Poe shadow (36 page)

Seeing my lack of interest in the point, the temperance side of the man became more adamant. “It is an appalling danger to society, Mr. Clark!”

“There is still much more to be done, Benson,” I reasoned with him. “In relation to Poe, I mean. You can help us—”

“Us? Are there others involved?”

Duponte? The Baron? I was not confident of an answer. “You can help. We can do this work together, Mr. Benson; we can find the truth you sought following Poe’s death.”

“I can do nothing more here. And you, a lawyer, Mr. Clark, do you not have quite enough to keep you occupied?”

“I have taken a leave from my situation,” I said softly.

“I see,” he replied knowingly and with a tone of some satisfaction. “Mr. Clark, the most dangerous temptation in life is to forget to tend to your own business—you must learn to respect yourself enough to preserve your own interests. If pursuing the causes of others—even in charity—prevents your own happiness, you will be left with nothing.

“The populace wishes to see Poe how they wish to see him, martyr or sinner; nothing you do prevents that,” he went on. “Perhaps we do not care what happened to Poe. We have imagined Poe dead for our own purposes. In some sense, Poe is still very much living. He will be constantly changed. Even if you were somehow to find the truth, they would only deny it in favor of a newer speculation. We cannot sacrifice ourselves on an altar of Poe’s mistakes.”

“Surely you have not come to believe those temperance men who fought you? That Poe caused all this by some petty vice?”

“Not at all,” said Benson with weak defiance. “But had he been more cautious, had he used his passions to address the claims of the world rather than only those of his high order of intellect, all this might not have had to happen—and the millstone around his neck would never have become ours.”

I felt a type of relief after my interview with Benson—relief that someone else had attempted to find the truth behind Poe’s death. Benson’s undertaking had proven Peter Stuart and Auntie Blum wrong. I had not embarked on the quest of a madman. Here was another; an accountant.

Relief flooded me from another direction, too, regarding the Baron and Duponte. I had stopped just short of betraying my allegiance to Duponte in favor of a criminal, a false showman. For what, a series of narrow coincidences between the Baron and Poe’s tales? I had lost Hattie forever and would never find a person in the world who knew me as she did. The law practice that my father’s good name helped build was sinking into extinction. My friendship with Peter was no more. At least I’d not made a horrible mistake with Duponte, too. I felt, returning home from Benson’s, as if I had just awoken from a deep sleep.

How much trust, how much confidence, how much time I had placed in Duponte and his own confluences with Poe’s tales! If he were but more confrontational against the Baron Dupin’s activities; if he but provided more reason to think he progressed as well as the Baron Dupin; if only he did not stand idly by while the Baron Dupin spouted his own claims; if he were to take these measures upon himself, I would naturally be able to eject these dangerous revolutions in my thoughts!

I watched Duponte as he sat in my living room. I looked directly at him and questioned him as to his ongoing submission to the Baron Dupin’s aggressiveness. I asked him why he stood by as the Baron Dupin all but claimed victory in our contest. I had begun to recount this conversation prematurely at an earlier chapter. You remember. You’ll recall I suggested boxing the Baron’s ears, to which Duponte noted that it might not assist our cause.

“Just so,” said I. “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 reversed. The Baron, I’m afraid for him, has already lost. He has come to the end, as have I.”

That is when my other fears suspended themselves. “What do you mean?”

“Poe drank,” said Duponte. “But he was not a
drinking man.
In fact, he was quite the opposite. On average, we can be confident he took less stimulus than any common man on the street.”

“Yes?”

“He was not intemperate, but he was
intolerant,
constitutionally, to spirits, to an extreme degree never witnessed by most ordinary persons.”

I sat upright. “How do you know this, Monsieur Duponte?”

“If only people would
see,
rather than just look. You will no doubt remember one of the few obituaries written by an acquaintance, rather than by a reporter. Therein was a report that, with a
single glass of wine,
Monsieur Poe’s ‘whole nature was reversed.’ Many would understand this to mean that Poe was habitually intoxicated, a reckless and constant drunkard. In fact, it is just opposite. The detractors have proved too much in this arena, and therefore prove nothing. It is likely—nay, almost certain—that Poe possessed a rare sensitivity to drink that would almost at an instant change and paralyze him. In a state of mental disarray, and in the company of low fellows, no doubt Poe sometimes followed this with further drinking, especially when in the midst of your aggressive southern conviviality, which requires that one not refuse such offers. But this last fact is irrelevant to us. It was the first drink, almost the first sip, that would send him into an attack of insensibility. Not madness from excessive drinking, but temporary madness from not being able to drink as does the next fellow.”

“So, on the day he was discovered at Ryan’s, monsieur, you believe he had taken some drink?”

“Perhaps one glass of indulgence. Not as the temperance writers would have it, who look upon human actions for their morality. I shall show you how they operate—indeed how they were operating at the
very time
that interests us.”

Duponte rummaged through one of his incomprehensibly organized piles of newspapers and brought out an issue of the
Sun
from October 2, 1849, the day before Poe was found.

“Do you know the name John Watchman, Monsieur Clark?”

At first I responded that I knew no one by that name. A vague memory recurred, and I corrected myself. The day I had been chasing after the Phantom—Mr. Benson of the Richmond Sons of Temperance—I had looked for him under the street in one of the city’s popular rum-holes. “Yes, I thought this Watchman was the Phantom because of a similar coat. Watchman was pointed out to me by another patron as one dangerously deep in the cups.”

“Not surprising. Monsieur Watchman’s hopes, his ambitions, for notoriety had been dashed not long before that. Here: a notice that would have interested you little two years ago, but may be of great value now.”

Duponte pointed to an article in the October 2 newspaper. The temperance Sunday law had been a prominent issue in that state election, though, as Duponte had surmised, I’d had no particular feeling about it at the time. I had seen examples enough of the effects of drinking to sympathize with the ideas of the temperance cause. But it seemed hard to squeeze together one’s energies into a single issue like temperance, to the exclusion of all other moral principles.

The Friends of the Sunday Law, an organization comprising the Baltimore temperance leaders of most consequence, had announced their own candidate for the House of Delegates to support their push for a Sunday law restricting the sale of alcohol: Mr. John Watchman. But Watchman was soon seen drinking at various taverns around town, and on October 2 the Friends withdrew their support of Watchman. Most interesting was the man who spoke in this column for the Friends of the Sunday Law committee: Dr. Joseph Snodgrass!

“This was only
one day
before Snodgrass would be called to Poe’s side at Ryan’s!” I said.

“Now you see the state of mind Snodgrass would possess. As a leader of this temperance faction, he had just been personally humiliated by his own candidate. Monsieur Watchman had been weak, no doubt. However, there is little doubt that the Friends of the Sunday Law suspected that Watchman had been purposely tempted by enemies of their political endeavor. Now, I should ask you also to look at the
American and Commercial Advertiser
from one week earlier to get a better view of Ryan’s inn and tavern in the days before Snodgrass and Edgar Poe met there.”

The first cutting Duponte pointed out to me spoke of

a large and enthusiastic meeting of the Whigs of the Fourth Ward of the city, held at Ryan’s Hotel.

“Then Ryan’s was not only a polling station,” I said, “it was also a place for Whigs of that ward to gather. And the place,” I sighed, “fated to be Poe’s last passage outside a hospital bed.” I thought of the group of Fourth Ward Whigs Duponte and I had observed at the den above the Vigilant engine house, near Ryan’s. That was their private place; Ryan’s, it appeared, their room for more public gatherings.

“Let us step backward even further,” said Duponte, “looking at several days before…when this meeting by the Fourth Ward Whigs was advertised. Read aloud. And note most of all how it is signed below.”

I did.

A Mass Meeting of the Whigs of the Fourth Ward will take place at Ryan’s Hotel, Lombard Street, opposite the Vigilant Engine House, on Tuesday. Geo. W. Herring, Pres.

Another extract advertised a meeting for October 1, two days before the election, at
7 1/2 o’clock,
again at
Ryan’s Hotel, across from the Engine House,
with
Full attendance earnestly requested;
this one was also signed
Geo. W. Herring, Pres.

“George Herring, president,” I read again. I remembered Tindley, the burly doorkeeper, obsequiously answering his superior at the Whig club: Mr. George…Mr. George. “The man we saw, that president, it was his Christian name that was George, not his surname…George Herring. Surely he is a relation to Henry Herring, Poe’s cousin by marriage! Henry Herring, who was the very man who came first to Poe’s side after Snodgrass and refused to board him in his own home.”

“Now you see that whatever Poe drank was a small part only of what transpired in his final days, but still is of importance to us to place all else in order. It helps now that we are able to comprehend the whole sequence of events.”

“Monsieur Duponte,” I said, putting down the newspaper, “do you mean that you
do
comprehend the whole now? That we are ready to share it with the world before the Baron Dupin speaks out?”

Duponte rose from his chair and walked to the window. “Soon,” he said.

IT WAS SURPRISING,
considering the Baron’s recent frantic activities, how quiet he had become. He was not to be seen; presumably he was preparing for the lecture in two days’ time—it was all Baltimore talked about. I took several circuitous walks around the city, trying to discover which hotel he had moved to.

While I was engaged in this way, my shoulder was tapped.

It was one of the men whom I had seen so many times following the Baron Dupin. Another man stood near him in a similar coat.

“Account for yourself,” said the first one, with a concealed accent. “Who are you?”

“Why is that your concern?” I replied. “Shall I ask you the same?”

“This is not a time to be bold, monsieur.”

Monsieur.
They were French, then.

“We have seen you in past weeks. You seem always to be outside his hotel,” he said with suspicion, his eyebrows gesturing in that peculiar French manner Duponte sometimes exhibited.

“Yes, well, there is hardly anything extraordinary about that. Does not one visit his friend often?” A man who had in the past kidnapped, deceived, and intimidated me—to call that a friend!

Caught in their silence, I worried about the implications of my hasty statement. My spying on the Baron, it seemed, had made enemies of these enemies of the Baron! I added, “I know nothing of that man’s debts or his creditors, and have not the slightest interest in such matters.”

The two men exchanged a quick glance.

“Then tell us which hotel he’s putting up at now.”

“I do not know,” I said honestly.

“Do you have any idea, monsieur, the scope of his troubles? They shall become yours if you try to guard him. Do not protect him.”

I turned quickly and began walking away.

“We are not finished with you, monsieur,” he called out from behind me.

I looked over my shoulder; they were following. I wondered if I ran, whether they would do the same. Testing this, I accelerated my steps.

Crossing Madison Street, I neared the Washington Monument, where a small assembly of visitors was gathered. The massive marble column, twenty feet in diameter, rose up from the base and supported the grand statue of General George Washington at the summit. The pure white marble stood out not just for its massiveness, but as a contrast to the brickwork of the street. It seemed the safest place in Baltimore right now.

Entering the base of the monument, I joined others waiting to begin the passage on the stairwell that ascended in a spiral up the long, hollow column. After I’d climbed the first flight of steps, I paused at one of the curves, illumined by only a small square opening, and watched a few young boys race past me. I smiled to myself, satisfied that the men had let me be or not seen me enter—but just as I expressed this silent delight to myself, I heard the heavy steps of two pairs of boots.