The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  “William, didn’t you ever go home to sleep?” Christina asked.

  “I suppose I lost sense of time,” William replied, waving around an edition of Paradise until the owl fluttered off. He returned to the Dante murders pamphlet he’d been examining. “This little booklet is rather atrocious in its content, Christina, but I must confess it’s difficult to put away. The crimes examined within it, the murders that supposedly came to pass in Boston, were re-creations of Dante’s vision of Hell in the modern world. The culprit there, we can rest assured, is no longer capable of doing harm.”

  “But if the perversion behind those events has now spread, if someone has decided to carry them forward from Inferno to Purgatory and from Boston to London, then we must understand how this started,” Browning replied. “You are performing a great service, Mr. Rossetti.”

  “Kind encouragement for a tired man,” William said, his voice charged with skepticism. “I’m afraid it is almost impossible to divide the fantasy from the truth in a scribbler’s tract such as this. However, I have made progress, I like to believe, in identifying the aliases of some of the individuals dramatized here. The literary men, in particular. I believe one, called Kensington here, a translator secluded in a mansion described as yellow as the sun, is the famous Mr. Longfellow himself, and another, a short man called Gabbert described as possessing special medical training as well as poetical skills, I’ve determined is meant to represent Boston’s celebrated Dr. Holmes. Now, there is also a noble investigator, hired, according to the story, by Universe College—that’s Harvard, naturally—to shadow the scholars. I am trying to match this investigator with a real name. If we could find out who his model is, and write to him, he may know—”

  “Hold on there,” Browning interrupted. “Did you say Holmes? Oliver Wendell, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table?”

  “That makes sense, doesn’t it?” Christina replied, looking back over her brother’s shoulder at the material. “I remember it was said he was one of the writers in Longfellow’s little translation circle. Do you think there’s a reason to doubt it, Mr. Browning?”

  “You confuse my excitement for doubt—I believe I recently came across the name of Dr. Holmes.”

  Christina and William followed as Browning hurried to the drawing room, where he reached for the stacks of newspapers they had combed through for mentions and details about Morton before his death—when he had been reelected, for the twenty-third time, to the House of Commons—and in its aftermath. Christina had carefully organized the newspapers based on their publication date and their quality of information.

  “It was here . . . ,” Browning said with frustration, tearing them open and perusing the columns. “Somewhere!” As he tossed papers aside after unsuccessful searches, Christina picked them back up and sorted them again. “An announcement about a speech or a lecture . . . I know I saw it . . . Ah!”

  Christina felt her impatience about to burst. “Mr. Browning?”

  Browning held up the newspaper. “We’ll get the story from Dr. Holmes himself!”

  OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES ON TOUR

  Having come with his daughter from Boston and after visiting other stops in Europe, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the American medical professor at Harvard, author of the Breakfast Table satires and many memorable poems, has received the academic tribute of an honorary degree at Oxford. He will visit Cambridge after that. It has been nearly thirty-five years since the celebrated New Englander last sailed to Europe, and his return is most welcome.

  VI

  Wearing the academic gown with the square-topped cap and dangling tassel transmitted a thrilling sensation to a man. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes stood in front of a sea of young faces watching as he was presented with his doctor of letters degree, an honor insisted upon by the university authorities who’d heard Holmes would be sightseeing in town. A chorus of voices grew. Some called for him to recite the John Howard Payne lyrics “home, sweet home!” in tribute to his name; others wished more generally that the American poet would deliver a “speech! speech!” Gregarious, garrulous Dr. Holmes on this morning instead stepped away from the platform with just a fleeting smile and wave.

  Holmes’s tour through Europe, starting with Switzerland and Holland, then Scotland and England, had brought him pleasures, including honorary degrees from Edinburgh, Oxford, and now Cambridge. He especially liked Cambridge, even in the wet weather. He delighted in walking through the quadrangles, along the riverbanks, beneath the giant trees which bordered it. The other Cambridge—that is, New England’s Cambridge—was his mother town, and since she was the daughter of Old England’s Cambridge, by his calculations that made the town he visited his grandmother town.

  Being in Europe for the first time in decades, though, brought with it a kind of unexpected dread. Holmes tried not to reflect on the events four years prior that he and his friends labored to keep secret. Back home in Boston and Cambridge, the safe familiarity of Holmes’s carefully maintained routines mostly kept the dark memories at bay. When possible, he would avoid walking or riding by the places that would remind him of the occurrences. But now, so far from home and unmoored from routines, his brain found a way of sauntering right where he didn’t want it to—through the unassuming byways and crevices of Boston where the gates of Dante’s Hell opened before his eyes.

  Those visions invaded Holmes’s waking hours and his dreams alike. It had come to this: even the admiration of enthusiastic English students seemed to be a demand for him not just to speak but remember. After all, one of those young men suddenly, momentarily transformed into an eerie double of one of the victims of that violent spree in the other Cambridge, the one whose demise brought Holmes more pain than any other, while another began to resemble the perpetrator, and more members of the audience took on the forms of the other people who had become mixed up in those blood-drenched days.

  Holmes’s daughter, Amelia, who had arranged their European journey together, knew something was amiss. She had asked after his health often during their voyage, and ran into his staterooms and hotel rooms when he shouted during nightmares. It was a passing nervousness always brought on by long trips, nothing more, he reassured her.

  The perpetual round of social engagements—breakfasts, luncheons, dinners, teas, receptions with spread tables, two, three, and four deep each evening—usually came as welcome distractions. Holmes was his entertaining self, reciting poems, leaving guests awestruck with his much-loved anecdotes—one favorite was the time he climbed a mountain in the Berkshires with Hawthorne and Melville, when Hawthorne couldn’t stop talking about his new Scarlet Letter and Melville argued vehemently against Holmes’s proposition that the English would always be superior to Americans.

  He slept better while in Cambridge than he had on most of their previous stops. Their rooms in Nevile’s Court at Trinity College were decorated with the imposing family ensigns of those who had lived there. Taking a stroll in the evening through the hoary library of Trinity College, he studied the marble busts. Holmes paused to look at the stern likeness of Alfred Tennyson, dated thirteen years earlier, showing a fresh-faced but already imposing poet.

  The morning after Holmes received his doctor of letters, he found himself in a sufficiently tranquil mood to write—first a few verses, then a valedictory address on what a young physician should aspire to do. The best a physician can give is never too good for the patient. These exercises helped him. In younger years, he’d wonder whether he was more doctor or writer. Since the dark period back home, he questioned if he was really either—witnessing death all around him had robbed him of both.

  He wanted to advise his imagined listeners . . .

  I warn you against all ambitious aspirations outside of your profession. Medicine is the most difficult of sciences and the most laborious of arts. It will ask all your powers of body and mind. Do not dabble in the muddy sewer of politics, nor linger by the enchanted streams of l
iterature. The great practitioners are generally those who concentrate all their powers on their business.

  . . . if only it didn’t seem hypocritical. Here he was, supposed master of so many arts, not just doctor but—as the titles of his three Breakfast Table books identified him—autocrat, professor, poet.

  He was still in his dressing gown when the door shook with knocking.

  Expecting Amelia or the college porter leaving his breakfast, Holmes bounded over. Nobody was there. He found a telegram that had been laid at his doorstep. It was from Robert Browning in London, and at first Holmes assumed it was another invitation to a literary gathering in the city—feeling a tickle of pride that the famous Browning, a poet who was even more respected than read, would be anxious to see him. Instead, the telegram contained a verse in Italian—

  Maestro mio, che via faremo?

  —which he swiftly translated as:

  My master, what way shall we take?

  Holmes, who was famous for his rapid step, never moved faster than he did to feed that telegram into the fire.

  * * *

  —

  It was six days earlier, moments after the forlorn pair of Christina Rossetti and Robert Browning had exited Scotland Yard into the unwelcoming fog, that Inspector Dolly Williamson, who so studiously ignored the frustrated literary callers, paused with a thoughtful expression at the desk of the constable first class, Tom Branagan. He put a hand on the brawny shoulder of the younger policeman, who’d conducted the interview, and waved him into his office.

  Dolly’s private office was not very different than the others at Scotland Yard. Except for two things. First, there was the number and varied selection of books on the shelves. Second were the plaster casts of heads along the wall, with ropes hanging alongside some of them.

  Even in the midst of a crisis, other police affairs would find a way to invade Dolly’s time. There were the silk curtains stolen from Windsor Castle that showed up at an auction house. There was the latest band of conspirators fighting for Irish freedom—over the years the diverse revolutionaries had come to be known as Fenians—arrested in a trap sprung by two of Dolly’s detectives, Thornton and Clarke. Even though the Fenians’ threats produced far less actual violence than garden-variety blackguards, the public feared them out of all proportion. But at the moment, Dolly couldn’t take his eye off the case that he felt growing more perilous—and peculiar—every day.

  “Well, Branagan,” Dolly said, “there go our poets. What did you think of them?”

  “They certainly seem to know Mr. Rossetti is in some kind of trouble and to have no better idea than we do of where he is.”

  “I said they would come here sooner rather than later, didn’t I?” Dolly boasted with a grin that landed heavily on one side, like his hat. He had a fondness for being correct, a trait that suited this career. “Notice the younger Rossetti brother, William, wasn’t with them.”

  “Inspector Williamson, why not tell Miss Rossetti what we know so far about her brother?”

  “Branagan, a person will always be inclined to reveal more by asking questions than they will answering them.”

  “I am sure you are right, Inspector. However, now we’ve heard what they have to say about Mr. Rossetti. What harm could it do to share some of our information, to tell them, at least, about the sighting of Mr. Rossetti at the scene of the crime?”

  Dolly thought about the suggestion before exiling it with a sigh. “Branagan, did you look into the eyes of that lady? Miss Rossetti has the eyes of faith. If she knew our suspicions . . . well, she’d tell us nothing.”

  “But what will she tell us now that we’ve dismissed her? It’s doubtful she’ll ever come back here at all.”

  “Now that she will presume we are uninterested in the issue of Mr. Rossetti, she and Mr. Browning will be more determined to do something about all this themselves. Especially when they read the Ledger and come across the information I gave Walker to write about. Mark what I say. Miss Rossetti and Mr. Browning could provide us revelations that, if they knew we are paying attention, they would not. For the moment, we continue to watch.”

  Dolly had already searched Tudor House and ordered Branagan to continue to shadow the movements of Christina, her brother William, and Browning. The detective was not intimidated by the celebrity of the visitors, nor the literary and artistic reputation of the missing Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Ever since he had handled a case that required him to trace the author and publisher of an anonymous book advocating the assassination of the French king, the commissioner selected Dolly for any matters related to books, authors, and artists. Even written and painted forgeries came to Dolly’s desk. Dolly considered it an advantage that he did not look as though he read the enormous number of books that he did. He seemed wonderfully average.

  It was the burden of the literary man or woman of a city such as London to feel themselves superior to the herds of common people. But Dolly felt confident that, if necessary, he’d outwit any ordinary genius. This case, in all events, had little room for error. With the murder of a member of Parliament, and the widow Morton assembling more public memorials than received by the ancient pharaohs, the Home Office roasted on hot coals.

  A week and a half later, Dolly was searching through another box of materials Branagan brought to him. The constable had urged Dolly not to take more than an hour, when he would have to bring them back before they would be missed. It was fortunate, Branagan said, that none of the sinister animals of Tudor House had attacked him yet.

  “Branagan.” Dolly called him back to him after examining the spoils. “You’ve done decent work. Get your things together. We have a scenic ride ahead of us. We are on to our best witness yet.”

  “Truly? Who is it, Inspector?”

  “Dante Alighieri.”

  VII

  Robert Browning lagged behind Christina as they made their way up two long flights of stairs leading to Arthur Hughes’s studio. The poet was impressed by how swiftly his companion, so much sturdier than she appeared, scaled the creaking treads in her restrictive skirts and heavy boots—or maybe he chose to believe she was quick moving rather than think his own fifty-seven years were finally slowing him down. Though he was average height, Browning prided himself on his physical strength, particularly in his shoulders and legs. Despite Christina’s reputation for reclusiveness, she exhibited none of the hesitation Browning himself felt in entering these chambers, which emitted obscene shouts and the strong odors of cheap perfumes and cheaper tobacco.

  How odd it had been at the Wapping gardens seeing her surrounded by society’s discarded outcasts, while Christina herself was such a—well, what was Christina? She wore colors that were too dark and skirts that did not extend to her boots as was standard. She had been a beautiful if pale girl who avoided marriage. She was an astoundingly original poet who swatted away fame. Browning couldn’t help but think of first meeting his Elizabeth when she was held in seclusion by her father. But Ba could not wait to be part of life, of politics, of movements. Christina cultivated her seclusion. With her complexion and the vaguely foreign rhythms of her speech, she really seemed to be taken out of one world and put into theirs.

  Generally speaking, Browning wasn’t shy about being out in society. He had appreciated hearing secondhand one acquaintance’s comment: “I like Browning—he isn’t at all like a damned literary man.” He frequented dinners and concerts and plays. One magazine writer had even named him the poet most accessible to the common public in the history of England except for Chaucer. Browning, unlike Tennyson, hadn’t gone to Oxford or Cambridge, cut off from such opportunity because his family had been dissenters from the Anglican Church; he started then abandoned London University, finding it useless. Still, the fact was that over the last years he felt himself become more accustomed, even reliant, on being around the wealthiest classes of London society. Especially as his poetry’s popularity
expanded.

  Ba would have challenged it all. Of course you seek company in white tie, Robert—she might have reprimanded him—because it will always be easier to make people like you in the dappled lights of chandeliers than through your poetry, which you would consider a failure if it didn’t push away as many people as it invites in.

  “Aren’t you coming, Mr. Browning?” Christina asked.

  As Christina’s gaze fixed on him, he realized she was the age Ba had been when he’d first met her. At least, he believed so. Ba, sensitive about being older than her husband, had been coy about revealing her exact age.

  His legs had stopped and he was standing lost in his thoughts. “Apologies, Miss Rossetti.”

  At the top of the stairs, they entered into a labyrinth of easels, half-complete sculptures, and stacks of papers and canvases, along with an assortment of artists and their models. Hughes, a beardless man with a meticulously combed mustache and luminescent skin, seemed to be about to attack his canvas with his brush, though he withdrew his hand before committing paint to it. A young woman in a long, silky green dress stretched herself over a sofa in front of him.

  “If you stay perfectly still and look at me as if I were Hercules,” the painter was saying to the model, “I will cosmeticize you to appear the age you claim to be, but every time you move your chin I will add a wrinkle.”