When the flames began running terrifically along the log, and I was contemplating these matters, I had a sudden thought about the Baron Dupin as though his face had been reflected back to me from the fire. It came to me while I was trying to picture the man without having the original present.
No portrait-maker or Daguerrean artist could do the Baron any justice because of the changes that constantly befell his features. In fact, if it were attempted, the Baron would likely grow more like the portrait canvas rather than the other way around. One would have to catch him asleep to see his true form.
“Monsieur Duponte,” I said, with a leap to my feet, as the fire cracked and popped to life. “It is you!”
He looked up at my dramatic pronouncement.
“He is you!” I waved my hands in one direction, then the other. “That is why he schemed to have Von Dantker here!”
It took me three or four tries to express the meaning of my realization: the Baron Dupin had appropriated the form of Auguste Duponte! The Baron had tautened the muscles in his face, had weighed down the ends of his mouth, had—for all I could say—used some spell of magic to sharpen the very contours of his head and adjust his height. He also selected his dress like Duponte’s, in the loose cut of the cloth and dull colors. He left behind the jewelry and rings with which he was formerly adorned, and smoothed the wilderness of ringlets in his hair. The Baron had subtly, using observation and the study of Von Dantker’s sketches and portraiture, remade himself into a version of Duponte.
The reason, I presumed, was simple. To irritate his opponent; to avenge the provocation of Tindley; to sneer at the nobler being who dared to compete with him in this endeavor. Whenever he saw Duponte around the streets, the Baron could hardly speak without breaking into laughter at the brilliance of his newly instituted taunt.
An abomination, a conjurer, a swindler: masquerading as a great man!
He had also—somehow—I vow to you—he had also transmogrified the very timbre and pitch of his voice. To parrot with precision that of Duponte’s! Even the accent was adjusted to perfection. If I had been in a dark chamber, and had been listening to a monologue by this falsifier, I would have happily addressed the fiend as though he were my accustomed and true companion.
The Baron’s petty masquerade dogged me. It haunted me. It ground down my teeth. I do not think it bothered Duponte half as much. When I complained about the Baron’s ploy, Duponte’s mouth lengthened into an enigmatic arch, as though he thought the taunt amusing, child’s play. And when he met his competitor, he bowed at the Baron all the same as before. The sight was astounding, particularly at nighttime, seeing them there together. Eventually, the only certain way to distinguish them was by the identity of the devoted associates, me on one side and Mademoiselle Bonjour on the other.
Finally, one day, I confronted Duponte. “When this fiend scoffs at you, mocks you, you allow it to continue unchallenged.”
“What would you counsel me to do, Monsieur Clark? Propose a duel?” asked Duponte, more mildly than I probably deserved.
“Box his ears, certainly!” I said, though I do not suppose I would have personally done so. “Become quite warm with him, at least.”
“I see. Should that help our cause?”
I conceded that it might not. “Just so. It would remind him, I should think, that he is not alone playing this game. He believes, in the infinite deception of his brain, that he has already won, Monsieur Duponte!”
“He has subscribed to a mistaken belief, then. The situation is quite the opposite. The Baron, I am afraid for him, has already lost. He has reached the end, as have I.”
I leaned forward in disbelief. “Do you mean…?”
Duponte was speaking of our very purpose, the unraveling of the entire mystery of Poe…
But I see I have jumped too far ahead of myself, as I tend to do. I will have to retrace my steps before I return to the above dialogue. I had begun to describe my life as a spy, stimulated by Duponte’s desire to know the Baron’s secrets and plans.
As I noted before, the Baron changed hotels frequently to elude pursuers. I maintained my knowledge of their lodgings by following as one tired hotel porter moved their baggage from his hotel to the custody of a brother porter. I do not know how the Baron answered questions about the peculiar practice of moving hotels when he signed each new register. If I ever found myself doing the same, and could not give the actual reason—“You see, sir, my creditors are looking to make me a head shorter”—I would have claimed I was writing a guidebook for strangers to Baltimore, and required a basis to compare lodging choices. The proprietors would shower you with advantages. This was such a good idea, I was tempted to write of it as an anonymous suggestion to the Baron.
Meanwhile, Duponte instructed me to find out more information about Newman, the slave the Baron had engaged, and so I insinuated myself into a discussion with him in the anteroom one afternoon.
“I gonna leave Baltimore after he spring me,” Newman said to my questions about the Baron. “I got a brother and sister in Boston.”
“Why not run away now? There are northern states that will protect you,” I commented.
He pointed to a printed notice in the entrance hall of the hotel. It stated that no colored person, “bond or free,” could leave town without first depositing his papers and taking a white man to be his surety.
“I ain’t no dumb nigger,” he said, “to be hunted down and dead. I’d as good as go to my owner and beg to be shot.”
Newman was right; he would be traced even if his owner did not especially care about the loss.
I should include an additional note, to avoid any perplexity, about the language of the young slave. Among the Africans, both slaves and free, in the southern and in northern states, the use of the word “nigger” was not about race. I have heard blacks talking of a mulatto with that term and even calling their masters “them white niggers.” “Nigger” was used by blacks to mean a low fellow of any sort, color, or class. This rather ingeniously redefines the ugly word, until it will no doubt be removed from our language altogether. For those who ever doubted the intelligence of that mistreated race, I point to this linguistic stroke and wonder if whites would have thought of the same.
“And what of the other Negro?” I asked.
“Who?”
“The other black engaged by the Baron,” I replied. I had become sufficiently convinced that the stranger I had seen once before with the Baron had been assigned by him to watch me—spying on me even as I spied on him.
“There ain’t no other, sir, black or white. Baron D. don’t want too many people to know him real close.”
With my new proximity, I was surprised, and not a little pleased, to find a diminishment in the bluster the Baron displayed. On several occasions in my hearing, Bonjour would pose a rather elementary question about the Baron’s conclusions regarding Poe; the Baron Dupin would demur. This brightened my hopes at our own success. But I suppose this also placed something of a negative and unsettling fear over me that Duponte would also be at a loss, as though there was a mystical connection between the two men. Maybe this was a subtle consequence on my mind of the new and startling resemblance between Claude Dupin and Auguste Duponte, as though one were real and one an image in the mirror, as in the doomed last encounter of Poe’s own William Wilson. Other times it seemed both were mirror images of the same being.
Their behaviors, though, were different enough.
In the public eye, the Baron continued his loud, obnoxious proclamations. He began raising a subscription for a broadsheet he proposed to publish, and a lecture series he would give, on the true and sensational details of Poe’s death. “Come, fly around, fly around me, gentlemen and gals, you shall never believe what happened under your noses!” he proclaimed in taverns and public houses, like a showman or mountebank. I must own, he was convincing, superficially; nearly another Mr. Barnum. You half expected him to announce to some street crowd that he would now trans
form this container of bran into a…live…guinea pig!
And the money that followed him wherever he went! I could not fathom the number of Baltimoreans who willingly forked over hard money into the hands of this storyteller; Baltimoreans, I sadly say, who exhibited no signs of doing the same for a book of Poe’s poetry. Yet a veritable fortune was lent to the notion that the Baron Dupin would unveil the events of the same poet’s last and darkest hours on this earth. Culture was enjoyed as long as it came with conflict. I recalled the time two actors simultaneously played Hamlet on nearby stages in Baltimore and everyone argued with passion about his own favorite Hamlet, not for the play itself but for the competition of it.
The lyceum lecture would be held at the Assembly Rooms of the Maryland Institute. The Baron began sending wires to repeat the same announcements of lectures to be subsequently held in New York, Philadelphia, Boston…. His plans were expanding, and ours seemed to fall more and more in his shadow.
The Baron, along the way, had further pried open Pandora’s box of rumors in the newspapers.
Some samples: Poe was found robbed in a gutter by a watchman; or the dying Poe was lying across some barrels in the Lexington Market covered entirely with flies; no, said another, Poe met with former cadets from West Point, where the poet had learned musket and munitions, dealing now in some private governmental operation that introduced Poe to a dangerous intrigue and probably related to his reported roles in his wild youth fighting for the Polish army and with the Russians; not so: Poe’s vain end had been a debauch at an acquaintance’s lively and intemperate birthday party; or he had been guilty of suicide. One female acquaintance claimed that as a ghost Poe had sent her poems from the spiritual world about being fatally pummeled in an attempted theft of some letters! Meanwhile, a local paper had received a wire from a temperance newspaper in New York that claimed to have met a witness to Poe’s raging debauchery in the day before he was discovered at Ryan’s, proving for the recorder at Judgment Day that all was Poe’s own fault.
While I sat surveying these articles in the reading room, that reliable, ancient clerk came over to me.
“Oh, Mr. Clark! I am still thinking of who had given me those articles on your Mr. Poe. Indeed, I have remembered distinctly how he asked me to give the articles to you.”
Suddenly, I lost all attention to the papers before me. “What, sir?” It had never occurred to me that those cuttings had been given to the clerk with specific instructions that they be delivered to me. I asked if I understood him correctly.
“Right.”
“This is startling!” I cried, thinking of how that single extract alluding to the “real” Dupin had completely changed the course of events.
“How so?”
“Because someone—” I did not finish the statement. “It is a matter of moment that you tell me more of this person, whoever he is. I am much occupied these days, but will call on you again. Try—please do try—to remember.”
My imagination was fired by this new revelation. Meanwhile, I found a less speculative distraction in determining to settle matters with Hattie. I wrote her a long letter, acknowledging that Auntie Blum’s cruel though well-meaning tactic had encouraged me, and proposing that upon my receiving word from her we should commence again the plans for our union.
16
TRACING THE ACTIVITY of the Baron Dupin, through covert observation and interviews, I learned that nearly a week earlier, Bonjour had insinuated herself as the chambermaid at the home of Dr. Joseph Snodgrass, the man whom Dr. Moran remembered had ordered the carriage that brought Edgar Poe to the hospital from Ryan’s on that gloomy October day. The Baron Dupin had paid a visit to Snodgrass earlier to find out the details of that stormy October afternoon. Snodgrass adamantly declined an interview. He insisted he would not contribute to the industry of gossiping about the worthy poet’s death.
Soon after, Bonjour had secured the position among the help in Snodgrass’s house. Remarkably, she did this with no position open. She had appeared in neat, unostentatious dress, on the doorstep of the fashionable brick house at 103 North High Street. An Irish servant girl opened the street door for her.
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 poi
nt 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?”
The Poe Shadow Page 21