Behold I am, truly I am Beatrice, she announces at the summit of the mountain of Purgatory, as a trembling, sobbing Dante looks on.
The Dante Master instructed the visiting pair, Sibbie and Fallow, in each canticle of the Comedy. But those lessons alone were not life altering. It was when the old demagogue gave them his rare copy of exiled Professore G. P. G. Rossetti’s treatise on Dante that Sibbie felt overmastered.
“Few have attempted to uncover the true value of the Divine Comedy,” said the Dante Master. “Fewer still have come so close as the professore.”
“What is the truth?” asked Sibbie.
“That we bleed with Dante’s words.”
She felt a wave of change upon her. The professore’s book, to the ordinary eye unreadable and tedious, was a prophetic text predicting the ascendancy of the figure of Beatrice over conventional, failed religions that had become antiquated and irrelevant. Professore Rossetti’s pages demonstrated, in fifteen volumes of dizzyingly persuasive terms, that Dante’s poem had been meant to initiate a secret sect dedicated to Beatrice and the Comedy’s power to save humankind.
“Madness, to some, this mysterium magnum,” mused the Dante Master on this topic, his lips making a popping sound as though to mock and belittle the doubters. “To others: the truth as yet unsketched by any philosopher.”
Sibbie had found meaning and purpose that no reading of the Bible, however passionate, no preacher or spiritualist or magical healer, had ever shown her.
“‘Behold I am, truly I am Beatrice,’” Sibbie read aloud from Purgatory, as though taking an oath. At the prompting of their mysterious instructor in Italy, she read the words again. Behold I am, truly I am Beatrice.
Repeat the words to yourself each day, he told her, seven times a day.
While the visitors were touring the homes and haunts of Dante and related locations, they found themselves at one point caught in a crushing crowd in Rome. Fallow began to panic. He shook, he cried. He felt he was about to burst out of his skin. But Sibbie, turning her ability onto the man who was ostensibly her superior, put her hands on his shoulders, her fingers moving like giant spiders up his neck. Against all logic this calmed him, and suddenly he could breathe.
From that moment on, Fallow was beholden to her. He increasingly served Sibbie’s wishes, rather than the other way around, even when to the outside world she still appeared to be laboring as an assistant. He pledged himself to her.
After Sibbie returned to England, she directed the preacher to assist her in finding those who would help her enact the vision and prophecy of Dante. Around this time, as their Phillip Sanatorium began to be organized, the preacher was called to assist in an exhumation of a body in order to retrieve a bundle of poems heavily influenced by Dante—and in doing so became acquainted with the troubled and brilliant Dante Gabriel Rossetti, son of the very scholar whose cult of Dante had mesmerized them. Sibbie, intent on including Mr. Rossetti in her mission, went to find the painter-poet.
Reader, it may be useful to describe further the woman so many, yourselves included, have worshipped or will worship for years to come. She is striking. Her excellent, piercing blue eyes burn through to the soul—examine one of the photographs of her reproduced here, notice those eyes possess a glow with a light when captured by a camera. People who were near her—couldn’t help themselves—wished she would look at them, and then wished she might stop. Just as when she looked upon the sacrifice of Brother Morton, she stands strong, long limbed, her hair the color of sunlight. Or, I should correct myself—her hair was so until recently when, under necessity to conceal herself from police attempting to interfere with her mission, she temporarily dyed her hair the dull color of a walnut, and later cut short and as black as ink. But her physical appearance is a modest hint of the inner strength and force that comes out in even the briefest encounter with this woman.
Mr. Rossetti, some say, nearly collapsed upon seeing her at the gates of the Highgate Cemetery after the unearthing of his wife, feeling the stranger’s power immediately as sensitive and artistic souls do; soon the brilliant man as well as a number of Sibbie’s other new devotees were collected on the grounds of the sanatorium, some moving back and forth between there and London and others residing there, seeming to have vanished from their previous lives in the eyes of outsiders. All the devotees, it is fair to say, needed Dante Alighieri to set their lives on the divine course and, perhaps even more, they needed Sibbie.
* * *
—
It had been a copper-skied evening in early October 1869. Gabriel could not stop his hands from shaking. The book pirate, Whiskey Bill, and the sexton of the cemetery had finally reached the coffin seven feet under the ground, and were disinterring it by the light of a large fire. Gabriel did not help. He could not help. Because of his trembling, but more so because of what he was doing. What vanity had it been, to think that the poems he had interred with his wife were worth disrupting her eternal peace—and his.
But he wanted those poems. He had a right to the product of his own genius, hadn’t he?
Gabriel turned to look at the next grave, his father’s. He had hazy recollections of the day the old man died. Deprived of his sight, writhing in pain, he had been speaking nonsense. “Where is my mother? She was right next to me a moment ago,” the professore moaned at one point.
His mind seemed to grow clear for short periods of time.
“What a consolation it is to have all my children around me! And yet not to be able to see them.” Then, to Gabriel: “Ingegnoso Gabriel. What mistakes I made. You are like a sheep running amok, full of genius but too lazy and disrespectful to be a Dante!”
Christina and their mother soothed Gabriel and promised him the professore did not know what he was saying. Soon, the old man cried out, “Ah Dio, ajutami tu”—Oh God, help me—and was gone.
A sheep running amok.
“Here’s the thing.” The words seeped out of the toothy grin of Whiskey Bill. The redheaded book pirate was holding the manuscript of poems. “Ah, don’t touch yet, Rossetti,” he said to the eager Gabriel, “we must dry it by the fire and so on.”
As the book pirate and a doctor began to treat the worm-eaten manuscript—the pages resurrected from death—with disinfectants, the religious observer—for one was required by their arrangements with the city—walked over to Gabriel, who was preparing himself.
“You’re not going to look into the grave, Mr. Rossetti?” asked Reverend Fallow, noticing the intense anticipation of Gabriel’s face.
The cool wind blew, and an eddy of sparks flew toward Gabriel and the preacher.
“Yes,” Gabriel replied.
“Perhaps I wouldn’t, Mr. Rossetti.”
“I was assured she would be in fine condition.” He hesitated, then asked, “Is she, Reverend? Is she?”
Whiskey Bill read aloud a poem about Dante Alighieri—maybe about Gabriel’s father the professore, as well—which Gabriel had called “Dantis Tenebræ,” from one of the pages he was drying.
This is that steep land
Where he that holds his journey stands at gaze
Tow’rd sunset, when the clouds like a new height
Seem piled to climb. These things I understand:
For here, where day still soothes my lifted face,
On thy bowed head, my father, fell the night.
Fallow’s mouth lifted into a pacifying smile. “Of course she is in excellent condition. Her hair continued to grow after death, it seems, and fills the coffin like a bed of roses. But do you not wish to remember her in life, rather than in death?”
“Please understand, Reverend, that I had no intention of disturbing her peace today, I merely . . . I tried so hard to remember my verses exactly as I wrote them, but I couldn’t. Even though I wrote them, they were not mine, not anymore. You see, my last volume of verse was hated by some of the bloody cri
tics who say I must choose to be either painter or poet, but these, these will set them all right again.” Tears welled up in Gabriel’s eyes. “I must see her.”
He knew. He knew they were all lying about her being in such splendid, lifelike condition. The body down there was not Lizzie anymore. It was a ghoul, a monster who would never again let Gabriel rest.
Murderer.
Reverend Fallow gripped Gabriel’s arm as tightly as he could.
“Let go of me! Let me see her!”
“Something else may have pulled you back here,” Fallow said with a peculiar air. “Dante. That is what is contained in many of those poems, isn’t it? Your visions of Dante Alighieri.”
Gabriel thought for a moment that the man could be making fun of him, then, seeing he was entirely serious, nodded. “How do you know?”
“There’s much we have uncovered about the power of Dante, which I understand is a birthright in your family. There is someone here to meet you.”
Through the gates there walked a woman, her hair bright in the low light of the moonrise. She might have been an amalgam of all the women Gabriel had painted since the golden days of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in his search for complete beauty and truth, or perhaps they had all been of her without him ever knowing. He could not decide if this woman before him was a copy or the original.
“Brother Gabriel,” she said.
Gabriel turned away from the grave and felt his legs take him toward Sibbie.
* * *
—
Christina felt conflicted as their span of horses carried them onward over rolling hills. Part of her wanted to throw herself from the moving vehicle and plunge into the thickening snow. But she could not bring herself to flee, not now that she was united with her brother. She would not let him out of her sight again. To questions about where they were going, Gabriel gave no response; his lips quivered and eyes widened. He didn’t remain completely silent. He spoke with fiery conviction about Dante as their way forward. “Father taught us,” he said in a near chant, “for so many years he taught us that very truth, Christina, and we refused, refused to listen, but it returns to us.”
She pleaded with him to let her bring him to safety where he could recover from his ordeal, and that anything else, everything else, could wait. “This cannot wait,” he said, “for she simply won’t allow it. Remember what Dante proclaims: ‘This day will never dawn again.’”
One horse’s leg became strained, and they had to stop twice for it to be wrapped. The drive went on for hours longer than it would have in better conditions, though she could not keep track of how long they rode along. Christina was tired of talking in circles with Gabriel, tired down to her bones. By the time they neared their destination, she had fallen asleep once again, and Gabriel picked her up, slipping off her boots, and lifted her from the vehicle. When she woke up, they were standing in a circle of people. Her head tipped backward, the first things she saw were several people’s bare feet.
She insisted Gabriel let her stand on her own. As she found her balance, a regal woman with the alabaster skin of a classical statue approached them—she hardly recognized this figure as Sibbie, whom she had mostly seen supine and silent in Tudor House until this moment. The quintessential patient. An object, not a subject. Now she wore a white, almost translucent robe. Her hair, glossy black mixed with shades of lighter blond and brown—as if she were a multitude of women—was blowing around in the winter gusts. Fallow was speaking into Sibbie’s ear.
Christina’s eyes roved, but she tried to fix her expression to hide how her mind was swimming. The residents of Phillip Sanatorium, including Reverend Fallow, all stood in postures of reverence toward Sibbie. The worshipped woman, meanwhile, stroked Gabriel’s hair. He bowed his head as if in a church.
“My dear boy,” Sibbie said in a hungry whisper, “I’ve just been learning all that I’ve missed while I was insensible. What they tried to do to you. Are you well enough?”
Gabriel’s eyes grew moist and he struggled to speak. Christina was astounded at the woman’s effect on her brother—an effect that took an instant hold of him the way she had only seen happen before under two influences, Lizzie Siddal and opium.
“Sister Christina,” the woman said, turning to her, the breath behind her words frosting into mist. “We have waited for you for a long time.”
“I don’t understand,” replied Christina, her fatigue swept away by awe.
“You’ve been welcome here for a long time, my dear. You may not have known that, or perhaps you did without admitting it. Do not fret. I assure you, you are ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“Please, my sister does not—” Gabriel tried to break in.
“Base child!” Sibbie turned back to Gabriel with thunder in her voice. “You could not stop yourself and your bottomless urges, and the consequences could have destroyed everything we have made. Oh, folly, when man is asked to serve the ways of God and reminds us he is merely a man!”
Christina thought back to Sibbie throwing herself into the drying shed to pull Holmes from the thick smoke. She was not trying to save Holmes at all—she was trying to stop Holmes from saving Loring. To stop him from ruining the purgation.
Gabriel fell to the snow, tears flowing as he begged the woman for forgiveness. Christina continued to try to hide the surge of emotions and fears that filled her, noticing the gathering included not only those wrapped in white robes but also those followers in green garments with swords in their belts.
One of the females robed in white stepped closer to Christina.
Christina gasped with fear and recognition. “Ethel!”
“Here I am called Sister Ethel,” said the refugee from Saint Mary’s, with a light giggle. With conviction she announced: “I found where I belong.”
Christina shook her head, and could only manage to blurt out: “Why?”
“At Saint Mary’s, they wanted us to conceal the past, however much we had done wrong and whatever wrongs were done to us. Brother Fallow came to teach us that we cannot run away from those vices, we must expel them, for ourselves and for all those around us.”
Christina heard a song before she noticed Ethel and the others were singing. “Te Deum laudamus.” Their voices reached her. We praise thee, O God.
When she willed herself to find the strength to look back at Sibbie, the leader’s hand was outstretched toward her. Christina bowed her head, raised her own hand, and felt the woman’s fingers slide onto hers.
O God, the song went on, in Thee have I trusted—let me never be confounded.
* * *
—
As the ride went on, the train’s speed decreased. Deep, drifting snow swirled out the window as darkness fell. Where there would have normally been glimpses of the spires and towers of London receding, there was a white blur. Holmes and Tennyson heard the conductors speculating whether the next train would be able to run at all. The train passed several depots along the way without stopping because of concerns it could stall in a drift.
Whiskey Bill’s information inside his cage at the British Museum had led the two poets to an array of surprising conclusions. If they had pieced everything together correctly, then they had reason to believe Reverend Fallow was at the heart of the deaths—a realization that filled them with more questions than answers, at least not answers to be arrived at in the brief amount of time they had to contemplate them.
After leaving the museum, they had sent messages to be delivered to the police and their friends at Tudor House, and by now they hoped all of them might already be heading toward Walsden. It certainly worried the two travelers to hear that the snow might prevent more trains from going north, but they stayed hopeful that a resolution to all was imminent. They couldn’t know, of course, that the Rossetti siblings had left well ahead of them with the same destination. If they had known it, if they had
known about Sibbie’s revival from her sleep, and what was revealed in its aftermath, they would have known to fear for their own safety and certainly for the Rossettis’. What they did know was this: Reverend Fallow could be holding his next victim somewhere at the Phillip Sanatorium, and as Holmes pointed out, he would not have been able to forgive himself if delaying even a minute longer than necessary resulted in another death.
They made their plans; they would search the grounds of the sanatorium after they arrived, and if they found traces of a potential victim or a victim-in-waiting—as they guessed they might—then they would shepherd the captive to safety until the police arrived.
Neither man wished to speak too much about all the things that could still go wrong. Tennyson, as he did in any circumstance when he was not fully comfortable, spoke about himself. He mused on and on about his poems on the Arthurian legends. “By King Arthur I always meant the soul,” he explained, “and by the Round Table I meant the passions and capacities of a man. There is no grander subject in the world, don’t you agree?”
When Tennyson asked if people agreed with him, he did not pause for the answer.
“Critics wish to make me out as celebrating war, Holmes. By Jove, anyone can see that all my verses about war represent a mood. But the critics are nothing and allow me nothing. For instance, take ‘the deep moans round with many voices.’ ‘The deep’ they say I stole from Byron, ‘moans’ from Horace, ‘many voices’ is Homer’s, and so on . . .”
The Dante Chamber Page 28
