The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  After Holmes’s revelation, whenever the trio was at Christina’s house at Euston Square, which they avoided so as to not disturb her mother or worry her about Gabriel, or at Browning’s house on Warwick Crescent or Tudor House—their base of operations—they made certain to keep an eye out for any signs that they were followed or observed. They took pains to arrive separately and to conceal papers and books that contained their more important notations.

  It no longer helped Christina to will herself not to fall into the trap that had plagued her father and Gabriel—that anxiety about being watched and followed by some outside menace. This time those anxieties were justified.

  They planned expeditions to try to learn everything else they could about the deaths of Jasper Morton and Lillian Brenner. There were discreet visits to the deadhouse to see the bodies. It was customary for victims to be displayed for the public in case people remembered anything of value to the police by looking at the faces of the dead or their articles of clothing (which were hung on hooks next to the bodies, while the bodies were washed with a stream of water to keep them fresh). Browning dutifully went but could hardly remain in the observation area for two minutes without sobbing; Holmes studied the bodies with an expert’s eye, and Christina seemed to take in the gruesome sights with an unflinching glare, taking a special interest in Miss Brenner’s clothing before rushing out with her head down, nearly crashing into several other bystanders.

  Browning was far more comfortable attending a London memorial for Morton, though there wasn’t much of interest to observe there (other than the conspicuous, slouching figure of their friend-rival-paragon Tennyson among those attending). There was a memorial prayer service for Miss Brenner at a small church that Christina had attended in the past, so she went there to hear more details about the opera singer: her dreams as a small child of singing for the public, her rigorous training by her father, her quick rise to prominence because of the immense compass of her voice, even if it lacked the flexibility of the best soloists. They secured seats for the benefit opera performance of Fidelio. Christina insisted on purchasing a seat in the stalls for herself, not in one of the frightfully expensive six-guinea private boxes where Holmes and Browning would be. They would not sit together, but of course that was part of their plan.

  Browning’s plan. He thought that by attending the opera separately they increased the probability of overhearing information from other audience members who knew Miss Brenner. Christina had been less than pleased with the entire visit to the opera house, but agreed it was a necessity. Although she enjoyed operas and plays in her youth, she long ago swore never to attend them because their dramatized stories were so often vulgar, if not utterly impious and unchristian. Christina followed the same practice with reading books, as a result almost entirely swearing off modern novels and, until the recent events, most newspapers. Look elsewhere for news, she would tell family members, but not to me. When it came to operas, the actresses and singers and musicians all had reputations for what Christina would kindly call moral agnosticism.

  Charles Cayley, during the years when studying under the professore brought him to the Rossetti home, had once laughed to Christina about her managing not to notice the existence of anything improper in a place like London. “How I wish,” the translator said in a state of sudden reflection, “I could see through such innocent eyes.”

  Part of the purpose of their expeditions to memorials and to the Haymarket Opera House was to identify any person Morton and Brenner might have known in common with Gabriel—someone who might have been involved in their disappearances who was also in a position to have known and taken Gabriel.

  They continued to prepare and study their notes. For hours at a time Holmes—as though delivering one of the famous medical lectures Christina had heard about over the years—narrated more details about the murders that shocked Boston. Christina and her accomplices faced a disadvantage in trying to trace the influence of Dante around London compared to that surmounted by Holmes and his Dantean friends. Boston in 1865 had been a time and place when almost nobody had knowledge about Dante or the Divine Comedy. Now that Longfellow’s translation of Dante had been widely published on both sides of the Atlantic, competing translations multiplied. With Dante so fashionable, they could not limit their suspicions to those who were so-called true Danteans. Holmes, in telling his tales, pointed out some of the key lessons they’d observed in Boston. One of these was the special appeal to the eye and mind of a soldier in the way Dante organized the world in pursuit of rightness and justice. Dante also had been a soldier in his youth, and since the beginning of human history the soldier and the poet had shared great (or terrible) imaginations that remade their surroundings.

  The words poured forth from the doctor’s mouth whenever he worked up steam on a story, but in talking about the Dantesque occurrences in Boston, there was something more than his ever-present energy and momentum of narrative; there was relief. He had liberated a part of his history that had festered by being locked inside him. There was also a degree of pride in what he and his friends accomplished.

  “After all,” Holmes tried to explain, realizing this pridefulness had been revealed by his tone, “Dante could have been blemished for ages if not for our clandestine intervention.”

  “With due respect, Dr. Holmes, what I care about, all I care about, is the safety of my brother,” said Christina. “I wish to make it very plain that the integrity of Dante Alighieri does not concern me.”

  Holmes hung his head a little and apologized with a nod.

  She did not mean to dismiss the importance of protecting literature from being perverted through violence. Dante, after all, buoyed her father to his dying day, and had inspired her siblings and herself—but this was the problem. She had to employ her expertise without getting sucked into the Dantesque vortex.

  When the Rossetti family’s fortunes crumbled, it seemed to happen in a single moment, though it had been coming for a long time. As children, they were often surrounded by Italian refugees and exiles who came to their home for conversation with the professore (mostly in Italian, though sometimes slipping into French) and to share the little food the family had. The professore said most of these callers were either cercatori or seccatori, the begging or the boring. But sometimes they were revolutionaries, conspirators, even assassins. Young Gabriel would stop his sketching or his dominoes to listen carefully to these stories of overthrowing corrupt rulers in the name of liberty. The boundary between being an exile and being mad seemed to be a fine one, convincing Christina that losing one’s rightful place in the world could mean losing one’s mind.

  There was a man named Fiorenzo Galli, to take one example, who sat in their house giving a very careful speech to prove he was Jesus Christ. Then there was Signor Galanti, who offered predictions of disasters to come, claiming first would start the Age of Roses and Thorns, then the Age of All Thorns, then the Age of Death. When the professore dismissed Galanti as a bird of ill omen, the visitor rose, crying, “You will see one day, Rossetti, whether I speak the truth, and you will confess it, but I will not await the direful time that is coming upon us!”

  Galanti then went to his house and slit his own throat.

  The professore quietly carried around his own superstitions. In the Abruzzo region of Italy where he came from, stepping over a child was said to stop the child from growing. There were always children on the floor of the small Rossetti home—playing, drawing, writing verses and novels, and even compiling their own family magazine printed by their grandfather. There would sit the professore, in such a fury of work at his desk, but when he needed to retrieve a book, he would begin a slow, delicate dance across the combined study and drawing room to reach the shelf, ensuring that his shadow did not touch any of them.

  Fewer refugees came over time—few visitors at all—as the professore began to conclude that a cabal of bloodsuckers around the world, including the novel
ist Victor Hugo, sabotaged his labors. He feared his own reflection in the mirrors, so Mrs. Rossetti took almost all of them out of the house. As Christina prepared maccheroni asciutti with Parmesan cheese and butter for the family, she overheard the professore confiding to her mother: “Whether Neptune or Vulcan devour my vigils, I shall not see it, I shall not suffer.” Meaning, in his dramatic language, his work would end up at the bottom of the sea or in ashes. And another outburst another time: “My own shadow terrifies me, Francesca! I have become like one of those people of exaggerated piety who think that in their most insignificant action they have committed a mortal sin.”

  Maybe they had entered Signor Galanti’s Age of All Thorns.

  As the professore continued to spend more time working on Dante in solitude, his eyes and health worsened. He had nightmares if he could sleep at all. He was forced to resign from the university, where there were fewer students who wished to study. (When Queen Victoria married a German, studying German became all the fashion, leaving Italian further behind.) In his best year the professore made no more than ten pounds, which they kept in a box in the house, never having enough to open a bank account. A few loyal pupils like Cayley continued to engage him as a private tutor of Dante and Italian, mostly as an excuse to help the struggling Rossettis. The family was left with little money and no expectations of future income. What the professore did next amazed everyone: he kept working on his Dante. He would spend the rest of his life, if necessary, but swore he’d finish his Dantean labors.

  Maria and Christina, who put her poetry aside for neither the first nor last time, both sought work as governesses to keep them from starvation; Christina also helped copy out the New Testament for a new edition until her fingertips bled from calluses, their mother worked as a teacher, and William picked up extra income outside his clerical job when he could. Gabriel, meanwhile, would wander around museums and galleries for inspiration, remarking that he was in too lively a poetry phase to waste himself on menial work. He was his father’s son.

  In the professore’s final years, when he was an invalid, he was hardly able to move from that desk where as children they believed he conjured his friend Dante. He wore a visor to prevent light from hitting his face and insisted the curtains remain closed. “I am so tired of life that I shall bless my death when it comes. I wish to die, but God will not yet concede me the great benefit.” His shrunken, bent form was wrapped in a dressing gown in the bed where he died.

  The Age of Death.

  Dante’s power over her family destroyed the professore and—if her supposition that this had been the reason Gabriel was taken proved correct—Dante was destroying his namesake. This time, though, she had been blessed with a chance to stop it.

  * * *

  —

  At the banquet in the opera house following the performance, Christina could tolerate no more. It was some form of punishment to be forced to observe moral decay disguised as amusement. She took another look at the young women nearby, some throwing their arms around men, others leaning on shoulders or holding court with two or three admirers at once. That was it—the performance and its gaudy costumes had already shaken her; she could not stay a moment longer.

  Over the last weeks, she’d become accustomed to justifying her deceit toward others for the sake of finding Gabriel. For example, to pretend that she had not known Holmes and Browning were present when the zealous man from the opera company brought them to each other. But to descend into this elegant debauchery! She thought of her sister, Maria, in her convent while Christina stood here. Here!

  As a young girl, Christina admired the liberated, eccentric set she encountered at her parents’ dinners more than she cared for the handsome, well-dressed people. She most envied those who roamed London freely at night. When she discovered the ways of God through her mother’s strict Anglican Church, however, she knew her path, however far out of fashion it fell. Many people blossomed as they moved into adulthood, but not Christina. She retreated to safety. In this way, she felt herself join with the poet she had tried to run away from her whole childhood: Dante Alighieri. According to Boccaccio, Dante had been a noisy and social boy, then somber and lonely as a man and as a poet. He had found a higher calling that had to be preserved and protected. He became impregnable.

  That was a word to which Christina aspired.

  She fled outside to the front of the opera house, into the cold night air of busy Haymarket. Every rattling coach and strolling couple invoked judgment against her.

  She could almost hear William chide her with what he had been thinking during this whole affair of Gabriel’s disappearance: Where did you expect to end up, when you decided to follow Gabriel down his path of darkness and selfishness? Where else, but where you utterly despise?

  She pulled her scarf tightly around her neck. Slender Christina felt chilled with the slightest breeze. She would not acknowledge it to anyone, but it was one of the reasons she almost never left her house after dark.

  Standing out in the cold night brought memories of one of the last times she had seen Gabriel before he disappeared. He had turned up without warning during the night at Euston Square and called to Christina’s window. She ran down the stairs before his shouts could wake their mother.

  “I saw her today,” Gabriel confided to Christina in the garden. The expression on his face was an odd mix of euphoria and fear.

  At first she thought he meant he had met someone, maybe a woman who could take his mind off his torments. She was about to ask her name. Then she worried he meant Lizzie herself. A mirage, a ghost, a phantom, as had plagued him in the dismal days he’d heard murderer echo through empty rooms.

  “It was at Highgate.”

  “The cemetery? You visited her grave?” Christina asked, deeply concerned. That was the worst place for Gabriel to go to preserve his mental state.

  “William took me,” Gabriel had said, so hastily that it did not sound entirely truthful. Then he smiled. “Her hair is like the sun, Christina, and runs down her back like a cape. Oh, dear sister.” He took both of Christina’s hands in his. “What would it mean to be blessed with a new light? ‘So that all ended with her eyes, Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise.’”

  Christina recognized the verse from one of Gabriel’s sonnets on Dante that he had buried with Lizzie. She had half expected him to forget the poems that he had put under the ground. “Remember, Gabriel, remember Father thought everything was to be found in Dante, and he ended with nothing.”

  “Don’t you see, Christina? We Rossettis will always be prisoners trapped between Dante and Beatrice.”

  She tried a different tack: “You ought to stay away from Highgate, Gabriel.”

  “You know how I am, Christina,” he said, suddenly pensive. “What I ought to do is what I can’t do.”

  The memory broke down as Christina heard her name called out from the doorway of the opera hall. She expected Browning or Holmes had followed her out to reproach her for leaving. Preparing to stand her ground, she turned to see Charles Cayley.

  “Miss Rossetti,” he said shyly in his nasal voice, unconsciously frowning at his attempt at a formal outfit as though seeing it only now through someone else’s eyes. He wore a rumpled shirt with no collar and a shabby tailcoat. “I thought I wouldn’t find anyone to speak to here. I grew rather tired standing in the corner alone.”

  “What brings you to an affair such as this, Mr. Cayley?” She regretted her accusatory tone, absurd considering she was there, too.

  Cayley paused for a long time, as he tended to do when asked even the simplest question, then explained that the opera company had engaged him to translate some of the more obscure German lines of the production so the singers could understand their scenes.

  “It is a little pocket change to help finance my latest translations of Dante and Homer,” he added, turning red at his own mention of money. “Excuse me if I seem unable to p
ut one foot in front of another here, Miss Rossetti. It is not my usual environment, nor the clothes.”

  “Count me in that same category.” In fact, Christina had worn her usual dark, plain dress, refusing to make a show of herself.

  “Has Gabriel been back home?” he asked with a smile. Cayley was always on the verge of smiling, as though appreciating a joke only he was hearing. “I would imagine he is the only one alive who could persuade you to come.”

  Christina started to speak, then simply shook her head.

  “Well, I suppose he will be armed with some good stories whenever he returns to London from . . . wherever it is. Miss Rossetti . . .” He was about to ask a question before he stopped himself. “I remember Gabriel’s hearty greetings when I first knew your family, when I would come to study at your father’s feet. The professore adored you all; I fancy you helped him forget his exile. And I remember first seeing you.”

  “Do you, Mr. Cayley?” The idea shocked Christina more than she could have explained.

  After another of his pauses, he exclaimed: “Certainly! A slight, murky-eyed, lovely little girl standing at a narrow desk, with a profile made dark by the winter light coming in, composing industriously, never looking over at me, not even once, as though I were a figment. Then, another evening, your father invited me to come back for dinner, and I looked forward to being able to speak to you. You were reading in your room, and never came in. I always wondered if you even knew there was a visitor.”

  She had. She had trembled down to her feet at the presence of the brilliant, nervous pupil of her father’s. Though she was not going to tell him that, not then, not now, never. “Were you going to ask something a moment ago, Mr. Cayley?”

  “This is terribly presumptuous of me, but if you are half as miserable going back to that noisy, crowded banquet as I am . . . well, do you fancy taking a walk?” He offered his arm.