The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  “With Gabriel to be released at any time, maybe even as we sit here, there is nothing more for you to do now.”

  “Come! Do not punish me with my flaws. As far as I know my own temperament, I can stand any sudden thing. But give me an hour to reflect, and I should go here and there, and all will be confused. If a fiery gulf opened in London, I would leap at once into it on horseback like Marcus Curtius in ancient times. But if I had to think about it? No. It is the moral question, not the fear, which would perplex me. Yes, Holmes, I suppose Gabriel must be liberated by the police, but do you really think, in your bones, that the detectives will leave him in peace, unless someone unveils the full truth that only we can find?”

  “I suppose I want to believe it for Miss Rossetti’s sake, and whatever I learn more from Sibbie may help the cause.”

  “Sibbie must continue her recovery, and that will take time, won’t it?” Tennyson got up, went into Gabriel’s library, and returned with Simon Camp’s Dante Murders booklet, which he placed in front of Holmes. “See what you notice about this. Long before any of this happened, Gabriel was already reading about what transpired in Boston.”

  “You think Simon Camp’s claptrap inspired him?” Holmes asked. “None of this makes sense any longer, including where Camp disappeared to after he so boldly accosted me. What am I supposed to notice?”

  “The quality of paper, the ink, and—look at the illustration on the front—even the burning feet of the simonists, which are reversed from the other one.”

  “What other one, Tennyson? Different from what?”

  Tennyson explained that he’d come to realize there was another version of the pamphlet. “The copy Inspector Williamson showed me.”

  “Showed you? He showed me, you mean, on the train. When would Williamson have shown you his copy of this?” Holmes asked with an edge of accusation. “Then Browning was right. You have been secretly talking to the police.”

  “Dolly Williamson had already been spying on Miss Rossetti, as you know. Yes, I obliged a request from the queen’s secretary to join your endeavors and give Dolly information so he could keep the people of London safer, and so the police could stop sneaking around Tudor House—at least he promised to call off his spies, though I had my doubts since that boat was still rowing around here. Never mind that, Holmes. You said Dolly had his version of the pamphlet when you saw him on the train, as well. Do you remember it?”

  “How could I remember such minutiae about an old pamphlet he waved in my face?” asked Holmes, though the objection was halfhearted. Litterateurs such as Holmes and Tennyson took in the details of every book they saw without trying. “Perhaps I can recall something of it—perhaps it was slightly different in the ways you suggest. What of it?”

  “This is a cheap production to begin with. In reprinting a booklet like this, one would avoid even the slightest extra expense. These changes have the markings of a pirated edition. If there was so much demand for more of these, the question is, where did it come from?”

  “How do you suggest we find out the answer?”

  “Come with me to try, then you can return to Sibbie’s bedside to your heart’s content.”

  Tennyson explained he already arranged to rendezvous with a young bookseller whom he had met once before. It was said he performed tasks for operatives of the publishing trade who dealt with the pirating of books and other activities that happened in the shadows.

  They found the man outside the British Museum. They heard his cheerful whistling first. “Well, it’s a brisk day—brisk!” said the bookseller, whose name was Fergins. In fact, it was a full-fledged snowstorm, one so late in April it had only been matched a dozen or so times in recorded English history. To Holmes, the fellow seemed oddly gregarious for someone who consorted with the most reviled profiteers of the literary world: book pirates. Tennyson handed him his walking stick.

  “Oh, then you found it,” said the bookseller with delight.

  “Where you said it would be,” Tennyson replied. “Do you have these hidden all over London?”

  Fergins unscrewed the top of the walking stick, then whistled a note of approval. “How I enjoy this method. It reminds me of Don Quixote’s famous trial, when Sancho Panza realizes there must be treasure concealed in the cane of a man who inexplicably refuses to let go of it. Enough of me. Are you ready to see our mutual friend in the den?”

  Fergins led them through the back of the British Museum into the printed books department. They had to go down a steep steel staircase that seemed to curl around itself. Along the way, their guide spoke with great expertise on the works of both Holmes and Tennyson. All around them were shelves of every shape and size holding books and papers. The place smelled of rotted leather and mold.

  “One day everything ever written will be in the British Museum, even newspapers,” Tennyson said.

  “There: the den,” said Fergins, catching his breath and pushing up his white-rimmed spectacles. It was a cage of steel bars, where a man with bright red hair sat at a table bathed in dim light.

  Fergins bowed as he exited, while the man with abundant red hair invited them into the cage. It was hard to gauge just how far underground they had gone. It was suffocatingly hot.

  “This den is where the transcribers work. I am not one of them, of course, but in return for providing some immeasurably rare books to the museum, I am studying some of theirs for my own purposes. I suppose you know who I am.”

  Tennyson and Holmes exchanged glances. “We know what you do, but your friend dutifully kept us in the dark about your identity,” Tennyson said. He volunteered the names of some of the well-known agents who he’d heard aided the world of literary piracy.

  “Frauds, all the ones you name! I am called Whiskey Bill, the most accomplished of them all, practically invented the profession.”

  “You are all frauds, by the very definition of your work,” Tennyson cried out.

  “We’re not here to debate the finer points of the dictionary,” Holmes said.

  They heard a sound like splashing, which turned out to be Bill’s bare feet soaking in a large bucket beneath the table.

  “My toes,” the man explained, his eyes dancing under bushy eyebrows, “swell up terribly in the humid air down here. Is it still snowing out there? It’s whispered that such a late snow is supernatural punishment for London’s vices, the heavens cracking, the proper seasons getting jumbled up into perpetual winter, and so on.”

  “Mr. . . . Bill,” Holmes began uneasily, removing the copy of The Dante Murders from his coat, “I believe your friend the bookseller informed you that we needed to know more about this.”

  “Dante, yes,” muttered Whiskey Bill, the excited flush across his cheeks receding. “Tell me, how is your friend Gabriel Rossetti?”

  Tennyson demanded to know how he knew anything about Gabriel’s involvement in the matter.

  “Now, Mr. Tennyson! It’s part of our task to know what every literary scribbler is doing, particularly when he’s in some kind of trouble. We’ve heard the police believe Mr. Rossetti has somehow been mixed up in this Dante business, though they were able to prevent the newspapers from printing it until they could be sure. If you must know, I’m quite concerned. Rossetti is something of a friend of mine.”

  “Indeed?” Tennyson replied with skepticism.

  “Who do you think helped him some five or six months back, when he needed to get a manuscript from the grave of his wife? Who indeed, but a man with talents for accomplishing unusual literary tasks.”

  Holmes and Tennyson experienced a newfound interest. Whiskey Bill sensed this and offered a lip-smacking grin before telling them more.

  Gabriel—Bill explained—had purchased some rare books about Dante from Fergins’s bookstall, and it was Fergins who arranged the first meeting between Gabriel and Whiskey Bill. Gabriel wanted to get back the manuscript of his poems, m
any of which were based on Dante, that he had impulsively buried with his wife. Bill oversaw the recovery, which required the presence of a medical and a religious observer in case there were any accusations of grave robbing. “I have to beg absolute secrecy to everyone,” Gabriel said to Bill at the time, “as the matter ought really not to be talked about.” Gabriel described his poems as bound in a rough gray calf cover, to distinguish them from the Bible that someone else put into Lizzie’s grave.

  “The body was badly decomposed, though we all agreed to keep Rossetti from seeing,” recalled Bill, a glimmer in his eyes as he lost himself in the memory. “We started a fire near the grave to disinfect the area. The bound pages were in acceptable condition, considering where they had been for seven years, though a worm had eaten through the middle of them. I even recall one of the poems he wanted most to retrieve was about Dante’s life in exile.”

  Whiskey Bill, somewhat surprising given his slick appearance, recited lines from the poem in question with naked feeling:

  And rising moon and setting sun

  Beheld that Dante’s work was done.

  “Rossetti’s hands shook as I handed him the manuscript,” Bill continued. “His health hasn’t been the same since then, from what I understand, as though he had been cursed by the desecration of his wife’s resting place, by her spirit or—”

  “What is it?” Tennyson demanded, observing the speaker’s disoriented expression.

  “There was a woman waiting for him at the gates of the cemetery, after we were done with the exhumation. I was finishing arrangements with the sexton to close up the grave, but I could see her from a distance.”

  “Well? What of it?”

  “I’m just recalling, Mr. Tennyson, that she cut a grand figure. Her brilliant hair caught the moonlight, and she held out her hand to Rossetti.”

  “Are you saying, Mr. Bill, that the spectre of Lizzie Siddal stood at the gates?” Holmes asked.

  Whiskey Bill just stared back with a grin, then dried the sweat from his neck with a dirty handkerchief.

  Tennyson expelled an ugh and seemed ready to get up and leave.

  “Mr. Fergins led Mr. Tennyson to believe that you had found some intelligence about the anonymously published Dante booklet,” said Holmes. “I’m afraid our time is too short for ghost stories.”

  “I believe I do have information that will be of use to you gentlemen. But there is the discussion of payment first.”

  Tennyson erupted, complaining that he already placed the money they agreed upon in the hollow cane as Fergins had directed him. “The bookseller didn’t say about owing anything more!”

  “I always say,” Whiskey Bill replied, “that a bookseller is one-quarter philosopher, one-quarter philanthropist, and two-quarters rogue.”

  “How much more money are you after?”

  “Not that sort of payment,” said Bill with greedy eyes and a double-gap-toothed grin. “A poem. An original, unpublished poem in the hand of Poet Laureate Tennyson. About a topic of my choice, say . . .”

  “A museum? Library?” Holmes tried to help and speed him along.

  “A tavern.”

  Tennyson tried to protest that he needed complete seclusion to write.

  “I suppose,” the doctor-poet whispered, “Browning would thrive on such a challenge.”

  Tennyson looked around, blew out a sigh, and grabbed paper and pen the man had waiting for him. When the poet threw the paper back at the blackmailer, Bill read aloud with satisfaction. “‘This tavern is their chief resort . . . Gives stouter ale and riper port.’ Hear, hear!” he cried.

  “It is splendid.” Tennyson could not help but admire it himself. “I hope you profit by it. Now, the information?”

  “Oh, poetry is a mere drug in the market these days, my friends; there is a glut of it and not enough customers. This I shall just keep for myself.” Whiskey Bill nodded, accepting his end of the bargain. “There have been two pirated printings of The Dante Murders since its original publication. Supposedly, the author is a former private detective of some kind from America. Here is what is most interesting. One of those printings was ordered privately—I mean, not by one of the usual piratical printers who can find profit in a pebble stuck to a shoe. Highly unusual. Let me see, where did I put it . . . the location these private copies were sent . . .” Bill searched through bundles of papers and books. “They must have had some success selling their copies, I suppose, since I’ve located a printer who is making new plates for them for another pamphlet of the same sort.”

  Tennyson grabbed Bill’s wrist. “A new booklet? What is it?”

  “Even as we speak, yes. It’s called In Dante’s Shadow, a True Account of the London Purgations by the Author of The Dante Murders. Here are my notes”—he pulled out a scrap of paper—“both the second pirated printing of the original Dante Murders and this new pamphlet have been ordered to be delivered somewhere called the Phillip Sanatorium. I’ve heard something of it before, a sanctuary of some kind from the sins of the city, no alcohol at all, if you can imagine, but they say that opiates are shipped in by the cartful to placate the residents.”

  Holmes rose to his feet, feeling the room spinning around him. “The religious observer. Who was it?” he asked. Bill stared back at him, his face a picture of confusion. “The religious observer who came to Highgate to help in the exhumation of Lizzie Rossetti’s grave,” Holmes continued. “Do you remember the name of the man who was there with you?”

  Their informant mulled over the question. “A preacher . . . I think it was Fallows or Fallow. Some name of that sort.”

  XXI

  Over at Tudor House, the perpetual sleep that had descended over a young woman finally lifted. Sibbie’s blue eyes opened on the darkened room where Holmes had spent so many hours at her side. At almost any other time over the last five and a half weeks, he would have been found there waiting for just such a miracle. But this time, his chair was empty.

  She had to take some time to think where she was, what had happened, how she had come to be here in this strange room full of strange objects.

  Sibbie rose slowly, gaining balance and strength by the second as her senses gradually returned. Her black hair had grown out considerably, and the back of her hair was matted from so much time in one position. The hair dye had begun to fade around the back of her head, revealing some strands of light brown and others of golden hue.

  She moved in a wobbly manner across the room, like a mermaid trying to balance on fins. Very slowly she made her way down the stairs, stumbling a few times as she went, her eyes stung by the light bouncing off the snow and through the windows. She relied on her hands to feel her way. A door from the basement opened and two men appeared, Colt pistols at the ready in case anyone tried to interfere with their mission.

  Soon, she was behind the house, in a boat on the Thames, on the first leg of her return.

  By the time a carriage brought her to the gates of the Phillip Sanatorium hours later, all her senses had been restored. She climbed down. Her stride became longer and more powerful as she walked through the gates, fresh-fallen snow singing beneath her bare feet. As excited shouts spread, white-robed men and women began to surround her, and Reverend Fallow rushed to her side.

  Fallow slowly lowered himself on one knee and bowed his head, and all the others followed suit in worshipful acknowledgment of their leader, who had finally returned.

  XXII

  DOCUMENT #6: FROM THE SURVIVING MANUSCRIPT FRAGMENT OF IN DANTE’S SHADOW, BY S. T. CAMP

  Isobel Worthington was given the nickname Sibbie in childhood by an aunt whom she loved and with whom she shared a resemblance. From the time of her youth, Sibbie had been recognized as having a rare and soothing influence over the distressed and ill, and an otherworldly effect in inspiring people around her to confess their greatest fears and dreams; there were some who insisted she po
ssessed not merely a bedside manner but near-magical powers of healing. She was visited by spiritualists and mesmerists who observed her, with some concluding she was a veritable prophetess. One supernaturalist tested her with magnetic devices that felt scratchy on her skin, to try to determine the source of her unusual powers.

  Her family, more practical, intended her to enter service, and she was considered well suited to be engaged assisting philanthropic men and women who visited charity homes, hospitals, and the like in London. While briefly in service to a well-known philanthropist, she found her employer dead, having poisoned himself, leaving behind a letter professing that he loved Sibbie but could not bear his own disloyalty to his wife and children. (Sibbie had earlier witnessed her father dead from his own hand, too, though in his case without explanation.) In this way she came into the employment of Reverend Fallow, whose career up to the present already has been partially sketched in this booklet, and her power over her subjects was soon perceived by many others around her, including—no, especially, the troubled and haunted preacher. He has told the present author that he has known people who would throw themselves from a cliff to be by Miss Worthington’s side, a long list that eventually included the reverend himself.

  I have included the previous examination of Reverend Fallow’s career in an earlier chapter primarily to illuminate the remarkable character of Sibbie Worthington.

  While traveling with Reverend Fallow through the Continent on their mission to inspect sanatoria, she accompanied him to visit the mysterious oracle of Dante Alighieri’s works, the erratic man known as the Dante Master. This authority on the Florentine bard was struck by how Sibbie shared the spirit of Dante’s Beatrice, usually so misunderstood by so-called scholars. Beatrice is believed by many casual readers of the Divine Comedy as merely a passive object of Dante’s love. In actuality, according to this Dante Master, she is the chief agent of all that transpires in the Comedy. It is Beatrice alone who perceives that Dante (and mankind) is caught in spiritual peril, and arranges an unprecedented intervention—she is the most powerful figure in the poem. More than Dante’s poetic idol, Virgil; more than the keeper of Purgatory, Cato; or Sordello or Statius or their other guides through the afterlife; or even the once-fearsome Lucifer dwelling listlessly in the pits of Hell. Nor does she allow pity to cloud her judgment and her enactment of divine justice. She is the healer and the punisher.