Poe shadow (26 page)

“Perhaps our little gift to you has woken up, Dr. Moran.” The Baron laughed in a way perhaps no man had ever done in the immediate vicinity of two dead bodies. The Baron leaned through the opening and peered down into the shaft. I was now in the dark center of the passage and, miraculously, was blocked from the Baron’s view by the bag with the corpse. He returned his head to the room.

“Never mind,” said Moran, “we secure the windows and doors with ropes in this building, and the place still seems to make more noise than any of the patients ever did.”

I then saw Bonjour trade places with the Baron at the shaft opening, and I became more anxious. She leaned fearlessly inside the horrible compartment.

“Take care, miss!” Moran said.

Bonjour now launched herself fully into the shaft, and for a moment I was certain she would land on top of me. Instead she caught the rope with one hand and then between her knees to steady herself. Moran must have been protesting above, since I could hear the Baron trying to placate him. I clung to my position for my life and prayed for a miracle. I could almost feel Bonjour’s eyes pierce the darkness directly onto my uncovered head.

She lowered herself inch by inch toward me, raising my side of the rope so that I was involuntarily moving nearer to her.

Eyes closed tight, ignoring the drops of cold perspiration, I waited for my discovery. A terrible inhuman shriek broke my concentration—at a breath, an army of voracious black rats rushed up the walls of the shaft. They ran
en masse
toward Bonjour, as though involuntarily attracted by her. Several propelled themselves onto my shoulders and back, their wiry claws attaching to my coat and daring me not to scream.

“Only rats,” Bonjour murmured after a moment, then kicked some of the creatures off the walls, sending them dropping down. The Baron extended a hand and helped her back into the lecture room.

“For goodness’ sake,” I gasped in gratitude to the beasts. I brushed off two that had remained perched on my back.

Since I could still hear most of the conversation, I decided to pull myself back up only a few inches and stay at that safer position.

“If you will go on with the details, Doctor,” said the Baron. “You told Poe you would bring his friends to him.”

Moran paused in hesitation. “Perhaps I should consult with Mr. Poe’s family and friends before speaking with you further. There were some cousins of his, when we were treating him—if I remember right, a Mr. Neilson Poe and a friend, a lawyer, Mr. Z. Collins Lee…”

The Baron sighed loudly.

“Let us see what is on the doctor’s table,” Bonjour said playfully. I could hear her rustling the white blanket on the naked cadaver.

“See here!” Moran gasped with obvious embarrassment. “What are you doing?”

“I have seen men before,” Bonjour replied happily.

“Do not shock the young doctor, my dear!” the Baron cried.

“Perhaps we should take this deceased gentleman home for our study,” Bonjour said, rolling the table away. Dr. Moran protested vigorously. Bonjour continued: “Come now, Doctor. No halves—finder keeper. Besides, I wonder, Baron, if the family of that young woman we have hoisted up in that shaft would be interested to know her body’s missing from the grave and could be found here, waiting to be diced to pieces by the dandyish doctor.”

“Most interested, I’d think, sweetheart!” said the Baron.

“What? But we do this to learn to save lives! You brought that other body here yourselves!”

“On your request, Doctor,” said Bonjour, “and you have accepted it in exchange for the information my master asks for.”

The Baron,
sotto voce,
leaned in to Moran: “You can see you had the wrong sow by the ear, Doctor.”

The heroism of the doctor’s voice deflated. “I see the gist now. Very well. Back to Poe then. I told him, in trying to comfort him, that he would soon enjoy the society of his friends. He broke out with much energy and said, I remember,
The best thing my best friend could do would be to blow out my brains with a pistol.
When he beheld what had become of him, he was ready to sink into the earth, and so on, as one talks when depressed in spirits. He then slipped into a violent delirium until Saturday evening, when he began calling for ‘Reynolds’ again and again, for six or seven hours until the morning, as I have told you the other day. Having enfeebled himself from exertion he said, ‘Lord help my poor soul’ and expired. That is all.”

“What we wonder now,” said the Baron, “is whether Poe had been induced to have taken some sort of artificial stimulus, a drug—opium, perhaps—that put him in this condition?”

“I do not know. The truth, sir, is that Poe’s condition was quite sad and strange, but there was no particular odor of alcohol on his person, that I can remember.”

During this exchange, I alternated between careful attentiveness to their words and desperate attempts to calm my pounding heart and breathing from my near discovery by Bonjour. When they closed the interview to the Baron’s satisfaction, and I felt convinced by listening for footsteps they had left the fourth floor, I climbed past the body and heaved myself through the opening in the wall. I checked that the coast was clear and dropped into the lecture room. Flattening myself on the floor, I coughed out the air of the dead and gulped in rapid, grateful bursts.

You will perhaps judge me harshly for not immediately relating my adventures to Duponte, and yet you have seen yourself the frequent inflexibility of his philosophies. I am not of a particularly philosophical cast. Duponte was born an analyst, a reasoner; I, an observer. Though it may occupy only a lower rung of the ladder of wisdom, observation requires practicality. Perhaps Duponte, and our investigations generally, needed a light shove toward the pragmatic.

I should have explained above, when I was searching for the mention of Henry Reynolds, how it was I had free access to the newspapers we kept in the library without Duponte taking notice. Since the first day we had disembarked in Baltimore, Duponte had inhabited the library and oversaw all the contents of his sanctum. However, when he was reading other things he would remove himself from the increasingly cramped library to different chambers and bedrooms of Glen Eliza I had forgotten existed. He would choose the odd book that I had on my shelf; or one of my father’s atlases of an obscure province of the world; or a pamphlet in French that my mother had brought from abroad. Duponte also read Poe, a practice that did not escape my interest.

At times the concentration with which he read Poe reminded me of the sheer nourishment the tales had provided me for so many years. But usually it was far more scholarly than that. Duponte read mechanically, like a literary critic. The critic never lets his reading overtake him; he never pulls the pages promiscuously close to his face and never wishes to be brought into the crevices of the author’s mind, for such a journey would relinquish control. Thus, often a reader will read a magazine critic’s notice of a book, after having already read the book himself, eager to compare perspectives, and think, “This cannot be the book I read! There must be another version, in which everything has changed, and I shall have to find it, too!”

I thought a dispassionate survey of Poe’s works by Duponte quite fitting. I believe it allowed Duponte crucial insights into Poe’s character and into the mysterious circumstances that we had begun to examine.

“If only it was known which ship Poe arrived to Baltimore on,” I said one afternoon.

Duponte became instantly animated. “The local papers speak of it as the unknown details of his arrival. That
they
do not know, monsieur, certainly does not confine it to the bounds of the
unknown.
The answer is plainly presented in the articles from the Richmond newspapers published in the last months of Poe’s life.”

“When Poe was lecturing on various subjects of poetry and literature.”

“Precisely. He was doing so in order to raise money for his proposed magazine
The Stylus,
as he mentioned also in his letters to you, Monsieur Clark. We may not know on which ship Poe sailed from Richmond to Baltimore, but this is hardly what is important, and hardly qualifies as making the
purpose
of his trip unknown. His reason for coming to Baltimore is quite knowable to any person employing thought. From the rumors in the newspapers over the last two years before his death, Poe had been involved in various romantic unions since his wife’s death. In this last period, he had just engaged himself to a wealthy woman in Richmond, and so his trip to Baltimore would likely not have been for the purposes of any romantic interlude. Now, in view of the fact that his intended, one Mrs. Shelton, was known as wealthy by all periodical editors, and thus naturally by everyone else (for editors rarely know something the mob does not know first); in view of this fact that her wealth was widely known, Poe might properly feel the need to deflect any perception by the public that he was set to marry her because she was ‘bankable.’”

“He would certainly never marry someone for money!”

“Whether or not he would, and your indignation on the question is quite beside the point, the result is exactly the same. This makes it easier for our review. If Poe
were
marrying her for money, it would be all the more reason to deflect the perception of it in order to avoid ruining the engagement if she suspected it. If his motives were pure ones, as you believe, his goal would remain identical—to raise money, this time in order to provide for his own expenses rather than rely unjustly on hers. Either way, finding he had not earned as much as he hoped in Richmond, he would come to Baltimore to gain professional support and subscribers for
The Stylus,
and thus bolster his financial prospects independently of Mrs. Shelton’s.”

“Which explains why he went first to see Nathan Brooks, for Dr. Brooks is a well-known magazine editor. Except,” I said grimly, “that, as I saw for myself, Dr. Brooks’s house had caught on fire.”

“Poe came here with plans, Monsieur Clark, to remake his life. I think we shall find that he died in a state of hope, not in despair.”

But I remembered Dr. Moran’s statement about Poe: he did not know when he had come to Baltimore or how he came to be here. How did this conform to the other particulars now before us?

The above conversation with Duponte occurred a few days after my secret call to the hospital. Meanwhile, in my visits to the reading rooms and my various errands around the city, I felt an increasing number of eyes on me. I thought that perhaps it was an unconscious product of my guilt at hiding my previous discoveries from Duponte, or my distraction whenever I remembered Hattie’s distressed behavior in my last encounter with her at the gates to her house.

There was one man in particular, a free black of about forty years old, whom I observed near me on more than one occasion in crowds on the street or from the window of a carriage I was riding in. He had sharply angled features and was of solid physical dimensions. It was usually easy to differentiate between the free and enslaved blacks by the superior and often quite fashionable dress of the former, although certain city slaves—slave dandies, as they were known—were provided exquisite clothing to fashionably match that of their owners.

I thought of the Phantom who had followed me once, long before I had dreamed of finding a man like Duponte or hiding from a man like the Baron Dupin; I thought, too, of the dead stare of the Baron’s man Hartwick as he trailed me through the halls of Versailles, preparing to grab me. Once, I saw this new stranger standing across from where I was walking on Baltimore Street. I was not surprised to see this presumed freeman speaking quietly with the Baron Dupin. The Baron took his arm enthusiastically.

That same evening, Duponte was reading Poe’s tale “Ligeia” on a sofa in the drawing room. Von Dantker had left with his brushes some hours before in a state of high irritation. Duponte had announced that he no longer wanted to see Von Dantker’s staring face whenever he looked up, and had informed the artist that he would have to sit behind him. Von Dantker had naturally protested on the basis that he could not paint Duponte’s back, but Duponte had refused to argue, and a system had soon been devised whereby a mirror was placed in front of Duponte and Von Dantker sat behind the analyst. He had positioned another large mirror by his easel, facing the first mirror, to transfer the original reflection back to the correct orientation. I thought both men quite mad. But Von Dantker, taking bites from the “olycoke”—a strange cake fried in lard—he always brought with him, had continued on with his project.

I busied myself reading a copy of Thomas Moore’s
Irish Melodies,
which I had procured from a book-stand. Dr. Carter, Poe’s friend in Richmond, had told the newspaper there that Poe had been reading Moore’s poems when he visited his office. It was also said that during his stay in Richmond Poe quoted this verse of Moore’s to a young lady he befriended: “I feel like one / Who treads alone / Some banquet hall deserted.”

My thoughts floated to the distracting subject of Hattie. “I wonder,” I said, interrupting Duponte’s reading.

“Yes?”

“Well, I am wondering whether a woman who says that things are ‘different’ means to say that her emotions, that is,
affections,
have changed, or rather refers to other, less profound matters.”

“Are you,” Duponte asked, putting aside the book, “soliciting my opinion on the subject, monsieur?”

I hesitated, hoping he would not believe that I was attempting to misdirect his skills of ratiocination at a purely personal concern, although that was precisely what I was doing.

He continued without an answer from me. “Do you, Monsieur Clark, believe it is the larger or smaller concern that her words refer to?”

I considered this. “Well, which is the larger and which the smaller of the concerns?” I asked.

“Exactly the quarrel, monsieur. To persons who are not the direct recipients of her affections, the question of her emotional state would be the
smaller
one; the state of the roof of her house, or a loan she may have secured from the bank, and whether these are
different
from some previous state of affairs would be the larger and most crucial question. To the person who seeks or has sought her affections, those emotions would be by far the more significant question to unravel, whereas if her roof were sinking entirely it would make little difference to that suitor. Therefore, your answer is that the meaning of her words would vary depending very much on whom she is addressing.”