The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  He smiled wanly. Like him, she was short and youthful enough to be dismissed by many, and so persistent as to make the doubter sorry. How do I explain a thing I cannot really explain? How can I explain that it is beginning again, or never stopped?

  She folded his right hand in both of hers, warming it between her leather gloves. “Heavens, you’re trembling. I suspect, too, that this business has to do with the telegram from Mr. Browning while we were at Cambridge.”

  Holmes wore the face of a man about to object to an injustice.

  “Come, Father,” Amelia said with a sharply creased brow before he could speak. “I did not spy on you, if that’s what you’re going to carp about. I was taking a walk early that morning at the university, and the messenger gave me a telegram from London for you. I left it at your door.”

  Holmes protested that he couldn’t breathe well in the cold air and needed to go below. She pointed out that Holmes always said he couldn’t breathe belowdecks, either. He insisted.

  “You never said anything at the university,” Holmes began once they were inside the ship’s small library, inhaling and exhaling in a deliberate rhythm. “About having read the telegram.”

  “I suppose I hoped you would tell me yourself when you were ready. When you didn’t, I began to consider that whatever that telegram from Mr. Browning meant must have been upsetting. It meant little enough to me. It appeared to me to be Italian. What did it say?”

  “It was a quote from Dante,” Holmes said quietly, switching from one foot to the other as he scanned the ship’s paltry selection of books on the shelves. “Dante has just entered the shores of the mountain of Purgatory, and asks his guide—the shade of Virgil who has escorted him all the way through the dangers of Hell—which path to choose in order to climb higher. The telegram translated as: ‘My master, what way shall we take?’ It’s Dante’s question to Virgil, showing his humility and his reliance on a guide. He has not yet fully become his own man, you see—though before he reaches the mountaintop, he must.”

  I crown you a lord and bishop over yourself.

  Amelia nodded with interest. “Mr. Browning was communicating with you through Dante. He was requesting your advice, your counsel. I remember you constantly reading Dante some years ago when—well, at a time Mother was so worried about you she confided in me that she wanted to take you away from Boston to Providence or to Manchester-by-the-Sea, or anywhere away from whatever was going on closer to home. Now you again read Dante late into the night.”

  Holmes nodded. After Inspector Williamson and his assistant had announced the completion of their interview on the train, the detective had left behind the copy of Dante’s Purgatory on the seat. No purpose on earth could compel Holmes to renew the conversation with the detective by trying to return the book to him. But he also could not just abandon the volume there among the debris of newspapers and cigar stubs. Dante had become part of him, whether he liked it or not. He took the book with him.

  If there was one trait of Dante’s that Holmes noticed every time he dared read him, it was bravery. Dante did not shy away from writing about bloodshed and violence; he converted it into beauty and poetry. He found meaning in the seeming cruelty and indifference of God’s ways. Holmes could never find meaning in violence and disease.

  His years as a medical professor had pushed him even further away, it seemed, from life and from death. He could recall sitting in the courtroom when his friend and fellow Harvard professor Dr. John Webster was being tried for murder. Such an extravagant proposition, the defense counsel told the jury, why, we might as well suppose Dr. Holmes committed a murder!

  Holmes didn’t know whether to laugh along with the rest of the courtroom or object (as if he had standing to do so).

  I can see well enough that you couldn’t help hunt a murderer.

  “Whenever Dante’s name came up,” Amelia continued, “you always told me that Dante managed the improbable, to be a poet and a man in equal parts of his soul. I may not be a scholar of Dante, but I know there must be something you could do, Father, to banish whatever eats at you.”

  “The great thing in this world, my dear ’Melia, is not so much where we stand, but the direction we are moving. Thank you.”

  Holmes embraced her, giving her instructions and letters of introduction for the remainder of the European tour. Upon returning above, he found a porter and filled the palm of one of his hands with coins to bring Holmes and his trunks to the first train to London straightaway—and arrange a cab to meet him at the other end ready to drive to the home of Robert Browning.

  * * *

  —

  Browning peered down from the large casement window as he soothed himself with a taste from his glass. He looked out at the tangle of chimneys and spires, the brickwork and woodwork of the other houses, attempts to keep the world out and the warmth in. He hoped he’d catch sight of Christina. He was more than anxious to hear what she’d say they should do now. Though he’d been the one to try to calm her in their initial meeting at Tudor House, as they had descended into the mysteries of her brother she proved to be the comforting force between the two of them.

  The latest edition of one of the London newspapers was nearby, and he caught a glimpse of the society column. Oliver Wendell Holmes, expected as a guest to literary and medical luminaries in London, has regretfully called off his visit to the city due to conflicts of schedule . . . Browning tossed the paper away in frustration before he’d feel compelled to curse the selfish Holmes—who never replied to his telegram—or to read the latest crime columns again.

  He steeled himself—their inquires would intensify with the news of another murder. He withdrew from as many of his social obligations as he could. There was one dinner in his honor he could not avoid, which he had attended the prior evening. Since the publication of Browning’s four-volume murder poem The Ring and the Book, the degree of “Browningolatry,” as his son called it, had increased manifold. People still criticized him for the poem’s length and complexity, but they celebrated the narrative and the travails of the characters—to him, the least interesting and important parts.

  What readers enjoyed most was what he was unmoved by; and what his ambitions thrived upon, a bold and metaphysical intricacy, left readers cold. “Childe Roland” came to him in a dream, with hardly any thought, and readers adored it. One thing he knew he couldn’t do was alter himself. It turned out success wasn’t something to achieve for Browning, it was something to conquer.

  “Why not make it easy to read your verse?” a young man once asked him.

  It wasn’t that he tried to make his writing obscure. But he never pretended to offer literature as a substitute for a cigar, or a game of dominoes, to an idle man. He wasn’t about to be Walt Whitman.

  He had not planned on staying at the dinner long, and while the other men gossiped and traded amusing stories, Browning’s mind wandered to Christina, to Dante Alighieri, to Gabriel. That literary gadfly John Forster was present, and seemed to sense Browning’s distraction. He was the last person on earth Browning wanted to be near. Forster thrived on rudeness and felt he earned the right to say anything to Browning by publishing a laudatory review of his poems some thirty-odd years earlier. For the most part, Forster’s close friendship with Dickens protected him from any repercussions for his behavior. The Dickens camp detested Gabriel Rossetti, too, the great novelist having declared the unorthodox art produced by Gabriel’s Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at turns mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting.

  It didn’t take long at the dinner for Forster to target Browning. Forster mentioned that he had heard Browning had been seen often lately with Christina Rossetti. “I am glad to hear it, Browning,” Forster continued, his jowls shaking with delight. “She was never as homely as her clothing. Perhaps Saint Christina has realized, albeit later than the rest of women her age in London, that she can do better than a barren life sputtering o
ut verses as a vestal virgin—oh, but is she still?”

  Browning felt the rage rush to his face.

  “Dare to say another word in disparagement of that lady,” he roared, “and I will pitch this into your head!” Browning lifted a heavy glass decanter over his shoulder.

  It was almost comical how the whole table of diners encircled Browning—as though it would take six men to stop the poet from throwing the decanter of claret—while the pale and trembling Forster retreated to the next room under guard of a magazine critic and a playwright, planning out his complaints about it to Dickens.

  Browning would never tell Christina what Forster had said. Not because he thought her overly sensitive, but because he knew how strong she was, and she did not deserve to hear insults from one who didn’t understand her and never would. What many saw as her aloof languidness, he knew was serious observation of the world. What people believed was inflexible religiosity, he’d sensed contained a potent and unusual spirituality. What others thought her stilted cultivation in conversation, he knew held gentle wryness ready to be sprung on any unsuspecting pretentiousness. In the throes of what she felt passionate about—her family, for one—she became animated and alive, and Browning saw beauty where others didn’t, as he had with Ba.

  Now Browning scanned the street below his window. He removed his watch from his vest pocket. On the watch chain was also Ba’s ring. It looked so small. Rather than reminding him of her, it made her seem unreal, as if no individual such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning ever existed. Nine years after her death, he was no longer unhappy, exactly, when thinking about Ba. He was resigned. An even worse feeling.

  Browning set down his glass on the table and resumed pacing the room. He had only taken up port after living in Italy. Having so much wine in Italy had soured him on drinking it. Around him, all across the study, were books inherited from his father, who spent his life trying to make up for the fact that he worked in a bank, as well as remnants of the Brownings’ life in Florence, including a portrait of Dante Alighieri. That portrait! That portrait in which Dante was missing one eye. That portrait, tainted with so many strange meanings.

  During the fourteen years they lived in Florence, the Brownings’ careers as English poets paradoxically flourished—the power of exile, it seemed. When Wordsworth died, both Brownings were said to be considered for the poet laureate position before it was awarded to Tennyson. Ba had laughed at the prospect for herself, but Browning wanted it for her more than he’d ever admit. He would have renounced all his ambition and would have destroyed every line he wrote, if by doing so she received the fame and honor she deserved.

  It was in Italy where Ba got caught up in the craze of spiritualism. “My poor husband will make no profession of faith till he has the testimony of his own senses,” she would say with a ringing laugh to her new friends before Browning had a chance to voice his skepticism about raising ghosts for the purpose of conversing with them.

  How different it was than just a generation before. There were so many styles of worship in so many different churches now, so many sets and sects and subsets and subsects of religions, so many foreigners from other lands with other, peculiar beliefs; there were atheists and new secularists. Nobody knew what they were supposed to believe or what neighbors and relatives believed. Ghosts suddenly became as legitimate an option as anyone’s god.

  The gravest offender among Ba’s spiritual advisors in Italy had to be old Seymour Kirkup, who moved to Italy thirty years earlier. The narrow angles of his face suggested aristocratic heritage, but the Englishman’s eyes were wild and raw. In an Italian church, he had discovered a lost portrait of Dante in profile, a fragment of a fresco by Giotto that had been painted over. Kirkup, who fancied himself an artist, traced the portrait. (Dante’s eye had been obliterated by a nail.) The discovery of the portrait, and the distribution of Kirkup’s own copies, brought him acclaim from the artistic and literary worlds. But Kirkup was not content with resurrecting Dante’s noble, war-wearied profile. He claimed to carry out regular and friendly communications with Dante’s ghost.

  Kirkup married the daughter of his maid, and proudly announced to the visiting Brownings that when his bride happened to be “in tune,” she possessed great spiritual abilities.

  The girl, who looked younger than the seventeen years of age Kirkup claimed, sank into a kind of trance during which, in a high-pitched Italian, she spoke as Dante. First, she—or Ghost Dante—said that Alighieri should henceforth be spelled with two l’s: Allighieri. With that settled after hundreds of years, Kirkup quizzed the ghost about Beatrice. He asked whether Beatrice was a real Florentine lady. No, said Ghost Dante in the grating voice of the maid’s daughter. Who was she, then? Era un’idea della mia testa, came the reply. An idea of my mind.

  It made Browning burn to see the delight on Ba’s face at the charade of supposed ghostly séances. What was it that made this brilliant woman and poet he loved so wholly believe fabrications and utter frauds? Their disagreements on this topic became arguments. Somehow his refusal to think ghosts were anxiously waiting to speak to them or to rap on tables became coupled with his distaste for cigars. “It would do you good to smoke occasionally, too,” she snapped, before citing Tennyson and his ever-present pipe. “Well, if the great Tennyson does it . . . ,” Browning would retort. Tennyson knows all, Tennyson sees all, every woman would rather marry the all-knowing, all-seeing, queen-beloved Tennyson! Those arguments—arguments over nothing—haunted him after her death, genuine haunting of a sort he was sure none of those spiritual mediums could recognize.

  His blood would cool; he would tearfully apologize. “I love you, Ba, because I love you.” He’d celebrate their wedding on the twelfth of every month, which would always catch her by complete surprise. She never knew the date.

  After her death, Browning tried remaining in Casa Guidi, their home in Florence. He appeared solid enough, keeping in one place like a worm-eaten piece of old furniture. But when he tried to move, to do anything, he went to pieces. He remembered, around that time, being in a plaza and catching sight of Tennyson, who was traveling in Italy with his wife and boys; Browning ducked out of sight—he could not tolerate having to greet the perfect family and the perfectly rich and successful poet. Browning pulled his hat down to hide his face, though it was not necessary since Tennyson couldn’t see an inch away from his nose.

  Kirkup kept calling on Browning and bothering him about taking a copy of the rediscovered Dante portrait. Since Browning never wanted to see Kirkup again as long as he lived, he agreed to purchase one, in hopes the old ghost-wrangler would have one less reason to harangue him.

  When Browning returned to London, his friends dutifully called on him. Gabriel was the first at his doorstep and the only one who didn’t try to cheer him. He just sat with him. Talk turned to religious balms for grief. “I have a knowledge of a God within me,” Browning said, pointing to his heart and pausing. “I know him, he is here, and it matters little to me what tales anyone tells me about him; I smile, because I know him.” Gabriel chewed on his lower lip, then in his deep, velvety voice said, “I lack only a confessor to give me absolution for all my sins.” It was the first time Browning had laughed since Ba died. He laughed until he felt sore, then cried.

  He didn’t have to put on a performance with Gabriel, but Browning did his best to reassure most visitors. Days, weeks, years could go by. He could continue on, he could grow old. But he could not feel he’d ever take root in life again any more than, at his age, he could think of learning a new dance step. In a few short years, Pen would be a full-fledged adult, and Browning couldn’t think what he would do with his own idleness then.

  There were bleak times. Christmas. New Year’s. Birthdays (his, Hers, Pen’s). Those times he wasn’t so sure he wanted to grow old without Her. He’d try to pray, but he, too, had been raised with an ineffective jumble of spiritual influences. He had no particular church allegiance.
He tried out atheism and vegetarianism, though neither suited him; he enjoyed the family lore that he had a Jewish ancestor. He always came back to the belief that creeds, religious and otherwise, were for those who did not have sufficient internal moral guidance.

  The magazine writers, when faced with a blank column and nothing to write about, sometimes took to criticizing Browning’s new life in London. He spent his time in gilded salons, they would sniff, of the great and wealthy, snobbish like his poetry. He was fond of expensive Scotch. (He hated it, but the writers had mistaken his port for it.) He liked to be among refined people who appreciated him. Very well. But what did any of it have to do with poetry? Besides, mixing with society and the friction of ideas were necessary things to a writer. These were the arguments Browning would make to himself or to sympathetic companions. He would never say—hardly ever let himself think, really—how he needed society for a more pressing reason, to avoid the emptiness that existed without Her.

  After the death of Lizzie Siddal, Browning made himself available to Gabriel. It was not only to repay Gabriel for being there when he returned to London after his own Elizabeth died. He knew what Gabriel was experiencing and, selfishly, having a companion whose wife was torn away would mean Browning was not quite so alone.

  But Tudor House had been the oddest of odd places for two widowers’ grieving. It once came out in conversation, somehow or another, that Browning had never seen a raccoon. Gabriel couldn’t have been more excited. He rushed Browning to a large packing case with a slab of marble on top of it. He induced Browning to help him move the slab. Gabriel then dipped his hand inside, pulling out his latest creature by the scruff and holding it up as it bared its teeth and tried to claw at anything close enough.