The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  The detective’s manner had softened considerably since the police were called to the sanatorium. He had been victorious. He’d caught Gabriel. Now he could show her compassion and did. But she found the detective’s narration of her brother’s deterioration as unpersuasive as all the disheartened laments by Browning, Tennyson, and Holmes that shrouded Tudor House. Even William Rossetti could not bring himself to defend his own brother.

  “Gabriel has many faults, many of which come from our father,” William conceded to Dolly and Constable Branagan, having accompanied Christina on one of these many interviews with the police in the days after Gabriel was found.

  “Not this. Whatever faults, whatever weaknesses, their sum does not add up to this,” Christina interjected.

  “Tell me, Miss Rossetti, Mr. Rossetti, about Thirty-eight Charlotte Street.” Seeing their surprised expressions, Dolly added in the tone of an apology, “I visited there, you see, as I learned more about your brother. Is it where he began writing and painting?”

  “Yes,” said Christina. “We used to play games of bouts-rimés—we would give each other rhymes to finish lines with, and we would have to create verses from them. Gabriel was remarkable at it.”

  “Not as remarkable as our modest sister, Inspector,” William said. “It’s true Gabriel’s imagination is rare, as visual as it is literary. Mr. Longfellow once sent two letters from Boston, one to Mr. Rossetti congratulating him on a volume of poems, and another to Mr. Rossetti about one of the paintings he had seen, thinking Gabriel had to be two different members of our family.”

  Dolly seemed to take pleasure in the intimate glimpse of their family life. “Do you still remember any of them? Those poems from when you were children.”

  Christina thought of one she had written about stacking up the casualties of a plague.

  Then all is over. With a careless chuck

  Among his fellows he is cast. How sped

  His spirit matters little: many dead

  Make men hard-hearted. “Place him in the truck.”

  She never could get the worms out of her verse, Gabriel had once told her. She shuddered. “Inspector, it was so long ago.”

  Outside the police offices, Christina confronted William on his treachery toward Gabriel.

  “Call it treachery, if you wish,” William said, heaving his usual I’m-done-for sigh, “but this will become public soon enough, and I am here to limit the damage this will do to our family.”

  “And I am here to protect Gabriel. There is something I’ve wondered, William.”

  “Yes?”

  “I remember one day, meeting Gabriel, and he was in a terrible state, talking of a vision of a woman. He had said you took him to Highgate to visit Lizzie’s grave. Looking back, I must wonder if his state descended from there. Why would you do that, knowing its effects on him?”

  William’s shoulders dropped and he looked off into the distance. “Gabriel was lying to you. He did go to Highgate, but I did not bring him there and only found out in a letter shortly beforehand. He had Lizzie’s coffin exhumed.”

  “What?”

  “So that he could retrieve the set of poems he buried with her. He entreated me not to tell you, knowing what your reaction would be. You must know, I could not stop him.”

  Christina drew back. “He was right about my reaction. Perhaps you could not have stopped him, William, but you might have tried. I would have tried.”

  William shook his head. “You blame me still, after all that has come to pass! I truly hoped, Christina, that telling Mr. Cayley to go to Tudor House would provide you with some distraction. Something to take your mind off of Gabriel.”

  “You told Charles Cayley to come?” Christina asked, her heart sinking.

  “He is quite fond of you, Christina. Dear sister,” William said, taking her hands in his, “imagine what a full life you still might salvage, alongside a decent and brilliant man such as Cayley, a man Father loved with all his heart. He hasn’t much money, it’s true, but I could assist the two of you in setting up a household.”

  Christina felt her hands trembling. She pulled them free.

  “Christina, where are you going? Christina . . . !”

  She was expected at Saint Mary’s to test the reading and writing abilities of two new girls. She had considered taking a leave from her post as associate sister there but could not bring herself to tell the warden. How could she hope for God’s love and mercy for herself—for Gabriel—in this great ordeal if she did not honor her own commitments to those who needed her?

  At Saint Mary’s, it was one of the days scheduled for Reverend Fallow to be a guest preacher. She thought he might decide not to show up, but he came right on time. Christina was awash with anxiety to see him, knowing that he blamed them for leading Gabriel to the sanatorium—for leading him to Loring—and for the accident from which his poor assistant might never recover. Fallow paused when he saw Christina and gave her a big nod; it carried no sense of admonishment or anger, and Christina felt grateful.

  She stood in the back of the chapel as he preached on the power of penitence and the importance of charity.

  “That poor, weary, outwardly hardened, sin-debased creature at your side—a victim to man’s brutal requirements—is, in the eyes of Heaven, your sister and mine. Suffering is not sin.”

  Christina noticed many of Saint Mary’s young residents were very taken with the imposing, eloquent speaker. Ethel, her eyes moist, placed her hand over her heart as he spoke of the relationship between repentance and renewal. The man had a certain magnetism on the pulpit one wouldn’t guess at seeing him away from it. Even after the sermon ended, the girls flocked around Fallow with praise and questions.

  After Saint Mary’s, she hastened back toward Dolly’s office, where she had an appointment for further review of the evidence in the case, so that she could begin to prepare to engage legal representation for Gabriel.

  Christina may have relied on faith, but she was not above presenting her own reasoning to Inspector Williamson and to her collaborators at Tudor House. For instance:

  First Point. If true that Gabriel chose to target Loring because Loring was a witness to two of the murders and could have implicated Gabriel in them, how had Gabriel known this about Loring?

  Second Point. Where was Gabriel keeping his various victims before their murders, without a shilling to his name, and Tudor House occupied at almost all hours by Christina and her companions?

  Third Point. If Dolly was so sure, so certain of Gabriel’s guilt and had no doubts, why had he protected Gabriel’s reputation by keeping it out of the newspapers; why hadn’t he given the full story to one of his ink-slinging stooges like Steven Walker at the Ledger? Gabriel’s Italian heritage, after all, fit nicely with the Home Office’s suspicions of a perpetrator with foreign origins.

  Then there were Gabriel’s eye problems, his dizzy spells, his insomnia, and added to that his obvious recent indulgences in opiates; with all that in mind, how could he have overpowered all the people the detective believed he’d murdered? Including the hale and hearty soldier Reuben Loring! Quite true, Gabriel had been part of the “Artists’ Rifles Corps” years before, but he hardly received training worth mentioning before dropping out to discard his uniform in favor of his painting coat. On a similar note, Dr. Holmes had marveled at the exactness in the mixture of gases released in that fateful drying shed. Gabriel, a proud Luddite, did not have the scientific skills to create those conditions in the death of Loring, nor the required medical and engineering knowledge to bring about the deaths of Morton and Brenner.

  The detective shook his head at these objections and spoke of the many mysteries of man he had seen in his line of work that would never be answered.

  “You do not strike me as a man who believes in mysteries, Inspector,” Christina said.

  Gabriel, meanwhile, passed in
and out of varying degrees of coherency; as time passed since his last ingestion of narcotics, his body and mind struggled even more. He slept and slept, not very restful and not very restorative. He sweated and trembled, opened and closed his hands over and over. Sometimes he spoke to her, though his words still did not make much sense. “Within my first life . . . ,” he’d mutter.

  CR—need your help. Christina heard the words again from Gabriel’s notation echo as a reprimand for failing to prevent all this. The old scissor slices across both her arms from youth, long faded from sight, seemed to pulsate and sting under her skin.

  In her mind she returned to her visit to the observation chamber of the deadhouse that had become a Dantean landscape. Morton, on one display table, with his neck bent and distorted. She leaned far forward toward the glass, trying to comprehend how it must have felt. Nothing transfixed her like Lillian Brenner’s eyes. She had tried to distract herself by examining the clothes folded nearby, but kept returning to those eyes. The police had left the iron wires that crisscrossed her eyelids, in case any member of the public recognized something about the material or the technique. But in death the eyelids gradually drew apart, so that a muted coconut brown strip of each of her eyes revealed themselves. Christina squinted to examine and to imagine and to reassure herself. She squinted, also, to hold back tears standing in her eyes before rushing away. Not Gabriel, never Gabriel.

  “My dear brother,” Christina whispered, even though his eyes had shut again, “I know, whatever mistakes you have made, whatever you found yourself mixed up in, the evil we have witnessed had to be wielded by someone else. I vow to you, I will find out who, and prove it.”

  Gabriel’s eyes snapped open. “I seem to see it—yes, every detail of it—as though in a dream.”

  DOCUMENT #4: FROM THE SURVIVING MANUSCRIPT FRAGMENT OF IN DANTE’S SHADOW, BY S. T. CAMP

  To achieve a deeper understanding of the role of Reverend Orin Fallow in the honor and glory now under way before the eyes of Great Britain and the world, it is necessary to divert the course of this narrative, momentarily, to introduce some early history of this fine gentleman’s career. As a young man, Mr. Fallow succeeded in various private commercial endeavors before giving himself over to preaching. Growing up the son of an Anglican minister, he had witnessed how people’s faith in God could be dislodged, and sought ways in and out of the pulpit to present a higher meaning of life to congregations caught in the commotion of dissipated London. Fallow earned the nickname “Fellow” for his ability to speak to men and women of any station and class, and was called by some the Prophet of the People. As for doctrinal arguments he mostly thought them worthless, and this led to his switching denominations several times, including at one time training as a Baptist, before deciding to leave behind formal denominations.

  Graver challenges awaited. Fallow, even at twenty-four years old, was an inspiring preacher—while many men of the British pulpit of the era lulled their audiences, he stirred them awake. As the popularity of the young preacher increased, rivals leveled criticism. He did not sufficiently concentrate on teaching the Bible. He was not educating, he was badgering his flock, daring them to shirk the vices of the modern age. The more strident he became, the more criticisms and crowds he attracted, until he had to hold his sermons in theaters and music halls. There was talk of traveling to America to preach, though this did not come to pass.

  Tragedy struck; it struck his burgeoning career and his congregation. During one of the reverend’s giant sermons near London, in which four thousand five hundred people had come, intent to hear his every word, Fallow became increasingly impassioned—more than usual—about the urgency to save weak souls from the creeping decay of secret sins. “The Lord’s curse is upon the house of the wicked. Flee for refuge,” Fallow cried out, “flee!” One man, somewhere in the middle of the audience, became so distressed and worried for his own moral state, or simply confused by the direction, that he stood up, screaming and shouting, running through the aisles.

  There were disputing accounts in the press about exactly what this man shouted. Some heard it as “We’re falling!” or “I’m burning!” In all events, fear began to spread through the audience that there was a fire in the theater. Panic reached all sides of the building. People were trampled, others tumbled over balustrades and fell to the floor below. Men pushed over women and children. Seven people died.

  Fallow watched it all from the stage—the roles reversed as he became the audience. He thought if he tried to continue preaching he might stop the madness. But he failed. “There is a terrible day coming . . . ,” he announced, then fainted dead away.

  Fallow disappeared from public after that day. He dreamed of manifestations of death all around him. He was fearful of being in crowds, and certainly could no longer think of preaching to large audiences.

  When he finally felt ready to shed his seclusion and begin preaching again, it was by necessity to far smaller groups. His name no longer reverberated with the public, and he had no desire to stand before a sea of people. He found a specialty in serving those citizens in and near London who moved from place to place, never fixed long enough to become part of a particular church. God can find all men, but man cannot always find God: this was an axiom for this chapter of the preacher’s career. In addition to churches that required assistance with transient persons, such as traveling merchants, fallen women, and soldiers, Fallow volunteered visits to poorhouses and sanatoriums. Because of these experiences, the preacher was offered a place among a party sailing to the Continent to observe similar institutions and report back on their latest advancements to the English civil and religious authorities.

  Reverend Fallow, it ought to be added, had in those years become casually fascinated by the literature of Dante Alighieri, like many others, through the recent translation into English by the famous American poet Longfellow and the much more modestly published volumes by the British scholar Cayley.

  While traveling around the Continent on his observation tour, staying on an island off the coast of Italy, Fallow, accompanied by his assistant, happened to be introduced by their guide, Signor J. Giuseppe Alviani, to an enigmatic man known as the Dante Master, from whom the preacher learned more. A man does not take hold of Dante, so it is said, Dante takes hold of a man and never lets go. Though Dante was not a priest, the “divine” poet, more than almost any other individual since the Son of God himself, made ordinary people believe in damnation and salvation—the rewards and, a more trying and remarkable subject, the necessary penalties to reach Paradise.

  “I can tell right away,” said the Dante Master, “when someone comes to me by walking in the footsteps of Dante.”

  The Dante Master kept an extensive library of books on Dante, including many considered heretical or dangerous. One of these was a rare complete set of the fifteen-volume commentary by the late Professore Rossetti, of which most copies had been burned by the professore’s wife, not realizing that the rarer she made the text, the more potent it became. “The Vatican knows,” said the Dante Master, “how dangerous Dante remains to established religion even hundreds of years later. The pope has recently banned the word ‘Divine’ from the title of the Comedy.”

  Fallow felt dizzy as his knowledge of Dante grew. “What is to be done now?” he asked his tutor.

  The Dante Master made a temple of his long fingers as he contemplated. “By asking the question, you will be led to the answer, sooner than you know.”

  Returning to England, the preacher also relished the very different material contained in a small booklet (by the current author) entitled The Dante Murders, furthering Fallow’s interest in studying the power of Dante over our minds—a power that reached beyond any mere transitory literature. Around this time, the preacher had been engaged to serve the religious needs of the residents of a Lancashire-area sanatorium that was to open on the property of a former textile mill, which itself had been forced to clos
e after being found to employ children under the age of thirteen without the required school certificates. The place had been built along a canal in a rural county, ideally suited to provide solace from the city. However, the proprietors of the planned sanatorium fell into financial distress, and Reverend Fallow, as well as a superior in his endeavor, were given control over the property. The new Phillip Sanatorium was established. But if it was once to be a place to simply assuage anxieties, it had a different goal at hand now, one handed down by Dante: deliverance.

  XVII

  The first few days after the disastrous turn of events at the Phillip Sanatorium, the weather grew colder and the routine of the poets at Tudor House churned on; when the streets came alive in the mornings, Browning and Tennyson would arrive cradling the latest newspapers to review with Christina, who was often preparing to visit Gabriel or returning from a visit to him, or on her way to meetings with more barristers at unusual locations to keep them secret from the public. One morning the routine cracked. Tennyson never appeared. The others dispatched word to his London address, and after two messages went unanswered, they learned from a cousin of Tennyson’s in the city that the poet laureate had returned to the Isle of Wight.

  Holmes gave up his hotel lodgings and moved into Tudor House in order to maintain his vigil over Sibbie. Though Christina had made up a room for Holmes near Sibbie’s on the second floor, he often slept in the hard chair next to her bed so he would be present to monitor developments. In that same chair he would sit watching her as he whistled and tapped his foot. Other than a few flutters of her eyelashes and occasional twitching in her body, there were no signs of life. He didn’t want to tell the others that prolonged comas most often ended in death within the first weeks. The great secret of success of every form of quackery was hope kept alive, but the fatal gift of science was a prognosis of despair. Holmes’s own medical studies at Harvard had demonstrated to his satisfaction that during sleep there was a diminution of blood flow to the brain, a deadly aspect of such an unnatural condition of unconsciousness as experienced by Sibbie.