Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  Edith’s neck curved like a swan’s to hide her face. “Well, dear heart.” Longfellow smiled gently. “How is my little darling this afternoon?”

  “I’m sorry for spying, Papa. I wished to ask you something and could not help but listen. That poem,” she said, timid but probing, “speaks of the saddest things.”

  “Yes. Sometimes the Muse calls for that. It is the poet’s duty to tell of our most difficult times with equal honesty as we tell of the gay times, Edie, for only in coming through the darkest moments, sometimes, is light found. Thus does Dante.”

  “That man and woman in the poem, why must you punish them so for loving each other?” A tear blotted her sky-blue eyes.

  Longfellow sat down on the chair, rested her on his knees, and made her a throne of his arms. “The poet of that work was a gentleman christened Durante but changed in childish playfulness to Dante. He lived some six hundred years ago. He was struck by love himself—that is why he writes so. You have noticed the marble statuette above my study mirror?”

  Edith nodded.

  “Well, that’s Signor Dante.”

  “That man? He looks to have the whole world’s weight on his mind.”

  “Yes.” Longfellow smiled. “And deeply in love with a girl he met long ago, when she was, oh, not much younger than you, my darling—about little Panzie’s age—Beatrice Portinari. She was nine when he first saw her, at a festival in Florence.”

  “Beatrice,” Edith said, imagining the spelling of the word and considering the dolls for whom she had not yet found a name.

  “Bice—that is what her friends called her. But never Dante. He only called her by her full name, Beatrice. When she came near, such modesty took possession of his heart that he could not raise his eyes or return her salutation. Other times, he would ready himself to speak and she would simply walk by, barely noticing him. He would hear the townspeople whisper of her, ‘This is no mortal. She is one of God’s blessed.’”

  “They said that of her?”

  Longfellow laughed lightly. “Well, that is what Dante heard, for he was deeply in love, and when you are in love, you hear townspeople praising the one you praise.”

  “Did Dante ask for her hand?” Edith inquired hopefully.

  “No. She only spoke to him once, to say hello. Beatrice married another Florentine. Then she became sick with a fever and died. Dante married another woman and they started a family. But he never forgot his love. He even named his daughter Beatrice.”

  “Wasn’t his wife angry?” the little girl asked indignantly.

  Longfellow reached for one of Fanny’s soft brushes and ran it through Edith’s hair. “We don’t know much about Donna Gemma. But we do know that when the poet met with some troubles in the middle of his life, he had a vision that Beatrice, from her home in Heaven, sent a guide to help him pass through a very dark place to reach her again. When Dante trembles at the idea of this trial, his guide reminds him: ‘When you see her beauteous eyes again, you will know your life’s journey once more.’ You understand, dear?”

  “But why did he love Beatrice so much if he never spoke with her?”

  Longfellow continued brushing, surprised by the difficulty of the question. “He once said, dear, that she excited such feelings in him that he could not find any words to describe them. For Dante, the poet that he was, what could capture him more than a feeling that defied his rhymes?”

  Then, he recited softly, caressing her hair with the brush, “‘You, my little girl, Are better than all the ballads/That ever were sung or said;/For ye are a living poem,/And all the rest are dead.’”

  The poem produced its usual smile from the recipient, who then left her father to his thoughts. Following the sound of Edith’s footsteps up the stairs, Longfellow remained in the warm shadow of the creamy marble bust, suffused with his daughter’s sadness.

  “Ah, there you are.” Greene appeared in the parlor, his arms out wide either side. “I believe I dozed off on your garden bench. No matter, I’m quite ready to return to our cantos! Say, where have Lowell and Fields disappeared?”

  “Out for a ramble, I believe.” Lowell had apologized to Fields for growing warm, and they had set off to get some air.

  Longfellow realized how long he had been sitting. His joints clicked audibly when he stirred from his chair.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, looking at the watch he removed from his waistcoat, “they’ve been gone for some time.”

  Fields tried keeping up with Lowell’s long strides on their way down Brattle Street.

  “Perhaps we should return now, Lowell.”

  Fields was thankful when Lowell came to an abrupt stop. But the poet was staring ahead with a frightful look. Without warning, he yanked Fields behind the trunk of an elm. He whispered to look ahead. Fields watched across the way as a tall figure in a bowler hat and checkered waistcoat turned a corner.

  “Lowell, calm down! Who is he?” asked Fields.

  “Merely the man I saw watching me in Harvard Yard! And then meeting Bachi! And then again in heated talk with Edward Sheldon!”

  “Your phantom?”

  Lowell nodded triumphantly.

  They followed surreptitiously, Lowell directing his publisher to keep a distance from the stranger, who was turning onto a side street.

  “Daughter of Eve! He’s heading for your house!” said Fields. The stranger started through the white fence of Elmwood. “Lowell, we must go speak with him.”

  “And let him have the upper hand? I have a much better plan for this blackguard,” said Lowell, leading Fields around the carriage house and barn and through the back entrance into Elmwood. Lowell ordered his chambermaid to welcome the visitor who was about to ring at the front door. She was to bring him to a specified room on the third floor of the mansion, then to close the door. Lowell snatched his hunting rifle from the library, checked it, and brought Fields up the narrow servants’ stairs in the back.

  “Jamey! What in God’s name do you think you’re going to do?”

  “I’m going to see to it that this phantom does not slip away this time—not until I am satisfied with what we know,” said Lowell.

  “Has your knot come loose? We’ll send for Rey instead.”

  Lowell’s bright brown eyes flared gray. “Jennison was my friend. He supped in this very house—there, in my dining room, where he took my napkins to his lips and drank from my wineglasses. Now he’s cut to pieces! I refuse to float timidly around the truth any longer, Fields!”

  The room at the top of the stairs, Lowell’s childhood bedroom, was unused and unheated. From the window of his boyhood garret, the view in winter was a wide one, taking in even a part of Boston. Now, Lowell looked out and could see the familiar long curve of the Charles and the wide fields between Elmwood and Cambridge, the flat marshes beyond the river smooth and silent with glittering snow.

  “Lowell, you’ll kill someone with that! As your publisher, I order you to put that gun away at once!”

  Lowell put his hand over Fields’s mouth and gestured at the closed door to watch for any movement. Several minutes of silence passed before the two scholars, squatting behind a sofa, heard the tread of the maid leading the guest up the front stairs. She did as instructed, showing the caller into the chamber and immediately closing the door behind him.

  “Hullo?” said the man to the empty, morbidly cold room. “What kind of parlor is this? What’s the meaning of this?”

  Lowell rose up from his place behind the sofa, aiming his rifle squarely at the man’s checkered waistcoat.

  The stranger gasped. He thrust his hand into his frock coat and drew out a revolver, pointing it at the barrel of Lowell’s rifle.

  The poet did not flinch.

  The stranger’s right hand shook violently, the excess leather of his gloved finger rubbing the trigger of his revolver.

  Lowell, across the room, raised the rifle above his walrus-tusk mustache, which showed itself a dark black in the insufficient light, and
closed one eye, looking with the other straight down the nose of the rifle. He spoke through clenched teeth. “Try me, and whatever happens, you shall lose. Either you send us to Heaven,” he added as he cocked his gun, “or we shall send you to Hell.”

  XIII

  The stranger held out his revolver for another moment and then flung it down to the rug. “This job ain’t worth such bosh!”

  “Collect his pistol please, Mr. Fields,” Lowell said to his publisher, as if this were their daily occupation. “Now, you rascal, you’ll tell us who you are and what you have come for. Tell us what you have to do with Pietro Bachi and why Mr. Sheldon was giving you orders on the street. And tell me why you’re in my house!”

  Fields lifted the gun from the floor.

  “Put up your weapon, Professor, or I say nothing,” the man said.

  “Do listen to him, Lowell,” Fields whispered, to the satisfaction of the third party.

  Lowell lowered his gun. “Very well, but I pray for your own sake that you are straight with us.” He carried over a chair for their hostage, who repeatedly pronounced the whole scene to be “bosh.”

  “I don’t believe we had the chance to be presented before you put a rifle to my head,” the visitor said. “I’m Simon Camp, a detective from the Pinkerton Agency. I was hired by Dr. Augustus Manning of Harvard College.”

  “Dr. Manning!” Lowell cried. “For what purpose?”

  “He wished me to look into these courses taught on this Dante character, to see whether it could be demonstrated as likely to produce a ‘pernicious effect’ on the students. I am to look into the matter and report back my findings.”

  “And what have you found?”

  “Pinkerton assigns me the whole Boston area. This trifling case wasn’t my highest priority, Professor, but I’ve done my fair share of work. I did call on one of the old teachers, a Mr. Bak-ee, to meet me on campus,” said Camp. “I interviewed several students, too. That insolent young man Mr. Sheldon was not giving orders to me, Professor. He was telling me what to do with my questions, and his language was a sight too smart to repeat in the company of such fine velvet-collared coats.”

  “What did the others say?” Lowell demanded.

  Camp scoffed. “My work is confidential, Professor. But I did think it was time I speak to you face-to-face, ask your own opinion on this Dante. That is why I’ve come here today to your house. And what a welcome!”

  Fields squinted in confusion. “Did Manning send you to speak to Lowell directly?”

  “I am not under his wing, sir. This is my case. I make my own judgments,” Camp answered haughtily. “You’re just fortunate I’ve slowed up on my trigger finger, Professor Lowell.”

  “Oh, what a row I shall call down on Manning!” Lowell jumped up and leaned over Simon Camp. “You came here to see what I say, did you, sir? You shall cease with this witch-hunt at once! That’s what I say!”

  “I don’t care a brass farthing, Professor!” Camp laughed in his face. “This is the case I have been given, and I shall not stand down for anyone—not for that Harvard swell and not for an old cuss like you! You may shoot me down if you like, but I take my cases to the end!” He paused, then added, “I am a professional.”

  With Camp’s careless inflection on this last word, Fields seemed to know at once what he had come for. “Perhaps we can work something else out,” the publisher said, removing some gold pieces from his wallet. “What say you enter an indefinite respite from this case, Mr. Camp?”

  Fields dropped several coins into Camp’s open hand. The detective waited patiently, and Fields dropped two more, prompting a stiff smile. “And my gun?”

  Fields returned the revolver.

  “I daresay, gentlemen, now and then a case works out for everyone involved.” Simon Camp bowed and made his way down the front stairs.

  “To have to pay off a man such as that!” Lowell said. “Now, how did you know he would take that, Fields?”

  “Bill Ticknor always said people like the feel of gold in their hands,” Fields remarked.

  His face pressed against his garret window, Lowell watched with steady anger as Simon Camp crossed the brick footpath to the gates, happy-go-lucky as could be, jiggling the gold pieces, staining Elmwood with his snow prints.

  That night, Lowell, overcome with exhaustion, sat still as a statue in his music room. Before entering it, he had hesitated in the doorway, as though he would find the real owner of the room sitting in his chair before the fire.

  Mabel peered in from the archway. “Father? Something is the matter. I wish you would speak about it with me.”

  Bess, the Newfoundland pup, galloped in and licked Lowell’s hand. He smiled, but it saddened him beyond measure to recall the lethargic greetings of Argus, their old Newfoundland, who had ingested a fatal amount of poison from a neighboring farm.

  Mabel pulled Bess away to try to maintain some seriousness. “Father,” she said. “We’ve spent so little time together recently. I know . . .” She restrained herself from completing her thought.

  “What’s that?” Lowell asked. “You know what, Mab?”

  “I know something’s troubling you and gives you no peace.”

  He grabbed her hand lovingly. “I am tired, my dear Hopkins.” That had always been Lowell’s name for her. “I shall go to bed and feel better. You’re a very good girl, my dear. Now, salute your progenitor.”

  She complied by giving him a mechanical kiss on his cheek.

  Upstairs in his bedchamber, Lowell plowed his face into his lotus-leaf pillow, not looking at his wife. But soon he tucked his head in Fanny Lowell’s lap and cried without pause for nearly a half-hour, every emotion he had ever known coursing through and spilling out into his brain; and he could see projected on the closed lids of his eyes Holmes, devastated, sprawled on the floor of the Corner and the carved-up Phineas Jennison crying out for Lowell to save him, to deliver him from Dante.

  Fanny knew her husband would not talk about what was upsetting him, so she just ran a hand through his warm auburn hair and waited for him to rock himself to sleep amidst his sobs.

  “Lowell. Lowell. Please, Lowell. Wake up. Wake up.”

  As Lowell’s eyes creaked open, he was stunned by the sunlight. “What, what is it? Fields?”

  Fields sat at the edge of the bed, a folded newspaper gripped close to his chest.

  “All right, Fields?”

  “All wrong. It’s noon, Jamey. Fanny says you’ve been sleeping like a top all day—turning round and round. Are you unwell?”

  “I feel much better.” Lowell focused immediately on the object that Fields’s hands seemed to want to hide from his view. “Something’s happened, hasn’t it?”

  Fields said bleakly, “I used to think I knew just how to deal with any situation. Now I’m as rusty as an old nail, Lowell. Why, look at me, won’t you? I’ve grown so terribly fat that my oldest creditors would hardly know me.”

  “Fields, please . . .”

  “I need you to be stronger than I am, Lowell. For Longfellow, we must . . .”

  “Another murder?”

  Fields passed him the newspaper. “Not yet. Lucifer has been arrested.”

  The sweat box in the Central Station was three and a half feet wide and seven feet long. The inside door was iron. On the outside was another door, of solid oak. When this second door was closed, the cell became a dungeon, without the slightest trace of or hope for light. A prisoner could be kept inside for days at a time, until he could no longer endure the darkness and would do whatever he was asked.

  Willard Burndy, Boston’s second-best safecracker behind Langdon W. Peaslee, heard a key turning in the oak door and a blinding plane of gaslight stunned him. “Keep me here ten year an’ a day, grunter! I ain’t pleadin’ to no murders I didn’t pull!”

  “Cheese it, Burndy,” the guard snapped.

  “I swear, ’pon my honor . . .”

  “Upon your what?” The guard laughed.

  “Upon the h
onor of a gentleman!”

  Willard Burndy was led in shackles through the hall. The watching eyes of those in the other cells knew Burndy by name if not by his appearance. A Southerner who had moved to New York to reap the wartime affluence in the North, Burndy had migrated to Boston after a long stretch in the New York Tombs. Burndy gradually learned that among the ranks of the underworld, he had earned a reputation for targeting the widows of wealthy Brahmins, a pattern that he himself had not even noticed. He had little desire to be known as an assailant of old fossocks. He had never considered himself a louse. Burndy had been quite cooperative whenever a reward was offered for stolen heirlooms and jewelry, returning a portion of the goods to a fair-minded detective in return for some of the cash.

  Now, a guard twisted and pulled Burndy into a room and then pushed him down into a chair. He was a red-faced, wild-haired man with so many lines crisscrossing his face that he resembled a Thomas Nast caricature.

  “What’s your game?” Burndy drawled to the man sitting across from him. “I would extend a hand, but you see I’m barnacled. Hold . . . I read about you. The first Negro policeman. An army hero in the war. You was at the show-up when that vag jumped out the window!” Burndy laughed at the memory of the broken leaper.

  “The district attorney wants you to hang,” Rey said quietly, tearing the smile off Burndy’s face. “The die is cast. If you know why you’re here, tell me.”

  “My game is safe-blowing. The best in Boston, I say, better than that dog nipper Langdon Peaslee on any day! But I didn’t kill no beak, and I didn’t jam no brother of the cloth neither! I’ve got Squire Howe coming in from New York and, you’ll see, I’ll beat this in the courts!”

  “Why are you here, Burndy?” Rey asked.

  “Those fakers, the detectives, they’re planting evidence at every stop!”

  Rey knew this was likely. “Two witnesses saw you the night Talbot’s house was robbed, the day before he was murdered, looking into the reverend’s house. They’re legitimate, aren’t they? That’s why Detective Henshaw chose you. You have just enough sin in you to take the blame.”