Мэтью Перл - The Dante Chamber

Over at Tudor House, the perpetual sleep that had descended over a young woman finally lifted. Sibbie’s blue eyes opened on the darkened room where Holmes had spent so many hours at her side. At almost any other time over the last five and a half weeks, he would have been found there waiting for just such a miracle. But this time, his chair was empty.

She had to take some time to think where she was, what had happened, how she had come to be here in this strange room full of strange objects.

Sibbie rose slowly, gaining balance and strength by the second as her senses gradually returned. Her black hair had grown out considerably, and the back of her hair was matted from so much time in one position. The hair dye had begun to fade around the back of her head, revealing some strands of light brown and others of golden hue.

She moved in a wobbly manner across the room, like a mermaid trying to balance on fins. Very slowly she made her way down the stairs, stumbling a few times as she went, her eyes stung by the light bouncing off the snow and through the windows. She relied on her hands to feel her way. A door from the basement opened and two men appeared, Colt pistols at the ready in case anyone tried to interfere with their mission.

Soon, she was behind the house, in a boat on the Thames, on the first leg of her return.

By the time a carriage brought her to the gates of the Phillip Sanatorium hours later, all her senses had been restored. She climbed down. Her stride became longer and more powerful as she walked through the gates, fresh-fallen snow singing beneath her bare feet. As excited shouts spread, white-robed men and women began to surround her, and Reverend Fallow rushed to her side.

Fallow slowly lowered himself on one knee and bowed his head, and all the others followed suit in worshipful acknowledgment of their leader, who had finally returned.

Over at Tudor House, the perpetual sleep that had descended over a young woman finally lifted. Sibbie’s blue eyes opened on the darkened room where Holmes had spent so many hours at her side. At almost any other time over the last five and a half weeks, he would have been found there waiting for just such a miracle. But this time, his chair was empty.

She had to take some time to think where she was, what had happened, how she had come to be here in this strange room full of strange objects.

Sibbie rose slowly, gaining balance and strength by the second as her senses gradually returned. Her black hair had grown out considerably, and the back of her hair was matted from so much time in one position. The hair dye had begun to fade around the back of her head, revealing some strands of light brown and others of golden hue.

She moved in a wobbly manner across the room, like a mermaid trying to balance on fins. Very slowly she made her way down the stairs, stumbling a few times as she went, her eyes stung by the light bouncing off the snow and through the windows. She relied on her hands to feel her way. A door from the basement opened and two men appeared, Colt pistols at the ready in case anyone tried to interfere with their mission.

Soon, she was behind the house, in a boat on the Thames, on the first leg of her return.

By the time a carriage brought her to the gates of the Phillip Sanatorium hours later, all her senses had been restored. She climbed down. Her stride became longer and more powerful as she walked through the gates, fresh-fallen snow singing beneath her bare feet. As excited shouts spread, white-robed men and women began to surround her, and Reverend Fallow rushed to her side.

Fallow slowly lowered himself on one knee and bowed his head, and all the others followed suit in worshipful acknowledgment of their leader, who had finally returned.

Isobel Worthington was given the nickname Sibbie in childhood by an aunt whom she loved and with whom she shared a resemblance. From the time of her youth, Sibbie had been recognized as having a rare and soothing influence over the distressed and ill, and an otherworldly effect in inspiring people around her to confess their greatest fears and dreams; there were some who insisted she possessed not merely a bedside manner but near-magical powers of healing. She was visited by spiritualists and mesmerists who observed her, with some concluding she was a veritable prophetess. One supernaturalist tested her with magnetic devices that felt scratchy on her skin, to try to determine the source of her unusual powers.

Her family, more practical, intended her to enter service, and she was considered well suited to be engaged assisting philanthropic men and women who visited charity homes, hospitals, and the like in London. While briefly in service to a well-known philanthropist, she found her employer dead, having poisoned himself, leaving behind a letter professing that he loved Sibbie but could not bear his own disloyalty to his wife and children. (Sibbie had earlier witnessed her father dead from his own hand, too, though in his case without explanation.) In this way she came into the employment of Reverend Fallow, whose career up to the present already has been partially sketched in this booklet, and her power over her subjects was soon perceived by many others around her, including — no, especially , the troubled and haunted preacher. He has told the present author that he has known people who would throw themselves from a cliff to be by Miss Worthington’s side, a long list that eventually included the reverend himself.

I have included the previous examination of Reverend Fallow’s career in an earlier chapter primarily to illuminate the remarkable character of Sibbie Worthington.

While traveling with Reverend Fallow through the Continent on their mission to inspect sanatoria, she accompanied him to visit the mysterious oracle of Dante Alighieri’s works, the erratic man known as the Dante Master. This authority on the Florentine bard was struck by how Sibbie shared the spirit of Dante’s Beatrice, usually so misunderstood by so-called scholars. Beatrice is believed by many casual readers of the Divine Comedy as merely a passive object of Dante’s love. In actuality, according to this Dante Master, she is the chief agent of all that transpires in the Comedy . It is Beatrice alone who perceives that Dante (and mankind) is caught in spiritual peril, and arranges an unprecedented intervention — she is the most powerful figure in the poem. More than Dante’s poetic idol, Virgil; more than the keeper of Purgatory, Cato; or Sordello or Statius or their other guides through the afterlife; or even the once-fearsome Lucifer dwelling listlessly in the pits of Hell. Nor does she allow pity to cloud her judgment and her enactment of divine justice. She is the healer and the punisher.

Behold I am, truly I am Beatrice , she announces at the summit of the mountain of Purgatory, as a trembling, sobbing Dante looks on.

The Dante Master instructed the visiting pair, Sibbie and Fallow, in each canticle of the Comedy . But those lessons alone were not life altering. It was when the old demagogue gave them his rare copy of exiled Professore G. P. G. Rossetti’s treatise on Dante that Sibbie felt overmastered.

“Few have attempted to uncover the true value of the Divine Comedy ,” said the Dante Master. “Fewer still have come so close as the professore.”

“What is the truth?” asked Sibbie.

“That we bleed with Dante’s words.”

She felt a wave of change upon her. The professore’s book, to the ordinary eye unreadable and tedious, was a prophetic text predicting the ascendancy of the figure of Beatrice over conventional, failed religions that had become antiquated and irrelevant. Professore Rossetti’s pages demonstrated, in fifteen volumes of dizzyingly persuasive terms, that Dante’s poem had been meant to initiate a secret sect dedicated to Beatrice and the Comedy ’s power to save humankind.