Мэтью Перл - The Dante Chamber

“Miss Lillian Brenner, the prima donna of one of the opera companies, Inspector,” someone answered — Dolly didn’t bother turning around to see who was telling him.

“Lillian Brenner,” Dolly repeated to himself. He cursed himself for knowing little about opera.

He ordered lanterns and candles be placed around the body for his examination. Blood continued to stream from where she had been impaled on the railings. Her face gave the appearance of being thoughtful. Her mouth hung open, her teeth white and regular. Just as Dolly predicted, her eyelids were sewn closed with wire. That had caused her blind stumbling into the street.

“Iron wire, looks like,” Dolly said, wiping his brow from the hot lamps. “‘The sin of envy is scourged within this terrace,’” he said under his breath, continuing: “‘No man walks the earth that he would not be pierced with compassion for what I saw.’”

“Inspector?” Branagan replied.

“We’ve reached the next terrace, Branagan.”

There was no blood around the iron wires — someone had taken care to clean it off, so as not to detract from the effect. Dolly gently pushed up one of the sewn eyelids with the tip of his finger. Tears, which had been caught inside, rolled down her cheek.

Oliver Wendell Holmes steadied himself as he boarded the Paris-bound steamship at the Liverpool harbor. In what had become a kind of catechism the last few days, his daughter asked yet again if he felt himself coming down with something. Holmes swore he was healthy — as a lion. But once on deck, he immediately dropped himself into a chair and requested his medical valise. He extracted the breathing trumpet he used when he felt the signs of his asthma.

Everybody remained on deck as long as possible before they’d have to go below, even in this gusty, murky weather, which at least was a little warmer than previous weeks. Glancing around through the fog at the passengers, all wrapped up in blankets and rugs on the chairs, the deck looked as if it had a row of mummies on exhibition. Holmes didn’t often experience the asthma that plagued his youth, but as Dolly Williamson’s words circled his brain, he felt his chest constrict. He inhaled air through the long, hollow neck of the trumpet device.

Just by looking at you, I can see well enough that you couldn’t help hunt a murderer.

The unwelcome feelings seemed — he convinced himself — attributable simply to preparing for a voyage on the ocean. He could never help but picture the ocean floor white with the bones of humans swallowed up by the waves over the ages. An old sea captain once told him the only way to get rid of those thoughts was to keep oneself under opiates until reaching the destined port — then again, opiates were the solution to every problem of mankind these days, as if the lotus-eaters of Tennyson’s poem were in charge. Holmes did not mind the sounds of the rushing winds that would soon greet them at sea, nor the sight of the billows, nor even the impression of unending depths brought by looking over the side. But the sight of the boats hanging along the sides of the deck, which most people found reassuring, suggested doom to him.

He thought of the legendary figure of Ulysses telling Dante in a low circle of Hell how he piloted his ship toward the sight of Mount Purgatory, trying to skip right to salvation, when the waves began to overtake him.

There he was again! Dante, back in his thoughts!

Along with the usual baggage and mail being shuttled on and off the ship before departure, Holmes noticed something less typical, which disrupted the Dantean images in his mind. Constables. They strolled through with a highly artificial and unconvincing casualness. Holmes walked to the rails and looked across to another docked ship: more constables. Looking out from the port side, there was a ship that had just arrived that had not attracted the presence of the blue-coated officers. They don’t care who’s coming in, no, they’re looking for someone who might be trying to leave , Holmes thought to himself.

He returned to his chair to close his eyes, but when he did he saw the scenes of Inferno -inspired death he tried so hard for the last four years to forget. These memories mixed with a vision of Christina Rossetti he’d been seeing ever since Dolly Williamson implied she was searching for her brother Dante Gabriel (and probably for Holmes, as he now suspected she had been a party to the telegram from Browning): the lovely and soft-spoken Miss Rossetti in fear for her brother, with the dashing Browning assisting her. All this swirled with the fragments of sentences he could hear from two constables conversing with each other as they walked by: impaled... bloody... eyes wired shut .

Holmes envisioned Dante Alighieri, pressing closer to the shades who suffered together on the second terrace up Mount Purgatory. “No man walks the earth,” Dante cautions his readers, “that he would not be pierced with compassion for what I saw.” The Envious lean on each other for support and guidance. Dante examines their eyes, sewn shut, and compares it to the hawks who undergo the same treatment to be trained not to fly away from their masters.

Was Holmes really hearing the constables correctly? Or was his treacherous brain tricking him, inserting Dante where he didn’t belong? His eyes widened like a man trying to wake from a bad dream.

After Amelia settled the arrangements for the passage, she took the sea chair adjacent to Holmes. “Father, I refuse to even ask you again if something is wrong, because I know something is dreadfully wrong, even if you won’t admit it to me. It has to do with that detective from Scotland Yard you met on the train, doesn’t it? Terrible Inspector What’s-his-name?”

He smiled wanly. Like him, she was short and youthful enough to be dismissed by many, and so persistent as to make the doubter sorry. How do I explain a thing I cannot really explain? How can I explain that it is beginning again, or never stopped?

She folded his right hand in both of hers, warming it between her leather gloves. “Heavens, you’re trembling. I suspect, too, that this business has to do with the telegram from Mr. Browning while we were at Cambridge.”

Holmes wore the face of a man about to object to an injustice.

“Come, Father,” Amelia said with a sharply creased brow before he could speak. “I did not spy on you, if that’s what you’re going to carp about. I was taking a walk early that morning at the university, and the messenger gave me a telegram from London for you. I left it at your door.”

Holmes protested that he couldn’t breathe well in the cold air and needed to go below. She pointed out that Holmes always said he couldn’t breathe belowdecks, either. He insisted.

“You never said anything at the university,” Holmes began once they were inside the ship’s small library, inhaling and exhaling in a deliberate rhythm. “About having read the telegram.”

“I suppose I hoped you would tell me yourself when you were ready. When you didn’t, I began to consider that whatever that telegram from Mr. Browning meant must have been upsetting. It meant little enough to me. It appeared to me to be Italian. What did it say?”

“It was a quote from Dante,” Holmes said quietly, switching from one foot to the other as he scanned the ship’s paltry selection of books on the shelves. “Dante has just entered the shores of the mountain of Purgatory, and asks his guide — the shade of Virgil who has escorted him all the way through the dangers of Hell — which path to choose in order to climb higher. The telegram translated as: ‘My master, what way shall we take?’ It’s Dante’s question to Virgil, showing his humility and his reliance on a guide. He has not yet fully become his own man, you see — though before he reaches the mountaintop, he must.”