by Louis Bayard
I told him that the body, when last I’d seen it, was lying on a blacksmith bed in Ward B-3 of the West Point hospital. The ice storm had slowed its decay: the skin had just the slightest flush of blue, and if you could have seen nothing more than the head, you would have thought it a fine specimen indeed, more imposing by far than Leroy Fry’s body. But for all that, it was every bit as dead, every bit as empty; if anything, the cincture round the neck was even deeper, the crater in the chest even more jagged, more splintered.
And that black rind of blood in the crotch, nearly hidden by the still-swollen penis. No way of getting round that. The person who’d done it was in no way disinterested. He’d had something deeply personal in mind.
Narrative of Gus Landor
23
December 4th to 5th
Captain Hitchcock had been badgering me all week about Leroy Fry’s diary. Had I found anything yet? Names of suspicious cadets? New angles to pursue? Wasn’t there something?
To pacify him, I began bringing him the transcribed pages each morning. “Here you are, Captain,” I’d say in a high, bright voice as I dropped the stack on his desk. Without even pausing to dismiss me, he got straight to reading. He really seemed to believe that each new installment would hold the key to everything. When in fact every one just held more of the same: litanies of woe; trivia; sexual itch. I felt almost sorry for the commandant. It could have been no great joy for him to see how little went on in a cadet’s brain.
Poe stayed in his quarters on Saturday night. The calls of sleep had grown too pressing even for him to ignore.
That very evening, just before eleven, it began to snow. A thick bestial slouching sort of snow. Only Patsy, normally, could have drawn me from the comforts of my hotel room to plash about in the stuff—and Patsy hadn’t sent for me. Well, it didn’t matter, I had Mr. Scott’s latest, I had a good fire, food, tobacco. Oh, I might have dug in for many days altogether, but the next morning, I received an invitation.
Dear Mr. Landor,
Forgive the inexcusably late notice, but might we prevail upon you to grace our humble home for a modest dinner party this evening at six? Mr. Ballinger’s death has cast such a pall over our happy little clan, and your company would be the ideal tonic. Please say you will!! With fondest hopes, Mrs. Marquis
Hadn’t I been waiting for just this chance to break the Marquis family enclosure? Wasn’t there every likelihood that seeing Artemus “embosomed” (as Poe would have it) in his boyhood home would give me the glimmer—the picture—I’d been lacking?
It was an invitation, in short, I couldn’t decline. So it was that at fifteen minutes to six, I was pulling on my Hessians and actually reaching for my cloak when the single knock came.
Poe, of course. Shaggy with snow, holding his sheaf of paper. He handed it over in perfect silence and drifted back down the corridor, and if the hallway’s acoustics hadn’t been so good, I might have missed what he said as he disappeared into the stairwell.
“I’ve just had the most extraordinary afternoon of my life.”
Report of Edgar A. Poe to Augustus Landor
December 5th
The first Snow, Landor! Rare bliss it was to awaken and to find every tree and rock overrun with snow; to find the snowflakes still spilling like hoarded coins from the sky’s cloud-purses. If you could only have seen me and my brothers in arms this morning, Landor. You might have thought a crowd of rosy-cheeked shavers had just been set free of their schoolhouse! Several of our company vied for the honor of throwing the first snowball, and in short order, our little skirmish bid fair to devolve into combat every bit as gory as Thermopylae, until the timely intervention of the cadet company commanders restored some small semblance of order.
Morning mess featured several helpings of ice soup, and the singing of “O Thou Who Camest from Above” during Sunday chapel was accompanied by baptismal showers of white powder. Amidst all this revelry and shrieking, it was left to more poetic sensibilities to remark upon . . . the supernal silence which lay just outside the realm of our tiny conflagrations. Overnight, it appeared, our little Academe had been transformed into a fay’s kingdom—a bejeweled realm in which the thundering tramp of boots was changed to pipsqueaks—the loudest invective muffled in a woolen white embrace.
Following chapel, I retired to my quarters, where I lit a fire in the grate and immersed myself in Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection. (During our next encounter, Landor, we must discuss Kant’s distinctions between “understanding” and “reason,” as I am reasonably sure that you and I are the respective embodiments of these antipodal principles.) It was some ten minutes after one o’clock when there came an unexpected knocking on my door. Presuming it to be an officer on his inspection rounds, I at once concealed the contraband book beneath my coverlet and rose to attention.
The door opened by small degrees to reveal—no officer—a coachman. Ah! how poorly that word suffices to convey the bald outlandishness of his appearance. A coat of dark green, he wore, lined through with scarlet and ornamented richly with silver aiguillettes. His waistcoat was scarlet, and his breeches likewise, with silver lace garters. These articles alone would have rendered him, in these austere climes, a specimen of ripe exoticism, had he not also been wearing the most anomalous of hats. Beaver-skin, if you may conceive it, set on a head of ebony hair so luxuriant that one might have thought a Gypsy ruffian had quit the employment of the fifth Duke of Buccleuch and offered his services directly to Daniel Boone.
“Mr. Poe, sir,” said he, in a gruff tenor voice that betrayed undertones of Mitteleuropa. “I’ve been sent to fetch you.”
“On what errand?” I asked, astounded.
He pressed a gloved finger to his mustachioed lip. “You’re to follow me.”
I hesitated to comply, as who would not? In the last reckoning, I believe it was naked curiosity (which, along with perversity, I judge to be the prima mobilia of human endeavor) that impelled me to follow.
This coachman led me into the assembly yard and thence set a steady course due north. As we wove our way amidst divers gamboling cadets, it was well nigh impossible to ignore the looks of wild surmise excited by my companion’s appearance. Still less was it possible to ignore the deteriorating condition of my boots, which, after a morning’s immersion in these Highland steppes, were quite soaked through. (The rather fine Hessians which I brought here from Virginia, I was lamentably forced to sell to Mr. Durrie, my fellow plebe, in order to satisfy a debt owed to Major Burton.) In fear lest I should contract frostbite, I begged the coachman to disclose our destination. Nary a word did he utter.
Presently this strange fellow, dragging his fine lace garments through foot-high drifts of snow, disappeared behind the tailor’s shop. I made haste to follow, spurred onward by a thousand vague fancies—fancies which corresponded but little to the reality that was to confront me. For as I rounded the corner of the building, I found myself gazing in wonder at . . . a sleigh.
It was an Albany cutter, its swelled sides giving the vehicle the graceful arabesque profile of a gigantic swan. The enigmatic coachman drew up the reins with one hand; with the other, he beckoned me to take the seat next to him. Something there was about his insinuating smile, the extraordinary forwardness and familiarity of his manner—and, most particularly, the singularly skeletal motion of those long, gloved fingers—which imparted the iciest of chills to my frame. I could well have believed that Pluto himself had come to convey me to his infernal and pestilential Netherworld.
Run, Poe! Wherefore did you not run? I can but assume that the anxiety which pervaded my soul was exactly counterweighted by the curiosity to which I have already alluded, leaving me, in effect, motionless, my eyes riveted upon the coachman.
“Driver,” I said at last, my voice rising to asperity, “I will not consent to go another step until you tell me our destination.”
Answer came there none. Or was I to take these for an answer, these attenuated, emaciated fingers, flexing and curling?
“I will not, I say! Not until I know where you mean to take me.”
At length his hand ceased to beckon, and with a cryptic smile, he proceeded to tug the gloves from his hands. These gloves he dropped onto the floor of the sleigh, and then, in an extravagantly violent motion, he flung away his beaver-skin hat. And before I could sufficiently recover myself, he began to peel the mustache from his face!
Nothing more was needed to disclose the visage and form that had lain so artfully submerged beneath that outré costume. It was my own, my beloved Lea!
At the sight of her dear countenance, so adorably smudged by the awn and spirit gum, so unutterably feminine amid these masculine habiliments, my soul trembled with joy. Once more, Lea beckoned—her fingers no longer the cadaverous talons of Hades’ emissary, but the sweet, tender, ineffably precious digits of the divine Astarte.
I set my foot on the runner and hurled myself into the sleigh coach with such unmitigated force that our bodies came into ecstatic collision. Laughing gaily, she fell back and closed her hands round mine, drawing me by graceful degrees closer. Her long jetty lashes folded down. Her lips—those ravishingly irregular lips—parted. . . .
And on this occasion, Landor, I did not swoon. I dared not! To be separated from her for the veriest second—though it were to dwell in the most resplendent and crystalline caverns of Dream—this I could never have borne.
“But where are we going, Lea?”
The snow had ceased to fall, the sun had risen in all its fiery eminence, and the land round us gleamed with a rare dazzle. Only now did I have adequate mastery of my faculties to apprehend the depths of Lea’s ingenuity. Somehow she had secured this conveyance. Somehow she had acquired this flamboyant costume. Somehow she had reconnoitered this sylvan setting, so ideal in its seclusion. Faced with such an intelligence—infinitely flexible, strategic in its cunning—what could I do, Landor, but resign myself to the part of spectator, awaiting the next stage of the spectacle?
“But where are we going?” I asked again.
Had she answered “Heaven” or “Hell,” it would have made no difference. I should have followed.
“Never fear, Edgar. We shall be back in time for supper. Father and Mother are expecting us both, you know.”
Ah, was this not the diadem on the crown? Stretching before us lay not just an afternoon but an entire evening, and the whole length of it to be spent together!
Of the remainder of that wintry excursus I shall write no more, except to say that when the Albany cutter had paused on the hill commanding Cornwall, when the tintinnabulation of the horse’s harness bells had subsided into silence, when Lea had set down the reins and granted me the privilege of laying my head in her lap, when the fumes of her orrisroot had risen round me like the holiest incense—then my Happiness passed into a new realm—beyond fancy—beyond belief—beyond even Life itself.
I did contrive, Landor, to introduce the subject of the lately deceased Cadets into our conversation. In regard to Ballinger, she gave me to know that she had considered him no more than an intimate of Artemus’—and was, as a consequence, more saddened in her brother’s behalf than by any loss she had endured. Turning the conversation to Leroy Fry proved a more complicated matter. I did suggest, in the course of proposing future destinations for our Albany cutter, that we might venture once more to the cemetery, if that hallowed ground did not hold too many taxing associations for her. I added that it might be of interest to see Mr. Fry’s newly dug grave, assuming that the snow had left any traces of it.
“But why should you concern yourself with Mr. Fry, Edgar?”
Anxious to placate her, I confessed that I had understood Mr. Fry to be an admirer of hers, and that in my present character of innamorato, I felt honor-bound to pay respects to any gentleman who had ever pretended to that exalted state.
Tapping her feet on the carpet, she shrugged and, in an offhand tone, said, “He would never have served my purposes, I fear.”
“Who would, I wonder?”
In response to this simple query, all imprints of emotion or thought drained from her countenance, leaving that treasured canvas a veritable tabula rasa on which I could not so much as etch a line.
“Why, you, of course,” she answered finally.
She gave the reins a brisk shake and, with a long and gladsome laugh, drove the long road home.
Oh, Landor. I can no longer believe it of Artemus. It beggars the mind that any kinsman of Lea’s—one who shares so much of her birthright, so many of her features, who has recited the same treble prayers from beneath the same counterpane—could be capable of such an inhuman, an inconceivable brutality. How can it be that two seedlings from one tree, twining themselves so tenderly round each other, could tend in such shockingly opposed directions . . . the one toward Light, the other toward Darkness? It cannot be, Mr. Landor. Heaven help us if it can.
Narrative of Gus Landor
24
December 5th
Oh, Poe should have known better. Thinking, I mean, that people tend only to light and dark, and not both ways. Well, it would make for a lively debate some evening, I thought, but right now there was this to consider: Poe and I would be attending the same dinner.
It took me the whole way to Dr. Marquis’ residence to decide that it was a good thing. For if nothing else, I would learn just how good an observer my little spy really was.
The door was opened by a wall-eyed girl with chaffed skin and spirits. Wiping her nose with one arm, she grabbed my cloak and hat with the other, dropped them on the hat stand, and sprinted back to the kitchen. She had no sooner vanished than Mrs. Marquis poked her rabbity head into the foyer. In that moment, her features seemed frozen in place, as though she had just been dragged from one of the snowbanks, but as soon as she saw me banging my boots on her mat, she came hard on in her black crepe mourning dress, hands fluttering like pennants.
“Oh, Mr. Landor, what sport! We are all refugees from the cruel elements! Yes, please, come in. It won’t do to linger a moment by that door.” With a surprisingly strong grip, she took me by the elbow and led me out of the foyer, only to be momentarily blocked by the small, half smiling figure of Cadet Fourth Classman Poe, slender and erect in his best dress uniform. He must have got there a few minutes before me, but in that moment, he became for Mrs. Marquis a newcomer again. She had to stare long and hard before she could account for him.
“Why, of course! Mr. Landor, have you met Mr. Poe? Just once? Well, once cannot be enough in this young gentleman’s case. No, I forbid you to blush, sir! He is quite the gallant, Mr. Landor, and has the most exquisitely tuned poetical ear. You must hear him go on about Helen sometime, it is really not to be . . . but what’s become of Artemus? Oh, his lateness is beyond habitual, it is perfectly criminal. Leaving me with two such handsome gentlemen and no one to entertain them. Well, I have a remedy for that. Follow me, if you please.”
Did I expect her to be bowed with grief over Ballinger’s death? Probably not. I was thrown a bit, nevertheless, by the vigor of her tread as she led us down an oak-paneled hallway lined with samplers—“God Bless This Home,” “How Doth the Little Busy Bee,” etc.— and, after brushing away a spiderweb from the grandfather clock, pushed open the parlor door. This parlor, Reader—maybe you know what I mean—it was the kind of room that seems to house all of a family’s hopes: the maple American Empire armchairs, with their scrolled feet and horn-of-plenty legs, the chiffonier and the glass cabinet filled with the porcelain tigers and elephants, the snapdragons and gladioluses in the vase on the mantel . . . and a fire, of course, large enough to topple a city. And sitting next to the fire, a young woman, hot-cheeked, embroidering on a tambour. A young woman named Lea Marquis.
I was on the point of introducing myself when Lea’s mother let loose with a gasp.
“Oh, me! I have quite forgot about the seating order. Mr. Poe, may I throw myself upon your mercy? It will require but a few minutes, and you do have such an eye for things,
and I would be so eternally grateful. Thank you so much! Lea, if you would . . .”
Would what? She never said. Just crooked her hand round Poe’s elbow and dragged him from the room.
This is to explain why Lea Marquis and I were never formally introduced. It may also account for the spottiness of our conversation. I did my best to make things easy for her. I set my ottoman at a discreet distance and, remembering well her horror of weather topics, avoided any mention of the snow. And when the talk failed, I contented myself with smelling the damp, sweet reek of my boots and listening to the hiss of the oak logs and peering through the stoles of snow on the parlor window. And when that failed to charm, there was always Lea to look at.
Silly of me, expecting Poe’s portrait to be lifelike. Some mote had clearly got in his eye, for she—well, she stooped a bit; and her mouth, I would have called overripe; and in almost every way, I’m afraid, she suffered by comparison with her brother. His jaw looked lumpen on her; the brows that arched so agreeably on his face were too square, too heavy for hers. And yet those eyes were every bit as enchanting as Poe had said; her figure was fine; and this he hadn’t quite got across: the strange fluid vitality of her. In the most languid of her movements—in repose, even—there was something alert and primed, a continual and never quite realized potential. I suppose what I’m saying is that there was not a trace of surrender about her.