both hands. “How fares your leg, Mr. Lowell? Ah, this—this is a must, Mr. Lowell, though a peety to waste good paper.”
From a steam-filled window of the grotesquely Gothic granite Gore Hall, the College library, Dr. Augustus Ma
“Ma
Ma
Lowell had to wipe his face with a handkerchief before climbing to the platform. “You dare burn books in an institution of learning!” The copper tubes of Gore Hall’s pioneering heating system always leaked steam, filling the library with billowing vapor that condensed into hot droplets on the windows, the books, and the students.
“The religious world owes us, and owes especially your friend Professor Agassiz, a debt of gratitude for triumphantly combating the monstrous teaching that we are descended from monkeys, Professor. Your father certainly would have agreed.”
“Agassiz is too smart,” Lowell said as he reached the top of the platform, breaking through the vapor. “He shall abandon you yet—count on it! Nothing that keeps thought out will ever be safe from thought!”
Ma
“What is it, Ma
Ma
Ma