Мэтью Перл - The Dante Chamber

Ever since the day he watched Elizabeth die in Florence, when her ravaging illnesses had made her look more like a young girl than his fifty-five-year-old wife, Browning could not brood on death — peaceful or painful, premature or expected, by illness or hanging, it didn’t matter — without his soul aching. It’s true that there were exceptions, as Tennyson made sure to remind him. You don’t always stay away from darkness, now do you, Browning? Eventually, Browning chose to write a long poem about crime and death — The Ring and the Book — but that came out of much hand-wringing and singular circumstances. He certainly had no desire to read about death or violence to pass the time over breakfast. He wanted to explain all this to Christina. Instead, he offered a version of the excuse he made on the same topic at the Cosmopolitan Club when Tennyson was devouring his newspaper. “I do my best to stay away from morbid excitement of the masses, Miss Rossetti. What does this have to do with Gabriel?”

“If I am right? Enough to place my brother in far graver danger than I believed. That is my fear, unless we can disprove it. Follow me, Mr. Browning. I avoid newspapers, too, but this story was impossible to escape. My aunts talked of nothing else. The backbreaking stone, as I say, was latched around Mr. Morton, and there were rumors a phrase had been etched into the horrid device. But until now the inscription was merely that — rumor — and the supposed Latin phrase not known to the public. Now the inscription on the stone has been exposed by this newspaperman, to the chagrin of police, as we witnessed in Inspector Williamson.”

Ecce ancilla Dei.

Behold, the handmaiden of the Lord. The call of the newsboy and the words Mary speaks about herself after she is informed she will carry the son of God, announcing her compliance. Dante Alighieri, as he enters into the first terrace of the mountain of Purgatory, hears Mary’s words emanating from a stone carving as an example of humility to instruct the prideful souls consigned there.

Each terrace of Purgatory introduces a different sin that traveling souls must exorcise in order to progress upward, and in passing through that region devoted to excessive pride, the repentant souls carry crushingly heavy rocks on their backs — sometimes for hundreds of years. The murderer of Mr. Morton intended for the world to discover Dante in his scene of death. Not only did the mechanism of Morton’s death mimic Dante’s description, but the stone carried the very words of Mary heard by Dante.

“Why? Why Morton? Why the Prideful?” Browning asked. Questions felt much safer to him than any attempts at answers.

“From the newspaper eulogies of the man that I’ve seen, there are numerous ways Morton’s life exemplifies excess pride. He strongly pushed to expand the number of foreign lands over which to impose British rule. He helped pass measures to punish the Irish people at large for the violence of the few who call themselves Fenians. He refused to allow another seat to be added to the House of Commons, alongside his own, to represent Bristol — according to his adversaries, a way of maintaining complete power over constituents. He even supported the horrid Contagious Disease Acts.”

“His primary sin is being in Parliament, then. When does the paper say Morton was last seen, before he was found dead?”

“Approximately two weeks before Gabriel went missing from our sight.” She gave a single, firm nod to emphasize the implications. “Mr. Browning, this all suggests the same thing — there is some kind of Dante-obsessed maniac in London. He must have overpowered and kidnapped Morton, then waited weeks before carrying out this grotesque killing. I believe he might have taken my brother also, and if the police do not want to listen to us that Gabriel could be in jeopardy, so be it. But if I’m correct, we may have days to act before this villain decides to do evil to him, too.”

Browning found it remarkable that she remained composed while speculating about violence against her brother. He ducked all thoughts that anything so awful could happen to a friend, and now summoned his courage even to consider it. “Gabriel wanders.”

“Mr. Browning?”

He had barely whispered the words. “He wanders the streets in the middle of the night when he cannot sleep, right?” Almost against his will, Browning gave voice to the fearful images taking life in his mind. “Reciting poetry, or with an open book in his hand...”

“A book of Dante Alighieri’s verses, often enough,” she said, finishing his thought. “He is renowned for painting scenes inspired by Dante and Beatrice on canvas and murals.” Christina held up Gabriel’s drawing she had come across in their first searches of the house, showing a scene from the punishment of the Gluttons in Dante’s Purgatory, with the scrawled note.

Browning read: “‘CR — need your help.’”

“Maybe he wasn’t reminding himself to ask my opinion. Maybe he was beginning to sense that his work on Dante had brought him into an atmosphere of danger. Maybe it wasn’t just the mental effects of chloral and morphia; this time he really was being followed. The drift of all this is that if there were some lunatic with a vendetta against Dante, or acting upon some kind of perverted monomania, my brother would be a tantalizing prize. He is even named for Dante.”

Browning studied the sketch — it showed vividly the suffering of a shade in a state of starvation. Many of their literary circle studied the Florentine bard — including Browning himself, who had taken an episode from Dante’s Purgatory and turned it into a long (too long, according to Browning’s critics) poem called Sordello , named for one of the shades who helped show Dante and Virgil the way up the mountain. When Ba died, it was a quote from Dante that Browning copied out to memorialize her, in which the Florentine expressed his faith that one day he would be reunited with Beatrice.

Thus I believe, thus I affirm, thus I am certain it is, that from this life I shall pass to another better, there, where that lady lives of whom my soul was enamored .

Dante meant Beatrice; with the same words Browning meant Elizabeth. At the time, he could not help but think of Percival Shelley, who had read Purgatory aloud to Mary Godwin (later, Mary Shelley) after their baby died. Some thought Shelley’s choice of Purgatory was meant to distract her with its sublime lyrics, while others assumed it was meant to console in a more direct way, to show that in death all are reunited.

Ba’s father had cut her off from the family starting the day of their marriage. When her father was told she died, it got back to Browning that Mr. Barrett unemotionally replied, “I never had much objection to that dandy poet, but my daughter should have been thinking of another world.” Browning buried Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Dante Alighieri’s city in a summer heat like a razor wrapped up in the flannel of sunshine. In many ways, Florence had provided a glorious setting for the Brownings’ fifteen years of marriage. He and Ba were out of reach of the control of her father. Mr. Barrett had turned her life in London into a prison, and just getting through the obstacles to reach their secret wedding before her father could enact his plan to take her away, Ba looked like death, but transcendently beautiful. How necessity makes heroes , she mused when they’d recount the elopement, or heroines .

Once they were abroad they could raise their son, also a Robert (Pen, for short), in the congenial Italian climate and culture. Browning had brought their boy with him on marvelous excursions, including to visit the ancient castle near Sarzana that had belonged to the Marquis Malaspina, one of the sanctuaries where Dante stayed after being exiled by political enemies from Florence. The place was in a state of decay when the Rossettis came to see it, but Dante’s cramped little chamber had been preserved and, with proper credentials, could be entered.