On Night's Shore

by Randall Silvis

  “I can only assure you, Miss Hobbs, that my research was exhaustive. The facts as I have assembled them allow no other conclusion.”

  “Your facts, sir, are incomplete. Therefore your conclusion is made spurious.”

  Had anyone else spoken so critically of his work Poe would no doubt have lashed out, given tongue to the scathing sarcasm of his Imp. But the young woman’s hands, though clasped and gloved, were visibly trembling, and her eyes were damp with tears.

  He drew a slow breath, released it, and spoke softly. “If you might edify me as to where I have erred…”

  “Mr. Andrews’s interest in Miss Rogers was fraternal and nothing more. To suggest otherwise is an offense to both his family and mine.”

  “I have no wish to offend either of your fine families.”

  “And yet you have done so. The mere fact of your accusation has done irreparable harm to my fiancé’s career, not to mention the security of our own future together.”

  “In light of your father’s influence in Gotham…” Poe said, suggesting that Andrews’s freedom required no more than a nod and a wink from her father, a few gold eagles passed from hand to hand.

  “Mr. Andrews will be released to my father’s house by the time I am returned there,” she said. “But that hardly rectifies the matter. The charges against him must be withdrawn and an apology tendered.”

  “I have not levied any charges. I have no power to do so. In any case, the witness upon whom I relied…he has become, in a word…unavailable.”

  “He will not testify?”

  “Not now nor ever.”

  “You see?” she all but shouted, jubilant, but immediately laid a hand to her breast to quiet herself. “Forgive me; this news is music to my heart.” She breathed shallowly for a moment, then calmed herself enough to continue. “Howsoever, Mr. Poe, you continue to believe in his guilt, do you not?”

  “What I believe is of small consequence. As I said, I have no power—”

  “I think you undervalue your power, sir. Was it not the power of your words that caused my fiancé to be arrested?”

  “The power of truth, Miss Hobbs.”

  “Half-truths. Half-truths and speculation.”

  “Again, if you could provide me with exculpatory evidence…”

  “I have the word of my betrothed, sworn to me this very day. It is all the evidence I require.”

  “I understand. Unfortunately it is insufficient to my own needs.”

  “In that case, I am prepared to offer you the opportunity to gather additional evidence sufficient to your needs.”

  “How so?” Poe asked.

  “I have been authorized by my father, Johnston Hobbs, to engage your services,” she said. “We desire to employ you to continue your investigation until you have gathered the factual evidence requisite to Lieutenant Andrews’s full and complete exoneration. We cannot allow a single doubt as to his innocence, either in your mind or in any other.”

  Poe said nothing for a moment. Then, “I have just this day been made an offer of permanent employment by the editor of the New York Mirror.”

  “At what salary, if I might ask?”

  It was not her bluntness that gave Poe pause, but, I am certain, this startling opportunity so unexpectedly proffered. In any case, it was Muddy who, having uttered not a sound to this point, suddenly answered the young lady’s query.

  “Ten dollars a week,” she said.

  “My father will pay you twenty-five dollars per week,” said Miss Hobbs. “With a one-hundred-dollar bonus upon completion of your duties.” She reached for a small gold purse attached to her belt. She opened it and withdrew a gold eagle, a brilliant ten-dollar sun in the white cloud of her hand.

  She leaned forward then and with her left hand grasped Poe’s and turned it palm up. She laid the coin in his hand and closed his fingers over it.

  “I ask you to accept this as a token of my trust in you as an honest man. A man who, I continue to believe, has been touched by the spark of divinity. And who therefore cannot be satisfied until Truth itself, which along with Love and Beauty are the threads that bind us to God, is satisfied as well.”

  Poe continued to look down upon his fist, enveloped as it was in Miss Hobbs’s gloved hands. Virginia and Mrs. Clemm and I dared not breathe.

  “Miss Hobbs,” he finally said.

  At that she stood. Her coachman came down off the brougham to attend her at the gate.

  “My father would be grateful to receive you at our home at two in the afternoon,” she said. “At which time he will learn of your decision to accept or reject his offer of employment.”

  She turned to the rest of us. “Mrs. Poe. Mrs. Clemm. Mr. Dubbins. I apologize for what has surely been a disturbing visit for all of you. May we soon meet again under happier circumstances.”

  Poe was rising unsteadily from his chair, but Felicia Hobbs did not linger for an escort. She was soon climbing into the brougham and setting off up the lane.

  After what seemed a very long while, Poe ceased staring after her and turned to regard first Mrs. Clemm and then Virginia. His eyes were dark and pleading, asking for something, though I knew not what.

  “One hundred dollars,” Mrs. Clemm said in a whisper. “It almost seems a sin just to say it out loud.”

  It was all I could do to keep from leaping onto Poe and prying open his fist, exposing there that wondrous thing I myself had never held or even seen up close. It made the silver dollar in my pocket as light as paper, as modest as a Bungtown copper. I was suddenly hollow with greed and could only hope that Poe in his silence was feeling the same.

  24

  Either the midday air was atremble, or my knees were. We stood outside the heavy wooden door of Johnston Hobbs’s Fifth Avenue gothic castle, Poe squarely facing the door with me slightly to his rear, not quite cowering but neither standing upright. This was the first time I had sought admittance through the front entrance of a home whose gold-plated door knockers were as large as my noggin. They, the knockers, were distended like gargoyle heads, terrifying harpy faces with gluttonous grins and ears like horns. The look they levied down on me did nothing to quiet the flutterings of my stomach, where Mrs. Clemm’s scrumptious beef dodgers now sat like twin lumps of clay.

  I was worried, I suppose, that the inhabitants of this castle would take one look at me and send me reeling into the gutter. I was freshly scrubbed and slicked down, true, my long hair greased back behind each ear with a smear of soap, but a part of me suspected Augie Dubbins of being filthy and reeking, a part of me always would, still does, and stands ever at the ready to scrunch up its nose at myself.

  On this afternoon, rather than try to hide myself in the shadows, I opted for blending in with Poe’s pant leg. He had insisted I accompany him; I was, he said, his protégé, which I took to mean some kind of an assistant.

  I have no doubts now that he was as nervous as I, and that he drew some composure from my quaking presence, much as a man suffering from any malady will find comfort in those more miserable.

  He had but to drop the knocker twice before the huge door swung open. There stood a portly butler with a tousled and patchy mane of silver hair.

  “Mr. E. A. Poe to see Mr. Johnston Hobbs,” Poe said.

  The butler nodded and stood to the side. Poe strode inside as if he meant to plant his flag in the tessellated marble floor. I clumped along behind him.

  The butler closed the door, then set off at a scurry into the far dark reaches of the foyer. “This way, sir.”

  He led us to a set of French doors and drew them open and, with a slight movement of his hand, indicated that Poe should step inside. Poe moved to the threshold and there faltered, a slight sagging as if all the breath had rushed out of him, a weakness of desire.

  The fullness of that room, the splendor. Though it was not the ornate luxury of
the furnishings that stole Poe’s air, not the gilded mirrors or yellow satin wall hangings, not the gold gaslight sconces on the wall or the deep and heavy chairs, the marble fireplace as wide as Poe’s bedroom, the rug with colors as rich and serene as a maharaja’s sunset. It was instead, I think, the very spaciousness of the room, the great wide sweep of freedom. Poe’s own existence in comparison to the one suggested here must have struck him as inexpressibly small and tight, a realization that squeezed him at the joints and stiffened his movements.

  A life in a room like this—it is what I heard him thinking as his gaze roamed from one distant corner to the other—a life in a series of rooms like this, here was a life in which a man could swing wide his arms and stretch out his thoughts in every direction, the imagination unconfined; such was the life he desired. Not having to be grubbing about in the muck for a fip here, a short bit there, knocking door-to-door with hat in hand. Not living a life so pinched and mean, straggling against one’s very nature to ingratiate oneself to intellectual and creative inferiors. Here before him stood a room sunny and high and festooned with fine things, in full representation of the existence he most longed to achieve—the space in which to turn himself free.

  You wonder, no doubt, how a boy from the Old Brewery could ascertain such longing in the sag of a man’s posture and the wistfulness of his gaze. Perhaps I did not at the time. Perhaps the recognition only grew in me over the years, grew in proportion to my own suppressed rages and bitterness, my own failure to shuck the various fetters clamped around my ankles, so that now, looking back, no less fettered but too old to kick against the restraints, I can finally put it into words. But on that morning in 1840, I sensed Poe’s desire; I assure you of that. I sensed it because I shared it.

  And then he was standing at our back, Johnston Hobbs himself. He clamped a hand on Poe’s shoulder. “Good afternoon, sir, good afternoon. You are as punctual as you are astute.”

  Before Poe could do much more than blink, Hobbs turned to the waiting butler. “Bring Mr. Poe and myself a carafe of the amontillado to enjoy with our coffee, Conroy. And on your way show his valet here to the kitchen for some tea and jam. Do you like gooseberry jam, boy? I have never known a boy who didn’t.”

  “No, sir,” I said. “Yes, sir, I do.”

  But he scarcely heard my answer, if at all. Still with a hand on Poe’s shoulder—Poe seemed even more stunned than I by the boom of Hobbs’s voice and his manner of quick familiarity—he ushered Poe into the sitting room and left the butler to turn me toward the kitchen.

  If Johnston Hobbs’s glow was not as incandescent as his daughter’s, there was still about the man a certain radiance of presence, an effulgence that, when considered against his otherwise plain appearance, left no doubt in my mind that the family’s luminosity could be attributed at least in part to the mountains of shiners they kept stacked and piled in various banks. He was a man of only average height, probably once as lean as Poe but now going flaccid from jowls to toes. He wore wire spectacles on a nose that was not quite bulbous, and pockmarked like his cheeks with a hundred gaping pores. His pate was all but bald at the summit; a wispy thatch of reddish hair still grew from a point three inches above his forehead, and this he wore parted in the middle and smoothed over his skull like a few threads of downy mohair yarn. But it was the way he stood, the lift of his narrow chin and the emerald-hard glint of his eyes—it was this aristocratic bearing that suppressed any resistance I might have voiced to being shuffled off to the kitchen.

  It was a kitchen of princely proportions, which is to say like none other in which I had ever been offered a chair. I sat at the corner of a long, narrow table where two plumpish women were preparing what must have been the evening meal: a cold ham being sliced, trays of rolls sliding into the oven, cider drained from a demijohn into a pitcher, wine bottles wiped clean of their cellar dust, a kettle of pungent soup simmering on the stove, the mold scraped and rind peeled from two small wheels of cheese, mutton shivering in a green aspic, two small fowls of some kind smeared with butter and waiting naked for the oven… In short, there was more food visible than I could inventory or imagine.

  A girl of fifteen or so cleared a corner of the table for me, pointed to a chair, and said, “Have yourself a seat.”

  She then set before me a tall and thick-walled mug filled with tea. The mug was made of a dull gray metal which I mistook for unpolished silver. I slipped one hand inside the handle and the other around the base, and I don’t know which intoxicated me more, the tannic steam or the erroneous notion that I was holding in my hands a mug worth more than a half dozen of my lives. I knew in that instant that I must steal the mug if given a chance.

  “Don’t you want to sweeten that up?” the girl asked as I gulped the tea. She set a silver spoon and a bowl of jam before me, then watched, grinning, as I ladled three heavy spoonfuls into my mug.

  “Whyn’t you do it the other way round,” she said, “and drip a little tea into the jam?”

  I grinned and blushed and tried to think of something witty to say.

  It was then that a narrow doorway opened in the opposite corner of the room, the door adjacent to a smaller open room used as a pantry. A man leaned out, visible only from the shoulders up, and close to the floor, suggesting that he was standing a few steps lower than the kitchen floor, no doubt on the stairs into the cellar. He was a strangely countenanced man, his face as long and thin as a post, and just as stiff, the skin stretched taut, pallid, mouth pulled into a slit.

  He held a dark and dusty bottle out to one of the portly women. “The amontillado,” he said. “For Mr. Hobbs.” His face remained motionless when he spoke; his lips barely moved. His fingers were long and thin, skeletal, and his long nails yellow.

  The woman took the bottle from him without a word and wiped it with a rag. The cadaverous man ducked away and closed the door, and I heard his steps retreating down into the basement.

  Had I had but the slightest idea what amontillado is, I would have leapt to my feet and tackled the woman as she carried the bottle to the sitting room. But I was still staring at the closed basement door, awed by the notion that a man could look so like a corpse and still move about of his own volition.

  Moments later, the smell of my tea brought me back to life. I spooned out another dollop of jam and stirred it into the mug. “Looks like you’re having a party here tonight,” I said to the girl.

  “Here?” she said. “No, just the usual mess.”

  “All this food every day?”

  “Two and sometimes three times a day,” she said.

  She plucked a pair of warm biscuits from a pan and set them in front of me. A moment later, she dropped a tray of silverware onto the table and pulled up a chair and, with polishing cloth in hand, sat opposite me.

  As she worked on the soup spoons, she watched me shove half a biscuit mounded with jam into my mouth. “Don’t your Mr. Poe feed you where you live?”

  I had no wish to get into the particulars of my relationship with Poe, especially since they were none too clear to me. “He feeds me fine,” I answered. “That is, Mrs. Clemm does.”

  “The mistress?” she said.

  “His wife, you mean? No, they ain’t married. Seems like it sometimes though, the way they look at each other. The way they carry on whispering and such. But no, his wife’s name’s Virginia.”

  I noticed how one of the plumpish women looked to the other one and winked. The girl said, “You mean he carries on with this Mrs. Clemm right there in front of his wife?”

  I snorted so loudly that a clump of biscuit popped out of the comer of my mouth. “Mrs. Clemm is his wife’s mother.”

  “So she’s old then.”

  “Not much older than him. Because Virginia ain’t much older than you.”

  The girl went stock-still for a moment, as did the other two women. And I thrilled to my sudden power to silence a room with
mere words.

  “Truth is I’ve seen him with his arms around Mrs. Clemm more often than around his wife. His wife’s more like his little pet, that one. He sleeps in a chair pulled up to her bed.”

  “Gawd,” said the girl. “And where does Mrs. Clemm sleep?”

  I did not want to say that she slept on the floor, because it would suggest that I too made my bed in such a humble place. But all three women were looking at me directly now, all three had eyes wide, mouths slightly open, ears waiting for my next utterance, and I felt huge with an authority I had never before known.

  “She’s got her own bed,” I told them. “Not that Poe sleeps much in that chair of his. He spends most every night in the same room as Mrs. Clemm.”

  “And his little wife don’t mind all this going on?”

  “She’s sweet about every old thing, she don’t mind nothing. Plus she’s sick, that’s the other thing,” I continued. “Virginia, I mean. The white plague. He won’t talk about it, but I’m more’n more certain that’s what it is. I’ve seen it before, of course. I’ve seen most everything there is to see.”

  They stared at me awhile longer, then the older women shook their heads and went back to their work. The girl gave me a sly grin and raised her eyebrows twice, then she blushed and turned away and concentrated on the cutlery.

  As for me, I cupped both hands around my mug and drank down the tea. Afterward I sat there staring into the empty mug and wondering how to get it into my shirt unseen, and a bitterness came into my mouth as I thought about the things I had said. If imprecise in my understanding of what wrongs I might have perpetrated with loose talk, I felt shamed nonetheless and knew that I had somehow denigrated Poe and Mrs. Clemm and Virginia in the eyes of these strangers. My remorse grew stronger with every second I remained at that table, and I began to despise the three servants whose look and attentiveness had caused my tongue to flap, and when I hated them enough to want myself punished for my words, I slid the mug off the table and between my legs, and then I slipped it down into my waistband and fluffed my shirt over it.