Poe shadow (30 page)

Bonjour said that she had been told the house was looking for a new upstairs girl (assuming, rightly, that this was the downstairs girl—and imagining it likely she had a rivalry with the current upstairs girl).

Was that so? replied the servant.
She
had not heard about this. Bonjour apologized, explaining that the upstairs girl had told a friend about her plans to leave without proper notice to her employers, and Bonjour was eager to present her desire for the post.

Soon after this, the downstairs girl, who had a straggly figure and a jealous tendency toward comelier females, reported the dialogue to the Snodgrasses, who felt obliged to dismiss the protesting upstairs girl. Bonjour was the heroine of the household drama for uncovering the imminent loss to their domestic operations and, appearing again at the opportune time, was the natural choice as replacement. Though Bonjour was far more handsome than the jealous downstairs girl, the fact that she was too thin for the popular taste and had an unseemly scar down her lip made her more acceptable.

All this was easily discovered later from the former upstairs girl, who after her departure was eager to speak of her unfair treatment. But once Bonjour was installed behind the walls of the house, there was little chance at gaining any further intelligence about her enterprise.

“Leave her to the Snodgrass family then, and confine your observations on the Baron,” Duponte suggested.

“She would not remain this long unless there was information to gain. It has been better than two weeks, monsieur!” I said. “In all events, the Baron is mostly occupied selling subscriptions to his lecture on Poe’s death.”

“Perhaps the information mademoiselle gains is not so large,” Duponte mused, “but simply slow.”

“I could inform Dr. Snodgrass that Bonjour is no chambermaid.”

“Why do so, Monsieur Clark?”

“Why?” I replied incredulously. It seemed obvious. “To stop her from gaining intelligence for the Baron!”

“What they find, we shall inevitably learn,” he replied, though I did not see the track of this reasoning.

Duponte, during my reports, regularly asked me to describe Bonjour’s demeanor and mood toward the job and the other servants.

Bonjour would leave the Snodgrass home every day to meet with the Baron. On one of these evenings, as she made her way to one of these rendezvous, I followed her into the harbor area. Not infrequently, a man would be expelled out the door of a public house, and one would have to take a high step over his body or trip into a pile with him. The streets there were filled with bar-rooms and billiards-rooms and stale, human smells. Bonjour was dressed accordingly: hair disheveled, bonnet crooked, and dress in comfortable disorder. She changed costume often—depending on whether an errand for the Baron Dupin required the appearance of one class or another—but there was no demonic transformation as with the Baron’s disguises.

I watched as she neared a group of low men, who were laughing and yelping riotously. One pointed at the passing figure of Bonjour.

“Look there,” he said gruffly, “a star-gazer! What a pretty bat!” “Star-gazer” and “bat” were equally vulgar terms; heard among the lowest classes, they connoted a prostitute who came out only at night.

She ignored them. He stretched out his arm as a barrier. He was almost twice Bonjour’s size. She stopped and looked down at his bloated forearm, on which the sleeve was rolled up indecently.

“What’s this, gal?” He yanked a piece of paper out of her hand. “A love letter,
I’d
guess. What’s this now? ‘There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear…’”

“Hands off,” said Bonjour, taking a step forward.

The man held the paper up high and away from her reach, to the exaggerated amusement of his compatriots. A chunky little fellow among his companions guffawed and sympathetically said to let it go, at which point the ringleader punched his arm and declared him a positive gump.

Bonjour eased closer with a light sigh, the plane of her eyes hardly coming up to the large man’s neck. She placed one finger along the muscle of his upstretched arm and followed the line. “The strongest arm I’ve seen in Baltimore, mister,” she said in a whisper, though projected distinctly enough for the others to hear her.

“Now, I ain’t going to lower this arm, my dear, on a little soft-soaping.”

“I don’t want you to lower it, mister, I want you to raise it higher—there, like that.”

He did as instructed—perhaps despite himself. Bonjour leaned almost into the crook of his neck.

“Oh, oh, look,” he said jovially to his companions, “the
bat
is going to fly at me for a kiss!”

They laughed. The man himself was giggling as nervously as a girl.

“Bats,” Bonjour said, “are awful blind.” In one gesture, swifter than lightning, she drew her hand behind her head and across the side of the gentleman’s neck. His arm, raised high on that side, could make no attempt to block her.

The man’s shirt and sack-coat collars, cleanly sliced at the buttons, both dropped to the ground. His clique fell into a grave silence. She returned a blade thin as a pin into the crown of her disordered hair. The man patted around his neck—making sure all his flesh was still there—and then, finding not a scratch, stumbled backward. Bonjour picked up the piece of paper where it had dropped and went on her way. Perhaps I imagined it, but before her departure, it seemed she glanced at me, across the way, and her face seemed to wear a look of bemusement at my stance of readiness to come to her aid.

I continued to frequent the area of the Snodgrass house. One morning after I arrived I saw Duponte approaching, dressed in his usual black suit and cloak and cape.

“Monsieur?” I greeted him inquisitively. It was something of an extraordinary event of late to see him in the daylight. “Has something happened?”

“We have an excursion today, in the interests of our investigation,” he commented.

“Where shall we go?”

“We are here already.”

Duponte walked through the gates and up the front pathway to the Snodgrass house. “Go ahead,” Duponte said when I came to a halt.

“Monsieur, the Snodgrasses are not home this hour. And, you must know, Bonjour may see us here!”

“I fully rely on it,” he replied.

He took the silver-plated knocker in hand, which promptly brought to us the downstairs girl. Duponte glanced around and saw with satisfaction that Bonjour was peering from the staircase high above, as likely she did with any guest calling for Dr. Snodgrass.

“Our business, miss,” said Duponte, “lies with Dr. Snodgrass. I am”—here he paused, with a slight nod up to the landing of the stairs—“the
Duke Duponte.
”

“Duke! Well, the doctor is not at home, sir.” She passed a slow gaze over my outer garments, which prompted me to remove my hat and coat.

“I should think not, for he is a man of extensive business. But he has left word, I believe, with your upstairs girl that we are to wait for him in his study at this hour,” said Duponte.

“Likely! How queer!” exclaimed the girl, whose jealousy for Bonjour seemed to rise like a visible object before our eyes.

“If the young woman is present, miss, perhaps she shall be able to confirm the particulars of our invitation.”

“Likely!” the downstairs girl repeated. “Does this have truth, in fact?” she called up to Bonjour. “The doctor said nothing to me.”

Bonjour smiled, and then said, “The doctor tells you nothing of what occurs upstairs, of course, miss. And his study
is
upstairs.”

Bonjour approached us and curtsied a greeting. I was quite startled to find her compliant in Duponte’s scheme, but as that first moment of surprise passed I came to understand. If Bonjour exposed Duponte’s scheme as a false one, we could quite as easily demonstrate Bonjour’s own falsehoods in securing her position. It was an automatic and unspoken bargain.

“Dr. Snodgrass asked that you follow me,” she said.

“Into the study, I believe he suggested,” Duponte replied, accompanying her up the stairs and gesturing for me to come.

Bonjour seated us in the study with a smile and offered to close the door behind us for our comfort. “You gentlemen will be most happy to know that the respected doctor will not be long before his return,” she said. “He returns early today. I shall be certain to bring him
straightaway
when he comes home.”

“We would expect nothing less, dear miss,” said Duponte.

When we were alone, I turned to Duponte. “What shall we be able to learn from Snodgrass? Shall he not object strenuously to our pretending to have an appointment? And, monsieur, have you not said a hundred times we haven’t any call to speak with witnesses?”

“Do you think that is why we’ve come? To see Snodgrass?”

I chafed a bit and made a point of not answering.

Duponte sighed. “We are not here to see Dr. Snodgrass; we shall be able to
read
what we wish to know among the doctor’s papers. This is no doubt why the Baron has sent Bonjour here, and why she cleverly ensured she would become the upstairs servant, to have a free hand in his study without observation. She seemed rather amused with our presence, and quite loose with the more established servant, which suggests she is nearly finished with her purpose here. Nor does she believe we have enough time to discover anything of importance among all these papers.”

“She’s correct then!” I said, noticing that Snodgrass’s study was awash in papers, in piles and stacks upon and around and inside the drawers of his office desk.

“Rethink your conclusions. Mademoiselle Bonjour has spent several weeks here now, and though she is a practiced thief, she would have no desire to risk that Dr. Snodgrass would notice the removal of any papers, which would foreclose any further search she might have wished to make. Thus she would have secretly copied in her own hand any items of interest and returned the originals to their place here for us to discover.”

“But how shall we be able to discover in a matter of minutes what has taken her weeks to compile?”

“Precisely because she has discovered them first. Any document or paper that has attracted a high degree of interest will have commanded her to remove it from its place, perhaps more than once. Certainly one would not casually notice this difference, but once knowing to look for it, we should have no trouble selecting and copying these particular documents.”

We went to work immediately. I took one side of the desk. Guided by Duponte, I searched for bent and misaligned corners, smudged ink, slight tears and folds, creases, and other indicators of recent handling among the various assortments and collections of documents and newspaper articles on all subjects, some with dates as much as twenty-five years old. Together we located many mentions of Poe that apparently had been examined by Bonjour in her time in this house, including a wealth of articles on the death of Poe that, if not quite as comprehensive as my own collection, was not unimpressive. Exhilarated and appalled, I found some rather more unique documents, three letters—the handwriting on which I recognized right away—from Edgar Poe to Dr. Snodgrass, dating from several years earlier.

In the first, Poe offered Snodgrass, then editing a magazine called
The Notion,
the rights to publish the second of the Dupin tales. “Of course I could not afford to make you an absolute present of it,” wrote Poe firmly, “but if you are willing to take it, I will say $40.” Yet Snodgrass turned him down, and Poe was declined by
Graham’s,
too, before publishing “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” elsewhere.

In the second letter from Poe, the writer asked Dr. Snodgrass to place a favorable notice of Poe’s work in a magazine then being edited by Neilson Poe, hoping that the latter would oblige him as his cousin. The attempt seems to have failed, and Poe wrote back in disgust. “I
felt
that N. Poe would not insert the article,” he said. “In your private ear, I believe him to be the bitterest enemy I have in the world.”

I rushed to share this. “Neilson Poe, monsieur! Edgar Poe calls him his bitterest enemy…. Didn’t I guess at his position in all this!”

Our time being too short to discuss each item, Duponte directed me to quickly copy into my memorandum book all items about Poe that seemed important to me and, for that matter, he said after thinking it over, items that seemed unimportant to me as well. I duly noted the date of Poe’s letter about Neilson: October 7, 1839—exactly ten years to the day before Poe’s death!

“He is the more despicable in this,” wrote Poe of Neilson, “since he makes loud professions of friendship.” And did Neilson not profess the same fables, when I met him?
We were not only cousins, but friends, Mr. Clark.
Neilson Poe, with his heart beating for his own literary fame, his hand holding a wife who was sister and near copy to Edgar’s—had he wanted the life of the very man he so outwardly denigrated?

This was not all I found in letters from Poe to Snodgrass about his Baltimore relatives. Poe had declared Henry Herring (the first Poe relation to arrive at Ryan’s) “a man of unprincipled character.”

Duponte paused in the midst of opening every possible drawer in the room.

“Survey the streets from the other side of the house, Monsieur Clark. Watch out for Dr. Snodgrass’s carriage. When he arrives, we must leave immediately, and ensure the Irish chambermaid says nothing of our visit.”

I studied Duponte’s face for any hint at how we would accomplish the second objective. I walked to a chamber at the front of the house. Looking from the window, I found that a carriage was passing nearby, but after it seemed to check its speed briefly, the horses continued down High Street. Turning back toward the study, I found myself facing Bonjour, leaning upon the hearth so that her black dress and apron radiated with the flame of the fire.

“All right, mister? Anything that I can help you with while you wait for Master Snodgrass?” she asked, in imitation of the downstairs chambermaid’s voice, and loud enough that she might hear. In a quieter tone, she commented, “You see now that your friend is only a vulture on my master’s investigation.”