Poe shadow (33 page)

They stepped toward the stairwell, Snodgrass pointing up to the chamber he had selected for Poe on the other side of the stairs. At my table, I tried my best to lose myself in the darkness.

“So you selected Mr. Poe’s room, and then sent for his relations?” asked the Baron.

“That is the peculiar thing. I did not need to. When I reached the bottom of the stairway again, I was met by Mr. Henry Herring, a relative of Poe’s by marriage.”

“Before you had called for him?” the Baron asked. I thought the detail strange, too, and strained to hear Snodgrass’s reply.

“That’s right. He was at the spot—perhaps with another one of Poe’s relatives; I cannot recall.”

This was another peculiarity. Neilson Poe had told me he first heard of Edgar Poe’s condition when the latter was in the hospital. If there was another relative with Henry Herring, and it was not Neilson, who was it?

Snodgrass continued. “I asked Mr. Herring whether he wished to take his relation to his house, but he strongly declined. ‘Poe has been very abusive and ungrateful on former occasions, when drunk,’ Mr. Herring explained to me. He suggested a hospital as a better place for him than the hotel. We sent a messenger to procure a carriage to the Washington College Hospital.”

“Who accompanied Mr. Poe to the hospital?”

Snodgrass looked down uncomfortably.

“You did send your friend there alone, then,” the Baron said.

“He could not sit up, you see, and there was no room in the carriage once he was lying flat on the seats. He was past locomotion! We carried him as if he were a corpse, lifted him into the coach. He resisted us, muttering, but nothing intelligible. We did not think he was fatally ill then. He was stupefied with drink, alas. That was his final demon.” Snodgrass sighed.

I had known already what the doctor felt of Poe’s purported drinking. Among the papers in his study, Duponte had come across a few verses on the subject of Poe’s death. “Oh! ’twas a saddening scene to find,” read Snodgrass’s refrains,

Thy proud young heart and noble brain
Steeped in the demon draught
—
thy mind
No longer fitted for the strain
Of thought melodious and sublime.

“So much for the death of Edgar Poe,” Snodgrass now remarked sullenly to the Baron. “I should hope you are satisfied and do not aim to put further light onto Poe’s sin. His failings have been mourned enough in public, and I have done everything I can not to say more of it for the time.”

“In that, Doctor, you have nothing to worry about,” said the Baron. “Poe took nothing to drink.”

“Why, what do you mean? I have no doubt. It was a debauch, sir, that killed Poe. His disease was
mania a potu,
even as the papers reported. I am a possessor of the facts.”

“I am afraid you witnessed facts,” said the Baron with a grin, “and may even possess them, but you fail to possess the
truth.
” The Baron Dupin put up his hand to silence Snodgrass’s protest. “You need not trouble to defend yourself, Dr. Snodgrass. You did your best. But it was not you, sir, nor was it any manner of alcohol that brought Edgar Poe low. There were forces quite more devilish turned against the poet that day. He shall yet be vindicated.” The Baron’s speech was now more to himself than to Snodgrass.

But Snodgrass still shook his hand in the air as though he had been meanly insulted. “Sir, I am expert in this area. I am an officer with standing of the Baltimore temperance committees! I know a…a…drunken sot, don’t I, when coming face to face with one? What are you attempting to do? You may as well try to outstorm the sky!”

The Baron repeated his words slowly, turning around in a circle, his nostrils flaring like a warhorse’s. “Edgar Poe shall be vindicated.”

“POE
HAD NOTHING
to drink,
the Baron said, and drinking did not cause his death, as the press reported.”

I was sitting opposite Duponte in my library now, perched at my chair’s edge.

Naturally, I did not wish to appear overly pleased about the Baron’s conversation with Snodgrass. I did not intend to praise the Baron
too
highly. He, after all, was our chief rival and obstacle.

“Oh, the look across Dr. Snodgrass’s face!” I accidentally continued. “Dupin might have punched him hard in the jaw.” I laughed. “Snodgrass—that false friend—deserved it, if someone were to ask me.”

An extraneous thought came into my mind, or a question really. Had there been suggestions, in the text of Poe’s tales, I asked myself, that C. Auguste Dupin had been a lawyer? I could not help it. The question chimed in my head without offering me a choice to reject it.

“And anything further?”

“What?” I stirred, realizing there had been an awkward interval of silence.

“Did you observe anything further today, monsieur?” asked Duponte, rolling his chair halfway back to the desk of newspapers.

I explained the other points of interest, particularly the sudden and inexplicable presence of Henry Herring at Ryan’s before Snodgrass had a chance to call for him, and the detailed descriptions of Poe’s disheveled dress. I was careful not even to say the name of Baron Dupin again, as much for my benefit as for Duponte’s.

“Neilson Poe, Herring! Now Snodgrass!” I exclaimed in distaste.

“What do you mean, monsieur?” Duponte asked.

“They were all at Poe’s funeral—men charged with honoring him. Instead, Snodgrass delivers a vision of Poe as a drunken sot. Neilson Poe takes no action to defend his cousin’s name. Henry Herring arrives quickly at Ryan’s, before he is even called for by Snodgrass, only to push his relative off alone into a hack to the hospital.”

Duponte passed a hand thoughtfully over his chin, sucked at his tongue, and then turned his chair so his back was toward me.

Around this time, the idea had begun to forcefully develop in my mind that, in encouraging my role as spy, Duponte had chiefly wished to keep me occupied. After the disquieting conference recorded above, I hardly spoke to him but to report the particulars of my latest findings, which he usually received with easy indifference; some evenings, if he had already retired by the time I returned to Glen Eliza, I would leave a concise letter detailing all I had observed on that day. I could not forget, moreover, that his somber inaction after discovering Bonjour’s prank had led to the great embarrassment between myself and Hattie in front of Glen Eliza. I suppose Duponte took notice of my cooler demeanor, but he never commented about it.

Over breakfast one day I said, “I’m thinking of composing a letter. To that temperance newspaper in New York that claimed knowledge of Poe having a debauch. It has been much on my mind. Someone should demand that they produce the name and account of this so-called witness.”

At first Duponte did not reply. Finally he looked up in a cloud of distraction.

“What do you think of the temperance periodical’s article, Monsieur Duponte?”

“That it is a temperance periodical,” he said. “Their stated desire is the universal elimination of the use of spirits, yet they have a different, in fact most contradictory need, monsieur: a reliable supply of well-regarded people ruined from drink to prove to their readers why their temperance periodical should remain in existence. Poe has become one of these.”

“So you do not think the magazine’s witness is real?”

“Doubtful.”

This raised my hopes and, for an instant, fully restored my fellowship with my companion. “And you have acquired the evidence, monsieur, which we might use to refute them. Can we prove yet that Poe did not drink when he was here?”

“I have never said that I believe he did not.”

I could not reply, so fixed was I in momentary shock. His implication was not absolutely certain, but I feared I understood it too well as the exact opposite of the Baron’s declaration at Ryan’s. My thoughts turned to changing the topic.…I did not want to hear him….

“In fact”—Duponte talked over me, preparing to confirm my dread—“he almost certainly did.”

Had I heard this correctly? Had Duponte come all this way only to affix Poe’s condemnation?

“Now, do tell me more about the subscriptions the Baron has been raising….” he said.

In my turmoil, I welcomed any other subject. Baron Dupin had continued to amass his fortune in subscription moneys around Baltimore. In one oyster tavern alone, he had gleefully received payment from twelve eager fellows. The proprietor, bothered by the Frenchman’s interruptions, had related to me the substance of his visits. “In two weeks, folks,” the Baron would say, “you shall hear the first true account of Poe’s death!” To Bonjour, he once added, “when they hear of my success in Paris, then, then…” His comment trailed off there; to the Baron Dupin’s hungry imagination, there was every possibility opening from this success….

A few days later, the Baron Dupin showed himself a bit distressed in the anteroom of his hotel. Afterward, I bribed a nearby porter and asked what had transpired. He said the Baron Dupin had called for his colored boy and found that he was gone. After much shouting and fussing, it was discovered through the civil authorities that Newman had been manumitted. The Baron knew he had been humbugged, and by whom. He laughed.

“Why do you laugh?”

“Because, my dear,” he said to Bonjour, “I should be smarter than that. Of course he has been freed.”

“You mean that Duponte has done this? But how?”

“You do not know Duponte. You shall yet know him better.”

I smiled at the Baron’s reported frustration.

On Duponte’s instructions, I had a day earlier found the name of Newman’s owner. He was a debtor who required quick funds, and thus had made the arrangement with the Baron to hire out Newman for an indefinite period of time. He had not known of the Baron’s promise to Newman to purchase his freedom. He was also appalled to hear that Newman had not gone to work for “a small family,” as had been advertised. Newman’s owner became angry when I told him of the deception. Not angry enough, though, to refuse my own check to him to secure the slave’s freedom. In my law practice I’d had extensive experience dealing with persons in great debt in a manner that neither offended their self-esteem nor overlooked their pressing needs.

I even escorted the young man to the train depot myself to send him on his way to Boston. When manumitting a slave, it was dictated that the former slave be quickly removed from the state so he would not negatively influence blacks who remained slaves. Newman was overjoyed as we walked, but seemed filled with worry, as though the ground might collapse beneath our feet before he was safely outside the state. He was not far off. We had only a few yards before reaching the depot when an enormous rumble came from behind and cleared the street of all who were on foot, including us.

Approaching were three omnibuses filled with black men, women, and children. Behind these conveyances were several men on horseback. I recognized one man, tall and silver-haired, as Hope Slatter, the most powerful of the city’s slave-dealers, or
nigger-traders.
The practice of the larger slave-traders in Baltimore was to house the slaves they purchased from sellers in their private prisons, usually a wing of their homes, until a ship could be sufficiently filled to merit the expenses of delivering a shipment to New Orleans, the hub of the southern trade. Slatter and his assistants were now driving to the harbor with approximately a dozen slaves in each bus.

Along the sides of the omnibuses waited other blacks, perpetually stopping to put their arms up to the windows of the omnibuses, and then running to keep up with them, to touch or speak with the occupants one final time. It could not be determined whether a greater amount of weeping occurred inside or out. From within, a voice shouted hysterically, loud enough for anyone who would listen. She tried to make clear that she had been sold to Slatter by her owner with the express provision that she not be separated from her family, as he was now doing.

I steered Newman away from this whole scene, but he was dangerously transfixed by the sight, perhaps the last of its kind he would see before leaving for the North.

The slave-trader and his assistants held up their whips and warned those surrounding the vehicles not to delay their pace. One man had climbed up to a window of the omnibus and was clinging to it, calling for his wife, whom he could not see. She pushed her way through other slaves in the bus to the window.

Slatter, spying this, pressed his horse around from the other side. “Do not continue!” he warned the man.

The climber ignored this, reaching inside to embrace his wife.

Out came Slatter’s cane, its strap wrapped closely around his wrist. He knocked the man in the back and then the stomach and left him writhing on the ground. “Away, little dog, before I call for your arrest! You do not wish what would follow that!”

As Slatter steered his horse to step around from the fallen man, his eyes drifted to my position—or, rather, to the young black standing with me.

“Who is this?” he asked gravely from his high saddle as he approached us. He pointed his cane down at Newman.