The Poe Shadow

by Matthew Pearl

  The morning before, I had been officially arraigned for the attempt to murder Baron Dupin. My declarations that the Baron must be stopped, combined with my appearance on the lyceum stage, were cited widely. Hattie’s cousin shook his beard disapprovingly at the fact that a highly respected police officer was a witness against me. The police had also found a gun when searching Glen Eliza—the weapon I had brought as a safeguard when I’d visited John Benson, which, absentmindedly, I had left in plain view.

  The tempests outside grew worse every day. The rain would not stop. Each time it slowed itself it followed on even harder, as though it had only been taking a breath. It was said that a bridge was swept away at Broadway near Gay Street and struck another bridge, so that the two bridges drove themselves downriver through half of Baltimore, knocking entire houses off the banks along their way. In the prison, meanwhile, the air itself seemed to change—full of pressure and discomfort. I saw one prisoner scream frightfully and squeeze his head with his hands as though something was burrowing through to get out. “It’s come!” he cried apocalyptically. “It’s come!” Confrontations between some of the more desperate prisoners and the guards also grew worse, whether from the air or from other causes of which I had not made myself aware. Through the bars of my window, I could see the shore of Jones Falls gradually surrender to the boiling layer of rainwater. I felt myself do the same.

  My lawyer returned, each time with more bad tidings from outside. The newspapers, which I could read only listlessly, were quite giddy about my guilt. It was now written that the Frenchman dangerously wounded and lying in the hospital was the model for Poe’s tales of analysis, and that I had done away with him because of jealousy, due to a diseased preoccupation with Poe. The Whig newspapers thought my action as assassin somehow heroic. The Democratic newspapers, perhaps in response against the Whigs, were convinced I was villainous and cowardly. Both, though, had decided I was certainly the killer. The newspapers known to be neutral, namely the Sun and Transcript, worried that the episode would do no insignificant damage to our country’s relationship with the still young French Republic and its president, Louis-Napoleon.

  I protested vociferously that the Baron Dupin was by no means the real Dupin, though I believe Hattie’s cousin thought my choice of objection in the matter most strange. Edwin came to see me several times, but soon the police peppered him with questions, suspicious of any Negro having business with me, and I begged him to refrain from his visits to protect himself from their scrutiny. John Benson, my benevolent Phantom, came to call on me in this wretched place, too. I shook his hand warmly, desperate for an ally.

  The cross-bar shadows fell over his haggard face. He explained that he was working nearly all hours on his uncle’s account books. “I’m dragged out, no mistake. The devil himself was never so pressed with business,” he said. He looked at me sidelong through the bars, as though at any moment we could exchange places if he were not careful with the words he chose.

  “Perhaps you should confess, Mr. Clark,” he advised.

  “Confess what?”

  “That you had been overtaken with Poe. Overcome, so to speak.”

  I hoped I could elicit more valuable assistance from him. “Benson, you must tell me if there was anything else you discovered about how Poe died.”

  He sat on a stool kicking his legs out, despondent and sleepy, and repeated his suggestion that I consider making a complete confession. “Don’t think of the Poe predicament any longer, Mr. Clark. The truth behind his death is beyond discovery now. You see that.”

  Hattie visited me on the days she managed to avoid both her aunt and Peter. She brought me food and small gifts. In my anxious and confused state, I could hardly find words to express my gratitude to her.

  She recalled many stories from our childhood to calm my nerves. We had frank discussions touching all subjects. She told me how she felt when I was in Paris.

  “I could see yours were great dreams, Quentin.” She sighed. “I know we do not have a life of mutual happiness ahead of us, Quentin. But I wish only to say that you mustn’t think I was angered, or melancholy, for your having gone away, or because you have not told me more. If I have shown melancholy it is because you did not feel, you did not know decidedly, that you could say every detail and would receive in return my unblushing friendship.”

  “Peter was right. There was selfishness that began all this. Maybe I did all this not for what Poe’s writings would mean to the world, but for what they meant to me alone. Perhaps that exists only in my mind!”

  “That is why it is important,” Hattie replied, taking my hand.

  “Why couldn’t I see?” I fretted nervously. “It has become all about his death to me, at the expense of his life. Precisely what I worried others would do. At the expense of my life, too.”

  The rains and flooding soon made it too difficult to travel to the prison from other quarters of the city. Separated from Hattie, there was no company outside the desolate prisoners. I had never felt quite so unaided, trapped, finished.

  Once, during a night in which sleep had mercifully overtaken me, I heard light footsteps coming toward my cell. Hattie. She had come again, through the worst floods and rains yet. She came swiftly and elegantly through the corridor, closed off from the filth of the cells in her bright red cloak. Yet, strangely, there was no guard beside her and—I realized when coming to my senses—these were not hours in which visitors were admitted. As she emerged from the shadows of other cells, she reached in and grabbed my wrists so tightly I could not move. It was not Hattie at all.

  In the weak light, Bonjour’s golden skin now showed a ghastly pale tint. Her eyes widened into a gaze that seemed to look everywhere simultaneously.

  “Bonjour! How did you get past the guards?” Though, I supposed, if anyone could arrange free entrance and exit into a prison, it was Bonjour.

  “I needed to find you.”

  Her grip tightened, and I was suddenly consumed with fear. She had come to kill me for the Baron, to personally carry out an execution. Without hesitation, she could slice my neck and, upon finding me headless, nobody would know she had ever been here.

  “I know you did not shoot the Baron,” she said, correctly reading the frightened look in my eyes. “We must find out who did.”

  “Don’t you know as well as I do? The creditors—those thugs who followed the Baron wherever he went.”

  “They were not sent by any creditor. The Baron settled with his creditors weeks ago, as soon as he was able after collecting subscriptions for his lecture on Poe. The amounts he raised were beyond what we’d hoped. Those assassins were not looking for his money.”

  I was shocked to hear this. “Then who were they?”

  “I need to find out. I owe the Baron that. You need to for the woman you love.”

  I looked down at my bare feet. “She no longer loves me.”

  When I raised my eyes I could see Bonjour’s mouth linger open, forming a questioning circle. She let the topic pass. “Where is your friend? He must help us find that answer.”

  “My friend?” I asked, surprised. “Duponte? How I have waited to ask you that! I have thought the worst for him after you and the Baron kidnapped him!”

  I learned that Duponte had not come to any harm—at least not at Bonjour’s hands. To my surprise, Bonjour had released Duponte shortly after his capture from Glen Eliza. The Baron Dupin had instructed her to free their rival at the hour the Baron’s doomed lecture was to begin. The Baron had not wished to murder Duponte; or, rather, he had wished to murder his spirit. The Baron guessed Duponte would rush to the lyceum and arrive in time to witness his rival’s triumph, thus amplifying the Baron’s victory with Duponte’s demoralization. But Duponte eluded this defeat, for he did not appear—and if he did, nobody had seen him.

  “Did Duponte fight you when you kidnapped him? Did he struggle?”

  Bonjour paused, not sure whether I would be disappointed at the answer. “No. He was wise not to fig
ht, as the Baron was determined to carry out our plan. Where would Auguste Duponte go now, Monsieur Clark?”

  “I have been locked up here, Bonjour. I haven’t the remotest idea where he is!”

  Her eyes caught mine with uncomfortable intensity. I could not help my thoughts: with Hattie to marry Peter, what hopes of love had I left? For the strength it would give me—what wouldn’t I give at the moment for even a token of affection! Perhaps my thoughts were obvious, as she now began to move closer to me. I looked away to break any improper insinuation. But she placed her hand on my shoulder, and as I looked back she pulled my face between the bars to hers, in a long moment that thrilled me even more by its surprise than in the warmth of her mouth. The scar that I had seen on her lips seemed to form an indent in the same place on my own face, and the currents ran through my chilled body. I was remade. When the kiss ended, I felt she was somewhat captured by it, too.

  “You must think of how to find Duponte,” she said in a low, unwavering command. “He can find the assassin.”

  And for a few days, I did try hard to puzzle it out. But several nights after Bonjour’s midnight visit, the gloom and unrelenting solitude of the prison cell conquered me again.

  Once, when I woke from one of my long stretches of unconsciousness, I found a single book lying on my cell’s small wooden table. I had no awareness of where it came from or who placed it there. At first sight of it I closed my eyes tightly and turned away, thinking it was part of some dream my brain had constructed to worsen my circumstances even further.

  It was one of Griswold’s volumes of Poe. It was the third—the latest volume—the one I could hardly suffer to look upon. The first two volumes contained a muddled though decent selection of Poe’s prose and poetry, but for this third volume the reckless editor, Mr. Rufus Griswold, had composed a downright defamatory essay.

  I had seen the advertisements in the press by Griswold the winter after Poe’s death, asking for any correspondents of Poe’s to send copies of their letters to Griswold for inclusion in this essay. However, having already been familiar with his obituary of Poe, with its manic lies, I hadn’t had a thought of complying. I had written Griswold at once telling him of my possession of four letters personally autographed by Poe, and detailing the reasons I would never share them with him, ever, unless Griswold pledged a different approach to his solemn duty. He had not had the forthrightness to reply to me.

  I had hoped, though, that Griswold would have grown to understand his responsibilities as a proper literary executor (not literary executioner!) after the publication of the first volumes. But upon this third volume originally coming into my possession—after opening to the page of Griswold’s vicious memoir of his onetime friend—I had put the book down and not looked at it again. In fact, I had vowed to myself to burn it.

  Duponte, however, had consulted the letters printed there in his examination. And now the volume had appeared in my cell. The stated reason given to me by a guard was that the officials were concerned for my health and, seeing that in my moral lethargy I would read no newspaper or magazine, and recalling my fondness for the writer Poe, this volume, which had POE printed in large letters on the boards, had been removed from my library and placed here.

  I had no doubt, however, that the real reason it had come to me was Officer White. An attempt to torment me and force me to admit my crime, to bemoan my wretched position in life. In the minuscule cell, there was no escaping it; if I looked away from the book during the night, my hand would fall on it in the paroxysms of unhealthy slumber. When it was daytime, I would hide it under my sleeping board so I would not see it, only to find my foot kick against it when I moved to sit up, the maniacal volume revealing itself by sliding out the other side. I would throw the book through the bars into the corridor, rejoicing to be rid of it, but upon my next waking it would appear again, neatly positioned next to my pitcher of water or on the end of my sleeping board—placed there by a prison official or, for all I knew, another prisoner bent on plaguing me.

  After all this, I could not help myself. I began to read. Skipping Griswold’s worthless comments, I instead took in Poe’s letters that he’d interspersed throughout his memoir of the author. I wondered, soon after, when I found what was there, whether Officer White had any secret inkling of the abyss into which this would sink me.

  Deep within—I cringe to remember—I found Poe had listed me in a letter among several names of people who might support his magazine, The Stylus, in the city of Baltimore. Griswold had written to Poe in reply, asking for more details. Then came this, in a subsequent letter from Poe elaborating on my identity:

  “The Clark you ask about is a young man of idle wealth who, knowing my extreme poverty, has for years pestered me with unpaid letters.”*

  Each day I would set aside a moment of my highest lucidity to read the page again in an effort to ensure that it was not merely an apparition of mental fatigue. Unpaid letters! I could not believe it. Poe had—but you have already seen!—Poe had insisted I not pay advance postage on our correspondence, as if I would otherwise be offending our friendship. He had asked that I help him! (“Can you or will you help me?”) He had called for my commitment directly! (“Pestered”?)

  I could not stop repeating the words of Poe to myself and, worse yet, I could hear the words in the wearied voice of my father. Young man of idle wealth! The wealth that he had transmitted to me with so much industry and sense.

  If only I knew how Poe’s voice sounded, so my mind might abolish the other one! But at the moment, I could not even guess at how Poe might have talked. Perhaps he really did speak with my father’s voice.

  Pestered?…A young man of idle wealth.

  I no longer found strength enough to leave my sleeping board. My feeble condition was obvious, and I could not bring myself to speak. After several days produced almost no sleep, I drifted off into continuous drowsiness, and I could not tell the difference between sleeping and waking states. I remember very little from this time except the undertone provided by the torrents of rain and regular claps of thunder that had been building now, on and off, for days.

  There were no more visitors, no more faces to come to me except for indistinct police officers and guards. Although, once, I was certain I saw across from my cell a man whom I had seen before. The stowaway from the steamer Humboldt, the scene of Duponte’s secret victory that made me feel as if a gift possessed by him had been bestowed onto me. There, in this dingy Baltimore prison, I thought in my dreamy hazes I saw him again, watching over me, but this time there was no sea captain to catch hold of his arms. There were also other strange moments, feeling every grain of my skin covered with bugs and flies, as one newspaper had reported Poe was found, only escaping this when waking up on my board in a cold perspiration.

  With the probability of my own death by hanging gnawing at my bones, I would often rehearse the story in my mind that the Baron had told me about Catherine Gautier—only her face, as it gazed down with pale calm from the height of the gallows, sometimes looked like sweet Hattie, and other times like Bonjour, a wickedness creeping into the countenance. Meanwhile, the warden of the prison came through for inspections and, after determining that my senseless and speechless condition was authentic, ordered me to be moved to a cot on the first floor of the prison. When I was touched, I apparently gave only a cold shudder in response, and no pulling or shouting in my ear would make me stir.

  I woke amid the new surroundings, and found myself the sole occupant of an apartment where not even the prisoners wanted to go—for though it was more comfortably appointed than the cells upstairs, here people were sent to die. The doctors detected nothing wrong with me physically, but concluded that my wavering sleep proved the die had been cast. Upon being asked some simple questions by agents of the police to test my consciousness, I remained silent or muttered unintelligibly. I was told later that when questioned as to my birthday, I repeated October 8, 1849, again and again—the date of Poe’s funeral, which
besides not being my birthday would have made me two years old.

  For my part, I could call to mind only brief moments of myriad dreams. When news of my parents’ death had first reached me, I had sat for many days in my chamber with a roving chill and illness. In my stupor, I had the clearest visions of speaking with my parents—conversations that had never occurred but were as real, or more so, as any that I had had in my life. In them, I repeatedly apologized for having given up so much, for not having heeded their years of advice as Peter did. Then I’d awake again. The book—the Griswold volume—had not followed me from my cell to the hospital chambers, and for this I was happy. I chuckled to myself, as though this were at last my great triumph.

  There was not much light there in the penitentiary’s hospital, the windows unscrubbed and filmy. Even on the morning the rain finally ceased, only a hint of daylight came through to the prison hospital rooms. The guards had been frantically moving prisoners around the building after flooding had begun to occur in some quarters. The hospital room had been safe from the flood so far, but that night I awoke with a shudder at a series of noises.

  “Who’s here?” I called out obliviously.

  It was suddenly terribly cold and, as I swung my bare feet to the floor, a stream of cold water curled over my toes. I jerked back to the cot and groped for a candle. My eyes opened for what seemed the first time in years.

  The floods had filled the sewer and had broken through the wall of the hospital chamber. I sat up and saw from the breach in the wall the darkness of the narrow passage open to me. The sewer, I knew, ran underneath the vast, high wall that surrounded the jail and passed into Jones Falls. There wasn’t the smallest obstacle between here and there. Because I had not been exposed to light for days, my eyes were immediately able to assess the circumstances even in this darkness.

  My mind turned rapidly, vivaciously. A new energy resurrected me from the funereal indolence I had been lying in. A half-formed idea, a certainty, propelled me forward to where the putrid water subsumed my ankles, my waist, reaching to my shoulders. Even as I became weighed down by the streaming water, it seemed I moved with greater swiftness, until I emerged where the gaunt towers of the prison could only be seen in the distant horizon.