A Rich Full Death

by Michael Dibdin

Then a very nasty suspicion peered over the rim of my mind, like the forelegs of a big blotchy spider crouched beneath the floorboards. A moment later it crawled boldly out and showed itself. Browning had stolen some of my personal effects and hidden them at the scene of the murders in an attempt to incriminate me!

  I leapt up, already making for the door. Then I stopped in my tracks. What had he taken? Without knowing that I could not be sure I had recovered everything before the police were informed that evening-as the note clearly threatened.

  Now I realised why my premises had been ransacked. It was precisely to prevent me taking a rapid inventory of my possessions and noting what was missing. Browning wished to force me to work it out the hard way: by solving the riddle written in the letter. Three lines of poetry, with a word left blank. Clearly the only solution was to identify the poem from which it had been taken, and read through it to find the missing word. But what was the poem?

  With a shudder of horror I realised that it must be Browning’s own Sordello!

  Now I saw the whole game to which Browning was challenging me. To save myself from imminent arrest on the false evidence he had planted, I had to try and track down and recover each of the items in turn. To know what to look for I had to find the words missing from the quotation supplied. And to do that I had to read Sordello.

  Do you realise what this meant? Sordello is the poem which all but destroyed Robert Browning’s promising reputation overnight, and established him in the one he presently enjoys-of being the most tedious, pretentious and obscure poetaster in existence. If it had merely sunk into oblivion the case would not be so bad, but although barely one hundred and fifty copies have been sold, the poem is notorious and the stories concerning it are legion. One man thought his mind had gone because he could not understand two consecutive lines. Mr Carlyle-one of Browning’s supporters, mind! — did not even trouble to read the piece, his wife having read it through without having any idea whether Sordello was a man, a city or a book. The present Poet Laureate, so his brother informed me when I mentioned the piece, claimed to have understood only the first and last lines, both of which, he said, were lies: ‘Who will may hear Sordello’s story told’ and ‘Who would has heard Sordello’s story told’.

  In short, the thing is a bete noire, a monstrous abortion of some six thousand lines, each both incomprehensible in itself and lacking any evident relationship to those immediately preceding and following it. And it was this which Browning was forcing me to read, literally to save my life-knowing full well that no lesser incentive would be sufficient. This was revenge, indeed!

  But for all his cleverness, I might well have called his bluff, and gone to bed-had it not been for Beatrice. For myself I would have risked it, but I could not rest easy until I knew she was safe. To do that I had to find Browning, and I had no hopes of finding him at home. No, he would be hiding at the centre of this maze he had constructed for me, and to locate him I should have to find my way through it-of that I was convinced. And so I set to work.

  Five o’clock rang as I leafed through the hateful volume, wondering where to start-hoping the pages might have been marked, or that my eye would magically light on the right passage. No such luck!

  One thing, however, did soon occur to me. Sordello is divided into six Books, and six was the number of murders which had recently taken place in Florence. The note instructed me to start at the scene of the last murder, so might the quotation before me not prove to be from the last of the six Books?

  It seemed worth starting there, at any rate. And so, eyes aching and brain awash, I began to pore over the bad print of that damned volume. When I had scanned all eight hundred and eighty-two lines of the final Book, I knew that unless I had been nodding somewhere-which was all too probable, and the fear of it was part of what made all that followed one long purgatory indeed-the lines in Browning’s note did not appear in that section.

  I was in despair-a furious raging despair, for Browning had out-thought me. But there was no time to lose: if the lines did not appear in the Sixth Book then they presumably appeared in the First; and there, sure enough, after reading another three hundred lines of meaningless rigmarole, I found what I was looking for:

  … select your prey,

  Waiting (the slaughter-weapons in the way

  Strewing this very bench) …

  The slaughter-weapons! Hardly had I found the words than I had snatched up a lantern and my travelling-pistol, stuffed Sordello into my pocket, and was gone!

  22

  It was still pitch dark, and very cold. The streets were empty and every house tightly shuttered. I ran along the cobbles which were still greasy from the rain which had fallen earlier in the night-ran, and fell painfully, bruising my hip and almost shattering the lantern. Thereafter I continued at a more moderate pace into Via Tornabuoni and down towards the river. At the Trinity square I turned left, and in another minute was standing outside the boatyard where Grant’s body had been found.

  The gate was shut, and the lock-forced open by the murderer-had been replaced. But with some little difficulty I was able to climb over, lit my lantern and started to search. After spending half an hour at my task-shifting heavy balks of wood with a jeweller’s care, to avoid making the slightest noise, fearing every minute that the watchman would take me-I had to admit defeat. If anything had been hidden in that courtyard, it had been done so well that I could not find it. But surely Browning could not have intended to make it so difficult, I thought. He must have meant to give me a fair chance at least, or where was his sport?

  Then an intriguing thought occurred to me. The note had not spoken of Grant’s murder, but of ‘the last murder’. Now the last murder which had taken place, strictly speaking, was not that of Grant but of the ruffian Petacco. True, this was not supposed to have anything to do with the crimes we had been investigating, but it seemed worth at least having a look there.

  The instant I stuck my lantern into the mews where the Italian had been found stabbed, I beheld a writing chalked up on the wall which told me, even before I looked any further, that I had found the place. It read:

  A poor gnome that, cloistered up

  In some rock-chamber with his agate cup

  His topaz rod, his…, in these few

  And their arrangement finds enough to do.

  A few seconds later I had found ‘the slaughter-weapons’-a lead-weighted stick given to me by my father when I set out for Europe, with my name and address in Boston inscribed on a plate; and the other a knife on the Bowie pattern, with my initials engraved on the blade.

  So far, so good; but what further tests lay ahead? Had I known, I think I might have turned that Bowie-blade against my own heart, and ended the torment then and there. How Robert Browning would have laughed to see me-huddled in the doorway of a slum tenement, an hour before dawn on a freezing winter’s morning, straining my bleary eyes over his most arrant piece of incomprehensible nonsense by the light of a lantern, at the raw end of a sleepless night!

  Well, I shall not make you live the horror with me-in the end I found the quotation, and knew the thing I sought was a seed-pearl, tiny and inconspicuous, mounted on a tie-pin. This was an ornament which I am given to wearing on important occasions, and many people in Florence would have been able to identify it as mine. I cursed Browning roundly in Italian and English as I picked my way through the old centre of Florence towards Via di Calimala, where Tinker died.

  The old bakery was not difficult to identify, even in the dark, with its wooden buttresses built across the street outside to shore it up, and posters warning that the building was in a dangerous condition. But where to look for that confounded pin? I blundered about the ruin, scaring a pack of rats that seethed about the floor. I could make out Browning’s inscription on the wall easily enough, but I did not trouble to read it yet: it would be time enough for that when I had found the pin.

  In the end there was only one place left to look-the most obvious, logical, and dreadful.
And there I saw the tiny gem, gleaming in the lamplight against the charred stones at the very back of the oven, far out of reach. There was no help for it-I would have to crawl in and retrieve it.

  The horror of it, Prescott! For think-I had to enter that terrible cavity head first! There was barely enough room for my shoulders, and voices screamed in my head that I should get stuck, wedged there for ever; or that the building would collapse, as the notices threatened, pinning me there, my mouth full of Tinker’s ashes, while the rats came to feast on me.

  Well, I survived-but the man who crawled out of that hell-hole, pearl tie-pin in hand, was but a shadow of the one who had gone in two minutes earlier. Already Browning’s devilish plan was working.

  Upon the wall, by the light of my quivering lantern, I read the following:

  We watch construct,

  In short, an……

  The clues were getting shorter and more difficult, I noted sourly.

  By now, though, despite everything, I felt I was ahead of the game. I had already solved two of the six riddles Browning had set me, and had the entire day to meet the challenge of the other four. For a moment I was even tempted to return home and sleep-sleep! How sweet the word sounded, lulling my ears with its insidious music.

  But I soon saw how foolish this would be. After all, I had no notion of how much harder my task was likely to become. Would not my tormentor deliberately have made the first tests easier than those which came after, so as to encourage me to continue? Such, after all, is the essence of purgatory. In hell all hope must be abandoned, but is there not a kind of peace in that?

  When my thoughts turned to the scene of the next crime-that ancient palace in the Borgo Pinti where the Chauncey sisters had used to receive spirits, and the faithful-I at once realised that this presented a problem quite different from any encountered so far. For Edith Chauncey had been murdered inside her home. How then had Browning been able to place any of my belongings at the scene? And how would I be able to get in to retrieve them?

  First, at any rate, I had to know what I was looking for. I betook myself to a cafe which had just opened and flopped down at a table, drinking five coffees one after another in a vain attempt to sting my brain into some semblance of activity. Then I settled down to read through another slab of the unspeakable Sordello.

  People came and went-street-sweepers, market porters, servants on their way to work, travelling salesmen, soldiers, priests, layabouts and ruffians of every description. Sordello himself might have entered and sung a lay or two without attracting more than a casual glance from me. Eight hundred and forty lines were my lot this time, before I found that the missing word was the unhelpful ‘engine’. The next ten lines made matters clearer: ‘A kernel of strange wheelwork … grows into shape by quarters and by halves; remark this tooth’s spring …’ Very good, Mr Browning, I thought-you have stolen my watch. I settled my bill and set out for the Chaunceys’ home.

  The door was opened to me by a strange girl, who very quickly apprised me of the fact that Miss Kate Chauncey no longer lived there, that a German family had moved in, that no Englishman had called recently, nor had any packets or parcels been delivered-and then shut the door ungently in my face.

  I stood dumbfounded on the step. Was the game to break down so soon, then? Had Browning not foreseen this check? Perhaps he was not so clever after all.

  I was on my way downstairs when the horrible thought struck me-and the rock-like building itself seemed to move as in an earthquake. I ran quickly upstairs again, past the floor where the Chaunceys used to live, up to the landing above. And there, scrawled in chalk upon the wall, I read the hateful message:

  From the wet heap of … where they burned.

  In the corner stood a large earthenware pot, and inside this I found my half-hunter. I now knew that I had at all costs to go on to the very bitter end-and how bitter that end was bound to be.

  I stalked the streets like a revenant till I saw a cab, and commanded the driver to take me to my destination with such a baleful glare he did not even haggle about the fare. Inside the musty vehicle I sat and tried to hold the book steady enough to hear another thousand lines of Sordello’s dreary story told. But I would grow cunning, I thought: instead of wading through pages of dead verbiage to find the quotation, which usually seemed to be near the end, I would work my way back. But once again Browning had out-guessed me, unless it was just my bad luck. At all events, the line was but fourteen from the beginning, this time, and the word ‘rubbish’-whatever that might mean. I seemed to hear Browning’s sardonic laughter echo about me, as that day in the Boboli Gardens. I was very tired by now, and subject to mild hallucinations.

  When I reached Purdy’s villa I found that in this case there was not the slightest difficulty about gaining access to the property. The gate stood open, and I was able to walk in and look around to my heart’s content. The snag was that there seemed to be nothing to be found: no inscription, no ‘rubbish’-nothing. I searched for an hour or more in vain, and then at last sat down to rest my bones for a moment amid the fragrance of rosemary and thyme in the little herb garden on the sheltered south side of the villa.

  I awoke, with a start, to find a dead man staring down at me. At first I thought I was dreaming, but then the corpse moved closer, growling fearfully, and I knew it was no dream. I crawled backwards, trying to distance myself from the thing. There was foam on its lips, I saw-and I knew it then for what had once been a man named Maurice Purdy.

  Suddenly it sprang! I knew that death was on its mouth and in its touch. With an energy I did not know I possessed, I leapt clear of its attack and ran screaming from that place, and did not stop until I was out of sight of the villa.

  That effort, and the terrible shock of seeing a man I had believed to be dead and buried-and very soon would be-standing there before me, utterly dissipated any beneficial effects of my long sleep. And it had been long, I discovered, for it was now past noon, and since my cabbie had long given me up I should have to walk the four miles back to Florence. And all without having recovered the object of my quest-or even knowing what it was.

  As I trudged despondently along, I caught sight of some chalk writing on the low stone wall which bordered the lane, and the next moment read, with a thrill, this line:

  As in his……she felt her tresses twitch.

  Scattered all over the verge, I found scraps of paper, calling cards, letters, accounts from tradesmen, and such like stuff-each with my name figuring prominently. This, then, was the ‘rubbish’. I gathered it all up and stuffed it into my pocket. It had of course been here, I realised, that Purdy’s giant wolfhound had been discovered the morning after the attack on its master, stretched lifeless beside the road with its brains blown out.

  As I continued my forced march back to Florence, more than one innocent peasant who saw me striding along-dishevelled, wide-eyed, an open volume of verse clutched in my hands-no doubt thought that he had seen a mad poet. ‘Mad perhaps, but no poet!’ I felt like shouting. ‘Spare me that, at least!’

  Meanwhile Sordello drummed inexorably into my brain, five steps to each line of that damned pentameter, until I thought I would go deaf or crazy or both. But in the end I found the line, and knew it was a pair of gloves I had to try and recover from Cecil DeVere’s apartment.

  The bells were striking half-past two when I finally reached the cypress-shaded mound to which most of those on whom I was presently calling had moved, and passed through the Porta a’ Pinti and back within the walls of Florence. My legs were aching fiercely, but I had to keep up my relentless pace as far as the Cathedral, where I found a cab at last, and drove the rest of the way to the Borgo San Jacopo.

  By applying to the porter’s lodge, I soon discovered that DeVere’s suite had not yet been re-let, and on representing myself as interested in taking it I was able to have myself shown around the premises. A sad sight they were, now that all their late occupier’s possessions had been crated and shipped back to his fami
ly home: bare plaster walls, a few lost-looking pieces of furniture, the floor one gleaming bleak expanse of marble. For the first time I was struck by the melancholy of murder-not the thrills and horror of the hunt, but just the dreary reality of empty homes, of grief, and a way of life destroyed.

  As soon as the porter showed me out on to the terrace I saw what I was looking for: the chamois pair with my initials stitched on a tag inside the wrist, draped over the newly-repaired railing at the very spot where DeVere had fallen to his death. Unfortunately the porter had seen them too.

  ‘Ah, the gentleman who came this morning has forgotten his gloves!’ he cried. ‘I will keep them until he returns for them.’

  I had to think quickly.

  ‘I know the man! He is a friend of mine. He came to look the premises over for me-it is on his recommendation that I have come. I shall take the gloves and give them to him this evening at dinner.’

  I added a brief description of Browning, which convinced the porter that I was speaking the truth, took possession of the gloves, and left.

  It was by now the dead slack part of the afternoon, and I might have known that it would prove impossible to find a cab to take me up to Bellosguardo. Nevertheless I stood waiting for almost half an hour in the sun opposite the axe-like wedge of the Palazzo Guidi, trying to force my eyes to follow my shaking finger across page after page of Book the Sixth of Sordello: A Poem in Six Books; by Robert Browning Esq.; London: Edward Moxon amp; Son, 172, Fleet St; 9, Capel St, Dublin; amp; Derby MDCCCXL (his dad paid the costs, he told me) in search of the teasing reference I had found neatly penned on a slip of paper inserted into the right hand glove:

  Quench thirst at this, then seek next ….-……

  When at length I found the missing word it was like a needle through my heart, confirming all my fears. But at least I had done with Browning’s damned drivel for ever-and with a great hoot of glee kicked the volume like a punctured football about the courtyard of the Pitti Palace, till I woke the guard, who shouted at me to desist. Then I set off almost at a run through the slums of the Oltrarno round the Santo Spirito and Carmine churches, towards the San Frediano gate.