The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons Read Free Book Online Page A

soft flesh at his inner elbow joint. On the bedside table—the table they had
shared
, the table on which James set his book when it came time to extinguish the lights—there was a vial of dark liquid that James had to assume was morphine.
    Henry James was not unacquainted with the delivery and effects of morphine. He had watched his sister Alice float off on its golden glow, away from all humanity (including her own), for months before her death. Katharine Loring had even been instructed by Alice’s physician on how to administer the proper syringe-amount of morphine should no one else be available. James had never been required to give his dying sister the injection, but he had been prepared to. Alice, in her final months the year before, had also received regular sessions of hypnosis, along with the morphia, in the concerted efforts to lessen her seemingly endless pain.
    But Sherlock Holmes was in no physical pain that Henry James knew of. He was simply now a morphine addict, after having been a cocaine-injection addict for many years. And he’d already stated that he was eager to find and use this new “heroic” drug of Mr. Bayer’s since it was so available in the United States.
    Holmes had not been embarrassed—he’d simply looked up at James under heavy eyelids and calmly set away the bottle, syringe, and other apparatus in a small leather case James had already seen him carrying (and assumed to be his shaving kit)—and then smiled sleepily.
    Disgusted and making no efforts to hide that reaction, James had turned on his heel and left the room, despite the fact that he had not changed into his deck-walking clothes.
     
    * * *
     
    Another painfully intimate moment came when James entered the stateroom after a perfunctory knock late on the fourth night out from Dublin only to find Holmes standing naked in front of the nightstand that held their water basin and small mirror. Again, Holmes showed no appropriate embarrassment and did not hurry to pull on his nightshirt, despite his stateroom-mate’s obvious discomfort.
    Henry James had seen grown men naked before. He tended to react in complicated ways to the naked male form, but his primary reaction was to think of death.
    When Henry James had been a toddler, he’d followed his brother William—older by just a year—everywhere William went. Henry couldn’t (and did not wish to) keep up with William during his brother’s rough-and-tumble years of outdoor play, but later, when William decided that he would become an artist, Henry decided that he would also become an artist. As many times as he could, he would join William in the drawing and painting classes their father paid for.
    One day James entered the Newport drawing studio to find his orphaned cousin Gus Barker posing nude for the life-drawing class. Shocked to his marrow by the beauty of his red-headed cousin—that paleness of skin, the flaccid penis so vulnerable, Gus’s nipples so femininely pink against that white skin—James had pretended to an artist’s professional interest only, scowling down at William’s and others’ drawings as if preparing to seize paper and stroke some lines of charcoal of his own to capture such an ineffable power of nakedness. But mostly young Henry James, the incipient writer in him rising more certainly than any specific sexual consciousness, was fascinated with his own layered and troubled response to his male cousin’s calmly displayed body.
    Young Gus Barker was the first of their close circle of family and friends to die in the Civil War, cut down by some Confederate sniper’s bullet in Virginia. For decades after that, Henry James could not think of his first shock of admiring the naked male form without thinking of that very form—the copper stippling of Gus’s pubic hair, the veins on his muscled forearms, the strange power of his pale thighs—lying and rotting under the loam in some unknown Virginia field.
    After Henry James’s youngest brother Wilkie