The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  Besides, there was a kind of ballast provided by Cayley studiously hunched over Dante material without worries of violence and crime. When she stopped in on him to ask if he needed anything, she tried not to feel too flattered by the quick, sloppy smile toward her.

  At times, she thought what it would be like to see Cayley more, not just under the pretense of scholarship. Then she would remind herself: any ability to devote herself to family, the essential quality for a wife and mother, had failed miserably in connection to Gabriel, who might already be forever out of reach.

  Cayley would tell her about his research. “I believe I’ve located indisputable evidence, Miss Rossetti, through a series of documents, that the historical Beatrice Portinari was indeed the Beatrice known to Dante.”

  “Mr. Cayley, Canto Thirteen, when Dante meets the Envious, he remarks that the shades wore cloaks the color of the stones, which in turn are described as ‘col livido color de la petraia’—the livid color of stone.”

  “Yes, I often wondered about that language, and discussed it with your father, who convinced me the color referred to was a combination of blue and black.”

  The cloak. Christina thought of the clothes folded near the body of Lillian Brenner in the deadhouse. Which included a dark-colored cloak. The color of the stones.

  Now, as she continued the labors with Browning and Holmes downstairs, Christina checked the time on one of Gabriel’s less unreliable clocks. Tennyson had been away from the house for three hours. Meanwhile, with the documents spread over the table, the other weary scholars searched for more mentions of any of the soldiers in recent newspapers.

  When the front door flew back open, Tennyson strutted back in with files on fourteen of the eighteen soldiers whose names they had gathered so far. After Tennyson bowed to cheers and applause, he explained that he had gone to the War Office in Pall Mall just as they were about to lock their doors. I’m at work on an ode, he told the official there with a self-importance that was both part of his act to fulfill the day’s purpose, and a part of being poet laureate. An ode, my dear fellow, to the courageous men who keep our empire strong and growing as we sleep and dine comfortably in our homes.

  Holmes cried out, “Bravo, Tennyson! And they opened their whole cabinet to you?”

  “Nearly all of it,” Tennyson boasted, lighting his pipe to celebrate the victory he recounted. “There are benefits of my post, I admit, though I often feel it crushing me. When I was first asked to be laureate by the queen, I wrote two letters, one accepting and one declining. I sat and stared at both until my eyes, weak to begin with, watered. I settled on accepting when my sister convinced me that as laureate I would surely always be offered the liver wing of a fowl when I dined out.”

  Christina noticed a flash of emotion on Browning’s face as Tennyson spoke of the topic. For her part, she could never imagine using her fame from her poetry to coax a favor—in fact, she never accepted that she possessed fame. “My name is Christina,” she would introduce herself even when faced with someone who had already squealed with delight upon recognizing her as the famous poetess.

  Ten of the fourteen military files borrowed by Tennyson included photographs. The documents inside listed tedious details about what wars and contests each man served in. The group studied these cold facts. They debated which man’s experiences most likely could have left him sufficiently scarred to turn toward Dante for a sense of justice.

  Christina could not help remembering Gabriel’s own experience being a soldier of sorts, however short and uneventful. It was ten years before, a time when everyone worried Louis-Napoléon was going to invade England. The “Artists’ Rifles Corps” was composed mostly of painters. Gabriel and his fellow artistic troops trained with weapons and were reviewed by Queen Victoria in Hyde Park, though Gabriel soon grew bored of the whole thing and dropped out.

  The day of research wound down without anything definite enough to satisfy Christina—a morass of grand ideas, theories, hypotheses, notions. The four retired to their own beds with a plan to meet again in the morning. Christina could hardly sleep, though, thinking of the faces in the photographs. They were mostly nondescript men with bold military mustaches meant to make them dashing but, at the moment, they gave Christina a pit in her stomach. One of the men could hold her brother’s fate in his hands. Or could she and her companions be chasing shadows, supposing one of these former soldiers guilty based on conjecture, just as that inscrutable Dolly Williamson seemed to be doing about Gabriel?

  In her dreams that followed, Gabriel urged her on, first with charm, then shouts. He always possessed a quick temper, and there had been a time the family hoped his marriage to Lizzie would ease it. But Lizzie, for her part, was just as unpredictable, and had lost her temper more easily after the stillbirth of their child.

  It was another of Gabriel and Lizzie’s arguments on February 10, 1862, that sent him stomping out of the house to seek out drink and distraction. When he returned, he found Lizzie in bed, breathing in a shallow rise and fall, an empty vial by the bed. The strong smell of laudanum pervaded the air. After the first doctor pronounced her dead, Gabriel called for another. Then another. As though all it would take would be to find someone with more imagination to bring her back.

  Lord, may I come to Thee?—that poem sat in between the bed and the mortal vial, her poison of choice. As one of the doctors examined her lifeless body, Gabriel read it through tear-blurred eyes.

  . . . My outward life feels sad and still,

  Like lilies in a frozen rill.

  I am gazing upwards to the sun,

  Lord, Lord remembering my lost one.

  O Lord, remember me!

  As Christina drifted in and out of sleep thinking of these verses and scenes, she had other visions. In one, she and Gabriel walked through Regent’s Park at sunset, a sunset Gabriel said made him imagine the sun setting fire to the distant trees and roof ridges. Then a yellow light swept from the trees, circling in a mass, and becoming all the canaries in London escaping their cages to be together, before each willingly returned to his or her captivity.

  The faces from the photographs flowed through her mind again, this time like images in a magic lantern. She sat up straight in bed, with an exhale that began in sleep and ended with her fully awake. She knew why the faces would not leave her alone.

  She had seen one of them before.

  “Reuben Loring,” she called out once Browning, who was rubbing the sleep from his eyes, appeared at the door at 19 Warwick Crescent.

  “Very unconventional hour for a visitor, Mr. Browning, and a woman!” cried the servant who had admitted her.

  Browning dismissed his domestic back to his chambers upstairs and brought Christina in. “Pay him no mind. No man is a hero to his valet de chambre. Who are you talking about, Miss Rossetti?” asked Browning, pulling his nightclothes more tightly around himself.

  She handed him the file Tennyson had secured for Reuben Loring. He was a thirty-four-year-old man listed as having served most recently in the Ethiopian conflicts. Browning took out the photograph—a deadened stare, curled mustache, a strong brow.

  “Do you recognize him?”

  “Should I?” Browning asked, shaking his head. “You know this man?”

  “No. But do you remember when we called on Arthur Hughes’s studio? Hughes ran after us and showed us the sketches he made the night of Morton’s killing—the studies of park-goers in the gaslight and moonlight. The man in this photograph was one of them.” She added before he could question it: “I am certain.”

  “I have found your certainty as reliable as steel, Miss Rossetti. But I’m afraid I don’t recall the sketches as clearly as you do. Wait a minute. Loring was on our list of witnesses at Miss Brenner’s murder. But Hughes sketched him—if it is the same man—at the gardens where Morton was found, which would mean—”

  Browning stopped himself, swa
llowing hard. Christina gave a severe nod to confirm he had landed on the most significant part of the discovery. Loring was at the scenes of both deaths. They had given a name to their adversary, their Cato-like overseer of a new Purgatory, and it was a name that seemed utterly unlikely to contain evil depths: Reuben Loring.

  XIII

  Browning sent messages to Hughes’s studio and learned from the artist’s late-night reply that the sketches he had showed them three and a half weeks earlier had been carried to one of his patrons to decide if he wished to commission a painting from the study. Christina insisted she and Browning call on the patron at once. Though too early to visit any civilized home in London, where calls were made between two and six o’clock, Christina was content to be a nuisance under the circumstance.

  They already met this same patron once since Gabriel vanished. Their earlier interview with A. R. Gibson had been to inquire whether he had run across Gabriel, to whom he also served as a patron. “Painters appear to steal patrons from each other as much as they steal models and themes,” Browning observed to Christina.

  Gibson welcomed them inside his impressive home, not mentioning or seeming to even notice the early hour. He wore his coat over his usual elaborate dressing gown. It was a large and mostly empty mansion. They sat in the airy library and asked about the sketches Hughes had sent over to him for review.

  Gibson—also patron to Gabriel compatriots James Whistler and Edward Burne-Jones—was a youthful, angular man, with brilliant blue eyes and the lazy demeanor of one who grew up steeped in wealth. Even the volume of his voice refused to labor, remaining the same whether a listener was beside him or across the expansive room.

  “Isn’t it something,” Gibson said, one hand carelessly caressing his velvet collar, “how this room could be the coolest in the whole house in the summer, and the warmest in the winter? Why, I practically live in the very library my father used to forbid me to enter, lest I muddy the floors with my always-bare feet.”

  He spread out his toes, and only then did Christina notice he was shoeless.

  “Father and Grandfather manufactured clothes—I joined their enterprise for a while, but stepped aside when I was twenty. Had you known that?”

  “You’re as surprising as usual, Mr. Gibson,” said Christina.

  “There is so much else in the world other than clothes, don’t you think?”

  Christina tried gently to remind him of the reason for their visit.

  He sighed at being forced on course, tickling the point of his short beard. “Well, Miss Rossetti, I haven’t had a chance to look over those sketches by Hughes very closely. I haven’t decided whether I wish to commission Hughes on them, truth be told, or whether they are just more of the same Hughesian drivel—people staring into space looking as though they wonder where they went all wrong. If I do commission them, I should want them to myself. What good is having beautiful art over your hearth, if other people have the same beautiful art over their hearths? Its magic ceases.”

  “We will not use the drawings for any purpose,” Christina said. “We need to study them for a few minutes, and then will trouble you no more.”

  Gibson accepted Christina’s promise and agreed to retrieve them. He left his visitors in the library while he crossed to another wing of the mansion.

  Browning took down a first edition of her Goblin Market and Other Poems. He opened to the woodcuts by Gabriel showing the two sisters of the titular poem in a protective embrace next to an image of the coming goblins. “Look over here, Miss Rossetti.”

  She gestured for quiet.

  “I am sorry, Miss Rossetti,” he said. “I blame the loudness of my voice, and the fact that I go too close to people when I speak, on the deafness of my father in his later years.”

  “It’s not that. Seeing one of my books where I don’t expect it is like having a stranger leap up from behind a wall and yell ‘surprise.’ Yet somehow people in both instances expect you to smile. Did you see this?” Christina asked, reaching a variety of Dante volumes.

  “What do you know? Dante galore.”

  “It is a respectable collection,” Christina said, whispering as she studied the titles. She drew out a volume sandwiched between Dante translations—a book delicately bound in red and brown calf leather. A book with no title.

  “I saw one like that at Tudor House,” Browning said. “I don’t recognize it.”

  She ran her finger along the bumpy spine. “My father’s final commentary on Dante. Nearly all copies were burned. Gabriel must have given one to Mr. Gibson.”

  “Yes. Your brother turned me into a lover of Dante,” Gibson said when he returned to the room and noticed where their attention landed. “What passion!”

  “Dante Alighieri’s, or my brother’s?” Christina asked.

  Gibson smiled and threw his head back in laughter, as though she had told a great joke. Christina never told jokes, and examined him with her serious eyes wide.

  “Imagine Dante walking among us, nearly a god on earth! We can’t complain about his being exiled, I suppose, for without that happening, he would have never been driven to write his Comedy. There is the story that during his exile he came to Oxford to study. Think of Dante, so close to where we are now, breathing the air we breathe. Now, as to Dante,” Gibson said, “oh, but now I speak of your brother—Dante Rossetti, he is unlike anybody else, an out-and-outer. A pagan, you might say, a hero for all that is beautiful and great.

  “I have a memory—may I indulge by sharing it with the two of you? Thank you. I was walking with Dante—again I mean Rossetti!—late one night. Poor fellow never sleeps, his nervous system, as you know, is all to pieces. A doctor I know says that if Dante were put into a Turkish bath he should sweat chloral at every pore. In any event—as we walked it came out that he was not so certain the earth revolved around the sun. I drew back in surprise at his unscientific declaration. ‘Well,’ said your sage and nonsensical brother, ‘our senses did not tell us so, at any rate, and what does it matter whether the earth does move or not? What Dante Alighieri knew is enough for me.’ In our age of sofas and divans, your brother teaches me to ignore comfort, and in an age of material things, he teaches me to test all that is unseen. Just the other day, I told him that he is the world’s truest teacher.”

  “The other day, Mr. Gibson?” Christina asked, for a moment excited.

  Gibson stopped and thought about it. “Oh, the other month—well, I hardly ever know the day or date, you know. Take your time with these, my friends.”

  Breaking into more throes of odd laughter, Gibson left them with the sketches as he shuffled from the room again to attend to another caller.

  From the front hall of the house, they could hear a woman’s voice, a crying child, and Gibson crying out “Responsibility? Responsibility!” over and over, as though each time the word was more absurd.

  Christina flipped through the sketches rapidly until she came, hands trembling, upon the one she sought. Browning held the photograph from Reuben Loring’s military file next to the sketch of the man in the gardens.

  The men were one and the same.

  * * *

  —

  As he sat engrossed by his work, Dolly Williamson was interrupted by Branagan. The constable announced a visitor who wished to see him.

  “If he does not need to see me in particular,” said the detective, not looking up from the paper where he was copying down a line from a book, “shoo him.”

  “To quote the gentleman: ‘I would like to see any fellow who desires to make solving these Dante killings as easy as lying.’”

  Dolly’s ink blotted as his hand stopped. “Easy as lying?”

  Branagan shrugged. “Some kind of Americanism. I remember hearing it when I traveled through New England.”

  Following Dolly’s instructions, Branagan returned to the inspector’s office with the gangly v
isitor, who sported a checkered waistcoat and bowler hat, which he tossed on a hook.

  Dolly asked him his name and business.

  “I’ve come all the way from Boston to help you. You see, I’m a Pinkerton man, of the famous American detective agency”—he omitted the fact he was no longer actually employed by the Pinkertons, and that they despised him—“and, simply put, I want to know what you know.”

  “If that nervous little Boston doctor-poet has engaged you to protect him from my questions, you can reassure him I have no further interest in him.”

  “Doctor-poet?”

  The chief detective saw by the visitor’s interested face that he had not, in fact, been sent by Dr. Holmes. The visitor brightened as he examined the plaster heads on the walls.

  “And these are . . .”

  “Casts of some of England’s most notorious criminals,” Dolly said.

  “Yes! I recognize many of them from my studies of criminal history, Inspector. You brought all these to justice, I take it. There’s the lass—Mrs. Kidder, wasn’t it? Drowned her stepdaughter in a stream, if I recall. And that ugly phiz must be Karl Kohl, who cut off his neighbor’s head and left it in the mud for the rats to chew on.”

  “Those ropes are the ones from which they were hanged at the gallows.”

  “Ah, that one, now that one is Barrett, the Fenian, ain’t it, Inspector? Last man England ever hanged in public. Won’t the people miss the entertainment?”

  “They can pick up a book,” answered Dolly.

  The visitor’s eyes floated along Dolly’s desk, landing on a book of poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

  “Speaking of that. Interesting reading, for a busy police detective.”

  “I repeat,” Dolly said with less patience, “who are you?”