The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  William Rossetti waited for Christina by the front door, warming himself by stamping his feet. He remarked to Browning that he didn’t realize “Christina was also dragging you into this wild-goose chase.” She showed no reaction but recoiled at the implications about her concern for Gabriel.

  “We met on the street and I confess I insisted,” Browning assured him. “Whenever I visit here, it occurs to me that rowing out in a shell would be easier passage than the crush of hackney cabs and wagons.”

  “Because of its proximity to the river, the house was actually used for smuggling two hundred years ago—more or less—first of political fugitives, later for supplies and even pirated and forbidden books, kept in vaults that had direct access to the water. I suppose she told you our wayward brother has been inconsiderately absent of late.” William had the same olive-colored skin and wide-apart eyes as their brother, inherited from their Italian father, and in his youth William edited and even wrote and translated poetry like his siblings. By this stage of his life his fussy expressions and dress presented the look of a respectable clerk. (“Respectable!” Gabriel would cry if the word were used in his presence as though an accusation of a heinous crime.)

  Christina silently prayed her thanks for Browning’s being there. He lent the occasion a feeling of a friendly gathering rather than what it was—a kind of breaking and entering.

  Gabriel tended to alienate everyone who dared to praise or support him, but not Browning. He had always been unusually patient with Gabriel. Much of their camaraderie came from shared grief. When Browning returned from Florence in the shadow of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s death, Gabriel was the first of their acquaintances to visit him. When Gabriel lost Lizzie months later, Browning never asked about the rumors. Rumors about the marriage, and her behavior, his drinking. He’d simply said to Christina, upon hearing of it and of Gabriel’s sorrow, Poor, dear man!

  “No servants,” Browning mused, when the echo of the big, ancient dragon-shaped knocker on Tudor House’s front door went unanswered.

  “Not for the last year or so,” replied William.

  “Gabriel used to say he had become a martyr to unsatisfactory servants,” Christina added.

  After struggling to fit the landlord’s key in a few locks, they found a door around the side of the house that admitted them into the impressive brick structure. The massive house with its sweeping stairs and array of doors unfolding into more rooms still felt a little like the palace it was when Queen Catherine, the luckiest of Henry VIII’s unlucky wives, lived there following the murderous king’s death. The floors creaked under the weight of the visitors, and every wall and post they touched produced bursts of dust, reminiscent of the fog outside. The place was great and strange, like Gabriel.

  “I suppose Gabriel isn’t still keeping his absurd—” Browning started, but his question was interrupted with a shriek. A dark shape climbed over a table and leapt over their heads.

  “His zoo,” Christina said. “Yes. Pray watch for the armadillos; they’re rather sly about taking you by surprise.”

  “There is more than one armadillo?”

  The animal that had jumped over them—a monkey about the size of a small greyhound—now perched low on the gilt frame of a mirror and stared with outrage.

  “Truth is, Mr. Browning, it is hard to ever know at a given time which creatures Gabriel has. I know the poor bull was taken away,” said Christina.

  “Yes, after trying to gore Gabriel,” William added grimly. “Gabriel only procured the beast in the first place because its eyes looked like those of a woman he once loved. You might imagine, Mr. Browning, how old Lord Cadogan reacted when he heard rumors about a bull roaming one of his tenants’ gardens. Then there was the kangaroo found murdered in the studio—”

  “Murdered!” Browning exclaimed.

  “By its own joey,” William continued. “Then, some time later, that patricidal creature himself was found bloodied and clawed to death, which Gabriel attributed to his raccoon—as an act of revenge.”

  Christina remembered Gabriel reporting to her, with his air of outrage and confusion, how neighbors would complain when a gazelle showed up in their gardens or a raccoon in their chimneys. She could also recall his earlier homes, where neighbors found different grounds for complaints—Gabriel’s loud, drawn-out screaming volleys with Lizzie.

  Tudor House, where Gabriel had moved not long after Lizzie’s death, had at first seemed to be a place where he could do anything. He could fill it with useless collections of objects. With exotic and winsome animals. He hosted raucous gatherings, with artists cavorting naked and sliding down the banisters. The house was a wonderland. An escape from a life without Lizzie.

  Christina looked back at the monkey on the mirror, then at the armadillos creeping into the doorway. They were waiting.

  Hungry.

  * * *

  —

  The house was stuffed with mismatched furniture from all over the globe, which Gabriel collected from junk shops, with every shelf not holding books lined with plates, china (mostly blue and white), and jewelry. Christina knew what happened when a notion took hold of her brother. It was the pursuit of the objects that gave him pleasure rather than the objects themselves. After he’d decided to collect blue and white china because one of his friends was doing it, she had been present at a dinner party with him. When Gabriel noticed a blue and white bowl at the center of the host’s table, he remarked on its exquisite beauty, grabbing it and turning it upside down to examine its mark—spilling soup all over himself, the table, and other guests.

  Christina’s eyes landed on a self-portrait Gabriel had sketched to mark his twentieth birthday. With the long, flowing dark hair, the searching eyes, the full lips, he was born to attract attention.

  Many kinds and sizes of mirrors reflected and expanded the chaos of artifacts and animals. The searchers next wandered around his library of more than a thousand volumes, where they found an eclectic selection of novels and histories in half a dozen languages, with an especially large selection of Italian books. The vast majority of the latter were editions of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy—divided into Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise, the segments of the afterlife Dante claimed to traverse—or volumes of the Florentine bard’s shorter works, or books of commentary about Dante, or books of commentary about the commentary on Dante.

  They inspected the central room of the house, Gabriel’s large studio that had once been a great dining hall, for signs of sketches or paintings, but of the many they found none could be identified as fresh enough to give them hope he had been there recently. Many of these pieces of art also incorporated scenes and figures from Dante Alighieri’s work. In one corner stood a giant canvas Christina had seen before, which Gabriel called Dante’s Dream. Some parts had been rubbed out; others had multiple layers of paint. There was no progress on it that Christina could detect, though in itself that wasn’t surprising. Gabriel had been working on it for fifteen years.

  The painting showed an awestruck Dante Alighieri, the medieval poet, being led by a heavenly figure through Florence to Beatrice, the girl who captured him heart and soul and whose spirit eventually led him to his celebrated journey into the afterlife. The scene took place moments before Beatrice’s death. The room where Beatrice prepares to die did not seem to be any earthly setting in Gabriel’s version. The floor is covered in poppies, symbols of sleep. It seemed the Florentine poet’s chamber of imagination, a dreamy place between his disappointing reality and the better world beyond. Gabriel would often work on this canvas—if sitting and pacing in front of it and staring into it counted as work. He would speak about how he would not be able to finish until he managed to imagine himself in the place of Dante Alighieri.

  “It is impossible to do. Impossible! To sufficiently become Dante . . . Maria was the only true Dante in our family,” Gabriel would say, unintentionally hurting Chris
tina. He would talk about how much he missed their older sister as though Maria were dead rather than in a convent. “You, my darling Christina, are a born apostle. You can learn and can teach, but cannot lead the way as Maria did. None of us can.”

  Christina did not say so at the risk of sounding conceited, but Gabriel was mistaken—about the painting, at least. It was Beatrice he would have to come to understand before the painting would allow itself to be finished.

  As she searched, she found some other chalk sketches hanging above the fireplace related to Dante, including one depicting the Florentine poet’s point of view of the sixth terrace of Purgatory, containing the souls besieged with gluttony. At the bottom Gabriel had scribbled a note to solicit Christina’s opinion: CR—need your help. In the drawing, a penitent soul with face hidden in the shadows slumps on the ground, unable to nourish himself from fruit high upon a nearby tree.

  With more to inspect, the searchers split up. William took on one part of the house, collecting fragments of Gabriel’s poems left scattered like autumn leaves, and Christina and Browning another. Meanwhile, hoarse cries, which seemed to mock their tiptoeing, were identified by Browning, by peering out the window, as two peacocks debating each other in the weed-infested garden, which led down to the banks of the Thames.

  “You must find someone to tend to this menagerie,” Browning said to Christina, adding quickly, “until Gabriel returns.”

  “He likes to look out every time he passes a window,” she said wistfully, “and if a lovely woman passes, he rushes out and says, ‘I’m a painter and I want to paint you.’”

  Browning asked if they assented.

  “Sometimes. Usually they scream, and he runs back inside, slams the front door, and hides.”

  With candle in hand, Christina entered her brother’s bedroom, kept dark by thick wall hangings and velvet window curtains. She slowly parted the heavy curtain around his bed and paused at her brother’s bedside table. There a small black vial and a small measuring glass sat among other odds and ends.

  Browning, coming up behind her, asked what it was.

  She smelled the vial. “The skeleton in his cupboard, so to speak. Chloral hydrate.” The room’s heavy décor made their voices sound muffled and weak. She glanced around. The bed was in a disarray that could have been from a day—weeks, months?—earlier. She let out a tiny sigh ending with a choked-back sob.

  Browning rushed closer to her with arms out.

  “I am well enough,” she insisted, putting out a hand. “Never expect me to faint, Mr. Browning. I will not.”

  “Something ailed you just now, Miss Rossetti.”

  “There is nothing the matter, only I am tired and have a headache. There is nothing at all the matter.”

  Browning swallowed down his protests and turned away.

  He deserved better for helping her. “I am overcome not by what is here, but by what is not here, Mr. Browning. To be honest, I feared we might discover my brother here—his body.”

  Christina paused before adding, “Please, do not tell anyone.”

  He was confused. “Tell them—you mean that Gabriel—?”

  Eeeiu! came the peacocks’ hollers. Eeeiu eeeiu!

  She wished she didn’t have to say it. “Please don’t tell anyone I almost wept.”

  * * *

  —

  They reconvened downstairs in the cluttered drawing room, where Browning lit a fire and William brewed tea.

  “What about the rest of your family?” Browning asked. “Not one of them has spoken with him?”

  “From the time we were children, our family never understood our brother,” said Christina, taking a chair to one side of the hearth while Browning settled in at the other. Perhaps their late father, the professore, understood him, Christina thought to herself, though he would never have admitted it. The fact was, their family gave up concerning themselves with Gabriel’s endeavors or whereabouts.

  “Just as Gabriel avoided his landlord knowing money would be demanded of him, I’m sorry to say we often found ourselves having to avoid Gabriel because of his demands for ‘tin’—that’s what he calls money—from us.” William finished serving tea and sat on the velvet sofa, first flicking off a few layers of fur. “As I’m sure you’ve felt yourself, Mr. Browning, with those closest to him Gabriel wavers between indifference, neediness, and abuse. It’s not all his fault, mind you. He hasn’t been able to conjure a good night’s sleep for years. Not without the compound my sister found at his bedside, or similar concoctions, anyway, of opiates and other narcotics. He said it also helped his eyes, which often cause him pain, and the dizzy spells that plagued him since he was young. When he cannot sleep, he wanders the streets half the night—finding trouble that way, often, and sometimes thinking he was being watched or followed. It has all grown worse.”

  “You mean since Eliz—Lizzie died,” Browning said, his voice trailing off.

  “No, Mr. Browning,” Christina said, followed by a solemn pause. She felt as though she were breaking a vow of silence. “Since Lizzie committed suicide.”

  William hung his head.

  Browning’s hand froze as he lifted the steaming drink. “Suicide?”

  “It was after her pregnancy—” Christina stopped herself and started again. “He came home from one of his walks to find her sprawled out, an empty bottle of laudanum nearby.”

  “Now the poor man fills his bloodstream with similar classes of poison.”

  “We wanted to protect our family and protect our brother, Mr. Browning,” said William. “He blamed himself for Lizzie. We try not to repeat that she took her own life.”

  “Did she give him any kind of warning? An explanation?”

  Christina looked at William. Her brother did not indicate approval for what she was going to do, but did not object. Christina crossed the room to a painting of Lizzie Siddal posed as a medieval damsel, her thick curls rolling down her back. Being so close to the painting made Christina feel as though Lizzie watched them.

  He nicknamed her the Sid and Guggum. Or Guggums. Or just Gug. If she was not home, Gabriel would sometimes mutter “Guggums, Guggums,” over and over, to console himself as he painted.

  She had luxuriant red hair and bright green eyes. Whether her skin was translucent or pale, her lips full or bloated, her expressions noble or crass, were impossible questions to settle. Lizzie appeared very different to different people, as though she transformed depending on which pair of eyes beheld her. Whichever details stayed with a particular person who met her, she was, in Gabriel’s vocabulary, a “stunner.” It all made her, in short, the ideal model to paint.

  She became Guinevere, the Virgin Mary, and especially Beatrice. She became Lizzie Siddal instead of Lizzie Siddall. She became Rossetti. She became Guggums.

  Christina reached behind the frame and removed a folded paper she passed to Browning. “He keeps this close at hand still.”

  She appreciated how gingerly Browning held it as he read to himself, and then recited the second stanza of the long poem aloud:

  Hollow hearts are ever near me,

  Soulless eyes have ceased to cheer me:

  Lord, may I come to Thee?

  Suicide announced by verse.

  Browning cleared his throat of Lizzie Siddal’s words, nearly in tears, before he asked Christina what they should do.

  “We find Gabriel, Mr. Browning,” she answered, “before he also does himself harm.”

  * * *

  —

  The reporter frowned to the left and then the right, then squeezed himself through the indifferent forest of busy men, many of whom he knew and wished he didn’t. They greeted and grunted at him. The Three Tun’s dining room was separated into private boxes by miniature walls that, in fact, discouraged any privacy at all, since you had to peer over each compartment to find the party you were looking for
. “Excuse me, pardon the bother,” Steven Walker was now saying as he did just this. Inside one of the boxes was the man who had sent him his card. A big book—The Decameron by Boccaccio—covered the bottom half of his face.

  Walker would have thought he was shaking hands with just another early-middle-aged man in London who read too many books, if he hadn’t known Dolly Williamson was the finest and most formidable detective at Scotland Yard.

  “Do you know why I’ve asked you here, Mr. Walker?” Dolly asked. “I’d like to invite you in the queen’s name to assist me.”

  “Inspector, I didn’t even know you knew my name,” said Walker, who was a short man with saggy cheeks that made him appear to pout even the rare times he wasn’t. “Boccaccio. Leisure reading for a police detective?”

  Dolly grinned. “I enjoy reading, true enough, though whatever leisure I get while the sun is up I try to give to my gardening or watching the rowers on the Thames.”

  “I’m surprised to find you here. I’ve always heard you don’t even stop to sit down when you have an open mystery.”

  “Hyperbole! Sometimes I—even I—put my feet up. I want to give you something, Mr. Walker. Something of considerable value in your field.”

  Dolly pushed a folded piece of paper across the table, steering it through a maze of wet circles left by bumpers of beer.

  Walker picked up the paper and unfolded it. “What is this?”

  “Read it.”

  A little reluctantly, Walker did. He read aloud some of the words: “‘Inscription . . . stone . . . Behold . . . handmaiden . . . Lord.’”

  While Walker studied the note, Dolly waved his hand over his head, and a Scotch appeared as though dropped from the sky.

  “Why pass this to me, Inspector Williamson? I don’t even much enjoy penning the police columns. There’s plenty of men—why, there’s a dozen in this room I could point out to you—who would salivate for something like this, or for a whisper about one of your Fenian cases. I’m just helping out with the police columns while my editor is shorthanded, but between us, I rather fancy—”