The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  Gabriel’s footsteps follow, and he pulls his sister—now in the dream-vision five or six years older, slipping from a girl into a young woman, even as he metamorphoses into a strapping buck—pulls her into one of his strong shoulders. Forget Dante, forget their father. Father’s an exile from his home country, says the older brother. He shuns daylight, and makes a goblin of the sun. He has lost his people, and so have we; we must protect each other to survive.

  “Miss Rossetti,” Browning called out from inside. “I have Dr. Holmes with me. My dear, are you unwell?”

  Christina stood in the wintry sunset on the terrace, gripping her arm as though the skin around the old wounds had ripped wide open.

  * * *

  —

  The flat center of his bare foot digging into the tip of the ladder, his other foot balancing in the air, his large body wobbled in rhythm with the motions of his hands. He assailed the wall with paint, thrusting his brush back and forth, shouting in frustration from time to time, and throwing the brush into the air. He would then reach for another one, certain that this brush would meet the unrelenting, intoxicating demands of his vision. Few of the techniques he used would be sanctioned by the art masters of London, but it was hard to quarrel with the beauty and power of the results so far.

  As the painting progressed, the massive chamber began to transform from an empty, useless place, an echo of soulless monotony, into a space made for this fresco, rather than a fresco made for the space. Dante Gabriel Rossetti struck and swiped, had tantrums lying down, naps sitting up, overturned his easels, then resumed creation.

  I still hope to be an outcast from humanity one of these days, he recalled saying to someone—perhaps it was Robert Browning. Browning’s solicitations and attention toward him sometimes turned into spying. He wondered if Browning could understand what all this was about. An announcement. A declaration. Browning—of all men, he who held Elizabeth Browning in his arms as she breathed her last breath—must have understood finally that death and art were inseparable.

  Verses he had composed floated through his mind, giving him a rhythm to paint by.

  Could I have seen the thing I am today!

  The same (how strange) the same as I was then!

  Gabriel went to work again. The image, as it came to fruition, showed a variety of tableaux, a panorama of living nightmares—one depicted a man crushed by the weight of stone on his shoulders, another revealed a woman suffering with eyes sewn closed. The solitary painter paced and stomped, raged at the sunlight streaming in to blind him, punched the wall here and then there, filling the place with clouds of dust. Then he’d return to his labors.

  There was an incomplete portion in Gabriel’s panorama in progress, a painting of a cloud of smoke, dark as night. This, the next step, the next revelation, the next ledge to reveal that made the depths of Hell timid by comparison: the terrace of the Wrathful.

  X

  A few piers down the harbor from where Oliver Wendell Holmes disembarked—only half an hour later going by the nearby clock tower at Salisbury Dock—another American stood tall on the deck of an ocean liner. The three-masted Daniel Webster had just made its arrival. The visitor in question brought to England one sole-leather trunk, two gun cases, and the mission of a lifetime; a mission combining literature, life and death, and a great fortune.

  Simon Camp, a scowler from birth, scowled over the railing at the dirty masses of people along the docks. The Pinkerton detective agency had cut ties with him before, when he was convicted for extortion and assorted peccadilloes, though Camp got a laugh by regaining his original position through more extortion after his release—extorting old Allan Pinkerton himself. But now the Pinkerton detective agency had struck him from the payroll once and for all after discovering he was the author of four anonymously published twenty-cent pamphlets about cases he’d investigated. Camp decided not to fight this latest dismissal. The job hadn’t been worth the bosh that he dealt with most of the time, and he preferred relying on his own judgment than another man’s any day of the week.

  He wanted to write a new crime pamphlet, and, with the extra time on his hands after his latest schism with the rotten, double-dealing, beastly Pinkerton, he had found his perfect opportunity. When he read in the foreign news columns of the Boston Herald about the dead politician discovered in a London public garden, he recognized similarities—possibly a direct connection—to the gruesome Dante murders in Boston he’d gained a pretty penny writing about (losing those pennies subsequently, which was an entirely different story). That’s when he booked his passage across the Atlantic. Now, upon arrival, practically as soon as he stepped down to the harbor, there was a ready-made scene for his pamphlet-in-progress!

  Camp studied the police constables flitting back and forth along the piers, some of whom were the same ones Holmes glimpsed earlier that day. Bloodhounds yapped and howled as they ran up and down lines of passengers waiting to board. This wasn’t just the usual customs operation looking for pirated books to confiscate and restricted goods upon which to heap extra fees.

  Liverpool, the dirty and ugly gateway to England, in the lazy late winter of 1870, amid the decidedly English stench of mutton pie and horse dung, witnessed a horde of police “bobbies” and their dog detectives scouring the seaport, all looking, hunting, searching: but for whom? A ghastly and heartless murderer still nameless to all but the fiend himself!

  He scribbled these words into a pocket-size notebook and punctuated his creative burst with a chortle of joy. When he later reached the train depot, he would find an even more promising development, for his purposes, than the sight of the constables. The papers hawked by the newsboys would inform him that a woman died in yet another method taken from Dante. Dante had a natural imagination for inventing torments. In fact, the surly Italian poet never seemed to run out of them.

  This mission would be even easier than Camp thought.

  And Camp’s own narrative would be able to feature a different champion this time. Not gawky students as in the story of the so-called technology disasters of ’68 (a pamphlet he’d entitled Science Run Amok), not stately poets as appeared in his original Dante Murders booklet, but him, Simon Thomas Camp (S. T. Camp, he thought of styling himself). This time, he would resolve the mystery by himself, unveil the identity of the murderer, and chronicle it every step of the way. He would be the alpha and omega. He would be the teller and the hero of the tale. Like that Dante fellow, he thought to himself, proud of how he’d educated himself since the first time he heard that name from the lips of a Harvard swell: Dante, a name that had already changed the course of his life, and was about to again.

  Dante, abbreviated from the Italian’s given name, Durante, or at least that’s what Camp remembered reading in some dull-as-lead book.

  Dante, a name about to carry him back to wealth and glory.

  * * *

  —

  The opera proved a rousing success. Spontaneous cheers interrupted the performance several times, nearly one-third of the audience stood for an ovation at intermission, encores drew the lead female soloist back to the stage at the conclusion, and only twenty-four audience members were counted sleeping.

  Perhaps just as satisfying was the number of distinguished members of the audience, including politicians, businessmen, philanthropists, and literary lights such as the poet Robert Browning.

  Browning’s natural element—society. His brilliant white tie and waistcoat, his spotless dark frock coat. Mr. Browning, the greatest diner-out and second greatest . . . Browning tried to drown out the words still ringing in his ears from his visit to the Hughes art studio. When he had reached the box in the upper tier he’d reserved for the performance, champagne and a plate of galantine awaited him. Browning took a bow at the round of applause given by the audience members who noticed him enter—as though he were one of the tenors for the evening’s show. His shoulders were practically a
s broad as theirs, at any rate.

  The opera told the story of a woman rescuing her husband from imprisonment. Not that Browning concentrated much on the drama of the opera, not with so much on his mind, ranging from the plans made that very morning to events that took place five hundred and fifty years before (approximately speaking).

  The thoughts that dwelled in those centuries long past belonged to the world of Dante Alighieri. It occurred to Browning that he was now about the age Dante was when he died. Unlike the sociable Browning, the great Florentine had been a severe man, by most accounts, though the earlier poet supposedly was courteous enough unless provoked. As Dante walked the lonely lanes of out-of-the-way Tuscan villages, the peak of his red cap drooping to one side of his head, he faced one of the many crossroads in his life.

  His wife and children pined for him since his exile. The hidden victim of his adoration for the memory of Beatrice was Gemma, Dante’s wife, whose thankless lot it was to be compared with angelic perfection. Now the poet had to choose between devoting himself to his poem—one that would probably take the rest of his life to complete—and initiating all-consuming plans to transport his family to be by his side. It was a decision all poets and artists make at one time or another, whether to stymie their art on behalf of the people they loved.

  There was the anecdote from around that same time recounting when Dante, as he strolled along in contemplation, heard one of his sonnets being sung—but with phrases added that didn’t belong. Dante followed the song until he came upon a blacksmith striking his anvil. He entered the workshop, took the blacksmith’s hammer, and threw it across the street, and did the same to more of the man’s tools.

  The livid blacksmith, nearly pulling out his own hair, accosted Dante. “Are you mad? What the devil are you about?”

  “What are you about?”

  “My trade, and you spoil my tools by throwing them into the street!”

  “If you do not wish me to spoil your things, do not spoil mine,” Dante replied. “You sing songs from my pen, but not as I wrote them. I have no other trade and you spoil it for me.”

  The blacksmith from then on would sing of Tristram, Lancelot, Grendel, anything but Dante.

  There were some writers who wanted all the world to read them. Then there were writers like Dante, who wanted as few readers as understood him.

  It was that kind of commitment that must have brought Dante to his final decision. He would leave behind his family, never to see them again. Perhaps not only because of the complexities of his creative needs and the hardships of his political exile but also because his masterwork hinged on love for a woman who was not his wife. His love for a dead woman—Beatrice—had become holier to him than his relationship with his family.

  Browning was increasingly convinced Dante spent much of his life searching for reasons why Beatrice had to die. Browning felt confident in this because he had done the same when it came to his Ba, though both women—Beatrice in 1290, Elizabeth in 1861—died of natural illness. He always thought about what might have been different had Ba been chosen as the laureate instead of Alfred Tennyson. Would the Brownings have returned from Italy to England? Could her health have improved, could she have grown stronger, could she have survived?

  Ba used to reminisce to her husband about her childhood, when as a girl she went to sleep each night with a nurse by her side because her father insisted she was too frail to be alone. I shall not like to be grown up, she remembered thinking to herself, because then I shall have nobody to take care of me—nobody to trust to take care of me.

  Browning was often asked about the seventeenth-century figure of Pompilia, the young wife murdered by her husband in The Ring and the Book. She was the center of his poem that had brought him a boost of wealth and respect. But so was Ba. It was why he’d dreaded to write it and why he knew he had to.

  Could she have survived?

  At the close of the opera, Browning accepted an invitation to attend the banquet with the performers and the supporters of the opera company, including many beautiful ladies sparkling with diamonds.

  This night of opera and celebration was unusual. All the proceeds would go to the family of Lillian Brenner, the company’s recently deceased prima donna. (Deceased sounded peaceful. Recently destroyed.) The proceeds left over, that is, after the expenses of the elaborate performance and banquet.

  In the banquet room, through the glittering crowd, Browning’s eyes fell on a young woman in the corner, covering her face with her hands. Typical Robert Browning—to be interested in the one woman who was hidden.

  He began to make his way over to her when he was interrupted by the proprietor of the opera company, who insisted on presenting him to other distinguished guests invited to the banquet.

  “Some people of your tribe are here,” whispered the proprietor, taking him by the arm and pulling him in a different direction. “I mean the literary sort. Come.” Then, louder, “Perhaps you already know one another? Mr. Browning, may I present an esteemed visitor from Boston, the famed ‘Autocrat’ Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes—poet, essayist, medical professor, is there nothing he doesn’t do?—and over at this table, the dear, one and only, Miss Christina Rossetti, who, believe it or not, had been in the stalls among ordinary people.”

  “What a happy surprise,” Browning said with a fulsome smile.

  * * *

  —

  Poets investigate. Don’t we? Isn’t that what we do every day?” Browning had philosophized back at Tudor House.

  This was four days before the opera.

  Browning sounded as if he wanted to reassure himself, though ostensibly he made the comment to convince Christina and Holmes as they plotted how to expand their search for clues after Lillian Brenner became the second victim.

  Tudor House had completed its metamorphosis from being the home of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to being their own version of Scotland Yard. William refused to play any further part in what he called their mad quest since Christina last met him outside the omnibus, though he still came to Chelsea to help organize Gabriel’s outstanding correspondence and bills and tend to the animals and property; the arrival of Dr. Holmes compensated for the loss of William’s help, as did consultations with the translator Cayley on obscure portions of the Dante text.

  Holmes’s medical and scientific expertise was a particularly welcome addition to their examinations. As he reviewed the vast amount of information they’d harvested, Holmes came to the conclusion that the perpetrator had to have been a master in anatomy to have designed the device attached to Morton and to have employed such a precise method of sewing Brenner’s eyes.

  Holmes, not belonging to this side of the Atlantic, had not known the Rossettis very well and knew Browning only slightly better, though all the celebrated American and British writers kept up with each other through regular letter writing and sent each other copies of new books and articles. To be asked personally for help—as Christina and Browning had asked Holmes, first through the cryptic telegram and then in person as they explained all that happened—was a matter of camaraderie between literary nations. That tradition could be traced back, at least in a symbolic sense, to the long-ago handshake of James Fenimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott, when the two gods of the page crossed paths inside a Paris stairwell.

  Holmes could not in good conscience let anyone—litterateur or not—be left with the haunting feelings that he carried around.

  To his new comrades Holmes spoke about what he had taken pains to hide from both Amelias (wife and daughter), from his two sons, from Inspector Williamson and Constable Branagan on the train—from everyone in the world, really, outside the circle of intimate friends who experienced the events with him and Longfellow. Holmes’s introductory speech, as it were, was given shortly after his arrival at Browning’s house.

  “It was four years and a smattering of months ago when it began—when Dante
’s Inferno came alive before our eyes in Boston. What followed changed us. That sensation pamphlet by the scoundrel Simon Camp eventually made it a topic of morbid fascination, but I watched the horrors too closely to feel anything a reasonable man would call fascination. If one had proposed that I would find myself in London in Robert Browning’s drawing room with Browning himself and Christina Rossetti, how many matters I would have wanted to speak about instead of . . . Well, my friends, we’ll postpone leisurely conversations. We have too much work to do, and we must do it with much caution, with the police watching you closely.”

  Christina dropped an edition of Purgatory, the pages fluttering from her place. Browning leapt to his feet. She and Browning in unison asked Holmes what he meant—or rather, Browning demanded:

  “What on earth did you just say, Holmes?”

  While Christina’s unflappable politeness came out as:

  “Dr. Holmes, please elaborate your point regarding the police.”

  Holmes told them every detail of his encounter on the train with Inspector Williamson. Dolly not only brought along his own copy of The Dante Murders—the detective made it very clear he had seen Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s copy of the same with notes written upon it by Browning and Christina. Holmes came to the conclusion that Gabriel’s copy of the booklet must have been studied by the police inside Tudor House, or taken from the house for that purpose and then placed back inside.

  Christina nodded her head vigorously. She was especially tidy and careful handling her brother’s belongings, in part out of a vague superstition that keeping his belongings in good order would make him more likely to return. She recalled the times over the last month that objects in Tudor House seemed to migrate an inch or two from where she remembered putting them. The culprit had not been her brother’s monkey, nor one of the poltergeists Gabriel sometimes searched for; it had been the wily operatives from Scotland Yard.