The Dante Chamber Page 6

  Browning’s head filled with images of the grim reality of London—both its shadowy districts of hidden sin and its corrupt pockets of luxury—stirred together with Dante’s array of purgatorial designs meant to cleanse the souls of the afterlife before being transported to Paradise. Wise Virgil teaches Dante the structure of the mountain as arranged by the sins it removed. The first group of terraces—Pride, Envy, and Wrath—comprise “ill love” or love that has been warped. The second category contains the terraces of “lax” or insufficient love, namely the Slothful, Avaricious, and Prodigal, while the final terrace of the mountain purges “profligate” or excessive love. Then a heavy thought struck Browning, and he no longer held back his obstinate doubts.

  “It’s not the first time.”

  Now it was Christina who was startled. “Gabriel disappearing?”

  “No. Dante inspiring crimes and horrors in real life. It’s happened before. Some believe that the torturers of the Inquisition with their intricate, vicious punishments found motivation in Dante’s classifications of sins. There were even tales that something happened in America just a few years ago, around the time of the six-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s birth. Do you recall?”

  “I heard rumors, passed to me by William from the usual literary gossips. But never for a moment did I think to believe them.”

  “There was some kind of booklet printed later that purported to tell of what happened in Boston, and it proved a bit of a nine days’ wonder in some circles. I remember seeing it a few times even in rarefied homes of London.” Browning rose to his feet and gathered his hat and coat.

  “What are you going to do?” Christina asked.

  “That booklet about the Boston events. If there is a connection between those incidents and what is happening now—what may be happening to your brother—we must find it.” Browning knew it would not be in any university library. There were some resourceful booksellers with whom he was acquainted who might be able to secure a copy, though he was impatient just thinking how long that might take. He began to list the bookstalls and reading rooms they’d visit.

  Then a smile of gratification formed on Browning’s lips. He began removing the gloves, coat, and hat in reverse order of how he’d just put them on, and stacking them.

  “Tell me,” Browning said. “If you were looking for an obscure publication with anything to do with Dante, where would you start, Miss Rossetti?”

  Christina knitted her brow, then realized.

  Gabriel had collected every book and scrap of paper on Dante he could ever find. It began with the volumes inherited from their father, including one fourteenth-century edition. The professore circled the world to hunt down a rare Dante edition or a piece of ephemera. There was even what was supposed to be Dante’s death mask, sent from Italy by the eccentric Seymour Kirkup.

  They were standing among the most comprehensive assortment of Dante writings, high and low, in all of England—as close to everything written about Dante as could ever exist.

  Together they entered Gabriel’s library. With the eyes of a wombat and parrot looking on, they picked and pulled books from the shelves until Christina gingerly removed a thin pamphlet poorly printed on yellow paper.

  Thrilling Mysteries of

  THE DANTE MURDERS

  in the City of Boston,

  Never Before Brought to Light

  by One Who Knew

  * * *

  —

  They promptly used up their writing paper taking notes. As Christina crossed through the labyrinth of rooms in the house, gathering up loose sheets, she paused at the doorway to a small chamber, where one object stood out. It was a wooden cradle turned upside down to be used for a drafting table. She remembered a time when she entered the house Gabriel had lived in before Tudor House, when Lizzie was alive, calling out in her shy way to see who was there.

  “Gabriel? Lizzie?”

  As Christina wandered the hall, she peered into a room where Lizzie sat. Startled by Christina’s footsteps, Lizzie snapped her head and shushed her sister-in-law. Thick, wet hair covered her brow. “You’ll wake the baby with all that noise, Christina,” she whispered. Lizzie rocked the empty cradle in a gentle, hypnotic rhythm.

  Christina expected to find a blank expression staring back from Lizzie’s eyes. What amazed her was that in the grieving woman’s eyes she observed only love—the purest form of it. It was maternal love for a child—and in this case, a child no longer of this earth—that Christina secretly doubted she herself could possess. Perhaps, deep inside, that had always led her to swerve and duck attention from men who had been interested in her, to swat down the possibility of new family by using existing family as her excuses. My mother needs me . . . My aunts . . . My brother . . .

  And yet, Christina had in the years since gradually composed poems she thought of as new nursery rhymes. As the playful lines came to her, she thought of the adventures she’d shared with Gabriel as children, when people used to say the two of them could see and read each other’s private thoughts. They tumbled, wrestled. They raced each other. They both read stories by Edgar Poe when others feared to. They competed to write verses quickly and argued over the greatness of nature. When Christina would stop to examine an interesting insect or patch of moss, Gabriel would stand in an impatient pose and shrug, not seeing what was at all interesting about it. Sometimes when writing her children’s lyrics she thought of Gabriel and Lizzie’s son, had he lived, and what he might have grown into.

  People admired her poetry, but she knew there were plenty of readers who questioned it. How could she write brokenhearted verse if she never loved? Why did she compose so much about death if she knew little of life? Her emotions and insights must be affectation. Maybe they were right. Years earlier, she received a letter from a family friend complaining that her poems were sad and despondent. If my verses are sad, Christina replied, I suggest few people reach even the age of twenty without sadness, and if despondent, I take shame and blame to myself, as they show I have been ungrateful for the daily love and mercy lavished upon me. She added: (Please remember to see to it this letter is burned.)

  The same people would think an unmarried, childless woman ineligible to understand and inspire children. She kept the nursery rhymes locked away in a drawer.

  As she continued harvesting sheets of paper on her return to the other side of the house where Browning feverishly worked, Christina paused again at one of Gabriel’s mirrors, brushing off a film of dust. Both the mirror and her own reflection seemed to come from another place and era. There were so many mirrors in the room that you were never looking at yourself; you were looking at yourself looking at yourself.

  Christina knew she had been a prettier girl than a woman, in part because of the preoccupied and remote expression usually fixed on her face, which convinced people she was in pain. Her skin looked olive from her Italian blood and yet also somehow colorless. But she knew that when deep enthusiasm and interest came to her, her sleepy oval eyes would beam, her pale skin would glow with warmth, and she became beautiful, and then ashamed because of it.

  She knew how others saw her—even Robert Browning. Now that she was almost forty, her choices meant she had all but given up any chance for marriage; if there was still time left where it could happen, it was almost gone. She had given up one suitor in her youth because he did not share her strict religious views. She lived with her mother. She was, in short, an old maid. That is what people saw. They saw what she turned away—being a wife, being a mother.

  One of Gabriel’s compatriots, Algernon Swinburne, had written a novel with the main character based on Christina, but unlike Christina, the character engaged in rather shocking and wild behavior; Christina pasted strips of paper over those startling sections but liked much of the rest of the story of her literary double. She would never say it to a living soul, but she enjoyed imagining what might have been.


  Her place in society was small, fixed. Family, home, church, charity. Sitting at her writing table and sitting at her tea. There was her poetry, for which she was acclaimed. But she had produced only one volume of poetry in the eight years since “Goblin Market.”

  There had been a time, of course, as an unknown poet when she had to introduce herself to the magazines if she wished to publish something. She could hardly bear it. To one editor, she wrote: I hope that I shall not be misunderstood as guilty of egotism or foolish vanity when I say that my love for what is good in the works of others teaches me that there is something above the despicable in mine. She woke up in the middle of that night, her head hot, her heart throbbing, realizing that “what is good in the works of others” could be construed as implying there was some that was not good, and that Christina’s was better. The next morning marked the first day she began to burn all of her letters she could find and to instruct correspondents to do the same.

  There was nothing quite like the heat produced by those burning letters—or from the discarded poems and the particular short story she once wrote that was morally deficient—a heat that prodded her to try harder, to do better, to prevent future shame.

  She had never been like other writers. She did not read voraciously, instead choosing the same stalwart books (the Bible, The Arabian Nights) to read again and again, and did not really seek inspiration from reading. She never sought advice from publishers or friends, and when advice was proffered, from Gabriel or others, and she listened, her writing suffered for it. She hardly revised her work. She refused to publish a portrait of herself, however flattering and unlike her, in the frontispieces of her books. She did not chase fame or money like those other female poets who far surpassed her in popularity, such as Jean Ingelow. Poetry for Christina was not a mechanism but an impulse and a reality, and her aims in writing were directed to that which is true and right. If events of the last weeks and days proved anything, it was that her calling had increasingly become to serve her family, and at the moment that meant finding Gabriel.

  CR—need your help. Gabriel’s message rang like a bell in her thoughts.

  The way Christina and Browning pored over the ratty Dante Murders pamphlet for the next four hours, elbow to elbow, a bystander would have been forgiven for mistaking it for a sacred document.

  The pamphlet was written in sloppy but enthusiastic prose. It recounted a scourge in Boston after the end of the American War of Rebellion. Prominent citizens had been discovered murdered in the style of the punishments Dante memorialized in the Inferno, the first part of Dante’s Comedy: a minister in the crypts beneath a church near Harvard College buried upside down, his feet set aflame, like the venal religious figures Dante encounters in one of the circles of Hell; a judge in Beacon Hill eaten alive by a rare breed of maggots, imitating the eternal state of what Dante named in another infernal circle the “neutrals”; and deaths even more shocking to the senses and less intelligible to the police.

  The anonymous pamphleteer told how, in absence of wider knowledge about Dante, several preeminent men of letters, poets and a publisher among them, were left to decipher the true inspiration behind the horrors and became entangled in unraveling them as they prepared what became America’s first translation of Dante. Just as the pamphlet’s cover page withheld the name of the booklet’s author, the names of the literary participants in the narrative were concealed by aliases.

  Christina sent for William to come to Tudor House to help examine the booklet for any insights into the eerie occurrence in London, so she and Browning could pursue finding more information that might lead them to Gabriel. Twice they called for a family friend, Charles Cayley, to look over a passage of Purgatory; the agreeable translator was so studious and eager to please, he never asked about the peculiar assortment of labors in progress at Tudor House.

  “Any excuse to read Dante, Miss Rossetti,” Cayley said, flashing his awkward smile, “counts as a good one.”

  “Just what my father would say, Mr. Cayley.”

  * * *

  —

  Christina and Browning traveled by steamer to the North Woolwich Gardens, a simple recreation space with a small lake at the center. The newspaper articles they collected, with all their shouting declarations about the unacceptable and hideous crime against a member of Parliament, were sparing in reliable details about the exact location. Christina wanted to see it for herself.

  Browning lamented that the gardens seemed completely deserted. It was frigid and foggy. There were few people whom they could even try to question.

  “I suppose such an event frightens some people away, at least until a new spectacle makes them forget,” Christina mused, looking up at the gray sky through a canopy of tree branches.

  Thinking of the recent overturning of her tightly controlled routines, Christina had a revelation.

  “The time,” she said to Browning.

  Routines: every person of every class had them—even if most were not as devoted to them as Christina. She proposed that they return closer to the time of day the body was found. Browning protested the gardens would not be safe in the darkness or at dawn, but Christina was undeterred. They would be more likely to encounter individuals whose routines had taken them there at the same time as the awful discovery. After passing time on their own, they reunited at the gardens.

  Christina’s conjecture seemed correct. Despite the cold, the gardens came alive under the cover of darkness. Young women—their painted cheeks and bright-colored garments enhanced by the moonlight, putting on a display for passing men—shied away from the obtrusive light of the lantern Browning held up. Soon enough, several recognized Christina and waved her over.

  After a few minutes, she returned to Browning and explained that she knew several of the girls from her work with Saint Mary’s penitentiary for fallen women—they had stayed there in the past, but left by their own will, or had been asked to leave the charity home for intoxication or other misbehaviors.

  “They worry you are one of the men who come here to inspect them,” Christina reported to Browning.

  The Contagious Disease Acts authorized the government to order physical inspections of prostitutes and lock them up if they were found to have signs of venereal diseases, with the stated purpose of protecting soldiers.

  “Is that what I look like?” Browning protested.

  “I’ve convinced them, Mr. Browning, that regardless of appearance, you are not.”

  Browning came back with her to the circle of girls, and Christina asked each one if she had been present in the gardens when the politician collapsed dead. Christina also brought one of the many thick sketchbooks from Tudor House filled with Gabriel’s self-portraits as well as other drawings, to determine whether any of the girls happened to have spotted her brother around London. Some of the sketches were in pen and ink, others in pencil or in red chalk. None of the girls whom Christina interviewed remembered seeing Gabriel at all recently, and none owned up to being in the gardens at the fateful moment in question, but one of the girls quietly slipped away and returned with another on her arm.

  “Pamela’s my sister; she was there,” said the first girl. “Now don’t be shy, Pam! Miss Rossetti is as true as the sun, strike me blind and dead.”

  “I won’t be reclaimed, miss,” protested her sister, as she flailed her arms around as though ready to fight Christina, “if that’s what you’re after, to reclaim my soul at Saint Mary’s!”

  “My name is Christina, and I’ve come for my own purposes. I’m trying to find my brother, I believe he is in danger, and we’re here only for information. Could you possibly show us what happened to Mr. Morton?”

  This girl, whose messy, thick orange hair surrounded her head like a crown, reluctantly led them to a clearing. She pointed out where she first saw the doomed man walking, hunched over, and then again after he fell to the ground and she and o
ther onlookers rushed to see what happened. She recalled his wobbly steps, and how they thought he was a hunchback at first.

  “I know him!”

  The declaration, interrupting their interview with the witness, came from another girl in the group, one of the youngest. She was a waif of sixteen wearing golden garments and a bonnet decorated with flowers. She and two other girls had taken hold of the sketchbook, mostly as a novelty, and were thumbing through the drawings by the light of Browning’s lantern.

  “Gabriel? You’ve seen Gabriel?” Christina asked with breathless anticipation. She hurried over.

  The waif wasn’t looking at one of Gabriel’s self-portraits. She had come across a different sketch pasted into the book, one Gabriel had made of painter Arthur Hughes, a member of the generation of artists who considered themselves avid followers of Gabriel’s.

  Christina pressed, asking how she knew the man. Her defiant shrug answered the question.

  “When was the last time you had a meeting with that man?” Christina asked, continuing the gentle tone.

  “It was right here. Nearly two weeks ago. The same night, matter of fact, as . . . ,” she began, her gaze falling, her long arms wrapping around her narrow middle. “When that poor fellow was found, his neck broken under that stone, we heard the hubbub and came to see, like everyone else who was near.”

  Christina itched to go right to Hughes’s studio when they left the gardens, but she suspected that he’d be asleep for hours more. Like Gabriel, most of the London artists tended to paint until late at night and then sleep through the afternoon. Browning accompanied her back to Tudor House, where they were surprised to find William asleep at the library table, his head buried in the crook of his arm. Around him, in addition to the now-well-worn booklet on the Dante murders of Boston, and Bobby the inquisitive owl, were various editions of the Divine Comedy, as well as an assortment of American poetry volumes and novels. He stirred, and cleared his throat when they entered.