The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  “Mr. Rossetti is a grown man,” the constable said in a soft, frictionless voice with a hint of an Irish upbringing, as Christina’s voice preserved a trace of Italy. “He is fully competent. I believe they are rather prone to wandering. Painters, artists, and men of letters, I mean. I appreciate that you’re both concerned. However, without evidence that he is in some kind of jeopardy . . . I suppose you can see for yourselves how busy our men are these days.”

  In the background, Dolly Williamson was now calling out to some unseen companion: “I want that reporter in irons! That’s right! His name is Walker!”

  “I didn’t want to unduly emphasize this, but do you know who we are, Constable?” Browning asked, leaning over the desk so that his face was almost against the constable’s.

  “Mr. Browning, please,” said Christina, mortified to her core.

  Constable Branagan nodded. “I do, Mr. Browning. You’re the poet of many popular volumes, The Ring and the Book, of course, but ‘My Last Duchess’ being my favorite. And Miss Rossetti, poetess of the remarkable ‘Goblin Market.’ Practically everyone I knew took a fancy to that when it was printed. A new volume coming soon, Miss Rossetti?”

  “No,” she said quietly.

  “I wasn’t much of a reader before serving as one of Mr. Dickens’s porters at Gad’s Hill,” explained Branagan, “but I’ve tried to keep up with books since leaving that position.”

  “I daresay nothing could impress a man after lugging around Dickens’s valise,” Browning muttered.

  Christina already blushed deeply at Browning’s attempt to use their renown, then felt another wave of stomach-twisting embarrassment at the constable’s mention of her most lauded poem.

  “Miss Rossetti, has your brother ever before left his home without telling anyone where he went?” asked the constable.

  He had.

  “In those previous occasions, has he stayed away for days? Weeks, sometimes?”

  At that moment she knew all their other arguments were lost.

  “Gabriel is not all gloom and eccentricity, Constable,” she said. “He does things that are at once beautiful and absurd, and his tender heart feels stabs from all sides. When he chooses to, he becomes the sunshine of the family.”

  The young man nodded with sincere reflection, but closed his notebook and the case.

  Speechless, helpless, she exited the building in a hurry. Her legs felt weak, as if they had been detached, as the cold wind whipped around her. The relentless noises of London rumbled around them, an obnoxious taunt, it seemed, emphasizing the indifference that met their pleas. The walls of nearby buildings were covered in advertisements, something her father always hated, saying London had written all over itself like a badly abused book. Flowers, milk, hot pies, all offered for sale from one direction or another, over the cries from bootblacks and street sweeps.

  Browning broke their silence. “If I ever cross that constable’s path, I shall probably be silly enough to soil my shoe by kicking him. I suppose there is nothing better to do at this point except wait until—”

  Christina held up a single finger, silencing him. “Did you hear it?” she whispered, so as not to drown out the noises.

  It started again. It was a faint cry.

  A phrase.

  Repeating itself.

  Christina walked as though in a dream state down the street, turning the corner until she traced the cry to a newsboy, who was shouting to the point of hoarseness.

  The boy called again: “‘Behold the handmaiden of the Lord’! Extrey Ledger! Cheap as dirt. Full account by crack reporter Steven Walker—what was found written upon the dead MP in Wapping. ‘Behold the handmaiden of the Lord’!”

  She was gripped by a double realization: that a terrible danger had come to London, and that she knew what had happened to her brother.

  V

  DOCUMENT #2: LETTER FROM DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI TO WILLIAM ROSSETTI, OCTOBER 5, 1869

  READ THIS ALONE.

  My dear brother,

  I want to tell you something lest you hear it from anyone else first. It is that I am going to recover my old book of poems. Only lately I made up my mind to it. I hope you will think none the worse of my feeling for one I held the dearest.

  The truth is, William, no one so much as herself would approve of my doing this. Art was the only thing for which Lizzie felt very seriously. Were it possible for her to do, I believe Guggums would open her grave, and before you knew it I would find the manuscript on my pillow at night.

  The matter is of a less dreadful nature than might seem possible, dear brother. I have received medical assurance that all in the coffin will be perfect, otherwise I would not have the courage to make the attempt. As I write, I wonder if it is hardly worth all this, but the conflicting states of mind one passes through about life are among the things which most call for making allowances.

  I am very anxious to know your view of this, and to remind you beforehand that no mistrust or unbrotherly feeling could possibly have caused my silence till now regarding this undertaking. Difficulties continue to be raised by the cemetery’s authorities as to whether we are attempting theft—theft of my wife’s body, and my own verses!

  I have begged those helping me with this to hold their tongues, but I suppose this will all ooze out to a wider circle in time. What would Christina think? She seemed to know my burying the thing was a mistake, but her religious strictures and unnaturally pure morals would surely forbid this attempt at recovery. With Christina, once a mistake is made, there is no undoing it. It is very desirable, as you will think with me, that Christina and the rest of our family should not know of this.

  Yours in affection,

  Gabriel

  * * *

  —

  Browning did not disrupt Christina’s concentration on the ride back to Tudor House. While she sat, he studied her strong profile, the slightly curved tip of her nose, her firmly set lips, her shoulders in a forward shrug, her mystical eyes directed straight ahead.

  The only thing she said to him on the way was: “Mr. Browning, I am truly sorry for my ebullition of temper toward you at the police office.”

  “What? Your . . . ebullition of temper?” Browning searched his memory before realizing she referred to her almost imperceptible change of tone after he alluded to her poetry to the constable.

  He didn’t mind the quiet the rest of the drive, as he was busy pinning down his own thoughts after reading the late edition of the newspaper Christina had hunted down from the newsboy. The article, by the reporter named Walker whom they had overheard Inspector Williamson excoriating, unleashed a chain of unanswered and disturbing questions.

  When they arrived back in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s disorderly drawing room, Christina smoothed her glossy brown hair and then, in a breathless flow of words, began sharing her thoughts from the armchair in front of the fireplace. She sat, perfectly composed and collected as usual, suggesting the slight but strong figure of the queen dowager who was said to have once dwelled there. “Mr. Morton, the representative of Bristol in the House of Commons, was discovered in the gardens with a backbreaking stone fastened to his neck. I suppose you have heard all about his horrifying murder, Mr. Browning.”

  Ever since the day he watched Elizabeth die in Florence, when her ravaging illnesses had made her look more like a young girl than his fifty-five-year-old wife, Browning could not brood on death—peaceful or painful, premature or expected, by illness or hanging, it didn’t matter—without his soul aching. It’s true that there were exceptions, as Tennyson made sure to remind him. You don’t always stay away from darkness, now do you, Browning? Eventually, Browning chose to write a long poem about crime and death—The Ring and the Book—but that came out of much hand-wringing and singular circumstances. He certainly had no desire to read about death or violence to pass the time over breakfast. He wanted to explai
n all this to Christina. Instead, he offered a version of the excuse he made on the same topic at the Cosmopolitan Club when Tennyson was devouring his newspaper. “I do my best to stay away from morbid excitement of the masses, Miss Rossetti. What does this have to do with Gabriel?”

  “If I am right? Enough to place my brother in far graver danger than I believed. That is my fear, unless we can disprove it. Follow me, Mr. Browning. I avoid newspapers, too, but this story was impossible to escape. My aunts talked of nothing else. The backbreaking stone, as I say, was latched around Mr. Morton, and there were rumors a phrase had been etched into the horrid device. But until now the inscription was merely that—rumor—and the supposed Latin phrase not known to the public. Now the inscription on the stone has been exposed by this newspaperman, to the chagrin of police, as we witnessed in Inspector Williamson.”

  Ecce ancilla Dei.

  Behold, the handmaiden of the Lord. The call of the newsboy and the words Mary speaks about herself after she is informed she will carry the son of God, announcing her compliance. Dante Alighieri, as he enters into the first terrace of the mountain of Purgatory, hears Mary’s words emanating from a stone carving as an example of humility to instruct the prideful souls consigned there.

  Each terrace of Purgatory introduces a different sin that traveling souls must exorcise in order to progress upward, and in passing through that region devoted to excessive pride, the repentant souls carry crushingly heavy rocks on their backs—sometimes for hundreds of years. The murderer of Mr. Morton intended for the world to discover Dante in his scene of death. Not only did the mechanism of Morton’s death mimic Dante’s description, but the stone carried the very words of Mary heard by Dante.

  “Why? Why Morton? Why the Prideful?” Browning asked. Questions felt much safer to him than any attempts at answers.

  “From the newspaper eulogies of the man that I’ve seen, there are numerous ways Morton’s life exemplifies excess pride. He strongly pushed to expand the number of foreign lands over which to impose British rule. He helped pass measures to punish the Irish people at large for the violence of the few who call themselves Fenians. He refused to allow another seat to be added to the House of Commons, alongside his own, to represent Bristol—according to his adversaries, a way of maintaining complete power over constituents. He even supported the horrid Contagious Disease Acts.”

  “His primary sin is being in Parliament, then. When does the paper say Morton was last seen, before he was found dead?”

  “Approximately two weeks before Gabriel went missing from our sight.” She gave a single, firm nod to emphasize the implications. “Mr. Browning, this all suggests the same thing—there is some kind of Dante-obsessed maniac in London. He must have overpowered and kidnapped Morton, then waited weeks before carrying out this grotesque killing. I believe he might have taken my brother also, and if the police do not want to listen to us that Gabriel could be in jeopardy, so be it. But if I’m correct, we may have days to act before this villain decides to do evil to him, too.”

  Browning found it remarkable that she remained composed while speculating about violence against her brother. He ducked all thoughts that anything so awful could happen to a friend, and now summoned his courage even to consider it. “Gabriel wanders.”

  “Mr. Browning?”

  He had barely whispered the words. “He wanders the streets in the middle of the night when he cannot sleep, right?” Almost against his will, Browning gave voice to the fearful images taking life in his mind. “Reciting poetry, or with an open book in his hand . . .”

  “A book of Dante Alighieri’s verses, often enough,” she said, finishing his thought. “He is renowned for painting scenes inspired by Dante and Beatrice on canvas and murals.” Christina held up Gabriel’s drawing she had come across in their first searches of the house, showing a scene from the punishment of the Gluttons in Dante’s Purgatory, with the scrawled note.

  Browning read: “‘CR—need your help.’”

  “Maybe he wasn’t reminding himself to ask my opinion. Maybe he was beginning to sense that his work on Dante had brought him into an atmosphere of danger. Maybe it wasn’t just the mental effects of chloral and morphia; this time he really was being followed. The drift of all this is that if there were some lunatic with a vendetta against Dante, or acting upon some kind of perverted monomania, my brother would be a tantalizing prize. He is even named for Dante.”

  Browning studied the sketch—it showed vividly the suffering of a shade in a state of starvation. Many of their literary circle studied the Florentine bard—including Browning himself, who had taken an episode from Dante’s Purgatory and turned it into a long (too long, according to Browning’s critics) poem called Sordello, named for one of the shades who helped show Dante and Virgil the way up the mountain. When Ba died, it was a quote from Dante that Browning copied out to memorialize her, in which the Florentine expressed his faith that one day he would be reunited with Beatrice.

  Thus I believe, thus I affirm, thus I am certain it is, that from this life I shall pass to another better, there, where that lady lives of whom my soul was enamored.

  Dante meant Beatrice; with the same words Browning meant Elizabeth. At the time, he could not help but think of Percival Shelley, who had read Purgatory aloud to Mary Godwin (later, Mary Shelley) after their baby died. Some thought Shelley’s choice of Purgatory was meant to distract her with its sublime lyrics, while others assumed it was meant to console in a more direct way, to show that in death all are reunited.

  Ba’s father had cut her off from the family starting the day of their marriage. When her father was told she died, it got back to Browning that Mr. Barrett unemotionally replied, “I never had much objection to that dandy poet, but my daughter should have been thinking of another world.” Browning buried Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Dante Alighieri’s city in a summer heat like a razor wrapped up in the flannel of sunshine. In many ways, Florence had provided a glorious setting for the Brownings’ fifteen years of marriage. He and Ba were out of reach of the control of her father. Mr. Barrett had turned her life in London into a prison, and just getting through the obstacles to reach their secret wedding before her father could enact his plan to take her away, Ba looked like death, but transcendently beautiful. How necessity makes heroes, she mused when they’d recount the elopement, or heroines.

  Once they were abroad they could raise their son, also a Robert (Pen, for short), in the congenial Italian climate and culture. Browning had brought their boy with him on marvelous excursions, including to visit the ancient castle near Sarzana that had belonged to the Marquis Malaspina, one of the sanctuaries where Dante stayed after being exiled by political enemies from Florence. The place was in a state of decay when the Rossettis came to see it, but Dante’s cramped little chamber had been preserved and, with proper credentials, could be entered.

  Prior to his exile, Dante already had begun composing his Comedy, named such to distinguish it from the form of tragedy since he’d planned to end with the poet’s ascension to Heaven. The poet, his life turned upside down by his enemies, had to find beds to sleep in, food to put on his plate. In the meantime, the pages he had already composed about his journey into Hell were lost. They gathered dust and mold in a trunk. The trunk was hidden from Dante’s adversaries and transported under the cover of night to a patron of the poet’s, who then carried it to Malaspina. The marquis hurried to Dante with the pages—probably into that very chamber of Dante’s where Browning stood—and begged the Florentine bard to continue it.

  Dante contemplated the peculiar second realm that would follow that first section—the kingdom of Purgatory. As a subject for poetry, it was without a doubt intimidating. It was this canticle that would reveal the penance that every one of them—not just the purely wicked—would have to pay one day. “Since fortune unexpectedly has restored my work to me,” Dante answered the marquis, “I will proceed however grac
e shall determine for me.” Dante dedicated Purgatory to Malaspina.

  The room where the exchange took place was a simple stone enclosure. It exuded the loneliness and bitterness of exile. Yet there was a window, and outside the brilliant outline of the Alps.

  “Nothing to see, Father,” noted Browning’s son, peering out.

  “Not so, my boy,” Browning whispered to Pen of the window, where there came in a rush of mountain air. “There is where Dante saw the heavens.”

  Dante Alighieri’s legacy in Italy remained complicated by continued debates over his politics, variations of the kind that had left Dante without a home hundreds of years before. All the more reason English-speaking writers prized their own commitments to Dante. In addition to the Brownings and Christina, other British writers, including John Ruskin and Tennyson, turned to Dante for inspiration.

  The translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy into English a few years earlier out of America, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with the help of James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other members of Boston’s land of letters, spread the gospel of Dante further through Great Britain, as did a translation by the Rossettis’ friend and former pupil of Professore Rossetti, Charles Cayley. But in England, no single writer had been immersed as completely and personally in the Florentine’s life and Comedy as Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

  Since the beginning of this quest to find Gabriel, somewhere tucked into Browning’s mind was the idea that it had all begun with Gabriel’s loss of Lizzie, that whatever path of descent he was on now, it might just as easily have been Browning.

  Browning grappled and battled with the possibilities Christina proposed—that Gabriel’s disappearance was the responsibility of a Dante-doused fiend. “Nonsense!” he cried at one point, and then exclaimed at another, “I refuse to believe it! Worse than nonsense!” Into his mind came the image of the ancient warrior Cato, the guardian of the mountain of Purgatory, glaring in disbelief at Dante, the new arrival—a living man, a man still casting a shadow! How was this poet breaking all the rules to enter the sacred kingdom? Virgil, Dante’s guide, eloquent almost to a fault, must convince the doubting sentry that the journey was authorized from higher powers.