The Dante Chamber Read online

  ALSO BY MATTHEW PEARL

  The Last Bookaneer

  The Technologists

  The Last Dickens

  The Poe Shadow

  The Dante Club

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Matthew Pearl

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ISBN 9781594204937 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780525558958 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Apart from historical figures, any resemblance between fictional characters created by the author and actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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  For Tobey, page 65

  CONTENTS

  Also by Matthew Pearl

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CANTICLE ONEI

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  CANTICLE TWOX

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  CANTICLE THREEXXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  Inside The Dante Chamber

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  DOCUMENT #1: LETTER FROM OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES TO H. W. LONGFELLOW

  The steamship Cephalonia, November 28, 1869

  My dear Longfellow,

  I have been assured that I should be kindly received in Europe, and I suppose I’d prefer anywhere on earth to this ocean liner, where a man annoys and is annoyed by the same two dozen fellow beings all day. Growing old, I realize there are few living persons left I wish to meet and few achievements to which I aspire. Instead, I have a certain longing for another sight of places I remember from travels in my youth, or places of which I read but never saw.

  As for the intellectual condition of the other passengers who are not named Holmes, I should say their faces are prevailingly vacuous, their owners half hypnotized, it seems, by the monotonous throb and tremor of the great sea monster on whose back we ride. I empathize. I seem to have fewer ideas and emotions than usual.

  Besides a short vacation, I have no thought of doing anything more important than brushing a little rust off and enjoying myself, while at the same time I can make my precious companion’s visit somewhat pleasanter than it would be if she went without me.

  Please give Lowell, Fields, and company my warm greetings and say something witty as if I had written it. Even composing a simple letter taxes me in the rocking and swaying of my stateroom.

  What book do you think I saw in the hands of one of the passengers, as I put down this letter to get fresh air above deck? Your Dante. It serves a great purpose, quite independently of its value with reference to the Florentine’s poetry. It shows our young Americans that they need not be provincial in their way of thought because of where they were born. We Boston people are so bright and wide-awake, and have been really so much in advance of our fellow barbarians, that we sometimes forget that 212 Fahrenheit is but 100 centigrade.

  There is something else tugging at my brain, my dear Longfellow. I am a series of surprises to myself in the changes that years, and a specific period of darkness that I need not name, have brought about. The movement onward is like changing place in a picture gallery—the light fades from this picture and falls on that, so that you wonder where the first has gone to and see all at once the meaning of the other. What a strange thing life is! I may have believed a voyage would remove me from certain memories of—I leave that sentence unfinished. But those memories follow me with a more persistent character than before. I suppose it is terribly American to journey thousands of miles and mentally stay in America, for better or . . .

  I reach the bottom of my page. Don’t think I expect an answer, or require consolation. I am afraid that my words as well as my handwriting betray the strain through which my nervous system is passing—but I am certain the picturesque hills of Switzerland will vanquish these thoughts, and this page will serve the world best crackling inside the hearth of your study.

  In the meantime, my mood makes me wonder: what is faith? It must be a quiet belief in the existence of something not proven. Faith that is genuine enough, religionists say, may accomplish much. Might we humans possess another thing that is the opposite of faith, that is just as important or more so? Knowledge that some things seemingly immaterial—memories, fears, the fog of nightmares—are figments. When I try to leave behind my own, they take on the form of some greedy beast who, abandoned in the wild wood, transforms from tame to rabid, to hunt me down, wherever I roam. Pray as I traverse the Old World it finds some new scent to pursue!

  Always faithfully yours,

  Oliver Wendell Holmes

  I

  He would not be long for this world.

  Hunched forward almost forty-five degrees, his body braced against the cold January wind, his big, tattered coat billowing behind. His legs trembled with each plodding step.

  The coming dawn did not remove much of the gloominess these public gardens boasted at night. Strips of colored paper and beads that welcomed the New Year two weeks before were still scattered over the ground, giving the appearance of colorful strands of hair and lost teeth. Here was one of the garden squares around London that better classes shunned and appreciated. Shunned, because it was a place of blackguards and outcasts; appreciated, because these blackguards and outcasts collected on the Wapping side of the Thames kept out of the way of respectable society. When respectable persons did have a need best served in North Woolwich, they believed themselves invisible here.

  Even in midwinter cold, ladies in elaborate, multicolored dresses walked along the elm-lined paths in pairs, objects of desire and subjects of contempt and fear for causing desire. Most of the girls who passed in sight of the plodder felt pity for him, though few pitied these girls. They did not know him; he was no frequenter of these gardens. One thing stood out: despite his terrible condition and his ratty clothing, the rest of him—his face plump and round, crystal blue eyes, silvering hair, smooth skin—all reeked of easier living somewhere else. Somewhere else must have been lovely.

  He was like Atlas, stooped, about to lose his grip on the world.

  The girls kept away, because whatever else the hunchbacked plodder might be he was in trouble that they could not afford. That explains why none came close enough to hear him utter, “God, have mercy upon me!” before his head drooped farther down. A loud crack like a whip followed.

  Then he was a heap on the ground.

  Another man approached at a stately pace. This man appeared somewhat rotund in his long dark coat and had a beard that extended some six inches below his chin,
where it slightly cleaved in two. He lowered one knee into the rain-matted grass next to the body. Full red lips quivered from under the black bristles of his mustache. He pressed his strong fingers to his own eyes as he wept.

  A crowd of the bolder girls and other onlookers began to gather. Some men hastily buttoned up vests and straightened hats. The weeping man felt their unwelcome presence. His hazel-gray eyes darted from one face to the next. He threw his hood over his head and down upon his broad brow, and began to walk away.

  Another onlooker in the crowd, a shorter man with a wide, crisp mustache, trailed behind him. “Dante? Dante, where have you—isn’t that you?” he called after him.

  Simultaneous cries of distress, meanwhile, multiplied over the crumpled-up man.

  “Is the bloke dead? Look at that!”

  “It’s too dark. What?”

  “Don’t you see, over there? Writing: on that thing!”

  A candle was secured as the sightseers closed in on the spectacle. They pointed in horror. The dead man was no hunchback, as he’d appeared from a distance. There was a massive stone that encircled his neck and back. It had put so much pressure on him that it had snapped his neck like a carrot. Someone feeling very bold—nobody remembered who, as recorded later in the reports of police interviews—reached out and touched the side of the man’s head, which wobbled on his limp neck like jelly. The crunch made by the bones as his head rolled would not be forgotten by any who heard it.

  Etched into the stone that had crushed his neck were words.

  Some people scrambled away from death, and others fled the police whistles that broke through the chill morning air. Those who remained tried to make out the words carved in the stone. One girl with long hair to her elbows whispered in a husky voice:

  “Latin.”

  “Can you read it, sweetheart, indeed?” scoffed a man. “Fancy that. A scholar, out here, in petticoats and torn hose.”

  “’Tis true!” another girl chimed in, with a touch of awe toward her friend, pointing out that the first girl was half Italian, half Flemish, or something similar, and knew many tongues.

  The others cleared space for her.

  She hesitated, inhaling a breath of courage before translating the three carved Latin words into English: “Behold, the handmaiden of the Lord.”

  * * *

  —

  Witnesses to a horror split up into those who will never talk about it, and those who never stop. By the time the police descended on North Woolwich, the men and women who had surrounded the dead man’s body began to sort themselves into these factions.

  The anxiety of the park-goers who were already skittish around police was hardly eased by the news that Inspector Adolphus Williamson himself was in the caravan of Scotland Yarders. When Dolly Williamson was assigned a case, people who knew anything knew to get out of the way.

  Dolly wore a hat half a size too large, so that he was always shifting his head to keep it from falling over his eyes, which had an unsatisfied look to them.

  He was correcting the tilt of this hat as he stepped down from his carriage and asked: “Who is he?”

  One of the constables replied they had not yet confirmed it. They had notions, said another. They weren’t certain, cautioned the first.

  “Don’t hold your tongues with me,” Dolly reprimanded them, removing a sprig of holly he was chewing. “Is his name Jasper Morton?”

  (The following reaction was common when it came to Dolly’s pronouncements.)

  “How . . . ,” one constable began in astonishment. “Inspector, it’s not possible you could have . . . before you’ve even . . .”

  Dolly rolled his eyes.

  Jasper Morton was a seasoned member of Parliament who represented Bristol. Not a particularly popular or effective legislator, but he held his seat in the House of Commons long enough that political longevity alone ensured his continued election.

  “Close your jaw, Constable; you look like you’re going to bite me,” Dolly said. “A dead bloke in this district would not produce ringing at my door any more than the carcass of a cat floating among the rushes of the Thames—unless the corpse made the Home Office nervous. Rest easy that I have my own reasons, beyond those, to think of Morton.”

  Dolly’s reasons had to do with a report he came across at Scotland Yard weeks earlier. Approximately a month before that, the legislator’s wife, Eleanor Morton, had mentioned to a police sergeant that Morton had seemed nervous and anxious when he was in public, and though the politician himself insisted nothing was amiss, she worried that some angry constituent was pestering him. Morton did not like to complain about such things, she said with pride in her husband’s stoicism.

  None of that was particularly noteworthy. What struck Dolly most in his memory of the report was that when a constable eventually attempted to interview the Honorable Mr. Morton about Mrs. Morton’s concerns, he could not find him.

  “Injuries?” Dolly asked as they approached the body.

  The hideous sight had remained in the same state as when first illuminated by the onlookers, though now expert eyes were trained on it. The massive stone fit around the neck and shoulders almost perfectly. The dead man’s head hung down loosely.

  Another constable answered him. “Broken neck, Inspector. This is some kind of stone contraption—like a yoke made for a man instead of an ox—and it’s been attached to the poor fellow. No other violence done to the body. Real mystery, isn’t it?”

  There were words etched on the stone—Ecce ancilla Dei—and they were scrambling to fetch a professor of Latin to consult with Dolly.

  “Don’t bother. I can read it myself,” Dolly said, gnashing the sprig again between two side molars. “Now cover that up with your coat. I want no one else to see those words who hasn’t.”

  To himself, he repeated over and over, trying to will it into making some sense: Behold, the handmaiden of the Lord.

  He thought about the inscription and thought about the word the frightened constable chose: mystery. A mystery, by strict definition, was an event that could not be understood. Mysteries were for religions; miracles, things tucked away in holy scrolls. The peculiarities of this killing were neither haphazard nor the mark of the insane. If they were understood by someone, anyone—and certainly they were understood by whoever did it—Dolly would not be far behind. Besides, there were other elements to consider. The public place. The prominent man as the victim. A human yoke made of stone. That inscription. The timing, at the break of day. Nothing hidden about this, no secret scrolls here—this was a page all London was meant to see.

  Dolly knew there was one person who would not have missed watching it for all the world: the culprit.

  II

  Like the sun, her routine could be counted on day in and day out. Fixing breakfast for herself and her mother. Sitting at the sagging but well-organized desk in the drawing room of their small home on Euston Square and replying to, perhaps, a magazine asking if she wished to publish new verses (Thank you, but no, was her usual answer), inquiries after her mother’s health (Hale and strong, thank you), bills for the latest repair at their home (Thank you, enclosed), notes from Gabriel beseeching her to call on Tudor House to see a sketch or read a new poem. She would keep copies of any letter she wrote in case the original was lost, and then after a few days she would burn the copy in the fireplace on the other side of the room. If she felt the call to do so, she would write poetry into one of her small notebooks. When she finally left their house, there was church to attend, the market to get to, Saint Mary’s to visit, her aunts to take on errands (We three old ladies, she would say only half joking; she was not yet forty), her father’s grave from which to clear away leaves and pine needles. No wonder Christina would say she only wore clothes fit for ten miles of plowing.

  On this day, in the great hall of Saint Mary’s home for fallen women, she paused at the t
hreshold, a figure elegant and slender. In her muslin cap with lace edges and dark veil, she blended in with the Anglican nuns in charge. Christina was not part of their sisterhood, though by now the nuns spoke to their “associate sister” as though she were, taking the liberty of referring to her as Sister Christina. For ten years, she had been coming to Saint Mary’s penitentiary—no prison, as the word was sometimes used, but an institution of reform—to help the nuns take care of women like the new arrival at the front of the line shyly holding out her wooden bowl for her first filling meal in weeks.

  Christina found peace here, a relief to know that her labors while at this charity home were worthy—assisting these women, many having come from foreign countries, most terribly young, though some her own age. It gave her a refuge different from what it gave the desperate women. Those women suffered because of what they had done, while Christina often suffered over what she had not.

  But this Sunday, by all appearances similar to most other days, felt incomplete. She’d had an uneasy feeling when bidding her mother farewell after church, and the feeling had not left. Her lithe fingers, emerging from long black sleeves, trembled as she ladled food. Behind that veil, her hazel-gray, oval eyes conveyed a general fearfulness. Even Ethel looked over with concern at the thirty-nine-year-old helper who always held her head high and greeted her and her fellow inhabitants without judgment.

  Ethel had been at Saint Mary’s nearly half of the two-year limit for residents. Like many of the girls, she was being trained to enter domestic service in a respectable home, and often helped the nuns in the kitchen. She looked younger than her years, which were twenty, her round face splashed with brown freckles and her eyes thoughtful and also brown. She was one of Christina’s favorites. The residents were forbidden to speak directly of their pasts to the nuns, but Christina was not quite as strict and would listen with open mind and heart. Ethel had told her how when her wages were lowered at a sewing factory, she turned to accepting men’s money in order to prevent her mother from being put into a workhouse.