Мэтью Перл - The Dante Chamber

They heard a sound like splashing, which turned out to be Bill’s bare feet soaking in a large bucket beneath the table.

“My toes,” the man explained, his eyes dancing under bushy eyebrows, “swell up terribly in the humid air down here. Is it still snowing out there? It’s whispered that such a late snow is supernatural punishment for London’s vices, the heavens cracking, the proper seasons getting jumbled up into perpetual winter, and so on.”

“Mr.... Bill,” Holmes began uneasily, removing the copy of The Dante Murders from his coat, “I believe your friend the bookseller informed you that we needed to know more about this.”

“Dante, yes,” muttered Whiskey Bill, the excited flush across his cheeks receding. “Tell me, how is your friend Gabriel Rossetti?”

Tennyson demanded to know how he knew anything about Gabriel’s involvement in the matter.

“Now, Mr. Tennyson! It’s part of our task to know what every literary scribbler is doing, particularly when he’s in some kind of trouble. We’ve heard the police believe Mr. Rossetti has somehow been mixed up in this Dante business, though they were able to prevent the newspapers from printing it until they could be sure. If you must know, I’m quite concerned. Rossetti is something of a friend of mine.”

“Indeed?” Tennyson replied with skepticism.

“Who do you think helped him some five or six months back, when he needed to get a manuscript from the grave of his wife? Who indeed, but a man with talents for accomplishing unusual literary tasks.”

Holmes and Tennyson experienced a newfound interest. Whiskey Bill sensed this and offered a lip-smacking grin before telling them more.

Gabriel — Bill explained — had purchased some rare books about Dante from Fergins’s bookstall, and it was Fergins who arranged the first meeting between Gabriel and Whiskey Bill. Gabriel wanted to get back the manuscript of his poems, many of which were based on Dante, that he had impulsively buried with his wife. Bill oversaw the recovery, which required the presence of a medical and a religious observer in case there were any accusations of grave robbing. “I have to beg absolute secrecy to everyone,” Gabriel said to Bill at the time, “as the matter ought really not to be talked about.” Gabriel described his poems as bound in a rough gray calf cover, to distinguish them from the Bible that someone else put into Lizzie’s grave.

“The body was badly decomposed, though we all agreed to keep Rossetti from seeing,” recalled Bill, a glimmer in his eyes as he lost himself in the memory. “We started a fire near the grave to disinfect the area. The bound pages were in acceptable condition, considering where they had been for seven years, though a worm had eaten through the middle of them. I even recall one of the poems he wanted most to retrieve was about Dante’s life in exile.”

Whiskey Bill, somewhat surprising given his slick appearance, recited lines from the poem in question with naked feeling:

“Rossetti’s hands shook as I handed him the manuscript,” Bill continued. “His health hasn’t been the same since then, from what I understand, as though he had been cursed by the desecration of his wife’s resting place, by her spirit or—”

“What is it?” Tennyson demanded, observing the speaker’s disoriented expression.

“There was a woman waiting for him at the gates of the cemetery, after we were done with the exhumation. I was finishing arrangements with the sexton to close up the grave, but I could see her from a distance.”

“Well? What of it?”

“I’m just recalling, Mr. Tennyson, that she cut a grand figure. Her brilliant hair caught the moonlight, and she held out her hand to Rossetti.”

“Are you saying, Mr. Bill, that the spectre of Lizzie Siddal stood at the gates?” Holmes asked.

Whiskey Bill just stared back with a grin, then dried the sweat from his neck with a dirty handkerchief.

Tennyson expelled an ugh and seemed ready to get up and leave.

“Mr. Fergins led Mr. Tennyson to believe that you had found some intelligence about the anonymously published Dante booklet,” said Holmes. “I’m afraid our time is too short for ghost stories.”

“I believe I do have information that will be of use to you gentlemen. But there is the discussion of payment first.”

Tennyson erupted, complaining that he already placed the money they agreed upon in the hollow cane as Fergins had directed him. “The bookseller didn’t say about owing anything more!”

“I always say,” Whiskey Bill replied, “that a bookseller is one-quarter philosopher, one-quarter philanthropist, and two-quarters rogue.”

“How much more money are you after?”

“Not that sort of payment,” said Bill with greedy eyes and a double-gap-toothed grin. “A poem. An original, unpublished poem in the hand of Poet Laureate Tennyson. About a topic of my choice, say...”

“A museum? Library?” Holmes tried to help and speed him along.

“A tavern.”

Tennyson tried to protest that he needed complete seclusion to write.

“I suppose,” the doctor-poet whispered, “Browning would thrive on such a challenge.”

Tennyson looked around, blew out a sigh, and grabbed paper and pen the man had waiting for him. When the poet threw the paper back at the blackmailer, Bill read aloud with satisfaction. “‘This tavern is their chief resort... Gives stouter ale and riper port.’ Hear, hear!” he cried.

“It is splendid.” Tennyson could not help but admire it himself. “I hope you profit by it. Now, the information?”

“Oh, poetry is a mere drug in the market these days, my friends; there is a glut of it and not enough customers. This I shall just keep for myself.” Whiskey Bill nodded, accepting his end of the bargain. “There have been two pirated printings of The Dante Murders since its original publication. Supposedly, the author is a former private detective of some kind from America. Here is what is most interesting. One of those printings was ordered privately — I mean, not by one of the usual piratical printers who can find profit in a pebble stuck to a shoe. Highly unusual. Let me see, where did I put it... the location these private copies were sent...” Bill searched through bundles of papers and books. “They must have had some success selling their copies, I suppose, since I’ve located a printer who is making new plates for them for another pamphlet of the same sort.”

Tennyson grabbed Bill’s wrist. “A new booklet? What is it?”

“Even as we speak, yes. It’s called In Dante’s Shadow, a True Account of the London Purgations by the Author of The Dante Murders . Here are my notes” — he pulled out a scrap of paper — “both the second pirated printing of the original Dante Murders and this new pamphlet have been ordered to be delivered somewhere called the Phillip Sanatorium. I’ve heard something of it before, a sanctuary of some kind from the sins of the city, no alcohol at all, if you can imagine, but they say that opiates are shipped in by the cartful to placate the residents.”

Holmes rose to his feet, feeling the room spinning around him. “The religious observer. Who was it?” he asked. Bill stared back at him, his face a picture of confusion. “The religious observer who came to Highgate to help in the exhumation of Lizzie Rossetti’s grave,” Holmes continued. “Do you remember the name of the man who was there with you?”

Their informant mulled over the question. “A preacher... I think it was Fallows or Fallow. Some name of that sort.”