The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  “Without the chloral, we will have you healthy and content for years to come. As you can tell, I am turning quite into an old nurse.”

  “By the by, I’m thinking of buying a nice ticker,” Gabriel said, miming pulling a watch chain out of his vest and studying the invisible watch, satisfied at the imaginary time on it. “To know the time—sometimes that would help. I have seen one I admired last week. But I don’t have the tin. Fifteen pounds . . .”

  “I will loan it to you, Gabriel,” Christina said.

  “Will you? I will pay you back, of course, sooner than you think.”

  Christina knew he never would. He was overjoyed about the idea of a watch for the next day and a half.

  Before they left for a walk that same afternoon, she noticed he had written three words on a piece of paper and pinned it on his wall, as a kind of motto, she supposed.

  Frangas non Flectes.

  It translated as: You may break but shall not bend me. A few weeks later, he’d printed this on Tudor House stationery.

  Life continued to pile up its demands on Christina while they had been occupied in such unusual endeavors. She had to oversee various repairs and projects for the house she shared with her mother, brought on by the year’s late snowstorms. She had letter after letter, personal and professional, to answer, always copying her response, then periodically burning the bundle.

  (Later biographers, after Christina Rossetti took her place among the most celebrated poets of the nineteenth century, would find the first half of 1870 a puzzle in chronicling her life, with so few extant documents and with police records referencing the Rossettis by that point either suppressed or destroyed. Christina, most biographers surmised, probably spent those months holed up at home, suffering from a stretch of feeble health.)

  Charles Cayley, who had to be abroad to work on a translation to which he had committed, wrote to Christina that he wished to hear from her as soon as possible about their last, unfinished conversation. She did not know exactly how to reply, so she wrote of the weather, of the death of the Tudor House wombat, of a trip abroad she was planning with her mother and aunts, of her work at Saint Mary’s, and some new efforts she had joined to combat cruelty to animals. She also found herself writing a poem to enclose to him:

  Remember me when I am gone away,

  Gone far away into the silent land;

  When you can no more hold me by the hand,

  Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

  That wouldn’t do. It went into the flame of the candle and was replaced by:

  None know the choice I made; I make it still.

  None know the choice I made and broke my heart,

  Breaking mine idol: I have braced my will

  Once, chosen for once my part.

  She did not rush to answer most of her correspondence, a contrast to her usual habits. Instead, she spent her time reviewing her stacks of compositions. She set aside more time to write new poetry and found verses of a variety of sorts—devotional, narrative, elegies—came to her quite easily. She soon surprised her publisher, Alexander Macmillan, at his offices.

  “I have a volume of poetry I am ready to publish, if you happen to have interest.”

  “If! Of course we do, Miss Rossetti,” said Macmillan.

  “Thank you. It is a volume of nursery rhymes for today. I shall leave you them to see if they suit your needs.”

  Macmillan called the next morning enthusiastically raving about her poems and began to make plans to put them into print as soon as possible.

  “It matters not to you that I am not a parent, and may never be?” Christina asked.

  “Why, Miss Rossetti, your children are the very kind who bring the greatest pride—your verse. Keep in mind, as great a poetess as Jean Ingelow herself has never married!”

  Early in May, Oliver Wendell Holmes called on her to bid farewell before sailing out of Liverpool. He had arranged his passage to meet his daughter in Belgium on the first vessel that could take him there. He was so full of talk and conversation about museums and libraries he had lately seen, about the Tower of London and Stratford-on-Avon, Christina had a strong feeling that the doctor wanted to discuss anything and everything except what had happened.

  “I suppose the wise traveler should never think time away will change him. It will interrupt his routine for a while, but then he will settle down into his former self, and be just what he was before. How small a matter literature is, Miss Rossetti, to the great seething, toiling, struggling, love-making, bread-winning, child-rearing, death-awaiting men and women who fill this huge, palpitating world of ours!”

  To her surprise, before they took leave from each other, Holmes did make what seemed a brief reference to the events.

  “At night before I sleep, I have been contemplating how liberty is often a heavy burden on a man, Miss Rossetti. It involves that necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men always dreaded. In common life, I suppose, we shirk it by forming habits that take the place of self-determination. But if a man has a genuine, hearty wish to get rid of his liberty, if he is bent upon becoming a slave to another’s doctrine, nothing can stop him.”

  He added: “Such a time as we had irons ten years’ creases out of one’s forehead.” Then he paused. “Thank heavens it’s over.” But when he said that, the hand with which he held his teacup shook slightly, and he said the words in a tone of a man who did not believe his assertion.

  Despite all Sibbie had done, it still seemed cruel to have to describe for Holmes how the burning building collapsed and exploded around an unmoving (unmovable was the better word) Sibbie. Holmes had wanted Sibbie to redeem him for what he thought were his shortcomings. Christina was glad he would soon be reunited with his daughter. At any age, a father’s presence brought comfort to a daughter, and Christina was hopeful Amelia’s company would be restorative for Holmes.

  Browning, always impressing Christina anew with his warmth in his friendships, wrapped Holmes’s hand in both of his. “Goodbye, Holmes,” he said, “and mind it isn’t so long before you come again! There’s always a one o’clock meal at my house waiting for you.”

  Not everyone in their recent coterie seemed in a hurry to pay a call on the Rossettis after Gabriel had settled in again. Tennyson returned to his Farringford estate to heal from the injuries he sustained in the carriage accident in Walsden. Those injuries remained painful for a few weeks although they ultimately proved minor. Still, no trips to London followed. Nor were any invitations extended to the Londoners to come to the Isle of Wight. The laureate walled himself into his burrow, and there wasn’t any sign of him at two successive Cosmopolitan Club meetings.

  Browning, who called on Tudor House regularly, remained indignant about Tennyson’s informing Inspector Williamson of their activities during the search for Gabriel, and the laureate staying away from London and Tudor House in the wake of all that had come to pass only compounded Browning’s resentment. He would not speak of Tennyson other than to repeat his position and then gloss it with the comment, “I’m not afraid of him, and he hates me for it. But let him make amends, and I won’t mind.” On a different occasion he exclaimed: “Tennysonite!”

  “Pardon?” Christina asked.

  “Tennysonites, Browningites . . . never mind. Thinking back over all that happened, Miss Rossetti, I see that we have been all the time walking over a torrent on a straw. Perhaps life must now be begun anew—all the old cast off and the new one put on.”

  Christina was content to slip back into her usual seclusion, but before she did she made her own unannounced visit to the Isle of Wight, largely an attempt to encourage Tennyson to mend his friendship with Browning. She hated to think that she, by driving their collective inquiries, caused a rift between friends. She herself easily forgave Tennyson for his breach of their trust. How could you forgive him, how could you not be full
of vinegar and gall for a man who blatantly betrayed you? Browning had demanded of her.

  Farringford had the look of a charmed castle, its windows glowing a soft crimson. As she crossed through the wicket gate, she saw that beneath the sign marked Private were words written in chalk by some local who resented the declaration: Old Tennyson is a fool. She hoped the desecration would be removed before he saw it. It only occurred to her when Tennyson greeted her and asked if she had seen the chalk message, that he could have scrubbed it off whenever he’d wanted. Tennyson couldn’t stop talking about it. “Whoever wrote it was right. We are all of us fools, if we only knew it! I am the greatest example. We are but the beginning of some better, fuller wisdom.”

  Speeches like that one, she wished she could tell Browning, was why she had little trouble forgiving Tennyson, who brought her up to his sanctum at the top of the house. They began the way all writers do when visiting each other—by looking at the books the other was reading.

  “Poetry, histories, but you’ll still not find many novels in my stack, Miss Rossetti. I like novels, I do. What I dislike is ending one and beginning a new one. I should like to have one novel to read in a million volumes, to last me my life.”

  “I have wondered something, Mr. Tennyson.”

  “Out with it! You can ask anything at all.”

  “You say you are the second most shortsighted man in the country. Who is the first most shortsighted man in England?”

  “Someone was bound to ask, sooner or later. I have to admit it was Charles Napier,” Tennyson said with a frown. “He died some years ago, which I suppose means I am the most shortsighted. Ugh. But that did not bring you all the way from the city.”

  “No. It’s Browning.”

  She should have guessed that Tennyson would prove just as intransigent as Browning, shielding himself from her entreaties in his capacious pipe smoke. It was not that Tennyson wouldn’t talk about the recent events. Though when he spoke of them, he did so somewhat circuitously, as though reflected by a wall of mirrors. Tennyson revealed that he had kept some of the pages written by Simon Camp that Holmes had recovered at the Golden Lion Inn in Walsden; Holmes still had some of the others, he believed. He removed these documents folded inside a book, handling them as if they were the Holy Grail, as he told Christina a story.

  The story he told was about a friend of Tennyson’s who found a poem by the previous poet laureate, Wordsworth, which had never before been published. The poem recorded all the details of a revolting crime. Tennyson’s friend, thinking a man of genius such as Wordsworth should never be associated with such an unworthy subject, condemned the papers to the flames before they could see daylight. “It was the kindest thing he could have done,” Tennyson exclaimed, concluding the anecdote.

  “Mr. Tennyson, you know Mr. Browning has been in a great battle for many years. He is far lonelier than he admits. He needs his friends.”

  “Dante’s great innovation,” Tennyson said, hearing her but giving no indication of listening, “was to dare envision poets and literati—Virgil and Homer, Statius and Sordello—to take part together in affairs of life and death, danger and destiny. After all, what else is poetry?”

  She knew at the moment she would not be able to build a bridge between Tennysonites and Browningites.

  He picked up some leaves of sage from a dish and rubbed them into his teeth. “That is the best thing in the world to take away the stain of tobacco.”

  Rising to his feet, he walked slowly to the hearth. He dropped Simon Camp’s pages on the fire before Christina could think whether she ought to protest, or whether that was exactly where she wanted them to end up.

  “I believe that everything which happens to us we remember no matter what we do. It is all stored up somewhere,” he continued dreamily, “to come forth again upon occasion, though it may seem to be forgotten—we shall even remember these ashes forming from these pages.”

  Christina, without thinking why, recited from one of her poems:

  And dreaming through the twilight

  That doth not rise nor set,

  Haply I may remember,

  And haply may forget.

  “Say, that’s lovely,” said Tennyson. “Are those my verses?”

  Back in London, Browning remained set on finding every answer to every question. He tried much harder than Christina to interview Gabriel about what happened at the so-called sanatorium, though he was not successful drawing out information. The more you asked Gabriel, the less you received.

  Police estimated that eleven of Sibbie’s followers, including Ethel and the two followers who were “purged” as Avaricious and Prodigal, perished in the fire. The remains of most of them, including those of Sibbie herself, were never recovered from the smoldering pile of ruins.

  Browning and Christina visited Scotland Yard to give their final accounts of the incidents in question for the official police records.

  Dolly Williamson greeted them as if old friends. His arm remained in a sling, and he walked tenderly on his left leg. Browning asked after Constable Branagan.

  “Home Office transferred him before I returned, I’m afraid,” said Dolly. “The lad served me gallantly, and do not doubt I shall watch his career with interest.”

  “Is it true, Inspector, what the newspapers said of you?” asked Christina. “That you had a vision of the solution to the Dante case before you were injured.”

  “Something of the kind, Miss Rossetti,” Dolly said. “As I stood at Clerkenwell, investigating the report of loiterers, I was thinking of these Fenian warriors before me. Second by second, my mind began to drink in the truth. They weren’t frightened of being captured. In fact, punishment was part of their duty, their desire. Then a sickening feeling came over me. Could it be? Could the same have happened in our Dante deaths, that those punished were parties to their fates from the beginning? Before I could say a word to anyone about it, I was thrown clear across the street and laid out cold as a December in Moravia. Saved, as it turns out, only by Dante.”

  Christina and Browning exchanged confused glances.

  Dolly went on: “In my consternation over the obstacles we had encountered, earlier that day I had decided to continue my reading of Dante where I left off, in Paradise. A shard of stone pierced me, you see.” Dolly brought over the third volume of Longfellow’s translation, split almost in half by a gray stone fragment in the center of it. “If I had not been carrying this book in my coat, that would have come to rest right in my heart. At least the prison explosion led us to break up the ring of revolutionaries who plotted it, and thwart their future plans. McCord, their mastermind, fled to Dublin, where we have men on his trail. Tell me, are we more afraid of what comes from outside of us, like the Fenians and whatever other foreign danger lurks next, or do we fear most what comes from inside? We relish punishing others, while we are terrified to punish ourselves—terrified, perhaps, because our creativity in tormenting ourselves knows no bounds. But listen to me, I sound like the literary fellow among the three of us. Let us turn back to the subject of your accounts. Mind if I take notes for my reports?”

  “Inspector, when you are finished with our interviews, would it be possible for us to have a turn to speak directly with that beastly Reverend Fallow?” Browning asked.

  The request caught Christina as much off guard as it did Dolly. She and Browning had not discussed the idea of speaking with Fallow. She was not certain she ever again wanted to see the preacher.

  Browning continued. “You see, Inspector, the first suicides wore the clothes of civilians, I suppose as a kind of bridge between everyday life and the new purgatory they believed they were creating. I’ve been puzzled why in their final ‘terraces’ they wore the robes of the sanatorium—perhaps it was a gesture to the moral mountaintop narrowing and the witnesses and observers becoming one.”

  Dolly’s reply took them both by surprise.


  “Certainly you may ask Fallow about that or anything else you wish. But you would have to find him first, Mr. Browning,” he said.

  “Simply escort us to his cell,” said Browning.

  Dolly shook his head, and chewed on a sprig of grass. He explained there were no charges sufficient to indefinitely hold Fallow, and he had been allowed to leave.

  Browning worked himself into a frenzy over the idea and listed all the things Fallow had done in the creation of the sanatorium’s morbid and deadly mission. Christina tried to placate him.

  Dolly waited until they were both quiet before explaining.

  “As you know, indeed, as you revealed to Constable Branagan, Mr. Browning, the deaths were not murders after all, but suicides. Of course, the fire killed others, but there is evidence that was the result of arson by culprits outside their strange settlement of believers. Then there is the murder by stabbing of that American pest, Mr. Camp, which we are continuing to investigate, however bereft of clues.”

  Browning was far from satisfied. “There was someone talked about in the pages written by Camp. Someone they called the Dante Master in Italy. Couldn’t you find him, and see what he knew? There must be some way to see to it that Fallow doesn’t get away with this.”

  “We could conjure up charges, Mr. Browning, but nothing that would pass muster at Old Bailey. The most we can prove is that Fallow stoked the darkest imaginations of other people—in that, he was no more guilty than Dante of doing the same and, as it seems we have discovered together, Dante cannot be stopped.”

  Christina wondered what plagued Browning most, the fading possibility of answering all his questions about the mysterious Dante movement that had changed so many lives—including their own—or the impossibility of finding justice, of ever making amends, for loss and death, for the heart he buried in Florence.

  As spring surrendered fully to summer, Christina took another excursion, having a desire to see once more where it had happened. Reaching the property of the sanatorium, she found the heavy gates with “Phillip Sanatorium” still there, but covered in cobwebs and left wide open. Only three of the buildings survived the fire, and the grounds were wild with fresh verdure. A deer loitered near the gates, and ate mulberries out of Christina’s hands. She watched the deer run gracefully across the property, not stopping to disturb the other animals, like the ducks that had gathered at the canal, and the cats who went in and out of the ruins, yet somehow seeming the master of it all.