The Poe Shadow

by Matthew Pearl

  “But Poe’s words from the hospital,” I said. “His shouts of ‘Reynolds’—could this not be an indication of some responsibility or knowledge on the part of Henry Reynolds, that carpenter who served as ward judge for the election in the location where Poe was found?”

  Duponte’s face broke out in genuine amusement.

  “Do you not believe it?” I asked.

  “I haven’t a reason to disbelieve it as a factual possibility, if that is your meaning, Monsieur Clark. Others will think they can guess what is unusual in Poe’s mind—an impossibility to do for anyone, much less for a genius. To do that, read his tales, read his poems; you shall get all that is extraordinary and singular—that is, not repeated in mental currents outside of Poe. But to understand the steps in his death, you must accept what is ordinary in him, in anyone, and in all around him that crash into his genius—these will be answers.

  “That Poe called this word, ‘Reynolds,’ for many hours the night of his death in the hospital is exactly what we should not pay attention to—if our purpose is to understand how he died. Poe was not in his clear mind, arising from the joining of disparate circumstances that we have already enumerated. That the Baron, that other observers might fixate on it demonstrates the common lack of understanding about how and why people think and act as they do. Even without profound consideration of the matter, we may remember that Poe is in a state of feeling completely alone. In truth, he could have been calling for anybody. It might have been the last name he had heard, perhaps belonging to that same carpenter who visited us in your parlor, or it might have been the name of a man whose part in a deadly affair of several years past renders it far too dangerous for either of us to speak about.* Most likely, though, it has something to do with a matter far distant from his death that we must never know about, for that is what Poe would be thinking about, just as a man trapped in a pit would be thinking of escape, not of the pit. Not about the death that is all too close upon him, but about life left behind.

  “You understand now. All this, all that he did in the days since stepping off the boat from Richmond, was an escape from Baltimore—from his lack of home. This city had once been his home, the land of his father and grandfather, the birthplace of his wife and adored mother-in-law, whom he called Muddy, Mother, yet he had no home there any longer—*

  “I reach’d my home—my home no more—

  For all had flown who made it so.”

  Here Duponte seemed ready, quite unconscious of me, to recite more of Poe’s verses, but stopped himself. “No, he had no home here. Not this Baltimore, where he did not trust his remaining relatives of the name Poe even to inform them of his presence, and indeed they were afterward ashamed enough of their response to his demise to say so little about it as to appear suspicious. Nor was home New York, where his wife, Virginia, was dead and buried and he was preparing to flee forever; not the city of Richmond either, where the marriage with a childhood love was still only a plan, however attractive, and his memories of losing that place as a home once before and losing his mother and adoptive parents were still strong. Not Philadelphia, where he once resided and wrote, where he was obliged to use another name or risk losing the last loving letter of the one relation still devoted to him, where somehow he found now that he could not even reach it on a train.

  “You see clearly now the map of Poe’s attempted movements in his last epoch of life—from Richmond to try to go to New York, from Baltimore trying to go to Philadelphia—it is no small fact that these four cities were all ones where he had once lived and was rolling incessantly between. If there were twenty men named Reynolds standing around in his hospital room, Poe’s Reynolds, man or idea, would still be far away from there—not of sickness, not of death—somewhere he would long to be. That name, monsieur, reveals to us nothing of the circumstances of Poe’s death, and will ever remain the possession only of Poe himself. In that way, it is the most crucial and most secret of all the particulars.”

  Forty minutes after the court had been abandoned, when it was found that the doors to the courtroom were fastened from the inside, there was another commotion. It was later declared that I was mad as a March hare for risking such behavior toward the judge, who was indeed irate. But I had not yet finished with Duponte when the doors began violently rattling. After the analyst concluded in full his demonstration, which presented but a few more details than transcribed faithfully above, Duponte looked at the door, and then turned back to me.

  “You may tell this to the court,” he said. “I mean, all we have said. You will not lose your fortune; you will not surrender Glen Eliza. All the precise points shall not be comprehended by some of the simpletons among your peers, of course, but it will do.”

  “I am not dramatist enough to claim these ideas were mine, not huckster enough to say they were the Baron’s. I must speak of you, monsieur, must reveal your genius, if I tell them this. And if I did I might by chance reveal something that leads those men back to you. If they hunt you out—”

  “You may tell them all,” interrupted Duponte. He nodded slowly to show he understood the risk to himself and was genuine in granting his permission.

  “Monsieur Duponte,” I began with gratitude.

  I looked at the fragments of faces and hollering mouths through the windows in the doors to the courtroom. The crowd was demanding them opened. I suppose the sight mesmerized me. When the doors were finally unbolted, I lost sight of Duponte in the stream of people. Peter rushed to me and pulled me aside.

  “Was that…who was that man with you?” he asked.

  I did not reply.

  “It was him. Auguste Duponte. Wasn’t it?” he asked.

  I denied it, but was not very convincing.

  “Quentin, it was!” Peter said with unchecked exuberance. “Then he has told you! He has given you all you need to know to uncover the mystery of Poe’s death? And to extricate yourself from all troubles! A miracle!”

  I nodded. Peter did not stop smiling as I was led back to the witness stand. The judge, apologizing for the interruption, reprimanding me for bolting the doors, and assuring us that the vagrant outside the building had been disarmed, now asked me to resume my testimony.

  “No,” I whispered.

  “What, Mr. Clark?” the judge said. “We must hear the balance of your testimony. Speak up, please!”

  I stood up. The skin around the judge’s eyes wrinkled in irritation. The onlookers whispered across to one another. Peter’s smile dropped from his face. He closed his eyes at what he realized was about to happen and rolled his head into his hand.

  I looked across the crowd to my great-aunt. Peter began waving demoniacally for me to sit. I pointed my cane right at her. “The memory of my parents belongs to me, and Glen Eliza and all that is in it belongs to the name I bear. I shall fight for all this, Great-Aunt, even though I will probably not win. I will live happily if I can, and die poor if I must. I shall not, not by you or Auntie Blum or the whole arsenal of Fort McHenry, be compelled to give up. A man named Edgar Poe died in Baltimore once, and perhaps it was because he was a man with dreams better than our own and we used him for it—used him all up until there was nothing left. He shall watch no one use him again. And,” I thought I might as well add, swinging the aim of my cane elsewhere in the audience, “I shall marry Miss Hattie Blum come tomorrow morning in the valley below Glen Eliza, at sunset, with all of Baltimore invited, and all will be right!”

  I thought I heard one of Hattie’s sisters fall to the floor in a faint. Hattie, who was beaming despite being wrapped by her aunt’s vise-like arms, shook herself free and rushed toward me. Peter was required to hold back the Blum family with explanations and assurances.

  “What have you done?” Hattie said to me in a nervous whisper. The throng had become louder, and the judge was now straining to silence them.

  “Proved my great-aunt correct, perhaps,” I said. “Your family will give us nothing, and I have already entered debt. I may have thrown awa
y all we have, Hattie!”

  “No. You’ve proved me right. Your father would be proud today—you are a chip off the old block, Quentin.” Hattie kissed me quickly on the cheek and, pulling herself from my grasp, hurried to try to soothe her family.

  Peter grabbed my arm. “What is this?”

  “Where is he?” I asked. “Have you seen where Duponte went?”

  “Quentin! Why did you not simply repeat whatever it was that Frenchman told you? Why did you not tell the court the truth of what you and he found?”

  “And to what purpose, Peter?” I asked. “To save myself. No, this is what they hope for me to do so they might feel they know me, and that I am inferior because different. No, I do not think I will. Send public opinion to the devil today—this history will remain unspoken for now. There is one person I will tell today, Peter. I wish her always to understand me, as she has before, and she must hear for herself.”

  “Quentin, Quentin! Think of what you’re doing!”

  36

  I DID NOT share the narrative of Poe’s death with that courtroom, not that day or any other. Instead, I worked alongside Peter and became, as he later liked to say, an unrecoverable lawyer, finding each item of inconsistency and weak supposition in the case against me. In the end, we won. I received official recognition of my sanity and did so quite handily, by the judgment of most who observed the entire proceedings. Though there were few who believed I was, in fact, completely sane, they admitted that the trial pointed to that fact.

  My reputation for an original bent of legal acumen spread. I rejoined Peter as an equal partner and we became one of the more successful law practices in Baltimore in mortgages, debts, and the contesting of wills.

  The practice also added a third attorney, a young man from Virginia of habitual industry, and Peter soon married the equally industrious sister of that gentleman.

  Though the police did not look for Edwin Hawkins in relation to the infamous assault on Hope Slatter, the slave-trader was said to have privately declared that he would know the man when he met him. But only a few months after the incident, Slatter decided that Baltimore had begun to be unreliable for his line of business, and he moved his slave-trading firm to Alabama, permitting the safe return to Baltimore of Edwin Hawkins. Edwin, meanwhile, deprived of his situation at the newspaper offices, had begun reading more books on the law and became a first-rate clerk in our expanding practice and later, at age sixty, an attorney.

  Nearly nine years after my last visit, I returned to Paris with Hattie, and brought along Peter Stuart’s young daughter, Annie. There was none of the general surveillance and spying that I had once experienced. Indeed, in some ways Paris was a more comfortable place to be as an empire under Louis-Napoleon than as a republic under the same man. As an American from a nation that was a republic, I had been an unwanted influence by a man planning an overthrow of that very form of government. As an emperor, Louis-Napoleon had the power he wished for, and so no longer thought to exercise its full range from day to day.

  The Baltimore line of the Bonaparte family, after Jérôme Napoleon Bonaparte’s conference with the new emperor, received by decree the right to the Bonaparte name for all of the descendants of Madame Elizabeth Bonaparte. But the emperor would yield no rights to succession or imperial property as Madame Bonaparte had instructed her son to demand. When Louis-Napoleon died years later, neither of Madame Bonaparte’s two grandchildren, both as handsome and as tall as could be hoped for, became emperor of the French. She lived for many years in Baltimore, and could be seen often in her black bonnet and red parasol in the streets, outliving even her son Bo.

  Bonjour, meanwhile, had become a popular member of the small French circle in Washington, and was much admired and sought after for her independence and wit. She found she had perfect freedom as a widow here in America. One who also called herself a widow (though her husband, the elder Jérôme Bonaparte, was still alive in Europe), Madame Bonaparte, for many years, found joy in instructing and encouraging Mademoiselle Bonjour regarding various schemes and romances, though Bonjour did not usually heed her advice. Bonjour refused to marry again even when she experienced serious financial trouble. Through certain friends she had made through Monsieur Montor, Bonjour was soon entered into the theater and became something of a minor sensation as an actress performing in several cities here and in England, before settling on the writing of popular novels.

  That day in the courtroom was the last time I saw Auguste Duponte. There were only a few more words passed between us than I have mentioned already. I believe I had some second sight in the courtroom, some foreboding that this was to be our final meeting. Once the crowd had settled down, I escaped outside and located Duponte exiting the court building. I tried to think what I might say.

  “Poe,” I said, “it is Poe…”

  In my mind, there was some coherent and important statement to convey before parting, but I could not now, facing him, imagine what it was. I thought about the letter I had anticipated for so long from Poe from his time in Richmond, which might have revealed that he had tried to arrange to meet me in Baltimore—the letter had not come and never would, yet on this morning I felt an almost exactly equivalent sensation as though it had, if such can be rightly judged.

  Duponte was looking out from high on the courthouse steps, gazing over Monument Square at a man and woman laughing together and an old slave leading a young horse, knowing there could be those who had seen him on the streets and recognized him. Peter and a few other attorneys were calling for me to come back inside. I remember what I saw with the unfading vividness of today. Duponte’s jaw seemed to loosen, his lips slide together, and that queer grin he had given the portrait artist, that very face of mischief and accomplishment and genius, passed over him for one extravagant moment before it disappeared with him across the street.

  I would always search for mentions of him—under some assumed name, of course—in newspaper columns about far-off places.

  Sometimes I was certain I found reference to my old friend, though he never revealed himself directly and, as far as was known to me, never returned to the United States. There were times I had a vague presentiment that he would appear unexpectedly when he was most missed—for example, during a period when Hattie fell bafflingly unwell, or in those months when no sign of Peter could be located during his much-talked-about time as a general in the war.

  I felt myself for many years, in some ways, waiting. I waited to tell my story, Edgar Poe’s story, waited for a time when Poe’s mind had been uncovered; waited for a day when others would need what I had found from Edgar Poe. I wrote this story in careful hand in memorandum books—it took up more than one of these books, for I was forever adding to the impressions; and I then would wait and write more.

  Sometimes I’d remove the Malacca cane from its place to feel its weight in my hands, and when alone unsheathe the shimmering blade, and I’d laugh with a start and think of Poe, dressed handsomely on his arrival to Baltimore, the Malacca confidently securing his steps.

  Hattie wished to know more about Duponte. She even expressed envy of her aunt for having had a few encounters, though that subject was forbidden from being discussed with Auntie Blum even in the old woman’s advanced years. Hattie often asked for my final assessment of him and his character. I could not say. I could formulate nothing close enough. I kept the portrait that had been painted so many years earlier, but what had seemed an exact replica before looked nothing like Duponte to me now or, for that matter, like the Baron. Or, rather, it resembled nowhere near as well Duponte as the images preserved in my mind.

  Still, it remained in the library of Glen Eliza, where he had sat. When told of him, supper guests might marvel that there was such a rare man. Here Hattie’s interest in the subject of Duponte would diminish. “It was you there also, dear Quentin, who did it,” Hattie would say; and then to see my stern look at the proposition, she would lightly admonish me: “Yes, it was, it was you.”

 
HISTORICAL NOTE

  Edgar Allan Poe died at the age of forty in a Baltimore hospital on October 7, 1849, four days after being found in distress at Ryans inn and tavern. On September 26 or 27 Poe had left Richmond, Virginia, by steamer on his way to his cottage in New York, with an itinerary that included a stop at Philadelphia to edit a book of poems by a writer named Marguerite St. Leon Loud. Poe asked his mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, to send him a letter in Philadelphia addressed to the pseudonym E. S. T. Grey. But Poe, from what we know, never reached Philadelphia or made it home to New York; instead he came on an unannounced and final visit to Baltimore. The details of his whereabouts for the next five daysfrom his arrival by ship to his appearance at Ryans on an election dayhave been almost entirely lost. This remains one of literary historys most persistent gaps.

  A small funeral for Poe was conducted by Reverend William T. D. Clemm at the Westminster Presbyterian burial yard on October 8. There were four mourners in attendance: Poes relatives Neilson Poe and Henry Herring, his colleague Dr. Joseph Snodgrass, and his former classmate Z. Collins Lee. Reports about the circumstances and causes of his death were hazy and conflicting and were further confused by the publication of a memoir by Rufus Griswold, in which facts and even quotes were fabricated. As the decades passed, theories and rumors about Poes demise multiplied, told by those who had known Poe and those who had not.