The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  Damn Tennyson. Christina was not Ba. Browning had not tried to make her so. But she was vibrant and brilliant.

  “Miss Rossetti, there is something I must say to you,” Browning blurted out.

  “Mr. Browning?”

  “Look at us—lost adventurers. I wondered, when this all began, if by being by your side, snakelike, stomping around in my ogre fashion, I could be of some use to you, or if anybody could be of use to anybody else.” Browning started to continue twice before he deflated. His eyes filled with tears and he said, “How do you feel about me, Miss Rossetti?”

  “Why, I feel I have known you a hundred years, Mr. Browning.”

  “My heart, I begin to believe, really is buried in Florence.”

  “I know it is.” She gently withdrew her hand from his.

  “I always thought I would want to go back to Florence, but now I don’t know. As an old man said to me once of Jerusalem, ‘No, I don’t want to go there, I can see it in my head.’ We outlive some places, people, and things that charmed us in our youth, I daresay. Ba was never very strong, never well, and yet I thought, I truly believed love saved her life. All this talk of my fame since my last volumes. You can guess and God knows that the simple truth is she was the poet, and I merely a clever person. My uninterrupted health and strength should have helped me, but look what she made of her mind, despite her limited experiences and her frailness. It is an injustice to all mankind, dear Miss Rossetti, that one does not call you his husband.”

  Browning rose and looked out the window, where the sky was dark with snow and hail, and the occasional clap of thunder made the glass tremble. He wept into his hands. Christina stood and looked out a different window, then said: “You were fortunate that your Gemma and Beatrice—the woman you had and the woman you needed—were one and the same. Besides, if one’s heart is to be buried, there is probably no place better than Italy.”

  * * *

  —

  English justice moved slowly. In order to review Gabriel’s circumstance, there were hearings and meetings between magistrates and commissioners and even, at one point, a conference of officials with the mayor of London.

  As days passed, Browning’s voice was joined by a chorus of others urging Christina to return home with her mother, or at least to go back to Tudor House, until something definitive had been announced regarding Gabriel’s fate. She still insisted that she would leave only with Gabriel. Browning brought meals and books to Christina to sustain her during her vigil, then would go back out to obtain the latest supplies Holmes requested for his care of Sibbie.

  Christina examined books of laws and regulations about the rights of prisoners until her eyes were red and heavy. She rested her head when she had to, permitting her eyes to close only when forced by her weakening body.

  As Christina sealed herself inside the police offices, the fears of the press and the public of London rose sharply, the realization growing that a murderer remained among them. There were more book-burning parties to incinerate copies of Dante. The booksellers, meanwhile, continued reporting record sales of Dante’s Comedy and related books, as well as stranger artifacts being manufactured, including Dante calendars and bookends—with a miniature bust of solemn Dante on one bookend, and a bust of a lovely Beatrice on the other.

  Unmoored from his expected course in the investigation, Dolly Williamson visited the Gibson home, built by the grandfather of the now-deceased art patron and collector. Liveried servants were wandering around aimlessly, weeping, like a group of ghosts abandoned to the old place. Dolly questioned the domestics and examined Gibson’s letters and diaries. Gibson’s mother, Annie, had died when he was a child, and not feeling himself loved by his father, the artists who fascinated Gibson became his family—his letters to painters demanded they tell him about their lives, their marriages, their travels. Correspondence from some years earlier also revealed that Gibson forced many of “his” artists to use him as a model in paintings. However much he saw them as family, Gibson also thought himself better and of higher standing than the artists, bargaining with them relentlessly to drive down their prices. He also complained that the subjects he modeled for were not noble enough, and that the practice involved in sitting as a model was too tiresome.

  The diaries were just as interesting and rather sad. Gibson had many mistresses—six, by Dolly’s count as he explored the entries, in the last four years—including married women, and from what Dolly could gather was father to several illegitimate children that Gibson went to great lengths to avoid.

  Back at Scotland Yard, Dolly received his orders from the Home Office to release his prisoner. He sat down one more time with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who had become gradually more presentable as the opiates ceased to control his body. Not that the painter would respond to Dolly’s questions, at least not by saying anything helpful. He gave no indication of understanding why he had been there—not even enough to deny his own guilt, as most imprisoned individuals would whether or not they were actually innocent.

  “I cannot. I simply cannot tolerate the chore, however necessary,” Dolly said, returning to his office.

  “Which chore?” asked Branagan.

  “Watching Rossetti go free while we still pine for the truth. Perhaps he is innocent. Perhaps guilty. Is it possible, Branagan, that he is both, or do I begin to lose all my instincts? You do it, please, Branagan. You release him.” Dolly was unusually jumpy. He did not have to look far for a distraction. He had received the usual variety of reports from around London that required his oversight.

  There were two horses poisoned in a stable; a woman’s bloodied clothes and effects found in a stairwell, without any other trace of a woman; then there was a pair of men found loitering outside Clerkenwell Prison.

  At the prison wall, Dolly found the constables holding the suspicious characters, who were both Irishmen.

  “We’re thinking Fenians, trying to plot to climb in and help their friends on the other side get out,” one of the constables said. “Good luck trying that. Inspector Williamson?”

  Dolly couldn’t shake his thoughts about Gabriel and the Dante Massacres. “You empty their pockets and coats? Good. Show me.”

  “One of them had this in his coat.”

  The constable dusted the snow off a white ball the size of a large egg.

  Dolly examined their other effects and stopped on a card on which was scrawled 16 Lombard. “This was one of the places where McCord was living,” Dolly said.

  “Who?” asked the constable.

  “Jeremiah McCord. Inspector Thornton believes McCord is one of the new Fenian leaders since we locked up his superiors. Thornton had tracked him to Ironhead Herman, a strongman for some black market opium traders. McCord was attempting to purchase phosphorus from Herman, and I gave authorization to Thornton to allow the transaction . . .” Dolly lost his train of thought. He marched over to where the men were being restrained, holding up the card with the address.

  “What was your business with General McCord? Come, come, where is the one-armed incubus?”

  The calmer of the two suspects, who had a scar over his right temple, looked right at Dolly. “I promise by the Divine Law of God to do all in my power to free and regenerate Ireland from the yoke of England. So help me God.”

  Dolly, agitated, received exactly the same answer from the other man.

  “Where precisely were these two looking?” he asked one of the constables.

  The constable showed Dolly to the place along the wall where the men were first observed loitering. In the meantime, the other policeman accosted the dark-suited Fenian with the ball. “And what were you doing with this ball, Dubliner? Something hidden inside, is there? A map back to the potato lands, I hope?”

  “Maybe,” replied the Irishman.

  “Show me,” ordered the constable, tossing the ball to him.

  Dolly, who w
as examining the wall, was on high alert. He steadied his too-large hat. He opened his coat and from his belt removed his ivory white truncheon, swinging the thick baton at his side. Then he was overcome with an unexpected thought. It did not really come to him in words, but rather an emotion, a feeling. If it were put in words, it would have been something like: I know what happened. I know how the Dante Massacres came about.

  The Fenian studied the little white ball for a moment, then hurled it high into the air, over the wall of the prison.

  Dolly spun around toward the man. A sly smirk had formed on the man’s face.

  The detective’s jaw fell open. “That’s a signal,” Dolly said, then, louder: “They weren’t trying to climb over—get back!”

  His cry was cut short by a horrendous boom. The prison wall shattered as the fireball of explosions erupted. Where Dolly, the constables, and the Fenians had been standing a moment before, there was nothing but rubble painted in dark blood.

  * * *

  —

  Back at Scotland Yard’s police offices, Constable Thomas Branagan filled out the documents required to complete the prisoner’s release. When he was finished, Branagan escorted Gabriel to where his sister was waiting for him in the anteroom. Gabriel was polite to everyone at the offices. He told the constable that he needed to speak to his sister alone. Branagan imagined the artist thanking his sister for all her efforts, though this did not prove to be an accurate guess.

  Whatever Gabriel might have said to Christina at that moment, in fact, became moot. As he walked over to her little encampment of books and food, he found her fast asleep on a thick blanket that Browning had brought her. She had subsisted without more than two hours’ worth of sleep a day for more than a week.

  The painter-poet bent his large body down very gingerly over the much slighter figure of his sister, and gave her a soft kiss on her forehead. “Remember me,” he whispered. He then turned with vigor and purpose and exited through the door to the street.

  Christina stirred herself awake, placing an automatic hand on her forehead where Gabriel had kissed her. In her dreams, her father tossed aside his Dante books, listened to her read her poetry, and gave her a loving kiss on her cheek. She looked around, seeing no one but experiencing a frantic sense that something had happened. Gabriel, she thought. She lifted up her weakened body as quickly as she could and stumbled around, looking for any sign of him before rushing outside. There he was: Gabriel. He seemed a phantasm among the ordinary men and women of the city. He stood in the middle of the street under the dark sky.

  As they faced each other a stone’s throw away, they appeared to be opposites: the slender woman with a severe expression on her thin, strong lips; the wide, muscular bulldoggish man with the sloping gait. As they eyed each other, resemblance grew. The shiny dark brown hair, the projecting nose, and, most of all, the changeable, hypnotic eyes.

  She ran over to him. “Come with me,” she tried to say, but at the same time he cried to her, “Come with me.” His command was not the practical, protective kind that she issued. Gabriel’s was a prophetic exhortation—the kind recounted in the Bible that would change the lives of a whole people or nation.

  She hardly noticed a carriage that was brought to a stop behind them. Gabriel’s paw-like hands led her to the vehicle, and within moments they were seated inside.

  * * *

  —

  Hours before Christina climbed into a carriage with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and before the explosion at Clerkenwell Prison, Browning, reluctant to leave Christina alone at this point, was delivering supplies to Holmes at Tudor House—fresh towels and scented waters to stimulate Sibbie’s senses.

  Holmes smiled and remained cheerful in Sibbie’s presence, feeling that a sentence of death on a doctor’s face was as bad as a warrant for execution signed by the governor of a state. Holmes had been speaking to Sibbie as much as possible, to the point where his voice grew hoarse. He could almost hear his daughter in his ear—Amelia would have teased him, he had no doubt, that if there was a single man who could carry on that many hours of one-sided conversations, it was Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.

  As the details of Sibbie’s previous life were taken in by her dormant brain, the experience could animate the other systems of the body to return to that life. This was Holmes’s educated theory, at any rate, and his abiding personal wish. He used the information he’d gleaned from the visits of Sibbie’s mother and from Reverend Fallow to speak to her about her childhood; to remind her how her kindness toward the afflicted as a youth was so great that people sought her out as though she could magically heal them; how she read studiously despite not having much formal schooling, and so became an avid student; and how even as her family suffered hardships, she maintained a positive outlook and always believed they could rise above their stations. Holmes silently hoped such positivity about her could influence him, too, to keep believing her recovery was possible.

  Finally, signs of real progress. Her eyelids fluttered from time to time. Her hands and feet had begun to twitch. At one point, she stretched her right hand out toward Holmes. This caused a great surge of optimism, which mostly subsided when the movement was not repeated. Holmes reasoned that all these constituted proof this was not a lost cause. (Then again, the history of medicine was to a great extent just a record of self-delusion.)

  “Wasn’t it all my fault?” Holmes had asked Browning without explanation.

  “What do you mean, Holmes?”

  “She ran in to try to pull me out when I fell.”

  “No,” Browning replied, “you were trying to save Loring after all.”

  “Yes, because I thought it was Gabriel stuck in there. I have tried all my theories to help her, Browning, but old theories are like the old men who cling to them, and must take themselves out of the way in favor of the new generation. And if I knew it was Loring inside that trap, a man we thought at the time was our evildoing Cato, would I have taken the same risk?”

  “I believe you would have. You dedicated yourself to all of us and our purpose—unlike Tennyson. I should get back to Miss Rossetti.”

  But then another shining sign of life, not long after Browning departed from Tudor House. Holmes was sitting beside Sibbie, trimming her nails, when she squeezed his fingers. He trembled as if grabbed by a spirit’s hand. He asked if she could squeeze his hand once for yes, twice for no. He waited so long he could barely endure it. She squeezed once.

  “My dear, do you know who killed Loring? Was there someone other than Gabriel Rossetti involved?”

  She squeezed. Yes.

  Holmes heard the street door open once again and a voice calling to find out who was home. Reluctantly, Holmes left Sibbie and headed down.

  When Holmes was gone, a white-robed figure crept down the second-floor hall, giving the appearance of a wandering ghost. From his belt woven of plant stems hung a small pistol. He had been listening carefully to the doctor-poet’s exhortations to the patient, and now he stopped at the open doorway and stared inside the dark room.

  * * *

  —

  Holmes, how d’ye do?” hailed Tennyson, whom Holmes found unwrapping himself from his old ratty coat at the foot of the stairs. He had a walking stick Holmes had not seen before, which Tennyson hung up with great care. From the horrified look on Tennyson’s face when he turned to see him, Holmes realized how he must have appeared after his countless hours at Sibbie’s bedside. His eyes were red and the skin under his eyes gray, the rest of his face sallow. Holmes explained where the others were.

  “And Sibbie?”

  “I had begun to think it would be a good plan to get rid of old professors like me. But I have broken down a wall in her. I believe she knows vital information she will be able to share with us.”

  “Excellent! Shan’t we sit for a while, Holmes?”

  “We thought you sealed yourself into Farringfor
d like the pharaohs in their pyramids,” Holmes said. “Browning believes you ordered the police to follow him and Miss Rossetti. He thinks that it was how they knew where the Slothful would be and also how they were so quickly on the scene at the sanatorium when Loring was killed.”

  “Pack of lies! Do you notice Browning always believes the worst in me? I’m terribly fond of him, meanwhile,” said Tennyson. “And I admire his poetry more than he thinks, though if he got rid of two-thirds, the remaining third would be finer. Do you know in his last work, he makes ‘impulse’ rhyme with ‘dim pulse’? As long as the pronunciation of the English language were forgotten, Browning would be held as the greatest of modern poets. No matter, I’ve come to speak to you more than to the others. To tell you that you were right.”

  The laureate found some port and they sat in Gabriel’s drawing room, which was almost immediately choked with smoke from Tennyson’s pipe.

  “There is more about myself in my poem on Ulysses than I like to confess,” Tennyson mused. “Ulysses tries to rush fate, like so many of us, in desperation to know where he’ll end up after all. He dies—in Dante’s conception, at least—for trying to pass over Hell and reach salvation through his own will. My dearest friend at university was Arthur Hallam. A young man who had every right to live a long life, but was taken by disease of the brain not long before I wrote that poem. He died, to our eyes, healthy, and since that day I have done what I have to do to prevent myself from losing hope. ‘Ulysses’ was written under the sense of loss that all had gone by, but that still life must be fought out to the end. It’s hopeful, that poem, more than I am myself. Poetry, I daresay, is a great deal truer than fact. You were right to remind me of that. I could have done more.”