The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  The patient was also losing weight at a rapid rate. He cleaned her lips and carefully tipped water into her mouth. At least their era was removed—only by a few short decades—from the time when patients in such “marvelous stupors,” the females sometimes called “sleeping beauties,” were toured around for people to gawk at.

  Everything about an era of history could be told by its medical barbarities.

  Holmes was relieved to have a good reason to be away from the discussions of Dante while holed up in Sibbie’s quarters. His mind had turned strongly against the Florentine. He could not help but feel that Dante somehow harbored some of the blame for unleashing his “justice.” He wondered whether Dante himself, toward the end of his life, had feared giving the world a poem so untamable.

  There was a story about Dante during his exile, not long before his death. Dante, the story went, had wandered into a monastery. A prior came up to him and asked him if he wanted something. Dante just stared. Finally the exiled poet, who had been away from his family and friends so long they would not have recognized him, removed a volume of his freshly printed Comedy (Divine would be added to the title later by an Italian writer of the next generation, Boccaccio) from his frock and handed it to the prior. The prior was taken aback when he noticed it was written in Italian instead of Latin, with the exception of a few phrases sprinkled throughout (such as the voice of the Virgin Mary appearing as elevated Latin, Ecce ancilla Dei). Dante explained he chose Italian (the “vulgar” tongue) because he wanted the poem to be read by every class of readers, since its contents were about to change the world. The prior, by this point very curious about the visitor, pleaded again that the exile explain to him what he sought. Dante wheeled around as he took his leave and finally replied: “Peace!”

  In addition to serving as a medical steward for their resident sleeping beauty, Holmes unexpectedly found himself playing the part of society host. Sibbie’s mother came, having read in the newspapers about what happened. A widow as quiet and retiring as her daughter, with the same bright blue eyes, Mrs. Worthington still lived in the countryside in a small village near where she raised “dear Isobel.” She spoke on and on about Sibbie’s natural gifts, about how she was so nurturing as a girl and always solicitous of the ill even as a child. She wept over not seeing her for the last few years, since Sibbie had begun helping Reverend Fallow, whom she guessed had some kind of supernatural sway over her daughter. Holmes did not intend to be rude, but he found himself rushing her visit to a conclusion. Normally, he would be the first to encourage a grieving relative to reminisce. But there was a stack of medical books and articles on comas he still wanted to review in a desperate attempt to reverse Sibbie’s course before time ran out.

  Reverend Fallow called on Tudor House, too. Holmes felt he ought to apologize to any man of religion for the décor: heavy and black, gloomy with strange objects from Gabriel’s collections such as grinning gargoyles and Chinese Buddhas.

  Holmes regretted having distrusted Fallow, and regretted even more the part they played in what happened. Fallow seemed genuinely stricken by his assistant’s ordeal. Holmes tried to apologize for leading Dante Gabriel Rossetti to the sanatorium and to Loring, but the minister did not want to talk about it. He sat with the hand of the unresponsive girl in his, and wept with a slow, dignified grief. You will be back where you belong, Holmes heard the minister whisper to her. When Fallow left her room, the preacher was so disoriented that he got lost in the endless corridors and rooms of the house, and Browning had to find him and guide him back to the front door.

  Despite his sympathy and feelings of guilt, even now Holmes harbored some discomfort at the familiarity the minister exhibited toward the assistant. Like the girl’s mother, Holmes fretted about the man’s hold over her. Of course, now there were bigger matters at hand—to start with, her survival. Even Fallow seemed to acknowledge, reluctantly, that Holmes represented her best chance. When Christina asked the minister as he exited the house if he planned to move her to one of the churches where he was involved, or to Phillip Sanatorium, the pious visitor stiffened, muttering, “It wouldn’t be safe.”

  Perhaps out of habit, the police still seemed to keep a watch on Tudor House, for one particular boat would periodically row up the Thames and lurk behind the house. Whenever they tried to come out to see who was rowing, the vessel would be whipped into a high speed. They knew it was the same craft because it had a green streamer tied to one end. The group had also discussed on several occasions who the turbaned man seen first at the church and then at the sanatorium could have been, and why he would have been following them. Perhaps it was coincidence. Christina—looking for any last sign of Gabriel’s innocence—felt the enigmatic man must have had something to do with the actual murderer.

  Despite all that had happened, Holmes still felt hope, not just for Sibbie but also for himself. He had thought helping the Rossettis could finally banish the memories that hounded him. They had been magnified instead. But here was one last opportunity not just to grasp in the dark for confidence but to prove himself, to save the life of the woman right in front of him.

  At one point during the long days Holmes watched over Sibbie, he realized he had fallen asleep only when he was woken up by the sounds of a conversation from outside the house. He looked down out the window and saw Tennyson at the front door. His heart jumped—the return of their prodigal partner, the first hint of good luck in a long time. After Holmes rubbed the sleep from his eyes, he headed down the stairs. He slowed to a stop when he heard a debate in progress. Tennyson had stepped inside but had not even removed his hat.

  “Holmes, I was just remarking,” Tennyson said by way of greeting, “how our labors here have dried up, despite our greatest efforts. There is no longer any chance of helping Gabriel. Leave Castle Crazy to the beasts and birds and return to your lives, as I have.”

  Holmes looked to Christina, wishing to shield her.

  Christina, of course, would not want to be shielded, nor did she need to be. She replied first: “There remains much more to do, Mr. Tennyson.”

  “What else? Think of the success in all this. You wished to find Gabriel before harm came to him, and we did.”

  “Now we must show he is innocent—to Inspector Williamson and to the public, if necessary.”

  “Innocent,” Tennyson repeated, then made one of his frequent guttural ughs. “Forgive me if I am now obliged to make reference to facts, Miss Rossetti. Let the police conduct their investigation, and then Gabriel will be fairly judged.”

  “None of this has been fair to Gabriel at all,” Christina said.

  “There’s that police boat again,” Browning said as he looked out the bay window over the overgrown gardens. “I want to get a better look—the roof!”

  Browning mounted the long flights of stairs to the perfectly flat roof and leaned over the edge. Tennyson, who had followed behind, seemed particularly interested as he looked out at the vessel with the green streamer among the rubbish and frozen animal carcasses floating on the river. “You’re certain it’s the police?”

  “We haven’t been able to see who is in it, but it’s constantly rowing back,” Browning said. “I’m tempted to swim out there and capsize it.”

  One by one, the others joined them out in the frigid air, hair and clothes tossed around by the wind. Christina pulled them back to the topic at hand. “Mr. Tennyson, perhaps you could petition for intervention from Queen Victoria before this goes further.”

  Tennyson threw his head back. “The queen!”

  “You are the laureate, Tennyson,” said Browning, each word emerging at a slow, deliberate pace. To Holmes, the words conveyed admiration, envy, and bitterness at once.

  “To honor the English language, not to rope the royal family into lost causes of law and justice. As poets, our lives and our work are one and the same thing. We don’t have the right to ask for more. Let the police do what
they do. Let the police finish their investigation!”

  Christina continued her polite but intractable defense, while Tennyson thundered out his objections.

  “It will not work, Miss Rossetti!” Tennyson finally blurted out with such force that the exchange came to a halt. “I wonder that all of you don’t see the impossibility of what you really seek.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Tennyson’s inhibitions vanished with his frustration. “You won’t find love from your father by trying to save Gabriel, Miss Rossetti. Believe me, that phantom can never be captured.”

  “We each have the same goals here, haven’t we?” Browning asked.

  “And you, Browning!” Tennyson continued. “Don’t you think it’s obvious what you’re doing? Following Miss Rossetti snakelike down these paths you can’t really believe in won’t rid you of guilt over wherever it was you never followed Elizabeth. Look at Miss Rossetti. Look at her! She is not Elizabeth, and deserves better than being her substitute. You cannot rescue Elizabeth, not by rescuing Miss Rossetti, not by writing The Ring and the Book, not even by bringing Gabriel back from his abyss where Lizzie sent him. As for our kinsman from over the water, good Dr. Holmes—”

  “No!” Holmes interjected, his voice cracking and his heart spilling out. “No, Tennyson, not yet. You mustn’t do what you’ve come to do. I’ve given up on a cause too soon in my past—well, more than one, in all honesty—and, I’ll tell you, it’s a heavy burden to bear, heavier than whatever you think you’ll free yourself from by fleeing. I’ll do it no more. This group—the four of us, I mean—together managed to shine light in darkness. The evidence is rather bad for Gabriel: yes. No one will deny it. But Sibbie still has a chance to recover.” He hated how that sounded, and tried again. “She will recover, at any rate, for in my experience in the medical field, women are the stronger sex—and she may have seen something important before Loring was killed, something that could help Gabriel.”

  “No one saw anything else,” Tennyson retorted, his face crimson from his consternation. “What miracle could we expect from her, or you, or from some strange man in a turban Miss Rossetti hopes might show up and confess he did it all? Why would that young woman know some secret nobody else does?”

  “The task of the physician is to generalize the disease and individualize the patient, Tennyson. There lurks more in her, I know it. If I can just make her well, I will throw out my poetry notebooks and become only a doctor again.”

  Debate ensued on all points. Holmes was not listening to the arguments, not exactly; he was watching Tennyson’s face instead, watching the frightened black eyes swell behind the thick ovals of glass. In the laureate he saw a man who had already given up before he came through the gates, a man who had determined in advance nothing would convince him to stay. Holmes knew what would happen if they lost Tennyson for good. The doubts they each possessed privately would expand and multiply until the whole thing fell to pieces. Somehow it seemed to him that would spell Sibbie’s death, too, an outcome he could not allow.

  “‘Death closes all . . . but something ere the end,’” Holmes began, waiting for the group’s attention. When he had it, he continued:

  Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

  Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.

  Christina and Browning stared with wonder. The verses were from Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,” based on Dante’s version of the aging Greek hero sailing toward Mount Purgatory. Tennyson kept his eyes fixed on the river below, puffing his pipe in a furious motion, then, grudgingly, looked up at Holmes with an expression of interest, rubbing his mustache with his free hand. Taking one step forward, and raising his volume over the wind, Holmes went on.

  His chest inflated, he felt twelve feet tall, and his thoughts raced with possibility:

  The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;

  The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep

  Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

  ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world—

  Holmes held out his hand to the laureate.

  “Enough!” Tennyson roared, slapping Holmes’s hand away. He glowered around the roof. “Enough. You know as well as I do how that tale turns out. Let me remind you that according to Dante’s rendition, old Ulysses and his crew drown just in sight of Purgatory. One need not wonder why I left that out of a poem otherwise inspired by Dante, and meant to inspire others. No, Dr. Holmes, indeed it is too late for us. Too late.”

  After Tennyson marched down into the house and out the street door, silence overtook those left there. From out front of the house, they could hear Tennyson cursing at some of the members of his adoring public who had found him, branding them with the epithet of “a many-headed beast.” Back inside, Browning later complimented Holmes for a good attempt to persuade Tennyson. “The harder you try with a man like Tennyson,” Browning advised him, “the farther he retreats.”

  Then Sibbie really is lost, and Dante is lost, Holmes thought, not sure himself whether he meant the medieval one or Gabriel Rossetti.

  Browning tried to comfort and encourage Christina, but she quickly excused herself into the gardens, where she formed a lonely tableau looking out over the river with Bobby, the owl.

  This time Holmes advised Browning.

  “Sometimes, my dear Browning, it seems every person’s feelings have a front door and a side door by which they may be entered. Some keep their front doors open. Others will latch and bolt and even nail it up. The side door, though, opens at once into the sacred chambers. I believe Miss Rossetti misplaced the keys to the side door a long time ago.”

  “No, Holmes,” replied Browning, his eyes still on her. “She holds all her keys tightly in her hand, and waits to loosen her grip.”

  DOCUMENT #5: PREFATORY NOTE OF THE AUTHOR, INCLUDED IN PROFESSORE G. P. G. ROSSETTI’S DISQUISITIONS ON DANTE

  I saw this all by myself, without the help of man. Now that it will come to us, now that Truth will live in the market square, I will never look backward. No one shall. No one shall have to. No one shall be able to.

  If we learn how to see it, Dante’s Divine Comedy provides us the one primitive and universal religion, which, destroying all the difference of men, is truly the religion of love, and the death of human oppression. The keys I provide will unlock all of Dante’s hidden treasures and unmask enemies.

  I do not approve of all the furies of the Florentine poet revealed through knowledge of his secrets. But who knows whether I am about to put into the hands of you, my good and attentive reader, a thread that will untie the knot of all civilization.

  Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti,

  professore nel Collegio del re d’ Inghilterra—a Londra 1854

  * * *

  —

  The Tudor House group complied with Holmes’s silent prophecies of demise. Tennyson stayed away, as he vowed. Holmes, for his part, was too occupied with Sibbie to help much in other areas. Browning did his best to remain chipper for Christina’s sake. She deserves that, he thought, remembering how such thoughts sustained his brave face worn for Ba during her final illnesses. But with all the intractable suspicions surrounding Gabriel, Browning’s facade began to crumble, too. Not that Christina appeared to notice. She labored as usual, methodically and carefully, blaming only herself for any misstep, and nothing slowed her down.

  Her retort to those who said there was nothing left to try was simple. If Dante Gabriel Rossetti was innocent, as Christina believed, then whoever was the true culprit would commit another atrocity soon—would not be able to resist continuing to re-create the seven terraces of Purgatory, starting with the next: the fourth. All a good Dantean had to do was anticipate how and where, and then come face-to-face with the real perpetrator.

  “‘All a good Dantean has to do!’ How in God’s name . . . Forgive my being profane, Mi
ss Rossetti. But what makes you think such a thing is even possible?” Browning demanded, his composure peeling away at every turn.

  “Mr. Browning, I’ll be happy to explain.”

  Using Dante’s text, the illustrations they had gathered together, and her handwritten notes, Christina demonstrated that each murder had been accompanied with some other element from Dante’s Purgatory besides the punishment itself. In the Prideful terrace that took the life of Morton, there was the engraving in stone of the Latin quote. In the death inspired by the Envious, where Miss Brenner died, she had been put into a blue-black cloak of the kind described by Dante as worn by the souls on that terrace (the color of stone signifying the bruised hearts of the Envious). As for the poisoning of Reuben Loring in the style of the Wrathful, Agnus Dei was chanted by someone unseen (everyone but Christina believed Gabriel sang it), just as it was on the corresponding terrace in Dante’s poem.

  The next terrace would contain the Slothful, who are consigned to run without pause for hundreds of years. After considering all the possible details within Dante’s verses about the punishment, Christina was certain she had identified the more likely elements for the perpetrator to reproduce, and how these could lead her to the location of the next murder before it happened.

  “The odds against you would be astronomical, Miss Rossetti! To anticipate the next move of a maniac, assuming one really is still out there, you’d have to be . . .”

  “A sibyl. Perhaps Manto,” Christina suggested almost cheerfully.

  “Yes, Manto!” he said, as though he’d thought of it.

  Manto was a Greek oracle and an even greater prophet than her famous father, the soothsayer Tiresias, who was both man and woman. Manto and Tiresias are found together by Dante in Inferno for their attempts to tell the future.