The Poe Shadow

by Matthew Pearl

  Though the Baron’s account of Poe’s death would have been ruinous to the truth, in some manner I regret that he did not deliver his words aloud. For now you cannot receive a full description of what it would have been like—the Baron marching back and forth on the stage as though it were his courtroom in his better days. Imagine the Baron, flashing his unmistakably shining teeth, spreading his hands wide and proclaiming the mystery solved:

  29

  POE HAD COME to Baltimore at the wrong time. It had not been his plan to visit Baltimore, for he was on his way to his New York cottage to fetch his poor mother-in-law and start his new life. But some ruffians on the ship from Richmond to Baltimore harassed the poet and probably stole his money, so Poe missed the train from Baltimore to travel north. This is shown by the fact that Poe had earned money lecturing in Richmond, but was not found with any just a few days later. Stranded in Baltimore, he noticed himself being followed by the thieves and attempted to take refuge in the house of a kind friend, the editor Dr. N. C. Brooks. However, Dr. Brooks was not home and these craven ruffians, not knowing this and worrying that Poe would report their actions to someone inside, recklessly started a fire that nearly burned down the Brooks home. Poe barely managed to escape with his life.

  The poet had money enough left for a small room at the United States Hotel, but not yet enough to take another train to New York or to Philadelphia, where a lucrative literary task awaited him. His new literary magazine, to be called The Stylus, was about to trumpet a new era of genius in American letters—but his enemies wished to stop him from exposing the mediocrity of their own writings. Poe therefore had begun to assume a false name, E. S. T. Grey. He even directed his own sweet mother-in-law—his cherished protector—to write him by this name in Philadelphia “for fear I should not get the letter,” for he worried that his adversaries would seek to intercept any letters of support or subscriptions to his daring enterprise. Nor did he wish them to know he was going to Philadelphia, certain that they would interfere with his task and destroy his attempt to raise money for his journal.

  He found himself trapped in Baltimore during a heated election week. Poe was a literary man. He was above all this. He was above the petty and the grievous actions of politics and of ordinary man. But to the everyday rascal, the great genius is mere fodder.

  Poe was easy prey. He had been traveling under his new alias, E. S. T. Grey. On the evening before election day, in the dismal weather that had plagued the city that week, he was snatched from the street. Here began the murder of Poe, perhaps one of the longest murders in history, certainly the longest and most pathetic in the history of literary men. The saddest since the poet Otway was strangled by a few crumbs of bread, the most iniquitous since Marlowe was stabbed through the head, into the very organ of his genius; and all of this turned Edgar Poe into the most slandered man since Lord Byron.

  Worse still, Edgar Poe’s family—those very people in the world who should have protected him—were among those to make him a target and a victim. One George Herring, who may be sitting among us today, oversaw the Fourth Ward Whigs—and it was at the very place Poe was found, Ryan’s Fourth Ward hotel, that these Whigs met. George Herring was a relation to Poe [here the Baron was barking somewhat up the wrong tree, as Henry Herring was a cousin of Poe’s by marriage, and it was Henry, not Poe, who was related to George Herring, but to let him continue…] and as a near relation knew Poe was vulnerable. It was not a coincidence, ladies and gentlemen protectors of the names of genius, that Henry Herring was one of the first men to approach Poe when it was announced he was stricken—that Dr. Snodgrass was surprised to find Henry Herring there even before he sent word to him! For the Herrings had selected Poe as a victim—they knew him; he was not to them “E. S. T. Grey.” George Herring knew from Henry that Edgar Poe was unpredictable when forced to take alcohol or other intoxicants, and determined that he was a vulnerable person to join the wretched voting “coop.” Knowing that Poe was likely to have severe side effects, George later sent for Henry to usher Poe away to the hospital in order to avoid trouble for the Fourth Ward Whigs. Henry Herring, we know, still resented Poe for having attempted to court his daughter, Elizabeth Herring, with love poems when the two cousins were young at the time Poe lived in Baltimore. Here was Henry Herring’s small-minded revenge for an outpouring of pure-hearted playful affection from a young poet.

  The political rogues of the Fourth Ward Whigs, who kept their headquarters in the den of the Vigilant Fire Company’s engine house across from Ryan’s, placed the helpless poet in a cellar with other unfortunates—vagrants, strangers, loafers (as Americans say), foreigners. This explains why Poe, a heartily well-known author, was not seen by anyone over the course of these few days. The miscreants probably drugged Poe with various opiates.

  When election day came, they took him around the city to various polling stations. They forced him to vote for their candidates at each polling venue and, to make the whole farce more convincing, the poet was made to wear different outfits each time. This explains why he was found in ragged, soiled clothes never meant to fit him. He was permitted by the rogues to keep his handsome Malacca cane, however, for he was in such a weakened state that even those ruffians recognized that the cane would be needed to prop him up. This cane he had intentionally switched for his own cane with an old friend in Richmond; for inside was hidden a weapon—a sword—of the most ferocious cast, and he called to mind his many literary enemies who in the past had challenged him on occasion to duels or otherwise mishandled him. But by the time he knew his danger here in Baltimore, he was too weak even to open its blade—though he would not let go of it either. In fact, he would be found with this very cane clutched to his chest.

  The political club had not cooped as many victims as they would have preferred, due to the inclement weather, which kept people out of the streets. They even carried one man to the coop who was a prominent official of the state of Pennsylvania, captured on his way from the theater to Barnum’s Hotel, but he was allowed to escape when it was discovered he was a big-wig. So Poe was used again and again, more than usual—and by the time his captors brought him to the Fourth Ward, located at Ryan’s tavern, to vote again, he had been abused too much. After being administered an oath by one of the ward election judges, a Henry Reynolds, Poe could not make it across the room and collapsed. He called for his friend Dr. Snodgrass, who arrived in disgust. Snodgrass, a leader of local temperance groups, was certain Poe had indulged himself in drink. The political ruffians, abandoning their captive, were glad to have their foul deed hidden by this assumption. Nor would stern-minded Snodgrass be the last to make this egregious error—the wide world would soon believe noble Poe’s death to be the result of moral weakness.

  Yet now we have Truth come back to us.

  Poe, heavily drugged and deprived of sleep, was in no condition to explain anything; and in the still rational portion of his mind, no doubt the ailing poet was devastated to see that Snodgrass, his supposed friend, looked down at him with disapproval and something like disdain. Poe was carried to a hackney carriage and driven alone to the hospital. There, under the careful ministering of Dr. J. J. Moran and his nurses, he drifted in and out of consciousness. Remembering like some distant vision his attempt to hide his own genius from its attackers through the nondescript name E. S. T. Grey, Poe deliberately told the good doctor as little as he could about himself and the purposes of his travels. But his mind was weak. At one point, no doubt remembering Snodgrass’s betrayal, Poe yelled out that the best thing his best friend could do to him would be to blow his brains out with a pistol.

  Poe, thinking of the last man who might have noticed his dilemma in time to stop the actions of his murderers—that judge, Henry Reynolds, who’d perfunctorily given the oath to all the voters—called out desperately as though he could still ask for assistance. Reynolds! Reynolds! He repeated this for hours, but it was not truly a cry for help as much as a death knell. “Oh the bells, bells, bells! What a
tale their terror tells…Of despair!” Poe’s time came to its restless end.

  There. Now you alone have heard a speech that never occurred, have witnessed what the Baron Dupin would have said to electrify his audience that evening. It was a speech that, although I had eagerly reduced its pages to ashes, I’d soon be set to announce to the entire world.

  30

  ON THE THIRD day after my discovery of the ten-year-old Graham’s magazine, Edwin could see my spirits were entirely demolished. I felt more poisoned than I had been when Neilson Poe had found me in front of 3 Amity Street; now it was my soul, my heart, that had been infected rather than my blood.

  Edwin tried to talk to me about finding Duponte for assistance. I no longer knew Duponte, though. Who was he, what was he? Perhaps, I thought to myself, Poe had not even heard of my Duponte. All truth had been turned on its head. Maybe it was Duponte who’d deliberately and meticulously pilfered part of his character, insomuch as he was able, from Poe’s tales, rather than the other way around. He was concealing himself, now, because he had known he could not fulfill the role he had imagined. Had it never occurred to me, in all the time I spent with Duponte, that his was some diseased reaction to the literature, rather than an inspiring source for it? I suppose the satisfaction of having assisted in Duponte’s emergence from his isolation in Paris had led me to deny any dormant doubts. It was insignificant now, dust in the balance. I was alone.

  The waters receded around the packinghouse, and with more people populating the streets nearby, Edwin advised that I must find another refuge. He secured a room in an out-of-the-way lodging house in the eastern district of the city. We arranged a time at which I would meet him to be taken to my new hiding place in a wagon covered with piles of his deliveries of newspapers. In the end, I was late, so distracted was I by the loss of Duponte.

  I had requested that Edwin bring me more of Poe’s tales. I read the three Dupin tales over and over whenever the packinghouse’s light was sufficient. If there was no true Dupin, no person whose genius had bestowed onto Poe this character, why had I believed so fervently? I found myself first copying out sentences from the Dupin tales in a scattered fashion and then, without any particular objective, writing out the entire tales word by word, as though translating them into some usable form.

  Poe had not discovered Dupin in the newspaper accounts of Paris. He had discovered Dupin in the soul of mankind. I do not know how best to share now what occurred in that upheaval of my mind. I heard again and again what Neilson Poe had said, that Edgar Poe’s meaning was not in his life, not in the world outside, but in the words, in their truths. Dupin did exist. He existed in the tales, and perhaps the truth of Dupin was in all of our capacities. Dupin was not among us; he was in us, another part of us, a plural of ourselves, stronger than any person who might resemble Dupin slightly in name or trait. I thought of that sentence from “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” again. We existed within ourselves alone…

  I found Edwin waiting for me.

  “You’re safe,” he said, taking my hand. “I was about to search the city for you. Give me that coat and put this one on.” He gave me an old pepper-and-salt coat. “Come, up hat and cut stick now. There’s a wagon I’ve borrowed to get to the lodging house. No loafing.”

  “Thank you. But I cannot stay, my friend,” I replied, taking his hand. “I must see someone at once.”

  Edwin frowned. “Where?”

  “In Washington. There is a man named Montor, a minister from France, who long ago first taught me about Duponte and tutored me for my visit to Paris.”

  I began to walk away when Edwin touched my arm.

  “He is a man you can trust, Mr. Clark?”

  “No.”

  Henri Montor, the French emissary to Washington, was worried. Back home, the Red Republicans and their followers complained more loudly. Vive la Republique! was hollered in the public squares. Parisians grew restless if there were too many months without political struggle, thought Montor, and so now they were turning their minds against Louis-Napoleon. The results could be catastrophic.

  Do not jump to conclusions. Monsieur Montor had no particular affection for Louis-Napoleon—the president-prince, a spoiled and arrogant product of fame who had made two failed and foolish grabs at power before—but Montor enjoyed his own current position and had no desire for it to be altered. It was not Washington, with its lukewarm food at even the best hotels’ dining rooms (even the corn cakes were only “warm” and not hot!), that he enjoyed but the fact of being an emissary to another country.

  Montor read as many French newspapers as could be found in Washington (it was during the commission of this activity, you’ll recall, that his interest was long ago diverted by a Baltimorean reading articles about one Auguste Duponte). Montor observed that more of the French press was aiming at the president-prince lately. In small ways, but nonetheless. Now Napoleon had ordered the prefect and the police to shut down uncooperative newspapers. What were Napoleon and his advisers anxious about, really? What did they expect the revolutionists would do? What grand plan could they concoct now? France was already a republic! They could elect someone other than Louis-Napoleon. But perhaps they could also first weaken Napoleon’s position enough that an enemy from outside would come in to take advantage…. No, Monsieur Montor did not guess the true plan any more than others did. Still, he worried constantly about events around the Champs-Élysées.

  He had smaller worries, too—local worries. There was a Frenchman found shot in nearby Baltimore. It was said by some that it was that infamous rogue lawyer, the foppish “Baron” Claude Dupin, who had been living in London. What was he baron of? No matter, the fool was no doubt involved in some mischief. Still he was a Frenchman, and Baltimore’s high constable had written with word about it to Monsieur Montor.

  But this had happened a few weeks ago already, and it was not even on Montor’s mind this evening. He thought only about sleep. He had two great pleasures in life, and to his credit neither involved superficial concerns of wealth or power. This is what separated him from men like the prince’s ministers. Montor liked most to entertain and be admired by strangers, as we have already alluded to, and besides that he liked to sleep, many hours at a time.

  There was one of Montor’s encounters with that young Baltimorean in the reading room, studying articles on Auguste Duponte. Montor spoke with awe about Duponte. He could not remember the last time he had heard of Duponte performing one of his magnificent feats, but no matter. This young man was so engrossed Montor did not wish to dissuade his study. This was some time ago, almost six months, and Montor, who was blessed with a short memory, only barely remembered the young gentleman or their numerous conversations. Until this evening, when Montor walked into his house. It took him a moment to think to himself that it was strange that his hearth was already roaring with a fire, and another moment still to notice someone sitting at his table.

  “Who—? What is—?” Montor could not think of the proper words. “Who allowed you in, sir, and what is your business?”

  No answer.

  “I shall call burglary…” Montor warned. “Tell me your name,” he commanded.

  “Don’t you know me?” came the question in fine French.

  Montor squinted. In his defense, the light was dim and the appearance of his visitor somewhat frightful and haggard. “Yes, yes,” he said, but he could not remember the name. “That young man from Baltimore…but how have you come in here?”

  “I spoke to your servant, in French, and told him we were to have an important government meeting that must be private. I ordered him to return in two hours, and paid him for his trouble.”

  “You had no right to…” Yes! Now Montor remembered this face. “I remember. I first met you in the reading rooms, studying the French newspapers. I helped you with your French language and took you around a bit. Quentin, isn’t it? You were looking for the real Dup—”

  “Quentin Hobson Clark. Yes, you remember.”

>   “Very well, Monsieur…Clark.” The engine of Montor’s mind was now clicking. “I shall have to ask you to leave my property at once.”

  Montor was alarmed to have an intruder in his lodging, even one who had previously been an acquaintance and had seemed so harmless. He was also alarmed at the name, Quentin Clark. He had retained almost no memory of the name from the reading room. But the name meant something else to him as of late.

  It took Montor a few moments to be able to produce any sound, and it came out as merely a breath. “Murder! Murder!”

  “Monsieur Montor,” I said when he had finally calmed down, “I believe you know all about the Baron Dupin.”

  “You—” he began. “But you—” Montor was finally able to explain that Clark’s name had been wired to Montor as the suspect in the attempted assassination of a Frenchman.

  “Yes. Me. But I did not shoot anyone. However, I believe you know something more to assist me in determining who did.”

  Montor now seemed more reluctant to cry out. “Help you? After you invade my house, bribe my servant? Why are you doing this?”

  “Simply for truth. I have been forced to look for it with an ungloved hand, and I will.”

  “They told me you were in prison!”

  “Did they tell you so? Did they tell you they were plying me with poisons to manipulate me into a confession?”

  Montor muttered, “I do not know what you wish me to say, Monsieur Clark! I have nothing to do with such foul play and have never even met this…this…so-called baron!”

  “The men pursuing him were a pair of French rogues. I believe they were under the command of someone else—some person of great intelligence and foresight.” Since Bonjour had told me they could not have been working for the Baron’s creditors, and since the rogues had spoken of “orders,” I knew there was more to it than the two blackguards. “You are surely aware of Frenchmen in and out of this area.”