The Poe Shadow

15

THAT IS HOW I became our secret agent.

The Baron Dupin changed his hotel every few days. I presumed his movements were spurred by constant fears that his enemies from Paris would trace him here, though this seemed far-fetched to me. But then I began noticing two men who seemed to be regularly observing the Baron. I was observing the Baron too, of course, and so it was difficult for me to watch them closely at the same time. They dressed as though in uniform: old-fashioned black dress coats, blue trousers, cocked derby hats hiding their faces. Though they did not resemble each other physically, both had the same unconscious stares, like the disdainful eyes of the Roman statues of the Louvre. These orbs were always trained on the same object: the Baron. At first I thought they might be working for the Baron, but I noticed that he strenuously avoided being in their proximity. After several times crossing their paths, I remembered where I had seen one of them. It had been on one of my walks with Duponte. I had tripped into him around the site of one of our encounters with the Baron. Perhaps that had been near the time they had first located their object.

They were not the only people in Baltimore now interested in the affairs of the Baron Dupin. There was also the doorkeeper from the "Rosy God" club-the den of the Whigs of the Fourth Ward where we had met with Mr. George, the president of that group. This massive doorkeeper began to harass the Baron while the Baron was in disguise-the disguise that I had first seen in the athenaeum reading room. Not even the Baron would openly challenge this Whig agent, Tindley-far too pretty a designation for a monster. Everyone seemed a dwarf next to him.

"What is it you want, good man?" the Baron asked his tormenter.

"For you dandies to stop talking about our club!" Tindley answered.

"Dear fellow, what makes you think I am concerned with your club?" the Baron asked magnanimously.

Tindley's mouth remained open, as he placed his finger into the folds of the Baron's flowing black cravat. "We've been warned about you, after you tried to palm me to enter the club! Now I'm watching."

"Ah, you have been warned, have you," said the Baron lightly. "Then I am afraid you have been terribly misled by this warning. Now," he inquired with desperately concealed worry, "who in the wide world would have warned you?"

Tindley didn't have to say Duponte's name-he didn't know it, regardless; the Baron could guess. "Tall, unelegant Frenchman with an oval head? Was it him? He is a fraud, dear sir," the Baron said of Duponte. "He's more dangerous than you can imagine!"

What a futile flash of anger in the Baron's eyes, as he stood there, all the while silently damning the triumph of Duponte! Obstructed by Tindley wherever he went, the Baron soon had to retire that disguise of the sneezer and the informants he had established through it…A small victory for us, I thought to myself vengefully, after the Baron's successful infiltration into Glen Eliza by the Dutch portraitist.

Speaking of how our Baron Dupin looked these days, what changes he was affecting before our eyes! I have mentioned in a past chapter his facility for altering his physical appearance with singular effectiveness. On recent occasions seeing the Baron on the streets, I had noticed a new transformation about his face and general person, without being able to identify what exactly had changed. This was no matter of a falsely bulbed nose and wig-that former costume belonged with the third-rate summer performers in the Rue Madame in Paris. His entire countenance now seemed to have become altogether different, and at the same time eerily, breathtakingly familiar.

One night I was adding some kindlers to the fire in the living room hearth. Duponte commented that he was comfortable enough. On this topic, I ignored him. In Paris, it's said there is hardly a smoking chimney even on the worst nights of winter. We Americans are rather too sensitive to heat and cold, while in the Old World they seem hardly aware of it at all-but I would not sit wrapped in blankets like a Frenchman would insist on doing. This same evening, I received a note.

It was from Auntie Blum. I opened it with some hesitation. She said she hoped that my unmannered French pastry cook (meaning Duponte) had been discharged. Chiefly, she wished to inform me, out of courtesy to her longtime friendship with the household of Glen Eliza, that Hattie was now engaged to marry another man, who was industrious and trustworthy.

At first, I fell under a spell of shock at the news. Could Hattie really have found someone else? Could I have managed to forfeit a woman as wonderful as Hattie, while at the same time doing what seemed right and necessary?

Then I realized. I thought back to Peter's sage warning that it would not be easy to appease Auntie Blum, and recognized this letter as a ploy by that cunning woman to torment me into apologies and excessive confessions of my wrong toward her niece.

I was not above this tactic, or beneath it, as the case might be.

I sat upon the sofa, thinking whether I had by nature of my present endeavor given up all proper intercourse with society. I was, after all, now in the company of men of great intensity like Duponte and the Baron, who defied any social customs and sought action that could not be obtained by ordinary politeness.

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 transform 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 point 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?"

"We have an excursion today, in the interests of our investigation," he commented.

"Where shall we go?"

"We are here already."

Duponte walked through the gates and up the front pathway to the Snodgrass house. "Go ahead," Duponte said when I came to a halt.

"Monsieur, the Snodgrasses are not home this hour. And, you must know, Bonjour may see us here!"

"I fully rely on it," he replied.

He took the silver-plated knocker in hand, which promptly brought to us the downstairs girl. Duponte glanced around and saw with satisfaction that Bonjour was peering from the staircase high above, as likely she did with any guest calling for Dr. Snodgrass.

"Our business, miss," said Duponte, "lies with Dr. Snodgrass. I am"-here he paused, with a slight nod up to the landing of the stairs-"the Duke Duponte."

"Duke! Well, the doctor is not at home, sir." She passed a slow gaze over my outer garments, which prompted me to remove my hat and coat.

"I should think not, for he is a man of extensive business. But he has left word, I believe, with your upstairs girl that we are to wait for him in his study at this hour," said Duponte.

"Likely! How queer!" exclaimed the girl, whose jealousy for Bonjour seemed to rise like a visible object before our eyes.

"If the young woman is present, miss, perhaps she shall be able to confirm the particulars of our invitation."

"Likely!" the downstairs girl repeated. "Does this have truth, in fact?" she called up to Bonjour. "The doctor said nothing to me."

Bonjour smiled, and then said, "The doctor tells you nothing of what occurs upstairs, of course, miss. And his study is upstairs."

Bonjour approached us and curtsied a greeting. I was quite startled to find her compliant in Duponte's scheme, but as that first moment of surprise passed I came to understand. If Bonjour exposed Duponte's scheme as a false one, we could quite as easily demonstrate Bonjour's own falsehoods in securing her position. It was an automatic and unspoken bargain.

"Dr. Snodgrass asked that you follow me," she said.

"Into the study, I believe he suggested," Duponte replied, accompanying her up the stairs and gesturing for me to come.

Bonjour seated us in the study with a smile and offered to close the door behind us for our comfort. "You gentlemen will be most happy to know that the respected doctor will not be long before his return," she said. "He returns early today. I shall be certain to bring him straightaway when he comes home."

"We would expect nothing less, dear miss," said Duponte.

When we were alone, I turned to Duponte. "What shall we be able to learn from Snodgrass? Shall he not object strenuously to our pretending to have an appointment? And, monsieur, have you not said a hundred times we haven't any call to speak with witnesses?"

"Do you think that is why we've come? To see Snodgrass?"

I chafed a bit and made a point of not answering.

Duponte sighed. "We are not here to see Dr. Snodgrass; we shall be able to read what we wish to know among the doctor's papers. This is no doubt why the Baron has sent Bonjour here, and why she cleverly ensured she would become the upstairs servant, to have a free hand in his study without observation. She seemed rather amused with our presence, and quite loose with the more established servant, which suggests she is nearly finished with her purpose here. Nor does she believe we have enough time to discover anything of importance among all these papers."

"She's correct then!" I said, noticing that Snodgrass's study was awash in papers, in piles and stacks upon and around and inside the drawers of his office desk.

"Rethink your conclusions. Mademoiselle Bonjour has spent several weeks here now, and though she is a practiced thief, she would have no desire to risk that Dr. Snodgrass would notice the removal of any papers, which would foreclose any further search she might have wished to make. Thus she would have secretly copied in her own hand any items of interest and returned the originals to their place here for us to discover."

"But how shall we be able to discover in a matter of minutes what has taken her weeks to compile?"

"Precisely because she has discovered them first. Any document or paper that has attracted a high degree of interest will have commanded her to remove it from its place, perhaps more than once. Certainly one would not casually notice this difference, but once knowing to look for it, we should have no trouble selecting and copying these particular documents."

We went to work immediately. I took one side of the desk. Guided by Duponte, I searched for bent and misaligned corners, smudged ink, slight tears and folds, creases, and other indicators of recent handling among the various assortments and collections of documents and newspaper articles on all subjects, some with dates as much as twenty-five years old. Together we located many mentions of Poe that apparently had been examined by Bonjour in her time in this house, including a wealth of articles on the death of Poe that, if not quite as comprehensive as my own collection, was not unimpressive. Exhilarated and appalled, I found some rather more unique documents, three letters-the handwriting on which I recognized right away-from Edgar Poe to Dr. Snodgrass, dating from several years earlier.

In the first, Poe offered Snodgrass, then editing a magazine called The Notion, the rights to publish the second of the Dupin tales. "Of course I could not afford to make you an absolute present of it," wrote Poe firmly, "but if you are willing to take it, I will say $40." Yet Snodgrass turned him down, and Poe was declined by Graham's, too, before publishing "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" elsewhere.

In the second letter from Poe, the writer asked Dr. Snodgrass to place a favorable notice of Poe's work in a magazine then being edited by Neilson Poe, hoping that the latter would oblige him as his cousin. The attempt seems to have failed, and Poe wrote back in disgust. "I felt that N. Poe would not insert the article," he said. "In your private ear, I believe him to be the bitterest enemy I have in the world."

I rushed to share this. "Neilson Poe, monsieur! Edgar Poe calls him his bitterest enemy… Didn't I guess at his position in all this!"

Our time being too short to discuss each item, Duponte directed me to quickly copy into my memorandum book all items about Poe that seemed important to me and, for that matter, he said after thinking it over, items that seemed unimportant to me as well. I duly noted the date of Poe's letter about Neilson: October 7, 1839-exactly ten years to the day before Poe's death!

"He is the more despicable in this," wrote Poe of Neilson, "since he makes loud professions of friendship." And did Neilson not profess the same fables, when I met him? We were not only cousins, but friends, Mr. Clark. Neilson Poe, with his heart beating for his own literary fame, his hand holding a wife who was sister and near copy to Edgar's-had he wanted the life of the very man he so outwardly denigrated?

This was not all I found in letters from Poe to Snodgrass about his Baltimore relatives. Poe had declared Henry Herring (the first Poe relation to arrive at Ryan's) "a man of unprincipled character."

Duponte paused in the midst of opening every possible drawer in the room.

"Survey the streets from the other side of the house, Monsieur Clark. Watch out for Dr. Snodgrass's carriage. When he arrives, we must leave immediately, and ensure the Irish chambermaid says nothing of our visit."

I studied Duponte's face for any hint at how we would accomplish the second objective. I walked to a chamber at the front of the house. Looking from the window, I found that a carriage was passing nearby, but after it seemed to check its speed briefly, the horses continued down High Street. Turning back toward the study, I found myself facing Bonjour, leaning upon the hearth so that her black dress and apron radiated with the flame of the fire.

"All right, mister? Anything that I can help you with while you wait for Master Snodgrass?" she asked, in imitation of the downstairs chambermaid's voice, and loud enough that she might hear. In a quieter tone, she commented, "You see now that your friend is only a vulture on my master's investigation."

"I am quite well here, miss, thank you, only looking out at these dreadful rain clouds," I said in my loud voice, and then quietly: "Auguste Duponte imitates no man. He shall resolve this in a manner deserving of Monsieur Poe. He can help you, too, if you wish, more than that thief, mademoiselle, your so-called husband and master."

Bonjour, forgetting the necessities of her charade, slammed the door closed. "I think not! Duponte is a thief of true measure, Monsieur Clark-he steals people's thoughts, their faults. The Baron is a great man because he is himself in all things. The most freedom I can have is by being with him."

"You believe that by ensuring the Baron's victory here you will have repaid the debt you owe him for releasing you from prison, and will be free from this marriage he has compelled."

Bonjour threw her head back in amusement. "Well! You are firing into the wrong flock. I'd suggest you not judge me by mathematical analysis. You are becoming too much like your companion."

"Monsieur Clark!" Duponte called hoarsely from the study.

I shifted my weight anxiously from one foot to the other.

Bonjour moved closer and studied me. "You do not have a wife, Monsieur Clark?"

My thoughts darkened. "I will," I replied without confidence. "And I will treat her well and ensure our mutual happiness."

"Monsieur, the French girl possesses no freedom. In America a girl is free and honored for her independence until she is married. In France, the tables are turned. She is only free once she marries-and then with a freedom never to be imagined. A wife can even have as many lovers as her husband."

"Mademoiselle!"

"Sometimes, a man in Paris is far more jealous of his mistress than his wife, and a woman more true to her lover than her husband."

"But why remain a thief for him, mademoiselle?"

"In Paris you must get what you want from others by hook or crook, or others will get what they want from you first." She paused. "Your master is calling, monsieur."

I started for the door. Bonjour lingered a moment before stepping aside with a mocking curtsy. As I re-entered the study, Duponte said, "Monsieur, here is the note that perhaps tells us more than anything else, the one you heard read in part at the harbor. Write every word and every comma in your memorandum book. And quickly: I believe I hear the wheels of another carriage coming up the path. Write then: ‘Dear Sir, There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan's…'"

Upon the completion of our transcriptions, Bonjour led us downstairs rapidly.

"There is a back entrance?" I whispered.

"Dr. Snodgrass is just in the carriage house." We all turned around. It was the downstairs girl, who had appeared among us suddenly. "The Duke shan't leave now?"

"I'm afraid my schedule has become conflicted," said Duponte. "I shall have to see Dr. Snodgrass another time."

"I shall be certain to tell him you were here, then," she replied dryly, "and sitting in his study alone among his private things for nearly half of an hour."

Duponte and I froze at this warning, and I glanced over questioningly at Bonjour, who would no doubt be implicated as well.

Bonjour stared at her fellow domestic almost dreamily. When I turned back to Duponte, I saw he had entered into a private conversation with the Irish girl, whispering somberly to her. At the end of his comments, she nodded slightly, a faint crimson blush splashed on her cheeks.

"The other door, then?" I asked, noticing that she and Duponte seemed to have reached some accord.

"This way," said the maid, motioning to us. We crossed through the rear hall even as we could hear the boots of Dr. Snodgrass on the steps to the street door. As we climbed down to the pathway, Duponte turned back and touched his hat to the two ladies in farewell. "Bonjour," he said.

"Monsieur, how did you persuade the doctor's chambermaid to cooperate so Bonjour would not be caught?" I asked as we walked up the street.

"First, you are on the wrong scent. It was not for Bonjour's sake, as you assume. Second, I explained to the chambermaid that, in all honesty, we were not in fact leaving for another appointment."

"Indeed? You told her the truth then," I said with surprise.

"I explained that her interest, or infatuation, with you was highly inappropriate, and I wished to leave discreetly and quietly before her employer returned and might notice it first-hand."

"Infatuation with me?" I repeated. "Wherever did such an idea come from, monsieur? Had she said something I did not hear?"

"No, but she certainly contemplated it upon my mention and, thinking something must have shown to that effect in her expression, she thought it must indeed be true. She will remain quiet about our visit, I assure you."

"Monsieur Duponte! I cannot begin to understand this tactic!"

"You are the model of the handsome young man," he replied, then added, "at least by Baltimore standards. That you are hardly aware of it only allows it to enter more decidedly in the eyes of a young female. Certainly the chambermaid noted this upon our entrance; indeed, her eyes flitted, as it were, immediately. Even if she did not consider it directly-until I mentioned it."

"Monsieur, still-"

"No more talk of this, Monsieur Clark. We must continue our work in relation to Dr. Snodgrass."

"But what do you mean by ‘it was not for Bonjour's sake'?"

"Bonjour hardly needs our assistance, nor would she hesitate to cross us for her purposes when given the opportunity. You would be especially wise to remember this. It was for the sake of the other girl I did that."

"How do you mean?"

"If the chambermaid had attempted to allege misconduct against Bonjour, I do not suppose the poor girl would have fared well against mademoiselle. Certainly, it is wise to save lives whenever you can."

I reflected a moment on my naïve understanding of the situation.

"Where shall we go next, monsieur?"

He gestured to my memorandum book. "To read, of course."

Meanwhile, a new obstacle awaited us. While we had been occupied, my great-aunt had arrived at Glen Eliza. Her purpose here was no mystery: word had reached her of my return to Baltimore and she came to see why I had not yet been married after my notorious lapse. She had a long fellowship with Hattie Blum's aunt (a conspiracy of these creatures!) and would have heard the odd bits of half-truth that the other woman had collected about my goings-on.

Nearly two hours passed after we returned home before I learned of her presence. After our endeavors at the Snodgrass home, we had adjourned to the athenaeum to match some of the records we had discovered with articles from the press. We continued on at Glen Eliza in fastidious conversation regarding our various discoveries made there. Because Duponte and I were organizing the intelligence we had gathered at the Snodgrass house, I gave firm orders that we were not to be interrupted. The table in the library had grown thick with newspapers, lists, and notes, and therefore we remained in the massive drawing room, which stretched out over half of the second floor of the house. At length, around twilight, I went to the other side of the house to consult something, but was stopped by Daphne, my best chambermaid.

"You must not go inside, sir," she said.

"Not go in my library? But why?"

"Ma'am insists she must not be disturbed, sir."

I obediently released the handle of the door. "Ma'am? What ‘ma'am'?"

"Your aunt. She arrived with her bags at Glen Eliza while you were out, sir. She has been exhausted by her trip, as it was frightfully cold and her baggage nearly lost by the railroad men."

I was confounded. "I have been sitting in the drawing room without knowing this. Why have you not told me?"

"You declared in great hurryment you must not be disturbed even before stepping through the street door, didn't you, sir!"

"I must greet her properly," I said, straightening my neck-cloth and smoothing my vest.

"Well, go about it quietly-she needs strict quiet to cure her sick-headache to which she is subject, sir. I'm sure she was quite displeased at the other disturbance."

"Daphne, the other disturbance?" I then remembered that, not more than an hour earlier, Duponte had retrieved a book he had remembered was in the library. Surely my faithful maid had instituted my great-aunt's domineering orders against Duponte as well?

"The gentleman would not heed my words! He went right in…" Daphne explained with heated disapproval and a fresh revival of her Duponte misgivings.

I thought about Duponte and Auntie Blum's encounter some weeks earlier, and imagining my great-aunt's reaction to any similar conversation made my own head throb. I now thought better of my desire to greet her-especially given the humor any woman of her advanced age was likely in, between the delayed train and Monsieur Duponte. I returned to the drawing room. Great-Aunt's presence would be no small disruption. Indeed, I could not guess the influence that elder relation would ultimately have over all this.

The next vivid memory I possess of that evening was when I stirred awake. I had fallen into an uncomfortable sleep on one of the drawing room's long sofas. The papers I had been reviewing had scattered on the carpet below. It was an hour or so past nightfall and Glen Eliza was eerie with silence. Duponte, it seemed, had retired to the third floor to his chambers. A loud bump jolted me to a greater state of consciousness. The wind was blowing through the long curtains, and a feeling of great anxiety flitted inside my stomach.

The corridors on this side of the house were deserted. Remembering my great-aunt, I ascended the winding stairs and crept past the chambers where she would have been placed by the servants, but found the door open and the bedclothes undisturbed. Walking back down directly to the library, I quietly pushed open the doors to the dimly lighted room.

"Great-Auntie Clark," I said softly, "I hope you are not still awake after such a difficult day."

The room was unoccupied-but not undisturbed. It was all but ransacked, papers overturned and books scattered around the room. No trace of the old woman was to be seen. In the corridor, I saw a darkly cloaked figure race past at a strong pace. I gave chase to the figure's shadow through the long halls of Glen Eliza. The figure dove through an open window near the kitchen on the first floor and ran toward a trail in the wooded area behind the house.

"Burglary!" I cried. "Auntie," I gasped to myself in sudden dread.

Following the little glen that ran along the house toward the gravel street, the burglar slowed to decide which way to run, leaving himself entirely vulnerable. I pounced, and wrestled him down with a giant leap and a groan.

"You shall not get away!" I yelled.

We fell together into a heap and I turned his body to face me, locking his wrist in my hand and struggling to throw off the hood of his velvet cloak. But this was no man.

"You? How? What have you done with Great-Auntie Clark?" I demanded. Then I realized my own stupidity. "It was you the whole time, mademoiselle? My aunt hasn't come?"

"If you wrote more frequently, perhaps she would," Bonjour scolded me. "I daresay there is reading in your library far more interesting dredged up by your master Duponte than in all your Monsieur Poe's tales."

"We saw you still at the Snodgrass house upon our departure!" Then I recalled our stop at the athenaeum.

"I was faster. That is your flaw-you hesitate always. Do not be angry, Monsieur Quentin. We are now even. You and your master wished to be in my territory in the Snodgrasses, and now I have entered yours. This is familiar, too." She writhed a bit under my grip, as I had done at the Paris fortifications in opposite positions. The velvet of her cloak and the silk of her dress rustled against my shirt.

I quickly released my grip. "You knew I could not send for the police. Why did you run then?"

"I like to see you run. You are not half slow, you know, monsieur, without a proper hat to hinder you." She passed her hand playfully through my hair.

My heart wild with bewilderment, I jumped up from our entangled position on the ground.

"Heavens!" I cried, looking ahead at the street.

"Is that all?" Bonjour laughed.

There was a small conveyance lurking on the hilly side of the street. Hattie stood calmly in front of it. I did not know when she had arrived, and could not imagine what she thought she saw before her.

"Quentin," she said, taking a cautious step forward. Her voice was unsteady. "I asked one of the stablemen to drive me. I have managed to get away from my house a few times but, until now, have not found you at home."

"I have been away much," I replied dumbly.

"I thought nightfall would provide us privacy to meet." She glanced at Bonjour, who lingered on the cold grass before hopping up. "Quentin? Who is this?"

"This is Bon-" I stopped myself, realizing her name would sound like a queer invention on my part. "A visitor from Paris."

"You met this young lady in Paris, and now she has come to call on you?"

"Not to see me in particular, Miss Hattie," I protested.

"You are in love after all, Monsieur Quentin. She's beautiful!" Bonjour tossed her head. She leaned forward as though peeping at a new litter of kittens. Hattie flinched at the attention of the stranger, wrapping her shawl tighter.

"Tell me, how did he pop the important question?" Bonjour asked Hattie.

"Please, Bonjour!" When I turned my back to Hattie to admonish Bonjour, Hattie climbed into her coach and ordered it away. "Hattie, wait!" I cried.

"I must go home, Quentin." I chased the carriage and called out to Hattie before losing too much ground as they passed into the forest. When I turned back to Glen Eliza, Bonjour had vanished as well, and I was alone.

The next morning, I firmly rebuked the chambermaid who had acted as guard to Bonjour's fraud.

"Say, Daphne, that you truly thought that young woman, hardly old enough to be my wife, was my great-aunt!"

"I did not say great-aunt, sir, but aunt only, as she said. She was in her shawl and the finest hat, sir, so I did not judge her age. Nor did the other gentleman question her on the matter when he entered there. And more so, sir, in large families one can have many aunts of all ages. I knew a girl of twenty-two whose aunt was not yet three years old."

I turned my attention to her most salient point, Duponte. It was possible, perhaps, that in the midst of his usual unbreakable concentration and with the library's stained glass keeping it dim even in the day, he had noticed no more than a feminine silhouette at the library table when he had gone inside for his book. Still, this seemed unlikely. I confronted Duponte on the issue. I could not restrain my anger.

"The Baron shall now possess nearly half, if not more, of the information we have gathered! Monsieur, did you not notice Bonjour right in front of you when you walked into the library yesterday?"

"I am not blind," he replied. "And to a very beautiful girl! It is a dim room, but not so dim as that. I saw her plainly."

"Why didn't you call for me, for God's sake? The situation has been much damaged!"

"The situation?" Duponte repeated, perhaps sensing that my frenzy went beyond her infiltration of our investigation on the case. Indeed, I wondered if I could ever look the same again in Hattie's eyes.

"All the intelligence we had possessed that they had not," I said more calmly and with decision.

"Ah. Not so, Monsieur Clark. Our hold on the events surrounding the time of Monsieur Poe's death is dependent only in very small part in possessing the details and facts, which are the blood of the newspapers. That's not the heart of our knowledge. Do not mishear me: details are elemental, and at times trying to acquire, but not in themselves enlightenment. One must know how to read them properly to find their properties of truth-and the Baron Dupin's reading of them has nothing to do with ours. If your concern is that we shall give the Baron some advantage over us, worry not, for it is the opposite of what you think. If his reading is incorrect, than the more particulars he must read, the farther we move ahead of him."

17

Dear Sir,-There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan's 4th Ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, amp; he says he is acquainted with you, and I assure you, he is in need of immediate assistance.

A LOCAL PRINTER named Walker had signed this note in an urgent scrawl that had almost sent the pencil through the coarse paper. It was dated 3 October 1849 and addressed to Dr. Joseph Snodgrass, who lived close to Ryan's, which on that election day when Poe was found also served as a polling place for the Congressional and state election.

A few days after Duponte and I occupied the study of Dr. Snodgrass, and Hattie stood dazed as I lay entangled with another woman, the Baron Dupin called on Snodgrass again.

I had been watching the Baron when he suddenly idled at a corner of Baltimore Street as though he had forgotten that he had any cares in the world. I was across the street, remaining inconspicuous among the crowds of people heading to hotels and restaurants for supper and the high baskets balanced on the heads of laborers and slaves. After a seemingly unending time waiting for the Baron to do something, I was distracted by the rumble of a carriage that swerved suddenly to the side near me.

From inside the carriage, I heard a voice:

"What are you doing? Driver! Why are you stopping here?"

Confirming that the Baron had not moved from his position, I decided to investigate the identity of the perturbed passenger. When I was nearing the carriage, I came to a standstill. I knew him instantly as a man I'd first seen at the burial ground on Green and Fayette. He'd stood restlessly that day, shifting from foot to foot, at the funeral of Edgar Poe.

"Do you hear me, driver?" continued his complaint. "Driver?"

Here, by some strange ordering of the universe, the mourner had left that dark dream-land, a place of fog and mud, and had been driven right to me in the clear of day. After my meetings with Neilson Poe and Henry Herring, I was now with the third of the four mourners. Only the fourth remained, Z. Collins Lee-a classmate of Poe's from college who, as I'd recently heard, had been appointed a United States district attorney.

I stepped to the side of the coach. But the man had now wriggled to the other side, shouting out at the driver and fidgeting with the handle to open the door. I was about to speak, to call his attention through the window. Then his door opened.

"Isn't it Dr. Snodgrass!" a voice bellowed.

I wheeled away from the window and hid myself near the horses.

It was the Baron Dupin's voice.

"You again," Snodgrass said contemptuously, stepping down. "What are you doing here?"

"Nothing at all," the Baron said innocently. "You?"

"Sir, I beg your leave. I have another appointment. And this rascal driver-"

Leaning over, I could see the Baron's light-skinned slave Newman on the driver's seat and I understood. The Baron had not been idling across the street; he had been waiting for this very man to be delivered to him. No doubt he had stationed Newman in a place where he had known Snodgrass would look for a hackney coach. The first time I had eavesdropped on Snodgrass with the Baron I had seen Snodgrass's face only obliquely. Now the Baron removed the Walker note from his coat; the few sentences written by Walker the day Poe was found, recorded above. He showed it to Snodgrass.

Snodgrass was astonished. "Who are you?" he asked.

"You were involved that day," said the Baron, "in tending to Mr. Poe's well-being. If I chose, this note could be printed in the papers as proof that you were responsible for him. Some people, not knowing better, will assume you were hiding something both by not coming forward honestly with more details and, worse, by sending Mr. Poe alone to the hospital."

"Balderdash! Why would they assume that?" Snodgrass asked.

The Baron laughed good-naturedly. "Because I shall tell the newspapers just that."

Snodgrass hesitated, wavering between compliance and anger. "Did you enter my house, sir? If you stole this, sir…"

Bonjour now joined the Baron's side.

"You! Tess!" This had been Bonjour's assumed name at the Snodgrass home. "My chambermaid?" Now Snodgrass could not help choosing anger. "I shall call for the police this moment!"

"There may be evidence of a small theft you can present them with. But there is also evidence…well, should I mention?" the Baron said, putting a finger to his lips in restraint. "Yes, should I mention there were other private papers of yours we have happened upon…? Oh, the public and all of your blessed committees and societies and so forth would be most interested if we were to kick up a dust…!Do you not think so…Tess, my dear?"

"Blackmail!" Snodgrass stopped himself again, outraged but also hesitant.

"Unpleasant business, I agree." The Baron waved it away. "Back to Poe. You see, that is what really interests us. If the public knows your story-if they believe you tried to save his life…that would be different. But we must have your story first."

Baron Dupin had a sly talent for shifting effortlessly from badgering to dandling. He had performed the same dance with Dr. Moran, at the hospital where Poe died.

"Come now. Back into the carriage, Doctor-let us visit Ryan's!"

At least that is what I imagined the Baron said next as the defeated Snodgrass contemplated a reply, for I had already started away to find an unobtrusive place to wait at the tavern, knowing that was where they would be headed.

"Once I received that letter from Mr. Walker, I repaired to this drinking-saloon-tavern is too dignified a name-and, sure enough," Snodgrass continued as he escorted the Baron inside, "there he was."

I sat at a table in a sunless corner of the room, obscured and further darkened by the shadow of the stairwell that led up to the rooms available for hire, which were often taken by those customers not sober enough to find their way home.

"Poe!" interjected the Baron.

Snodgrass stopped at a dingy armchair. "Yes, he was sitting over here with his head dropped forward. He was in a condition that had been but too faithfully depicted by Mr. Walker's note-which, by the bye, you have had no business to read."

The Baron only grinned at the reproof. Snodgrass continued dejectedly.

"He was so altered from the neatly dressed, vivacious gentleman I knew, that I hardly would have distinguished him from the crowd of intoxicated men, whom the occasion of an election had called together here."

"This whole room was a polling place that night?" the Baron asked.

"Yes, for the local ward. I remember the whole sight well. Poe's face was haggard, not to say bloated," said Snodgrass, unbothered by the contradictory adjectives. "And unwashed, his hair unkempt, and his whole physique repulsive. His forehead, with its wonderful breadth, and that full-orbed and mellow yet soulful eye-lusterless and vacant now."

"Did you have a good look at his clothing?" The Baron was scribbling at a railroad pace in his notebook.

Snodgrass seemed to be dazed by his own memory. "There was nothing good to see, I'm afraid. He wore a rusty, almost brimless, tattered and ribbonless palm-leaf hat. A sack-coat of thin and sleazy black alpaca, ripped at several of the seams, and faded and soiled, and pants of a steel-mixed pattern of cassinette, half worn and badly fitting. He had on neither vest nor neck-cloth, while the bosom of his shirt was both crumpled and badly soiled. On his feet, if I remember aright, there were boots of coarse material, with no sign of having been blacked for a long time."

"How did you proceed, Dr. Snodgrass?"

"I knew Poe had several relatives in Baltimore. So I ordered a room for him at once. I accompanied a waiter upstairs and, after selecting a sufficient apartment, was returning to the bar-room to have the guest conveyed to his chamber so he could be comfortable until I got word to his relatives."

They stepped toward the stairwell, Snodgrass pointing up to the chamber he had selected for Poe on the other side of the stairs. At my table, I tried my best to lose myself in the darkness.

"So you selected Mr. Poe's room, and then sent for his relations?" asked the Baron.

"That is the peculiar thing. I did not need to. When I reached the bottom of the stairway again, I was met by Mr. Henry Herring, a relative of Poe's by marriage."

"Before you had called for him?" the Baron asked. I thought the detail strange, too, and strained to hear Snodgrass's reply.

"That's right. He was at the spot-perhaps with another one of Poe's relatives; I cannot recall."

This was another peculiarity. Neilson Poe had told me he first heard of Edgar Poe's condition when the latter was in the hospital. If there was another relative with Henry Herring, and it was not Neilson, who was it?

Snodgrass continued. "I asked Mr. Herring whether he wished to take his relation to his house, but he strongly declined. ‘Poe has been very abusive and ungrateful on former occasions, when drunk,' Mr. Herring explained to me. He suggested a hospital as a better place for him than the hotel. We sent a messenger to procure a carriage to the Washington College Hospital."

"Who accompanied Mr. Poe to the hospital?"

Snodgrass looked down uncomfortably.

"You did send your friend there alone, then," the Baron said.

"He could not sit up, you see, and there was no room in the carriage once he was lying flat on the seats. He was past locomotion! We carried him as if he were a corpse, lifted him into the coach. He resisted us, muttering, but nothing intelligible. We did not think he was fatally ill then. He was stupefied with drink, alas. That was his final demon." Snodgrass sighed.

I had known already what the doctor felt of Poe's purported drinking. Among the papers in his study, Duponte had come across a few verses on the subject of Poe's death. "Oh! 'twas a saddening scene to find," read Snodgrass's refrains,

"So much for the death of Edgar Poe," Snodgrass now remarked sullenly to the Baron. "I should hope you are satisfied and do not aim to put further light onto Poe's sin. His failings have been mourned enough in public, and I have done everything I can not to say more of it for the time."

"In that, Doctor, you have nothing to worry about," said the Baron. "Poe took nothing to drink."

"Why, what do you mean? I have no doubt. It was a debauch, sir, that killed Poe. His disease was mania a potu, even as the papers reported. I am a possessor of the facts."

"I am afraid you witnessed facts," said the Baron with a grin, "and may even possess them, but you fail to possess the truth." The Baron Dupin put up his hand to silence Snodgrass's protest. "You need not trouble to defend yourself, Dr. Snodgrass. You did your best. But it was not you, sir, nor was it any manner of alcohol that brought Edgar Poe low. There were forces quite more devilish turned against the poet that day. He shall yet be vindicated." The Baron's speech was now more to himself than to Snodgrass.

But Snodgrass still shook his hand in the air as though he had been meanly insulted. "Sir, I am expert in this area. I am an officer with standing of the Baltimore temperance committees! I know a…a…drunken sot, don't I, when coming face to face with one? What are you attempting to do? You may as well try to outstorm the sky!"

The Baron repeated his words slowly, turning around in a circle, his nostrils flaring like a warhorse's. "Edgar Poe shall be vindicated."

18

"POE HAD NOTHING to drink, the Baron said, and drinking did not cause his death, as the press reported."

I was sitting opposite Duponte in my library now, perched at my chair's edge.

Naturally, I did not wish to appear overly pleased about the Baron's conversation with Snodgrass. I did not intend to praise the Baron too highly. He, after all, was our chief rival and obstacle.

"Oh, the look across Dr. Snodgrass's face!" I accidentally continued. "Dupin might have punched him hard in the jaw." I laughed. "Snodgrass-that false friend-deserved it, if someone were to ask me."

An extraneous thought came into my mind, or a question really. Had there been suggestions, in the text of Poe's tales, I asked myself, that C. Auguste Dupin had been a lawyer? I could not help it. The question chimed in my head without offering me a choice to reject it.

"And anything further?"

"What?" I stirred, realizing there had been an awkward interval of silence.

"Did you observe anything further today, monsieur?" asked Duponte, rolling his chair halfway back to the desk of newspapers.

I explained the other points of interest, particularly the sudden and inexplicable presence of Henry Herring at Ryan's before Snodgrass had a chance to call for him, and the detailed descriptions of Poe's disheveled dress. I was careful not even to say the name of Baron Dupin again, as much for my benefit as for Duponte's.

"Neilson Poe, Herring! Now Snodgrass!" I exclaimed in distaste.

"What do you mean, monsieur?" Duponte asked.

"They were all at Poe's funeral-men charged with honoring him. Instead, Snodgrass delivers a vision of Poe as a drunken sot. Neilson Poe takes no action to defend his cousin's name. Henry Herring arrives quickly at Ryan's, before he is even called for by Snodgrass, only to push his relative off alone into a hack to the hospital."

Duponte passed a hand thoughtfully over his chin, sucked at his tongue, and then turned his chair so his back was toward me.

Around this time, the idea had begun to forcefully develop in my mind that, in encouraging my role as spy, Duponte had chiefly wished to keep me occupied. After the disquieting conference recorded above, I hardly spoke to him but to report the particulars of my latest findings, which he usually received with easy indifference; some evenings, if he had already retired by the time I returned to Glen Eliza, I would leave a concise letter detailing all I had observed on that day. I could not forget, moreover, that his somber inaction after discovering Bonjour's prank had led to the great embarrassment between myself and Hattie in front of Glen Eliza. I suppose Duponte took notice of my cooler demeanor, but he never commented about it.

Over breakfast one day I said, "I'm thinking of composing a letter. To that temperance newspaper in New York that claimed knowledge of Poe having a debauch. It has been much on my mind. Someone should demand that they produce the name and account of this so-called witness."

At first Duponte did not reply. Finally he looked up in a cloud of distraction.

"What do you think of the temperance periodical's article, Monsieur Duponte?"

"That it is a temperance periodical," he said. "Their stated desire is the universal elimination of the use of spirits, yet they have a different, in fact most contradictory need, monsieur: a reliable supply of well-regarded people ruined from drink to prove to their readers why their temperance periodical should remain in existence. Poe has become one of these."

"So you do not think the magazine's witness is real?"

"Doubtful."

This raised my hopes and, for an instant, fully restored my fellowship with my companion. "And you have acquired the evidence, monsieur, which we might use to refute them. Can we prove yet that Poe did not drink when he was here?"

"I have never said that I believe he did not."

I could not reply, so fixed was I in momentary shock. His implication was not absolutely certain, but I feared I understood it too well as the exact opposite of the Baron's declaration at Ryan's. My thoughts turned to changing the topic…I did not want to hear him…

"In fact"-Duponte talked over me, preparing to confirm my dread-"he almost certainly did."

Had I heard this correctly? Had Duponte come all this way only to affix Poe's condemnation?

"Now, do tell me more about the subscriptions the Baron has been raising…" he said.

In my turmoil, I welcomed any other subject. Baron Dupin had continued to amass his fortune in subscription moneys around Baltimore. In one oyster tavern alone, he had gleefully received payment from twelve eager fellows. The proprietor, bothered by the Frenchman's interruptions, had related to me the substance of his visits. "In two weeks, folks," the Baron would say, "you shall hear the first true account of Poe's death!" To Bonjour, he once added, "when they hear of my success in Paris, then, then…" His comment trailed off there; to the Baron Dupin's hungry imagination, there was every possibility opening from this success…

A few days later, the Baron Dupin showed himself a bit distressed in the anteroom of his hotel. Afterward, I bribed a nearby porter and asked what had transpired. He said the Baron Dupin had called for his colored boy and found that he was gone. After much shouting and fussing, it was discovered through the civil authorities that Newman had been manumitted. The Baron knew he had been humbugged, and by whom. He laughed.

"Why do you laugh?"

"Because, my dear," he said to Bonjour, "I should be smarter than that. Of course he has been freed."

"You mean that Duponte has done this? But how?"

"You do not know Duponte. You shall yet know him better."

I smiled at the Baron's reported frustration.

On Duponte's instructions, I had a day earlier found the name of Newman's owner. He was a debtor who required quick funds, and thus had made the arrangement with the Baron to hire out Newman for an indefinite period of time. He had not known of the Baron's promise to Newman to purchase his freedom. He was also appalled to hear that Newman had not gone to work for "a small family," as had been advertised. Newman's owner became angry when I told him of the deception. Not angry enough, though, to refuse my own check to him to secure the slave's freedom. In my law practice I'd had extensive experience dealing with persons in great debt in a manner that neither offended their self-esteem nor overlooked their pressing needs.

I even escorted the young man to the train depot myself to send him on his way to Boston. When manumitting a slave, it was dictated that the former slave be quickly removed from the state so he would not negatively influence blacks who remained slaves. Newman was overjoyed as we walked, but seemed filled with worry, as though the ground might collapse beneath our feet before he was safely outside the state. He was not far off. We had only a few yards before reaching the depot when an enormous rumble came from behind and cleared the street of all who were on foot, including us.

Approaching were three omnibuses filled with black men, women, and children. Behind these conveyances were several men on horseback. I recognized one man, tall and silver-haired, as Hope Slatter, the most powerful of the city's slave-dealers, or nigger-traders. The practice of the larger slave-traders in Baltimore was to house the slaves they purchased from sellers in their private prisons, usually a wing of their homes, until a ship could be sufficiently filled to merit the expenses of delivering a shipment to New Orleans, the hub of the southern trade. Slatter and his assistants were now driving to the harbor with approximately a dozen slaves in each bus.

Along the sides of the omnibuses waited other blacks, perpetually stopping to put their arms up to the windows of the omnibuses, and then running to keep up with them, to touch or speak with the occupants one final time. It could not be determined whether a greater amount of weeping occurred inside or out. From within, a voice shouted hysterically, loud enough for anyone who would listen. She tried to make clear that she had been sold to Slatter by her owner with the express provision that she not be separated from her family, as he was now doing.

I steered Newman away from this whole scene, but he was dangerously transfixed by the sight, perhaps the last of its kind he would see before leaving for the North.

The slave-trader and his assistants held up their whips and warned those surrounding the vehicles not to delay their pace. One man had climbed up to a window of the omnibus and was clinging to it, calling for his wife, whom he could not see. She pushed her way through other slaves in the bus to the window.

Slatter, spying this, pressed his horse around from the other side. "Do not continue!" he warned the man.

The climber ignored this, reaching inside to embrace his wife.

Out came Slatter's cane, its strap wrapped closely around his wrist. He knocked the man in the back and then the stomach and left him writhing on the ground. "Away, little dog, before I call for your arrest! You do not wish what would follow that!"

As Slatter steered his horse to step around from the fallen man, his eyes drifted to my position-or, rather, to the young black standing with me.

"Who is this?" he asked gravely from his high saddle as he approached us. He pointed his cane down at Newman.

Newman's lips trembled terribly; he tried to speak but failed. I hoped the man would simply continue on with his other horrid task, but that was not to be.

He pointed his cane at Newman's mouth, and then across his body as though he were lecturing at the medical college. "A likely Negro, aren't you. Fine mouth, generally good teeth, no broken bones to be seen. Good coachman, I'd bet, or a waiter, if he can be careful and honest." Addressing me, he said, "I could sell him for at least six hundred dollars, with a commission to me, my friend."

"I am not his owner," I replied. "Nor is he for sale."

"Then perhaps he is your bastard child?" he said sarcastically.

"I am Quentin Clark, an attorney of this city. This young man you see is manumitted."

"I'm a free man, boss," Newman finally said in a tiny whisper.

"Oh?" Slatter asked musingly, reversing his horse and peering down again at Newman. "Let us see your certificates then."

At this Newman, who had received all the necessary papers that morning, merely trembled and stammered.

"Come on now." Slatter prodded Newman in the shoulder with his cane.

"Leave him," I cried out. "He is freed by my own hand. A man with more freedom than you, Mr. Slatter, for he knows what it is not to have it."

Slatter was about to hit Newman in the shoulder harder when I raised my cane and blocked his instrument with it. "Tell me, Mr. Slatter," I said. "I wonder, if you are so interested in papers, if you should like to have the authorities inspect your slaves on the bus and ensure that all are being sold in accordance with their particular deeds."

Slatter grinned darkly at me. He withdrew his cane with an air of courtesy and, without saying another word to us, dug his heels into his horse's sides to catch up with the train of vehicles heading down into the harbor. Newman was breathing rapidly.

"Why not show him your papers?" I asked insistently. "You do have them on you?"

He pointed to his head, where he wore a ragged hat-he had sewn the papers into the brim. Newman then told of the many traders like Slatter who asked to inspect their certificates of freedom and, once they had them in hand, destroyed the documents. They'd then conceal the rightfully free men and women in their pens until they were sold as legal slaves to another state, far away from any evidence to the contrary.

19

"MONSIEUR DUPONTE, I must ask something at once."

I said this after one of our many recent silent suppers in the large rectangular dining room of Glen Eliza.

Duponte nodded.

I continued. "When the Baron holds his lecture on Poe's death, it may irrevocably pollute the truth. Perhaps, when he delivers his speech, I should cause some distraction to him outside the hall, and you could claim the stage and reveal the truth to the people!"

"No, monsieur," said Duponte, shaking his head. "We shall do nothing of the kind. There is more here than you realize."

I nodded sadly, and did not touch another morsel of food. That had been my experiment. Duponte had failed. He went on with his undisturbed silence.

I was entirely absorbed in distraction. To my visible displeasure, the dronish fellows who were overseeing some of my father's investments came to the door and I sent them away at once. I could not think about numbers and annual accounts.

"The Purloined Letter": the second sequel to "The Murders in the

Rue Morgue." That's what I was thinking about with such a wistful air. C. Auguste Dupin has discovered the secret location of the letter stolen by Minister D--, hidden most ingeniously by being placed right in front of everyone's eyes. It was the ordinary aspect of the spot that eluded all but one man. The analyst uses an unnamed collaborator to fire a gun in the street and raise a commotion. The collaborator's distraction allows C. Auguste Dupin to retrieve the letter, and put a false one in its place.

I relate this to bring out a point. C. Auguste Dupin trusts his collaborator there; and, besides, puts increasingly great trust in the work of his faithful assistant in all of Poe's Dupin trilogy.

Yet Auguste Duponte, my own companion, hardly gave credence to my role as collaborator and quietly dismissed my numerous ideas and suggestions, whether it was questioning Henry Reynolds, for which he made a mockery of me, or my latest design regarding the disruption of the Baron's lecture. On the other hand, Baron Dupin in all he endeavored constantly favored employing accomplices!

Then there was the interesting fact to consider of Baron Dupin's gift for disguises and alterations. A similarity might be noted, that the literary Dupin uses his green spectacles as another way to dupe his brilliant opponent, Minister D--, in "The Purloined Letter."

And how about Baron Dupin's profession as a lawyer? I had begun in the last few days to underline certain lines in the trilogy. "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" implies to the careful reader, in certain key passages, that C. Auguste Dupin was deeply acquainted with the law, perhaps hinting for us at his past practice as a lawyer. Like Baron Dupin.

Then there is that initial, so uninteresting to the uninformed eye: C. Auguste Dupin. C. Dupin. Could it not remind the reader of one Claude Dupin? And is not Poe's character of the genius analyst known by the time of the second tale by the dignified title of "Chevalier"? Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin. Baron C. Dupin.

"But what of the Baron Dupin's cold penchant for money?" I asked myself. Alas, recall that C. Auguste Dupin profits monetarily, and most deliberately, from the employment of his skills in each of the three tales!

Above all, here was the Baron Claude Dupin confronting Snodgrass, boldly denying the notion of Poe expiring through a disgraceful debauch. While on that same day in Glen Eliza Auguste Duponte was allowing for the merits of that shameful position. His nonchalant comment about Poe's drinking resounded in my mind again and again until bitterness and regret reigned over me. "I had never said he had not."

I acknowledged the seeds of my idea and allowed it to germinate: what if the Baron Dupin, all this time, were the real Dupin. And would not Poe have enjoyed this jolly, philosophical, hoaxing rogue, who had so thrilled and plagued me? Poe had written in a letter to me that the Dupin tales were ingenious not just for their method but their "air of method." Didn't the Baron understand the importance of appearance in gaining the awe of those around him, whereas Duponte ignored and alienated to no end? What a great, strange relief these thoughts suddenly provided me. I had miscalculated all along.

Though it was late at night when these ideas culminated in me, I descended the stairs soundlessly and stole out of Glen Eliza. I reached the Baron Dupin's hotel room a half hour late and stood at the door. I was breathing deeply, too deeply, my breathing an echo of my frantic thoughts. I knocked, too exhilarated and fearful to be articulate. There was a rustle from the other side of the door.

"I've possibly been mistaken," I said softly. "Some words, please, just a few moments." I looked behind me to make sure I had not been followed.

The room door nudged opened, and I put my foot in front of it.

I knew I would have only a brief hearing to state my position. "Baron Dupin, please! I believe we must speak at once. I believe-I know you are the one."

20

"BARON! IS THERE a real baron staying in this hotel?"

A thickly bearded man in nightclothes and slippers stood at the door, holding up his candle.

"This is not the room of Baron Dupin?"

"We have not seen him!" replied the man with disappointment, looking over his shoulder as though perhaps there was a baron in his bed-quilt he had neglected to notice. "But we've only arrived this afternoon from Philadelphia."

I mumbled my apologies and returned hurriedly through the hall and to the street. The Baron had changed hotels again and, in my distraction,

I had missed it. My thoughts ran quick and conflicting as I emerged from the hotel. Immediately I felt eyes upon the back of my neck and slowed my walk. It was not merely the intensity of my mood. There was the handsome black whom I had seen before, hands deep in his coat pockets, standing under the streetlamp. Or was it? He remained within the scope of the light only momentarily; then I could find him no more.

Turning to the other side, I thought I saw one of the two men in the old-fashioned dress I had seen following the Baron. My heart thumped violently at the vague feeling of being surrounded. I marched away as quickly as possible, jumping nearly headlong into a hackney coach, which I directed back to Glen Eliza.

After a night of sleeplessness, images of Duponte and the Baron

Dupin alternating and mixing in my mind with the sweeter sounds of

Hattie's sonorous laugh, a messenger arrived in the morning with a note from the athenaeum clerk. It concerned the man who had handed him those Poe-related articles-that first hint of the existence of the real

Dupin. The clerk had indeed remembered or, rather, had seen the very man himself, and when doing so had requested his calling card to send to me.

The man who had passed along the articles was Mr. John Benson, a name meaningless to me. The enameled calling card was from Richmond but had a Baltimore address written in a man's hand. Had someone wanted me to find the real Dupin? Had someone possessed a motive in seeing him brought to Baltimore to resolve Poe's death? Had I been chosen for this?

To say sooth, though, my hopes for elucidation were dim. It seemed to me likely that the ancient clerk, however well-meaning, may have simply mistaken this fellow as the man he had met so briefly two years ago.

I thought of the figures who'd seemed to creep from the shadows around me the night before. Prior to venturing outside on this day, I had secured a revolver that my father had kept in a box to bring on his business visits to the less cultivated countries that traded with Baltimore. I placed the weapon in the pocket of my coat and started for the address printed on Benson's card.

Walking through Baltimore Street, I saw, from a distance, Hattie standing in front of the sign for a fashionable store. I signaled her halfheartedly, not knowing if she would simply walk away without addressing me.

With great abruptness, she ran ahead and embraced me warmly. Though I thrilled at her affection, and the comfort of being close to her again, I imagined with true torment and anxiety that she would brush against the revolver in my coat and develop again the doubts about my behavior that had plagued her. She pulled back as quickly as she had reached for me, as though afraid of spying eyes.

"Dear Hattie," I said, "you do not abhor the very sight of me?"

"Oh, Quentin. I know that you have found new worlds for yourself, new experiences outside the ones we could have together."

"You do not understand who that was. She is a thief, a burglar! Please, I must make you understand. Let us talk together somewhere quiet."

I took her arm to lead her. She gently pulled away.

"It is far too late. I had only come to Glen Eliza that night to explain. I have told you things are quite different."

This could not be! "Hattie, I needed to follow what seemed right. But soon all will be returned to normal."

"Auntie wishes that I never say your name again, and has instructed all of our friends that they are never to mention our engagement with a single living breath."

"But surely Auntie Blum can be readily convinced…What she wrote in her note to me about you finding someone else…it is not true?"

Hattie gave a small nod. "I am to be married to another man, Quentin."

"It is not because of what you saw at Glen Eliza."

She shook her head no, her face motionless and ambivalent.

"Who?"

Here was my answer.

Peter stepped from inside the store where Hattie stood, counting out some coins given to him by the shop-girl. Seeing me, he turned away guiltily.

"Peter?" I cried. "No."

He let his gaze drift aimlessly. "Hello, Quentin."

"You are…engaged to marry Peter!" I moved forward and whispered to Hattie so that he could not hear. "Dear Miss Hattie, Hattie, just tell me one thing-are you happy? Just tell me."

She paused, then nodded brightly, putting out her hand to me.

"Quentin, let us all talk together," Peter said.

But I did not wait. I rushed forward, passing Peter without so much as touching my hat. I wished that both of them would disappear.

"Quentin! Please!" Peter called out. He followed me for a few feet, but he gave up when he saw I would not stop-or perhaps when he saw the anger that flashed in my eyes.

I almost forgot the gun hidden in my coat, considering the mortal weight of this new discovery. On my way to Mr. Benson's address, I passed through some of the finer, most well-appointed streets of Baltimore.

After explaining that I was a stranger with some brief business to discuss with the gentleman of the house, and apologizing for possessing no letter of introduction, I was ushered inside by a colored servant to a sofa in the parlor. The rooms were sparser than was the fashion of the day, with rather exotic paper of an Oriental flavor on the walls, the background for several small silhouettes; the only large portrait loomed behind the sofa, and at first it did not strike me as anything worth noticing.

I do not know, scientifically speaking, if one's senses can detect the eyes of a painting looking upon them, but as I waited for the master of the house, a curious sensation arose in me that made me crane my head. The position of the lamps threw a vivid light around the picture. I rose to my feet as the painted eyes met mine. The face was full, wearied but still alive with vivacity, as though from some idealistic past. The eyes, though…No, how foolish of me. It was an excitable spell at work from the strains of the last days. The shadowy face was older, the hair whiter, the chin thick, whereas his was gaunt and almost pointed. Yet the eyes! It was as though they had been transplanted from the dark orbs of the Phantom, the man whose image still invaded my mind at regular intervals, telling me not to meddle and having started, almost single-handedly, the quest that had taken me this far. I quickly shook away this unhealthy notion of recognition, yet remained in a bothered state. As I waited longer, I remembered how little faith I had in the use of the present visit, and felt the formal setting of the receiving room to be suffocating. I decided to leave my calling card and return to Glen Eliza.

But upon hearing someone coming, I halted.

Slow steps led down the stairway, and from around its bend Mr. Benson appeared.

I gasped. "The Phantom!"

There he stood. The singular man who so many months earlier had warned me away from the case of Poe. A younger version of the eyes on the wall behind me. The man who had seemed to dissolve himself into smoke and mist as I pursued his shadows through the street. Without thinking about it, without considering what I might do next, my hand plunged into the pocket of my coat and my fingers found the handle of my revolver.

"What's that?" he asked, turning one ear toward me doubtfully. "Fenton, do you say? Benson, sir. John Benson…"

I imagined myself pointing the gun at his mouth. That, after all, was the mouth that provoked me to investigate Poe, that had led to all this, to all these decisions, to the neglect of my friends, to Hattie and Peter's irreversible betrayal of me!

"No, not Fenton." I do not know what perverse urge led me to correct a man into knowing he was my long-sought foe. I clenched my teeth around the word: "Phantom."

He studied me carefully, lifting a finger to his lips in thoughtful contemplation of my reply. "Ah." Then, raising his eyes in the operation of remembering some lines, he recited:

"Mr. Clark, isn't it? This is a surprise."

"Why did you give me that article? Did you want me to find him? What sort of madman-Was this some sort of plan all along?" I demanded.

"Mr. Clark, I confess confusion," answered John Benson. "If I may ask a question in return, what brings you here?"

"You warned me not to meddle in the business of Poe's death. You cannot deny it, sir!"

Benson leaned back with a sad grin. "May I suppose from your manner that you did not listen to me?"

"I demand you explain!"

"Happily. But first…" He extended his hand. Hesitating for a moment at the gesture, I removed my hand from its pocket, yielding the ready grip on the revolver, and watched his hand as though he might throttle me. "Pleased to properly make your acquaintance, Mr. Clark. I'll certainly explain how you came to my personal attention. But tell me something I had been wondering at the very time we first met: what is your interest in Edgar Poe?"

"To protect his name from the vermin and false friends," I replied, looking him over suspiciously for a reaction.

"Then we did indeed have some common interest, Mr. Clark. When we spoke that day near Saratoga Street, I was visiting Baltimore. I live in Virginia, you see. In Richmond I am an officer of the Sons of Temperance. Edgar Poe was visiting Richmond that summer, as you may know, and had met some of our members at the Swan Inn, where he was lodging, including a Mr. Tyler, who invited the writer to tea."

I thought of the clipping from the Raleigh newspaper describing Poe joining the temperance men. We mention the fact, conceiving that it will be gratifying to the friends of temperance to know that a gentleman of Mr. Poe's fine talents and rare attainments has been enlisted in the cause. That was only a month and three days before he'd turn up in distress at Ryan's.

"Mr. Poe took our pledge never to sip the juice again. He stepped up to the desk and attached his signature with unusual firmness. He was the newest son, and one we took pride in among our ‘children.' There were those who were skeptical. I was not among them. I heard that after the vigilance committee secretly followed him for a few days in Richmond, they found him honest to his word. Not long after Mr. Poe's departure from Richmond late the next month, we were shocked to hear of his death at a hospital here, and more shocked to read that it was the result of a spree he commenced on reaching this city. We of the temperance order tried to reach the facts from Richmond, and the consensus had been he was not drinking. But we were too far from the facts to try to change the public opinion.

"Being as I was only a few years younger than Poe, and had met him on occasion and had greatly admired his writing, our council suggested that I travel here to inquire after the circumstances of what happened to him. You see, I was born in Baltimore, and lived here until I was twenty-one, so it was thought I would have the better chance of discovering what had happened than any other of our members. I was determined to make a careful investigation, and bring back the truth about Poe's death to Richmond."

"What did you find, Mr. Benson?"

"First, I spoke to the doctor at the hospital where I heard Poe had died."

"John Moran?"

"Yes-Moran." Benson looked me over, perhaps a bit impressed by my knowledge. "Dr. Moran admitted that he could not say that Poe had been drinking, but that Poe was in such an agitated and insensible state Moran could not prove that he was not."

It was the same comment I had heard Moran say, which made me trust Benson's account more. "When did you make this visit, Mr. Benson?"

"A week after Poe's death, perhaps."

It began to settle upon me that this man, the devious Phantom of months past, had entered the mystery even before I had.

"The newspapers," he sighed. "The way they cut up Poe. Those fictions they were printing! The temperance unions here and in New York were keen on using him up. You have seen the articles, perhaps. As though to defeat a dead man to teach a lesson was a triumph. Well, Mr. Clark, believing that Poe was innocent, and knowing his genius, I felt rather-"

"Enraged," I completed his thought.

He nodded. "I am by habit a man of calm and reserve, but yes: I was enraged. I left word in many quarters that I wished to discover the details of Poe's final days as corroboration that he had held his pledge to the Sons of Temperance. It happened, while doing some researches, that I overheard you one afternoon, in the athenaeum, request the reading room clerk to reserve for you all articles about Poe's death. I presumed you were among those taking pleasure in reading these venomous reports of Poe's supposed demoralization and sin. I asked the clerk your name, and I learned from others that you were a local lawyer, gifted with a bright mind but known to be under the thumb of people more assertive than yourself. And that you had represented some local periodicals before. I suspected, at that point, that you were engaged by the Baltimore temperance press, who wished to portray Poe as a drunkard as a moral lesson against drinking. I imagined that perhaps you had been paid by them to counter my own mission and to disrupt the aim of the Richmond Sons of Temperance. And so, when I observed you on a different day coming toward the athenaeum, I proffered to you a caution not to meddle in it."

"You thought I was part of the ruin of Poe's name?" I asked, astounded.

"It seemed at the time I was the only one who was not, Mr. Clark! Do you know what that feels like? I tried to visit the offices of the editors of some of the city's newspapers. They would not hear of correcting the misleading information they were printing. I compiled a selection of positive extracts and articles on Poe from years past-praising him, praising his writings-and handed these to the editors to try to persuade them that the late Mr. Poe deserved more honor. Some of these articles I left in the care of the athenaeum clerk for you, as well, with the same purpose. I believe this is one of the articles you referred to earlier."

"Do you mean you selected the articles at random?" I asked.

"I suppose," he said, unclear at the source of my utter disbelief.

"They were not intended to cause or provoke any particular action?"

"I hoped the praise included about Poe from less bloodthirsty times would cause more consideration of the value of Poe and his literary productions. Soon after that, I returned to Richmond. Having presently come back to stay here with my Baltimore relatives for a while, I had the occasion to come upon the clerk from the athenaeum, and the clerk excitedly requested my calling card so he could pass it along to you, Mr. Clark."

"When you spoke to me on the street, you said I must not meddle

‘with your lowly lies.'"

"Did I?" He blinked thoughtfully, then developed a trace of a smile.

"It comes from Poe's poem of a woman half in death and half in life, Lenore, ‘that now so lowly lies.'"

"I suppose it does" was Benson's maddening answer.

"Didn't you mean something by this? Some sort of message or cipher? Do not say, Mr. Benson, that this too was only randomly selected?"

"You are a man with a highly nervous character, I see, Mr. Clark." He did not seem inclined to answer my questions beyond this observation, yet he continued. "When you have taken to reading Poe, it is difficult, nay, impossible, to stop his words from affecting you. Indeed, the man or woman who reads Poe too much, I'd suggest, will believe themselves eventually to be in one of his astounding and perplexing creations. When I came to Baltimore, my mind and every thought was engraved with Poe; I could read only words that had passed through his pen. Every sentence I said might be at risk to be his voice, no longer belonging to my own speech or intelligence. I reveled in his dreams and in what I believed was his soul. It is enough to crush a man who is liable to the trap of discovery. The only answer is to cease reading him at all-as at length I have done. I have banished him from memory, though perhaps not entirely successfully."

"But what of your investigation into Poe's death? You were among the first, perhaps the very first, to make any sort of examination-you were in the best position to learn the truth!"

Benson shook his head.

"You must have learned more!" I cried.

He hesitated, then began as though I had asked something different. "I am an accountant, Mr. Clark. I had forgotten this for a moment. I had begun to damage my business interests by remaining here, away from my proper work in Richmond. Imagine, a man who has kept perfect account books since age twenty, losing all sense of his finances. Indeed, the decline was to such a degree that I must now depend on working for part of each year in my uncle's business here in Baltimore, as I am doing at present." It was this uncle of the Benson family who was pictured in the portrait above us showing the strong resemblance to Benson. "Your city is fine in many respects-though far more coachmen drink spirits while they are meant to be in control of their horses."

Seeing my lack of interest in the point, the temperance side of the man became more adamant. "It is an appalling danger to society, Mr. Clark!"

"There is still much more to be done, Benson," I reasoned with him. "In relation to Poe, I mean. You can help us-"

"Us? Are there others involved?"

Duponte? The Baron? I was not confident of an answer. "You can help. We can do this work together, Mr. Benson; we can find the truth you sought following Poe's death."

"I can do nothing more here. And you, a lawyer, Mr. Clark, do you not have quite enough to keep you occupied?"

"I have taken a leave from my situation," I said softly.

"I see," he replied knowingly and with a tone of some satisfaction. "Mr. Clark, the most dangerous temptation in life is to forget to tend to your own business-you must learn to respect yourself enough to preserve your own interests. If pursuing the causes of others-even in charity-prevents your own happiness, you will be left with nothing.

"The populace wishes to see Poe how they wish to see him, martyr or sinner; nothing you do prevents that," he went on. "Perhaps we do not care what happened to Poe. We have imagined Poe dead for our own purposes. In some sense, Poe is still very much living. He will be constantly changed. Even if you were somehow to find the truth, they would only deny it in favor of a newer speculation. We cannot sacrifice ourselves on an altar of Poe's mistakes."

"Surely you have not come to believe those temperance men who fought you? That Poe caused all this by some petty vice?"

"Not at all," said Benson with weak defiance. "But had he been more cautious, had he used his passions to address the claims of the world rather than only those of his high order of intellect, all this might not have had to happen-and the millstone around his neck would never have become ours."

I felt a type of relief after my interview with Benson-relief that someone else had attempted to find the truth behind Poe's death. Benson's undertaking had proven Peter Stuart and Auntie Blum wrong. I had not embarked on the quest of a madman. Here was another; an accountant.

Relief flooded me from another direction, too, regarding the Baron and Duponte. I had stopped just short of betraying my allegiance to Duponte in favor of a criminal, a false showman. For what, a series of narrow coincidences between the Baron and Poe's tales? I had lost Hattie forever and would never find a person in the world who knew me as she did. The law practice that my father's good name helped build was sinking into extinction. My friendship with Peter was no more. At least I'd not made a horrible mistake with Duponte, too. I felt, returning home from Benson's, as if I had just awoken from a deep sleep.

How much trust, how much confidence, how much time I had placed in Duponte and his own confluences with Poe's tales! If he were but more confrontational against the Baron Dupin's activities; if he but provided more reason to think he progressed as well as the Baron Dupin; if only he did not stand idly by while the Baron Dupin spouted his own claims; if he were to take these measures upon himself, I would naturally be able to eject these dangerous revolutions in my thoughts!

I watched Duponte as he sat in my living room. I looked directly at him and questioned him as to his ongoing submission to the Baron Dupin's aggressiveness. I asked him why he stood by as the Baron Dupin all but claimed victory in our contest. I had begun to recount this conversation prematurely at an earlier chapter. You remember. You'll recall I suggested boxing the Baron's ears, to which Duponte noted that it might not assist our cause.

"Just so," said I. "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 reversed. The Baron, I'm afraid for him, has already lost. He has come to the end, as have I."

That is when my other fears suspended themselves. "What do you mean?"

"Poe drank," said Duponte. "But he was not a drinking man. In fact, he was quite the opposite. On average, we can be confident he took less stimulus than any common man on the street."

"Yes?"

"He was not intemperate, but he was intolerant, constitutionally, to spirits, to an extreme degree never witnessed by most ordinary persons."

I sat upright. "How do you know this, Monsieur Duponte?"

"If only people would see, rather than just look. You will no doubt remember one of the few obituaries written by an acquaintance, rather than by a reporter. Therein was a report that, with a single glass of wine, Monsieur Poe's ‘whole nature was reversed.' Many would understand this to mean that Poe was habitually intoxicated, a reckless and constant drunkard. In fact, it is just opposite. The detractors have proved too much in this arena, and therefore prove nothing. It is likely-nay, almost certain-that Poe possessed a rare sensitivity to drink that would almost at an instant change and paralyze him. In a state of mental disarray, and in the company of low fellows, no doubt Poe sometimes followed this with further drinking, especially when in the midst of your aggressive southern conviviality, which requires that one not refuse such offers. But this last fact is irrelevant to us. It was the first drink, almost the first sip, that would send him into an attack of insensibility. Not madness from excessive drinking, but temporary madness from not being able to drink as does the next fellow."

"So, on the day he was discovered at Ryan's, monsieur, you believe he had taken some drink?"

"Perhaps one glass of indulgence. Not as the temperance writers would have it, who look upon human actions for their morality. I shall show you how they operate-indeed how they were operating at the very time that interests us."

Duponte rummaged through one of his incomprehensibly organized piles of newspapers and brought out an issue of the Sun from October 2, 1849, the day before Poe was found.

"Do you know the name John Watchman, Monsieur Clark?"

At first I responded that I knew no one by that name. A vague memory recurred, and I corrected myself. The day I had been chasing after the Phantom-Mr. Benson of the Richmond Sons of Temperance-I had looked for him under the street in one of the city's popular rum-holes. "Yes, I thought this Watchman was the Phantom because of a similar coat. Watchman was pointed out to me by another patron as one dangerously deep in the cups."

"Not surprising. Monsieur Watchman's hopes, his ambitions, for notoriety had been dashed not long before that. Here: a notice that would have interested you little two years ago, but may be of great value now."

Duponte pointed to an article in the October 2 newspaper. The temperance Sunday law had been a prominent issue in that state election, though, as Duponte had surmised, I'd had no particular feeling about it at the time. I had seen examples enough of the effects of drinking to sympathize with the ideas of the temperance cause. But it seemed hard to squeeze together one's energies into a single issue like temperance, to the exclusion of all other moral principles.

The Friends of the Sunday Law, an organization comprising the Baltimore temperance leaders of most consequence, had announced their own candidate for the House of Delegates to support their push for a Sunday law restricting the sale of alcohol: Mr. John Watchman. But Watchman was soon seen drinking at various taverns around town, and on October 2 the Friends withdrew their support of Watchman. Most interesting was the man who spoke in this column for the Friends of the Sunday Law committee: Dr. Joseph Snodgrass!

"This was only one day before Snodgrass would be called to Poe's side at Ryan's!" I said.

"Now you see the state of mind Snodgrass would possess. As a leader of this temperance faction, he had just been personally humiliated by his own candidate. Monsieur Watchman had been weak, no doubt. However, there is little doubt that the Friends of the Sunday Law suspected that Watchman had been purposely tempted by enemies of their political endeavor. Now, I should ask you also to look at the American and Commercial Advertiser from one week earlier to get a better view of Ryan's inn and tavern in the days before Snodgrass and Edgar Poe met there."

The first cutting Duponte pointed out to me spoke of

a large and enthusiastic meeting of the Whigs of the Fourth Ward of the city, held at Ryan's Hotel.

"Then Ryan's was not only a polling station," I said, "it was also a place for Whigs of that ward to gather. And the place," I sighed, "fated to be Poe's last passage outside a hospital bed." I thought of the group of Fourth Ward Whigs Duponte and I had observed at the den above the Vigilant engine house, near Ryan's. That was their private place; Ryan's, it appeared, their room for more public gatherings.

"Let us step backward even further," said Duponte, "looking at several days before…when this meeting by the Fourth Ward Whigs was advertised. Read aloud. And note most of all how it is signed below."

I did.

A Mass Meeting of the Whigs of the Fourth Ward will take place at Ryan's Hotel, Lombard Street, opposite the Vigilant Engine House, on Tuesday. Geo. W. Herring, Pres.

Another extract advertised a meeting for October 1, two days before the election, at 7 1/2 o'clock, again at Ryan's Hotel, across from the Engine House, with Full attendance earnestly requested; this one was also signed Geo. W. Herring, Pres.

"George Herring, president," I read again. I remembered Tindley, the burly doorkeeper, obsequiously answering his superior at the Whig club: Mr. George…Mr. George. "The man we saw, that president, it was his Christian name that was George, not his surname…George Herring. Surely he is a relation to Henry Herring, Poe's cousin by marriage! Henry Herring, who was the very man who came first to Poe's side after Snodgrass and refused to board him in his own home."

"Now you see that whatever Poe drank was a small part only of what transpired in his final days, but still is of importance to us to place all else in order. It helps now that we are able to comprehend the whole sequence of events."

"Monsieur Duponte," I said, putting down the newspaper, "do you mean that you do comprehend the whole now? That we are ready to share it with the world before the Baron Dupin speaks out?"

Duponte rose from his chair and walked to the window. "Soon," he said.

21

IT WAS SURPRISING, considering the Baron's recent frantic activities, how quiet he had become. He was not to be seen; presumably he was preparing for the lecture in two days' time-it was all Baltimore talked about. I took several circuitous walks around the city, trying to discover which hotel he had moved to.

While I was engaged in this way, my shoulder was tapped.

It was one of the men whom I had seen so many times following the Baron Dupin. Another man stood near him in a similar coat.

"Account for yourself," said the first one, with a concealed accent. "Who are you?"

"Why is that your concern?" I replied. "Shall I ask you the same?"

"This is not a time to be bold, monsieur."

Monsieur. They were French, then.

"We have seen you in past weeks. You seem always to be outside his hotel," he said with suspicion, his eyebrows gesturing in that peculiar French manner Duponte sometimes exhibited.

"Yes, well, there is hardly anything extraordinary about that. Does not one visit his friend often?" A man who had in the past kidnapped, deceived, and intimidated me-to call that a friend!

Caught in their silence, I worried about the implications of my hasty statement. My spying on the Baron, it seemed, had made enemies of these enemies of the Baron! I added, "I know nothing of that man's debts or his creditors, and have not the slightest interest in such matters."

The two men exchanged a quick glance.

"Then tell us which hotel he's putting up at now."

"I do not know," I said honestly.

"Do you have any idea, monsieur, the scope of his troubles? They shall become yours if you try to guard him. Do not protect him."

I turned quickly and began walking away.

"We are not finished with you, monsieur," he called out from behind me.

I looked over my shoulder; they were following. I wondered if I ran, whether they would do the same. Testing this, I accelerated my steps.

Crossing Madison Street, I neared the Washington Monument, where a small assembly of visitors was gathered. The massive marble column, twenty feet in diameter, rose up from the base and supported the grand statue of General George Washington at the summit. The pure white marble stood out not just for its massiveness, but as a contrast to the brickwork of the street. It seemed the safest place in Baltimore right now.

Entering the base of the monument, I joined others waiting to begin the passage on the stairwell that ascended in a spiral up the long, hollow column. After I'd climbed the first flight of steps, I paused at one of the curves, illumined by only a small square opening, and watched a few young boys race past me. I smiled to myself, satisfied that the men had let me be or not seen me enter-but just as I expressed this silent delight to myself, I heard the heavy steps of two pairs of boots.

"Il est là!" came a voice.

Without waiting for a glimpse of them, I turned and dashed up the stairs. My only advantage was that I had known the vast interior of the monument from the time I was young. The Frenchmen may have been stronger and quicker, but they were strangers here. Indeed, I imagine they'd compare this narrow flight to the wider compass of their Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Both places had the same reward for the sturdy climber-an unrivaled view of each city at the summit-but honored opposite achievements. The Parisian arch, Napoleon's empire. The marble column, Washington resigning his commission as commander of the army, refusing to use his position to seek the permanent power of a despot.

I suppose none of this occurred to these men, who seemed to prefer thinking of throwing me off the top of the monument. They ran faster even than the group of young boys, who, chasing each other upward, had wearied by the middle of the ascent. The two men finally reached the observation gallery at the top, and walked around the circular platform, pushing past the visitors who stood looking across the Patapsco River to the Chesapeake in the distance. Though the two men inspected the face under the brim of each man's hat, and peered around widely flounced dresses, they did not see their subject anywhere.

But I could see them. I'd already hidden 120 feet below: near where a narrow, unmarked door in the lower portion of the stairs opened onto a lower ledge used by those whose task it was to keep every crevice of the monument clean. It was a passage used also by persons who needed a bit of air on their journey upward. I waited on that ledge to ensure that both men appeared on that gallery platform far above, thus confirming that neither was lying in wait for me below.

Realizing they had been deceived, they now leaned upon the railing and found me standing below them. I smiled and saluted them before rushing back to the door.

My celebration was short. The door back to the stairs would not budge.

"For God's sake!" I kicked at it.

The latch on the inside of the door had somehow fixed itself after I had closed it. I pounded at the heavy door for someone to open it from inside.

Observing my situation from their all-seeing view, one of the men started back to the stairwell, while the other waited and watched me from that omniscient perch. If the first made it down the stairs and to my door, I would certainly be trapped. I craned my neck and watched with faint hope that the band of older ladies emerging above from the stairs would delay his descent long enough for me to arrive at some miraculous plan for my deliverance.

The second man stood guard by leaning over the rail and keeping his eyes fixed on me. After another fruitless attempt to attract attention from the other side of the door, I returned to the railing and looked down below to assess my chances of jumping into the trees. Then I was met with a familiar face from below!

"Bonjour!" I exclaimed.

She looked up at me, then looked to the sky where that blackguard was peering down at me. "Back up toward the door," she said.

"It is bolted from the other side. You must open it for me, mademoiselle!"

"Back up! More…more, monsieur…"

I did as instructed, moving away from the railing. The man above leaned farther over the railing so he could still watch me.

Bonjour took a breath and then shrieked, "He's going to jump!" She pointed with hysterical gestures to the Frenchman, who was now nearly hanging from the railing 180 feet above the ground. The Frenchman's face went pale as screams erupted from the gallery. The gallery-goers, in an effort to aid him, swarmed the man on the rail so forcefully as to almost push him off. Meanwhile, those sightseers rushing up from below to witness the human tragedy now herded the second Frenchman, who had just managed to enter the stairwell for his descent, back onto the gallery platform.

"Mademoiselle, ingenious! Now, if you can open this door!"

Bonjour entered the stairwell, and soon enough I could hear the door to the base unlatch. I gleefully swung the door open to thank my savior, perhaps the one woman left who cared about me.

She stepped through the doorway, the end of a small revolver pointed at me. "Time to come with me, monsieur."

Bonjour did not say another word on the way to the hotel. She untied my hands and legs-which she had bound-upon our arrival at Barnum's Hotel and rushed me through the anteroom without attracting notice. Upon reaching their rooms, where the Baron awaited, she spoke. "He was with them, very hand and glove together," she said to the Baron. "I separated them, but they may have been signaling each other."

"Who?" I asked confusedly. "Those two blackguards? I would never have anything to do with men like that."

"Very cozy, going into that monument together."

"They were accosting me, mademoiselle! You rescued me!"

"I had no such intention, monsieur!" she assured me. "Perhaps Duponte leads them by a leash, too."

The Baron had an agitated manner. "Make yourself scarce, my dear."

Bonjour gave me a pitying glare before leaving us alone.

The Baron held up a glass of sherry cobbler. "The proportion of sherry is decidedly smaller at this hotel than the proportion of water. Still, at least the beds have curtains, a rare enough luxury in America. Do not mind mademoiselle. She believes she depends on me because I saved her, when in fact it is just the opposite. If she were ever to give me the bag, or to be harmed, I would go to pieces. Do not underestimate her arts."

I had noticed on the writing-desk stacks of paper with widely scribbled notes on them.

"There," said the Baron with a proud, mischievous grin, seeing my interest. "There lie all the answers you have been looking for, Brother Quentin, put down in black and white. Of course, I have not perfected my presentation yet, but I will, be sure. But I am afraid"-here he leaned close-"that in the meantime I have the burden of ensuring that nobody troubles me before it is brought into the light of day. Now, who are they, the men Bonjour saw you with? Why are they working with you and Duponte?"

"Baron Dupin," I said with exasperation, "I do not know them, do not wish to, and certainly am not leagued with them in any way."

"You have seen them though, as I have," he said loftily. "They have been watching me. There is death upon their eyes. It is dangerous. You have noticed them, surely, while you yourself have acted the spy on me?"

I opened my mouth to speak but was caught off guard.

"I know," he said, taking my silence as an admission. "Since I heard Bonjour happened upon you at the wharves, watching her quite closely. I hardly think that would be your usual place of leisure, among the drunkards and the slave-traders. Or perhaps"-he broke into laughter-"you will surprise me yet, Quentin Clark."

"Then why not stop me, if you knew?"

He swirled his drink. "Isn't it quite obvious to you? Haven't you learned from your master? It was a desperate measure-Duponte knew he was losing, so he sent you out. The very fact made it clear that I need not defend myself against him. Besides, seeing what you were trying to spy on permitted me to know what Duponte was most interested in-to be a spy is always to be spied upon, monsieur."

"If you are all-knowing, Baron, I would guess you have already discovered who those two Frenchman are and who sent them."

He paused, his agitation stirred. "They are French, then?"

"From their accents, their words, yes. You could coax them to your purposes perhaps, as you did with Dr. Snodgrass." I wanted to regain some balance in the interview, and make it clear I was not without my own sources of knowledge.

"If they serve certain powerful factions against me for my pecuniary interests back in Paris, I am afraid it is not so simple."

He spoke in that open tone of his, as though you were firmly on his side of affairs, which made you temporarily forget you were anything but. He had to push aside strands of his hair from his eyes; his hair now looked thin and soapy.

"You see, Brother Quentin, how a man can be pushed to live behind masks. Never able to freely be myself. And I am quite good as myself, yes, monsieur. Thundering good! In the courtroom, all eyes, even those of the lawyers opposing me, would look to me for the truth. I am happy there. I am not ready to hang up my fiddle, not yet."

"Yet you carry on your cheap charade to bully us," I protested. "You mimic Auguste Duponte."

I noticed a painting of Duponte leaning in the corner of the room. I had seen Von Dantker's work at various stages of progress, and recognized this canvas as his. I could not help remarking on how complete the finished portrait seemed-as though it had completed Duponte himself. It captured his exact likeness but also more than his likeness.

The Baron laughed good-naturedly. "Has Duponte appreciated the humor of it, Brother Quentin? My small jest among serious business, that is all. Duponte does not know about wearing masks. He believes that if he does not, he will be attached to reality. In fact, without any masks, he is-we are-nothing."

I thought about that singular pointed grin that Duponte had innovated for his sittings with Von Dantker, which could be seen creeping onto his face in the portrait. A smile that was not really his…Perhaps Duponte did know about wearing masks, after all? I grabbed hold of the portrait and placed it under my arm.

"I shall take this, Baron; it is not your property."

He shrugged.

I continued, perhaps hoping to induce a bigger reaction, "You know-you must know-that Duponte shall resolve this. He is the real basis for Dupin."

"Do you believe that is important to him?"

I cocked my head with interest. It was not the reply I'd expected.

"Has Duponte told you how he and I came to know each other?" The Baron looked at me with a serious air. "Of course the answer is no," the Baron went on, shaking his head knowingly. "No, he too much lives inside himself. Duponte needs to feel people are interested in him, but finds the act of speaking of himself too tiring. We were both in Paris. There was a lady named Catherine Gautier accused of murder, a woman most important to your friend."

I called to mind the policeman at the café in Paris who said changes had come over Duponte when the woman he loved was hanged for murder and he could not stop it. "Duponte loved her, didn't he?"

"That is nothing! I loved her too. Oh, do not look at me so, like we are in some light novel; I do not mean what you think. No, Duponte and I were not rivals for her affection. But she was attractive enough, and brilliant enough, for any man who knew her to love her. You ask, how could we live in a world where such a woman could be accused of bludgeoning her own sister to death? The idea is absurd."

Catherine Gautier, the Baron said, was of the poorer class, but virtuous and known as very intelligent. She was Duponte's closest and (some said) only companion. One day, this woman's sister was found murdered in a vile fashion, and Duponte's lover was suspected at once. Because the police were Duponte's enemies after he had embarrassed them by solving crimes they could not, many believed that the accusation represented their reprisal against Duponte by turning against Catherine.

"She was innocent then?"

"Innocent enough" came the Baron's peculiar answer after a pause.

"So you were acquainted with her?"

"Dear friend, has he really never said anything about it? Your companion for so many long months now. Yes, I knew her." He laughed. "I was her lawyer, dear man! I defended her against that terrific charge of murder."

"You?" I asked. "But she was executed. You never lost a case."

"Yes, that is true. I suppose that record was somewhat knotted up by Mademoiselle Gautier."

I looked down, thinking of Duponte's failure. "Duponte failed to free her. He will return to his glory, though," I asserted, using the Baron's favorite term, "now, with Poe."

"Failed to free her!" the Baron laughed. "Failed to free her?"

His taunting angered me. I knew Duponte had tried examining the affair himself when Mademoiselle Gautier was arrested, but had given up in despair. I repeated this history to the Baron.

"He tried to examine, is that what you have been told? Why, monsieur, Brother Duponte did examine the matter. He never gave up. He was as successful as always."

"Successful? How? Do you mean she was not executed after all?"

"I remember vividly," the Baron began, "my first visit to the apartments of Auguste Duponte in Paris."

The Baron Dupin found a place for his hat and stick himself, since Duponte did not offer. The Baron wished for better light. The lawyer found brightness an advantage when demonstrating through the eager motions of the hands and large expressions of the face why cooperation should be offered to him. He did not relish relying on any ordinary routine of persuasion with Auguste Duponte, of course-but circumstances were dire. His career was at a treacherous crossroad. Also, a woman's life was at stake.

The Baron had never been to see Duponte before. He had, like all informed persons in Paris, and like all the criminal-minded, known of Auguste Duponte. The Baron had devised one strict rule as an advocate. He would not accept the case of an accused criminal who had been arrested through the ratiocination of Duponte. The reason for this was not the obvious one: that the Baron presumed a person accused by Duponte automatically guilty. Instead, it was that Duponte's reputation was too strong in that day-once it was known by a judge that Duponte had brought down the charges, it would be almost impossible to obtain an acquittal.

Now the Baron saw an opportunity. He could use Duponte's blind affection for Catherine Gautier to win his most important case. The Baron convinced himself that each case was the most important, but this one was special-it was a case that seemed to every other lawyer quite impossible. That made him all the more determined.

"We are mounting a steady defense," the Baron told Duponte. "We aim to give mademoiselle her liberty," he said in a brave tone. "Your assistance, Monsieur Duponte, would be most valuable-most critical, in fact. You will be the hero in absolving her." The Baron did not actually believe this, for he knew he would be the hero.

Duponte was fixed in an armchair by the unlit hearth. "My assistance will confirm that she is doomed," he answered almost absently.

"It need not be so, Monsieur Duponte," the Baron said excitedly. "You are reputed to see what others cannot. If others see only her guilt, you can use your talents, your genius, to see her innocence. The Holy Bible says we are all guilty, monsieur, but does it not follow that we are also all innocent?"

"I had not heard you were a religious scholar, Monsieur Dupin."

"It is ‘Baron,' if you please."

Duponte stared at him unblinkingly.

The Baron cleared his throat. "I bring a choice, monsieur, that surely will appeal to your wisdom. You can employ your genius to rescue a person you love, a person who has loved you, from a fate of the blackest die. Or you can sit idly here in your luxurious rooms, and let yourself perish forever in solitude. It is jackassable-I mean, any ass could see what to decide. Which will be your destiny?"

The Baron was not usually inclined to argue in profound terms, but he was not above it. Mademoiselle Gautier had salvaged her life after being a mistress to a wealthy Parisian student who had tossed her aside. In her circumstance, most girls fell into prostitution, but Catherine Gautier had managed to avoid that. Not so for her sister, however, despite Catherine's pleas. Her sister's ruin would be hers as well, for they shared not just a surname but also appearances similar enough to be confused on the street by acquaintances, shopkeepers, and policemen. This was ample motive for Catherine to eliminate this stain on her own identity. Still, the Baron had learned much that suggested the accused was quite unlikely to act in any foul deed, and had found the names of many villains that the sister had consorted with in her new profession who could quite easily be shown culpable with the most minor evidence.

"If I do examine the affair of her sister's death," Duponte began, and the Baron thrilled at those words, "if I do so, I would not wish others to know of my involvement."

The Baron promised not to talk to the press about Duponte's assistance.

Duponte did investigate the Gautier sister's death, as promised. He promptly discovered, with no trace of a doubt, the chronicle of events that led to the murder. His conclusions pointed indisputably at his lover, Catherine Gautier, as the perpetrator. He passed on his information to the prefect, producing a witness undetected by the police and ruining all of Baron Dupin's chances to win by other means. This turn made the Baron more desperate. He was too proud to accept defeat gracefully. He expended many favors, and many thousand francs beyond what was already a deepening debt, to manipulate the case. But it was to no effect. Duponte's evidence was too strong to be tarnished. The Baron was now ruined in his finances and reputation.

Meanwhile, Officer Delacourt, ambitious to advance in the prefecture, assured Duponte and Gautier that with the new evidence, which painted the young woman as confused and deluded but by no means demonic, and taking into account her sex, there would be leniency in her sentencing. And yet, a few months later she was executed, with Dupin and Duponte, along with three-quarters of Paris, attending.

"First of all," I said, "it was Duponte more than you who suffered in this matter. Not only did it sap him of an ability to pursue the work of his genius, he also lost the one woman he loved-at his own hands! You shall not avenge yourself for your disgrace by plaguing Duponte now. You cannot use Poe's death for that purpose. I shall not stand by!"

The Baron retorted, "Recollect that fine legal axiom super subjectum materiam: no man can be held professionally responsible for opinions which have been founded on the facts submitted to him by others." The Baron stood over my chair. "I didn't start this, monsieur. You did. You prompted me to look into Poe's fall. You stand in your own light, do you realize it? Feel your oats, Brother Quentin! You made me see that I could renew myself. My name was crushed by detractors and defamers because the shadow of my genius grew too large and refused to conform to their small lives, so the eyes upon us make every small peccadillo into a mortal sin to stop me-why, it is like our dear Poe."

"Will you compare yourself to Poe?" I asked, openly aghast.

"I do not have to, because Brother Poe has already. Why do you think he chose the character of Dupin as his finest hero? He saw in the genius of the decipherer his own divine abilities to understand what gods and men could never fathom. And with what credit? The prefect of the police, not the hero Dupin, receives the praise of all parties. Even as other writers half as good as Poe found themselves winning gold from the magazines, Poe struggled one last time to overcome adversity, struggled until the end, until finally cut-from existence."

"Do you truly believe, monsieur, that you are worthy as the model for Dupin?"

"You did, before having the misfortune to find Duponte, seduced by talents that he uses only for his own interests. Duponte is an anarchist. Have you ever, since meeting him, had any doubts that…perhaps…" He stretched out the words. "Perhaps you know there was another reason I gave you leave to act the spy on us, my friend. So you might see first-hand, Brother Quentin, that you passed something up in Paris, at the fortifications, when you chose him over me."

I wondered if he knew-if the Baron had had someone observing me when I had come to what I thought was his hotel that night. That free black standing under the lamp? "Duponte is the one. You cannot hold a candle to him," I said. I could not let him have the mental victory of knowing how close I had come to giving up hope in Duponte only a few days earlier. I think my expression might have been transparent, though.

"Well," he said, smiling a little, "only Edgar A. Poe could answer who the original Dupin is, and he is gone. How does one solve something when the solution is unreachable? The real Dupin is whoever convinces the world of it; he shall be the remaining one."

22

I FOUND MYSELF fearing Duponte for the first time. Wondering if-indeed-his talents, when released unrestrained and unharnessed, could turn disastrous, as they had against Mademoiselle Gautier. I could not help calling to mind the finale of "The Gold-Bug," Poe's rousing tale of a hunt for treasure-it had always seemed to me, rumbling beneath the surface, that in the triumphant ending there was the clue that Legrand, the master thinker, was about to murder his servant and his friend now that their mission was achieved. The last ominous words of that story-"Who shall tell?"-reverberated in my head.

I called to mind one peculiar evening during my stay in Paris. I was walking behind Auguste Duponte into an area of the city Madame Fouché had warned was not safe at night. Your cries, Madame Fouché had said, would bring no police, who are often in league with the bad people. I remember I was stopped by an object inside a store window that seemed to shift as though on its own power. There was a circle of artificial jaws representing every state of the human mouth: one with bright gums and spotless milky teeth, another with decayed and wilting gums, and so on. Each rotated and opened and shut at different speeds through some unseen mechanical ingenuity. Above the jaws were revolving wax heads showing a toothless, collapsed face and then one boasting a fresh and sturdy mouth with shining teeth, presumably repaired by a dentist with his office behind this window.

Before I could pull myself away from the mesmerizing sight, I felt a tightness around my ears. Everything went black. My hat had been thrust down over my eyes to blind me, and I could feel hands burrowing into my coat from behind. As I cried out for help, I managed to knock the narrow portion of my hat up from my eyes. I saw an old woman with a threadbare dress of rags and blackened teeth. After having tried to blind me with my hat to rob me, she had stepped back and now only stood staring. I followed her gaze to Duponte, standing a few feet from the attacker. Once she had run off, I turned gratefully to Duponte. What had so frightened her away? If he knew, he never shared it with me.

I now considered that the wretched being must have recognized Duponte from a former era. A criminal enterprise that Duponte must have spoiled-perhaps she had once been part of some grand assassination plan (for it was said of Duponte that in his time he had uncovered more than one plan to kill the head of France) and, in consequence of his acumen long ago, was in the interim reduced to animal desperation. It was no physical fear of Duponte that had prompted her flight from me. She could have thrust a blade through my heart ten times before Duponte stopped her (if stopping her was his intention). It was not fear of his strength or agility. It was raw, impulsive fear of his pure intellect-a fear of his genius.

Who shall tell?

After leaving the Baron's hotel, I found Duponte sitting by the large window in the drawing room of Glen Eliza, intently facing the door. I began to tell him all that had occurred at Barnum's Hotel.

"Take this," Duponte interrupted, holding up a leather bag. "Bring it to the address on this paper." He handed me a slip of paper.

"Monsieur, have you not listened to the intelligence I bring? Baron Dupin-"

"You must go out at once, Monsieur Clark," he said. "It is time."

I looked down at the address and did not recognize it. "Very well… What should I say once I arrive?"

"You shall know."

Such was the extent of my distraction that I did not notice that it was three times as dark as it should have been for that hour. By the time it was starting to rain I was already too far on my walk to return for an umbrella. The water grew deeper along the way until it was lapping at my ankles. I trudged ahead, the brim of my hat sheltering my face as much as possible.

I took an omnibus part of the way to the address Duponte had written down. Still, I was drenched walking through the downpour. The address was a small office where a man behind a desk dispatched telegraph messages. "Sir?" he turned to me.

Not knowing what to say, I merely asked whether this was the address I sought.

"Downstairs," he said blandly.

I walked down the steps, to the next sign, which was dripping with streams of water. It was a clothier. Well! This was the urgent mission, perhaps to hand over a coat that needed mending for Duponte-perhaps he had some supper party to attend. I walked in, overcome by my impatience.

"Ah, you've come to the right place."

It was a man with a large belly stuffed into a bright satin vest.

"Me? Are we acquainted, sir?"

"No, sir."

"Then how do you know I'm at the right place?"

"Look at you!" He put his arms out dramatically, as though I was the prodigal son returning to him. "Wet to the bone. You shall have a chill and fall sick. Now, I have just the suit." He rummaged behind his desk. "You have found the right place to trade your clothes."

"You are mistaken. I have brought something for you."

"Truly? I am not expecting it," he said greedily.

I put the bag down on a chair and opened it, finding only a folded newspaper-a number of the Baltimore Sun. Drops of water blotted the page from my hair and brow.

He snatched it from me while his friendly face sharpened. "Blame me! I daresay I can purchase my own newspaper, young man. This isn't even from this year. Do you come here to jest? What shall I do with this, I ask you?" He glared at me reprovingly. I had dropped from "sir" to "young man." "If you have no business for me tonight…" He waved his hand.

At the word "business" he pointed to one of the signs on his wall to demonstrate his own. Fashionable Clothing and Outfitting Establishment. Shirts, Collars, Under-shirts and Drawers, Cravats, Socks, Hosiery-Warranted in every respect equal to the best custom work.

"Hold on a minute! Apologies, sir," I said eagerly. "I should like very much to make that exchange of clothing, after all."

He brightened. "Excellent, excellent, a wise choice. We shall put you in a suit of finest quality and fit."

"That is what you do, sir? Trade clothing?"

"When there is the need, of course. It is a necessary service for stranded gentlemen like yourself, dear sir. So many forget umbrellas even in the fall and bring but one suit in their trunk. Especially strangers to Baltimore. You are a visitor, I suppose?"

I made a noncommittal gesture. I began to better understand the work of this man; and of Duponte…

The clothier brought me a handful of garments-what a costume it was! He repeated his assessment that they were of the finest quality, though they were quite shabby, and they did not fit in the least. The coat and its drab velvet collar almost matched one leg of the pants-the less faded one-and neither were intended to match the vest. All were several sizes too small for me, yet the clothier had an expression of deep pride as he declared me very "finefied" and held up a looking-glass so I might glory in the sight of myself.

"There, snug and dry! It is quite a fair shake for you, this trade," he said. "Now this"-he picked up my cane-"this is as fair a specimen as I have seen. Heavy thing, though, for a pilgrim like yourself. A burden. Looking to part with it? I may pay well for this, and my prices are not cut under by anyone in the neighborhood."

I almost forgot, before leaving his store, the newspaper Duponte had sent with me. I looked at the date at the top of the page. October 4, 1849. The day after Poe was discovered with ill-fitting clothes at Ryan's. I scanned the pages, stopping at the reports of the previous day's weather. The day, I mean, when Poe was found. "Cold, raw, and misty." "Damp and rainy." "A steady, heavy blow from the northeast."

Just like today. When I'd entered the library, Duponte had been waiting at the window, looking not absently into the air, as it seemed, but into the sky and clouds. He was waiting for a day fitting the description of that fateful third of October to send me into.

"I'll take that, sir," I said politely, removing the Malacca cane from his grasp. "This I shall never part with." Before leaving, I fished out some half-dimes and took an umbrella the clothier had sitting behind his table.

Outside, I found my steps were uneven, with my legs constrained by the irregular pants. I stood under the awning while testing the flimsy umbrella.

"The heavens are splitting tonight."

I jumped, startled by the coarse voice. In the dark covering of rain I could hardly make out the figure of a man.

I screwed up my eyes as he turned and faced me. Another shape appeared near him.

"You would try to hide from us, would you, Monsieur Clark?"

The two French thugs.

"Clothes like this," said the other one, bowing his head down at my scrubby dress, "will still not conceal you."

"Gentlemen-monsieurs-I know not what to call you. I do not wear this to conceal myself from you. I know not why you should continue to bother me."

It was not the time for this, I know. But my eye, which somehow felt free of the concerns of my brain, was drawn inexplicably to a flyer on the lamppost, which was flapping from the pressure in the air. I could not read it, but I suppose by some instinct I knew it contained something of great interest.

"Look here when we speak!"

The man slapped me against my cheek. It was not particularly hard, but the extreme abruptness left me standing in shock.

"You cannot long protect a man marked for death. We have been handed our orders."

His partner pulled a pistol from his coat. "You're in for it now. You should select a friend more carefully."

"My friend? It is untrue!"

"Then his wench assisted you for her mere pleasure at the Washington Monument?" he replied.

"I vow it! He is no friend!" I shouted, my voice trembling at the sight of the weapon.

"No…not any longer."

23

"SIR! SIR! YOU FORGOT-"

The clothier had come out with the bag I had left inside. He stopped when he saw my company in their unfriendly postures. One of them had wrapped his arm around mine.

The clothier gesticulated angrily at my assailant. "What is this about?

Let that suit be!"

When the clothier took a step forward, the other assailant turned around and slapped the clothier across the face with more force than a punch. It sent him spinning down hard beyond the awning.

As the clothier met the ground, he let out a high-pitched, cat-like groan. Making use of the distraction, I pulled my arm free. I flung my new umbrella behind me and ran against a sheet of rain that felt like a brick wall against my body. The two assailants bolted after me.

I swerved onto the first street, hoping the darkness of the storm would cloak me. But the pair of men trimmed the distance almost at once. My head twisted around to watch them, and I tripped over some uneven ground. Though I caught myself, they were now dangerously close, one of them brushing my coat with his hand. I dared not look back again.

Ahead a party of pigs was devouring the evening's garbage. Our chase disturbed them, sending them scattering. A flash of light hit the sky and illuminated all of us. I found myself panting and sucking at the air for breath. They were coming nearer to my heels, and I would certainly be tackled within a few rods. I noticed the street we were coming to and heard faint bells. This gave me an idea. I quickly turned around and ran toward my pursuers. The Frenchmen, running fast as they were, took a moment to halt themselves on the slippery ground.

In Europe, I knew, the railways began on the periphery of the city, and

I had met in my life many visitors from other countries surprised that our trains began right in the center of town-first drawn by a span of the strongest horses and then latched onto an engine. When the men started back toward me, I led them right past the sign: LOOK OUT FOR THE LOCOMOTIVE. The two Frenchmen, perplexed at it, did just that, looking everywhere they could think.

I ran like mad. Finally I slowed down, surveying the trail behind me. Not a soul. The rain was a bit lighter, too. I came to a stop. I was safe.

Then there came the pair of them, side by side, like devils appearing from the great Abyss.

Just when I fell into a terrible despair, another figure appeared in front of me. As he came closer, I was shocked to realize it was the older black man I had previously seen with the Baron and eyeing me watchfully on the streets. Indeed, since the Baron's young slave had insisted the Baron had no other blacks in his employment, I had come to consider that this man might be in collusion with the French rogues. And here he was running toward me!

I had nowhere to turn without making myself vulnerable either to the two men behind or the one in front of me. I decided my chances were better against one man and plunged myself toward him. As I attempted to pass, he grabbed my arm and pulled me.

"This way!" he said against my struggling.

I allowed myself to be led onto a darker, narrower avenue; we were now running side by side. He moved his hand to my back, helping me to keep up.

The men still followed us. My companion suddenly began crossing back and forth in front of me as we ran.

"Do the same!" he shouted.

Understanding his scheme, I followed his example. In the rain and darkness, the two rogues would not be able to see who was who.

He now darted away from me, and after a moment's hesitation and confusion, one of the rogues followed him. The other stayed on my trail with renewed vigor. At least the number of hands that could strangle me at any moment had been cut by half. I hadn't even time to think why that stranger whom I thought an adversary had assisted me against these killers.

A window of advantage had opened, but I had to act quickly. I looked back and saw the rogue stop in mid-run and raise his pistol. The discharge broke like thunder. The bullet went right through my hat, which flew off. The rage in his eyes and his loud, seething grunts frightened me more than the pistol. My Malacca cane repeatedly slipped in my hand from its coat of water and almost fell, but I would not let it drop.

The rain lessening, all the earth turned muddy. I slipped and slid through the streets while the solitary pursuer followed. I tried to cry for help, but my power of speech died in the back of my throat, and although both of us had been hobbled by our rough paths, if I stopped I would be at great risk. Besides, in my wet and disheveled clothes, with my head bare, I looked like a wild vagrant-the very fear of the city residents. Nobody would come to aid me this time. Searching for sanctuary in the business part of the city, I spied the door to a large warehouse that had been blown open by the wind. I rushed inside and located a stairwell.

Bursting onto the upper floor, I bumped into a single wheel, freshly painted, that stood nearly up to my neck. I realized where I was.

Wheels, chaises, straps, and axles were all around me: I had come upon Curlett's carriage factory on Holliday. On the first floor, there was a room where the latest carriages were shown and sold. Along with the piano works a few blocks away, the building represented a new idea: to manufacture, warehouse, and sell all in the same location.

"Your flint is fixed, brave fellow," said a voice, now speaking in French. The rogue appeared at the door. A smirk emerged through a wheezing pant, and he peered over at me savagely. "There is nowhere else to run. Unless you want to jump out the window."

"I want no such thing. I wish to speak like civilized men. I care nothing of preventing you from collecting your debts from the Baron."

He stepped closer and I backed away. He looked at me inquisitively. "Is that what you believe, monsieur?" He snickered very unpleasantly. "Do you think we're here to dun some dead-head for a few thousand francs?" he asked with offense. "There is far more. There is the very future peace of France at stake."

The Baron Dupin? A disgraced lawyer? Affecting the future of France?

My face betrayed my utter bafflement, and he looked over at me with angry impatience.

With an abrupt swipe, I grabbed the gigantic wheel next to me and pushed it with all my remaining strength. He put out his hand and boot to stop it, and it toppled on its side, limp and harmless.

I dashed farther into the room but knew he had been right-there was nowhere to go. Even if I had not been dead tired and soaking wet, the warehouse was just one gigantic space littered with carriage parts. I tried to leap over the half-completed chaise of a carriage, but it snagged my boot and I went tumbling down, to the echoing of brutal laughter.

I had not, in tumbling, fallen to the floor-it was much worse than that. I'd become tangled in a rope around the back of the carriage tying together certain components that were not yet fixed to the vehicle. As I pulled and kicked through the rope, I found my neck entangled inside a narrow loop. I held my cane in one hand, using its tip to cling to the back of the carriage, and tried desperately to loosen the snarled confusion of knots around the area of the rope pressing my neck. Still, it pulled tighter with my every movement.

The man's unhurried steps came closer. He entered the coach, which as yet had no roof. Standing above me smiling, with a sudden and bold motion he kicked my cane away from the coach. Though I still had a grip on one end, the other end, which I'd been using to cling to the carriage, was displaced, and now I found myself dangling. Each time I tried to grasp the back of the carriage, with cane or hand, my pursuer joyfully kicked harder. Feeling the knots of this horrid lasso tighten fatally around my throat, I propped the hook of the cane into the widest spot between the rope and my neck. Meanwhile, I flailed with my feet; but the few inches between the bottom extremity of my body and the floor simply could not be reduced.

To be hanged to death, by a carriage! I could almost share my murderer's ghastly smile at my fate.

As I hung suspended there, I gripped my cane tightly with both hands in a sort of hapless, hopeless prayer. I held it so tightly that the pores in the wood would later leave a white trail on my moist palms. Squeezing my eyes shut, I was surprised to suddenly feel the cane giving way, as though in my hands were the strength of four men. The middle section had jerked out of its place. The cane, as I quickly appraised, was actually made as two separate parts, joined together in the middle. In the gap I could see the gleam of shiny steel.

I pulled harder and found that the entire top half of the cane was a sheaf, slipping right off. There, hidden underneath, was a sword. A sword two, no, a full two and a half feet long when unsheathed!

"Poe," I whispered, with what might have been my last breath.

At once I sliced the bond off my neck, swinging as I was freed onto the back of the carriage, which I grabbed with my free hand.

The first thing I saw when I looked up was the Frenchman perched on the top of the carriage chaise, peering curiously. In his confusion at the sight of my weapon, he had let his pistol dangle at his side. With a powerful yell, I swung the sword above me. It caught the side of his arm. Then, my eyes closed, I pulled the sword back and plunged the weapon forward again. He released a shrill scream.

I fell to the ground, landing on my back. My boots were propped against the back of the chaise. The rogue, wild and pale, hollering terribly from his wound, widened his eyes as I pushed hard with both legs. The half carriage went rolling across the room and, one of its loose wheels slipping off its axle, spilled over on top of him like a giant tomb. A piece of the carriage severed one of the nearby pipes, sending a burst of steam sizzling into the chaos.

I pushed myself to my feet and returned the sword into its sheath. But the violent thrill of the triumph could not lift me home or sustain me; my exhaustion and my aching leg combined to inhibit me from moving hardly ten feet from the building before falling down. I leaned heavily on the cane that had saved my life, worried that one of the rogues I had escaped would find me in this weakened condition.

There was a rattling at the door of the warehouse, which I had just closed a few moments before, and a frightful moan.

" Clark!" I heard my name shouted from within my daze. It sounded like it was coming from a great distance, but I knew it was near.

Perhaps it was terrible fear, or the throbbing in my body, or the utter fatigue coming over me; perhaps it was from a combination of everything. As a hand reached me, I surrendered almost peacefully, feeling a heavy blow strike the side of my head.

24

NOISES OF INFORMAL conversation merged into one faraway hum. The scene grew clearer in my vision. Men drank wine and beer, and the smell of chewed tobacco filled my nostrils with an unpleasant sting. Trying to sit straight, I felt myself restrained around the neck. The room seemed identical to the tavern in Ryan's hotel, as it might have looked the afternoon Poe had arrived there. I thought about the unfriendly stares of the Whigs of the Fourth Ward across the street from Ryan's, and sat straight up despite a wave of dizziness.

As a small group of men walked past some candles, I saw they were all colored-indeed, the groggery was populated with black men and a few brightly clothed young women, and I now could see that the windows were in a different arrangement than at Ryan's. The easy intermingling of the sexes called to my mind Paris more than it did Baltimore. Around my shoulders, which had felt as though they were in some sort of immovable straitjacket, was actually a stack of heavy, warm blankets.

"Mr. Clark. You look better."

I turned and saw the black man who had diverted one of the rogues during the chase.

"Who are you?"

"My name is Edwin Hawkins."

My temples throbbed. "Was it one of them who hit me?" I asked, stroking the side of my head.

"No, you weren't hit just now, but it probably felt like you were. As you ran from the carriage warehouse, you keeled right over before you made it more than a few yards. You hit the side of your head on the pavement before I could catch you. I brought you here so they wouldn't find you. The one chasing me had given up after we passed under a streetlamp and he could see he was after the wrong man, but I'd wager he could still be searching."

"Did I kill that man in the warehouse?" I asked, remembering the events with chilling horror.

"He came out looking for you, and he fell down too. He looked cut pretty bad. I sent word for a doctor to treat him-you don't want murder on your head."

I looked around the room guardedly. The grogshop was in the rear of a black grocery. It was the sort of place, in Old Town localities like Liberty Alley, that the press often complained should be prohibited for its evil influences on the poorer classes and its instigation of riotous conduct. Two light-skinned black men were conferring confidentially in the corner, one occasionally throwing a glance in my direction. I looked on my other side. I did not wonder when I saw more suspicious gazes. I was not the only white man here, as there were several whites of the poorer classes sharing tables with black laborers. But it was quite obvious I was in some sort of trouble.

"You are safe, Mr. Clark," Edwin said with remarkable tranquillity. "You need to be out of the rain for a while."

"Why did you put yourself at risk for me? You do not even know me."

"You're right, Mr. Clark. But I did not do this for you. I did it for someone I did know," he replied. "I did this for Edgar Poe."

I looked over the hard angles and handsome features of the face before me. He was perhaps a few years past forty and had enough lines in his face to be older, but there was a younger, or at least more restless, gleam hidden in his eye. "You knew Edgar Poe?"

"Before I was freed, yes."

"You were a slave?"

"I was." He studied me and nodded thoughtfully. "Mr. Poe's slave."

More than twenty years earlier, Edwin Hawkins had been a house slave for a relative of Maria Clemm's. Mrs. Clemm, called Muddy, was Edgar Poe's aunt and later, when Poe married her young daughter Sissy, would become his mother-in-law. Upon the death of Edwin's owner, the slave's deed and title had fallen to Muddy, then a resident of Baltimore.

Around the same time, Edgar Poe had recently withdrawn from his position as sergeant major in the army at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, certain now that he would be a poet after having completed an epic lyric, "Al Aaraaf," from his army barracks. The struggle to secure his military discharge had been long and frustrating, as Edgar Poe had needed consent from two equally strict parties: John Allan, his guardian, and his military superiors. Having finally accomplished this, Poe was now residing temporarily with Aunt Muddy and their extended Baltimore family. Eddie, as he was called by most people then, had enlisted in the army as Edgar A. Perry (the young slave had overheard Poe tell Muddy to watch for mail addressed to that name), initially having hoped to end all ties with Mr. Allan, who refused to support Poe's desire to publish his poetry.

Now, though freed from Allan's demands and from his army service, Edgar Poe had no money and no help to earn his place in the world.

Muddy, a tall, nurturing woman of forty, opened her home to Eddie Poe as though he were her son. He seemed to Edwin the style of man who liked exclusively to be around women. Overwhelmed with family illnesses in the household, Muddy asked her nephew to take the newly inherited slave and act as her agent in Edwin's sale. Soon Poe made an arrangement to sell Edwin to the family of Henry Ridgeway-a black family-for forty dollars.

I expressed my interest in the details of this arrangement. For a strong young male slave, Poe might have received five or six hundred, possibly more.

Edwin explained: "Our legislature tries hampering the freeing of slaves by making the process costly, so they don't look like they're disturbing our domestic economy. Mr. Poe and his aunt did not have that sort of money. But there is no law to prevent a free black family from purchasing a slave, and no law requiring a minimum sale price. Selling a slave cheap, maybe for the price of the lawyer's fee, to a free black owner was another way to free a slave-a way to free me, as Mr. Poe did in this arrangement. It also meant I could stay in Baltimore: not a perfect city, but my home. There are men among my people who own their wives and children as slaves, for the same reason."

"Poe did not write much about the slavery question," I said. "He was not a writer for any abolitionist causes." In fact, it had always seemed to me that Poe had never liked causes at all, automatically believing them hypocritical. "Yet he did this in your situation, forgoing hundreds of dollars, at a time when he was entirely poor and without support."

Edwin replied, "It is not a question of what a man writes. Especially a man who writes to earn his dollar, as Poe was beginning to do then. It is a question of what a man does that says who he is. I was only twenty years old. Mr. Poe was twenty, also, only a few months older. Whatever he thought on slavery, he was quiet about it in the little time I was acquainted with him. He was quiet altogether, actually. He was a man with few associates, and if he had associates, they were not friends. He saw something of himself in me, and he decided right there that he would free me if he could.

"I never saw Mr. Poe again, but I'll never forget what he did. I loved him for it and love him still, even though I knew him a short time. I began employment for several of the local newspaper offices when I was freed. Now I assist in wrapping the papers to be delivered to various points around the city. It was in one of those offices that I overheard your complaints to the editors, around the time Poe died, that Poe had been used up by the press, and that even his grave was unmarked. I had not known where he was buried until then. After finishing work that day, I walked there and left a token at the place you described."

"The flower? Was that you who left it?"

He nodded. "I remember Eddie was always neatly dressed, and sometimes wore a white flower like that one in his button-hole."

"But where did you run to once you left the flower?"

"It is not a Negro cemetery, you know, and it would attract suspicions to loaf there in the evening. While I knelt at the grave I heard a carriage coming fast and made haste exiting."

"That was Peter Stuart, my law partner, out looking to see where I was."

"Every day after that as I readied the newspapers for delivery, I saw another ungentlemanly article about Poe's character-having long ago been taught to read by the Ridgeways and their Webster's spelling-book, I could decipher all of this unkindness. The living like to prove they're better than the dead, seems to me. Much time had passed when another fellow, a foreigner, began coming around to the newspaper offices, filled with blusteration about Poe. He claimed he wanted justice for Poe, but to my eye he wanted to spread base excitement."

"That is Baron Dupin," I explained.

"I talked to this man, more than once, asking that he should respect Poe's memory. But there is a saying he reminded me of: all sham-skin and no possum. He merely dismissed me, or tried to persuade me there was cash to be made for helping him." I remembered the day I'd seen the Baron with his arm snaked around Edwin's and thought they were conspiring.

"It was around this time that I saw you again, Mr. Clark. I saw you and this Baron, as you call him, arguing over Poe. I decided to learn more about you, and I followed you. I saw you bring that young slave to the depot, and stand up to that slave-trader, Hope Slatter."

"Do you know Slatter?"

"It was Slatter who arranged my own sale to my second owner. At the time I did not blame Slatter in particular, for I was just a boy and it was the life I knew. He had his job. But I came back to his pen once years later to ask who my parents were-for he had sold them and had split us apart, though he had promised all the owners he would never separate families. Slatter was the one man who knew, yet he refused to answer, and drove me away with his cane. Since then, I can never look up when I see him with his rumbling omnibuses on the streets, bringing slaves to his ships. It is strange, but he sits always with Poe in my head-I knew neither man's heart, I guess, but I know one put me in chains and the other took me out of them.

"I saw you defy Slatter. It seemed as though you might need help-and so when I happened upon you out this evening in the storm, I followed again."

"You probably saved my life, Edwin."

"Tell me about those men."

"Villains of the first order. The Baron owes large amounts of money to powerful interests back in Paris. This is why he pursues the mystery of Poe-for money."

"And your involvement, Mr. Clark?"

"I have no involvement with those men who wished to leave me under the sod! Whatever ideas they have formulated in their minds, they're fables. They don't know me from a bull's foot."

"I mean your involvement in all of this. You say this Baron pursues the mystery of Poe to feather his own nest. Very well. What do you pursue?"

I thought of the past reactions, the disappointed gazes of my lost friends, of Peter Stuart and of Hattie Blum, and hesitated to reply. But Edwin did not seem to want to judge me. His open manner had put me at ease. "I suppose my reasons are not very different from yours for helping me tonight. Poe freed me from the idea that life had to follow a fixed path. He was America -an independence that defied control, even when being controlled would have benefited him. Somehow, Poe-truth is all personal to me, and all-important."

"Then brisk up, sir. There may still be more for you to do for the good cause." Edwin signaled the waiter, who placed a steaming cup of tea in front of me. I don't believe I'd ever tasted anything so marvelous.

25

MY WAY HOME was more leisurely than you would think after a night like this. I was filled with relief. I had left both of my pursuers far behind somewhere in Baltimore. Yet there was more than this, more even than Edwin's camaraderie, that brought me my new sense of relief.

The day had been long. I had been brought into the Baron Dupin's sanctum, had heard the painful secret of Auguste Duponte's past, had discovered something of Poe through revelations of dress and cane, the full meaning of which my mind was still receiving. Something else had happened, too. As I walked through the streets, through a rain that was now no more than an occasional mist, I saw that particular flyer-a yellow flyer with black print, hanging on boards and lampposts all over the city. Some were floating in puddles from the storm. There was a vagrant looking at one under the trickle of gaslight, with his hands deep in the pockets of his threadbare suit.

I stepped in front of him and touched the paper to ensure that it was real. I saw that he was shivering and removed my overcoat, which he wrapped around himself with a grateful nod.

"What does it say?" he asked. He took off his bent hat, which had the crown knocked in. I realized the pauper could not read. "Something remarkable," I commented, and read aloud with a vibrancy that would have rivaled any one of the Baron's presentations.

What a sight I must have been. In my shredded, drenched, untailored, unmatched suit, coatless, my hair uncovered and straggled down the middle, leaning my tired body on the precious but bruised Malacca cane. The glimpse of myself in the looking-glass inside the front hall of Glen Eliza seemed to be from another world. I smiled at this thought as I climbed the stairs.

"Poe was not robbed," I said to Duponte even before any salutation. "I see your drift now. The cane he had, this type of Malacca, has a sword concealed inside. He had ‘played' with the cane at Dr. Carter's office in Richmond, according to the press. That means he would have known of the sword. If he had been robbed of his clothes, or violently treated, he would have tried to use it."

Duponte nodded. I wanted to show him more.

"And the clothes. His clothes, Duponte, would have been soaked through from the weather the day he was discovered. There are clothiers across the city who would change his suit for another."

"Clothing is a unique commodity," said Duponte, agreeing. "It is one of the few possessions that can be worthless and valuable at the same time. When wet, a suit of clothing is quite worthless to the wearer; but, as experience teaches us it will inevitably dry, it is just as valuable as a comparable dry suit in the eyes of the clothier, for whom the value comes only when he sells it later."

On the table, there was a pile of the yellow flyers I had seen outside. I picked one up.

"You are ready," I said. "You are ready! When did you have these printed, monsieur?"

"There is more to do first," said Duponte. "In the morning."

I read the flyer again. Duponte was announcing that he would present to the public a lecture explaining the death of Edgar A. Poe. The source for the celebrated character of Dupin, it read. The analyst of great fame in Paris, who sought out the infamous murderer of Monsieur Lafarge, the famous victim of poisoning, will present an exposition detailing all that happened to Edgar A. Poe on October 3d, 1849, in the city of Baltimore. All facts gathered by personal examination and reflection.

Presented free to the public.

The next morning, the day of Duponte's lecture, I left before Duponte woke in order to distribute more flyers. I placed them on many stores, gates, and poles. I had sent for Edwin and, after hearing about Duponte, he agreed to help spread the notices around various quarters of the city while out and about for his newspaper jobs. I handed the flyers to passersby and watched their faces react with interest as they read.

As a hand reached for one, I looked up into the stern face before me. He grabbed for the flyer.

Henry Herring narrowed his eyes at me over the top of the flyer. "Mr. Clark. What is this all about?"

"Everything will now be understood," I said, "about your cousin's death."

"I hardly consider myself a relation, to speak the truth."

"Then you need not concern yourself," I answered, taking the flyer back. "Yet you were enough of a relation to be one of the few people to watch his burial."

Herring's lips compressed into a tight line. "You do not understand him."

"You mean Poe?"

"Yes," he grumbled. "Do you know that when he lived here in Baltimore, before marrying Virginia, Eddie courted my daughter? Did your friend Eddie tell you of that infamous conduct? Wrote her poems, one after another, declaring his love," he said distastefully. "My Elizabeth!"

Herring starting clucking in the hollow of his cheek. By this time, though, my attention had drifted. Filled with the excitement of the day that was about to occur, I had been imagining the face of the Baron Dupin upon seeing the flyer-assuming the French assailants had not yet caught him. Henry Herring said a few more words to the effect that it seemed unsavory to pull up the affairs of a dead man from a dishonorable grave.

I stared out at a tree bough weaving in and out of the wind. Looking around, I saw Duponte's flyers in glorious abundance at every corner. That is what filled me with alarm.

If the Baron did know about Duponte's lecture and the flyers, would he not be sending Bonjour and whatever rascals he might hire to tear them down, or cover them with his own notices? He would at least do that. It would only be fair, from his perspective. But not a single one of the notices had been removed. Would the Baron allow that? Would he back out so easily…?Unless…

"The Baron!" I cried.

"Where in the deuce are you going?" Herring called out to me as I broke into a run.

"Monsieur? Monsieur Duponte!"

I called while still clutching the latch of my street door. I scurried through the front hall anxiously, climbed up the stairs, and rushed into the library. He was not there. I knew something had come to pass.

No, not Duponte.

I heard the light steps of Daphne in the hall with another servant. I ran after her and asked her where Duponte was.

She shook her head. She seemed frightened, or perhaps just bewildered. "His friends took him, Mr. Clark."

No, no, I thought, the words clutching my chest.

A young man had come to the door and said there was a caller for Mr. Duponte; but, he explained, the caller was lame, so Mr. Duponte would have to come to the gate to see him. The carriage was waiting there. Daphne replied that it would be better for the caller to come to the door, as was the custom. But the driver insisted. She informed Duponte and, after giving the matter some thought, he went.

"And then," I urged her to continue.

Daphne seemed to have softened her harsh stance against Duponte, as her eyes were blurred and she dabbed them before continuing. "There was a man sitting in the carriage like a king-I don't think he was lame at all, as he stood tall and took Mr. Duponte by the arm. And he-sir-"

"Yes?"

"He looked just like Mr. Duponte! As though exact twins, honor bright!" she vowed. "And Mr. Duponte went into the carriage, but with a quiver in his face that was sad. Like he knew he was leaving something behind, forever. How I wished you were here, Mr. Clark!"

I had been a simpleton, an ass! The Baron had not stopped our flyers for the lecture because he would stop the lecturer himself!

There was no trace of the Baron at the hotels, which I began calling on myself. First, I went to the police to report that Auguste Duponte was missing and gave them Von Dantker's formal portrait, which I had taken from the Baron. I also gave them a drawing I hastily sketched of the Baron and his colleagues, including the various drivers, porters, and messengers who I had noted had at one time or another been engaged by him. Later, I received a message that I was wanted at the station house.

The same Officer White whom I had spoken with at the time of Poe's death was waiting at his desk. His hands were folded tightly together in front of him.

"Have you found him now? Have you found Duponte?"

"Or Dupin?" he asked. "These portraits you gave us help, Mr. Clark. But the hotel clerks we interviewed all recognize Duponte not as Duponte, but as Dupin. You do notice their similarities even in the sketch you made with the painting?"

I could barely suppress my agitation. "The reason they appear similar is because Baron Dupin has been flagrantly attempting to ape Monsieur Duponte, and the artist, Von Dantker-he was part of it!"

White repositioned his hands and cleared his throat.

"Duponte was pretending to be Dupin?"

"What? No, no. Entirely the reverse, Officer White. Dupin wishes to prove he was the real source for Poe's character-"

"Poe again! Now, what has this to do with him?"

"A great deal! You see, Auguste Duponte is the model for the character of C. Auguste Dupin. That is why he has come. To resolve the mystery of the death of Poe. He has been living in my house and has busied himself at his labor; that is why he has not been seen very much at all. Not to mention he walks mostly in the evening-well, Poe's Frenchman does the same. In the meantime, the Baron Claude Dupin has pretended he is also the model of Dupin, as well as imitating Duponte."

Officer White put his hand up to stop me. "You are implying Duponte is Dupin."

"Yes! Well, it is much more complicated than that, isn't it? The Baron Dupin is trying to be C. Auguste Dupin. The important point is simply to find the man before he comes to harm."

"Perhaps, if I may suggest, you have simply seen this one fellow, Dupin, and mistaken him for someone else."

"Mistaken him…" I said, reading his meaning. "I have not imagined the entire existence of Auguste Duponte, sir. I have not imagined someone living and supping and shaving in my house!"

White shook his head and looked to the floor.

I went on in a deep and serious tone. "Dupin is the wire-puller of this. He must be stopped at all costs! He is dangerous, Officer White! He has kidnapped a rare genius and may have already brought him to injury. He will spread his false version of events behind Poe's death. Does none of that concern you?"

It clearly did not; and there was nothing to do for the moment but keep on doggedly with my search.

I wondered what might have been had I been more aware of human malice in those days. Had I been able to posit the dismal, secret plans-had I known to stay near Duponte at all times, to carry him bodily to the lecture hall if necessary. For all of Duponte's strengths, he could do nothing faced with the Baron and Bonjour threatening his life, and I pictured him, as described by my domestic, accompanying them without even a struggle. What it would have meant to Poe's legacy for Duponte to have spoken on this night. But such a question is pure speculation.

The time for the lecture was growing near. Walking with a rueful air along that street, for I wished to brood at the appropriate site, I was startled to see a throng of people pushing into the entrance of the lyceum hall. I touched the arm of one of the men on line and asked him the occasion.

"Haven't the lyceum organizers canceled the lecture tonight?"

"No such thing!"

"This is the lecture that has been planned, you mean to say? On the true death of Poe?"

"Of course!" he said. "Perhaps you thought Emerson had come to town."

"Duponte," I breathed. "Has he escaped after all? He has come?"

"Only," the man interjected, "there has been a change of circumstances. They now must charge for each ticket of admission."

"Impossible!"

He nodded with resignation. "No matter. It is the original ‘Dupin,' you know. It is worth one dollar and a half."

I stared at him. He proudly held up a copy of Poe's tales. "It is bound to be something," he said.

Running to the front of the mob, I shoved my way inside, past the objecting doorkeeper asking for my ticket.

There, behind the stage, sat the erect figure of Auguste Duponte, quietly waiting alone in contemplation. I looked on with renewed faith and triumph, and reverence.

"How-?" I stepped closer.

"Welcome," he said, glancing up at me deviously, and then looking around as though waiting for something more important. "I am glad, Brother Quentin, you will be a witness to history."

It was not Duponte.

As remarkable as his imitation of Duponte had been at earlier times, the metamorphosis was now terrifyingly complete. Even the eyes contained something of Duponte's spirit.

"Baron! I will not let this come off, be sure of that." I gripped my Malacca in front of me.

"And what will you do?" His gaze fell leisurely over me. "You and Duponte have done me a favor, you know. I already have collected the subscription fees from my lecture to be held in a few days, and will receive those from today as well."

I was surprised, once my mind adjusted to the circumstance, to find no trace of Bonjour around him. Would the Baron leave himself so unprotected? I suppose someone had to guard Duponte, unless they had…no, not even the Baron. Not an unarmed man.

"I will tell you the truth, the real truth, Brother Quentin. There were times before this day when I thought the jig was up. That Duponte was too clever for me. I see by your face you can hardly believe it. Yes, I thought, by the bye, he would by some measure prevail. He has lost his last chance, and now he may lie down and die."

"Where is he?" I demanded. "What have you done to him?"

The Baron wore a devilish grin. "What do you mean?"

"I shall have the police on you! You shall not escape this!" I decided to try for any ace of information from him, and to loosen his confidence besides. "You know, wherever you have him, however you are holding him, Duponte will find a way out. He will come for you like all wrath. He will stop you at the last moment; he will prevail."

The Baron offered an intimate laugh. He revealed nothing, but his insecurity showed in a twitch of his lip. "Monsieur Clark, do you know the obstacles I have overcome to reach this day? The Baltimore police pose no problem to me. Today, I turn a corner. Today it is do or die to put a finale on all this. Unless you shall stop me, for you are the only one who can now-no, but clearly you will not. I shall no longer live in the shadows, not in the shadows of my enemies or of Auguste Duponte. There are times when genius, like Duponte's, must doff its hat to cunning. This day shall be my passport back to glory."

The Baron followed the lyceum director onto the platform and to the podium. I looked around desperately, trying to think of what to do, but found myself on a mental treadmill. Finally, I pushed forward onto the platform and attempted to at least divide the Baron from the podium. Then I saw the crowd-no, call it the mob, the endless, formless, hollering expanse of people's stares-and I understood why the Baron did not need Bonjour at his side to be protected. He was safe in a crowd. He was about to become legitimate again in the eyes of the world.

In the background, a lyceum clerk was fixing a light, causing it to sway disruptively, further confusing my senses in the dark hall. I could only shout for the lecture to be stopped and heard moans of displeasure in response.

I had lost all ability to articulate, all flow of logic. I shouted something about justice. I pulled and prodded, and was pushed in return. At some point in the fog of my memory, I can see there was the face of Tindley, the Whig doorkeeper, standing out in the crowd. A red parasol twirled in the horizon of my sight. I saw faces: Henry Herring, Peter Stuart, who pushed past the anxious crowd to come closer to the front. The old clerk from the athenaeum was there, too, squeezed into his seat, and newspaper editors from all the chief offices of the press. Sometime in all this, in the wavering light I saw it-the grin, the razor-sharp peculiar grin of mischief that Duponte had held for Von Dantker, now precisely plagiarized upon the face of the Baron. Then there was the noise, the only noise that could have risen above the excited clamor that my disturbance had now provoked. It was like a cannon burst. The first sent the stage lights crashing to the ground, drowning the whole place in darkness. And then there was another.

I jumped back amid the sea of screams and feminine shrieks at the sounds of gunfire. I trembled with a sudden chill, and from some macabre instinct put my hand to my chest. I remember only fragments after that:

The Baron Dupin above me and both of us falling together in a bloody tangle, upending the podium in the process…his shirt stained with a wide oval, the rim of which was a thick darkness the color of death…he groaning, gripping madly, passionately at my collar…a horrid weight over my body.

Then, both of us sinking, sinking into oblivion.