Мэтью Перл - The Dante Chamber

Had Christina been obliged to leave in such a hurry that she would abandon her things? Browning’s confusion grew worse, because at Tudor House, Browning could not find the Rossettis or Holmes, and they were not the only ones absent. Most shocking of all, Sibbie was not in her room.

Pacing the house, he noticed a purple scarf on a hook he was certain belonged to Tennyson.

Had Tennyson been back here, or had he left his scarf weeks before and Browning was only noticing it now?

His mind tumbled through the questions. Through the rooms, up and down the floors of the house, onto the roof and back down, on the street and in the garden ( Eeeiu , the peacocks screeched for him to get away), examining the books that had been most recently consulted on the big table, Browning came no closer to knowing where his companions or Sibbie had scattered in the last hours, and at the same time he was certain something momentous had come to pass, possibly in the twinkling of an eye. He admitted to himself that he was frightened. He noticed something else peculiar. The doors to the cellar were slightly ajar.

He followed the stairs down through labyrinthine halls filled with the surplus of Gabriel’s monstrous collections of china, Japanese furniture, and rare musical instruments that had given him a glimmer of purpose after Lizzie died. Led by the light of a candle, Browning found another set of doors where the cellar seemed to end — behind these doors was another staircase leading farther down. Beneath the cellar?

He followed these stairs down into a dark, gloomy labyrinth of vaults, recalling William Rossetti’s words at the outset of Browning’s quest with Christina.

Because of its proximity to the river, the house was actually used for smuggling... first of political fugitives, later for supplies and even pirated and forbidden books.

The vaults themselves must have been there for hundreds of years, since the time of the Tudors. The strangest thing among all these relics of long-gone eras was a plate Browning found. It had scraps of meat and cheese on it — not yet rotted.

He heard the faint sound of the dragon door knocker from above.

Never had Browning been so relieved to welcome a messenger, who was waiting at the door and would have given up had Browning taken a few more seconds. Browning unsealed a letter written in Dr. Holmes’s hand.

Reverend Fallow is Cato. Get to Phillip Sanatorium. Use care.

He dropped the paper as though struck in the gut.

He rushed over to the train station. Frustrations piled as thick as the snow north of London. The trains already departed from the city (including the one that had carried Holmes and Tennyson) were limping along their routes, and no more trains or hired carriages were going into the snowstorm. Workmen were trying to clear enough snow from the tracks, but after slowing down, the snowfall would start again, or the winds would pick up and move the snow to obstruct the tracks.

Hours passed in which all Browning could do was imagine dire consequences to come from the delays. Finally a conductor came around to announce the next train was being fitted, and soon enough the bell rang out for passengers and Browning boarded. As he walked through the cars, he faced a man he had been looking for hours earlier: Constable Tom Branagan.

“Well, I’ve begun to be frightened a little by all this bad luck.”

“I’m sorry that’s what you think of us, Mr. Browning,” said Branagan.

He spotted a letter in front of Branagan. The constable could not tuck it into his pocket quickly enough to keep Browning from recognizing Tennyson’s hand.

“Our friend Mr. Tennyson has been diverting information to Scotland Yard all along, Constable, as I first suspected at the scene of Gibson’s death.”

“Could you blame him, Mr. Browning?” Branagan asked. “If we were not at Phillip Sanatorium as quickly as we were when Mr. Loring died, would we have been able to transport Mr. Rossetti to receive medical help in his dangerous opium haze as swiftly as we did? The arrangement between Inspector Williamson and Mr. Tennyson has made sure you were safe. All of you. Now we can find Orin Fallow and the answers we’ve sought.”

“Tennyson betrayed our trust. That cannot be justified by any outcome. As for Inspector Williamson, I am sorry for what I heard. I cannot agree with all he’s done, but I admit his clasp may be equal to his grasp. How is he faring?”

Branagan gazed down at the floor. “We’re waiting. He has the finest doctors around him.”

Browning hesitated for a moment before sitting across from the constable.

“I’m guessing,” Branagan said, as the train began crawling, “we share the same destination again. The sanatorium. If they can clear the tracks enough for us to reach the station. To be perfectly honest, Mr. Browning, we ought to have examined the place closely long ago.”

“Why?” asked Browning.

“Months before Reuben Loring died there, Inspector Williamson had received reports of unregulated shipments of opium making their way in that direction.”

“Is that something that would normally have been investigated?”

“No, but perhaps it should be. The Home Office debates how much of our time should be taken in tracking opium sold without supervision of the doctors and druggists — opium that is usually in purer forms and more potent. The fact is, asylums and sanatoriums often require larger supplies than are typically available at one time. Scotland Yard usually looks the other way because it’s considered useful that certain populations are artificially... dulled . Phillip Sanatorium was one of those places that seemed harmless to ignore. What is it? What’s wrong?”

Browning had fallen into a reverie of thought, his face lighting up as it did in the throes of composing poetry. “Of course...,” he rasped.

“There’s no reason to hide anything from each other now, Mr. Browning.”

“Philip! In Canto Seven of Purgatory , Dante enters the region of the late repentant and encounters the shade of Philip III. He’s a part of Ante-Purgatory, where shades prepare themselves for the journey up the terraces of the mountain.”

“Yes?” Branagan replied, reaching into his bag for Longfellow’s translation as Browning continued.

“Follow my thinking, Constable. Philip was not a ruler Dante Alighieri particularly admired; he believed Philip’s leadership in war brought infamy to France and that Philip’s son brought disgrace. But he places him in Purgatory instead of Hell to redeem him. Reverend Fallow’s sanctuary is called Phillip Sanatorium — I suppose when we heard it, we would have assumed the ‘Phillip’ in the sanatorium’s title was named for Jesus’s disciple, if we gave the name of the place much thought at all. Not so: it was a reference to Dante all along. And just like Philip III, the people of England, in Fallow’s mind, have fallen into disgrace, and Fallow in his demented way offers an entrance to Purgatory to redeem them. There were things the man said that rush back into my head. He called London a ‘tossing-and-turning metropolis.’”

“Yes?”

“Why didn’t I hear it? Canto Six, Purgatory , Dante compares Italy to a ‘sick woman who finds no rest upon her downy feather-bed, but by her tossing and turning chases off her pain.’”

Branagan scribbled down Browning’s conclusions into a notebook, then turned back to Purgatory and copied out notes from it.

The constable then leaned closer. “How do you think Mr. Rossetti came to be caught up in this?”

Browning thought about finding Gabriel on the grounds of the sanatorium, and their fear — mistaken, he now realized — that they had been the ones to lead him there. The ten words the messenger had handed him from Holmes remade Browning’s understanding of the place and of what may have been happening there. He thought about the turbaned stranger whom Holmes and Tennyson had seen at the church in London before Browning observed him at Phillip Sanatorium. The man’s presence conveyed a deep sense of trouble, and he was following someone. But he was not following them at all — he was after Fallow, both at the church and at the sanatorium.