Мэтью Перл - The Dante Chamber

“You surprise me so,” Cayley said to her.

“Finding me out for a nighttime walk is rather a surprise to myself.”

Cayley gave a snort followed by his unwieldy laugh. They had turned back toward the massive structure of the opera house. He finally explained: “I don’t mean that. Thank heavens I found you here, or I should have dug a hole in the banquet hall and hidden inside. I refer to the Divine Comedy .”

“Oh?” Christina said, concerned about what he could mean.

“How I’ve enjoyed stopping by Tudor House the last couple of weeks when receiving your requests to help interpret arduous passages. I’ve always found Purgatory invigorating! Full of secrets. Just when you think it shall mimic Inferno , when you believe it will turn down the one corridor you’ve been searching for, Dante opens two more you never expected. Still, it always seemed to me your father’s obsession passed to Gabriel more than to you.”

“I suppose there is a time when we all must enter our fathers’ tombs so to speak, and find what was left behind.”

“And your own writing, your poems? I always anxiously await the latest, and have felt it has been too long a wait.”

Christina paused to relish the comment, then cursed herself for it. Her main feeling related to her writing rushed upon her: embarrassment. “Jean Ingelow has a fine new volume, I understand.”

“That’s so?” he responded with confusion. “Your company, of course, exceeds even the pleasure of your verse. Miss Rossetti, there is something more I wanted to ask about your father’s work on Dante. I believe I have found new information pertinent to your father’s theories on Beatrice and his conviction that she was not a real woman. I wonder if you would allow me to search through and organize the professore’s materials held in Tudor House as I continue my research?”

“I suppose that would be fine.”

“Truly? Well, I am as pleased as a cat eating a mouse. May I tell you my strategy for my investigation into Beatrice?”

“Mr. Cayley, could you excuse me for a moment?”

“If I’ve spoken out of turn...”

In a way she could do even to a stranger, Christina silenced Cayley simply by raising a hand. Her eyes were fixed ahead of them, at one of the entrances to the opera house, where a slouched figure waited. Waited, she somehow knew, for her.

Christina walked toward this figure, and at the same moment Browning and Holmes emerged from inside the building.

“Miss Rossetti, it’s urgent!” Browning called out. Whatever he was about to say was lost as he and then Holmes saw the same distinctive silhouette that transfixed Christina.

Moving toward her, drops of water traveling down the uneven brim of his hat onto the same tattered, food-stained frock coat he’d worn for thirty years, Alfred Tennyson nodded a greeting.

“Miss Rossetti,” growled out the poet laureate, his neck craning toward Browning and Holmes before his stern gaze returned to Christina. “I’ve come about Dante.”

That same morning, Alfred Tennyson had taken his breakfast in bed. He usually smoked and breakfasted in the bedroom before climbing to his sanctum on the top floor of the house to contemplate his poetry in progress and smoke another pipe. When he first came to the remote country estate of Farringford — isolated within its vast grounds and, if that weren’t enough, located on an island — two of their servants burst into tears. They said they would not live somewhere so removed. Tennyson just smiled. People often said the man never smiled, but this was not so — his smile was hidden under uncombed whiskers that concealed a mouth made jagged by dental procedures, like many other things about the poet that were secreted away.

On his regular walk through the rolling meadows of his estate, Tennyson brought along his dogs and a thick stack of letters handed to him by his butler. Among the day’s letters was a message from his publisher expressing increasing irritation at not reaching Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Reading this slowed down Tennyson’s brisk shuffle. He thought back to Robert Browning at the Cosmopolitan Club inquiring whether he’d seen Gabriel Rossetti lately. I stick to my friends , Browning had bragged of his persistence on the topic about which he seemed haunted.

Browning made a spectacle of himself, but that wasn’t new. Tennyson’s thoughts reeled back in time to his elder son Hallam’s christening, eighteen years earlier, where Browning proceeded to show Tennyson how to hold the baby — to tell a father how to hold his own child! Then Browning tossed Hallam into the air. Even Thackeray, who never paid much attention to anyone, seemed to look askew at Browning’s antics that morning. Browning’s happiness for the Tennyson family’s new addition was quite genuine, though; whatever complaints you could have about him and his discursive poetry, Browning was genuine down to his boots.

While Browning pestered him at the Cosmopolitan Club about Gabriel Rossetti, Tennyson had been distracted by the crime columns he was reading in the newspaper — the gruesome discovery of the body of Mr. Morton. Even the vague details of those early reports struck Tennyson as Dantesque (confirmed in a very literal way by the later revelations). Browning had not seemed the least interested in the crime, so Tennyson dropped the topic. But Tennyson’s brain quickly began to associate the two seemingly disparate things — news of the murder, and the mystery of their Dante-obsessed, Dante-named mutual friend, Gabriel.

Browning would probably die in white tie, but Tennyson attended the clubs and the dinners around London only grudgingly. Though England’s poet laureate owned a small residence in London, the city usually only dulled and interrupted him. He required quiet, and to keep himself to himself, more than any writer he’d known. He was a shy beast who loved his burrow.

More to the point, he carried the strain of black blood that had always been in his family, and it worsened when trampled by the outside world. That feeling. The feeling that every stranger harbored ill will and machinations. The same feeling that — along with drinking — fueled Tennyson’s father, the village rector, sending him stomping through the house, hurling insults and objects at young Tennyson and his ten siblings.

Still, at times Tennyson had little choice given his laureate duties but to show himself in public, such as the memorial gathering he had attended in London for that fallen member of Parliament, Jasper Morton. Before that had already been the proper funeral in Bristol, with this second ceremony for the purposes of London folks showing off their grief and their importance in public. Tennyson hated writing epitaphs, but they’d bother him out of his wits if he refused. Doing it was the best way to peace. His first and last draft read:

The distraught widow Morton at first seemed honored by Tennyson’s presence. But as he took her hand she held it too long and trembled, staring at him in fright.

“What is it, Mrs. Morton?” Tennyson asked, a little too brusquely for speaking to a freshly christened widow, he was sure Emily, his own wife, would later chastise him.

“Your hair, sir!” she said with a gasp, and nothing else for a moment or two. His hair was one of his finest features, along with his almost Spanish complexion and iron cheekbones, and among the reasons Hartley Coleridge once told him he was far too handsome to be a poet — so he was rather offended at the widow’s agitated allusion to it. There was not a single gray or silver strand in it even at sixty. Eventually, the widow found her voice to apologize. She explained that Tennyson’s hair — the long, disheveled strands of raven black — reminded her of something that recently had frightened her. Before her husband died, she had found a wig of dark black hair, which felt as though it were made of silk, in one of his trunks. She had never seen it before. She recounted to Tennyson that she asked Mr. Morton why he seemed to be sneaking around at night, and he’d said he was an “easy target.” “You see, my husband had been scared, scared enough to disguise himself with wild hair like yours — he was trying to avoid detection by someone! Money went missing, too. He had been acting peculiar; at first I had thought it was only due to some strange tidings about his family that he had discovered.”