Poe shadow (19 page)

I began to collect all the newspapers Duponte had requested. The imposing
Baltimore Sun
building had been the first iron structure in Baltimore. Although some judged the five-story edifice beautiful, that was the wrong sort of term. Impressive: that’s what you thought while walking through the newspaper offices, the presses and steam engines whirling below in the basement, heating your boots; the cracking of telegraph machinery raining onto the ceiling from the second floor above. You were in the middle of something powerful, something demanded by the mass of our citizens.

Visiting also the
Sun
’s competitors, the Whig papers
Patriot
and the
American,
and those known for Democratic leanings, the
Clipper
and the
Daily Argus,
I gradually furnished Duponte with everything he had asked for from Baltimore. Then I started for the athenaeum to search for more from other states and any new reports about Poe.

I had not yet sent word to Hattie or Peter of my return. Auntie Blum’s prohibition on Hattie writing to me had remained for the balance of my time in Paris. Peter, in his last few letters, had said little of Hattie or anything else of interest, but had alluded to certain sensitive matters of business he needed to speak with me about. I had a strong desire to commune with both of them. But it was as though the world outside my involvement with Duponte was suspended; as though I had been caught in a universe made only from Duponte’s mind and his ideas and could not return to my usual place until the task at hand had been achieved.

Though I had been abroad for only a season, I noticed every change in Baltimore acutely. The city was growing bigger by the day, so it seemed. There was the rubble, ladders, joists, and tools of construction in every direction. Warehouses five stories high had overtaken old mansions. All that was brand-new, like the dust of the construction, cast a dull pallor over the city. There was something else, I know not what to call it. An unrest. A cheerless restiveness. This is how it seemed passing through the street.

At the reading room, I situated myself at a table with my memorandum book and opened a newspaper. I scanned the columns, stopping several times to study some interesting bit of news that had transpired in my absence. Then I saw it. My heart quickened with—surprise, exhilaration, fear. I could not have said which. I switched to the next paper, then another. There was not just a chance mention in the back sheets of one paper. No. There were mentions everywhere! Each paper featured some item about the death of Poe! There were many details yet to learn in the mysterious circumstances of the late poet’s death, wrote the
Clipper.
“The prominent topic of conversation in literary circles, has been the death of that melancholy man Edgar A. Poe,” said a weekly dollar magazine. “He was altogether a strange and fearful being.”

The articles provided almost no factual details. Instead, each page was like a newsboy who shouted
ad infinitum
of some sensational hanging without saying how it had come to be.

I rushed to the front of the room, where the ancient clerk sat. Another patron of the reading room stood across from the desk, but as he was not yet addressing the clerk, I felt free to proceed.

“What is all of this about Edgar Poe? How has this come about?” I asked.

“Mr. Clark,” replied the clerk, with a look of great interest, “you have been away quite a while!”

“My good sir, not many months ago,” I said, “there was hardly any concern for the death of Edgar Poe. Now it forms a topic in the columns of every paper.”

The clerk appeared ready to answer when we were interrupted.

“Yes, yes!”

We both turned to the other patron, whose spot I had taken. He was a bulky man with wiry eyebrows. He blew his large nose into a handkerchief before continuing.

“I have read of it, too,” he said collegially, nudging me, as though we had shared snuff from the same box.

I looked at him blankly.

“Of Poe’s death!” he said. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

I studied this stranger. “Wonderful?”

“Certainly,” he said suspiciously, “you think Poe a genius, sir?”

“Of the greatest degree!”

“Certainly you think there is no better prose written in the world than ‘The Gold-Bug’?”

“Only ‘A Descent into the Maelström,’” I replied.

“Well, then, it is wonderful, is it not, that it is finally receiving the attention it deserves from the editors of the newspapers? Poe’s sad sorrowful death, I mean to say.” He touched his hat to the clerk before leaving the reading room.

“Now, you say…what is it that has come to your attention?” the clerk asked me.

“The newspapers, why…” My thoughts were lost in the memory of what the other man had just said. I pointed to the door. “Who was that gentleman standing here before, who has just bid us farewell?”

The clerk did not know. I excused myself and hurried to the corner of Saratoga Street, but there was no sign of him.

I was so struck by these combined phenomena—the newspapers, the strange Poe enthusiast, the restiveness that seemed to have overtaken the city—that I did not initially direct much attention to a woman, with puffed cheeks and silver hair, on a bench not too far from the athenaeum. She was reading
a book of poems by Edgar A. Poe
! Here, I should say, I was in command of a unique advantage of observation. Having purchased every volume of Poe’s writings published, I could recognize the editions from great distances by small attributes of appearance, size, and engravings unique to each of them. I suppose my boast is lessened by the fact that there were not many collections. Poe did not like the few that were published. “The publishers cheat,” he lamented in a letter to me. “To be controlled is to be ruined. I am resolved to be my own publisher.” This would not happen, though. His own finances were in disarray, and the periodical press remained miserly in what they would pay him for his writings.

I stood over the woman’s bench and watched her propping her finger to turn the dog-eared and spotted pages. For her part, she did not notice me, so rapt was she in the tale’s final pages, the sublime collapse of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Before I realized it, she had closed the book with an air of deep satisfaction and scurried away as though fleeing from the crumbled ruins of the Ushers.

I decided to inquire to a nearby bookseller to see whether he had followed the new public discussion of Poe. It was one of the booksellers less likely to fill his shelves with cigar-boxes and portraits of Indians and anything else
other than books,
which had become a growing trend among these establishments since more people were buying books through subscriptions. I paused inside the front vestibule when I saw another woman, this one committing the most peculiar crime.

She was standing on one of the store’s ladders used to examine the higher shelves. The crime, if it qualifies as that, was not the theft of a book, which should be noteworthy and strange enough, but the placement of a book from the folds of her shawl onto the shelf. Then she moved to the next higher rung of the ladder and added yet another book from her shawl to the store’s selection. The sight of her was obscured to my view by the rays coming through the large skylight, but I could see she was wearing a fine dress and hat; she was not one of the gaudy butterflies to be found promenading on Baltimore Street. Her neck hinted at golden skin, as did the sliver of arm beneath her glove. She descended the ladder and turned down a row of bookshelves. I walked down the next aisle in a parallel line and found her waiting at the end.

“It is impolite,” she said in French, the scar-crossed lips posed in a frown, “for a man to stare.”

“Bonjour!” My former captor in the fortress of Paris, the Baron Dupin’s compatriot, stood before me. “Many apologies—you see, I seem to be staring sometimes in a sort of haze.” But this had not been one of my staring spells. Her killing beauty rushed back to me at first sight, and I looked elsewhere to break her hold on me. After recovering myself, I whispered, “What in the world are you doing?”

She smiled as though it were self-evident.

I ascended a few rungs of the ladder that I had seen her climb and removed the book that she had placed on the shelf. It was an edition of Poe’s tales.

“It is opposite from my custom. Putting valuable things
into
a place.” She laughed with child-like enjoyment at the idea. When she smiled she had the air of a little girl, particularly now, as her hair had been cut shorter.

“Valuable? These are only valuable for readers who can appreciate Poe!” I said. “And why place them so high up, where they are difficult to find?”

“People like to reach for something, Monsieur Quentin,” she said.

“You have done this under the direction of the Baron Dupin. Where is he?”

“He has begun the work of resolving Poe’s death,” Bonjour said. “And shall end it in triumph.”

My head was pounding. “He has no business with that! He has no business here!”

“Consider it fortunate,” she replied cryptically.

“I do not consider his using this serious matter for his entertainment fortunate.”

“Still, he has found an activity more useful than murdering you.”

“Murdering
me
? Ha!” I tried to sound cavalier. “Why should he do that?”

“When you wrote your letters to Baron Dupin, you spoke at length of the urgent assistance needed to decipher the beloved Mr. Poe’s death. ‘The greatest genius known to American literary journals, who will be endlessly and forever mourned,’ and so on.”

This was a true rendition of my sentiments.

“Imagine the Baron’s surprise, then, when we arrived here to Baltimore some weeks ago. No ladies weeping in the streets for the
postmortem
of poor Poe. No riots demanding justice for the poet. Few people we could find knew, with particularity, who Edgar Poe was other than to say a writer of some queer and popular fantasies. Indeed, most didn’t know that Monsieur Poe had gone to his long home.”

“It is true,” I said defiantly. “There are many, mademoiselle, who will greet genius with jealousy and indifference, and Poe’s uniqueness made him an especial target for that. What about it?”

“Baron Dupin had come here to answer the demand to understand Poe’s death. And here no demand at all could be found!”

I fell silent. I suppose I could not argue against the Baron’s frustration, as I had experienced the same kind.

“He blamed me,” I muttered.

“Well, do not imagine my master felt very forgiving toward you. In fact, finding we had traveled so far and at great expense without purpose, the Baron grew very warm very quickly.”

I think I must have shown apprehension, because she smiled.

“Nothing to fear, Monsieur Quentin,” she said. But her smiling, somehow, made me feel less safe. Perhaps it was the scar that divided her mouth into two. “I do not think you are in the shadow of any harm—at the moment. You have no doubt seen what has happened, since that time, to the awareness of Poe in your city.”

“You mean, in the newspapers?” I began to put it together. “You have something to do with all that?”

She explained. First the Baron had placed notices in all the newspapers in the city, offering substantial rewards for “vital information” in the “mysterious and untoward death” of the poet Poe. He did not expect to actually hear from witnesses at once. Rather, the notices served their real purpose—to stir questions. The editors of the papers sensed excitement, and they followed its path. Now the people were clamoring for more and more Poe.

“We are helping to enliven the public’s imagination,” Bonjour said. “I believe Poe’s books are met with a ready sale now.”

I thought back to the woman in the park…the Poe enthusiast in the reading room…and now Bonjour planting books for more people to find.

She turned to leave, and I grabbed her. If anyone was watching us, my hand wrapped around the gloved wrist of a young woman, it would occasion a small scandal and would travel with the speed of a telegraph to Hattie Blum’s aunt. In Baltimore, the cold breezes of the North met the hard etiquette of the South, and the gossip that came along with it.

It was a twofold compulsion that made me reach for her hand. First, being seized once again by her careless beauty, so strikingly relocated in Baltimore, so distinct from the normal lady’s-magazine appearance of local girls. Second, she might know something of Poe’s death already. Third—for I suppose the compulsion should be called threefold—I knew that where she came from in Paris, touching the hand of a lady was hardly a noticeable act, and this emboldened me. But her eyes burned at me, and at a breath I pulled my hand away.

I find it difficult to describe the sensation that passed through me upon touching, even for a moment, this lady. It was the sensation that at any moment I could be transported anywhere in the world, into anyone’s life, almost that I was not restricted to my own body—it was a spiritual feeling, in a sense, feeling as light as a star in the sky.

Much to my surprise amid the bookstalls, as soon as I released her, both her hands sprung toward me and gripped me far more firmly than I had seized her. I could not pry her fingers off my hands, and we stood facing each other for a long moment.

“Sir! Remove your hand, if you please!” she burst out in an outraged, virginal voice.

Her cry prompted the Argus-eyed inquisitiveness of everyone in the store, at every table and bench. After she released me, I attempted to appear occupied by commonplace interest in the nearest books. By the time the stares dissipated, she was gone. I raced into the street and spotted her, the back of her head now covered by a striped parasol.

“Stay!” I called out, hurrying to her side. “I know you are well intentioned. You kept me safe from the shooting at the fortifications. You saved my life!”

“It seemed you wished to assist me when thinking the Baron forced my service to him. This was”—she tucked her lip under her small front teeth to consider this—“unusual.”

“You must know that this is far too important a matter to cheaply excite the periodical press. No good shall come of that. Poe’s genius deserves more. You must stop this now.”