The Poe Shadow

by Matthew Pearl

  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.”

  “Do you think you can shuffle us off from our task so easily? I have read some of your friend Poe. It seems it consists chiefly of him saying plain things in a fashion that makes them hard to understand, and commonplace things in a mysterious form which makes them seem oracular.” Bonjour checked her speed momentarily to look at me. I also came to a stop. “Are you in love, Monsieur Clark?”

  I had lost my concentration on Bonjour. My gaze had landed nearby, where a woman was striding along the sidewalk. She was woman of around forty, attractive enough. My eyes followed her path down the street.

  “Are you in love, monsieur?” Bonjour repeated gently, following the object of my gaze.

  “That woman…I saw her with Neilson Poe, a cousin of Edgar’s, you see, and she looks remarkably like—”

  I had not meant to blurt this out.

  “Yes?” Bonjour said. Her softer tone compelled me to finish the sentence.

  “Remarkably like a portrait I’ve seen of Virginia Poe, Edgar’s deceased wife.” The fact was, even seeing this woman seemed to bring me closer to the life of Edgar Poe.

  My view of her was soon blocked by the rest of the crowd. I then realized that Bonjour was no longer standing by my side. Looking around, I saw that she was approaching the woman—that Virginia Poe copy!—and I felt angry at myself for having revealed what I had.

  “Miss!” Bonjour called. “Miss!”

  The woman turned and faced Bonjour. I stood aside, not believing that the woman had seen me at the police station house, but wishing to be safe.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Bonjour, in a convincing southern accent that she must have imitated from some of the belles she had heard around the city. She continued, “You looked so much like a lady I used to know—but I was mistaken. Perhaps it was only that lovely bonnet….”

  The woman gave a ki
nd smile and started to turn her back to Bonjour.

  “But she looked so much like Virginia!” Bonjour now said as though to herself.

  The woman turned back. “Virginia?” she asked with curiosity.

  I could see a look of enjoyment spread across Bonjour’s face, knowing that she had achieved her object. “Virginia Poe,” Bonjour said, adopting a somber aspect.

  “I see,” the other woman said quietly.

  “I met her only once, but Lethean waters will never erase it from my memory,” gushed Bonjour. “You are as beautiful as she was!”

  The woman lowered her eyes at the compliment.

  “I am Mrs. Neilson Poe,” the other woman said. “Josephine. I am afraid no one shall ever be as beautiful as my darling sister was when she was still alive.”

  “Your sister, ma’am?”

  “Sissy. Virginia Poe, I mean. She was my half-sister. She was all courage and confidence even at her weakest. Whenever I see her portrait…!” She stopped, unable to continue the thought.

  So that was it! Neilson was married to the sister of Edgar Poe’s late wife. After a few words of condolence, they walked together and Josephine Poe quietly answered Bonjour’s questions about Sissy. I followed behind to listen.

  “One evening while Edgar and Sissy were residing happily in Philadelphia on Coates Street, darling Sissy was singing at her beloved piano when a blood vessel ruptured. She collapsed in the middle of her song. There was an almost hourly anticipation of her being lost. Especially by Edgar. The winter of her death, they were so poverty-stricken that the only thing that could keep Sissy warm in their badly heated rooms was to be wrapped in his great-coat with a tortoise-shell cat lying on her bosom.”

  “What happened to her husband since?”

  “Edgar? The oscillation between hope and despair for so many years had driven him insane, I believe. He needed womanly devotion. He said he would not live another year without true and tender love. People say he ran about the country looking to find a wife several times since Sissy’s death, but I believe his heart still bled for Sissy. He was engaged to be married again only a few weeks before his death.”

  The women exchanged a few more words before Josephine departed with a graceful farewell. Bonjour turned back to me with a girlish giggle. “It is too bad for you, that you must be against the Baron in one of his plots, Monsieur Clark. You see, we do not hide in the shadows, lingering over small details.”

  “Mademoiselle, please! Here, in Baltimore, in America, you do not have to retain your association with the Baron and his schemes! I would flee him at once. There are no bonds here!”

  Her eyes widened with interest. “Is there not slavery?”

  She was clever.

  “Just so!” I said. “There are no bonds for a free Frenchwoman. You do not owe any duty to the Baron.”

  “I do not have duty to my husband?” she said. “This is useful to remember.”

  “The Baron. Your husband?”

  “We have full swing over this, and beginning now there will be no letup. If I were you, Monsieur Clark, I would try not to get in our way.”

  Wherever you travel in the world, you are sure to find the same limited number of species of lawyers, as surely as a naturalist finds his grass and weeds in every land. The first sort of lawyer views the intricacies of the rules of the law as profound and unshakable idols of worship. There is a different species of attorney, a carnivorous one to whom the first is prey, who instead treats rules as the principal barriers to success.

  The Baron Claude Dupin was such a good specimen of the latter category that his skeleton might be hung in the Tuileries Cabinet of Comparative Anatomy. The legal codes were the weaponry he utilized to wage battle; they were his pistols and knives, nothing more hallowed. When he required a delay to his advantage, the Baron was known to have ended an appointment or even a trial by sneaking out an anteroom window. When such sinister methods were not sufficient, the Baron Dupin employed actual pistols and knives through his networks of rogues to secure the information or confession needed. The Baron was a lawyer, yes, but only secondarily; he was a heartfelt impresario, first, who worked as a lawyer. A showman on his box, a huckster of the law.

  Duponte had told me one day, during our transatlantic journey, the story of Bonjour, though he had neglected to mention her marriage. In France, Duponte explained, there is a type of criminal known as the bonjourier, whose method entails the following: in fashionable clothing, the lady or gentleman thief will enter a house, moving past the servants as though present for an important appointment, take whatever objects they can quickly seize, and then walk right out the street door. But if a servant or other member of the household notices them between entrance and exit, they bow, say “Bonjour!” and ask for the resident of the house next door, having researched that name. They are, of course, assumed to merely have come in at the wrong door, and are directed away without suspicion and with as many stolen valuables as they’d managed to collect. The young woman who had stood before me in the fortifications was the best bonjourier in Paris and so had eventually become known to all simply as Bonjour.

  Bonjour was said to have been raised in a rural village of France. Her mother, a Swiss woman, died a few months before the child had reached one year. Her French father, a hardworking baker, cared for his daughter. He spent most nights wailing, however, and the young girl soon had little patience for her father’s endless grief. This, in combination with the lack of a maternal instructor, forged a young girl who was as fiercely independent as any Frenchman. Soon, the father was arrested and taken away before her eyes in the chaos of one of the country’s smaller revolutions. She made her way to Paris to live on her own and survived through cleverness and physical strength. There were many assaults against her as a young thief, and one of these resulted in the prominent scar on her face.

  “But how is it such a beautiful woman persists as a common thief?” I had asked Duponte one evening as we sat at the long dining table of the steamer.

  Duponte raised an eyebrow at my question and seemed to consider leaving it unanswered. “She has not remained a thief, in fact, and has not been common. She has for many years been an assassin of the most efficient character. It is said that, because of her former practice, in her role as assassin it is her habit to call out ‘bonjour’ before sending a knife through a man’s throat. However, this is mere speculation, for nobody living can confirm it.”

  “Yet she was womanly and courageous enough at the fortifications on my behalf,” I said. “I believe poor health and environments create such lapses in character in women.”

  “She has been most poor then,” replied Duponte.

  It happened one winter that Bonjour, brought in by the Parisian police after a botched theft that left one gentleman dead in his parlor, was threatened with execution to be made an example to the growing race of female thieves. The Baron Dupin, at the height of his eminence, represented her with overpowering zeal. He demonstrated with skill that the police of Paris had quite mistakenly victimized Bonjour, a delicate and angelic creature whose physical appearance, petite girlish form, and comeliness added not a little to the general effect for observers.

  You shall not now wonder, considering this example, how the Baron accumulated faithful rogues. When he secured their release from prison, as he did Bonjour’s, their loyalty accrued to him as a matter of honor. You shall think this a contradiction, but all people need rules to live, and criminals can only have a few—loyalty is one they favor. The Baron had been married before, but the women were said to have motives ranging from simple love to, at one time in his life, his great wealth. It remains anyone’s guess whether with the loyalty of Bonjour also came love, or one superseded the other, or they mingled together in some heartless combination.

  12

  BACK AT GLEN ELIZA , Duponte, when he heard all that Bonjour had told me, mused only that the Baron Dupin’s tactics would complicate matters. I had of course arrived at the same conclusion,
and this made me more eager to continue tracing the fruits of the Baron’s campaign I had begun to witness around the city. I was now out all through the city on errands a good deal and Duponte was almost always sitting in my library. He was usually silent. I sometimes found myself unconsciously imitating his posture or an expression on his face, whether out of monotony or in an attempt to assure myself he was really there.

  One day, Duponte, reviewing some newspapers, exclaimed, “Ah, yes!”

  “Found something, monsieur?” I asked.

  “I have only this moment remembered the thought I was having when your caller arrived yesterday, while you were out.”

  “Caller?”

  “Oh yes, her visit was monstrously disruptive, and I have recovered my line of reasoning only now, if you believe it.”

  When Duponte would say little more on the subject, I surveyed my chambermaids. They had not thought to inform me of the caller since Duponte had been here to receive her. It was clear from their varied descriptions that the visitor was in fact Auntie Blum, who came with a male slave holding an umbrella over her head. Though my domestics differed on some of the particulars, this was the fullest narrative I could re-create of the conversation that occurred in my library.

  Auntie Blum: Is not Mr. Clark here?

  Auguste Duponte: Right.

  AB: Right? What do you mean, “right”?

  AD: You are correct. Mr. Clark is not here.

  AB: But I did not—Who are you, then?

  AD: I am Auguste Duponte.

  AB: Oh? But—

  AD: Mademoiselle—

  AB (alarmed by the French): Madem-mois…?

  AD (now looking up for the first time): Madame.

  AB: Madame?

  AD (Duponte said something in French that, after much reflection, neither servant could recollect, and that unfortunately must be imagined.)