Мэтью Перл - The Dante Chamber

As spring surrendered fully to summer, Christina took another excursion, having a desire to see once more where it had happened. Reaching the property of the sanatorium, she found the heavy gates with “Phillip Sanatorium” still there, but covered in cobwebs and left wide open. Only three of the buildings survived the fire, and the grounds were wild with fresh verdure. A deer loitered near the gates, and ate mulberries out of Christina’s hands. She watched the deer run gracefully across the property, not stopping to disturb the other animals, like the ducks that had gathered at the canal, and the cats who went in and out of the ruins, yet somehow seeming the master of it all.

It was beautiful. Standing there long enough, one was left with only a shadowy recollection of the incidents.

A few weeks after her final meeting with Dolly, Christina was walking with William along a busy street in London when she spied Charles Cayley from a distance. His suit, as out of date as the cocked hat and ruffles of Shakespeare, could be spotted ten miles away. In a flash, she thought about the people and activities that filled her life now and in the past — Gabriel, her mother, her poetry, Dante, her father, her lost uncle, her church, her charity. Cayley noticed her and changed direction toward her. She froze.

“Did you arrange for him to be here?” Christina asked her brother.

“Christina,” William replied, “who do you mean? What did you see?”

She fell backward, the back of her head landing hard on the sidewalk.

She woke up with her head and neck sore from the fall. William and Cayley were standing over her, looking down with grave concern, along with a man with silver whiskers snapping his fingers. She waited for the wave of embarrassment and self-recrimination to wash over her, but it never came.

“... quite serious. My sister does not faint,” William was saying.

“Look.” Cayley gestured toward Christina. “Her eyes. They’re open.”

“Can you sit up?” asked William, gently placing his hand beneath her head.

“Wait. If you please,” Christina said, wanting to stay right where she was. “I feel out of sorts and... lazy.”

“I should think you are out of sorts, swooning before our eyes,” said William. He then must have considered how odd that last word was for his sister, for he exclaimed: “Lazy!”

William consulted more with the silver-whiskered man, who turned out to be a doctor. He assured William there didn’t seem to be anything serious to worry about and excused himself from the little spectacle.

Christina examined the sky. You rarely ever stopped to do that in London, there was so much to divide attentions among the buildings, the towers, the people and horses. You never looked heavenward.

“This is not the time, Mr. Cayley,” William was arguing.

“I don’t care if it isn’t,” said Cayley. “Miss Rossetti, can’t you hear me? I have never been adept at expressing my emotions or speechifying, so forgive me. You take care of so many others, practically of everyone you meet, and you must allow someone to return the favor. Allow me to.”

“Mr. Cayley?” Christina said.

“Miss Rossetti—” He swallowed hard, for a moment glancing back to William. “I started to say this to you once before, and haven’t stopped torturing myself for never finishing. You sent me some verses that I’m sure I didn’t fully understand, but they were melancholy and despondent and lovely and made me love you more. You shall never be alone, and you will be all better with me. You will be Mrs. Cayley from now on!”

“It is a suitable match,” William admitted.

The sky.

In the London sky she faced something special. The atmospheric conditions caused by the smoke and fog in the air sometimes created a kind of copper vapor unlike anywhere in the world. Christina stared into the unreal heavens and said, “I have thought about what my father believed, that Beatrice was not real, and what you seek to demonstrate, Mr. Cayley, that she was. But she is never real and always unreal in others’ eyes. How different Beatrice’s legacy might have been had she spoken for herself , even the more powerful had she been unhappy instead of happy.”

Cayley again looked at William, this time in confusion, then back at Christina, until he had a thought that enthralled him. “How well you know my interests, Miss Rossetti!”

Christina’s mind returned to the events in the late winter of 1870, and when she did, it was like tumbling up a flight of stairs — she could not think of any one moment without remembering in rapid succession all of the horrors and tragedies and triumphs. It sometimes occurred to her that with the punishments demonstrated by Sibbie and her followers — the Prideful, the Envious, the Wrathful, the Slothful, the Avaricious and Prodigal, the Gluttonous, and the Lustful — there had never been an attempt made to represent the very first area of Purgatory encountered by Dante: the “Ante-Purgatory.” This was the location where humanity’s souls resided who were not ready to confront their vices at all. These shades had avoided Hell and its hopeless torments, but were still being prepared for the path over the mountain toward Paradise. Dante provided a poignant depiction of those temporarily trapped near the base of the divine mountain, listening to the beating of the waves as oncoming vessels brought ever more souls. They prayed that, as they waited, the works of the devil would not intrude on them.

Shelter us from our ghostly foe...

It was as though she could see them again ranged around her — Dr. Holmes, Tennyson, Browning, even Dolly Williamson, in the search for Gabriel — and in her mind she, too, was listening to the waves as she climbed onward.

“Miss Rossetti,” Cayley shouted, in case she lost hearing in her fall. He held out his hand to her. “Dear Miss Rossetti, haven’t I loved you since I watched you at your desk in Charlotte Street while I pretended only to do my labors with your father? Take my hand now and be my wife.”

She thought about living in Charlotte Street. She would steal into her tiny room to write poetry on the corner of her washstand. It was uncomfortable and awkward writing against that washstand, but it was her corner.

“Haven’t you made a decision?” Cayley asked.

“Have you?” William asked.

“Well?” Cayley added eagerly.

A small crowd of impatient and curious pedestrians had formed a semicircle behind Cayley and William around the woman sprawled out on the ground.

“My favorite poet on earth, I cherish...,” came a whispered voice. “Please, how I cherish her!” Pushing right through the two hovering men, a young woman leaned over and in the same voice declared, “You’re Christina Rossetti. Are you alive?”

Christina’s pinned-up hair had come loose in the fall and spread out in a thousand points over the dirt-encrusted ground. Her lips opened into a smile as her eyes floated along the clouds of copper.

My novel The Dante Club centered on Boston’s Dante trailblazers confronting a series of murders in 1865 based on Dante’s Inferno . While drafting it, I began jotting down ideas for continuing the story. I wanted to progress further along in Dante’s vision of the afterlife by moving from Inferno to the next canticle of his Divine Comedy, Purgatory , which happens to be my favorite, maybe because it most closely resembles modern dramatic storytelling. I also wanted to shift most of my focus from American “Danteans” to the fascinating circle of British poets who, contemporaneously, explored and wrestled with the unique poet of Florence.