The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  In the morning, Dolly was called over to the deadhouse to restore order. There was a throng of people, doubling back on itself into the street, to view the bodies of Jasper Morton and Lillian Brenner. The public clamor was not to help—or not chiefly so—but to share in the spectacle.

  Two days later—as certain as daylight—a message arrived at Scotland Yard from the Home Secretary requesting Dolly visit Buckingham Palace. The constables and other detectives glared upon him with jealousy and pity on his way out. He didn’t fear what was coming from the visit to the royal palace—Dolly didn’t fear much, other than not finding his quarry in a case. But he didn’t like the interruption to his plans for the day or the distraction this would provide to the policemen who worked under him. He remembered, at the last moment before entering the palace, to discard the sprig of grass he had between his teeth.

  He was escorted by an attendant through chandelier-lit halls and up broad flights of stairs. His colleagues back at Scotland Yard probably envisioned him playing whist with Her Highness. But he only saw the queen for a moment through a row of open doors—Victoria was chubby and pink and sat with some ladies over tea. The rest of the visit he was seated in a non-palatial office with the queen’s private secretary, Charles Grey. Grey was an ex-military man and ex-member of the House of Commons and, as a result, carried himself with an air of competence and urgency. Grey liked speaking more than listening, and he diplomatically prodded Dolly for information on his investigation and in return passed on mostly irrelevant advice.

  Grey had known Jasper Morton in Parliament, and although he admitted to never actually liking the man, he became impassioned when speaking about his murder, and insinuated the queen was similarly impassioned (which, at the moment, was hard for Dolly to imagine, having just seen her tear a dainty bite of chocolate sponge cake). “Her Highness has come from Windsor to deal with a multitude of pressing matters, this included. She wishes me to convey that the police ought to take some very stringent measures.” The secretary also railed against the notion of a young woman murdered, as though Miss Brenner’s was the first such death in England. Dogs? asked the royal secretary.

  “We’ve taken the bloodhounds out, yes sir, to the harbor and to some of the neighborhoods known to shelter criminals on the run,” Dolly assured him, with little confidence in his voice. The dogs were trained to take in scents—from the scenes of the two deaths—and try to match them elsewhere, but the method was little more than an experiment, and had not yielded clues.

  Grey promised all kinds of resources from the palace, though with the exception of one or two, most were distractions.

  There was a larger, unspoken message of the unusual visit, and of making sure Dolly had that glimpse of the queen: Dolly was to bring this case to a conclusion quickly, and put a stop to further public ripples. Grey commented that many inside the palace favored a theory that the culprit had to be a foreigner. Maybe even an Irish Fenian to distract the police from the scoundrels’ real plans.

  “Theories, theories, theories,” Dolly said. “We are nearly lost in them.”

  The Home Office the next morning announced they were providing Dolly with more men, no doubt a modification insisted upon by Grey. By order of the commissioner, extra policemen, armed to the teeth with revolvers and cutlasses, were to observe the city from the roofs of buildings and down in the sewers looking for the Dante-inspired killer, but reports came back to the police offices as “all correct” (though one police sergeant got lost for four hours in the sewer system and, after it was feared he might have gotten stuck and drowned, turned up safe on the other side of London). The Home Office also ordered that two detectives and two men of lower ranks be sent abroad, one to Italy and one to France, to investigate whether the menace in London might have had some faraway source.

  Some of the extra operatives were useful as Dolly scoured London looking for connections between Morton and Brenner, and between either murder victim and the literature of Dante Alighieri. The fact was, members of Parliament sometimes attended an opera, opera singers sometimes voted in elections for Parliament, but beyond that, the two unfortunate people might as well have lived on separate planets.

  There was an assortment of new items of greater interest that floated across Dolly’s desk—for example, that Morton had been seen wearing a disguise as he hurried through the London streets one night, and that Brenner visited several opium dens.

  Now Dolly had Constable Branagan driving him all over London through a seemingly random set of destinations. The detective interviewed some of the individuals identified by the new men as having additional information. As they went along in the more troubled quarters of the city, Dolly would inevitably be noticed by bulging eyes and, in a peculiar way, welcomed. Pickpockets would flip their pockets inside out to show their lack of booty. Miscreants offered vulgar toasts to Dolly’s health with pots of ale. A woman raced across a street to shake his hand, and other women smiled gently at him.

  Some of the locations Dolly wanted to visit were perplexing.

  There was the modest box of a house at Charlotte Street. Dolly walked back and forth in front of it. He wasn’t quite pacing. He seemed to be counting his steps.

  “No garden,” he mused. “They must have stayed inside—reading, no doubt, writing.”

  “Who?” Constable Branagan asked—who could say why he asked, as he knew the detective would not give him an answer. Not yet.

  “Twenty-five, thirty years ago this street was filled with poverty and struggle.”

  Dolly announced his credentials to the residents and scurried around the house. He called out from inside one of the rooms: “House looks bigger from the outside, Branagan, then it is inside, doesn’t it?”

  True. But the observation didn’t render the visit to the little abode particularly relevant to the constable at a time when all of London was in an uproar and bills were being posted not to go out alone after dark. Nor did their next stop, which was a cemetery, seem pressing. Dolly went in but told Branagan to wait at the gates and watch.

  “Inspector?” Branagan replied. “There’s no one around. What exactly am I watching for?”

  “We are looking for information on people, Branagan, and that means there may be people looking at us.”

  On his way inside, Dolly tore off a bill posted on the gates. It read: Jew and Gentile, Tory and Radical, patrician and plebeian, can agree the police detectives are failing to protect us!

  After spending a half hour in the cemetery, Dolly’s figure emerged from a cloud of gray fog to declare to Branagan their next destination: the British Museum. Once they arrived, Branagan idled outside, assuming he should keep guard again.

  “No, Branagan,” Dolly said, popping his head back out of the building, “come inside with me. It’s as quiet as a stopped clock in here. If someone enters with an eye on us, we’ll know.”

  There was a line of hopefuls trying to get tickets of admission. As Dolly and Branagan went past several attendants in the entrance hall, Dolly took pity on the constable and explained a little more.

  “To understand someone’s soul, you must understand where they come from.”

  “So that house on Charlotte Street,” Branagan replied. “I take it that was where Gabriel Rossetti grew up?”

  Dolly nodded. “And it seems a home where the world would open to a young man primarily through his bookshelves and his parents.”

  “And the cemetery. His wife is buried there, I suppose?”

  “You see more than you reveal, Branagan. His wife and his father. But it wasn’t her burial that interests me as much as her exhumation. That grave I saw back there had been opened.”

  “Opened? Why?”

  Dolly waved away the question as he and Branagan entered the museum’s reading room under the great dome. With several witnesses near Lillian Brenner’s murder recognizing Dante Gabriel Rossetti there, earlier susp
icions became certainties. Coincidence could not be entertained; Rossetti was the man they needed to find.

  Inside the reading room, men and women studied books and newspapers in the soft glow of lamps. A trustee of the museum, with whom Dolly had exchanged messages in advance, greeted them with a stack of papers and a smattering of memories.

  “He would sit right there, as I recall,” the trustee commented, speaking in a whisper. In the chair he pointed at was a bald man with a straggly white beard who was roused awake by the attention. He was surrounded by the pages of a manuscript. The trustee handed Dolly some papers. “Yes, Gabriel Rossetti would sit and translate these medieval love poems of . . .”

  “Dante Alighieri,” Dolly said.

  “Indeed.”

  “But why,” Branagan broke in, “do you possess them? If he labored on them so, wouldn’t he have kept them?”

  “Well, Constable,” said the trustee excitedly, “that is just it. This was eight, nine years ago, mind you, so I cannot bring back every detail. But I can still see him as clear as I see you, Constable, and you, Inspector—yes, I see forty or fifty examples of man and womankind a day, but I could still see what a—well, never mind my memory of him. You could not look at him too much, in any event, because he was constantly looking over his shoulder, as though worried that someone would be spying on him. Back to what you ask. He would leave the papers here, like a trail of carrion abandoned by a predator pursued by hunters.”

  “Remarkable metaphor,” Dolly commented drily.

  “Why, thank you, Inspector. Yes, Mr. Rossetti would be consumed by his labor here—but he had no interest in what he was producing. These papers, so dazzling to me, were worthless to him. It was the act of entering Dante Alighieri’s mind he wanted. These translations are quite wonderful, so I preserved them instead of throwing them away.”

  “What does he look like when you see him in your mind’s eye?” Dolly asked the trustee before they moved on in their examination of the room. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti, what did you think of him?”

  “He looked like a man who could lead armies, if he wished to, Inspector, and destroy worlds. Quite like . . .”

  “Who?” Dolly asked when the trustee stopped himself.

  “You, Inspector.”

  * * *

  —

  The stains of cheap ink on her fingertips stubbornly resisted washing, even when she mixed water with lemon juice. Never in her life had Christina spent so much time with newspapers. When she wrote poetry, she looked for what she thought of as the moral movements of the words and ideas and stories. To share something with the public she equated to a spiritual responsibility, and she felt she had to deserve the honor of publication. Reporters, she realized as she immersed herself in the publications of various political stripes, wrote as though morality did not exist; there was hardly a beginning and never an end to stories they told, and no lessons to draw from them. They were fragments of unrecovered truth.

  Shaking her hands dry, she returned to her work at the big dining table at Tudor House, where Browning and Holmes created disarray as quickly as she tried to impose order.

  During the opera and at the banquet afterward, Christina had done her best, before her walk with Cayley and Tennyson’s appearance, to collect names of those attending before the dancing and the revelry. People sometimes asked her how she could spend so much time among prostitutes at Saint Mary’s but become so upset by dancing or other relatively innocent merriment. She always tried to explain that the unfortunate women she helped were hated by society even when they attempted to remove themselves from their field, while the immoral acts of respectable society were utterly ignored. The women, in other words, never had a fair shake.

  It had been after meeting Tennyson, once they got back to Tudor House from the opera, when Browning and Holmes shared their story of Lillian Brenner’s friend, Jane Cary, and Brenner’s all-consuming concern and jealousy of another singer becoming the prima donna. “Envy,” Christina replied, closing her eyes tight and picturing the scenes of Brenner fearing she would be replaced. “There is the reason Miss Brenner would be chosen to be punished for it. Whom did Miss Brenner share her feelings with who would have had the idea to associate her with the Envious?”

  “That is the bit of bad luck. It seems she spoke about it with anyone who listened,” Browning, a bit demoralized, informed her.

  There was more: Holmes recounted Miss Cary’s discussion of using opium—and while she didn’t say if Brenner participated in her dangerous habit, she had told Browning that she and Brenner were inseparable. It would be hard to find an opium fiend inseparable from a friend who abstained. “She revealed something else, too,” Holmes added. “She commented that opium has been much more difficult to find around London, even for those who need it, including soldiers—”

  “—and that is what made me think of what Holmes had already told us,” Browning interrupted, “about the natural appeal of Dante’s justice to the mind of a soldier.”

  Holmes continued, “If one of these soldiers observed Miss Brenner and her friend obtaining opium he required, this might have directed a soldier’s attention on Miss Brenner and, possibly, also on . . .”

  “Gabriel,” Tennyson finished his sentence. “Who also relied on opium, and may have been searching to replenish his own supply.”

  A soldier trained in stealth and in the execution of violence could have carried out the “punishments” of Morton—who had callously voted to send soldiers around the globe to fight in useless conflicts—and Brenner. Their reasons to examine connections to soldiers strengthened with information added by Tennyson. From him they learned how the widow Morton believed her husband had been disguising himself in order to hide from someone who may have been hunting him. Morton had commented to his wife that he was an “easy target,” an expression used by soldiers in the field hunting an enemy. If the madman had in fact skillfully stalked his prey, it was another hint that fit with a soldier’s training.

  There were other soldierly reflections throughout Dante’s poem of the afterlife. Lucifer, around whom Dante’s Hell is structured, led a military rebellion against God. Beatrice herself, guiding Dante’s journey, is described by Dante as an admiral. Cato, the supervisor and guardian of Purgatory, had been a soldier in war against Julius Caesar.

  “Promising ideas, indeed,” Tennyson praised them. “We could have a Cato of our own in our midst.”

  In the Tudor House drawing room’s burgeoning museum of the Great Purgations, they had kept track of all those mentioned as witnesses to the crimes. Some of these names they had collected themselves through their interviews, others they found in newspapers. It was a slippery process. Prostitutes, like the ones they spoke to in the public gardens, were nervous about being identified, and it seemed women in general were rather skittish about even admitting seeing such horrors. In fact, a blond woman at Morton’s death and a brunette beauty at Brenner’s were described in their library of newspapers as being among those closest to the scenes, but both presumably refused to provide their names, making it impossible for the group to pursue valuable information from them.

  Within the catalog of witnesses, the group set out to identify all the soldiers or former soldiers they could. As luck would have it, English reporters made a fetish of pointing out a man as having served in war, however briefly, bestowing authority upon whatever it was those witnesses had to say. This was true even if they had very little to say. Example number twenty-four: The situation of Miss Brenner’s death created chaos in the street, according to eyewitness H. M. Everton, a sergeant in the recent affairs in India. Tacking the names to the wall, however, amounted to little progress for the researchers—none of the names yet matched associates of Gabriel’s, and each was identified as being near the Morton death in the North Woolwich Gardens or the Brenner death in St. James’s Street, but none at both.

  Tennyson pointed t
o a classified advertisement in one of the papers. “Here is something important.”

  The advertisement was a letter that read: Dear Sirs at Cockles’ Pills, Like most literary men I am subject to violent constipation, & your pills I find of the greatest possible comfort. Yrs A. Tennyson

  “Did you really write that, Tennyson?” Browning asked.

  “Of course not!” Tennyson said with a laugh. “That is my point—only trust what we find in these news rags to a degree.”

  Tennyson changed the mood of any room he was in. Part of it was purely physical. His face was an interesting combination of strength and suffering. Christina understood women’s fascination with and men’s anxieties about him. Being with him was something like being with a king, she thought. Then there was his personality. He was decisive and autonomous. For example, he suddenly stood up to leave the house and promised, with a flicker in his dark eyes, that he had a notion of how to find more to test their ideas about a soldier’s involvement.

  Christina had also invited Cayley to come again, arranging one of Gabriel’s studios upstairs for the project he’d proposed to Christina on their walk around Haymarket. He was organizing the late professore’s vast unpublished notes and materials on Dante. She could tell that the other parties, Browning, Holmes, and Tennyson—who had to stare two inches from Cayley’s face to realize he wasn’t Browning or Holmes—thought it a questionable choice to have Cayley in the house at the same time as they were engaged in a confidential endeavor. But little sound traveled in or out of Gabriel’s upstairs studio, and Christina had observed Cayley from the time he had been one of her father’s pupils. When he was engrossed in his books and papers, the world could crumble around his ears and he wouldn’t notice. Cayley also provided a mastery of Dante—whenever they needed another opinion—that even the combined minds of Christina, Browning, Holmes, and Tennyson couldn’t match.