The Dante Club

Throughout the many volumes of his journal, Phineas Je

Some friendships would be strained—or sacrificed.

In the last months, on his many visits to University Hall—for he was a considerable financial patron of the College and often had business there—Je

Je

At what exact point Je

“There was never a jar between us,” Lowell said sadly.

“Je

“I ca

“He helped split you and the College, Lowell, and was split apart in return,” Holmes said. “That was his contrapasso.”

Holmes had appropriated Nicholas Rey’s preoccupation with the scraps of paper found near Talbot’s and Je

Longfellow turned to a fresh page in their investigative journal. He drenched his pen in ink but sat staring ahead so long that the tip dried. He could not write down the necessary conclusion of all this: Lucifer had meted out his punishments for their sake—for the sake of the Dante Club.

The gated entrance to the Boston State House stood high on Beacon Hill; higher still was the copper dome capping it, with its short, sharp tower watching over the Boston Common like a lighthouse. Towering elms, stripped naked and whitened by the December frost, guarded the state’s municipal center.

Governor John Andrew, his black curls coiling out from under a black silk hat, stood with all the dignity his pear shape would allow as he greeted politicians, local dignitaries, and uniformed soldiers with the same inattentive politician’s smile. The governor’s small, solid gold-framed spectacles were his only sign of material indulgence.

“Governor.” Mayor Lincoln bowed slightly as he escorted Mrs. Lincoln up the steps to the entrance. “It looks to be the finest soldiers’ gathering yet.”

“Thank you, Mayor Lincoln. Mrs. Lincoln, welcome—please.” Governor Andrew motioned them inside. “The company is more prestigious than ever.”

“They’re saying even Longfellow has been added to the list of attendees,” Mayor Lincoln said, and passed a complimentary pat on the shoulder to Governor Andrew.

“It is a fine thing you do for these men, Governor, and we—the city, I mean—applaud you.” Mrs. Lincoln held up her dress with a slight rustle as she took a queenly step into the foyer. Once inside, a low-hung mirror provided her and the other ladies a view of the nether regions of their dresses, in the event that the garment had repositioned itself inappropriately along the way to the reception; a husband was wholly useless for such purposes.

Mingling in the massive parlor of the mansion were seventy to eighty soldiers from five different companies, garbed splendidly in their full-dress uniforms and capes, alongside twenty or thirty guests. Many of the most active regiments being honored had only a small number of survivors. Although Governor Andrew’s counselors had urged that only the most upstanding representatives of the soldierly core be included at the gatherings—some soldiers, they remarked, had grown troubled since the war—Andrew had insisted that the soldiers should be feted for their service, not their level of society.

Governor Andrew walked through the center of the long parlor with a staccato march, enjoying a surge of self-importance as he surveyed the faces and felt the ringing of the names of those with whom it had been his good fortune to become familiar during the war years. More than once during those wrenching times, the Saturday Club had sent a cab to the State House and forcibly removed Andrew from his office for an evening of gaiety in Parker’s hot rooms. All time had been separated into two epochs: before the war and after the war. In Boston, Andrew thought as he melted seamlessly into the white cravats and silk hats, the tinsel and gold lace of the officers, the conversations and compliments of old friends, we have survived.

Mr. George Washington Greene positioned himself across from a glowing marble statue that showed the Three Graces leaning delicately against one another, faces cold and angelic, eyes filled with calm indifference.

“How could a veteran from the soldiers’-aid home who heard Greene’s sermons also know the minute details of our tension with Harvard?”

This question had been posed inside the Craigie House study. Answers were proposed, and they knew that to find this answer would mean to find a killer. One of the young men consumed by Greene’s sermons could have had a father or uncle in the Harvard Corporation or the board of overseers who i

The scholars would have to determine exactly who was present at the various board meetings involving the roles of Healey, Talbot, and Je