The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  “Look at that hill, Emily,” Tennyson said. “It’s four hundred million years old. Think of that. Now look at what is happening in this nineteenth century, and in the rain!”

  He threw down his silverware and, thinking again of the day’s mail, announced he’d stay in London for a few nights and attend to some business. He gathered a few things. On the stairs, he passed the print of the portrait of Dante, discovered hidden under whitewash in an Italian church, with the nail obliterating one eye, given to him by old Seymour Kirkup in Italy. He thought about what Kirkup had said to him during his trip to Italy. Something in you, the strange little exile said to Tennyson, staring up at him, yes, something in your face, Mr. Tennyson, suggests the lofty brow and aquiline nose of Dante.

  Of course, now there were those across England railing against Dante’s vicious imagination, as if the great Florentine himself had come to London to choose victims. Murders aside, Tennyson did not think Dante an unflattering face for his own to be compared. Dante was not only a brilliant poet but a serious one, something in short supply since the beginning of time. He did not suffer nonsense. Tennyson enjoyed the story of Dante meditating on his life and art in the church of Santa Maria Novella. A local bore, who did not respect the poet’s need for solitude, came up to Dante and began chattering and asking trivial questions.

  Before I answer, Dante replied, you must solve a question for me. What is the greatest beast in the world? Thinking about it, the man replied that the philosopher Pliny supposed it to be the elephant. Well, Dante replied, Elephant, do not annoy me. The man, dumbstruck, slipped out of the church.

  After promising Emily he would not overexert himself, Tennyson rode a ferry and train to London, where he met with his publisher and, after a slew of other errands and appointments, then a late supper, hired a driver to go to Tudor House in Chelsea.

  When he had met Gabriel in the past, it was usually out in society. Tennyson couldn’t remember the last time he’d called at Tudor House—perhaps after the death of Gabriel’s wife? Tennyson had dragged his feet as usual when it came to the awkward routines of paying condolences. When he had finally made it there a month after Lizzie’s funeral, Gabriel, in his painting coat, was beginning a portrait of a bride-to-be who was straining to keep smiling. She was the sister of a friend’s friend, and no doubt the session had been arranged as a gentle distraction for Gabriel. The pretty bride heard a strange noise behind her.

  “You’ve moved your head,” Gabriel admonished her.

  “I do believe that a wombat has got my hat and is eating it!”

  Tennyson and Gabriel rushed to the corner of the room, where Gabriel pulled the masticated hat from the wombat’s teeth.

  “Oh, poor Top!” Gabriel exclaimed.

  “I should have thought you might have pitied me, Mr. Rossetti. I shall have to go home without a hat!”

  “But it is so indigestible.”

  The evening rain began to fall harder as Tennyson approached Tudor House once again. He sheltered himself on the portico and knocked. The door opened on William Rossetti.

  “Mr. Rossetti,” Tennyson said. “How d’ye do? Forgive me if I appear surprised. I am looking for your brother, and I suppose I didn’t actually expect anyone to be home.”

  “Mr. Tennyson. Gabriel isn’t—what brings you out here from the Isle of Wight, on a night like this?”

  “Your brother was given a commission to do a drawing for a new illustrated edition of my poems—perhaps you know. He was meant to illustrate a few of my verses, starting with my ‘Ulysses.’ In all events, I’m afraid he was paid but never submitted the artwork. The publisher wishes to pester him for holding up our publication but cannot find him, so they pester me. Your talented but evasive brother, meanwhile, has not replied to any of my letters so, since I am staying in London for the night—”

  He paused.

  “What’s wrong, Mr. Tennyson?” William asked.

  “I’m being followed,” he muttered back, peering over his shoulder.

  “The police?”

  Tennyson stared back with an air of confusion. “A carriage full of tourists who have been after me half the day. Did you hear that? I think that’s the sound of the rascals coming again now. I hate publishing. Why could I not have the money from my books without notoriety? Let me inside.” He stepped into the house. “This is better, Rossetti. It’s been too cold and wet outside to keep a pipe lit. You don’t mind my smoking.”

  He threw his hat on a table and started up his clay pipe. Most of the curtains were closed. There were papers spread over the table.

  “Gabriel, he’s been—well, he’s away, and I’m afraid I’m detained here a few hours a day because I must collect all the demands from creditors and such so I can try to plead for time,” William explained, stepping over his own words. “Christina also has been . . . helping clean here.”

  “Pack of lies,” Tennyson said under his breath, with a grunt.

  “What?”

  Tennyson’s eyes lingered on the motley assortment of hats and coats hanging on the rack. He then flew right past William to the far wall, where there was a curtain—but not a window. He drew aside the curtain to reveal illustrations pinned to the wall depicting scenes of Dante’s Purgatory, side by side with cuttings from London newspapers about the two violent deaths that had mesmerized and terrified the nation. All of these were scrawled over with annotations and circled words and phrases.

  Tennyson closed his eyes and thought about one of his first walks with Gabriel through the London streets, many years before. Tennyson had been, as always, fused to his pipe, but Gabriel never smoked. Smoking was the one vice Gabriel said his constitution could not tolerate.

  “Oh, you make a great mistake,” Tennyson had said that night, puffing with relish. “What were you saying before?”

  “That I grudge Wordsworth any vote he gets!” Gabriel continued the usual literary parlor game of picking the great geniuses of the past. “Utter muffishness. The three greatest English imaginations are Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Shelley.”

  “The one I count greater than them all—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, even Byron—is Keats—thousands of faults! But he’s wonderful. Any new paintings of yours to admire around town?”

  “Oh, certainly, Tennyson, I hate showing my pictures to the public, but I’ve been agreeing to put more in galleries. I’ve been hanging myself daily, you might say.”

  “Something else, Rossetti. Too many of my family members have been stuffed with it by druggists and doctors.”

  “What do you mean?” Gabriel asked.

  “Laudanum, chloral, whatever it is you are ingesting to help you sleep, or to help stay awake, whatever it is making you rub your eyes red as fire. To quote an essay I read of late by Dr. Holmes, no families take so little medicine as those of doctors. Opium is a millstone, and will drown you. It will make you who you are not.”

  “Aren’t we all doomed to be who we’re not, sooner or later?”

  Tennyson made no further comment, and after a few minutes the subject had faded away. They passed a building one could hardly see because there were so many hackney cabs around it. Tennyson asked what it was, and Gabriel said it was one of the most infamous dance halls in London, filled with rogues and prostitutes. Tennyson wondered aloud what it was like inside, and Gabriel took his arm to lead him—Tennyson, who had had tea with the queen weeks before!

  “You wouldn’t really like to take me inside there, Rossetti!”

  “Tennyson, I never do anything that I don’t like.”

  There was a twinkle in Gabriel’s eye, looking over at that nefarious den. Tennyson had not meant he actually would ever go in, but there was no hesitation in Gabriel before Tennyson stopped in his tracks. None at all. His face at that moment, the strong brow creased, the big nostrils flaring, ready to flip the world on its head, remained imprinted in Tennyson�
�s mind.

  Tennyson noted the contrast to the well-groomed and overwhelmed countenance of William Rossetti who was wishing with every fiber of his being that Tennyson might leave.

  “Mr. Rossetti,” Tennyson said to William, “where can I find your sister, Browning, and Holmes right now?”

  William appeared completely befuddled, gawking with a combination of fascination and fright as though witness to black magic.

  “The handwriting,” Tennyson explained, gesturing at the annotations. “The more nearsighted a man is, the better he becomes at recognizing life on a small scale. Same goes for my hearing. Why, sometimes at night in Farringford I hear the shriek of bats from the stables. I have corresponded with Holmes over the years and I certainly know how to spot Browning’s hand. Please, where is Miss Rossetti?”

  After finding Christina, Browning, and Holmes outside the opera house, where William had directed him, Tennyson returned with them to Tudor House, where they could speak in privacy.

  William left as soon as they got back, as though scared of the conversation about to occur. Tennyson contemplated for a while as he smoked, then put his feet up on a table with a thud. “When there is trouble, I’m afraid I’ve come to assume Gabriel Rossetti might be mixed up in it. So I cannot say it is a surprise to me to realize that you believe there is some connection between his apparent disappearance and these horrible crimes. But what if Gabriel is the fiend as the police suspect?”

  “Heavens!” Browning boomed. “How would you know the police suspect Gabriel?”

  “Because if they didn’t, William would not have worried I was being followed by the police. Because if they didn’t, I presume you would be sitting in Scotland Yard sharing these ideas you’ve scribbled over these clippings and cuttings, and these lists of Gabriel’s past locations, instead of doing all of that in here behind drawn curtains. Don’t you agree?” Noticing the simultaneously chagrined and impressed looks on the others’ faces, he added: “And the new generation of critics say I have no imagination!”

  Tennyson rose to his feet and returned to the wall covered with the products of their inquiries, eyes narrowing behind his thick double glasses to make out details. “So Mr. Morton, MP, disappears until he is found crushed in the pleasure gardens—his death represents the first terrace of the mountain of Purgatory that Dante travels up. On that terrace the great Florentine encounters the Prideful, shades who are weighed down by unimaginably heavy stones. Dante stoops down to speak to them, as if he, too, is being crushed—because Dante, in a sense, must take part in every punishment he witnesses. Shortly after the time of Morton’s disappearance, the singer Brenner fails to appear in an opera where she is expected to sing. Later, she stumbles back into the picture among the grog halls of St. James’s Street, impaling herself not from being inebriated, as it initially appeared to witnesses, but from her eyes being sewn shut—reenacting the second terrace of Purgatory, where the Envious suffer that awful form of purgation as retribution for disdaining the happiness and success they saw in other people.

  “Now, I presume you fear the third terrace will feature your own Gabriel as one of the Wrathful, subsumed in the afterlife by noxious, dark smoke. But I ask again what all three of you surely have already thought to yourselves, one time or another, for as long as you’ve been engaged in this quest: What if Gabriel is not missing because he is a victim-in-waiting of these Dante Massacres? What if Dante Gabriel Rossetti cannot be found because somehow he perpetrated these crimes? Put it another way: how do you know he did not?”

  Holmes and Browning jumped right into the fray, arguing against Gabriel’s being responsible. Holmes used examples from his experience during the Boston horrors. Browning pointed out how the detective seemed to have made up his mind without hearing their information, and soon Browning and Holmes, each trying to outtalk the other, somehow ended up debating Gabriel’s philosophy of poetry and art. When there was a pause in the exchange, Christina stepped forward.

  “He is my brother,” Christina said evenly. “That is how I know, Mr. Tennyson.”

  Tennyson squinted again, studying her.

  In a window across from Tennyson, where the curtains had not been pulled closed all the way, a woman flattened her face against the rain-soaked window before shouting to unseen friends, “You can see the laureate well from here!”

  Tennyson hurried over to yank the curtains together. He turned back to the others, speaking at the same time as he took a puff of courage from his pipe.

  “That, Miss Rossetti,” he said, “is good enough for me. Though there is one brother of mine who, I am certain, might have been a murderer, had he even a tithe of ambition.”

  * * *

  —

  Simon Camp reached the bottom of the stairs beneath the bowling alley, where a man in a turban was emerging from one of the rooms, glaring at Camp as he passed him to go upstairs.

  Camp turned into the same door from which the turbaned man had emerged but was blocked by a gorilla of a man in a dark sackcloth coat.

  “Who was the sheik?” Camp asked.

  “Ask him, why don’t you, if you want your neck separated from your head,” the man said. “Lost your way.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Not yet,” Camp said. “Tell Mr. Matt Kadnar, won’t you, I bring presents from Boston.”

  The gorilla disappeared behind the door, which was next opened by a shorter man with prominent ears, a crooked nose, and sore-looking, red eyes. He was missing his left arm.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Greetings. May I?” Camp asked, waving himself into the room.

  The smoke-filled room was populated with men and women playing cards, with large stacks of money piled up all around. The man followed right behind Camp.

  “This is for members of our club only,” he warned Camp. He stroked his beard, which he wore long.

  “Oh, I haven’t time to play whist today,” Camp said. He reached into his coat and yanked at a bundle of envelopes, showing just their corners. “You are Matt Kadnar, aren’t you? Or at least, Kadnar when you are in Austria and Germany. Porter in Paris. McCord in Ireland. I’ve brought some letters to deliver from Boston, with some important information from your colleagues there in freedom and revolution. New trade routes for your arms shipments that aren’t currently being monitored, some instructions for building weapons, that sort of thing.”

  McCord put out his hand.

  “Not so fast,” Camp said, letting the letters slip back into his pocket. “Your friends in Boston assured me that in return for safe delivery of these you could give a stranger some advice.”

  McCord formed a small grin. “Look around. I can simply have those letters removed from your possession if I want.”

  “And I’ve given instructions to my associates in London that if they don’t hear from me in an hour, they deliver copies of these same documents right to Superintendent Williamson at Scotland Yard.”

  Some of the gamblers finished a game and rose to their feet. McCord nodded to the now-empty table, and Camp sat across from him.

  “What is it exactly that you want, stranger?”

  Camp glanced at the stump of an arm under McCord’s black suit. “I suppose you’re no longer one of the soldiers in your organization.”

  “You could call me one of its generals.”

  “I understand that you Fenian gentlemen keep a close eye on every criminal going-on in London.”

  “We know enough, aye. Enough that other activities won’t get in the way.”

  “Fine, fine, Mr. McCord-Kadnar-Porter,” Camp said, taking the letters out and slapping them onto the table. “I want to know all you’ve heard about these Dante killings.”

  McCord gave a shrug. “It’s a mess out there. Bobbies everywhere. They even got their bloodhounds running around causing a ruckus.”

  “With all the ears you have li
stening, no gossip has reached you about who might have done it or why?”

  “Not much to hear. MP Morton, he was some bastard, voting down any hint of rights for our people. The opera singer wasn’t one of the girls who were, well, available at a price, if that interests you. Not to say any actress or singer could be called ‘chaste,’ but she wasn’t mixed up with that sort.”

  McCord put his hand down on the pile of letters, and Camp slammed his hand down on McCord’s, causing four and then five men to appear behind the Fenian leader.

  “Who killed them?” Camp demanded.

  “If I knew that, I’d take a knife to the bastard myself,” said McCord. “Get rid of our friends in blue staring everyone up and down. We can keep our ears open, and keep you in mind for anything we hear.”

  Camp nodded, satisfied, then slowly lifted his hand away. “We have our bargain.”

  “What makes you so interested?”

  Camp, rising and ostentatiously brushing off his suit, paused and thought about it. “You could say I’m something of a Dante aficionado and want to know the story before anyone else.”

  “Don’t know much of the fellow myself.”

  “Dante? Oh, he’s something. Breaks all the rules of God and the afterlife, all for love of country and glory.”

  “What is it you’re doing now?” McCord asked, irritated.

  Camp was scribbling in his notebook. “I liked how that sounded, didn’t you? Love of . . . country . . . and glory.”

  “Leave your name and address so we can find you. But I’m afraid you’re never going to be the first to know what happened, not with Dolly Williamson on the chase.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Inspector Dolly has gotten in our way more than once. We have a number of comrades essential to our cause rotting behind bars because of him and his detectives. Nobody gets the jump on him.”

  XII

  From the time he was ushered to the body of Lillian Brenner, everything began to change for the police investigation into what quickly came to be known as the Dante Massacres or the Great Purgations (depending on which clever newspaper writers you read). Dolly felt the change in his bones before it happened, the way sailors knew a storm was coming. He sat up in his bed the night Brenner was discovered, writing notes on the case, but also waiting for the changes to come.