Poe shadow (32 page)

“Not to see me in particular, Miss Hattie,” I protested.

“You are in love after all, Monsieur Quentin. She’s beautiful!” Bonjour tossed her head. She leaned forward as though peeping at a new litter of kittens. Hattie flinched at the attention of the stranger, wrapping her shawl tighter.

“Tell me, how did he pop the important question?” Bonjour asked Hattie.

“Please, Bonjour!” When I turned my back to Hattie to admonish Bonjour, Hattie climbed into her coach and ordered it away. “Hattie, wait!” I cried.

“I must go home, Quentin.” I chased the carriage and called out to Hattie before losing too much ground as they passed into the forest. When I turned back to Glen Eliza, Bonjour had vanished as well, and I was alone.

The next morning, I firmly rebuked the chambermaid who had acted as guard to Bonjour’s fraud.

“Say, Daphne, that you truly thought that young woman, hardly old enough to be my wife, was my great-aunt!”

“I did not say
great
-aunt, sir, but aunt only, as she said. She was in her shawl and the finest hat, sir, so I did not judge her age. Nor did the other gentleman question her on the matter when he entered there. And more so, sir, in large families one can have many aunts of all ages. I knew a girl of twenty-two whose aunt was not yet three years old.”

I turned my attention to her most salient point, Duponte. It was possible, perhaps, that in the midst of his usual unbreakable concentration and with the library’s stained glass keeping it dim even in the day, he had noticed no more than a feminine silhouette at the library table when he had gone inside for his book. Still, this seemed unlikely. I confronted Duponte on the issue. I could not restrain my anger.

“The Baron shall now possess nearly half, if not more, of the information we have gathered! Monsieur, did you not notice Bonjour
right in front of you
when you walked into the library yesterday?”

“I am not blind,” he replied. “And to a very beautiful girl! It is a dim room, but not so dim as that. I saw her plainly.”

“Why didn’t you call for me, for God’s sake? The situation has been much damaged!”

“The situation?” Duponte repeated, perhaps sensing that my frenzy went beyond her infiltration of our investigation on the case. Indeed, I wondered if I could ever look the same again in Hattie’s eyes.

“All the intelligence we had possessed that they had not,” I said more calmly and with decision.

“Ah. Not so, Monsieur Clark. Our hold on the events surrounding the time of Monsieur Poe’s death is dependent only in very small part in possessing the details and facts, which are the blood of the newspapers. That’s not the heart of our knowledge. Do not mishear me: details are elemental, and at times trying to acquire, but not in themselves enlightenment. One must know how to read them properly to find their properties of truth—and the Baron Dupin’s reading of them has nothing to do with ours. If your concern is that we shall give the Baron some advantage over us, worry not, for it is the opposite of what you think. If his reading is incorrect, than the more particulars he must read, the farther we move ahead of him.”

Dear Sir,
—
There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan’s 4th Ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, and I assure you, he is in need of immediate assistance.

A LOCAL PRINTER
named Walker had signed this note in an urgent scrawl that had almost sent the pencil through the coarse paper. It was dated 3 October 1849 and addressed to Dr. Joseph Snodgrass, who lived close to Ryan’s, which on that election day when Poe was found also served as a polling place for the Congressional and state election.

A few days after Duponte and I occupied the study of Dr. Snodgrass, and Hattie stood dazed as I lay entangled with another woman, the Baron Dupin called on Snodgrass again.

I had been watching the Baron when he suddenly idled at a corner of Baltimore Street as though he had forgotten that he had any cares in the world. I was across the street, remaining inconspicuous among the crowds of people heading to hotels and restaurants for supper and the high baskets balanced on the heads of laborers and slaves. After a seemingly unending time waiting for the Baron to do something, I was distracted by the rumble of a carriage that swerved suddenly to the side near me.

From inside the carriage, I heard a voice:

“What are you doing? Driver! Why are you stopping here?”

Confirming that the Baron had not moved from his position, I decided to investigate the identity of the perturbed passenger. When I was nearing the carriage, I came to a standstill. I knew him instantly as a man I’d first seen at the burial ground on Green and Fayette. He’d stood restlessly that day, shifting from foot to foot, at the funeral of Edgar Poe.

“Do you hear me, driver?” continued his complaint. “Driver?”

Here, by some strange ordering of the universe, the mourner had left that dark dream-land, a place of fog and mud, and had been driven right to me in the clear of day. After my meetings with Neilson Poe and Henry Herring, I was now with the third of the four mourners. Only the fourth remained, Z. Collins Lee—a classmate of Poe’s from college who, as I’d recently heard, had been appointed a United States district attorney.

I stepped to the side of the coach. But the man had now wriggled to the other side, shouting out at the driver and fidgeting with the handle to open the door. I was about to speak, to call his attention through the window. Then his door opened.

“Isn’t it Dr. Snodgrass!” a voice bellowed.

I wheeled away from the window and hid myself near the horses.

It was the Baron Dupin’s voice.

“You again,” Snodgrass said contemptuously, stepping down. “What are you doing here?”

“Nothing at all,” the Baron said innocently. “You?”

“Sir, I beg your leave. I have another appointment. And this rascal driver—”

Leaning over, I could see the Baron’s light-skinned slave Newman on the driver’s seat and I understood. The Baron had not been idling across the street; he had been waiting for this very man to be delivered to him. No doubt he had stationed Newman in a place where he had known Snodgrass would look for a hackney coach. The first time I had eavesdropped on Snodgrass with the Baron I had seen Snodgrass’s face only obliquely. Now the Baron removed the Walker note from his coat; the few sentences written by Walker the day Poe was found, recorded above. He showed it to Snodgrass.

Snodgrass was astonished. “Who are you?” he asked.

“You were involved that day,” said the Baron, “in tending to Mr. Poe’s well-being. If I chose, this note could be printed in the papers as proof that you were responsible for him. Some people, not knowing better, will assume you were hiding something both by not coming forward honestly with more details and, worse, by sending Mr. Poe alone to the hospital.”

“Balderdash! Why would they assume that?” Snodgrass asked.

The Baron laughed good-naturedly. “Because I shall tell the newspapers just that.”

Snodgrass hesitated, wavering between compliance and anger. “Did you enter my house, sir? If you stole this, sir…”

Bonjour now joined the Baron’s side.

“You! Tess!” This had been Bonjour’s assumed name at the Snodgrass home. “My chambermaid?” Now Snodgrass could not help choosing anger. “I shall call for the police this moment!”

“There may be evidence of a small theft you can present them with. But there is also evidence…well, should I mention?” the Baron said, putting a finger to his lips in restraint. “Yes, should I mention there were other private papers of yours we have happened upon…? Oh, the public and all of your blessed committees and societies and so forth would be most interested if we were to kick up a dust…!Do you not think so…
Tess,
my dear?”

“Blackmail!” Snodgrass stopped himself again, outraged but also hesitant.

“Unpleasant business, I agree.” The Baron waved it away. “Back to Poe. You see, that is what really interests us. If the public knows your story—if they believe you tried to save his life…that would be different. But
we
must have your story first.”

Baron Dupin had a sly talent for shifting effortlessly from badgering to dandling. He had performed the same dance with Dr. Moran, at the hospital where Poe died.

“Come now. Back into the carriage, Doctor—let us visit Ryan’s!”

At least that is what I imagined the Baron said next as the defeated Snodgrass contemplated a reply, for I had already started away to find an unobtrusive place to wait at the tavern, knowing that was where they would be headed.

“Once I received that letter from Mr. Walker, I repaired to this drinking-saloon—tavern is too dignified a name—and, sure enough,” Snodgrass continued as he escorted the Baron inside,
“there he was.”

I sat at a table in a sunless corner of the room, obscured and further darkened by the shadow of the stairwell that led up to the rooms available for hire, which were often taken by those customers not sober enough to find their way home.

“Poe!” interjected the Baron.

Snodgrass stopped at a dingy armchair. “Yes, he was sitting over here with his head dropped forward. He was in a condition that had been but too faithfully depicted by Mr. Walker’s note—which, by the bye, you have had no business to read.”

The Baron only grinned at the reproof. Snodgrass continued dejectedly.

“He was so altered from the neatly dressed, vivacious gentleman I knew, that I hardly would have distinguished him from the crowd of intoxicated men, whom the occasion of an election had called together here.”

“This whole room was a polling place that night?” the Baron asked.

“Yes, for the local ward. I remember the whole sight well. Poe’s face was haggard, not to say bloated,” said Snodgrass, unbothered by the contradictory adjectives. “And unwashed, his hair unkempt, and his whole physique repulsive. His forehead, with its wonderful breadth, and that full-orbed and mellow yet soulful eye—lusterless and vacant now.”

“Did you have a good look at his clothing?” The Baron was scribbling at a railroad pace in his notebook.

Snodgrass seemed to be dazed by his own memory. “There was nothing good to see, I’m afraid. He wore a rusty, almost brimless, tattered and ribbonless palm-leaf hat. A sack-coat of thin and sleazy black alpaca, ripped at several of the seams, and faded and soiled, and pants of a steel-mixed pattern of cassinette, half worn and badly fitting. He had on neither vest nor neck-cloth, while the bosom of his shirt was both crumpled and badly soiled. On his feet, if I remember aright, there were boots of coarse material, with no sign of having been blacked for a long time.”

“How did you proceed, Dr. Snodgrass?”

“I knew Poe had several relatives in Baltimore. So I ordered a room for him at once. I accompanied a waiter upstairs and, after selecting a sufficient apartment, was returning to the bar-room to have the guest conveyed to his chamber so he could be comfortable until I got word to his relatives.”