“You,” I said, standing upright with the revelation. “You poisoned me. It was not the police or the prison guards! It was you. You slipped the poison into my mouth when we kissed.”
“After I found a way inside the prison, I saw that the walls of the hospital chambers were already giving way to the floods,” she said. “I felt you could get out through the sewer passage, but I needed to find a way for you to be transferred there. You may say I helped you, monsieur.”
“No, you did not do it to help me. You wanted to follow me to Duponte so he would find the men who shot the Baron, and whoever ordered it. You thought Duponte could still help and that I’d know where Duponte was.”
“I wanted the same thing as you, Monsieur Clark. To find the truth.”
“Please,” begged the man on the floor. Bonjour kicked him fiercely in his stomach.
I looked on as the man twisted in pain. I took a step closer. “Bonjour, this will help nothing. The police can arrest them now.”
“I have no trust in police, Monsieur Clark.”
The man swallowed down some further plea and trembled pitifully.
Bonjour crouched on the floor, positioning her blade. “Leave,” she said to me, pointing to the door.
“You do not owe the Baron vengeance, mademoiselle,” I said. “You have fulfilled your obligations by discovering the man who ordered his killing. Murdering this villain now will only make your life wretched, will only force you to run, as you have had to before. And,” I added, “I will be the sole witness to this crime. You will have to kill me, too.”
I was surprised when Bonjour, after remaining dead still in the midst of contemplation, turned slowly to me with a tear at the corner of her eye. It seemed a true affection had arisen in her expression. She stepped gingerly toward me like a scared deer. She seemed to be holding her breath when she threw her arms around my shoulders with a low moan. It was less of an embrace, somehow, than when our bodies were brought together at the fortifications in Paris. It was more a need for support, and I stood straight as a pillar. “Bonjour. It will be made right. We have both helped ourselves. Let me help you.” She then shoved me away as though I had been the one to pull her to me. I nearly fell against the edge of a sofa. There was something lost from her eyes that made me know that I would not see her again.
Bonjour let her dagger drop and, after a moment of looking over the scene she had created, she began kicking the man brutally across the face several times in a flurry of blows. Then she ran from the room. I breathed in relief that she had not killed him. And yet it was not my monologue that had moved her not to do so. Approaching the place where Rollin lay crumpled like a corpse, I saw what Bonjour had seen: one of the objects that had crashed to the floor during their struggle was a newspaper from that morning. On the first page was announced the death of the mysterious French baron in the hospital.
The slave-trader had not been mistaken, as I had thought, when he’d said I was wanted for murder. Bonjour, for her part, must have felt her obligation to avenge the Baron somehow burn and fade upon his death—perhaps, for the thief in her, the reward, his honor, disappeared past redemption. Perhaps, for the true criminal mind, honor did not continue beyond death; nothing continued beyond death—there was no heaven or hell for persons who sought those same territories here. Or perhaps true sorrow had made all else pale in comparison. Whatever the reason, she had abandoned her revenge.
I leaned down at the side of Rollin and found that he was insensible but only superficially injured. I wrapped his wounds with a piece of fabric I tore from a fringed curtain. Then, before leaving, I found the washbasin to try to expunge his blood from my hands.
My mind circled vigorously around what I had learned. Though I had made great strides in understanding all that had happened, I still had no evidence against the men who’d killed the Baron. I had nothing in my possession to convince the police of what I now had uncovered. Even if I waited for the two villains to return to the Bonapartes’, they would not hesitate to eliminate me. Indeed, this would perhaps be Rollin’s first order to them if he regained consciousness. Since the police would only want to arrest me, I would have no protection if I sent for them.
And I would remain forever the man who killed the real Dupin. That was what people would think. I was destroyed. I would hang for someone else’s sins and, at the moment, I could not even decipher whose—these men, or Duponte’s. Worst of all, I had let all this mess forever prevent the resolution of Poe’s death.
With these thoughts, I walked up and down the streets of Baltimore, stopping only at intervals to rest. I walked until the early hours of the morning, and then sunrise came and still I walked.
“Clark?”
I turned around. As I did I realized I was not far from one of the district station houses, and so you can imagine that I was not entirely unprepared to see what I did.
“Officer White,” I said, and then I greeted his clerk, too.
I looked down half bemused at the blood splattered like stains of guilt across the sleeves and buttons of my ragged coat, as they grabbed me.
32
ONE WEEK LATER, as I was sitting in the most comfortable armchair of my library, my mind turned to Bonjour, whom I had not seen since I had first left to visit the Bonapartes’ address. Although she had been driven by her desire to avenge the Baron’s death, and had not had any design of assisting me in my own plight, I harbored no ill will. In fact, I had little doubt I would see her again and believed she truly cared for me. There was no earthly reason to fear for her safety, wherever she was. I suppose if I had been able to fathom something about her through all of this, it was her complete self-sufficiency in surviving, though she believed she had depended on the Baron since he had exonerated her in a Paris court. She was, in the end, purely composed of the criminal character. All means were open to her to meet threat with threat, death with death.
When Officer White discovered me after the incident at the Bonaparte house, I would have fallen at his feet if he and his clerk had not caught me. My body was debilitated. I had not realized how long it had been since I had experienced any true rest. I awoke in one of the upstairs rooms of the Middle District station house. When I stirred and lifted myself, the police clerk appeared and brought in Officer White.
“Mr. Clark, are you still unwell?” the clerk asked solicitously.
“I feel stronger.” Though I am not sure this was true, really. Still, I did not want to seem ungrateful for the kindness of placing me in their comfortable apartments. “Have you arrested me again?”
“Sir!” Officer White exclaimed. “We had been searching for you for several hours to ensure your well-being.”
I saw that a box of various objects that had been removed from Glen Eliza was sitting on the floor. “I escaped from prison!” I exclaimed.
“And we were quite determined to restore your place there. However, in the meantime witnesses were discovered who had seen the murderers on the night of the Frenchman’s lecture. They saw two men, including one badly injured and bandaged, and thus sticking in the memory of the witness. Both had pistols drawn as they stood at the wings of the lyceum. This was quite evidential of your innocence, but we were unable to find the men. Until yesterday.” The clerk explained that a horse belonging to a prominent slave-trader had been reported stolen. It was located by a police officer at a house of an absent Baltimorean where there were, remarkably, also two men just returning from some errand who met the exact description of the witnesses to the Baron’s murder! Though the men fled, and were suspected of boarding a private frigate with a third man, their behavior strongly demonstrated my innocence in the matter.
I learned, furthermore, that Hope Slatter, embarrassed to report that a black man had put him down, claimed the assault on him had been by some German foreigners. German seeming a nationality close enough to the police to French, and the horse being found in front of the house where the rogues were returning, the police felt certain that the assaul
t on Slatter had been perpetrated by the same parties who had killed the Baron.
“So I am not to be arrested?” I asked, after some contemplation.
“Heavens, Mr. Clark!” the police clerk responded. “You are quite free! Don’t you wish to be driven home?”
Others had not forgiven me for the long period of public denunciation against me. This became clear over the next months.
All that I had in possession would soon be at risk.
Glen Eliza felt empty and worthless without Hattie Blum. She and Peter were to be married and I could not in the inmost regions of my mind seek to disrupt that. They were both better people than I could be, perhaps; they had tried to steer me away from trouble, and had been deeply united by that very thing that had pushed me away from them. Hattie had risked her own reputation with her visits to my prison cell. Now that I was free, I wrote a brief letter thanking her with all my heart and wishing her happiness. I at least owed them tranquillity and peace.
For myself, I had none. My great-aunt had come to visit after I was restored to Glen Eliza, where she questioned me repeatedly about the “delusions” and “fanatical” ideas that had, in my long despair over my parents’ death, ultimately led to my imprisonment.
“I did what I thought was right,” I said, remembering Edwin Hawkins’s words to me when I was hiding in the packinghouse.
She stood with her arms folded, her long black dress a great contrast to her snow-white hair. “Quentin, dear boy. You were arrested for murder! A jailbird! You are fortunate if anyone in Baltimore will keep your society. A woman like Hattie Blum needs a man as worthy as Peter Stuart. This house has become the very castle of indolence.”
I looked at my great-aunt. She had been thrown into more of a passion over this than I had realized. “I’d have wanted nothing more than to marry Hattie Blum,” I said, which was even more outrageous to her, since I was now talking about a woman shortly to be married. “Anything you can say meant to punish me further is far too little. I am happy for Peter. He is a good man.”
“What would your father say! God forbid we should visit upon the dead the errors of the living. You, dear boy, are a great deal your mother’s blood,” she added with a dull mutter.
Before leaving that day, she flashed a glare at me intended, I later realized, as a threat. She examined Glen Eliza as though at any moment it could crumble from the moral dilapidation I had perpetrated.
Soon after, I was informed that my great-aunt had brought suit to claim possession of most of what I had inherited from my father’s will, including Glen Eliza, on the basis of the mental incompetence and imbalance exhibited in my conduct since the irrational resignation of my position in Peter’s practice…and my strong neglect of the Clark family investments and business interests, which had resulted in severely diminished value over the last two years…culminating in my wild, raving interruption at the fatal assembly of the Baron Dupin…my outrageous escape from prison, my rumored attempt to dig up a grave and encroach on a home on Amity Street…and all of this was proved by my complete lack of comprehension of the whole chronicle of actions.
I learned further that she had been helped in all this by Auntie Blum. It seemed that Auntie Blum had intercepted my letter of gratitude to Hattie. Inflamed to learn through my letter of Hattie’s visits to my prison cell, Auntie Blum had immediately called upon Great-Auntie Clark.
Great-Auntie wrote me a letter, explaining that she was fighting for the honor of my father’s name and because she loved me.
I began to ready my defense. I worked feverishly, hardly leaving the library, calling to mind the former times when Duponte would sit at the table sometimes for days without interruption.
I prepared as well as I could to defend my actions. The process was strenuous. Not only to produce responses to each accusation that my great-aunt would allege as evidence that I had squandered and misused my good fortune and name in society; but also to frame it in the language of the law that I had thought I had abandoned.
Auntie Blum had reportedly advised that the case against me emphasize the disregard of my family’s wealth. She calculated that polite Baltimore would not brook the injustice of any such pecuniary offense. This was Baltimore’s lynch law.
Meanwhile, I contemplated the many witnesses and friends I might call to my defense, but sadly concluded that many—like Peter, of course—could no longer speak in my favor. The newspapers, having only recently finished with the sensational news of my arrest, escape, and exoneration, now looked happily upon this lawsuit as containing an interesting sequel to my affairs, and always wrote about it with a tone of suspicion that it might prove me guilty yet of some other, larger misdoing.
At times, I felt convinced that I should peacefully leave this shattered house, Glen Eliza, which I seemed now to float inside rather than live in. As I loped through the upper stories, and climbed up one set of stairs and down another, it only seemed to confirm this feeling—word of my great-aunt’s suit, indeed, left me asking myself, “Where in the land am I?” The house, with all its rambling divisions and subdivisions, with its wide spaces, still seemed to have room for only a few particles of myself.
I do not know why I stopped before one particular framed silhouette. It was one I had rarely noticed before. Even if I were to reproduce it here, it would look unremarkable to my reader’s eye: an ordinary man’s profile, with an old-fashioned three-point hat. It was my grandfather, who had turned furious upon hearing of my father’s intention to marry Elizabeth Edes, a Jewish woman. He threatened and fumed, and stripped my father of family money rightfully owed to him. No matter, my father said, for it put him as a young man in a position not so different from my mother’s family, who had built their own foundations. Through his packinghouses—“through my enterprise,” he said—Father prospered enough to build one of Baltimore’s unique mansions.
But while my father always spoke of his Industry and Enterprise, the traits he found opposite of Genius, I realized, looking upon this picture, that he was the pioneer he had always claimed not to be. For he and Mother had created this world from nothing for the sake of their happiness—and how much impatience and insistence, how much genius, this entailed it could not be said. My father had the very pains of genius he warned against. This is why he tried so hard to keep me away from any but the ordinary path—not because he had embraced it, but because he had deviated from it and found himself, though victorious, also wounded.
The grand old patriarch in the silhouette even unto death did not retract his objections to my mother’s Jewish blood having been interjected into our orderly family line. Yet my parents had hung his silhouette in a central place in Glen Eliza, the place erected for our happiness, rather than hiding it, abandoning it, or destroying it. The meaning of this had never struck me fully until this moment. I felt an instant possession of this place and of my family and returned to my desk and to the work at hand.
I received no visitors until the evening Peter arrived.
“No servant to open the door, I see?” he commented, then frowned at himself, as though confessing he could not regulate his mouth sometimes. “Glen Eliza is still as magnificent as when we were children, playing bandits in the halls. Some of my happiest times.”
“Think of it, Peter. You, a bandit!”
“Quentin, I want to help.”
“How do you mean, Peter?”
He regained his usual bluster. “You never were meant to be a single attorney; you’re too excitable. And perhaps I was not meant to have another partner other than you—I have been through two men in the last six months, by the bye. In all events, you need help.”
“You mean with my great-aunt’s case against me?”
“Wrong!” he exclaimed. “We will turn it into your case against Great-Auntie Clark, my friend.” He smiled broadly, like a child.
I proudly welcomed Peter in that day, and he devoted as many hours as he could each evening after completing his work at the law offices. His help was o
f tremendous value, and I began to feel more optimistic about my chances. Moreover, it seemed I had never known anybody so intimately as my friend, and we talked as people only can before the flickering light of a fireplace.
Still, we both refrained from mentioning Hattie. Until one night, in our shirtsleeves, while making our strategies. Peter said, “At this point in the defense, we shall call Miss Hattie to testify, to show your honest bearing and—”
I looked at Peter with an alarmed expression, as though he had just screamed loudly.
“Peter, I cannot. What I mean—well, you see how it is.”
He sighed anxiously, and looked down at his drink. He was taking a nightcap of warm toddy. “She loves you.”
“Yes,” I said, “as does my great-aunt. Either those who love me fail me, or I fail them, as with Hattie.”
Peter stood up from his chair. “My engagement with Hattie is dead, Quentin.”
“What? How?”
“I ended it.”
“Peter, how could you?”
“I could see it every time she would look in my direction, as though she wished to be looking past me over to you. It is not that she doesn’t have love for me; in a way she does. But you have something stronger, and I must not be in your way.”
I could hardly stammer a response. “Peter, you mustn’t…”
“None of your hums and hahs. It’s done. And she agreed, after much discussion. I always thought she loved you because you were handsome, and so took a bit of queer joy in having won her after all. But she believed in you when there was nothing to believe in and nobody else to believe.” He chuckled morbidly, then clapped his large hand around my shoulder. “That is when I realized she is a great deal like you.”
I talked through in a rush what I should do, and whether I should immediately drive to Hattie’s…. He waved me back into my seat.
“Not that simple, Quentin. There is still her family, which forbids her from communing with you, particularly now that you are under threat of losing all your possessions, even Glen Eliza itself. First, you must prove yourself, and Hattie will be yours again. Until then, it is better that they think Hattie and I are to be married. If even you see her on the street, turn the other way—do not be seen together.”
The Poe Shadow Page 36