Мэтью Перл: The Dante Chamber

Christina balked at the idea of his prodding his lover to alter the spelling of her own name. Gabriel’s giant eyes narrowed.

“But, dear Christina,” Gabriel pointed out to her, “I could have asked her to change it altogether.”

Sometimes, after Lizzie Siddal’s tragic end, Gabriel would ponder whether Lizzie’s fate had been inevitable all along. “Guggums was ready to die daily,” he’d insist to Christina, then added, almost whimsically, “sometimes more than once a day.” Other times, he despaired that he caused her decline or at least did not prevent it.

She was buried in the Rossetti family plot in a grave adjacent to that of the professore. During the burial, someone placed a Bible into Lizzie’s coffin. In the blur of the funeral, nobody remembered who, maybe one of Lizzie’s weeping relatives from the countryside. Gabriel insisted the holy book was the last thing he would have ever included to bring her peace.

Gabriel left something of his own. He dropped in the only manuscript of his latest poems with her body, resting them between her cheek and her flowing hair. “I wrote these when I might have been attending to her,” Gabriel later confessed to Christina, “and they will go with her.”

Gabriel hated the churchyard that took his wife. As they left the burial, he took Christina by the arm. “Let me not on any account be buried at Highgate. When I die, burn my remains where I lay.”

It was odd to think of the professore buried so close to Lizzie, so close to those abandoned poems. How the old man’s spirit would have hungered for poetry about Dante Alighieri! The man who’d given his son the middle name Dante in the first place.

Christina could still hear the professore talking of Dante to her and her siblings, describing the secrets he found in the medieval poetry, sometimes with a pupil, such as the odd but brilliant young man Charles Cayley, stationed nearby on a hard stool. From his big chair close to the fire, illuminated by a semicircle of candles like an ancient prophet, the professore would lean over his writing desk, on top of which was the biggest snuffbox ever seen and his thick manuscript, the paper of which reflected the light back onto his face. He would make such pronouncements as:

“How many masked sphinxes I have come upon, so many, my bantlings — it is a true marvel!”

The professore, gesticulating with bony hands, would explain that the middle section or canticle of Dante’s poem Purgatory represented the bold Florentine poet at his boldest. This “second kingdom” of the afterlife between Hell and Paradise — where (as Dante put it) “the human spirit is purged” — had only ever been described in vague terms. In the Florentine’s vision, its physical reality came through — beginning with the rocky shores where some “shades,” or disembodied souls, dwelled in “Ante-Purgatory,” and moving up the mountain where each sin would be repented for on a distinct terrace, starting with Pride, where shades heard the voice of the Virgin Mary cry out humbly — Behold, the handmaiden of the Lord — as a counter to their own excessive and destructive pride.

“Dante’s words are not merely that,” declared the professore.

Each mystery about Dante that the professore solved — so he said — led him closer to the glorious revelations of the past and future of religion, literature, and the world. He had sent some of his tedious, grandiose work to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who ended any budding friendship when he commented in return, “Some of your views of Dante’s meaning are just, but you have pushed it beyond all bounds. How could a poet such as Dante have written a secret political and doctrinal tract as you conjecture?”

Now, Gabriel had left his own poetic visions of Dante so tantalizingly close to the professore’s coffin, one could imagine the old man’s spirit reaching out for them.

Not long after Lizzie’s funeral, a poem Christina worked on for more than ten years, “Goblin Market,” was published in a collection with some shorter verse. Through unique and witty verses, “Goblin Market” told of a girl who must save her sister from the ravages of temptation held out by a crew of pleasure-obsessed beast-men.

Eat me, drink me, love me , cries the girl, who has consumed the goblin’s fruit in order to share the restorative juices with her sister. Laura, make much of me.

Gabriel showed the manuscript to a critic he knew. No publisher, I am deeply grieved to say , the critic replied in a letter, will take these, they are so full of quaintness and strangeness. Your sister should learn the strictest employment of meter and then, perhaps , can write something the public will like .

Christina’s curious poem was published and exploded in popularity. Of course, questions followed: did the troubled sibling who required saving represent Lizzie? Gabriel?

Christina would often be sent for in the middle of the night to help placate or chase down her brother. Every night after Lizzie’s funeral, Gabriel saw her ghost. He could not say whether she appeared in anger or sympathy. He’d escape into the midnight streets until Christina or William retrieved him. Like Dante Alighieri after Beatrice died, Gabriel appeared as a savage creature, gaunt, beard thick and uneven, hair greasy. Soon after this period he moved to Tudor House. He took more chloral hydrate to be able to sleep, increased his laudanum to ease his anxiety. He painted and wrote and read. Christina told him to read anything, anything at all except Lizzie’s suicide poem. She advised it was also best to stay away from reading Dante Alighieri, with his tales of a quest after death — a quest, at its heart, to reunite with his lost love.

Gabriel would proceed to read either Lizzie’s suicide poem or more Dante.

Christina would report back to her mother about Gabriel, and then placid, sensible Frances Rossetti — who most people thought looked exactly like Christina thirty years on, except for those who declared the two looked nothing alike — would shake her head. “I always had a passion for intellect and wanted to instill it in my children,” she’d say. “I had my wish. And I now wish that there were a little less intellect in the family, and a little more common sense. You will watch out for him, won’t you, Christina, and keep him from...?”

Her mother didn’t finish the request and didn’t have to. If there would be less and less time for Christina’s writing and career, so be it.

“Do you hear that?” Gabriel would sometimes ask Christina in that period when she found herself running to his side at Tudor House on a regular basis.

“What? I don’t hear anything, dear Gabriel. What do you hear?”

“Her voice,” he would say, and explain it was calling a single word out at him, over and over. “Murderer,” it would ring in his ears. Murderer.

Murderer.

Christina experienced a feeling of relief as she watched the gray streets of London from the dirty little window of the omnibus bringing her to Scotland Yard. Her refusal to involve the authorities proved brief; the deeper she traveled back into Gabriel’s darkest years from the confines of Tudor House, the deeper her alarm. As soon as she managed to bear it, she sent word to Browning, consenting to go to the police offices. Browning, always waiting to be a man of action, flew to her side.

William declined to accompany them. He worried. Worried about the reputation of the family, worried about his job at the excise office. He didn’t say outright that he didn’t want to be seen walking into the police offices, but Christina knew.

No matter. What mattered was that Gabriel would be found. That was what Christina thought about and prayed about on the ride while sitting alongside Browning. Fear no more , she imagined a dashing detective reassuring her with a lingering, firm handshake.