A Rich Full Death (27 page)

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
bête 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!

It was still pitch dark, and very cold. The streets were empty and every house tightly shuttered. I ran along the cobbles which were still greasy from the rain which had fallen earlier in the night—ran, and fell painfully, bruising my hip and almost shattering the lantern. Thereafter I continued at a more moderate pace into Via Tornabuoni and down towards the river. At the Trinity square I turned left, and in another minute was standing outside the boatyard where Grant’s body had been found.

The gate was shut, and the lock—forced open by the murderer—had been replaced. But with some little difficulty I was able to climb over, lit my lantern and started to search. After spending half an hour at my task—shifting heavy balks of wood with a jeweller’s care, to avoid making the slightest noise, fearing every minute that the watchman would take me—I had to admit defeat. If anything had been hidden in that courtyard, it had been done so well that I could not find it. But surely Browning could not have intended to make it so difficult, I thought. He must have meant to give me a fair chance at least, or where was his sport?

Then an intriguing thought occurred to me. The note had not spoken of Grant’s murder, but of ‘the last murder’. Now the
last
murder which had taken place, strictly speaking, was not that of Grant but of the ruffian Petacco. True, this was not supposed to have anything to do with the crimes we had been investigating, but it seemed worth at least having a look there.

The instant I stuck my lantern into the mews where the Italian had been found stabbed, I beheld a writing chalked up on the wall which told me, even before I looked any further, that I had found the place. It read:

A poor gnome that, cloistered up
In some rock-chamber with his agate cup

His topaz rod, his…, in these few
And their arrangement finds enough to do.

A few seconds later I had found ‘the slaughter-weapons’—a lead-weighted stick given to me by my father when I set out for Europe, with my name and address in Boston inscribed on a plate; and the other a knife on the Bowie pattern, with my initials engraved on the blade.

So far, so good; but what further tests lay ahead? Had I known, I think I might have turned that Bowie-blade against my own heart, and ended the torment then and there. How Robert Browning would have laughed to see me—huddled in the doorway of a slum tenement, an hour before dawn on a freezing winter’s morning, straining my bleary eyes over his most arrant piece of incomprehensible nonsense by the light of a lantern, at the raw end of a sleepless night!

Well, I shall not make you live the horror with me—in the end I found the quotation, and knew the thing I sought was a seed-pearl, tiny and inconspicuous, mounted on a tie-pin. This was an ornament which I am given to wearing on important occasions, and many people in Florence would have been able to identify it as mine. I cursed Browning roundly in Italian and English as I picked my way through the old centre of Florence towards Via di Calimala, where Tinker died.

The old bakery was not difficult to identify, even in the dark, with its wooden buttresses built across the street outside to shore it up, and posters warning that the building was in a dangerous condition. But where to look for that confounded pin? I blundered about the ruin, scaring a pack of rats that seethed about the floor. I could make out Browning’s inscription on the wall easily enough, but I did not trouble to read it yet: it would be time enough for that when I had found the pin.

In the end there was only one place left to look—the most obvious, logical, and dreadful. And there I saw the tiny gem, gleaming in the lamplight against the charred stones at the very back of the oven, far out of reach. There was no help for it—I would have to crawl in and retrieve it.

The horror of it, Prescott! For think—I had to enter that terrible cavity
head first!
There was barely enough room for my shoulders, and voices screamed in my head that I should get stuck, wedged there for ever; or that the building would collapse, as the notices threatened, pinning me there, my mouth full of Tinker’s ashes, while the rats came to feast on me.

Well, I survived—but the man who crawled out of that hell-hole, pearl tie-pin in hand, was but a shadow of the one who had gone in two minutes earlier. Already Browning’s devilish plan was working.

Upon the wall, by the light of my quivering lantern, I read the following:

    We watch construct,
In short, an……

The clues were getting shorter and more difficult, I noted sourly.

By now, though, despite everything, I felt I was ahead of the game. I had already solved two of the six riddles Browning had set me, and had the entire day to meet the challenge of the other four. For a moment I was even tempted to return home and sleep—sleep! How sweet the word sounded, lulling my ears with its insidious music.

But I soon saw how foolish this would be. After all, I had no notion of how much harder my task was likely to become. Would not my tormentor deliberately have made the first tests easier than those which came after, so as to encourage me to continue? Such, after all, is the essence of purgatory. In hell all hope must be abandoned, but is there not a kind of peace in that?

When my thoughts turned to the scene of the next crime—that ancient palace in the Borgo Pinti where the Chauncey sisters had used to receive spirits, and the faithful—I at once realised that this presented a problem quite different from any encountered so far. For Edith Chauncey had been murdered
inside
her home. How then had Browning been able to place any of my belongings at the scene? And how would I be able to get in to retrieve them?

First, at any rate, I had to know what I was looking for. I betook myself to a café which had just opened and flopped down at a table, drinking five coffees one after another in a vain attempt to sting my brain into some semblance of activity. Then I settled down to read through another slab of the unspeakable
Sordello
.

People came and went—street-sweepers, market porters, servants on their way to work, travelling salesmen, soldiers, priests, layabouts and ruffians of every description. Sordello himself might have entered and sung a lay or two without attracting more than a casual glance from me. Eight hundred and forty lines were my lot this time, before I found that the missing word was the unhelpful ‘engine’. The next ten lines made matters clearer: ‘A kernel of strange wheelwork … grows into shape by quarters and by halves; remark this tooth’s spring …’ Very good, Mr Browning, I thought—you have stolen my watch. I settled my bill and set out for the Chaunceys’ home.