The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  “Maybe so. But, Mr. Browning,” Christina continued, “the maniac you speak of is entranced by every word of Dante’s. Because of that, he cannot hide. We do not need to see into the future. We merely need to follow the verses just as closely. You were right, in Purgatory you cannot look back or you are sent to the beginning. But that is not the only lesson we are taught. To ever leave Purgatory safely, you must go through it—through it entirely. We have not yet done so. The way out of Purgatory is up.”

  “Forgive me, but this makes me think of your—”

  “Yes?”

  “It seems to me, my dear Miss Rossetti, perhaps you have come to believe that the more you sacrifice of yourself, the closer you come to doing your duty.”

  “Isn’t it so, Mr. Browning?”

  He did not finish his aborted thought, could not bring himself to say, This makes me think of your father. Browning had heard how Professore Rossetti gradually sank into Dante, into uncovering a secret society devoted to undermining the orthodoxy in religion and politics. Patrons and friends begged the professore to condemn his writing to the fire. But the old man refused. He even began to have books of his writings printed.

  The more Christina walled herself in with stacks of books and notebooks in her latest phase of the undertaking, the more Browning fretted.

  He would go out saying he was on some errand related to their labors, but in fact he would walk through London, even in the unseasonable cold, just to clear his thoughts. Had there ever been a woman so hardheaded? He could almost see Ba’s grin before him and hear her reply, How about the woman who enraged her father, abandoned her family and country, taking only her little dog, just to be with a poet named Robert whom she happened to love?

  Inspired by Ba’s genius and her love, he’d set out to be England’s great poet. Yet, the more the years went on, the more he wondered. Was he just another Sordello, laboring so hard on his poetry but most of it falling far short, while his contemporary, Dante, sullen and unsociable, changes the Italian language and, subsequently, the history of literature?

  If he only had had more time to learn from Ba, from her strength. To the very last she spoke of plans for the next summer, the next year. She slept that night in a broken fashion. When Browning offered to bathe her feet, she said, “Well, you are determined to make an exaggerated case of it!” “How do you feel?” he asked her. “Beautiful,” came her smiling reply. Within a few minutes she died with her head on his cheek.

  Browning’s mind was still so cluttered that he hardly noticed the commotion in front of one of the oldest surviving Roman Catholic churches on the outskirts of London. Then he looked up to find his weakened senses assaulted. There was a barrel bonfire, with books being fed into the flames. He stepped closer and saw: volumes of Dante. Or about Dante. Many were copies of Longfellow’s translations. He saw one or two of Charles Cayley’s translations, some volumes featuring Tennyson’s “Ulysses”—and even a copy of Browning’s own much-derided Dante-inspired Sordello!

  The mob of people pouring the books into the fiery mouth of the barrel represented a mix—from their style of dress, anyway—of laborers, bankers, lawyers, even one man whom Browning recognized as a librarian. Behind them, an effigy of Dante—unmistakable by the flat-nosed profile—was feasted on by fire.

  The cries flew from all sides.

  “Find the monster!”

  “Hang ’em from London Tower!”

  Most creatively:

  “This vampire Dante takes hold of some man, and turns him into a murderous devil!”

  Browning rushed to his house, heart in his throat. He was startled to find his publisher, George Smith, waiting in his drawing room. He was holding Sordello. Browning felt his hands trembling. Smith was there to break the news gently.

  “I already know, Smith,” Browning cried. “Couldn’t I have even a moment’s peace?”

  “You know?” Smith asked with curiosity. His usually dull eyes seemed to dance. “We’ve been having a hard time finding you. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  “Wonderful? Aren’t you going to tell me Sordello is to be removed from circulation for its association with Dante?”

  “Sordello removed!” the balding, bearded publisher replied, then gave a gravelly laugh. “Why, it’s flying off the shelves, Browning. People’s fascination with Dante has no bounds.”

  “I just saw my poem, as well as a hodgepodge of Dantean books, being burned in a bonfire by a band of fools.”

  “How many books inspire that kind of passion? Only books that provoke hate and disgust also have the power to provoke adoration. Besides, people have to buy the books before they burn them. Now, we’ll need your signature on some new contracts with all the printings we’re having to do . . .”

  “It’s like something down the rabbit hole of Dodgson’s Wonderland,” Browning roared, turning around and fleeing over his publisher’s protests.

  Back at Tudor House, Browning was in the overgrown garden putting out food for the animals when he could hear a caller come to the door. He recognized Cayley’s voice at the front door. Browning slipped back inside, listening the best he could to the conversation between Cayley and Christina in the next room. He could not make out the entire exchange, but he heard the visitor say he was going to the country to the Cayley family estate for several months. Cayley invited Christina to come stay with them. Browning pressed his ear closer.

  “Mr. Cayley, I did not want to address this,” Christina said, “but I know why you’ve been coming here.”

  “I don’t understand, Miss Rossetti. Why, I’ve told you in quite thorough detail, I need to dig through your father’s . . .”

  “I know William sent you as some kind of tactic to distract me, to disrupt me, to pretend to . . . to woo me.”

  “That’s not true,” Cayley cried.

  “Isn’t it true that William told you to be here at Tudor House?”

  “Well, yes he did, Miss Rossetti, but—”

  Browning worried that Christina would hear him sneaking around, and returned to the garden before the finale of the conversation. When he reentered the drawing room, Cayley, in a dejected state, was leaving, and Christina was hovering again over her books and documents. Browning felt something unexpected mixed with sympathy for Cayley. Pleasure that the translator would no longer be vying for Christina’s attention.

  When Christina was ready, she began chasing her ideas in and around London. Browning came along by coach and omnibus and ferry, to various destinations that she inspected. Some he could see no relation to Dante’s text at all, or perhaps he had stopped trying. One was a pathway through a village outside of the city.

  “Do you see how it is nearly a perfect circle? Ideal to run around in perpetual futility.”

  Perpetual futility echoed in his mind, epitomizing their wild-goose chase.

  “I’m afraid, Miss Rossetti,” he replied, realizing as he spoke that he was short of breath from their surveillance of various sites, “this will not do any longer.”

  “If you doubt the cause or methods, I perfectly understand if you step away from it.”

  Her lost faith in him, the lack of anxiety from her that he might cease helping her, broke his heart. “Miss Rossetti, you will become so polite one of these days that you will be impossible to speak with. At what point will you put this behind you?”

  She blinked at him, seeming to reflect on it. Her enormous eyes answered for her, as though to say: Never. I will never stop.

  XVIII

  It would almost have been fair to say that Simon Camp’s wish upon arriving in London came true—up to a point, at least. He was writing the new booklet he’d set out to write about the Dante deaths, the one he thought could make such a splash. The problem was he was doing it with one leg chained to an immovable block.

  He was also made to wear a long robe, tied at the waist by a crude r
ope made of plant stems twisted around each other. He wrote with a goose quill at a standing desk, at the insistence of Reverend Fallow. While engaged in his composing, he was confined inside the well-appointed library dungeon, the only such library dungeon in the world, to Camp’s knowledge. In the times he was not chained up, when he was being moved from one place to another in the so-called sanatorium, he had studied the books on the shelves and realized that each and every volume, many of them cracked and ancient, had something to do with Dante or medieval Italy.

  Fallow would march himself on his thick legs into the chamber, lecturing and sermonizing to Camp about how the recent deaths witnessed by London had begun to purge the metropolis of its many sins, to transform it. Camp was supposed to transcribe Fallow’s ramblings and select what to include in the booklet. The preacher had also left stacks of newspaper clippings about his earlier, short-lived career preaching to crowds of thousands and other relevant topics. Instead of making himself the hero of the narrative, the fearless private detective Simon Camp, as Camp had planned, he was compelled to turn this rabid minister into some kind of avenging angel.

  “Brother,” said Fallow, as the shades in Dante’s Purgatory called each other, “we will soon all be citizens of one true city, and you are among the most important witnesses to the why and how.”

  People rarely used their given names on the sanatorium grounds; they were “brother” or “sister.”

  Sisters: indeed. Fallow kept a collection of comely young women wrapped up loosely in their white robes close at hand.

  Camp bided his time. He smacked his lips with his tongue and bobbed his head while in Fallow’s presence, as though he were a puppy eager for scraps of the preacher’s genius. He was waiting for the perfect opportunity to escape his strange imprisonment and, if possible, avenge himself for this ordeal with a good beating on the good minister.

  Though most of the time when Camp saw Fallow, the preacher was surrounded by his adoring sirens and the rest of the flock, the prisoner happened to witness two more unpleasant meetings between Camp and the dark-eyed stranger with the tunic and woolen cord around his waist. The stranger’s voice was a powerful baritone that could make a man jump, and he carried a walking stick that was topped with an ugly gold beast that Camp fancied was a symbol of the man’s soul. Whoever he was, he was not among the sanatorium’s herd of followers. Camp caught that Fallow referred to him as Brother Herman and, at a different point, in an agitated state, the preacher called the visitor by the peculiar sobriquet “Ironhead.” Camp noticed that Ironhead Herman did not wait for Fallow to be notified of his visits by one of his handmaidens; this caller commanded his own kind of attention and authority.

  It soon became clear that Herman was not there for an escape from the sins of the city or for lessons on Dante, Fallow’s chief pastimes. Herman had been dunning the minister for money—at churches where Fallow went to preach, at the sanatorium, it didn’t matter, he’d become Fallow’s unwanted shadow. “It would be a shame to see this place in ashes,” bellowed this force of nature. “I don’t run a Jew’s marketplace!” was another of the fragments of conversation Camp picked up, when Fallow apparently tried to negotiate a lower payment. Camp had to retain his sober demeanor, but inwardly he smiled, thinking the hostility of this belligerent invader could become key to his own escape.

  * * *

  —

  Tennyson stood at the top of the hill about a half mile from Farringford, gazing over the coastline. The brown cape that covered his shoulders, above his long cloak, flapped in the stinging cold wind. His two staghounds, Don and Duke, were chasing stray sheep. As he listened to the gulls gliding by the edge of the cliffs, he heard the crunch of boot steps.

  The sounds of people approaching his solitary perch would normally make the reclusive poet alert for intruding admirers. This time, he expected the sounds. Constable Branagan approached first, and Inspector Williamson, walking almost as briskly as his younger colleague, came next.

  “Have you ever,” Tennyson said, still peering out at the sea, “felt London so far away, as when you stand right at this spot?”

  “Very nice island, Mr. Tennyson,” said Branagan, “except that my shoes and trousers are soaked from the dew.”

  “Dee-you,” Tennyson corrected him.

  “What?” Branagan asked.

  “There’s no Jew on the grass, Constable,” Tennyson said of the pronunciation. “There may be dew, but that’s quite another thing.”

  “If you had come to our usual meeting spot near Scotland Yard, it would have saved us some trouble, Mr. Tennyson,” Dolly Williamson said. “When I want to stand around outside in the cold, I’ll take care of my garden, thank you.”

  “I’m afraid anywhere in London has become too risky that my friends would find out we’ve been having conversations,” the poet replied. “You do understand that, Inspector? I’ve been thinking. The descent of man from lower animals, if it is true, helps solve the mystery of man’s dual nature. We inherit a great deal from our brute ancestors. The spiritual nature is something else, but the brute nature is there, and remains side by side with the other.”

  Dolly watched the gulls circle, then gave a slight shrug. “Mr. Tennyson, we’ve appreciated the information you’ve given us throughout this ordeal. And we’ve protected your position. I understand my friend at the War Office performed his role well for his colleagues when he gave you the files of the soldiers you requested, making it appear he simply was charmed by your position as poet laureate.”

  “When I accepted my honor from the queen,” Tennyson said gravely, “I swore my allegiance to God and to England, and that includes the general rule of law and, for better or worse, you gentlemen.”

  “We have everything we need from you and your companions,” Dolly said, impatient to be finished.

  “Then why do you still have your damned spies watching Tudor House?”

  “We have no such thing,” Dolly objected.

  “I suppose Robert Browning and the others are simply hallucinating the boat that happens to row by at regular intervals.” Tennyson reprimanded his dogs for running too far, then returned to the topic. “I saw it with my own eyes.”

  “Our detective department hasn’t requisitioned the use of a duty boat from the Marine Police for over a year, I believe, when we suspected two rival groups of Fenians were transporting weapons on the river,” Dolly said.

  “Mr. Tennyson, the message you sent to me last night indicated you had some new information for Inspector Williamson,” Branagan broke in.

  Tennyson turned away from the cliff and looked right at the men for the first time. “How is Gabriel doing?” Suspecting the answer wasn’t good, he went on without waiting. “If you are being honest and really have given up your intelligence gathering, there might be a serious problem. I think you should be watching Miss Rossetti carefully again. Very carefully.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Dolly.

  The poet explained that Christina still pursued her inquiries into the London deaths, and he worried for her safety.

  “If you believe, as I do, that Mr. Rossetti was responsible, what is your concern, Mr. Tennyson? Miss Rossetti can go in circles if she wishes; no harm will come to anyone.”

  “The only fault of Miss Rossetti is that she has no fault at all. Intellectually, I accept Gabriel Rossetti’s guilt, Inspector. Given all the facts, who wouldn’t? But what if Miss Rossetti proves to be right?”

  Dolly, annoyance growing in his voice, asked what it was Tennyson was driving at.

  “There is a verse by Robert Burns,” said the poet, then recited:

  The trumpets sound, the banners fly

  The glittering spears are ranked ready,

  The shouts o’ war are heard afar,

  The battle closes thick and bloody.

  Tennyson rolled the last two lines again on his tongue, and said,
“I would give anything to have written that.”

  “Still, Mr. Tennyson, I don’t understand—”

  He all but shouted: “Two poets can write about war, but only one writes those lines, because he sees it in a way no one else could.”

  “You are the poet laureate of all England, Mr. Tennyson, so forgive me if I find it odd to think there are versifiers with greater vision.”

  “Well! Perhaps it is because I am the laureate that it is absolutely the case. To declare a poet laureate is to put a coronet on a skull. Browning’s wife was under consideration to be the first woman given the laureate title, you know, and Browning will never forgive me for it.”

  “You believe Miss Rossetti sees something more—some more powerful truth—in Dante and in those deaths than all the rest of us. More than you, than me, the other detectives and policemen in my department, the hundred and one newspaper reporters who wrote about it.”

  Tennyson took a few moments of silence. Then, he said, “If she does, someone else may be hurt or killed. Inspector, tell me, do you really have no doubts at all that you know everything that happened?”

  Dolly seemed as though he didn’t want to answer, then called for Branagan to prepare to return to the ferry. Tennyson did not try to sway or influence them further, listening to their steps down the path and again watching the gulls, who elegantly swerved just in time to avoid crashing into the cliffside.

  * * *

  —

  Sitting in a seat far back in the half-empty stands was Jeremiah McCord—McCord who went by other names if he was abroad or otherwise motivated to hide, but given McCord was his most common alias this month, McCord it will be. With him was a much younger woman with a dark hat brightened by a large white feather, and a plaid shawl over her silk dress.

  McCord watched the races only at intervals, as the freezing, gusty wind—and almost April!—had kept the best horses off the track to save their strength for better weather and bigger stakes. Likewise, McCord’s mind was on the chance for much more significant days to come. With his good hand, he impatiently scratched at his beard until he finally caught sight of the man he’d sent for.