A sick man talking about himself, a woman talking about her baby, and an author talking about his book never knew when to stop.
Holmes tried to keep up his end of the conversation, knowing there was nothing they could do until they reached the destination that seemed to become impossibly farther away. But distractions of the present took hold. Holmes could not think of King Arthur’s quests when he was thinking of Dante’s journey on the mountain of Purgatory. The great figures were opposites in some ways. Arthur, said the legends, was consumed by personal tribulations in pursuit of saving the world, while Dante left behind all his personal attachments in order to serve the world, to save humanity from certain doom. As the doctor stared at the dim world framed by the train window, his mind turned to the scene of Dante falling asleep as he moved from the fourth to the fifth terrace of Purgatory—Dante experiences a vision of a beautiful woman, a siren of the sea, who transforms before his eyes into a horrid and foul-smelling witch grasping at him. Dante’s dreams constitute a miniature narrative of their own in Purgatory, an account of the mystical experience of penitence.
The train chugged along with greater difficulty. Laborers would come and clear the tracks, the train would progress, then more tracks would be cleared. Finally, they reached the station in the quiet hamlet of Walsden. It was all but deserted. They found one coachman who agreed to take them, though he gave them a stern warning about the conditions. The warning was as much about how much the drive would cost them as it was about the conditions themselves. If only the driver knew his desperate riders would have paid a king’s ransom.
The snow had piled up in banks. Underneath, the frost was hardening. Holmes thought he could hear the axle grinding beneath them. He was about to shout to the driver, but there was no time. One wheel of the carriage ran up a snowbank, and the entire vehicle separated from the horses and flipped over. Next came a blank space in Holmes’s memory—he found himself shivering and sucking in air, his whole body in the snow, the carriage ten feet from him.
“Tennyson!” he called, and repeated it over and over. He found his companion also in the snow back by the carriage. The laureate’s leg was trapped under the vehicle. “Help me! Help me with him!” Holmes cried.
The driver stood unscathed, but looked back in a stupor at the poet-doctor’s request for assistance. “Did you say Tennyson? Is this the immortal bard of England?”
Tennyson’s mouth appeared to unconsciously stir into a smile.
“Help me with him, man!” Holmes demanded again. “He’s mortal still, and wounded!”
“The laureate Tennyson! The favorite of the queen’s? What have I done?” the driver muttered. “What will they say of me?” Turning to the left, then right, he turned his back on them and ran.
Holmes called after the driver but it was no use. He was gone. Holmes could not lift the vehicle off the poet by himself.
“Nothing to worry about,” Holmes said to Tennyson. “Nothing at all.” Tennyson drifted out of consciousness. Holmes wanted to shout but knew his cries would be shredded to whimpers by the wind.
* * *
—
Constable Branagan, stuffing Tennyson’s letter into his vest pocket, bolted through the halls of Scotland Yard until he found Inspector Thornton, acting superintendent in Dolly’s absence, who was in the detectives’ billiard room.
“Inspector, I need a posse of men to go north to Walsden,” Branagan cried out.
Thornton turned to Branagan and raised one eyebrow at a sharp angle. He took careful aim with his stick and thumped a ball across the table. “I suppose you’re aware that the entire department is in awful crisis, Constable.”
Branagan let his gaze sneak back to the billiard table.
“This,” Thornton said defensively, “helps me cogitate.”
“Of course, sir,” said Branagan. “But I’ve received a message about a crucial development in the Dante Massacres.”
“From who?”
“There isn’t time to explain, sir. It’s complicated.”
“I’m a little surprised you’re not by Inspector Williamson’s bedside,” Thornton said coolly.
Branagan knew the right response was Yes, sir, and to retreat. Instead, he answered, “I’m doing what he would.”
Thornton walked to the other side of the table and assessed his position in the game. “Indeed you are. As a matter of fact, Williamson became so engrossed with your bookman murders that he and the Home Office lost sight of the lurking peril of the Fenians, while the rest of us were left to whistle even for our out-of-pocket expenses. I’d expect the commissioner will see to it that your appointment in our division is short-lived, Constable Branagan. An Irishman like you, lending his hand to a Scotsman like Williamson, how will that look to the public where a foreign threat is concerned?”
“My blood is Irish. I am English. My blood is Irish and I am English.”
“Spare me philosophies. Dolly could be dead by the morning, Constable; I would stick to worrying about that.”
“Inspector Williamson will not die—however badly hurt, he will fight through to survive. How will it look, sir, if the newspapermen find out you lost track of McCord after he got his hands on phosphorus by your own secret arrangement with Ironhead Herman?”
Two detectives playing backgammon and a detective sergeant boxing a heavy bag all looked over. Thornton waved their attention away and carefully leaned his billiard stick on the wall.
“You have begun to learn from your time with Dolly.”
“He’s taught me a thing or two, I believe.”
“Very well. I will give you two men and arms, but understand that it will be accompanied by my recommendation to the commissioner that you are transferred away from our department as of tomorrow morning due to a rebellious Irish temperament.”
Branagan, with no time to lose by arguing, swallowed down the bitter bargain.
* * *
—
Browning’s confusion began at Scotland Yard and soon turned into alarm. After attending to Holmes’s requests related to Sibbie’s care, then stopping over at his own house to order preparations for the worsening snow, Browning returned to Whitehall, walking the path to the Scotland Yard building. He found Christina’s belongings at the police office but no sign of Christina. The place was in chaos. As he tried and failed to locate Inspector Williamson or Constable Branagan, another policeman informed him that there had been an explosion at Clerkenwell Prison when some Fenian agents attempted to break out their allies, and that Dolly had been injured and was being operated on even as they spoke by a team of surgeons. The policeman also said Gabriel Rossetti already had been released to Christina’s care.
Had Christina been obliged to leave in such a hurry that she would abandon her things? Browning’s confusion grew worse, because at Tudor House, Browning could not find the Rossettis or Holmes, and they were not the only ones absent. Most shocking of all, Sibbie was not in her room.
Pacing the house, he noticed a purple scarf on a hook he was certain belonged to Tennyson.
Had Tennyson been back here, or had he left his scarf weeks before and Browning was only noticing it now?
His mind tumbled through the questions. Through the rooms, up and down the floors of the house, onto the roof and back down, on the street and in the garden (Eeeiu, the peacocks screeched for him to get away), examining the books that had been most recently consulted on the big table, Browning came no closer to knowing where his companions or Sibbie had scattered in the last hours, and at the same time he was certain something momentous had come to pass, possibly in the twinkling of an eye. He admitted to himself that he was frightened. He noticed something else peculiar. The doors to the cellar were slightly ajar.
He followed the stairs down through labyrinthine halls filled with the surplus of Gabriel’s monstrous collections of china, Japanese furniture, and rare musica
l instruments that had given him a glimmer of purpose after Lizzie died. Led by the light of a candle, Browning found another set of doors where the cellar seemed to end—behind these doors was another staircase leading farther down. Beneath the cellar?
He followed these stairs down into a dark, gloomy labyrinth of vaults, recalling William Rossetti’s words at the outset of Browning’s quest with Christina.
Because of its proximity to the river, the house was actually used for smuggling . . . first of political fugitives, later for supplies and even pirated and forbidden books.
The vaults themselves must have been there for hundreds of years, since the time of the Tudors. The strangest thing among all these relics of long-gone eras was a plate Browning found. It had scraps of meat and cheese on it—not yet rotted.
He heard the faint sound of the dragon door knocker from above.
Never had Browning been so relieved to welcome a messenger, who was waiting at the door and would have given up had Browning taken a few more seconds. Browning unsealed a letter written in Dr. Holmes’s hand.
Reverend Fallow is Cato. Get to Phillip Sanatorium. Use care.
He dropped the paper as though struck in the gut.
He rushed over to the train station. Frustrations piled as thick as the snow north of London. The trains already departed from the city (including the one that had carried Holmes and Tennyson) were limping along their routes, and no more trains or hired carriages were going into the snowstorm. Workmen were trying to clear enough snow from the tracks, but after slowing down, the snowfall would start again, or the winds would pick up and move the snow to obstruct the tracks.
Hours passed in which all Browning could do was imagine dire consequences to come from the delays. Finally a conductor came around to announce the next train was being fitted, and soon enough the bell rang out for passengers and Browning boarded. As he walked through the cars, he faced a man he had been looking for hours earlier: Constable Tom Branagan.
“Well, I’ve begun to be frightened a little by all this bad luck.”
“I’m sorry that’s what you think of us, Mr. Browning,” said Branagan.
He spotted a letter in front of Branagan. The constable could not tuck it into his pocket quickly enough to keep Browning from recognizing Tennyson’s hand.
“Our friend Mr. Tennyson has been diverting information to Scotland Yard all along, Constable, as I first suspected at the scene of Gibson’s death.”
“Could you blame him, Mr. Browning?” Branagan asked. “If we were not at Phillip Sanatorium as quickly as we were when Mr. Loring died, would we have been able to transport Mr. Rossetti to receive medical help in his dangerous opium haze as swiftly as we did? The arrangement between Inspector Williamson and Mr. Tennyson has made sure you were safe. All of you. Now we can find Orin Fallow and the answers we’ve sought.”
“Tennyson betrayed our trust. That cannot be justified by any outcome. As for Inspector Williamson, I am sorry for what I heard. I cannot agree with all he’s done, but I admit his clasp may be equal to his grasp. How is he faring?”
Branagan gazed down at the floor. “We’re waiting. He has the finest doctors around him.”
Browning hesitated for a moment before sitting across from the constable.
“I’m guessing,” Branagan said, as the train began crawling, “we share the same destination again. The sanatorium. If they can clear the tracks enough for us to reach the station. To be perfectly honest, Mr. Browning, we ought to have examined the place closely long ago.”
“Why?” asked Browning.
“Months before Reuben Loring died there, Inspector Williamson had received reports of unregulated shipments of opium making their way in that direction.”
“Is that something that would normally have been investigated?”
“No, but perhaps it should be. The Home Office debates how much of our time should be taken in tracking opium sold without supervision of the doctors and druggists—opium that is usually in purer forms and more potent. The fact is, asylums and sanatoriums often require larger supplies than are typically available at one time. Scotland Yard usually looks the other way because it’s considered useful that certain populations are artificially . . . dulled. Phillip Sanatorium was one of those places that seemed harmless to ignore. What is it? What’s wrong?”
Browning had fallen into a reverie of thought, his face lighting up as it did in the throes of composing poetry. “Of course . . . ,” he rasped.
“There’s no reason to hide anything from each other now, Mr. Browning.”
“Philip! In Canto Seven of Purgatory, Dante enters the region of the late repentant and encounters the shade of Philip III. He’s a part of Ante-Purgatory, where shades prepare themselves for the journey up the terraces of the mountain.”
“Yes?” Branagan replied, reaching into his bag for Longfellow’s translation as Browning continued.
“Follow my thinking, Constable. Philip was not a ruler Dante Alighieri particularly admired; he believed Philip’s leadership in war brought infamy to France and that Philip’s son brought disgrace. But he places him in Purgatory instead of Hell to redeem him. Reverend Fallow’s sanctuary is called Phillip Sanatorium—I suppose when we heard it, we would have assumed the ‘Phillip’ in the sanatorium’s title was named for Jesus’s disciple, if we gave the name of the place much thought at all. Not so: it was a reference to Dante all along. And just like Philip III, the people of England, in Fallow’s mind, have fallen into disgrace, and Fallow in his demented way offers an entrance to Purgatory to redeem them. There were things the man said that rush back into my head. He called London a ‘tossing-and-turning metropolis.’”
“Yes?”
“Why didn’t I hear it? Canto Six, Purgatory, Dante compares Italy to a ‘sick woman who finds no rest upon her downy feather-bed, but by her tossing and turning chases off her pain.’”
Branagan scribbled down Browning’s conclusions into a notebook, then turned back to Purgatory and copied out notes from it.
The constable then leaned closer. “How do you think Mr. Rossetti came to be caught up in this?”
Browning thought about finding Gabriel on the grounds of the sanatorium, and their fear—mistaken, he now realized—that they had been the ones to lead him there. The ten words the messenger had handed him from Holmes remade Browning’s understanding of the place and of what may have been happening there. He thought about the turbaned stranger whom Holmes and Tennyson had seen at the church in London before Browning observed him at Phillip Sanatorium. The man’s presence conveyed a deep sense of trouble, and he was following someone. But he was not following them at all—he was after Fallow, both at the church and at the sanatorium.
“I don’t know exactly how Gabriel came to be there,” Browning finally answered. “But I suppose you know more about our inquiries than you and Inspector Williamson ever let on. You’ve been watching us. First through your own spies entering Tudor House, then Tennyson, now the police vessel on the Thames.”
“You’ve confused inferences for facts, Mr. Browning,” Branagan replied, realizing he sounded like Dolly. “Inspector Williamson had you and Miss Rossetti shadowed when we were searching for Mr. Rossetti’s whereabouts, yes, but no longer. As Inspector Williamson told Mr. Tennyson, we’ve never sent any boats to Tudor House.”
Browning studied him with headstrong skepticism, but found no signs of deception. The train continued to struggle forward for a short time, then halt, nauseating the men. The poet stared at the expanse of white outside the window.
“If that wasn’t your boat hounding us after all . . . Green is the color of hope, and appears throughout Purgatory. Green . . .” Glimpses of green had been right in front of their eyes: the handkerchief Reverend Fallow had in his pocket; the streamer flapping on the boat that had been lurking behind Tudor House, below Sibbie’s room; the garments of some
residents of the sanatorium, like the wings and garments of the blond-headed, sword-carrying angels who enforced the rules of Purgatory. Browning searched his memories for the first time they saw the vessel on the Thames. It was after they brought Sibbie to Tudor House. Then came the thumping “spirit noises” when the medium was there. The plate of food in the vaults. “The vessel wasn’t there to watch us at all,” Browning continued his realization. “They were watching her, waiting for her. They came in through the underground vaults under Tudor House—the ones that were ages ago used for smuggling—keeping watch on her progress, waiting until Holmes found a way to revive her, so they could take her back. When Fallow visited, he got lost in the house and I had to show him the way out.”
He thought about Fallow’s face that day at Tudor House, could almost see it before him on the train. The impassioned, calculating eyes locking onto him.
Browning continued: “But Fallow wasn’t really lost trying to find a way out—no. He was studying the house for a way in, unlatching doors, all for her.”
“You’re talking about the girl, Fallow’s assistant?” Branagan asked, trying to keep up with the rapid flow of conclusions.
“Sibbie Worthington! We thought Fallow was harboring improper affections for her, but if his minions were lurking there, waiting for her, protecting her, it might be the clue to an entirely different story. Constable, what if she wasn’t serving the preacher at all, and we were blind to the truth—he was serving her. Whatever has happened there, what if she is the true center of it?”
XXIII
Simon Camp would be roused at odd hours, pulled around by the collar to see some new sight or another he was to chronicle, or to interview someone, or to study a book or documents. The ingenious plans Camp had concocted for escape had so far all remained untested for one particularly inconvenient reason—that class of green-robed fanatics armed with very long, very sharp swords in their belts. He noticed that these guards, oddly enough, all had blond hair. There were usually one and sometimes two armed fiends accompanying him, or guarding a door to his chambers, where he wrote and slept. His activities were mandated and few: mostly, studying Dante or composing his chronicle of the “divine achievements” of his captors, the pages of which were gradually transported to a printer in London. (Camp did not know which, and so hesitated to try to embed any messages asking for help.)
The Dante Chamber Page 29
