Мэтью Перл - The Dante Chamber

After the death of Lizzie Siddal, Browning made himself available to Gabriel. It was not only to repay Gabriel for being there when he returned to London after his own Elizabeth died. He knew what Gabriel was experiencing and, selfishly, having a companion whose wife was torn away would mean Browning was not quite so alone.

But Tudor House had been the oddest of odd places for two widowers’ grieving. It once came out in conversation, somehow or another, that Browning had never seen a raccoon. Gabriel couldn’t have been more excited. He rushed Browning to a large packing case with a slab of marble on top of it. He induced Browning to help him move the slab. Gabriel then dipped his hand inside, pulling out his latest creature by the scruff and holding it up as it bared its teeth and tried to claw at anything close enough.

“Does it not look like a devil?” Gabriel asked with an openmouthed smile.

Gabriel had worshipped Lizzie, as Browning had Ba. At times, Browning felt alienated by Gabriel’s version of grief. Séances, for example. Browning would call on Tudor House and there would be yet another medium discovered by Gabriel or one of his bons vivants who swore Lizzie’s spirit was impatient for contact.

All the frustrations Browning had felt from Ba’s interest in spiritualism returned with Gabriel’s enthusiasm. The medium, while searching the afterlife for Lizzie, announced contact with Gabriel’s uncle John who, through knocking on the table, indicated he hadn’t committed suicide, as was believed, but had been murdered after the publication of The Vampyre . When Gabriel promised to reach out to Ba’s spirit, Browning excused himself. If it had been anyone but Gabriel, he would have shouted and screamed about the cruelty of charlatans. But he could never bring himself to try to take away Gabriel’s faith that, one way or another, Lizzie might return.

Each had to pay tribute in his own way. For Browning, it had been The Ring and the Book . He first found the story at a bookstall in Florence in an old yellow scrapbook of personal accounts and newspaper clippings of a seventeenth-century murder of a young woman and her family. Browning was enthralled and repulsed. Ba was certain: You must turn it into poetry, my love. Tell her story. It was the last idea for a book he ever discussed with her. Browning tried to rid himself of it. He wrote to Tennyson to beg him to write it. ( This is not mine , Tennyson wrote back in a moment of gentle sensitivity, before adding, and it is doubtful it can ever be popular .) Browning knew that however bloodcurdling the story, it was his great venture.

He had come to basically live upon milk and fruit, usually did a good morning’s work, went to bed early, and got up earlyish. But as Browning continued to wait for Christina, he realized they had all slipped in the wrong direction. Not away from the past sorrows, but heading inexorably toward more, more sorrow, more death.

When there was a pull at the doorbell, instead of finding Christina, Browning opened it on a man in a cabdriver’s hat arranging a pile of trunks.

“What is this about? Whose are these?” Browning demanded, before he looked past the driver.

At the curb was a carriage; Oliver Wendell Holmes stepped down and sprinted toward the house, out of breath as though he had run the whole way from Liverpool.

Shrews! No I won’t!”

Even Saint Mary’s, so cloistered behind its high walls, seemed to fall under the spell of disorder that had spread across London. While Christina was instructing a group of girls whom she’d classified as illiterate or nearly illiterate, there was a commotion from the hall. Two nuns were trying to calm one of the newer girls, who was shouting.

“I won’t! No, I won’t just quiet myself down !”

The two guest preachers that day, Reverends Anderson and Fallow, offered assistance. Anderson tried to perform a blessing on the girl. “Sibbie, please take these,” Fallow said, giving his handwritten sermon to a quiet, dark-haired woman who had come along to assist him.

“Steady there, my young friend,” Reverend Fallow was saying, in a skillfully reassuring tone. “What is her name, Sister?”

“Ruthie,” answered a nun.

“Steady there, Ruth,” Fallow purred.

The unruly girl continued. “No, nothing steady about it, preacher! No friends here, you’re our jailers!”

Ethel had also been trying to intervene and sprang to Christina’s side.

“What happened to Ruthie, Ethel?” asked Christina.

Some residents were suspicious or hostile to the greener girls who were in the position they had been as little as a few months before, but not Ethel. She was always a sympathetic advocate.

“In prayer circle, she wished to talk about how she came to be here, about a man who punched her for sport, and her baby who was ripped out of her arms.”

Christina nodded with compassion. Ruthie flouted Saint Mary’s strict rule that the residents not speak of their pasts, and certainly not taint the purity of the nuns’ ears.

“She’ll be sent to the workhouse, won’t she, Sister Christina?” asked Ethel, her eyes filling with tears. “Or turned over to be inspected by the government physicians. I know it. Oh, how awful it is, poor lass will run right back to the streets for sure, and be as likely to end up with a slit throat as anything else.”

“I’m certain it will be all right,” Christina said, not certain at all as she watched with sadness the nuns and Saint Mary’s wardens escorting the offender out of sight.

Christina always walked with a martial gait, but when she exited Saint Mary’s, she moved at a clip even more decisive than usual. Since the evening she and Browning had visited Arthur Hughes’s studio, she continued searching for details about what Gabriel could have been doing on the Wapping side of the Thames when Mr. Morton was discovered. She had begun to have flashes of unwelcome memories — memories of stories she had been told long ago by her mother and aunts about searching for their brother — Christina’s uncle.

A kind of British version of Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Polidori was a physician also known for his writing. Polidori, spurred by a challenge posed in the presence of Mary and Percival Shelley and Lord Byron, had written a tale about a monster inspired by foreign folktales largely unknown to the English-speaking world. The Vampyre ended up being published without Polidori’s knowledge, and readers became obsessed with the book’s subject and with guessing its author. Many thought the author was Polidori’s friend Lord Byron. Some said this odd circumstance of Polidori’s art taking on its own separate life drove him mad. He disappeared, sending his family into a scramble until his body was finally discovered. Uncle John poisoned himself with cyanide.

I knew , her mother had reluctantly told her, as soon as my brother disappeared, I knew I would never meet him again in this world .

Christina’s thoughts had turned to her uncle as she headed to wait for the omnibus, until she was hailed — and for a moment her heart skipped. The voice was Gabriel’s.

Until it wasn’t. “There you are. Finally. That silly charity home of yours is the one place where I knew I could find you,” William Rossetti said.

“You found me, William,” she said flatly.

“Have you discovered anything new?”

She wanted to boast of progress, but her demeanor crumbled. She knew he would pounce.

“Christina, you are risking your health with this useless exercise. I do not want that and Gabriel — wherever he is right now — would never want that.”

“If you are no longer assisting the cause, I thank you not to interfere with it and certainly not to tell me what Gabriel would want, as if he is not as much my brother as yours.”