The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  “Does it not look like a devil?” Gabriel asked with an openmouthed smile.

  Gabriel had worshipped Lizzie, as Browning had Ba. At times, Browning felt alienated by Gabriel’s version of grief. Séances, for example. Browning would call on Tudor House and there would be yet another medium discovered by Gabriel or one of his bons vivants who swore Lizzie’s spirit was impatient for contact.

  All the frustrations Browning had felt from Ba’s interest in spiritualism returned with Gabriel’s enthusiasm. The medium, while searching the afterlife for Lizzie, announced contact with Gabriel’s uncle John who, through knocking on the table, indicated he hadn’t committed suicide, as was believed, but had been murdered after the publication of The Vampyre. When Gabriel promised to reach out to Ba’s spirit, Browning excused himself. If it had been anyone but Gabriel, he would have shouted and screamed about the cruelty of charlatans. But he could never bring himself to try to take away Gabriel’s faith that, one way or another, Lizzie might return.

  Each had to pay tribute in his own way. For Browning, it had been The Ring and the Book. He first found the story at a bookstall in Florence in an old yellow scrapbook of personal accounts and newspaper clippings of a seventeenth-century murder of a young woman and her family. Browning was enthralled and repulsed. Ba was certain: You must turn it into poetry, my love. Tell her story. It was the last idea for a book he ever discussed with her. Browning tried to rid himself of it. He wrote to Tennyson to beg him to write it. (This is not mine, Tennyson wrote back in a moment of gentle sensitivity, before adding, and it is doubtful it can ever be popular.) Browning knew that however bloodcurdling the story, it was his great venture.

  He had come to basically live upon milk and fruit, usually did a good morning’s work, went to bed early, and got up earlyish. But as Browning continued to wait for Christina, he realized they had all slipped in the wrong direction. Not away from the past sorrows, but heading inexorably toward more, more sorrow, more death.

  When there was a pull at the doorbell, instead of finding Christina, Browning opened it on a man in a cabdriver’s hat arranging a pile of trunks.

  “What is this about? Whose are these?” Browning demanded, before he looked past the driver.

  At the curb was a carriage; Oliver Wendell Holmes stepped down and sprinted toward the house, out of breath as though he had run the whole way from Liverpool.

  * * *

  —

  Shrews! No I won’t!”

  Even Saint Mary’s, so cloistered behind its high walls, seemed to fall under the spell of disorder that had spread across London. While Christina was instructing a group of girls whom she’d classified as illiterate or nearly illiterate, there was a commotion from the hall. Two nuns were trying to calm one of the newer girls, who was shouting.

  “I won’t! No, I won’t just quiet myself down!”

  The two guest preachers that day, Reverends Anderson and Fallow, offered assistance. Anderson tried to perform a blessing on the girl. “Sibbie, please take these,” Fallow said, giving his handwritten sermon to a quiet, dark-haired woman who had come along to assist him.

  “Steady there, my young friend,” Reverend Fallow was saying, in a skillfully reassuring tone. “What is her name, Sister?”

  “Ruthie,” answered a nun.

  “Steady there, Ruth,” Fallow purred.

  The unruly girl continued. “No, nothing steady about it, preacher! No friends here, you’re our jailers!”

  Ethel had also been trying to intervene and sprang to Christina’s side.

  “What happened to Ruthie, Ethel?” asked Christina.

  Some residents were suspicious or hostile to the greener girls who were in the position they had been as little as a few months before, but not Ethel. She was always a sympathetic advocate.

  “In prayer circle, she wished to talk about how she came to be here, about a man who punched her for sport, and her baby who was ripped out of her arms.”

  Christina nodded with compassion. Ruthie flouted Saint Mary’s strict rule that the residents not speak of their pasts, and certainly not taint the purity of the nuns’ ears.

  “She’ll be sent to the workhouse, won’t she, Sister Christina?” asked Ethel, her eyes filling with tears. “Or turned over to be inspected by the government physicians. I know it. Oh, how awful it is, poor lass will run right back to the streets for sure, and be as likely to end up with a slit throat as anything else.”

  “I’m certain it will be all right,” Christina said, not certain at all as she watched with sadness the nuns and Saint Mary’s wardens escorting the offender out of sight.

  Christina always walked with a martial gait, but when she exited Saint Mary’s, she moved at a clip even more decisive than usual. Since the evening she and Browning had visited Arthur Hughes’s studio, she continued searching for details about what Gabriel could have been doing on the Wapping side of the Thames when Mr. Morton was discovered. She had begun to have flashes of unwelcome memories—memories of stories she had been told long ago by her mother and aunts about searching for their brother—Christina’s uncle.

  A kind of British version of Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Polidori was a physician also known for his writing. Polidori, spurred by a challenge posed in the presence of Mary and Percival Shelley and Lord Byron, had written a tale about a monster inspired by foreign folktales largely unknown to the English-speaking world. The Vampyre ended up being published without Polidori’s knowledge, and readers became obsessed with the book’s subject and with guessing its author. Many thought the author was Polidori’s friend Lord Byron. Some said this odd circumstance of Polidori’s art taking on its own separate life drove him mad. He disappeared, sending his family into a scramble until his body was finally discovered. Uncle John poisoned himself with cyanide.

  I knew, her mother had reluctantly told her, as soon as my brother disappeared, I knew I would never meet him again in this world.

  Christina’s thoughts had turned to her uncle as she headed to wait for the omnibus, until she was hailed—and for a moment her heart skipped. The voice was Gabriel’s.

  Until it wasn’t. “There you are. Finally. That silly charity home of yours is the one place where I knew I could find you,” William Rossetti said.

  “You found me, William,” she said flatly.

  “Have you discovered anything new?”

  She wanted to boast of progress, but her demeanor crumbled. She knew he would pounce.

  “Christina, you are risking your health with this useless exercise. I do not want that and Gabriel—wherever he is right now—would never want that.”

  “If you are no longer assisting the cause, I thank you not to interfere with it and certainly not to tell me what Gabriel would want, as if he is not as much my brother as yours.”

  William’s practiced sigh came from a life surrounded by artists. “Do not say such unfair things, Christina. The ‘cause,’ is that what it is? Didn’t I probe line by line of that grotesque pamphlet on the Boston murders at your request? But there must be limits. There are natural limits to everything, and we ought to respect them. This is a matter for the police to finish—the police alone.”

  “Do you think they can ever be as versed in Dante as we are? It is in our blood. Do you ever wonder what would have happened if Father had not gotten out of Italy when he did, William?”

  William groaned. “I heard the story as much as you.”

  The professore would stare out the window, recalling it all with a bitter smile. Closer, my bantlings, hear of my time as a hunted fugitive. Ferdinand I had declared the professore a criminal for his poems critical of the ruler. The professore went on the run in Sicily. It was an admirer of his poetry, the Englishwoman Lady Moore, who saved him. She was in Italy with her husband the admiral, who sent a squad of naval men to drill in front of the house where he was hiding. Meanwhile, the professore
was given a blue jacket and slipped out into the drill, marching with the Englishmen right onto Moore’s ship. You, my bantlings, are in your own country but I have always been an exile.

  “You heard it but you never really listened. Everyone thought he was as good as dead,” Christina continued. “His life, the lives of his future family, all saved because one person, one woman, a heroine to all Rossettis, believed in him.”

  Christina stopped and smoothed out her dark dress. Since childhood, she had developed her methods for suppressing any outbursts of temper or anger—for remaining steady no matter the chaos ensuing around her. Making adjustments to her clothing was one of these tricks that carried into adulthood. “We know that Arthur Hughes told the detectives he saw Gabriel at the North Woolwich Gardens. The police already knew that when I called at Scotland Yard with Mr. Browning, and yet indicated nothing of the kind.”

  “Maybe you spoke with the wrong person at the Yard,” suggested William.

  “Inspector Williamson—the head detective for the case of Mr. Morton—was standing there as we spoke to the constable. He was listening. He wanted it to seem he was not paying us attention, but he was.”

  “Why would he do such a thing?”

  “Think of it. Gabriel is seen at the place of Morton’s death before anyone else knows what happened. At the same time, Gabriel disappears from public view—even from his family. He is a known fanatic of Dante’s poetry and ideas. It is not much of a leap to read the story Inspector Williamson must have in this.”

  “Sounds reasonable to me.”

  She began walking down the sidewalk again. He followed at her side. The omnibus was coming on at a roaring gallop.

  “Please, listen to reason, Christina. When we were children, you stopped playing chess even though it was one of your favorite games.”

  She slowed down her steps, curious in spite of herself at the point he wanted to make.

  “You stopped playing chess because you said it made you too eager to win. That it was an unworthy emotion for a Christian woman. Perhaps this puzzle with Gabriel is merely making you too eager to win, to be the first to resolve it before anyone else, whether you are equipped to do so, and whatever darkness it will force into your life.”

  The conductor on the platform shouted for passengers.

  “Mr. Browning is waiting. There has been another death in the style of Dante, and we must decide our next course of action.”

  “It is as the professore used to say: you and Gabriel are the storms, Maria and I were the calms. Only while you grew to master your passion, Gabriel gave in to his, and Maria gave hers up in exchange for God. Our brother may have the voice of Jacob but he has the hands of Esau. Do you not imagine I would have liked to live every day without duty or worry, Gabriel-like? I am left as the head of the family, Christina, and as such I forbid you from boarding that omnibus to Mr. Browning’s. I cannot stand by as Gabriel’s irresponsibility leads you to become as lost as he was!”

  “Was!?” she responded, her heart breaking.

  The conductor gave her a hand to the ladder. She willed herself not to look out the window at her brother as the vehicle pulled away.

  Nineteen Warwick Crescent, Browning’s residence, was as lonely and quiet as Christina knew her own home would be one day, whenever her mother was gone. Amid all the Florentine bric-a-brac of Browning’s study, the marble bust of Elizabeth Barrett Browning stood out. Browning’s late wife seemed to give a questioning glare at Christina’s presence, and Christina knew that by now the gossips of the London literary world would do the same. Elizabeth’s black haircloth chair supported a stack of books—a way of stopping anyone, Christina thought, from trying to take her sacred place. She put a hand carefully on the back of the chair, then lifted it off as though the furniture was burning.

  Just an old maid.

  Christina learned from Browning’s butler of the surprise arrival of Dr. Holmes; Browning had stepped out to take Holmes to a nearby telegraph office, where the doctor was to send some wires about his changed plans and to secure certain arrangements for his daughter as she continued her travels.

  Meanwhile, William’s exhortations blotted out what might have been elation at the news about Holmes. Standing on Browning’s terrace, the cold air washing over her, she shut her eyes tightly, suppressing her tears and memories until it became painful.

  After boarding Admiral Moore’s vessel, the professore eventually fled to London, which he thought sounded ideal for an entirely new life, akin to Dante’s La Vita Nuova. His pockets were picked twice the week he arrived. He would teach Italian and he would labor over his masterpiece, his great commentary on Dante. He had found in the Divine Comedy secrets that, he claimed, were earning him dangerous enemies who wanted to destroy him.

  Concealed in Dante’s text, he insisted further, were the mysterious mechanisms to overthrow all the corruption and degeneracy in the world. He also insisted that his work would elucidate the mysterious and previously misunderstood role of Beatrice. Those who thought she was merely the object of Dante’s love were terribly mistaken. She was a spiritual representation of truth, and should be embraced—like the Virgin Mary—as a kind of guide to the moral life for all mankind. The professore was certain a vast fortune could come to him and to his family from completing his text on Dante.

  The professore, on a typical day, would come through the door after teaching whatever students he could recruit, and sleep on the rug in front of their fireplace on Charlotte Street. When he had restored his strength, he would go to his desk where his books on Dante were open. Their father was a little man with a broad face and forehead and strong open nostrils. The children, hearing him grumble and shout about Dante, began to stay away from their father’s desk, afraid they might meet Mr. Dante himself in the shadows. Once, Gabriel tried to sneak into that dark corner and capture the hated Mr. Dante for himself. When the professore found out Gabriel had trespassed into his private territory, he glared at his son and told him, in a tone that suggested neither condemnation nor compliment, that Gabriel was a born rapscallion. (“He takes after the Polidori side,” Christina once heard their father say to their mother. “Your pazzo brother John, murdered by a book.”)

  She remembered Gabriel strangely unmoved that he had been caught in the transgression. Had it been her, she would have dropped dead of humiliation. Then again, Gabriel always experimented with his effect on people’s emotions. When he was young, he developed an alarming habit along these lines. He would make himself appear to be lame and, when a bystander would try to help, he’d run off in a fit of laughter.

  The fact is, she’d come to hate Dante Alighieri.

  He had been like a banshee, his screech always audible but not examined. For years, she read Shakespeare, Milton, anything but Dante. But living in the Rossetti household made her an unwitting expert and, over time, a reluctant appreciator. Dante had formulated the most perfect romance, a love so pure for a woman that it guided his entire life, even after Beatrice’s death. Especially after her death.

  Dante, ensnared by politics and hatred on earth, could only be disentangled from his past and renewed for the future by exploring the world of desperate ruin (Hell, or Inferno), the world of pain and hope (Purgatory), and the world never seen by mortal eye (Paradise). For Dante, simply put, Beatrice connected our world with God, the essential role of an angel whose form we know but whose mind and heart transcend our understanding. Centuries could not exhaust the wonder, sympathy, awe, and admiration that Dante left behind by responding to all that was lovely and terrible.

  Christina never stopped being wary of the horrors of the Florentine’s punishments. Gazing down a precipice fascinates the gazer enough to think of what a shattering fall must be like. So it was with sin and retribution. She had to put aside those reservations. She had to inhabit Dante’s vision so completely that she could pull Gabriel out from inside it.

 
Christina saw herself, as though in a dream, as a girl around six years old. Such a louder, wilder being than she’d become.

  There. There she is.

  They are at her grandparents’ home in Holmer Green, surrounded by fields. She finds her father under a reading lamp, though the day is sunny and beautiful and everyone is outside. She is caked in mud and tells her father of a dead mouse she found that she buried in a mossy bed. The professore laughs and laughs, compliments her rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes, her face like a little moon risen, tells her to return to playing “like a butterfly among the flowers, and when I see you next, my impertinent darling, vivace Christina, you shall be prettier still.” He sneaks her a fig, which he keeps hidden from Frances, who doesn’t approve of sweets for the children.

  She returns to the spot she marked where she buried the mouse earlier that day. She slowly moves the moss coverlet, and a black insect squeezes out. She flees in horror.

  She scurries inside, but they are no longer at Holmer Green. They are in their little house on Charlotte Street in the city. By her eye level entering the room, she is ten years old, eleven maybe, as she runs to the grand desk over which her father is slumped, long locks of white hair spilling down his shoulders. She begs him to look at a drawing she had made of a wombat at the zoo, when turning around the professore scolds her for interrupting his train of thought—something about discovering a pattern inside Dante’s medieval stanzas that would spell the final doom for the modern papacy. “What do you think, young lady, could be more important than that? Pull those curtains back, the sun stings me. Do you know not the rules to follow, after the many times I’ve announced them? If you are ever to be wanted as a worthy man’s wife, you must learn obedience, deference!”

  The girl scrambles upstairs, weeping so hard she can’t breathe. She grabs a pair of scissors and rips up her own arm, watching the blood rise up in large drops and collect into a unified stream, dulling the sting of her father’s rebuke. The tears dry up as the blood flows.