A Rich Full Death

21

My dear, dear friend,

You cannot guess what pains it costs me to write. My muscles have all turned traitor, and my body become an Iron Maiden for the poor scrap of spirit which still unwillingly inhabits it-yet still worse is the mental effort, to remember what I have told you and what not, what you know and what you do not know-to say nothing of what you may have guessed. I am terribly afraid I may lose my grip on the story before I finish, at moments everything quivers and shimmers so. Was there not some philosopher-you will know who I mean-who held that the material world is only sustained by God’s attention, and that if that failed for a split second the whole universe would start to curl at the edges, smouldering and shrivelling up like a sketch tossed on the fire?

But I shall finish-I must! This at least I shall achieve, though nothing else.

The week following Grant’s death was like one of those great calms which sailors fear worse than the fiercest storm, when nothing stirs and the very air seems all to have been sucked away, leaving a breathless vacuum beneath which the ocean lies so flat and bland you fancy you could dance quadrilles on it. So it was that week. There was an oppressive absence of event: the police investigation once again came lo nothing; Mr Browning made no attempt to make good his threats.

I had by now convinced Beatrice to leave Florence with me, but she would not quit her post without giving due notice; and while she worked out her time I lay abed, or on the sofa, or at the balcony door, dreaming of those azure depths, the rocky coves, wind-battered centenarian olives, the sky a flawless sheet of polished lapis-lazuli …

Every evening, when she returned, [ordered up supper from the trattoria: first some rounds of fire-charred bread rubbed raw with garlic, salt-sprinkled and drenched in olive oil as green and cloudy as glass on a beach; then a mess of hand-rolled noodles soaking up some rich dark sauce of hare and wild mushrooms; and then a chicken roast on a wood fire, and some fruit, and a flagon of wine.

And so time passed, until it was Friday the 3rd of March, and the last day of her service.

That evening I sat in the room at Via Dante Aligheri awaiting my mistress’s return as usual. A bottle of champagne stood on the table beside a huge bouquet of flowers. I waited, and I waited. The wine grew warm, the flowers began to wilt, and still Beatrice did not come. At length, when ten o’clock sounded without any sign of her, I grew so anxious I could sit there no longer. It was unheard of for her to be so late.

My mind ran riot with unpleasant speculations, which I could do nothing to allay-it was of course out of the question for me to enquire of the family for whom she had been working. I nevertheless left the house and walked to where they lived, to see if I could catch any sight of her, half-hoping to meet her on the way. I knew not what I hoped, or feared-but in the event I saw nothing and nobody.

My next impulse was to return home, in case there might be some message for me there. As I hastened through the dark and empty streets my heart was full of evil forebodings, and I seemed to see the final look Browning had given me, and to hear him say, ‘You’ll be sorry for this-both of you!’ That ‘both’ had puzzled me at the time-had he intended Talenti, who had been present, or Beatrice?

When I opened my front door I looked at once at the silver salver where Piero puts any letters which have been delivered in my absence. There was a long envelope there, bearing my name in a hand I recognised. I tore it open and scanned the contents in a flash. This, word for poisonous word, is what it said:

Dear Mr Booth,

I took the liberty of calling on you this evening, at an hour when I knew you would be from home, to discuss this brave New Life of yours. Your manservant was about to leave, but before doing so was good enough to let me in to await your return, which I gave him to understand was imminent.

I fear I misled him, though, for of course you were wandering ‘pensive as a pilgrim’, as the bard has it: dreaming about everything save that which was under your nose (I quote from memory: consult the original for further details).

R.B.

I walked through to my living-room with this extraordinary composition in my hand-and stopped dead. Books, papers, clothes, and household articles of every description lay strewn about the floor in the most complete disorder. My first thought was that I had been the object of a burglar’s attentions, until I caught sight of several valuable objects which should in that case have been taken. What then? A wanton explosion of destructive energy appeared to have reduced my home to a diabolic shambles, as completely and impartially as a bomb.

Then I remembered the letter. Browning claimed that my servant had left him alone in the suite-was this his revenge? That he sought revenge was no longer in doubt-that much, at least, I could understand from his cryptic letter. But was it credible that this childish tantrum was all a mind as cunning as his could dream up to torment me?

I picked up the letter once again. That it was crammed full of secret significance I did not for a moment doubt. That my future happiness, and quite possibly my survival, depended upon my understanding it was no less evident. What did it all mean?

I strode restlessly back and forth, picking my way between the volumes which lay singly, in piles, precarious heaps and fallen rows all over the floor, alternately picking up the malicious text and then throwing it down again in despair-a process I repeated half a hundred times as the night wore on.

The Dominicans’ chimes had sounded two o’clock before I got my first glimpse of its hidden meanings. I had initially assumed that the phrase ‘this brave New Life of yours’ was a mocking echo of Miranda’s naive exclamation in Shakespeare’s Tempest: ‘O brave new world, that has such people in it!’ The irony of that was evident, if Browning knew-as he presumably did-about my relations with his former mistress. But why ‘Life’ for ‘world’? Why were only the two words capitalised? Why capitals at all, for that matter?

The truth came to me, as it will, in a flash. The ‘New Life’ of course referred to the collection of verses which Dante published in celebration of Beatrice-the Vita Nuova. Having understood that, it took me very little longer to recognise ‘wandering pensive as a pilgrim’ and the rest of it as the paraphrase of the opening of the famous sonnet on the death of Beatrice: Deh peregrini che pensosi andate.

On the death of Beatrice!. A chill ran down my spine. ‘Consult the original for further details.’ I ran to the case where I keep my Italian classics-and gave out a howl of fury when I realised that it too had been wrenched off the wall and the books hurled to all four corners of the room. Like a beast, I scrabbled desperately on all fours among the volumes which lay strewn about the floor, seizing each in turn and flinging it away like the rubbish they all were now-all except that one I sought, and could not find.

Dear God, I found everything else that night! Books I had forgotten about, books I did not know I had, books I did not know existed: everything from Browning’s own Sordello, which he had given me to make up for his gaffe at DeVere’s funeral, to a broadsheet singing the exploits of the Monster of Modena, a berserk butcher who terrorised that Dukedom early last century, turning his victims into the large spiced boiling sausages for which the region is famous. Everything but Dante’s posy for his dead love!

At last I gave it up, staggered to the table, sat down and poured myself a glass of brandy-and there was the volume I had been seeking in vain, ‘under my nose’, as the letter had fruitlessly hinted. Feverishly I snatched it up, hunting out the sonnet in question. Ignoring a piece of paper which fluttered to the table as I found the page, I skimmed the first twelve lines, and found this: Ell’ha perduta la sua beatrice.

Now Dante meant by this that Florence had lost the person who had made her blessed, the source of her beatitude (with a quibble on Beatrice’s name). There is, however, a simpler way of reading the Italian, and it was this, I knew, that Browning had intended: ‘You have lost your Beatrice’. He had made away with the poor girl-killed or kidnapped or God knew what! I was beside myself with anger and remorse. Let him do his worst with me, but why should she suffer, poor child?

Then I noticed the scrap of paper which had fallen to the table when I found the correct page of the Vita Nuova. It had writing on it, I saw, and picked it up, and read:

Since you have been kind enough to act as my guide through hell, I thought it only fair to treat you to a little tour of purgatory. You have been my Virgil. What shall I be to you?

I heard half past three strike, and still I sat there, my brain swarming with a hellish brew of thoughts and dreams all stirred up and simmering together, poring over the opaque message before me. ‘You have been kind enough to act as my guide through hell’; ‘You have been my Virgil’. That was clear enough-a reference to our joint investigation into the murders based on the Inferno, ‘I thought it only fair to treat you to a little tour of purgatory’; ‘What shall I be to you?’

Who had been Dante’s guide in purgatory? In the Inferno, as every schoolboy knows, the poet was guided by the spirit of Virgil; in the Paradiso by that of Beatrice. But in the Purgatorio?

I had to find my copy of the Divine Comedy to answer this, and that cost me another three-quarters of an hour of frenzied searching through the ruins of my library-for this time it had not been conveniently left on the table for me. When I finally located it, however, I felt that my time bad been well spent, for I discovered that Dante had been guided through purgatory by the most celebrated of the Italian troubadours-Sordello!

I could hardly be in any doubt what Browning intended me to do next: the reference was plainly to his long poem dedicated to this personage, which had been in my hands earlier. But my subsequent searches had created so much fresh disorder that it took me almost an hour to find it again; and when I had I realised that I had not the slightest idea what to do with it.

I picked the volume up by the spine and shook it-and out fell another piece of paper with some lines of writing on it. I gathered it up, and read:

Speaking of your servant, are you still missing some of your personal possessions? I trust not. It might prove embarrassing if the police had to be informed. But no doubt you can locate them first. How about this, for example?

Select your prey,

Waiting (the………-…….in the way

Strewing this very bench)

At the scene of the last murder. You have until dusk tomorrow.

I read this through, at first, with a sense that Browning must have taken leave of his senses. The comment about my servant, in particular, seemed utterly nonsensical, for while Piero may be a vain unprepossessing little squirt, he has never presumed to try and steal so much as one of my fallen hairs. So what was Browning getting at?

‘It might prove embarrassing if the police had to be informed. But no doubt you can locate them first.’

Then a very nasty suspicion peered over the rim of my mind, like the forelegs of a big blotchy spider crouched beneath the floorboards. A moment later it crawled boldly out and showed itself. Browning had stolen some of my personal effects and hidden them at the scene of the murders in an attempt to incriminate me!

I leapt up, already making for the door. Then I stopped in my tracks. What had he taken? Without knowing that I could not be sure I had recovered everything before the police were informed that evening-as the note clearly threatened.

Now I realised why my premises had been ransacked. It was precisely to prevent me taking a rapid inventory of my possessions and noting what was missing. Browning wished to force me to work it out the hard way: by solving the riddle written in the letter. Three lines of poetry, with a word left blank. Clearly the only solution was to identify the poem from which it had been taken, and read through it to find the missing word. But what was the poem?

With a shudder of horror I realised that it must be Browning’s own Sordello!

Now I saw the whole game to which Browning was challenging me. To save myself from imminent arrest on the false evidence he had planted, I had to try and track down and recover each of the items in turn. To know what to look for I had to find the words missing from the quotation supplied. And to do that I had to read Sordello.

Do you realise what this meant? Sordello is the poem which all but destroyed Robert Browning’s promising reputation overnight, and established him in the one he presently enjoys-of being the most tedious, pretentious and obscure poetaster in existence. If it had merely sunk into oblivion the case would not be so bad, but although barely one hundred and fifty copies have been sold, the poem is notorious and the stories concerning it are legion. One man thought his mind had gone because he could not understand two consecutive lines. Mr Carlyle-one of Browning’s supporters, mind! — did not even trouble to read the piece, his wife having read it through without having any idea whether Sordello was a man, a city or a book. The present Poet Laureate, so his brother informed me when I mentioned the piece, claimed to have understood only the first and last lines, both of which, he said, were lies: ‘Who will may hear Sordello’s story told’ and ‘Who would has heard Sordello’s story told’.

In short, the thing is a bete noire, a monstrous abortion of some six thousand lines, each both incomprehensible in itself and lacking any evident relationship to those immediately preceding and following it. And it was this which Browning was forcing me to read, literally to save my life-knowing full well that no lesser incentive would be sufficient. This was revenge, indeed!

But for all his cleverness, I might well have called his bluff, and gone to bed-had it not been for Beatrice. For myself I would have risked it, but I could not rest easy until I knew she was safe. To do that I had to find Browning, and I had no hopes of finding him at home. No, he would be hiding at the centre of this maze he had constructed for me, and to locate him I should have to find my way through it-of that I was convinced. And so I set to work.

Five o’clock rang as I leafed through the hateful volume, wondering where to start-hoping the pages might have been marked, or that my eye would magically light on the right passage. No such luck!

One thing, however, did soon occur to me. Sordello is divided into six Books, and six was the number of murders which had recently taken place in Florence. The note instructed me to start at the scene of the last murder, so might the quotation before me not prove to be from the last of the six Books?

It seemed worth starting there, at any rate. And so, eyes aching and brain awash, I began to pore over the bad print of that damned volume. When I had scanned all eight hundred and eighty-two lines of the final Book, I knew that unless I had been nodding somewhere-which was all too probable, and the fear of it was part of what made all that followed one long purgatory indeed-the lines in Browning’s note did not appear in that section.

I was in despair-a furious raging despair, for Browning had out-thought me. But there was no time to lose: if the lines did not appear in the Sixth Book then they presumably appeared in the First; and there, sure enough, after reading another three hundred lines of meaningless rigmarole, I found what I was looking for:

… select your prey,

Waiting (the slaughter-weapons in the way

Strewing this very bench) …

The slaughter-weapons! Hardly had I found the words than I had snatched up a lantern and my travelling-pistol, stuffed Sordello into my pocket, and was gone!