The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  Gray twilight pour’d

  On dewy pastures, dewy trees,

  Softer than sleep—all things in order stored,

  A haunt of ancient Peace.

  “Isn’t that splendid?”

  “You quote yourself often, Mr. Tennyson,” Christina pointed out.

  “Mine are the easiest verses to remember. Besides, I am the only one who can say my lines properly. Don’t you feel so about yours?”

  “Heavens, Mr. Tennyson,” Christina answered. “I should rather be before the firing squad than spontaneously recite my lines. It is the great vice of being a poet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I share my poetry, I am extraordinarily happy to receive praise, and bitter when more praise is given to another, someone such as Jean Ingelow.”

  “Ingelow?”

  Christina, realizing what she had said, seemed to startle herself. “Never mind, Mr. Tennyson.”

  “But you just said . . .”

  “Jean Ingelow. The poet, of Ipswich? Examining the newspaper columns during our inquiries, I inadvertently noticed her latest volume is in its eighth edition. Eighth! Perhaps you noticed as I sat looking at the papers that my complexion became a green tinge.”

  Tennyson just kept repeating Jean Ingelow, Jean Ingelow.

  “Yes, you will have to forgive me for confessing it,” Christina went on. “How conceited I must sound! The vanity—the pride and jealousy—of writing is a constant threat to consume us.”

  “Threat,” Tennyson repeated, trying out the idea, “no such thing! The vanity is what carries us along. Do you truly believe Miss Ingelow, who I recall as perfectly lovely and harmless in person and verse, will be read in a hundred years rather than your ‘Goblin Market’? In all events, I suppose we already know the good reverend does not feel particularly blessed to have poets trying to question him. I fear he will not be very happy to see us at all when he returns, no matter any of our literary accomplishments.”

  “He seemed quite worried our inquiries could bring down trouble on those under his protection.”

  “What was your opinion of the girl with him?”

  “Sibbie?” Christina replied.

  “She seemed like a nice woman. ‘Nice’ sounds objectionable to the ear, but it is useful—a ‘nice’ person is one that you’re satisfied with.”

  “I think women can persist in all kinds of imprisonment by men, and convince themselves otherwise.”

  “She ought to leave his service.”

  “Perhaps she hasn’t the choice. Here is a discovery, Mr. Tennyson: women are not men. There,” she said with sudden alarm.

  “Is it the minister?” Tennyson asked, squinting helplessly through his double-thick glasses in the direction she looked. “You know I’m the second most shortsighted man in England. Where is he?”

  “No, not him.”

  Her next word pierced the air.

  “Loring!”

  She had studied the photograph for so long that she could have picked out the soldier in a crowd of hundreds. The man was walking on a path toward them, and was conspicuous for his ordinary clothes—a black coat and boots—rather than the robes of the others they had seen. He was tall and powerfully built. Even at a distance, he seemed to sense something amiss. He turned and disappeared back toward the little grouping of buildings.

  Around the same time, on the other side of a hill, Holmes and Browning were both looking over a decaying brick building that retained hints of its more functional use in the property’s industrial past.

  Browning was asking a question about Holmes’s searches around London with Tennyson, in a way that suggested Browning worried about how he and Tennyson compared in Holmes’s mind.

  “True, we do look at the object of art so differently,” Browning said of Tennyson (even though Holmes did not ask or even wonder about this divergence). “Holmes, you’ll remember there is in Tennyson’s Idylls a scene of a knight being untrue to his friend and yielding to the temptation of that friend’s mistress. I should judge the conflict in the knight’s soul the proper subject to describe. Tennyson? He thinks he should describe the castle, and the effect of the moon on its towers, anything but the soul.”

  “I sometimes think that every man has a religious belief peculiar to himself. Tennyson is always a Tennysonite, for example. Some of our peculiar religions are simply incompatible with others. Perhaps the Browningite’s truth must always differ from the Tennysonite’s.”

  Holmes hoped to leave it there. Though usually game for debating schools of poetry, he couldn’t stop pondering Simon Camp. Even if he had imagined the sight of the private detective on the train—as surely he must have—the thought of Camp made Holmes think of all that had gone wrong during the days of hunting for the secrets of Dante back home. Whatever their accomplishments under Longfellow’s leadership, Holmes had also witnessed death he had been helpless to stop. Being a poet and a doctor, it turned out, both teased lifesaving powers the roles couldn’t always sustain.

  He willed their quest to move more quickly. In Inferno, time blurred and meant nothing, but in the middle realm, every minute mattered. Holmes could picture the moss-covered sundial in Longfellow’s garden back home, its inscription from Purgatory, Canto Twelve, line 84, fading a little more every year: Remember, this day will never dawn again.

  “How thoroughly England is groomed,” said Holmes as he looked around. “Our New England out-of-doors landscape often looks as if it had just been born.” Holmes lifted his head like a man awakened. “Do you hear that?”

  “Hooves. Wheels.”

  Thinking of how horse-drawn conveyances were forbidden on these grounds, they both realized something had to be wrong. They hurried toward the sound. Across the meadow, horses moved at a brisk trot and tore up rows of clover in clouds of dust. When the vehicle came to a stop, a figure stepped down familiar to the doctor. A towering, dark-skinned man in a wide tunic. Ironhead Herman.

  “That man. Tennyson and I saw him in London. We thought he seemed to be watching us.”

  “Why would he be following us?” Browning asked.

  “We asked the same question.”

  “And who’s this, now?”

  Stepping toward them from the other side of the hill was a lean figure who made a mocking bow. “Dr. Gabbert!” he called out.

  “So help me Phoebus, it was him,” Holmes gasped.

  Browning looked with concern at Holmes, who gestured that he stay back.

  “But Holmes—it was who?”

  “I have unfinished business with this man.”

  There was Simon Camp right before Holmes’s eyes. Dr. Gabbin’ Gabbert was the appellation given to the character representing Holmes in Camp’s grotesque pamphlet on the Dante murders because, in Camp’s witless formulation, he could not stop gabbing.

  Holmes charged toward Camp.

  “That was no illusion on the train,” Holmes said.

  “But I led a genius like yourself to think it was—so you’d bring me along on this quest none the wiser.”

  “What are you even doing in England?” Holmes hissed.

  “Same as you,” said Camp. “I find Dante’s potency irresistible.”

  “No, you are nothing more than a literary cannibal. You seek to exploit suffering and make money from it. I’m trying to prevent any harm coming to innocent parties.”

  Camp rolled his eyes. “We each play in our own game. Tell me exactly what you have discovered so far. I want to know where that lunatic Dante Rossetti fits into this jumble, and I want to know what or who is on the grounds of this place of such interest.”

  “I’ll tell you nothing.” Holmes crossed his arms in front of his chest. “You may act bold, Camp, but don’t think I’ll ever forget how you shook in your boots with the barrel of a rifle in your face.”

 
Camp’s face darkened. “Let’s see this time how you and your fellow bookman react when faced with the same.” He slid his hand under his coat.

  Christina’s shouts began to ring out, followed by Tennyson’s. Holmes and Browning left behind the two intruders penning them in on either side—Camp and the mysterious stranger in the tunic—and hurried toward their friends’ voices.

  When the poets came into sight of each other, Tennyson was yelling the startling news—Reuben Loring was here. Christina called out that Loring had to have Gabriel somewhere on the grounds. The fear blazed through her usually steady voice. The four hurried in the direction where Christina and Tennyson had spied Loring. As they approached a squat, gray stone outbuilding once used as a drying shed, they all heard a thud. Its door had slammed shut—followed by a more ominous sound. A man’s harrowing scream from inside.

  Reaching the stone structure, a tangle of arms tugged and pulled at the door as wailing continued to come from inside. From somewhere nearby, there began the indistinct, incongruous sound of singing.

  Reverend Fallow and Sibbie had also arrived and raced toward the same disturbance. Fallow, seeing the uninvited guests, demanded to know their business.

  “Reuben Loring is here, and I believe he’s locked my brother inside!” Christina cried.

  There was thick smoke inside escaping through the space around the frame of the door. Christina could almost hear Dante’s timid question to Virgil as he reached the smoke-clogged third terrace, posed in the way a questioner does who does not want to hear the answer: Tell me, what trespass is purged in the circle where we are?

  Christina also thought of the answer that Dante was to discover: he had entered the purgation of the Wrathful.

  Browning, pulling back a muscular leg for more leverage, kicked in the door on the third try, as he cried out, “We’re not afraid of you, Loring!” The noxious fumes billowed out, causing the onlookers to break into fits of coughing. There was the figure of a man on the ground. Holmes tied a handkerchief around his mouth and rushed in, grabbing hold of the prostrate man. The victim, however, would not budge. Holmes groped in the darkness, looking for something that might be holding the victim down, until he felt with absolute terror a steel manacle. It was attached to the man’s leg. There was no saving Gabriel from this. As more light came through, Holmes gaped with amazement. The trapped man moaned and panted for air. He was still alive, but barely, and only for another moment. And he was not Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but Reuben Loring. Louder singing from outside could be heard, with a chant of Agnus Dei. Then, a pronouncement:

  “Beati pacifici, who are without ill anger!”

  The doctor’s handkerchief slid from his mouth and he began to cough and retch. “No!” cried Sibbie bravely, jumping in and trying to pull Holmes out. In the darkness and confusion, their legs became knotted, and the others had to carry Holmes out. But Sibbie’s arm had become lodged under the deadweight of Loring’s body. By the time she was also pulled out, the reverend’s assistant had succumbed, motionless, spread out across the grass.

  Fallow rushed to her, feeling for signs of life on her limp neck and wrists.

  “What have you brought here? What unholy evil?” Fallow screamed at them.

  Standing uphill, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s hand stroked his beard thoughtfully. He tottered forward, in a wobbly series of steps, toward his stunned sister and friends.

  “Was it you, Gabriel, after all?” Browning said through coughing. “What have you done?”

  “Gabriel,” Christina said. “No.”

  Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s eyes met his sister’s, just before his legs buckled.

  XV

  DOCUMENT #3: FROM PHONOGRAPHIC MINUTES OF POLICE INTERVIEW BETWEEN INSPECTOR ADOLPHUS WILLIAMSON AND DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI AT SCOTLAND YARD, WHITEHALL, MARCH 3, 1870

  WILLIAMSON: Do you confess to trapping the deceased, Reuben Loring, in that outbuilding, chaining him down, with the malicious intention of poisoning him with smoke?

  [Rossetti gives no reply.]

  WILLIAMSON: Mr. Rossetti, I have been trying to puzzle out how you knew Mr. Loring would be present there. Had you been surreptitiously watching your sister and your friends, and trailed them to the sanatorium in Walsden? Is that how you found him?

  [Rossetti gives no reply.]

  WILLIAMSON: Call me Dolly, Mr. Rossetti. My friends call me Dolly. Since this began, and we discovered your having absented yourself from your usual life and being observed at the scenes of these crimes, it occurred to me that an obsession with Dante might lead a creative-minded fellow like you to try to bring his words to life, a kind of “living art.” Start, at least, by telling me that you regret what you’ve done.

  ROSSETTI: Vain regret. Vain desire! Vain—[trails off]

  WILLIAMSON: Let’s start at an earlier date, shall we, Mr. Rossetti? Do you wish to smoke? No, very well. I wonder how you knew Mr. Morton, the member of Parliament who was killed, and Miss Brenner, the opera singer who died after him. You realize, sir, that we know quite well these killings were modeled after Dante’s Purgatory, your favorite part of your favorite writer’s masterwork on the afterlife? I read that Dante Alighieri’s own father was also exiled for a time. Strange, how a son’s life repeats his father’s in so many ways. I had a chance to examine some of the translations of Dante you made from Italian into English at the British Museum.

  ROSSETTI: In those early days all around me I partook of the influence of the great Florentine, from my father’s devoted work, till from viewing it as a natural element I, growing older, was drawn within the circle.

  WILLIAMSON: Excellent. We’re getting somewhere together now, aren’t we, Mr. Rossetti? We know you trained in the early sixties with the rifle corps for painters and other artistic types, trained a bit for combat and with artillery. Let me speak plainly with you, and I hope you shall do the same in return. I will tell you what some police officers around here think about your connection to Mr. Loring. Some of the other detectives—smart men, they are. They believe that this unfortunate Mr. Loring happened to have the bad luck to spot you at the scene of the two earlier crimes. Loring’s had trouble with the law before, mind you, and probably did not like talking to police, but these detectives of mine think Loring was dogging you, even studying Dante to better comprehend your crimes and expose you. And that is why you next turned your attentions on him to silence him once and for all.

  ROSSETTI: If an isolated life has any sting, it is felt in the absence of those friends who made for years unheeded avowals of obligation and gratitude. Still, this will come, in time, to pass and be forgotten, not emphasized by momentary visits once or twice a year. Life is a coin that I once shared, but which has now quite passed from my pocket into another’s—doubtless rightful enough. Only I desire no half farthing of its small change.

  WILLIAMSON: Small change. I don’t—I’m not certain I really understand, Mr. Rossetti.

  ROSSETTI: So that all ended with her eyes. Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise.

  WILLIAMSON: I’ve been learning about your exhumation of your wife’s grave in October of last year, after I noticed the cemetery plot had been disturbed. Now, I have kept quiet about it until I understand what it was all about. The petition filed with the church authorities indicated you looked to retrieve some poems buried with her. Did you do so? Won’t you say something about it? I try to be a fair man. I’ll tell you what we will do, Mr. Rossetti. I know you’re feeling out of sorts, and it may be difficult to answer all my questions in one interview. Is that so?

  [Rossetti again gives no reply.]

  WILLIAMSON: I thought you might be able to express what has happened a different way. We’ve brought some things from your house.

  [On a signal by Inspector Williamson, an easel, canvas, crayons, paintbrushes, paints, etc., are wheeled in by First Constable Thomas Branagan.]

  [Mr. Rossetti eagerly picks u
p paintbrush.]

  WILLIAMSON: Good, good, help yourself. That’s right! Go on. Whatever you wish to do with it, to your heart’s content.

  [Mr. Rossetti studies the brush, dips it in paint, slowly runs it back and forth into Inspector Williamson’s beard.]

  ROSSETTI: Now shall all things be made clear.

  * * *

  —

  Prying his eyes open, he took in as much as he could in the deep shadows of the frigid chamber. When he tried to raise his hands, he found his wrists latched down tight. His head feeling light, his thoughts cloudy, he had to try hard to remember the origin of his predicament.

  The scribblers: that’s where all this bosh and bunkum had started. He’d been on the Yorkshire–Lancashire train with them. He’d gotten off at the same station—what was it called, Walsden—where they did.

  Camp had traced the scribblers’ movements once off the train, and that’s how he ended up at an odd destination. His driver, whom he instructed to stay as far behind the scribblers’ conveyance as possible, told him that the property where the poets entered had been a mill in the past, but now was some sort of sanatorium. Rehabilitation from the ills of city life for the weak-minded.

  Sneaking around the fields and buildings, Camp watched his quarry, trying to determine exactly what it was this literary squadron was doing there—and most importantly, what connection their expedition had to the recent murders that would comprise his newest sensation booklet. He wasn’t planning on showing himself unless he had to, instead pursuing information from them back in London. But as he usually did, he grew impatient, and that’s when he confronted Dr. Holmes. That was one of his last clear memories. He was about to make Holmes tell him everything, yes, he could remember that . . . He was reaching for his pistol. Until there was the sound of a woman’s scream and Holmes galloped away like a spooked pony.

  That’s when it happened—as he peered around the corner from behind one of the sheds. A painful blow to the back of his head. That was the last thing he remembered clearly.