Michael Dibdin: A Rich Full Death

‘Very touching, Mr Booth. I wish I could believe you. But it would make no difference. Since you once feigned an interest in my work, you will perhaps permit me to quote from one of my plays: “It is because I avow myself a very worm, sinful beyond measure, that I reject what you ask. Shall I proceed a-pardoning

— I who have no symptom of reason to assume that aught less than my strenuousest efforts will keep myself out of mortal sin, much less keep others out? No-I do trespass, but I will not double that by allowing you to trespass.” ‘

‘God rot you and your work, you hypocritical scab! I hope your wife dies in agony this very night!’ Well, that got home! Indeed, I had almost overplayed my hand-for a moment I was afraid he would shoot me in cold blood. But in the end he contented himself with spitting saliva rather than lead, turned on his heel and walked off without another word.

The sound of his footsteps receded, ever more faintly, through the garden. A distant gate opened, closed, and was locked.

I hurried down the steps of the belvedere as fast as my shaking limbs would carry me. The garden was quite silent and almost completely dark. I scurried along the path like a dead man issued from his grave.

A reciprocal demonstration of incompetence, was it? Not quite reciprocal, I thought. I had achieved my first aim, at least-to get Browning so worked up that he did not think to try the key I had given him in the lock of the garden gate. If he had, he would have found that it did not fit, for the simple reason that the one that did was still in my pocket.

I opened the gate cautiously and stepped out into the lane, a free man. Scrambling over the low wall opposite, I dropped into the field which adjoins the lane and started down the steep slope as fast as I could. Browning’s natural route home was by the same road as I had taken that afternoon, which curves around the hillsides to the church of San Francesco di Paola lying somewhere in the darkness below me. By cutting across the field I could reach the church before him and be lurking there in its shadow when he passed, my Bowie-knife at the ready. Then we would see who was incompetent.

One thing was clear-Browning had told no one of his suspicions, which were in any case no more than that. So when the poet’s body was found in a lonely lane outside the city walls-minus watch, pocket-book, cufflinks and wedding ring-the crime would be ascribed to some footpad. ‘Poor Mr Browning!’ people would say. ‘He would go for those long walks alone at night. We always did think it rather imprudent.’

Only Talenti knew enough to have suspected something, and thanks to Browning and his influential friends Talenti had been exiled to the malarial swamps of the Maremma! It all seemed deliciously ironical.

But first I had to reach the church before my enemy, who was a notoriously fast walker. The hillside was very steep, and cultivated in the traditional Tuscan manner, with rows of vines strung between olive trees running across the slope. I was therefore forced to follow one row of vines right across the field to the far edge, and then run straight downhill as fast as I dared. The moon had not yet risen, and it was a wild and perilous course I ran, falling half a dozen times, but always leaping to my feet again, eager to continue.

I had completed well over half the distance when I tripped on an olive branch, went flying forward, and fell heavily on my left ankle, which turned over. Even then I did not give up, but hobbled on somehow, supporting myself on the branch which had tripped me. But to no avail. Twice, three times I passed out from the intense pain-and when I came to the last time I heard eight o’clock chiming from the church I had hoped to reach. I had been unconscious for several hours, and Browning had long reached the safety of his home. All my hopes were dead, and I seemed destined to join them very shortly.

I shall not attempt to describe that night. Dante’s poem is a work of genius, but no one can read it now as he meant it to be read-as a Baedecker to hell. How luxuriously his damned souls seem to us to suffer, mangled by ingenious cosmic machinery, designed expressly to inflict the specific punishment prescribed for their sin, no expense spared! One might write a very different account of our hell-but no one would wish to read it, any more than you would wish to read about the night I spent shivering uncontrollably in that naked ditch beneath the bright, distant, indifferent stars.

As I lay there I thought over Browning’s final question to me: why? And I bitterly regretted not having told him to his face that the fault was all his . For Isabel’s death is the only crime I take upon myself, and that was a crime passionnel if ever there was such a thing!

Ah Prescott, what a joyful turbulence possessed my soul when I saw her again that summer day at Bagni di Lucca! How my heart cried out in mingled agony and joy, like a healed lung which starts to breathe again after years of clogged suffocation! I waxed sentimental; she was kind. I became bolder; she smiled. I made love to her; she encouraged me. What bliss!

It could not last, of course. Her idle spoilt passions changed as quickly as they came, and before long I was made aware that a rival had supplanted me in her affections. I had no idea that it was DeVere-she might be still living if I had, for contempt would surely have quenched every other emotion. But I thought she had thrown me over for some great figure from our Florentine Pantheon; for someone like Browning, in fact!

I had drunk heavily that Sunday at Jarves’s, and when I reached the villa at dusk I was in an ugly temper. Isabel was waiting for me in the large salon, softly lit by lamplight. She was in a dumpish mood; she said she wanted to return to America-she was sick of Florence, sick of Italy, sick of Europe. What? I cried-and leave me?

All my smouldering resentment burst into flame. I flung accusations at her wildly, not caring what I said so long as it hurt. I called her faithless, vile, impure; she responded in like manner, laughing in my face and calling me a bumptious empty failure, a creeping conceited nothing unworthy to lick her husband’s boots. In the end I could not endure her frightful voice a moment longer, and so I put my hands around that squawking throat, and silenced it.

Forgive me for not telling you all this before now, my friend, but it would not have done, would it? I have at least told you nothing untrue -and I am sure I have hidden the truth away somewhere, despite myself, in a description of a street-scene or something of the sort.

So Isabel was dead. Very well-but I did not intend to swing for her, after those things she had said. No, instead she should swing for me! It took very little time to think it out. I fetched rope and water from the well, carried the table over, and strung her up. No one had seen me come, and no one saw me go-and if Browning had not stuck his interfering snout in where it had no earthly business to be, the whole unseemly matter would have been passed over in a decent silence, and all the innocent people who have died since would be alive and well today. That being so I think I can justly say that it is on his shoulders, not on mine, that the responsibility for their deaths ultimately rests. I fail to see how any impartial person can possibly deny that .

When I found that my charade had been exposed, I at first hoped to avoid any further unpleasantness by leaving that knife engraved with Eakin’s name in the garden on my way to Siena.

With his alibi that scheme went for nothing, but when DeVere asked me what I had been doing in the garden that morning, I realised that he would do very well as my scapegoat. I went to see him that evening, and applied a heavy seventeenth-century silver candlestick-over whose acquisition he had invited me to exult with him-to the base of his skull. When I discovered later that it was he who had been Isabel’s latest attachment justice seemed doubly served.