The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  Now that he regained consciousness to find himself in the drafty, unlit chamber, Camp couldn’t decide what to yell out. He settled on:

  “American! I’m an American!”

  This would suggest to his captors—Camp hoped—that the United States Navy might be on its way with a warship to rescue him.

  A lamp was carried in, the sudden dash of light stinging Camp’s eyes. By the time he recovered himself, the light vanished, leaving behind darkness. He shouted again. The glow of the lamplight soon returned, held up by one of the white-robed residents he had seen wandering the grounds, a man with a head roughly the shape of an onion. He was followed by a slightly pug-nosed man in a dark suit who had an expression on his face intense enough to be worthy of the first son of man. Camp took advantage of the light in order to examine the place of his captivity—he could now see that the room, which he had expected to be a kind of old-world dungeon, was actually quite opulent, with book-lined shelves and marble statues of ancients.

  “Mr. Camp, I am glad to see you are safe. We are sorry for the chill in here. I’m afraid it’s unavoidable in these old structures. We do our best. I believe you were trying to say you lived in America before your pilgrimage. You may disregard that. Here, we are all citizens of one true city.”

  “Who—I demand that you release me from this blasted dungeon right now! Why, I am an American and—” Camp stopped. “How did you know my name?” He had not given his real name to anyone except Dolly and McCord during his trip to London, not the steamship line, not the lodging houses where he boarded.

  “Take those manacles off, if you please,” the dark-clothed speaker requested of his companion, who unlocked Camp’s restraints.

  Camp immediately reached into his coat for his weapon, but it was gone.

  The man giving orders handed Camp his bowler hat. “My name is Reverend Fallow,” he said. “Shall we stretch our legs?”

  Fallow did not wait for an answer before starting up the stairs, and Camp, not able to think of a better alternative at the moment, replaced his hat on his head and followed behind. They had been inside the subterranean chamber of a large, brick structure. Once they were up aboveground, Fallow put his arm through Camp’s.

  “Old gray London—like New York or Boston back in your United States, Mr. Camp—is one of the most licentious and depraved cities in the world. To be part of it is to be trampled, spit on, disrespected, and disheartened. The city in the modern era is taking a severe toll on the souls of good men and women,” Fallow said. “Here, on these grounds, we have begun to change that.”

  As they stepped into the brisk afternoon air, more men and women cloaked in shining white robes sauntered about. It was another abruptly humid day, as though winter had been given no time for a graceful exit.

  “I see what you are. Some kind of utopia, is that it?”

  “A utopia, a utopia,” the minister mulled over the word. “No, not that, Mr. Camp. Our aspirations here are quite more important than temporary tranquillity.”

  “I’ll ask again, fellow, how do you know who I am?”

  “All questions are answered where we dwell, though not always when we wish them to be. This way, please.”

  They followed a gravel path along the slow-moving canal that ended at another structure. They entered a generously open space in what appeared to be a chapel, and Camp’s eyes were drawn to the rounded ceiling. A mesmerizing, if incomplete, painting had begun to fill the white spaces above them.

  Camp took in the astonishingly expressive and emotional faces in the fresco—the agony in the eyes and mouth of a man being crushed under impossible stone weight, the confusion and helplessness in the woman whose eyelids were sewn together with wire. At the shore of the mountain was a fearful man with a flowing beard—the beard, not the man, reminded Camp of old Longfellow—and eyes of fury, the image of Purgatory’s ancient Roman protector, Cato.

  The style of the paintings was singular. It combined medieval splendor and modern taste. It was the style of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose art and writings Camp had been examining since marking Dolly Williamson’s interest in Rossetti.

  The preacher recited: “‘These passages are nothing like those to Hell, for here songs usher us in, and down there with savage laments.’”

  “Dante,” Camp said. “You’re behind these grotesque deaths, ain’t that the truth? You’re the lunatic Scotland Yard is hunting for? What is it that happened after I was knocked cold?”

  To Camp’s surprise, Fallow calmly filled him in about the ex-soldier Loring dying in the old drying shed and Sibbie, who had arrived with Fallow, getting caught in the poisonous smoke.

  “What is it you’re doing, tricking some of these feebleminded people you have stumbling around here into helping you imprison your victims until you decide when and how to finish them off? And now you’re paying the price, with that poor girl getting stuck inside? I suppose a man like you sacrifices your pawns without a second thought?”

  The accusations caused no change to the placid, paternal expression on Fallow’s wide face.

  “I can’t picture you snatching people off the street with your own two hands. No, I’ve been in this line of work long enough to know that’s not what’s going on. Dante Gabriel Rossetti did these horrifying paintings, didn’t he? From what I’ve read, he seems to be a bear of a man, and he has a monomania for Dante’s Comedy. Is he the henchman for your crimes?”

  “You asked how I know who you are, Mr. Camp,” Fallow said, taking one long step toward him. “I have known of you for quite a while, actually. You wrote admirably about the Dante phenomena that took place in Boston. Those were revelations, but faint glimmers of possibility compared to how Dante begins to come to life. The few were punished, but the many were left unprotected, unchanged, except perhaps to be tickled by your pamphleteering. The soul of London and of the modern age is at stake. Do not dwell upon the forms of torment. As Dante tells us as he leads us onto the shores of Purgatory, consider what comes after our life, for mere pain cannot last beyond the final judgment. From now on, it will be your role, Brother, to write the story of how the great serpent is chased out of England before our eyes.”

  Fallow stretched his arms out.

  Camp threw a glance over his shoulder and saw more white-robed ghouls blocking the doors. His years as a private detective trained him to know when to stand his ground and fight, or, at times like this, when to comply with a lunatic—especially a lunatic who, from what Camp could tell, had murdered at least three people.

  Two of the berobed denizens of the place carried in a massive stone bowl filled with water.

  “Baptism?” Camp chuckled. “I never subscribed to one religion or another.”

  “Like too many, you have felt God is but a myth, an antique of our forefathers. That, also, is changing.” Fallow shook his head. “This is not to baptize, but to cleanse—for your face. To wash away the stains of Hell.”

  “You must be joking.” Camp waited, but there was no hint of a smile. He prepared to duck his face into the bowl. “Well, farewell to Hell’s stains.”

  “Fallow!” a voice bellowed from outside. The minister, irritated at the interruption to the ritual, excused himself. Camp was still being eyed by Fallow’s followers, but couldn’t stop his instincts to investigate. He moved his position slightly, on the pretense of viewing more of the chapel ceiling’s mural, but in actuality to steal a glimpse outside. Fallow stood there with the new visitor—a very large, darker-skinned man in a turban. He thought of the man he glimpsed leaving the Fenian gambling den and wondered if this was the same one. Camp could not hear every word in the conversation, but the visitor was impatient and Fallow, Camp took note, seemed afraid.

  From Fallow he heard: “If you . . . tell him . . . simply wait . . .”

  The visitor: “How much . . . patience! . . .”

  Fallow: “A critical time
. . . our . . . mission . . . finally coming to realization . . .”

  XVI

  The beautiful young lady would have died—so wrote the London reporters who gathered to trade notes in the Three Tun tavern, insatiable as ever for stories about beautiful young ladies in danger, and all young ladies, incidentally, were beauties when they were in danger—yes, the beautiful lady would have died if not for the exertions of the famous American Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and his highly advanced medical techniques. He consulted with some of the London doctors but they were all specialists, impossible to get to say anything the slightest step away from their own subjects as it would be to get help from a policeman outside of his own beat. We have dermatologists, gynecologists, oculists, aurists, the reporters quoted Dr. Holmes as remarking, and, mark my words, one day in the future I expect to hear of laryngologists, cardiologists, urinologists, syphilogists, and for aught I know rectologists. Holmes seized control over her case, having her moved to Tudor House, where he converted one of Rossetti’s bedrooms into a convalescence chamber. Even with one of the most celebrated doctors of the nineteenth century in charge—even with the Parkman Professor of Anatomy at Harvard University—she remained in grave danger. Nor could she tell them or the police or the press anything more about what happened. She was in a coma.

  Holmes felt lost in a blur.

  Upon reaching the mountain of Purgatory, Dante believes he has left behind the torments he witnessed in the infernal passages carved into the earth’s core; in fact, one the first requirements onshore, after wrapping a smooth rush around his waist, is to wash Hell’s stains away from his face. His goal is lofty. Virgil, his trusted guide, announces it to Cato, the suspicious and battle-hardened guardian of the mountain: He goes to search for liberty. But Dante soon discovers Purgatory can be harsh, at times harsher than the infernal circles. (He also will learn that fire is actually more prevalent in his journey through Purgatory than it was in Hell.) By the time he enters the terrace of the Wrathful, he witnesses the terrified shades of men and women shrouded in thick black smoke. In their lives, they blinded themselves with anger and rage; on Mount Purgatory they themselves are blinded until that anger is fully released—purged—from the depths of their souls, a process that could take hundreds of years. Dante realizes traversing Hell was only the beginning of the trials he is to undergo to save humanity. Darkness of Hell, as Dante warns readers, had never made so thick a veil over my eyes as the rough smoke with which Purgatory covered us. The murderer of Reuben Loring meticulously staged this scene by piping in coal smoke and smothering Loring—and then inadvertently felling poor Sibbie as she tried to rescue Holmes from sharing Loring’s fate—in a mixture of carbon monoxide with other noxious fumes.

  “We looked backward,” Browning said in a raspy, uncharacteristically quiet voice, but everyone sitting around the Tudor House library heard him and everyone understood, for they battled similar regrets. When Dante begins his ascent up the purgatorial terraces, the angel at Peter’s gate carves the letter P into Dante’s forehead—representing the sins (or peccatum) that must be removed from his soul—then points his sword and gives the voyager a crucial instruction: that he should never look back during his climb, or he will go to the foot of the mountain.

  Enter, but hear this warning, he who looks back, returns to the beginning.

  “By thinking too much about making this fit what happened in Boston, we looked backward,” Browning continued, “instead of forward. Then we brought danger to the people around Reverend Fallow by going to the sanatorium in search of Loring, exactly as Fallow had warned us we would if we persisted.”

  Later, Tennyson and Browning were sitting alone by the drawing room fire, still anguished.

  They could speak more freely with Christina out of the room. Tennyson, hanging his head over his lap, added to Browning’s accounting of mistakes. “You see what it was, Browning? We denied the possibility of Rossetti’s involvement for selfish reasons, because of his importance to us as a person, and because he is an artist and a poet like we are. We thought he could not, must not be dangerous.”

  “Do you believe Dante was right?” Browning asked, glassy-eyed. “Not that Dante really made the journey he claimed, but that there is something after this life, something that can make up for what goes wrong in our lives here, or make it worse.”

  “Absolutely,” Tennyson said flatly. “I am certain of it, Browning. There must be some extension of individual consciousness after death. I would rather know I was to be damned eternally if there wasn’t; I’d rather sink my head right now in a chloroformed handkerchief and have done with it all than not to know that I was to live eternally. There must be a form of immortality or it is all—this is all—useless!”

  “It is a great desire, certainly. But I see no reason to suppose that it will be fulfilled.”

  “Listen to me talk of danger. My father, the late, great, drunken Reverend Tennyson, would be proud—but would he? I eat my heart out with silent rage at the man, when I am not wondering if I slowly become him. You know, Browning, my father traveled through Russia a few years before I was born. He used to tell us thrilling stories. He had begun to suspect a group of nobles had been involved in the assassination of the emperor, and slyly investigated the matter of his own volition. Well, he gave a speech at a dinner accusing these men—accusing them in public of murder! As soon as he left the ballroom, he was hunted. He had to flee and hide from his pursuers in the Crimea, where dwell the wild people of the country. He learned that twice a year—never at the same time—a carrier passed blowing a horn, a signal that it was safe to cross the border. He lay waiting through the nights for that sound, waiting to make his escape. Do you know what my dear father told my uncle when he heard I was publishing my first volume of poems? He said, ‘I hear that my son has made a book. I wish it had been a wheelbarrow.’”

  “What is it, Tennyson?” Browning asked. “What happened?”

  Tennyson suddenly appeared stricken.

  “My watch has stopped,” he said, holding it in his trembling hand. “What am I to do?”

  Tennyson was frozen in his distress. Browning rose from the chair, asked for Tennyson’s watch key, took the instrument and wound it, then silently returned it.

  They heard Christina and Holmes coming back down the stairs. They had been checking on Sibbie. The expressions of Browning and Tennyson grew heavy with anticipation.

  “No change in the poor girl,” Holmes mumbled to the questions written on the others’ faces.

  “Her mind,” Browning began, stopped, then began again. “Is it still . . . working?”

  “The connection between the condition of our brain and our thoughts is so close to each of us, and yet always out of our grasp,” replied Holmes. “We have never found Hamlet and Faust, right and wrong, the valor of men and the purity of women, by testing for albumen, or examining fibers in microscopes. I’m afraid the answer is that I don’t know the answer.”

  “There must be something to do,” said Tennyson.

  “People have shown they will do anything to recover their health, my dear Tennyson. We have submitted to be half drowned in water, half choked with gases, to be buried up to our chins in earth, to be seared with hot irons, to be crimped with knives like codfish, to have needles thrust into our flesh, and bonfires kindled on our skin, to swallow all sorts of abominations, and to pay for all this, as if to be singed and scalded were a costly privilege, as if blisters were a blessing, leeches a luxury. Of the many things uncertain in this world, among them will always be the effect of a large proportion of the remedies prescribed by physicians.”

  No change in the poor girl. Holmes meant Sibbie but could have been speaking about Christina. She alone had remained unchanged in her position on her brother. Her companions, one by one, resigned themselves to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s culpability. The evidence, after all, seemed insurmountable, especially once Inspector William
son told them some of what Scotland Yard knew. It came together in a bleak picture.

  There was Gabriel’s obsession with Dante; his disappearance from home just around the time these events began; his presence (for which Dolly had witnesses) at the scene of the first two deaths; and, of course, front and center at the third as witnessed by Christina, Browning, Tennyson, and Holmes. They had to accept that it was Gabriel who seized Loring, rather than the other way around.

  Christina refused to change her stance one whit. Logic may have stacked up against her, but she was not doing math. It was faith, no different from her faith in God. “My faith is faith. It is not evolved out of argumentation.” At other times, talking to her friends, she pointed to Dante’s Purgatory itself as evidence. “Remember, Dante struggles to understand why the penitent souls on the mountain must suffer so. Virgil implores Dante that mankind should accept that our knowledge is finite and limit ourselves to the quia—the what—not the why.”

  Christina visited Gabriel in his cell. After Gabriel collapsed near the scene of Loring’s death, they realized on closer inspection that he was teetering on the point of being almost insensible. He had consumed an excessive amount of opium. Dolly and his men were not far behind reaching the sanatorium—in the blur of all that had happened, it seemed they appeared almost out of thin air.

  Dolly was courteous and respectful toward her when she called on Scotland Yard.

  “There’s another element of the case,” Dolly Williamson said to her in his office, trying his best to hide his pride in his own analysis and his usual success in the resolution of a knotty mystery. “Your brother’s wife hastened her demise by the use of opiates. Then, in the subsequent years, your brother’s own habits worsened, you see, distorting his judgment and scruples—and combining with his unhealthy preoccupation with Dante. Literature, like a parasite, can envelop a man’s whole soul when weakened.”