Мэтью Перл - The Dante Chamber

The Fenian studied the little white ball for a moment, then hurled it high into the air, over the wall of the prison.

Dolly spun around toward the man. A sly smirk had formed on the man’s face.

The detective’s jaw fell open. “That’s a signal,” Dolly said, then, louder: “They weren’t trying to climb over — get back!”

His cry was cut short by a horrendous boom. The prison wall shattered as the fireball of explosions erupted. Where Dolly, the constables, and the Fenians had been standing a moment before, there was nothing but rubble painted in dark blood.

Back at Scotland Yard’s police offices, Constable Thomas Branagan filled out the documents required to complete the prisoner’s release. When he was finished, Branagan escorted Gabriel to where his sister was waiting for him in the anteroom. Gabriel was polite to everyone at the offices. He told the constable that he needed to speak to his sister alone. Branagan imagined the artist thanking his sister for all her efforts, though this did not prove to be an accurate guess.

Whatever Gabriel might have said to Christina at that moment, in fact, became moot. As he walked over to her little encampment of books and food, he found her fast asleep on a thick blanket that Browning had brought her. She had subsisted without more than two hours’ worth of sleep a day for more than a week.

The painter-poet bent his large body down very gingerly over the much slighter figure of his sister, and gave her a soft kiss on her forehead. “Remember me,” he whispered. He then turned with vigor and purpose and exited through the door to the street.

Christina stirred herself awake, placing an automatic hand on her forehead where Gabriel had kissed her. In her dreams, her father tossed aside his Dante books, listened to her read her poetry, and gave her a loving kiss on her cheek. She looked around, seeing no one but experiencing a frantic sense that something had happened. Gabriel , she thought. She lifted up her weakened body as quickly as she could and stumbled around, looking for any sign of him before rushing outside. There he was: Gabriel. He seemed a phantasm among the ordinary men and women of the city. He stood in the middle of the street under the dark sky.

As they faced each other a stone’s throw away, they appeared to be opposites: the slender woman with a severe expression on her thin, strong lips; the wide, muscular bulldoggish man with the sloping gait. As they eyed each other, resemblance grew. The shiny dark brown hair, the projecting nose, and, most of all, the changeable, hypnotic eyes.

She ran over to him. “Come with me,” she tried to say, but at the same time he cried to her, “Come with me.” His command was not the practical, protective kind that she issued. Gabriel’s was a prophetic exhortation — the kind recounted in the Bible that would change the lives of a whole people or nation.

She hardly noticed a carriage that was brought to a stop behind them. Gabriel’s paw-like hands led her to the vehicle, and within moments they were seated inside.

Hours before Christina climbed into a carriage with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and before the explosion at Clerkenwell Prison, Browning, reluctant to leave Christina alone at this point, was delivering supplies to Holmes at Tudor House — fresh towels and scented waters to stimulate Sibbie’s senses.

Holmes smiled and remained cheerful in Sibbie’s presence, feeling that a sentence of death on a doctor’s face was as bad as a warrant for execution signed by the governor of a state. Holmes had been speaking to Sibbie as much as possible, to the point where his voice grew hoarse. He could almost hear his daughter in his ear — Amelia would have teased him, he had no doubt, that if there was a single man who could carry on that many hours of one-sided conversations, it was Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.

As the details of Sibbie’s previous life were taken in by her dormant brain, the experience could animate the other systems of the body to return to that life. This was Holmes’s educated theory, at any rate, and his abiding personal wish. He used the information he’d gleaned from the visits of Sibbie’s mother and from Reverend Fallow to speak to her about her childhood; to remind her how her kindness toward the afflicted as a youth was so great that people sought her out as though she could magically heal them; how she read studiously despite not having much formal schooling, and so became an avid student; and how even as her family suffered hardships, she maintained a positive outlook and always believed they could rise above their stations. Holmes silently hoped such positivity about her could influence him, too, to keep believing her recovery was possible.

Finally, signs of real progress. Her eyelids fluttered from time to time. Her hands and feet had begun to twitch. At one point, she stretched her right hand out toward Holmes. This caused a great surge of optimism, which mostly subsided when the movement was not repeated. Holmes reasoned that all these constituted proof this was not a lost cause. (Then again, the history of medicine was to a great extent just a record of self-delusion.)

“Wasn’t it all my fault?” Holmes had asked Browning without explanation.

“What do you mean, Holmes?”

“She ran in to try to pull me out when I fell.”

“No,” Browning replied, “you were trying to save Loring after all.”

“Yes, because I thought it was Gabriel stuck in there. I have tried all my theories to help her, Browning, but old theories are like the old men who cling to them, and must take themselves out of the way in favor of the new generation. And if I knew it was Loring inside that trap, a man we thought at the time was our evildoing Cato, would I have taken the same risk?”

“I believe you would have. You dedicated yourself to all of us and our purpose — unlike Tennyson. I should get back to Miss Rossetti.”

But then another shining sign of life, not long after Browning departed from Tudor House. Holmes was sitting beside Sibbie, trimming her nails, when she squeezed his fingers. He trembled as if grabbed by a spirit’s hand. He asked if she could squeeze his hand once for yes, twice for no. He waited so long he could barely endure it. She squeezed once.

“My dear, do you know who killed Loring? Was there someone other than Gabriel Rossetti involved?”

She squeezed. Yes.

Holmes heard the street door open once again and a voice calling to find out who was home. Reluctantly, Holmes left Sibbie and headed down.

When Holmes was gone, a white-robed figure crept down the second-floor hall, giving the appearance of a wandering ghost. From his belt woven of plant stems hung a small pistol. He had been listening carefully to the doctor-poet’s exhortations to the patient, and now he stopped at the open doorway and stared inside the dark room.

Holmes, how d’ye do?” hailed Tennyson, whom Holmes found unwrapping himself from his old ratty coat at the foot of the stairs. He had a walking stick Holmes had not seen before, which Tennyson hung up with great care. From the horrified look on Tennyson’s face when he turned to see him, Holmes realized how he must have appeared after his countless hours at Sibbie’s bedside. His eyes were red and the skin under his eyes gray, the rest of his face sallow. Holmes explained where the others were.

“And Sibbie?”

“I had begun to think it would be a good plan to get rid of old professors like me. But I have broken down a wall in her. I believe she knows vital information she will be able to share with us.”

“Excellent! Shan’t we sit for a while, Holmes?”

“We thought you sealed yourself into Farringford like the pharaohs in their pyramids,” Holmes said. “Browning believes you ordered the police to follow him and Miss Rossetti. He thinks that it was how they knew where the Slothful would be and also how they were so quickly on the scene at the sanatorium when Loring was killed.”