Michael Dibdin - A Rich Full Death

Dear God, I found everything else that night! Books I had forgotten about, books I did not know I had, books I did not know existed: everything from Browning’s own Sordello , which he had given me to make up for his gaffe at DeVere’s funeral, to a broadsheet singing the exploits of the Monster of Modena, a berserk butcher who terrorised that Dukedom early last century, turning his victims into the large spiced boiling sausages for which the region is famous. Everything but Dante’s posy for his dead love!

At last I gave it up, staggered to the table, sat down and poured myself a glass of brandy-and there was the volume I had been seeking in vain, ‘under my nose’, as the letter had fruitlessly hinted. Feverishly I snatched it up, hunting out the sonnet in question. Ignoring a piece of paper which fluttered to the table as I found the page, I skimmed the first twelve lines, and found this: Ell’ha perduta la sua beatrice .

Now Dante meant by this that Florence had lost the person who had made her blessed, the source of her beatitude (with a quibble on Beatrice’s name). There is, however, a simpler way of reading the Italian, and it was this, I knew, that Browning had intended: ‘You have lost your Beatrice’. He had made away with the poor girl-killed or kidnapped or God knew what! I was beside myself with anger and remorse. Let him do his worst with me, but why should she suffer, poor child?

Then I noticed the scrap of paper which had fallen to the table when I found the correct page of the Vita Nuova . It had writing on it, I saw, and picked it up, and read:

Since you have been kind enough to act as my guide through hell, I thought it only fair to treat you to a little tour of purgatory. You have been my Virgil. What shall I be to you?

I heard half past three strike, and still I sat there, my brain swarming with a hellish brew of thoughts and dreams all stirred up and simmering together, poring over the opaque message before me. ‘You have been kind enough to act as my guide through hell’; ‘You have been my Virgil’. That was clear enough-a reference to our joint investigation into the murders based on the Inferno , ‘I thought it only fair to treat you to a little tour of purgatory’; ‘What shall I be to you?’

Who had been Dante’s guide in purgatory? In the Inferno , as every schoolboy knows, the poet was guided by the spirit of Virgil; in the Paradiso by that of Beatrice. But in the Purgatorio?

I had to find my copy of the Divine Comedy to answer this, and that cost me another three-quarters of an hour of frenzied searching through the ruins of my library-for this time it had not been conveniently left on the table for me. When I finally located it, however, I felt that my time bad been well spent, for I discovered that Dante had been guided through purgatory by the most celebrated of the Italian troubadours-Sordello!

I could hardly be in any doubt what Browning intended me to do next: the reference was plainly to his long poem dedicated to this personage, which had been in my hands earlier. But my subsequent searches had created so much fresh disorder that it took me almost an hour to find it again; and when I had I realised that I had not the slightest idea what to do with it.

I picked the volume up by the spine and shook it-and out fell another piece of paper with some lines of writing on it. I gathered it up, and read:

Speaking of your servant, are you still missing some of your personal possessions? I trust not. It might prove embarrassing if the police had to be informed. But no doubt you can locate them first. How about this, for example?

Select your prey,

Waiting (the………-…….in the way

Strewing this very bench)

At the scene of the last murder. You have until dusk tomorrow.

I read this through, at first, with a sense that Browning must have taken leave of his senses. The comment about my servant, in particular, seemed utterly nonsensical, for while Piero may be a vain unprepossessing little squirt, he has never presumed to try and steal so much as one of my fallen hairs. So what was Browning getting at?

‘It might prove embarrassing if the police had to be informed. But no doubt you can locate them first.’

Then a very nasty suspicion peered over the rim of my mind, like the forelegs of a big blotchy spider crouched beneath the floorboards. A moment later it crawled boldly out and showed itself. Browning had stolen some of my personal effects and hidden them at the scene of the murders in an attempt to incriminate me!

I leapt up, already making for the door. Then I stopped in my tracks. What had he taken? Without knowing that I could not be sure I had recovered everything before the police were informed that evening-as the note clearly threatened.

Now I realised why my premises had been ransacked. It was precisely to prevent me taking a rapid inventory of my possessions and noting what was missing. Browning wished to force me to work it out the hard way: by solving the riddle written in the letter. Three lines of poetry, with a word left blank. Clearly the only solution was to identify the poem from which it had been taken, and read through it to find the missing word. But what was the poem?

With a shudder of horror I realised that it must be Browning’s own Sordello!

Now I saw the whole game to which Browning was challenging me. To save myself from imminent arrest on the false evidence he had planted, I had to try and track down and recover each of the items in turn. To know what to look for I had to find the words missing from the quotation supplied. And to do that I had to read Sordello .

Do you realise what this meant? Sordello is the poem which all but destroyed Robert Browning’s promising reputation overnight, and established him in the one he presently enjoys-of being the most tedious, pretentious and obscure poetaster in existence. If it had merely sunk into oblivion the case would not be so bad, but although barely one hundred and fifty copies have been sold, the poem is notorious and the stories concerning it are legion. One man thought his mind had gone because he could not understand two consecutive lines. Mr Carlyle-one of Browning’s supporters, mind! — did not even trouble to read the piece, his wife having read it through without having any idea whether Sordello was a man, a city or a book. The present Poet Laureate, so his brother informed me when I mentioned the piece, claimed to have understood only the first and last lines, both of which, he said, were lies: ‘Who will may hear Sordello’s story told’ and ‘Who would has heard Sordello’s story told’.

In short, the thing is a bete noire , a monstrous abortion of some six thousand lines, each both incomprehensible in itself and lacking any evident relationship to those immediately preceding and following it. And it was this which Browning was forcing me to read, literally to save my life-knowing full well that no lesser incentive would be sufficient. This was revenge, indeed!

But for all his cleverness, I might well have called his bluff, and gone to bed-had it not been for Beatrice. For myself I would have risked it, but I could not rest easy until I knew she was safe. To do that I had to find Browning, and I had no hopes of finding him at home. No, he would be hiding at the centre of this maze he had constructed for me, and to locate him I should have to find my way through it-of that I was convinced. And so I set to work.

Five o’clock rang as I leafed through the hateful volume, wondering where to start-hoping the pages might have been marked, or that my eye would magically light on the right passage. No such luck!

One thing, however, did soon occur to me. Sordello is divided into six Books, and six was the number of murders which had recently taken place in Florence. The note instructed me to start at the scene of the last murder, so might the quotation before me not prove to be from the last of the six Books?