The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  XXIV

  DOCUMENT #7: FROM THE SURVIVING MANUSCRIPT FRAGMENT OF IN DANTE’S SHADOW, BY S. T. CAMP

  The Honorable Mr. Jasper Morton, member of Parliament, had been thunderstruck some months ago to learn, through family documents hidden long before, that he was born before his parents were wed, and that they had traveled out of the country in order to conceal the fact. Here he was: a man who had publicly argued for many decades that he possessed a birthright to the Bristol seat because his father had held it; who had beaten back attempts to add another seat to the House of Commons for Bristol using the same logic, in order to maintain his monopoly on constituents’ gratitude and favor. If his father had been sufficient to protect Bristol’s interests, he was sufficient. Here he was: a man who stoked the fiercest reactions against the Irish Fenians and with fanfare pushed for expansion of military power into other lands, and he himself was, in a sense, born a foreigner. Now even though Morton continued to stand for election and win his seat, he was lost; everything he had always prided himself on felt like it became mere . . . pride.

  His wife badgered him to tell her why he suddenly had such a short temper and prolonged bouts of melancholy. He tried to explain, told her about what he’d discovered in the blasted family papers, but he was an orator, not a speaker; he never managed to express to her what it all really felt like to him.

  What Morton felt was immense shame and dishonor. These feelings consumed him, and nothing he did rid himself of them. He began to partake in a clandestine pastime he had only ever heard about, one that took place in the deepest recesses of London midnights, in fireless rooms reached through dark corridors, where in exchange for generous payment, female strangers would whip and beat him with a paddle as he cried. In these perverse, awful, wondrous sessions, the shame would grow and be exorcised at the same time.

  Of course, as a politician Morton feared exposure of his peculiar habit, and wore a raggedy black wig and false nose and mustache when he went to the flagellation den. When his wife found the wig and questioned him about it, he merely muttered that he was an “easy target,” by which he meant if anyone recognized him, he could end up in the gossip columns, but of course he could not explain to her where he was going, and the exchange left her more confused than before. Mrs. Morton, presuming a constituent must have been harassing or even threatening her husband in order for him to hide in this way, even reported her suspicions to the police.

  In the meantime, Sibbie had urged Reverend Fallow to recruit followers for their settlement. They had initiated their mission by printing copies of The Dante Murders, humbly authored by the present writer, in order to demonstrate the vitality and power of Dante. (These were pirated copies, it must be noted, losing the present writer his rightful income, but I hasten to add, monetary gain must not be considered in relation to a glorious and obligatory spiritual calling.) They also searched out Londoners who already recognized their own sins that had to be purged, even if these citizens did not know how to do so in a true or fulfilling way. Remember the secret den Morton frequented, for example. Sibbie heard of this place where the frequenters actually longed for punishment, and began to watch the mixed-up souls who went in and out.

  Sibbie called out to Morton as he was about to enter his familiar rendezvous. Sibbie did not crack a paddle onto him like the woman whom he’d come to see, but took hold of him in a different and more satisfying way; she spoke of Dante’s revelations—of how the time had come to extract sins from our souls and the collective soul of London. She described how punishment against ourselves was natural, not shameful, even necessary in an age of material comforts, and that the end result would be freedom and—as Virgil put it in stating Dante’s quest in Purgatory—liberty. Morton was not in control of his own actions or his body, for he belonged to God. For once, Morton felt he was speaking with someone who understood the peace that eluded him, and his entire being was liberated under Sibbie’s influence.

  Morton began spending time at the Phillip Sanatorium—first occasionally, then frequently, until it seemed he vanished entirely and search parties started looking for him in Bristol. Morton and the other residents of the sanatorium who joined the group did not drink alcohol or use tobacco, though they were given opiates to drink to begin to forget and reject their past mistakes. Fallow had found that the greater the availability of this smuggled opium, the greater the obedience that was inspired.

  Fallow would gather their growing number of followers in the large building that had been the machine shop when the property was a mill—now turned into a chapel—preaching of Dante’s revolutionary ideas of humanity’s purgatorial destiny.

  As the settlement’s numbers increased, so did its requirements for opium. They had found a supplier in the figure of a man who had been called Hormazd in his own faraway country, but known around London as Ironhead Herman. Through Herman the organizers found Lillian Brenner, an opera prima donna who had come to rely on Herman’s steady supply of opium to block out her many anxieties about her future. Fallow had met Herman in the city to make a payment, and Miss Brenner was there in tears, both about needing opium and also about her rival whom she loathed, who was prettier and better than her and who made Brenner positively hate herself.

  Fallow, pulling her aside, convinced her to visit the sanatorium, both as an escape from the city and to hear more about a brotherhood and sisterhood that helped clear away all the vices that tormented them, all while granting them the higher purpose of freeing humanity from its burdens. At the same time, Fallow mined his transient congregations of former and present soldiers, and found more members this way, including Reuben Loring, who every night suffered from nightmares of the murder he’d committed years before in a fit of rage against a soldier who had spoken offensively of the natives where they were stationed; from the groups of reformed prostitutes Fallow was invited to address around the city, he found half a dozen warmhearted but sad women.

  Among the inhabitants and visitors, not so different from the impressive denizens of Dante’s Purgatory, were accomplished and highly esteemed engineers, writers, intellectuals, doctors. In Dante’s vision of Purgatory, the punishments are not merely carried out, they are memorialized in many artistic forms of images and sounds. So it was at the Phillip Sanatorium where their own artistic genius, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was sent to be witness and recorder of their purgations—just as Dante Alighieri before him was sent by Beatrice up the mountain with a similar purpose: to save himself and the world.

  Sibbie would hold sessions, sometimes for hours at a time, with her followers, that became a sort of confession. Followers would tell her everything—their stories and sins, the stories and sins of others—without having to be asked. From Gabriel Rossetti’s stories, Sibbie learned of A. R. Gibson, who was plagued by inheriting his fortune without ever finding it in himself to exert himself to make his own name. He had no interest in business matters or in the women who harangued him to support children they claimed were his. Gibson would wander art galleries and stare at paintings and scenes of great battles and moments in history, wondering why he could not find his own such moments to live out. Sibbie appeared at one of these galleries in the dead of night, seeming as though she had just stepped out of a painting, or off of a sculpture’s pedestal. He met her glittering eyes, which saw right through him.

  Gibson would become one of them and, Fallow made sure, would help replenish their precariously thin finances, as had money given by Morton and other followers.

  Some who flocked to the Phillip Sanatorium were already devotees of Dante—Rossetti, of course, and Gibson, whom Rossetti had influenced to study Dante through his art and by loaning him Professore Rossetti’s visionary treatise—while others knew little about Dante before entering the sanatorium, or had read bits and pieces of the famous Longfellow translation. Fallow taught the words of Dante; Sibbie made all of it come alive.

  Some of the members who gathered around Fallow and Sib
bie had previously attempted spiritualism, occultism, Millerism, freemasonry, and secret orders of various kinds. But this place, this community erected on the property of the former textile mill, was different. It did not merely spread fear of the world ending, like the Millerites, it taught that sacrifices—their own sacrifices—would purge a declining world of the sins that were killing them all.

  Sibbie anointed a brother or sister of the movement, one by one, to embody a purgatorial terrace to demonstrate to England—and, ultimately, to the larger world—that the time to enter upon a course to Paradise had come. Brother Morton was fitted with the burden of stone that embodied pride; Sister Brenner’s visions of envy were sewn into darkness. Witnesses from the movement were sent to each purgation, just as Dante Alighieri on his pilgrimage must pass through each and every terrace. Brother Rossetti and Brother Loring, as well as Sibbie, were among those who watched the remarkable purgations of Brother Morton and Sister Brenner.

  Loring was preparing to embody his own chief sin—wrath—when he glimpsed visitors to Phillip Sanatorium he worried would try to stop him. Fallow had already warned him there were interlopers searching for him in London. Loring rushed away to enact his punishment earlier than he’d expected, locking himself into the drying shed, where noxious smoke would be released. Loring chanted—Agnus Dei—as a demonstration of the peacefulness that finally was overtaking him. Gabriel was witness, once again, and continued the chant as Brother Loring’s burdens were released. The mechanism to release the gas had been prepared by two of the residents who were engineers, who also collaborated with a resident shoemaker to invent the boots that Brother Gibson eagerly donned—the boots that would not allow him to stop and give way to his besetting sloth ever again.

  Once the seven terraces of Purgatory—Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice-Prodigality, Gluttony, Lust—are each brought from the page to the life of England, the movement will have transformed humanity. Indeed, with each remarkable death, with the lines of people snaking around the deadhouse in London, with every breathless newspaper column coming closer to understanding, whispers succeeded in recruiting more and more members, until the group’s numbers swelled over fifty.

  [The next few lines were blotted over with ink and rendered illegible.] Ironhead Herman has just left this room where I am at work writing this. I believe an occasion arises for my escape through an open door, if this paper should fall into your possession before these maniacs [illegible], send the police to find me—I am a close and personal friend of the venerable and august Allan Pinkerton in Chicago and Insp. Adolphus Dolly Williamson in London!—send him for God’s sake send anyone for me before it’s too late

  * * *

  —

  Books. That was the last thing Holmes expected to find as cargo in the overturned carriage while he looked for any tools that could help him free Tennyson. The shipment inside the carriage contained pirated editions of novels, essays, and histories, mostly by British authors but a few American—including Holmes’s most popular work, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, he was rather tickled to find, though not so tickled that his middle name was misspelled by the piratical printers as Wenndell. Booksellers in the villages were less likely to have their inventory inspected by customs officials than those in London, and the scoundrel of a coach driver obviously conspired in their delivery and distribution for extra income.

  Holmes stacked a sufficient number of the books beneath the body of the carriage to raise it inch by inch. After several attempts, he was able to slide Tennyson’s leg out from underneath. First, Holmes felt like crying and laughing in relief that he had managed to release Tennyson by using, of all things, the fruit of shadowy book peddlers’ schemes. They would not be trapped in the snowbank, they would not fall to hypothermia in the middle of a deserted village lane. “Thank goodness Browning made The Ring and the Book as long as he did!” he called out about the thick counterfeit volume that had lifted the vehicle just high enough.

  Relief quickly fled. Surveying his surroundings, the snowfall, the blackening sky, Holmes knew in an instant there was no chance any longer for them to reach the sanatorium. They would not be able to get to many places on foot from here even if Tennyson hadn’t been injured.

  The first thing Tennyson did when he regained his senses was to insist he could walk the two miles in the snow to the sanatorium, in fact he could walk five if need be. Then, when he could barely make it just a few steps, the laureate urged Holmes to go without him to the sanatorium, but of course Holmes would not leave him. They had passed a small inn in a valley on their drive. With Tennyson’s arm awkwardly draped over the shorter Holmes’s shoulders, they trudged through the snow.

  When they reached the isolated inn, marked outside with a large painting of a gold lion, they were completely exhausted from the journey.

  “Who would believe I would welcome another lodger, in this storm,” the surly German-accented innkeeper said. Holmes, stuck on welcome being a very strong word compared to the innkeeper’s actual demeanor, did not think much of the wording of a different part of his statement—another lodger—until later on.

  Once in their rooms, Holmes improvised a bandage for Tennyson’s leg and kept it raised.

  What bothered Holmes about the turn of events was their lack of knowledge about any developments since leaving London. He hoped that their letters had been received at Scotland Yard and at Tudor House.

  As Holmes expected, Tennyson’s pain grew much worse as he rested. Sometimes, when the body is in repose, the brain enhances discomfort.

  Tennyson made a few nonsensical statements (for instance, “What I admire most in a man is when he does not press upon me any verses of his own”), then told Holmes, in stilted fragments, a story from his childhood.

  Tennyson’s father collapsed to his death from a combination of alcohol and laudanum, a tincture of opium and morphine. Tennyson, twenty years old, climbed into bed with the body of his father, waiting up all night to see if his ghost would appear.

  “That is when I learned,” Tennyson murmured drowsily, “poets do not see ghosts.”

  “Why did you help Scotland Yard, Tennyson? It wasn’t just to follow your duty to the queen, was it?”

  “I’ve heard it said it is my verses, Holmes, that made people believe poets were heroes. But we’re not, are we? I am called the leader of all poets of our land. If Miss Rossetti or Browning came to harm thinking they were heroes, I wouldn’t have forgiven myself. You won’t find much in me, after all, Holmes. I have had no life—mine has been one of feelings, not of actions.”

  Mercifully, the laureate fell asleep while Holmes himself, without realizing it, dozed on the sofa.

  Holmes dreamed of Dante, with the hard lines of his nose and chin, the laurel crown that represented his creative triumphs in contrast to his failures as a father, husband, and politician. The sneer on his lips for all that was weak in Holmes and in life, all the vulnerability that Dante had expelled from himself. Dante opened his mouth, but instead of words, discordant noises emerged—noises of death. He reached to shake Holmes’s hand, before his grip became a vise from which Holmes could not free himself.

  Holmes jumped up from the sofa, his heart in his throat. He was soaked with perspiration. He realized the noises in his dream had intruded into his mind from somewhere in reality. Tennyson still slept soundly and nothing in the room was disturbed. Holmes took a candle and stepped out into the corridor. A coolness swept through him; there was an open window somewhere in the inn, and loose papers flew past him like leaves.

  Grabbing one of these, Holmes glanced over it by the glow of the candle. He couldn’t believe his eyes. In his hand was a manuscript page about Dante—not just about Dante, but about the Purgatory-inspired deaths that had occurred in and around London. Holmes—mystified and mesmerized—followed the trail of pages, collecting them as he went. He read as quickly as he could. With the pages out of order and inc
omplete, their narratives came in spurts and fragments.

  In Dante’s Shadow, a True Account of the London Purgations by the Author of The Dante Murders, read the title page he found.

  One of the pages told of Sibbie waking from her coma and returning to lead her followers at the Phillip Sanatorium.

  Our Sibbie? Holmes thought. Could it be? She had warned them the very first afternoon they questioned her about Loring: You cannot understand.

  The followers, Holmes pieced together in a combination of his thoughts and what he could read from the assorted pages he gathered, were submitting themselves to be purged of their sins to provide examples for all of England. The murders were not murders at all, Holmes realized; they were by consent of the dead . . . they were suicides.

  Then came an incomplete account that alarmed Holmes most of all: that Dante Gabriel Rossetti had returned to be purged of gluttony, with Christina as witness. They have taken the Rossettis.

  Send the police to find me, was scribbled at the end of one page, for God’s sake send anyone for me before it’s too late.

  Only then, scooping up a few more pages, did Holmes notice spots of red on some of them. He searched for the source of the papers. He turned the corner into another corridor, where he was met by strong gusts. An open door led to an open window, the panes rattling in the wind. On the floor were more pages being blown around, and in the corner of the room under the eaves, there was a body slumped over. Holmes approached cautiously, raising his candle.

  It was Simon Camp, stripped naked, with the hilt of a long sword protruding from his chest. On his forehead, some of his flesh was cut and bloody. Out the window, Holmes could make out bloodstained footsteps in the snow where the assailant—barefoot, from the looks of it—had fled.

  Holmes returned to inspect the body. On Camp’s forehead was not merely a random cut as it first had appeared, but a letter.