Poe shadow (29 page)

At first, I fell under a spell of shock at the news. Could Hattie really have found someone else? Could I have managed to forfeit a woman as wonderful as Hattie, while at the same time doing what seemed right and necessary?

Then I realized. I thought back to Peter’s sage warning that it would not be easy to appease Auntie Blum, and recognized this letter as a ploy by that cunning woman to torment me into apologies and excessive confessions of my wrong toward her niece.

I was not above this tactic, or beneath it, as the case might be.

I sat upon the sofa, thinking whether I had by nature of my present endeavor given up all proper intercourse with society. I was, after all, now in the company of men of great intensity like Duponte and the Baron, who defied any social customs and sought action that could not be obtained by ordinary politeness.

When the flames began running terrifically along the log, and I was contemplating these matters, I had a sudden thought about the Baron Dupin as though his face had been reflected back to me from the fire. It came to me while I was trying to picture the man without having the original present.

No portrait-maker or Daguerrean artist could do the Baron any justice because of the changes that constantly befell his features. In fact, if it were attempted, the Baron would likely grow more like the portrait canvas rather than the other way around. One would have to catch him asleep to see his true form.

“Monsieur Duponte,” I said, with a leap to my feet, as the fire cracked and popped to life. “It is you!”

He looked up at my dramatic pronouncement.

“He is you!” I waved my hands in one direction, then the other. “That is why he schemed to have Von Dantker here!”

It took me three or four tries to express the meaning of my realization: the Baron Dupin had appropriated the form of Auguste Duponte! The Baron had tautened the muscles in his face, had weighed down the ends of his mouth, had—for all I could say—used some spell of magic to sharpen the very contours of his head and adjust his height. He also selected his dress like Duponte’s, in the loose cut of the cloth and dull colors. He left behind the jewelry and rings with which he was formerly adorned, and smoothed the wilderness of ringlets in his hair. The Baron had subtly, using observation and the study of Von Dantker’s sketches and portraiture, remade himself into a version of Duponte.

The reason, I presumed, was simple. To irritate his opponent; to avenge the provocation of Tindley; to sneer at the nobler being who dared to compete with him in this endeavor. Whenever he saw Duponte around the streets, the Baron could hardly speak without breaking into laughter at the brilliance of his newly instituted taunt.

An abomination, a conjurer, a swindler: masquerading as a great man!

He had also—somehow—I vow to you—he had also transmogrified the very timbre and pitch of his voice. To parrot with precision that of Duponte’s! Even the accent was adjusted to perfection. If I had been in a dark chamber, and had been listening to a monologue by this falsifier, I would have happily addressed the fiend as though he were my accustomed and true companion.

The Baron’s petty masquerade dogged me. It haunted me. It ground down my teeth. I do not think it bothered Duponte half as much. When I complained about the Baron’s ploy, Duponte’s mouth lengthened into an enigmatic arch, as though he thought the taunt amusing, child’s play. And when he met his competitor, he bowed at the Baron all the same as before. The sight was astounding, particularly at nighttime, seeing them there together. Eventually, the only certain way to distinguish them was by the identity of the devoted associates, me on one side and Mademoiselle Bonjour on the other.

Finally, one day, I confronted Duponte. “When this fiend scoffs at you, mocks you, you allow it to continue unchallenged.”

“What would you counsel me to do, Monsieur Clark? Propose a duel?” asked Duponte, more mildly than I probably deserved.

“Box his ears, certainly!” I said, though I do not suppose I would have personally done so. “Become quite warm with him, at least.”

“I see. Should that help our cause?”

I conceded that it might not. “Just so. It would remind him, I should think, that he is not alone playing this game. He believes, in the infinite deception of his brain, that he has already won, Monsieur Duponte!”

“He has subscribed to a mistaken belief, then. The situation is quite the opposite. The Baron, I am afraid for him, has already lost. He has reached the end, as have I.”

I leaned forward in disbelief. “Do you mean…?”

Duponte was speaking of our very purpose, the unraveling of the entire mystery of Poe…

But I see I have jumped too far ahead of myself, as I tend to do. I will have to retrace my steps before I return to the above dialogue. I had begun to describe my life as a spy, stimulated by Duponte’s desire to know the Baron’s secrets and plans.

As I noted before, the Baron changed hotels frequently to elude pursuers. I maintained my knowledge of their lodgings by following as one tired hotel porter moved their baggage from his hotel to the custody of a brother porter. I do not know how the Baron answered questions about the peculiar practice of moving hotels when he signed each new register. If I ever found myself doing the same, and could not give the actual reason—“You see, sir, my creditors are looking to make me a head shorter”—I would have claimed I was writing a guidebook for strangers to Baltimore, and required a basis to compare lodging choices. The proprietors would shower you with advantages. This was such a good idea, I was tempted to write of it as an anonymous suggestion to the Baron.

Meanwhile, Duponte instructed me to find out more information about Newman, the slave the Baron had engaged, and so I insinuated myself into a discussion with him in the anteroom one afternoon.

“I gonna leave Baltimore after he spring me,” Newman said to my questions about the Baron. “I got a brother and sister in Boston.”

“Why not run away now? There are northern states that will protect you,” I commented.

He pointed to a printed notice in the entrance hall of the hotel. It stated that no colored person, “bond or free,” could leave town without first depositing his papers and taking a white man to be his surety.

“I ain’t no dumb nigger,” he said, “to be hunted down and dead. I’d as good as go to my owner and beg to be shot.”

Newman was right; he would be traced even if his owner did not especially care about the loss.

I should include an additional note, to avoid any perplexity, about the language of the young slave. Among the Africans, both slaves and free, in the southern and in northern states, the use of the word “nigger” was not about race. I have heard blacks talking of a mulatto with that term and even calling their masters “them white niggers.” “Nigger” was used by blacks to mean a low fellow of any sort, color, or class. This rather ingeniously redefines the ugly word, until it will no doubt be removed from our language altogether. For those who ever doubted the intelligence of that mistreated race, I point to this linguistic stroke and wonder if whites would have thought of the same.

“And what of the other Negro?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The other black engaged by the Baron,” I replied. I had become sufficiently convinced that the stranger I had seen once before with the Baron had been assigned by him to watch me—spying on me even as I spied on him.

“There ain’t no other, sir, black or white. Baron D. don’t want too many people to know him real close.”

With my new proximity, I was surprised, and not a little pleased, to find a diminishment in the bluster the Baron displayed. On several occasions in my hearing, Bonjour would pose a rather elementary question about the Baron’s conclusions regarding Poe; the Baron Dupin would demur. This brightened my hopes at our own success. But I suppose this also placed something of a negative and unsettling fear over me that Duponte would also be at a loss, as though there was a mystical connection between the two men. Maybe this was a subtle consequence on my mind of the new and startling resemblance between Claude Dupin and Auguste Duponte, as though one were real and one an image in the mirror, as in the doomed last encounter of Poe’s own William Wilson. Other times it seemed both were mirror images of the same being.

Their behaviors, though, were different enough.

In the public eye, the Baron continued his loud, obnoxious proclamations. He began raising a subscription for a broadsheet he proposed to publish, and a lecture series he would give, on the true and sensational details of Poe’s death. “Come, fly around, fly around me, gentlemen and gals, you shall never believe what happened under your noses!” he proclaimed in taverns and public houses, like a showman or mountebank. I must own, he was convincing, superficially; nearly another Mr. Barnum. You half expected him to announce to some street crowd that he would now transform this container of bran into a…live…guinea pig!

And the money that followed him wherever he went! I could not fathom the number of Baltimoreans who willingly forked over hard money into the hands of this storyteller; Baltimoreans, I sadly say, who exhibited no signs of doing the same for a book of Poe’s poetry. Yet a veritable fortune was lent to the notion that the Baron Dupin would unveil the events of the same poet’s last and darkest hours on this earth. Culture was enjoyed as long as it came with conflict. I recalled the time two actors simultaneously played Hamlet on nearby stages in Baltimore and everyone argued with passion about his own favorite Hamlet, not for the play itself but for the competition of it.

The lyceum lecture would be held at the Assembly Rooms of the Maryland Institute. The Baron began sending wires to repeat the same announcements of lectures to be subsequently held in New York, Philadelphia, Boston…. His plans were expanding, and ours seemed to fall more and more in his shadow.

The Baron, along the way, had further pried open Pandora’s box of rumors in the newspapers.

Some samples: Poe was found robbed in a gutter by a watchman; or the dying Poe was lying across some barrels in the Lexington Market covered entirely with flies; no, said another, Poe met with former cadets from West Point, where the poet had learned musket and munitions, dealing now in some private governmental operation that introduced Poe to a dangerous intrigue and probably related to his reported roles in his wild youth fighting for the Polish army and with the Russians; not so: Poe’s vain end had been a debauch at an acquaintance’s lively and intemperate birthday party; or he had been guilty of suicide. One female acquaintance claimed that as a ghost Poe had sent her poems from the spiritual world about being fatally pummeled in an attempted theft of some letters! Meanwhile, a local paper had received a wire from a temperance newspaper in New York that claimed to have met a witness to Poe’s raging debauchery in the day before he was discovered at Ryan’s, proving for the recorder at Judgment Day that all was Poe’s own fault.

While I sat surveying these articles in the reading room, that reliable, ancient clerk came over to me.

“Oh, Mr. Clark! I am still thinking of who had given me those articles on your Mr. Poe. Indeed, I
have
remembered distinctly how he asked me to give the articles to you.”

Suddenly, I lost all attention to the papers before me. “What, sir?” It had never occurred to me that those cuttings had been given to the clerk with specific instructions that they be delivered to
me.
I asked if I understood him correctly.

“Right.”

“This is startling!” I cried, thinking of how that single extract alluding to the “real” Dupin had completely changed the course of events.

“How so?”

“Because someone—” I did not finish the statement. “It is a matter of moment that you tell me more of this person, whoever he is. I am much occupied these days, but will call on you again. Try—please do try—to remember.”

My imagination was fired by this new revelation. Meanwhile, I found a less speculative distraction in determining to settle matters with Hattie. I wrote her a long letter, acknowledging that Auntie Blum’s cruel though well-meaning tactic had encouraged me, and proposing that upon my receiving word from her we should commence again the plans for our union.

TRACING THE ACTIVITY
of the Baron Dupin, through covert observation and interviews, I learned that nearly a week earlier, Bonjour had insinuated herself as the chambermaid at the home of Dr. Joseph Snodgrass, the man whom Dr. Moran remembered had ordered the carriage that brought Edgar Poe to the hospital from Ryan’s on that gloomy October day. The Baron Dupin had paid a visit to Snodgrass earlier to find out the details of that stormy October afternoon. Snodgrass adamantly declined an interview. He insisted he would not contribute to the industry of gossiping about the worthy poet’s death.

Soon after, Bonjour had secured the position among the help in Snodgrass’s house. Remarkably, she did this with no position open. She had appeared in neat, unostentatious dress, on the doorstep of the fashionable brick house at 103 North High Street. An Irish servant girl opened the street door for her.