The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  Christina looked back at the windows of the opera house, blazing yellow and red.

  She offered her arm and gave a slight nod, proud of herself that she managed to hide the slightest hint of a smile.

  * * *

  —

  Browning took in the scene before him. Some of the women wore masks over the upper part of their faces, and many members of both genders wore dominoes, or long, satin robes of all black or all white.

  Browning knew—even from across the room—how uncomfortable Christina was. Her eyes, made mysterious by their unusual tint of bluegray that at times appeared hazel, projected a fearful glare at her surroundings. The traditions of the opera balls were associated with times of decadence and celebration that brushed against Christina’s every fiber. Browning knew this and hated making her come along. Still, Christina was their best hope for recognizing associates of Gabriel’s, which made it all the more alarming when a few minutes later he could no longer spot her. As for Holmes, Browning was impressed with his superhuman conversational powers as the doctor fluttered through the room like a hummingbird, progressing gab by gab.

  For a while, Browning also lost sight of the woman he’d been curious to try to interview—the one, though not masked, who concealed her face in her hands.

  When he found the same young woman again, he could see the reason for her posture. She was periodically sobbing.

  “For just such occasions,” Browning said, holding out his silk handkerchief emblazoned with his initials.

  She smiled a little and introduced herself as Jane Cary. She had wide-set green eyes, which she now dried with his handkerchief, and pinned-up hair the color of wet sand. He recognized her from her small part in the opera.

  “It was a terrific success, wasn’t it?” she said.

  “But . . . ,” Browning replied, gesturing at her tears.

  “Oh, don’t mind what a sight I am, sir. This all—well, not to burden a stranger, but it just makes me miss Lilly even more.”

  Browning nodded sympathetically, trying to hide his desire for more. “You were a close friend of Miss Brenner’s?”

  “Inseparable,” the young woman corrected him. “A day didn’t pass when we weren’t together. Hardly ever, at least. I was in the countryside with my sister’s family for a few weeks when she vanished. I curse myself that I wasn’t with her! What kind of villain, what kind of devil would do such a thing? To think of the terror she must have felt, to die like that, alone in the streets, and her eyes . . .”

  From the emotion she showed as her lips trembled, Browning’s mind turned back to the unimaginable moment Brenner would have experienced when realizing her situation. With her eyes sewn, she would be lost in a whirlpool of unhelpful voices and noises. When I approached close enough to see their condition, Dante Alighieri recounts in Purgatory’s Canto Thirteen, the heavy grief pushed tears from my eyes.

  The young woman continued, telling stories of Lillian’s career and family. “Lilly’s father was a great singing teacher, and kept her in a military regimen of lessons before he abandoned the family. That changed her.”

  “Did it?”

  “Indeed. I think she always wondered had she been a different singer, a better one in the upper registers, for instance, which her father reprimanded her about—had she practiced more, might he never have left?” The weeping young lady turned fierce with anger. “There! That’s who took it all away from her!”

  Browning wheeled around ready to confront a monster. Her accusation was directed toward the lovely prima donna of the evening’s performance, who sang the part of the heroic wife.

  “What do you mean? She did it?”

  Jane explained that this new prima donna, Miss Spalding, had been eyeing the position held by Lillian for the better part of a year.

  “Lilly worried about it all the time,” explained Jane.

  “Did she?”

  “She worried Miss Spalding was younger, prettier, with a better range of voice.”

  The sin of envy is scourged within this terrace, Browning heard Virgil’s lesson (and warning) to Dante. He tried casually asking, in a quieter voice, “Tell me something, Jane. Did Miss Brenner speak about her feelings toward Miss Spalding—this envy that plagued her—with anyone other than you?”

  “Oh, yes,” Jane said, leaning in closer with a confidential tone. “Lilly spoke about it with almost everyone she met.”

  Browning frowned.

  “I remember once,” Jane went on, “being at a grand banquet like this with Lilly—oh, wasn’t she feted by everyone there! Every man wanted to dance with her! Real aristocrats, too. Then when we left she immediately burst into tears.”

  “But why?”

  “Lilly said all the attention made her realize she was a mere opera singer.”

  Jane reached for champagne from a passing tray, and when dancing recommenced, Browning was divided from her by a sea of revelers.

  Later on he noticed that the spirits Jane drank seemed to free her from her melancholy over Lillian Brenner, at least temporarily, and he overheard her ask Holmes, in a giddy, intoxicated treble, “Is it true you’re a doctor?”

  After exchanges with a few other people, Browning pulled Holmes aside. “Have you seen Miss Rossetti?”

  “I leaned out the window for some air, and saw her walking with someone,” Holmes answered.

  “In this cold? Whom?”

  “A man.”

  “Are you certain?” Browning replied, swallowing down an unwelcome sensation of amazement and resentment.

  “I couldn’t see the fellow clearly,” Holmes added.

  “Miss Rossetti can take very good care of herself. And if she is walking on the arm of a man, he must be some kind of saint. Holmes, there was one of the lesser singers here, Jane, who spoke with you . . .”

  “Strange girl.”

  “How so?”

  Holmes explained that Jane had apparently overheard him speaking to someone else about his medical lectures. That’s why she approached him and asked him if he really was a doctor. Though she was not familiar with Holmes’s poetry (a fact Holmes found extremely hard to believe), she was quite interested in his profession.

  “I wonder why,” Browning said.

  Holmes’s reply was unexpected. “Opium.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jane had insisted to Holmes she used it only occasionally, but that both the apothecaries and the shady street dens had been insisting that supplies were running short, depriving even some injured soldiers and others who depended on long-term use of the medicines. She thought Holmes, as a doctor, might have advice.

  “What’s bothering you now, Browning?”

  “It’s about the opium,” Browning replied, struck as though by a thunderbolt. “It reminds me of something you said shortly after your arrival. Let’s find Miss Rossetti—right now.”

  * * *

  —

  Along the way on their walk, Cayley spoke about the histories of the buildings and squares and monuments they passed in the halos of the street lamps, recalled the old structures that had been swallowed by long-ago fires, chronicled the riots and scandals that had occurred at various spots. Christina for the most part listened, not minding at all Cayley’s arbitrary pauses and the hurried tone of speech that many mistook for madness. To be out around the city at night brought a thrill and fright like a sailor’s discovery of a new world. As rain began again, Cayley held up an umbrella, trying to place it over her head more than his own, accomplishing neither.

  “You surprise me so,” Cayley said to her.

  “Finding me out for a nighttime walk is rather a surprise to myself.”

  Cayley gave a snort followed by his unwieldy laugh. They had turned back toward the massive structure of the opera house. He finally explained: “I don’t mean that. Thank heavens I found yo
u here, or I should have dug a hole in the banquet hall and hidden inside. I refer to the Divine Comedy.”

  “Oh?” Christina said, concerned about what he could mean.

  “How I’ve enjoyed stopping by Tudor House the last couple of weeks when receiving your requests to help interpret arduous passages. I’ve always found Purgatory invigorating! Full of secrets. Just when you think it shall mimic Inferno, when you believe it will turn down the one corridor you’ve been searching for, Dante opens two more you never expected. Still, it always seemed to me your father’s obsession passed to Gabriel more than to you.”

  “I suppose there is a time when we all must enter our fathers’ tombs so to speak, and find what was left behind.”

  “And your own writing, your poems? I always anxiously await the latest, and have felt it has been too long a wait.”

  Christina paused to relish the comment, then cursed herself for it. Her main feeling related to her writing rushed upon her: embarrassment. “Jean Ingelow has a fine new volume, I understand.”

  “That’s so?” he responded with confusion. “Your company, of course, exceeds even the pleasure of your verse. Miss Rossetti, there is something more I wanted to ask about your father’s work on Dante. I believe I have found new information pertinent to your father’s theories on Beatrice and his conviction that she was not a real woman. I wonder if you would allow me to search through and organize the professore’s materials held in Tudor House as I continue my research?”

  “I suppose that would be fine.”

  “Truly? Well, I am as pleased as a cat eating a mouse. May I tell you my strategy for my investigation into Beatrice?”

  “Mr. Cayley, could you excuse me for a moment?”

  “If I’ve spoken out of turn . . .”

  In a way she could do even to a stranger, Christina silenced Cayley simply by raising a hand. Her eyes were fixed ahead of them, at one of the entrances to the opera house, where a slouched figure waited. Waited, she somehow knew, for her.

  Christina walked toward this figure, and at the same moment Browning and Holmes emerged from inside the building.

  “Miss Rossetti, it’s urgent!” Browning called out. Whatever he was about to say was lost as he and then Holmes saw the same distinctive silhouette that transfixed Christina.

  Moving toward her, drops of water traveling down the uneven brim of his hat onto the same tattered, food-stained frock coat he’d worn for thirty years, Alfred Tennyson nodded a greeting.

  “Miss Rossetti,” growled out the poet laureate, his neck craning toward Browning and Holmes before his stern gaze returned to Christina. “I’ve come about Dante.”

  XI

  That same morning, Alfred Tennyson had taken his breakfast in bed. He usually smoked and breakfasted in the bedroom before climbing to his sanctum on the top floor of the house to contemplate his poetry in progress and smoke another pipe. When he first came to the remote country estate of Farringford—isolated within its vast grounds and, if that weren’t enough, located on an island—two of their servants burst into tears. They said they would not live somewhere so removed. Tennyson just smiled. People often said the man never smiled, but this was not so—his smile was hidden under uncombed whiskers that concealed a mouth made jagged by dental procedures, like many other things about the poet that were secreted away.

  On his regular walk through the rolling meadows of his estate, Tennyson brought along his dogs and a thick stack of letters handed to him by his butler. Among the day’s letters was a message from his publisher expressing increasing irritation at not reaching Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Reading this slowed down Tennyson’s brisk shuffle. He thought back to Robert Browning at the Cosmopolitan Club inquiring whether he’d seen Gabriel Rossetti lately. I stick to my friends, Browning had bragged of his persistence on the topic about which he seemed haunted.

  Browning made a spectacle of himself, but that wasn’t new. Tennyson’s thoughts reeled back in time to his elder son Hallam’s christening, eighteen years earlier, where Browning proceeded to show Tennyson how to hold the baby—to tell a father how to hold his own child! Then Browning tossed Hallam into the air. Even Thackeray, who never paid much attention to anyone, seemed to look askew at Browning’s antics that morning. Browning’s happiness for the Tennyson family’s new addition was quite genuine, though; whatever complaints you could have about him and his discursive poetry, Browning was genuine down to his boots.

  While Browning pestered him at the Cosmopolitan Club about Gabriel Rossetti, Tennyson had been distracted by the crime columns he was reading in the newspaper—the gruesome discovery of the body of Mr. Morton. Even the vague details of those early reports struck Tennyson as Dantesque (confirmed in a very literal way by the later revelations). Browning had not seemed the least interested in the crime, so Tennyson dropped the topic. But Tennyson’s brain quickly began to associate the two seemingly disparate things—news of the murder, and the mystery of their Dante-obsessed, Dante-named mutual friend, Gabriel.

  Browning would probably die in white tie, but Tennyson attended the clubs and the dinners around London only grudgingly. Though England’s poet laureate owned a small residence in London, the city usually only dulled and interrupted him. He required quiet, and to keep himself to himself, more than any writer he’d known. He was a shy beast who loved his burrow.

  More to the point, he carried the strain of black blood that had always been in his family, and it worsened when trampled by the outside world. That feeling. The feeling that every stranger harbored ill will and machinations. The same feeling that—along with drinking—fueled Tennyson’s father, the village rector, sending him stomping through the house, hurling insults and objects at young Tennyson and his ten siblings.

  Still, at times Tennyson had little choice given his laureate duties but to show himself in public, such as the memorial gathering he had attended in London for that fallen member of Parliament, Jasper Morton. Before that had already been the proper funeral in Bristol, with this second ceremony for the purposes of London folks showing off their grief and their importance in public. Tennyson hated writing epitaphs, but they’d bother him out of his wits if he refused. Doing it was the best way to peace. His first and last draft read:

  Stand here, among our noblest and our best,

  J. Morton, MP, thy long day’s work hast ceased.

  The distraught widow Morton at first seemed honored by Tennyson’s presence. But as he took her hand she held it too long and trembled, staring at him in fright.

  “What is it, Mrs. Morton?” Tennyson asked, a little too brusquely for speaking to a freshly christened widow, he was sure Emily, his own wife, would later chastise him.

  “Your hair, sir!” she said with a gasp, and nothing else for a moment or two. His hair was one of his finest features, along with his almost Spanish complexion and iron cheekbones, and among the reasons Hartley Coleridge once told him he was far too handsome to be a poet—so he was rather offended at the widow’s agitated allusion to it. There was not a single gray or silver strand in it even at sixty. Eventually, the widow found her voice to apologize. She explained that Tennyson’s hair—the long, disheveled strands of raven black—reminded her of something that recently had frightened her. Before her husband died, she had found a wig of dark black hair, which felt as though it were made of silk, in one of his trunks. She had never seen it before. She recounted to Tennyson that she asked Mr. Morton why he seemed to be sneaking around at night, and he’d said he was an “easy target.” “You see, my husband had been scared, scared enough to disguise himself with wild hair like yours—he was trying to avoid detection by someone! Money went missing, too. He had been acting peculiar; at first I had thought it was only due to some strange tidings about his family that he had discovered.”

  Wild hair?! Tennyson thought, aghast.

  That was his whole exchange with the widow Morton and it was, if pecu
liar, at least less monotonous than the rest of the memorial. Tennyson also saw Browning from a distance at the memorial but did not get close enough to speak with him. At one point, as the flock of people moved from the church to the outdoors, the flow came to a halt, and in fact seemed to move in the wrong direction; Tennyson felt trapped.

  “What is going on? We’re hemmed in, why won’t they move?!” Tennyson growled.

  A nearby man gave him a gentle, embarrassed smile. He whispered to the poet: “I don’t think they will go, sir, as long as you are standing there.”

  Tennyson realized with a sinking heart—he was the reason for the crowd. They were all trying to see him, to get close to him. He felt trapped because, well, he was trapped, by humanity. The kind man next to him helped him fight his way out of the crowd and out a rear door, then requested that Tennyson send him a photograph and autograph. The poet emitted a sound of disgust: ugh.

  * * *

  —

  Even the Isle of Wight, the setting not only of Farringford but also one of the queen’s rural retreats, was not free from encroachment, as freshly proven on this day that started in such typical fashion with breakfast, walking, and reading the mail. When cold rain began to fall, he whistled for his dogs, who stopped abruptly and doubled back for him. The letter he’d read from his publisher, and another letter concerning literary matters from his stack were on his mind. As he neared Farringford again, he could see something ahead. He squinted, which he had to do to make out anything not right in front of his face. There was a group of people loitering, one of them holding a map. The poet turned on his heels and took a longer way around. But then while he and his wife had their luncheon inside there was a commotion in the gardens. They peered outside the large window that opened on a hill to see the gardener pointing a rifle up a tree, where a man was perched to try to steal a glimpse of Tennyson.