The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  “Illustration.” Dolly completed his sentence.

  “You know?”

  “I’ve seen the drawings you’ve done in Punch. Quite entertaining, the lot of them!”

  “Well, won’t yet pay my landlord, will they? So if you know my head isn’t in mysteries and police stories, why would you . . .” He stopped himself as Dolly sipped his drink through a smile. “You don’t want me to be too interested in this. Is that it, Inspector?”

  Dolly lifted his drink in consent. “You’re better at this game than you think. Reporters who are too interested in a story want more, alas, than I can ever give them, and eventually turn on me. You are a tourist in the police columns, and that’s exactly why you are right for what I need. You wield an able pen but not an insatiable one.”

  Walker gazed back at the words on the piece of paper. “May I ask one thing. Is this crime so different, to go out of your way like this?”

  “Mr. Walker, at any given time I would estimate almost six thousand criminals in London, two hundred who are first-rate thieves, six hundred swindlers and dog stealers, forty burglars and garretteers. The rest, well, common pickpockets, pilferers, children who sneak and steal, and then of course there are the political criminals, the Fenians who want to hurt or embarrass England to change things in Ireland. This? This is different. You’ll remember what I wrote down, won’t you?”

  Walker shrugged. “Yes, Inspector, though I’m sorry to say I still don’t really understand the point of it.”

  Dolly plucked the paper out of his hand and ripped it in half. “It’s not you I’m counting on to understand it.”

  IV

  Christina and Browning called on every art studio in London and beyond where Gabriel had leased space in the past—sometimes, during those periods, he’d painted with such fury that he would sleep on floors not to lose time, content as a seal on a sandbank—and at the residences of half a dozen of his old friends. Some friends, they learned, had turned into ex-friends because of Gabriel’s erratic behavior. The questioners heard about his being warm, generous, and inspiring from some; from others, that he was selfish, spoiled, and a broken-down devil who was mad as a March hare.

  Some people they spoke to were almost as anxious as they were to know where they could find Gabriel. One of these was a man who had bought paintings by Gabriel, A. R. Gibson.

  On their way to the art exhibit where they were told they could find Gibson, Browning asked Christina if she knew much about the art lover.

  “His actual initials were R. A. Gibson,” Christina explained to Browning with the slightest hint of disdain that, coming from her, landed with the thud of a raging insult. “But he did not like that the letters of his name spelled something as common and dirty as ‘rag,’ so he changed it. He is rather infamous for his bossiness toward the painters he commissions.”

  Browning seemed to find the idea of Gibson’s changed name wildly amusing until Christina pointed out Gabriel had done something similar. “Dante was actually one of my brother’s middle names.”

  “Was it?”

  “He was born Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, but around age twenty shortened it by removing the Charles and changed the order to Dante Gabriel to honor Dante Alighieri. That is why only his artist friends call him Dante—he instructs them to do so, but we wouldn’t. To us, he is always Gabriel.”

  They found the original subject of their conversation smoking a long, thin cigarette and directing the ashes away from his orange-brown velvet collar. Smoking was not allowed in the gallery, but Gibson was too important to be reprimanded. “Your brother owes me two paintings, but you might say I am patient to a fault,” Gibson reported to them. “Oh, you know him. When Dante thinks he is unappreciated, he demands attention, but when he knows something is wanted of him, he—what’s the word a versifier, like one of you, might use?—recoils.”

  Browning asked Gibson why he still did business with Gabriel, if he had been so difficult.

  “Mr. Browning, you must know Dante Gabriel Rossetti is”—he sent out a cloud of smoke as he searched for another word—“irresistible. We have had our battles over the price of my commissions from him. Still, it is rare to find one who is as excellent a poet as a painter, and such a capable imagination improves his craft in both. He always says you could have been a great artist yourself, my dear.”

  “Me?” Christina replied, aghast at the idea.

  “Dante says you have the artistic imagination of a hundred men, but that you can hide more easily in your poetry. He adores you, you know. I always picture you, Miss Rossetti, as something of a caged bird, waiting to be freed. Do you ever feel that way?”

  The stare Christina returned at Gibson could have made a murderer confess at Old Bailey.

  When after many similar interviews they failed to make progress tracing where Gabriel could have gone, Browning suggested they consult the police, but Christina refused. She didn’t give a reason. In part, she was thinking of Gabriel, who would fume at the idea of a bobby looking for him.

  More than that, asking for help from the police would confirm there was a problem, and, in spite of herself, she was not ready to admit that to more people. She continued to go to Tudor House, sometimes on her own and sometimes with Browning or William, organizing and examining her brother’s letters and notebooks and sketches, hoping a clue would appear. William brought her letters from Gabriel that he could find for her to review.

  She found old neglected documents, including some writing and sketches from around the time he’d met Lizzie. The sketches, usually preparations for paintings that would never be completed, often experimented with transforming the visage of Lizzie into the image of Beatrice.

  Beatrice Portinari—the real Beatrice, many scholars believed—was one of many girls known for her beauty around Florence of the late thirteenth century, but for whatever reason she, not one of the others, captured the young poet’s heart and imagination. When Beatrice’s father died, Dante observed her tenderly grieving. This, in turn, filled Dante with grief and with a startling idea that invaded his every waking thought: There will come a day when beautiful, tender Beatrice, too, must die. If he had dared look right into her eyes, he would have dropped dead right there, drowned in sorrow. Perhaps the most peculiar part of Beatrice’s destiny was that she probably never knew about her poetic admirer’s extraordinary preoccupation. Her life was, by all accounts, perfectly ordinary, marrying at twenty and dying of illness a few years later.

  Dante and Beatrice had met when she was so young. At that age, men imagine girls as paragons of purity and perfection. No wonder she became an angelic figure in Dante Alighieri’s mind, a figure whose only purpose was to rescue Dante from darkness and despair. If they never had to age, all women would be mistaken for angels by men. Dante, however, was a brilliant enough poet not to leave it so simple. When Beatrice finally reappears to Dante atop the mountain of Purgatory on Holy Wednesday, 1300—as he describes in the second canticle of his Divine Comedy—she is armed with far more than she had appeared in the vision of a heartsick young poet; she roars with intelligence, anger, determination, righteousness. What Beatrice gains in power at the top of the mountain she loses in compassion, no longer speaking to Dante but at him.

  Strangely, several times when Christina returned to Tudor House to continue journeying through Gabriel’s memories and thoughts, it seemed as if some of the books or papers had been moved just slightly—as if by one of the ghostly apparitions so popular with the professional mediums Gabriel sometimes patronized. Every time she opened the door to the house, she held her breath, hoping against hope he would be standing in the hall beyond the threshold. Or, more likely, sprawled on a sofa, head low and feet propped up, staring at the vast ceiling—dreaming of his next painting.

  Once, she heard footsteps on the stairs and looked over, thinking of Gabriel, only to see his raccoon scampering down. Tap tap tap. When the r
accoon, with its shining eyes, would trot by, she could only envision the kangaroo’s joey torn apart by its long claws in retaliation. She shooed the animal away. She formed a better relationship with Bobby, an owl with a large face and eggshell green beak. He was her favorite among the wonderland of animals.

  Another time, as she read at the table looking for clues, she heard a shout: “You should be in church!” A search turned up Gabriel’s parrot, repeating the advice.

  “I will not disagree, Parrot,” Christina had said with a frown, returning to memories of Gabriel she had tried so desperately to forget.

  * * *

  —

  Gabriel first encountered the woman who would change his life when she was as still as a stone. She was sitting as Viola from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night for a painting by one of Gabriel’s artistic conspirators and studio mates, Arthur Hughes. But she could not help but follow Gabriel with her eyes as he lumbered around the studio staring at her. “Do not move your eyes so much,” shouted Hughes. “Keep your damned eyes over here!” She began to sit for Gabriel’s paintings and they remained entranced by each other. As with everything that affected Gabriel, her charm and beauty pleased him not just in themselves but as symbols of something he’d searched for his whole life. He convinced her to change the spelling of her surname from Siddall to Siddal, which he said improved it. More elegant.

  Christina balked at the idea of his prodding his lover to alter the spelling of her own name. Gabriel’s giant eyes narrowed.

  “But, dear Christina,” Gabriel pointed out to her, “I could have asked her to change it altogether.”

  Sometimes, after Lizzie Siddal’s tragic end, Gabriel would ponder whether Lizzie’s fate had been inevitable all along. “Guggums was ready to die daily,” he’d insist to Christina, then added, almost whimsically, “sometimes more than once a day.” Other times, he despaired that he caused her decline or at least did not prevent it.

  She was buried in the Rossetti family plot in a grave adjacent to that of the professore. During the burial, someone placed a Bible into Lizzie’s coffin. In the blur of the funeral, nobody remembered who, maybe one of Lizzie’s weeping relatives from the countryside. Gabriel insisted the holy book was the last thing he would have ever included to bring her peace.

  Gabriel left something of his own. He dropped in the only manuscript of his latest poems with her body, resting them between her cheek and her flowing hair. “I wrote these when I might have been attending to her,” Gabriel later confessed to Christina, “and they will go with her.”

  Gabriel hated the churchyard that took his wife. As they left the burial, he took Christina by the arm. “Let me not on any account be buried at Highgate. When I die, burn my remains where I lay.”

  It was odd to think of the professore buried so close to Lizzie, so close to those abandoned poems. How the old man’s spirit would have hungered for poetry about Dante Alighieri! The man who’d given his son the middle name Dante in the first place.

  Christina could still hear the professore talking of Dante to her and her siblings, describing the secrets he found in the medieval poetry, sometimes with a pupil, such as the odd but brilliant young man Charles Cayley, stationed nearby on a hard stool. From his big chair close to the fire, illuminated by a semicircle of candles like an ancient prophet, the professore would lean over his writing desk, on top of which was the biggest snuffbox ever seen and his thick manuscript, the paper of which reflected the light back onto his face. He would make such pronouncements as:

  “How many masked sphinxes I have come upon, so many, my bantlings—it is a true marvel!”

  The professore, gesticulating with bony hands, would explain that the middle section or canticle of Dante’s poem Purgatory represented the bold Florentine poet at his boldest. This “second kingdom” of the afterlife between Hell and Paradise—where (as Dante put it) “the human spirit is purged”—had only ever been described in vague terms. In the Florentine’s vision, its physical reality came through—beginning with the rocky shores where some “shades,” or disembodied souls, dwelled in “Ante-Purgatory,” and moving up the mountain where each sin would be repented for on a distinct terrace, starting with Pride, where shades heard the voice of the Virgin Mary cry out humbly—Behold, the handmaiden of the Lord—as a counter to their own excessive and destructive pride.

  “Dante’s words are not merely that,” declared the professore.

  Each mystery about Dante that the professore solved—so he said—led him closer to the glorious revelations of the past and future of religion, literature, and the world. He had sent some of his tedious, grandiose work to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who ended any budding friendship when he commented in return, “Some of your views of Dante’s meaning are just, but you have pushed it beyond all bounds. How could a poet such as Dante have written a secret political and doctrinal tract as you conjecture?”

  Now, Gabriel had left his own poetic visions of Dante so tantalizingly close to the professore’s coffin, one could imagine the old man’s spirit reaching out for them.

  Not long after Lizzie’s funeral, a poem Christina worked on for more than ten years, “Goblin Market,” was published in a collection with some shorter verse. Through unique and witty verses, “Goblin Market” told of a girl who must save her sister from the ravages of temptation held out by a crew of pleasure-obsessed beast-men.

  Eat me, drink me, love me, cries the girl, who has consumed the goblin’s fruit in order to share the restorative juices with her sister. Laura, make much of me.

  Gabriel showed the manuscript to a critic he knew. No publisher, I am deeply grieved to say, the critic replied in a letter, will take these, they are so full of quaintness and strangeness. Your sister should learn the strictest employment of meter and then, perhaps, can write something the public will like.

  Christina’s curious poem was published and exploded in popularity. Of course, questions followed: did the troubled sibling who required saving represent Lizzie? Gabriel?

  Christina would often be sent for in the middle of the night to help placate or chase down her brother. Every night after Lizzie’s funeral, Gabriel saw her ghost. He could not say whether she appeared in anger or sympathy. He’d escape into the midnight streets until Christina or William retrieved him. Like Dante Alighieri after Beatrice died, Gabriel appeared as a savage creature, gaunt, beard thick and uneven, hair greasy. Soon after this period he moved to Tudor House. He took more chloral hydrate to be able to sleep, increased his laudanum to ease his anxiety. He painted and wrote and read. Christina told him to read anything, anything at all except Lizzie’s suicide poem. She advised it was also best to stay away from reading Dante Alighieri, with his tales of a quest after death—a quest, at its heart, to reunite with his lost love.

  Gabriel would proceed to read either Lizzie’s suicide poem or more Dante.

  Christina would report back to her mother about Gabriel, and then placid, sensible Frances Rossetti—who most people thought looked exactly like Christina thirty years on, except for those who declared the two looked nothing alike—would shake her head. “I always had a passion for intellect and wanted to instill it in my children,” she’d say. “I had my wish. And I now wish that there were a little less intellect in the family, and a little more common sense. You will watch out for him, won’t you, Christina, and keep him from . . . ?”

  Her mother didn’t finish the request and didn’t have to. If there would be less and less time for Christina’s writing and career, so be it.

  “Do you hear that?” Gabriel would sometimes ask Christina in that period when she found herself running to his side at Tudor House on a regular basis.

  “What? I don’t hear anything, dear Gabriel. What do you hear?”

  “Her voice,” he would say, and explain it was calling a single word out at him, over and over. “Murderer,” it would ring in his ears. Murderer.

&n
bsp; Murderer.

  * * *

  —

  Christina experienced a feeling of relief as she watched the gray streets of London from the dirty little window of the omnibus bringing her to Scotland Yard. Her refusal to involve the authorities proved brief; the deeper she traveled back into Gabriel’s darkest years from the confines of Tudor House, the deeper her alarm. As soon as she managed to bear it, she sent word to Browning, consenting to go to the police offices. Browning, always waiting to be a man of action, flew to her side.

  William declined to accompany them. He worried. Worried about the reputation of the family, worried about his job at the excise office. He didn’t say outright that he didn’t want to be seen walking into the police offices, but Christina knew.

  No matter. What mattered was that Gabriel would be found. That was what Christina thought about and prayed about on the ride while sitting alongside Browning. Fear no more, she imagined a dashing detective reassuring her with a lingering, firm handshake.

  But the young constable who met them at Scotland Yard was reticent as a clam as he took down their information. He was only intermittently attentive. Meanwhile, a wide-shouldered, tall man, whom the other officers called Inspector Williamson, burst into and out of the room a few times, chewing on the stem of a flower and complaining to his inferiors about a newspaper that published new details, before permission had been given, about the shocking murder of Jasper Morton.

  The constable slowly printed in careful hand in his notebook: Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

  “Listen to us, young man,” Browning said, his irritation pushing out as he seemed on the verge of exploding across at the indifferent official. “We are talking about a missing man here. Aren’t you going to initiate an inquiry? Are you going to do something, anything?”