Chapter III: The Exhumation

Seven years crawled past like a slow bleeding wound.

Gabriel became a recluse in his rambling house in Chelsea, barricaded behind high brick walls, surrounded by exotic animals, strange oriental furniture, and the relentless ghost of Elizabeth Siddal. He painted her face over and over again in Beata Beatrix—her eyes closed in a mystic trance, a white dove dropping a poppy into her hands as her life slipped away.

But ambition, long dormant under layers of opium and guilt, began to claw at his chest once more.

His friends—literary men, critics, and admirers—begged him to publish his poetry. They reminded him that his finest work, his purest verses, lay rotting in a damp wooden box beneath the clay of Highgate Cemetery. For years, he resisted. The thought of violating the grave made his stomach turn.

Yet, as his eyesight failed and his mind grew increasingly paranoid, the temptation grew too loud to ignore.

Late one October night in 1869, under the cover of absolute darkness, a small group of men gathered by the weed-choked plot in Highgate. Lanterns cast long, sickly yellow arcs across the tombstones. A team of workmen drove their spades into the heavy, clay-packed earth. Gabriel waited in a carriage nearby, too broken and terrified to watch the excavation begin, his hands trembling as he stared into the dark.

When the heavy wooden lid of the coffin was finally pried loose and hauled to the surface, the men stepped back, gasping.

The dampness of the earth had worked its strange, alchemical magic over the span of seven years. When the lantern light was lowered into the box, they saw her.

Elizabeth Siddal lay preserved in the stillness of the tomb, untouched by decay, her features as sharp and arresting as they had been the day she posed in the bonnet shop. But it was not her face that made the workmen cross themselves in horror.

It was her hair.

The magnificent, smoldering copper hair had continued to grow after death. It had filled the entire coffin, branching out in thick, heavy, shimmering waves that completely enveloped her body, wrapping her from head to toe in a radiant, living shroud. And nestled securely within those endless coils of copper lay the damp, intact manuscript of Gabriel’s poems.

One of the men reached in with trembling fingers, lifted the manuscript free from the golden strands, and brought it out to the carriage.

When the book was placed into Gabriel’s shaking hands, he opened the cover. The pages were slightly damp, smelling faintly of earth and old rain, but the ink was clear. His words stared back up at him.

Gabriel closed the book, pressed it to his chest, and looked out through the carriage window toward the dark silhouette of the open grave. In the flickering lantern light, it seemed for a fleeting second as though a pair of pale, mournful eyes were watching him from the depths of the gold.

He whispered her name into the dark, knowing that whatever poems he published, and whatever fame he clawed back from the world, he would never truly escape the prison of her hair.