The Poe Shadow

26

I WAS NOT suspicious when Officer White took me in his coach from the lyceum to Glen Eliza. Think of it. I had more knowledge of the complex situation that had just occurred than anyone. Though I did not have unreserved confidence in the abilities of the police officers, I believed that with my assistance, Duponte could be found…and then he would find the truth the Baltimore police could not.

Officer White entered the drawing room of Glen Eliza with his clerk and several other police officers I had not seen before. I proceeded to transfer to White all the knowledge I possessed-from the arrival of Baron Dupin in Baltimore to the violent moment as I had just witnessed it. But from his interjections, I began to wonder how closely he was listening.

"Dupin is dying," White kept repeating with different emphasis. "Dupin is dying."

"Yes, at the hands of these two rascals," I explained once more, "who pursued me through the city earlier, thinking I was trying to prevent their petty vengeance against the Baron."

"Then you saw one of them shoot the Baron at the lyceum?" asked Officer White, who sat at the edge of an armchair. The police clerk was all the while standing dumbly behind me. I never liked feeling watched, and I looked back repeatedly with an unsubtle desire that he would at least be seated.

"No," I answered the officer, "I couldn't see anything from the stage, with the glare of the lights shining and then going off, and that mob of people. A few faces…But it is most obvious, it had to be their deed."

"These two rascals you mention-names?"

"I do not know. One of them nearly did me in the day before. I was shot through the hat! He would be injured, no doubt, from our struggle, as I managed to cut him. I do not know their names."

"Tell me what you do know, Mr. Clark." The police officer had a distant tone.

"That they were French, that is most certain. Baron Dupin was in great debt. A Parisian creditor will never quit his harassment and dunning-even as far as Baltimore." I did not know if this was true of all Parisian creditors, but thought it best under the circumstances to make an axiom of it.

To this, Officer White merely bobbed his head as one would do to a rambling child.

"Claude Dupin had to be stopped-for the sake of Poe," he said.

I was surprised at this turn in the conversation. "Precisely," I replied.

"You told me earlier he had to be stopped-‘at all costs.'"

"Indeed, Officer." I hesitated then began again. "Yes, you see, what I meant…"

"He was certainly laid out awful flat," commented the clerk from behind my chair, "Dupin was. Flat as a hog barbecued."

"A hog barbecued, sir?" I asked.

"Mr. Clark," Officer White continued, "you wished to choke off his speaking at the lyceum. You told me as much beforehand when you came looking for your French friend."

"Yes…"

"That portrait you passed along to us, signed by one Von Dantker, was of the Baron. It shows him to a hair. Why had you commissioned a portrait of him?"

"No, it was not the same man! I did not commission anything!"

" Clark, you may gas and blow all you have a mind to later, but no more fables today! It is said that the Baron had precisely the same fantastic smile upon his face right before being shot as the one shown in this portrait! Unusual smile!"

My skin grew warm, my body sensing danger before I could think about what was happening. I halted when I noticed my shirt stained with the Baron's blood. Then I realized that my servants were shuffling around nervously in the corridors, away from their posts. The three or four police officers who had come with Officer White were nowhere to be seen in the room-and other policemen were now parading through the room, enough to constitute a standing army. I could hear footsteps ascending the stairs and moving in the bedrooms above. Glen Eliza was being searched even as I sat there. I felt as if the walls were sinking around me, and the image of Dr. Brooks's burning house came into my mind.

"You grabbed the Baron, even as he began to address the audience-"

"Officer! What do you mean to say?" We were talking over each other now.

"No one could account for your presence-and there is no trace of your friend, this ‘Mr. Duponte,' anywhere."

"Officer, you are implying something…you may call me a story-teller if you like…!"

"…Poe has done you in once and for all."

"What? What do you mean?"

"Your obsessive dalliances with Mr. Poe's writings, Mr. Clark. You would have done anything to stop Baron Dupin talking of Poe, wouldn't you? You have admitted you assaulted and ‘cut' another Frenchman. You wished only for yourself to talk of Poe and nobody else. If someone indeed was involved with Mr. Poe's death, I wonder if that person would have exhibited signs of preoccupation with it-it's leading me to wonder about your own activities at the time Edgar Poe died."

As I strenuously objected, the police clerk came around and took my arm, asking in calm tones that I stand up and not struggle.

27

AT FIRST I was held in one of the cells across from Officer White's private rooms in the Middle District station house. At the sound of every footstep there rose in me a semi-desperate expectation. Imprisonment, I might interrupt myself to say, does not merely produce a feeling of being alone. Your entire history of loneliness returns to you piece by piece, until the cell is a castle of your mental misery. The memories of solitude flood over all other thoughts of the present or the future. You are only yourself. That is the world; no poet of the penal system could devise anything harsher than that.

Whom did I await with palpitating breast? Duponte? Hattie? Perhaps the sour but stalwart expression on the face of Peter Stuart? The Baron Dupin himself, escorted by the doctors, able to bear witness to the real culprit who shot him and to free me? I longed even for the clamor of my great-aunt's voice. Anything to remind me that there was another person concerned by my fate.

There was no word about Duponte, meanwhile. I feared for him an outcome worse than my own. I had failed him. Failed in my role to protect him in the operation of his genius.

Officer White circulated a selection of passable newspapers and journals as part of the jail liberties for the prisoners who were literate. I accepted them, but only pretended to read them while, in fact, I went about far more important reading, which I had smuggled in with me. When I had wrestled at the lyceum with the Baron Dupin, I had semi-consciously removed from his hands the notes he had brought for his speech. Hardly thinking of their significance, I had thrust these papers into my coat before accompanying Officer White to the station house.

As long as I had candlelight in my cell, I studied them, propped in a magazine. Edgar Poe has not left, but has been taken away, said the Baron's treatise. It was not on the whole inelegant, though at no time aspiring to literary merit. As I read, I committed it to memory. I thought of Duponte reading over my shoulder. Only through observing that which is mistaken can we come to the truth.

One time while studying these pages, I was interrupted by the approach of a visitor. The slouching figure of a man came into the hall, escorted by the clerk. It was a man unknown to me, wearing an expressionless face. He leaned his umbrella on the wall and shook off the excess water from his gigantic boots, which seemed to take up half his height.

"The stink in here…" he said to himself, sniffing.

A woman sang drunkenly from the ladies' cells corridor. The visitor merely stood silently. Not finding any particular look of sympathy about him, I did the same.

I was surprised when the stranger was joined by a frightened young lady, wrapped tightly in her cloak.

"Oh, dear Quentin, look at where they've put you!" Hattie stared pityingly at me. She was near tears.

"Hattie!" I reached out and grabbed her by the hand. It hardly seemed possible that she was real, even with the warm leather of her gloves. Taking renewed notice of the stranger, I released her hands. "Is Peter not with you?"

"No, he would not hear of me coming. He will not speak of the situation at all. When he went to the lecture, he was quite angered, Quentin. He felt he had to do something to try to stop you. I do believe he is still your friend."

"He must know I am innocent! How could I have something to do with the shooting of the Baron? The Baron had kidnapped my friend to prevent him from speaking-"

"Your friend? Would that be the friend who has placed you into this débâcle, Mr. Clark?" said the man standing at Hattie's side, turning toward me with a frown not unlike Peter's.

Hattie motioned him for patience. She turned back to me. "This is my cousin's husband, Quentin. One of the finest attorneys in Washington in this sort of matter. He can help us, I'm certain."

Despite the despair of what was now my lot, I felt comfort at the word "us."

"And the Baron himself?" I asked.

"He lies without hope of recovery," my new lawyer blurted out.

"I have written to your great-aunt for her to come at once; she shall help rectify all this," Hattie continued, as though not having heard the terrible words. If what her cousin said was true, if the Baron was shortly to die, in the eyes of the world I would be condemned as a murderer.

A few days later I was moved from the district station house to the Jail of Baltimore City and County, on the banks of Jones Falls. The atmosphere duplicated my hopelessness; the surrounding cells were filled to capacity with some who'd been convicted of grave crimes along with those waiting, with small hopes, for their trial dates, or with perverse eagerness for their own hangings.

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

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

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

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

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

"Perhaps you should confess, Mr. Clark," he advised.

"Confess what?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I needed to find you."

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

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

"Don't you know as well as I do? The creditors-those thugs who followed the Baron wherever he went."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Did Duponte fight you when you kidnapped him? Did he struggle?"

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

"I have been locked up here, Bonjour. I haven't the remotest idea where he is!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Clark you ask about is a young man of idle wealth who, knowing my extreme poverty, has for years pestered me with unpaid letters." [1]

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

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

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

Pestered?…A young man of idle wealth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Who's here?" I called out obliviously.

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

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

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

This was my idea: Edgar Poe was still alive.

I was not ill, as you might think. There was no degradation of my mental acumen, despite the long ordeal of incarceration that led me to the realization-this half-formed idea. Edgar Poe had never been dead.

As my eyes turned to the outside of the prison for the first time in what seemed to be months or years (I would have believed either one if told so at this point), all knowledge related to the affair of Poe's death shaped itself in a new and startling way in my brain.

Perhaps I should have found aid, rest, sanctuary, at the moment. Perhaps I should never have left the confines of the prison, where, strange to say, I was safe from what awaited me outside. But what would you have done-remained there on your cot, staring out at the lights of the stars? Consider now what you'd have done, if you had known with sudden clarity that Edgar Poe was among the living.

(Had Duponte not seen it? Had he not considered it in all his analysis?)

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 alive.

I remembered that Benson had said this in our first meeting, very nearly those words, at least. Benson had seemed to know more than he was telling me. Had he known this? Had he found something he could not reveal in his early investigation, and had he been giving me a suggestion, a clue to the secret truth?

I could see the faces of the men at the funeral, as though daguerreotyped on the mind, could still see them coming toward me with the hurried, muddied footsteps of that day.

Think of it…think of the evidence. George Spence, the sexton, had not seen Edgar Poe in many years, and had emphasized Poe's unfamiliar appearance when brought in for burial. Neilson Poe saw his cousin only through a curtain at the college hospital, and did he not tell me in his chambers that the patient looked like another man altogether?

Meanwhile, the funeral I witnessed had been performed hastily, lasting perhaps three minutes, with few witnesses and even a canceled oration-as inconspicuous, as quiet, as was ever seen. Even Snodgrass, intransigent Dr. Snodgrass, had exhibited anxiousness, misgiving, self-reproach over Poe's end and burial. I thought again of the poem we found in Snodgrass's desk that he had written on the subject, which spoke of his idea of Poe's drunkenness. It had also recalled that day of the funeral.

Had any who knew him of recent years seen the lifeless form as it lay in the coffin before it was lowered under the earth? And most of those witnesses-Neilson Poe, Henry Herring, Dr. Snodgrass-wanted to say nothing about this funeral, as though there was something to conceal. Had they known more? That Poe, in fact, still breathed and still lived? Had he been hidden by outside agents concealing something? Or had he, Edgar Poe, perpetrated his ultimate hoax upon the world?

You see that the reasoning in my mind, produced in an admittedly highly excited state, was neither deranged nor insubstantial. I would demonstrate Poe was not yet dead, and all that had occurred would be thrown into an immediate reversal. I proceeded by foot after passing through the sewer directly to the old Westminster Presbyterian burial ground. Its place toward the center of the city, away from the larger bodies of water, had spared it and the surrounding roads the worst consequences of the flooding, though rivulets still streamed through the grassy burial yard, and certain crevices and corners contained deeper gullies of water.

I would speak to the sexton and insist upon full answers. But as I crossed through the gates, a different determination overtook me. Though it was dark, my eyes retained the exaggerated power of sight resulting from my prolonged stay in the dark cells of the prison. Indeed, with just a single burst of lightning from another storm that was gathering itself, I located precisely the spot of Edgar Poe's grave, which outrageously had remained unmarked. What was underneath?

I cleared the tree branches and other debris that covered it, and began digging with my bare hands into the grass. With each tuft of grass I removed from the center, a stream of water would appear from underneath. I tried around the periphery with no better luck. At certain places, the soil was so hardened that my fingernails cracked, staining the clumps of dirt and mud with blood.

Realizing I could make only incremental advancement in this fashion, I crossed the burial yard and, fortune on my side, located a small spade. With this instrument I began the labor of breaking up the earth in a circle outlining the grave. I drove the spade into the ground with zeal. Mounds of dirt soon surrounded me. The task was exhausting, and consumed me to such a degree that at first I did not pay attention to the sudden noise bearing down on me. I was distracted by what I saw below.

It was a common pine coffin. I reached my hand down and could touch the cold surface of the smooth wood. Clearing the soil from the top, my fingers found where the cover met the coffin but, just as I began to lift it, I was compelled to release it.

The sexton's mongrel dog was racing upon me ferociously. She pounced a few feet from me and I thought, for a moment, that she had paused because she remembered our having befriended each other. This was not the case. Or, if she remembered, she was all the more angered by my betrayal of our mutual trust. She was quite certain I was trying to steal a body from her domain (the opposite, brave canine! There is no body to steal!). She snarled and snapped her jaws among the graves, and in my state of intense excitement I thought I could see Cerberus's three jaws in that one. I tried waving her away with the shovel, but she only lowered her position and, at any moment, would launch herself onto my throat.

The sexton now emerged from within the underground tomb I had once found him in, holding up a lantern. The air was of a quality so dense and dark that I could hardly see him. He looked to be all of one color. I pictured him as the man who was found petrified to stone in that same vault.

"I am not a resurrection man!" I cried out. Although I suppose that as I was waving a shovel in the air, my hands and clothing covered in dirt and blood, with a partially revealed coffin below me, this proclamation was hardly convincing. "Look inside! Look inside!"

"Who is it? Who's there? Sailor, get 'em!"

I had no choice. I looked longingly at the wood below me, then dropped the shovel and ran. Man and dog chased at my heels.

I was not yet defeated. After leaving behind my pursuers in the cemetery, I located myself in a narrow alleyway for shelter. I spent nearly a half hour recuperating from the fatigue of my failed attempt at the burial yard before stirring myself with a renewed objective. Surely the sexton would now be guarding Poe's grave. But with wild determination, I made my way across the city, remembering along the way the address of Poe's last home in Baltimore, on Amity Street between Lexington and Saratoga, to which I had seen reference during my long researches into Poe's history.

I could ask him. Why? Friend Poe, why write the letter? Why say I am an idle young man, a pest? Had you forgotten we understood one another?

Poe had just withdrawn from his place as a cadet at West Point when, shunned by John Allan in Richmond, who refused to help rescue him from a series of debts, the twenty-two-year-old Poe came to this modest dwelling to live with his aunt, Maria Clemm, her daughter, Virginia-then eight years old-as well as Poe's older brother, William Henry, and his ailing grandmother. Poe searched for a position as a teacher in one of the local schools, without success. Each of his fellow cadets at West Point had given him a dollar for the publication of his first collection of poems, and with this volume he had great plans to make his name.

Certain I had found the correct address at a narrow house between Lexington and Saratoga streets, without any consideration of a more rational scheme, I burst up the steps through the street door and, finding myself at the foot of a narrow staircase, bounded upstairs. Why? Oh, Edgar! Why write that of all things? Perhaps, if Poe had lived, he would have returned here, to his last home in Baltimore, and left some sign for me of his next destination. I hardly noticed the two women, one with white hair and one young and fair, who screamed upon seeing me enter the tiny back room where they were sitting by a fireplace. (Perhaps I was a dreadful sight, my sackcloth uniform fitted to me by the prison now tattered and dripping, and spotted with soil and blood from my failed efforts at the burial yard.) In another bedroom, a garret room at the very top of the house, a lanky man leaned out the window overlooking Amity Street and began calling, Robbery! Murder! and other exclamations. The two women now scurried through the house, and the walls reverberated with unintelligible shouts.

I shrank from the commotion and, finding that the man was in the process of gripping a crowbar, I hastened down the stairs, past the frantic younger woman, through the front hall, back to the door. I ran at such velocity that I could not stop myself until I was in the middle of the street, where under the vague glow of a faraway streetlight I could see a giant horse and carriage coming right for me, leaving me without time to move in any direction where I would not fall directly under its mass of hooves and wheels. Having no chance to save myself from this gruesome fate, I merely blocked my eyes with my arms from the sight of death.

In a miraculous motion, I was pulled bodily to the curb, out of harm of the carriage. My wrist was held tightly. My deliverer struggled to move me closer. I had shut my eyes in lifeless surrender, and now opened them warily upon this person, as though to find a phantasm haunting me from beyond instead of a human. I looked and found I was gazing on the face of Edgar A. Poe.

" Clark!" he said quietly, gripping me tighter, his mouth contracting into a small, intense line under the dark mustache. "We must take you away from here."

I paused, I looked again, reached my hand to his face, and in that instant all things trembled and disappeared into blackness.

When I experienced a brief moment of consciousness, it was in a dark, moist chamber. I felt myself being lowered, and I fought a strange foreboding of mortal danger. As my eyes unclosed slightly, and I lifted my neck as high as it would move, I could see only one object with true clarity, for it loomed above, the very horizon of vision.

It was a rectangular tablet, with writing upon it: HIC TANDEM FELICIS CONDUNTUR RELIQUAE.

I gasped as I realized it was a gravestone marker, and with horror translated its morbid epitaph of my twenty-nine years…Here at last he is happy.

28

BLACKNESS OVERTOOK ME again. When I rose from my trance, I sat up in a sudden frenzy and gasped at the harsh thirst burning my throat. Though I could feel myself blinking, I could see nothing, and my thoughts shifted between persuading myself I had been blinded and assuring myself that I was only in a space or chamber with no light. A lamp now came on from across the room.

I heard a small voice near me: "He is awake." I could see a bowl of water and reached for it.

"No," another voice counseled sharply. "That is for the hand."

One of my hands had been hurt in my efforts at the burial yard.

"Here."

There was now a little circle of candlelight and two children, a boy and girl, whose fair complexions looked green to me, making them look like goblins under the conditions, and who stood around me in stocking feet. The gaslight was turned up now and I saw that the girl was holding forth a glass of water, patiently waiting for me with a look of perfect sweetness. I drank it feverishly.

"Where-" I began to say, then looked up again at the terrible grave marker! In the light, I could now see that it was a large and detailed sketch of a grave marker, and could read its full inscription. HIC TANDEM FELICIS CONDUNTUR RELIQUAE EDGAR ALLAN POE and, below that, OBIIT OCT. VII1849.

I turned to the little girl, grateful for her kindness. I felt suddenly protective of the children. "You are not scared?"

"No," said the girl. "Only worried for you, mister. You were a frightful sight when Father brought you in!"

I breathed easily for the first time in months. I realized I had been changed into a clean suit of clothes, and was sitting on a flat board resting on two chairs, a makeshift bed I had been lying on.

"I'm afraid, Mr. Clark, there are rarely spare beds in a house with six Poe children and one new Poe baby! I should hope this would afford you some rest nevertheless."

The man speaking was the one who'd rescued me from the street-only it was not Edgar, but rather Neilson Poe. He looked different than the last time we had met, at the police station house. He was thinner and wore a mustache that made him an almost perfect replica, at first glance, of the portraits of his cousin.

"William. Harriet." Neilson looked sternly to the children, who had remained loyally at my side. "To bed." The two children hesitated.

"You have been a great help," I said in a confidential voice to the boy and girl. "Now you must listen to your father."

They fled soundlessly from the chamber.

"Why am I here?" I asked my host.

"Perhaps you could answer the question better," Neilson said with concern, and sat across from me.

He explained that he had received word that there had been some attempt to dig out the coffin of Edgar Poe at the Westminster burial ground and, though the hour was late, he had hired a coach and started immediately for the cemetery. The streets, however, were in poor condition from the rains, and the drive necessitated a path across Amity Street, where Neilson Poe heard a great commotion that he thought was emanating from the old dwelling of his relation Maria Clemm, which-fifteen years ago-had been inhabited by Edgar Poe, as well.

Neilson, finding this coincidence most bizarre and disturbing, considering his current destination of Edgar's grave, had the driver return in this direction. Stepping down on the pavement, he began to investigate, but remembering that he should continue to the cemetery to inquire into those strange happenings, he instructed his driver to turn the carriage back around, facing the other direction, to save time. At this point, with the driver engaged in this task, I was seen emerging from the street door and, finding that I had placed myself in the immediate path of the carriage and would be crushed, Neilson pulled me down to the pavement, where I fainted.

Having seen the layer of dirt on my clothing as he lifted me into the carriage, Neilson Poe considered that the complaint he had received from the cemetery might not be entirely unrelated to my presence at Amity Street.

I remained silent, unsure how much to say. He went on.

"I transported you here at once, Mr. Clark, and my messenger boy assisted me in lifting you onto this board. The boy then brought back a doctor from the next street, who examined you and departed only a short time ago. My wife has been upstairs praying for you to recover your strength. Had you been at the Westminster burial yard tonight, sir?"

"What is that?" I asked, pointing at the sketch of the grave marker. It sat on a shelf harmlessly with other papers and books but, having initially been illumined by a little light in the chamber, had been the sole and dreary object of my attention during my brief revival of consciousness earlier.

"It is a sketch by the man I have hired to build a suitable marker for my cousin's grave. Perhaps we should speak of this later. You seemed excessively overtired."

"I will sleep no more," I said to him. Indeed, I felt my slumber had rapidly rejuvenated me. There was something more, too. Although Neilson Poe had doubts about my affairs, and I had my own about him, he had protected me-his children had protected me. I felt safe. "I am appreciative of your family's assistance this evening, but I'm afraid I know more than you may realize. You have told me and the police that Edgar Poe was not just cousin but friend. Yet I know what your cousin called you."

"What is that?"

"His ‘bitterest enemy in the world'!"

Neilson frowned, stroked his mustache, and calmly nodded without recoil. "It is true. I mean that he was known to make comments such as that, about me as well as others who cared about him."

"What would lead him to think that of you, Mr. Poe?"

"There was a time, when his affections for young Virginia had just developed. I had married my wife, Josephine, who was Virginia 's half-sister, and, feeling that my sister-in-law at thirteen was too young to leave with him, I offered to provide for her education and allow her to enter into society if she remained with us in Baltimore. Edgar saw this as an insult. He said he would not live another hour without her. He felt that I was seeking to ruin his happiness and that he would never see his ‘Sissy' again. He could not bear himself under the pressure of any grief."

"What of his suggestion, made in a letter to Dr. Snodgrass, that you would not help his literary career?"

"Edgar believed I was jealous, I suppose," Neilson answered forthrightly. "I myself attempted something of a literary career in my youth, as I have said to you before. Because of this, he concluded that I was envious of the amount of literary notice he did achieve, both positive and negative."

"Were you?"

"Envious? Not in the way Edgar believed. I did not perceive myself equal to him. Rather, if I ever were jealous, it was from an observation that his writing carried a quality of genius, of naturalness, that my own lacked however meticulously I labored at it."

"I can't forget," I said firmly to my host, "that you hindered the chance for the police to investigate your cousin's death, Mr. Poe."

"Is that what you think?" He remained placid. "I understand why you would believe that. However, it was Officer White, before you arrived at the police station house, who was quite adamant that there should not be the least investigation made, for, you see, the Baltimore police are in the habit of fancying that there are no crimes in our city, particularly any crimes toward tourists. In my practice, I often represent those accused of petty wrongs, and depend much on the police to be reasonable to certain offenders, and felt I had little choice but to cooperate with Officer White's desires in the matter. I could see that he was wont to make an example out of those who tried to demonstrate more criminal acts in Baltimore than were already known, and so when I saw you at the police station house, I tried my best to dissuade you from any further pursuit for your own good. Sometimes I do not think our justice is so different from the days of witchcraft-crimes are seen only when it suits the accusers." He walked toward the door of the room. "I see that you believed me overly hostile toward my cousin in our first meetings. Follow me, Mr. Clark."

We moved into Neilson Poe's library. There was a row of books and magazines of Edgar Poe's writings that nearly rivaled my own. In my great surprise, I examined its contents, removing a particular volume or periodical from the impressive collection as I went.

Neilson could see that I was taken aback at his apparent devotion to Edgar's writings. He smiled and explained. "I had been angry at Edgar in his last years, and even after his death, for I knew he saw himself as superior to me all along. He saw my life as dilapidated in its artistic qualities. I knew, in short, that he had hated me for many years! Yet it occurred to me that I had never hated him. It has occurred to me, further, that Edgar was a man who represented himself through his literary productions-that was him, more than the physical form and character he presented in person, more than any letter he might write in a fit of anger, or some comment he might pass in an excited state to an acquaintance. His art was never meant to be popular, it was not meant to have a principle or a moral sense, but it was his true form of being."

As he spoke, Neilson situated himself in the corner of his library and, as he swiveled his chair for a volume of Edgar Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, there was a twitch at the side of his mouth that seemed a distinct quality of Edgar Poe's. To hide my observation of him, I removed from the shelf the April 1841 number of Graham's, containing the first tale of Dupin, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." I held it reverently and thought of my own library, my own collection, my home, Glen Eliza, which no doubt had been disturbed and ruined by the police in their various searches for evidence of my guilt and obsessions.

"Do you know he was paid only fifty-six dollars for his first Dupin tale?" Neilson said, seeing the object of my interest. "In the time since his death, I have seen the press push and splatter him. I have seen that shameful and unjust biographer make Edgar whomever he would like. Remember, this is my name, too, Mr. Clark. Poe is the name of my wife, and my children are Poes-as my sons' children will be. I am Poe. In the last months, I have read and reread nearly all that my cousin wrote, and have felt with each turn of the page greater affinity with him, a closeness of the highest order, as though the same words might have come from me that he had managed to extract from our common blood. Tell me, Mr. Clark, you had met him?" he asked offhandedly.

"No."

"Good!" said Neilson. Seeing my puzzled reaction, he continued. "I mean only that it is better that way. Seek to know him through the words he published. His genius was of such a rare quality, hardly to be sustained in this world of magazinists, that he could not but believe all were against it and that, given time, even friends and relatives would turn into enemies. His perception, frightened and anxious on this point, was a result of a world harsh to literary pursuits-a harshness I discovered for myself in my youth. His life was a series of experiments on his own nature, Mr. Clark, that brought him far from the movements of our world into a knowledge only of the perfection of literature. We cannot know Edgar Poe as a man, but can know him well as the genius he was. This is why he could not be fairly read until after his death-by me, by you, and now, perhaps, by the world." He paused. "You are feeling better now, Mr. Clark?"

I found I could think more clearly and had been freed of a surge of wild emotions that had before consumed me. I could only remember my latest actions as one thinks of a dream, or a distant memory. I blushed a bit in embarrassment to think of how Neilson had found me. "Yes, many thanks. I fear I had been rather overexcited when you came upon me at Amity Street."

"Please, Mr. Clark," he chuckled in surprise, "you must hardly blame yourself for being poisoned."

"What do you mean?"

"The doctor who examined you was quite certain that you had been mildly poisoned. He found traces of the white powder still in the posterior of your mouth, an expert mixture of several chemicals. Do not worry. He was also rather certain the effects had quite exhausted themselves and were not permanently harmful in these doses."

"Poison? But who-" I stopped myself, knowing with sudden clarity the answer. The guards at the prison who, with great vigilance, constantly replaced the pitchers of water on my cell table. Officer White, frustrated with my continued denials in the interviews with him, had likely been the one to order it: to confuse my mind enough to extract some kind of statement of responsibility, to ensure a confession of my wrongs! Indeed, I now also possessed Neilson Poe's information about White's desire to suppress the inquiry I had demanded. He would have poisoned me until I confessed or died, or was driven to harm myself. My life had been saved through the means of my chance escape.

All the derangement of my mental state in the hours after leaving the prison became clear to me and stung my mind. Searching for Poe-digging his grave with the belief that he was alive-invading his former home from so many years earlier! That person had dropped from me and I stood taller now, seeing all that was happening with perfect vision.

Neilson seemed momentarily thoughtful and, perhaps, anxious. "Perhaps you do need more rest, Mr. Clark."

"The boy," I said suddenly. "The messenger boy of whom you spoke, the one who helped you carry me, and then who returned with the doctor. Where is he?" I had not seen anyone in the house other than the children.

Neilson hesitated. I could hear a new sound, unmistakable and increasing. Horses, high-stepping through the watery streets; a carriage's wheels splashing behind.

Neilson raised his head at the sound. "I am a member of the bar, Mr. Clark," he said. "You are a fugitive from justice, and I have done my duty by sending the police word of your presence. I have a responsibility. Yet, somehow, I cannot help but think that you, of all people, have the ability to vindicate the memory of my unhappy kinsman and my name. I would be pleased to serve as your defender in court, should you wish." I remained frozen in place. "Remember, Mr. Clark, you were an officer of the court, too. You have a duty to choose."

Neilson stepped slowly in front of the door, and in my weakened state he would have likely subdued me with ease until his messenger boy entered with the police.

"The children," Neilson said suddenly. "Do not think me too strict, Mr. Clark, but I must see to it that they are sleeping."

"I understand," I said, nodding with gratitude.

As he started into the hall toward the stairs, I dashed out of the room and did not look back.

"God watch over you!" Neilson called after me.

My mission was clear. I would find Auguste Duponte. He alone could provide the definitive proof of my innocence. Now that Bonjour had revealed to me that no harm had been done to him, even thinking of how close he might be lent me an air of invincibility that moved me rapidly through the drowned streets of Baltimore. Indeed, perhaps Duponte had already begun to investigate the shooting of the Baron. Perhaps he had even come to the lyceum that evening, before it occurred, had witnessed it and fled in preparation for the troubles he knew would come from it.

It seemed the most necessary objective in the world to prove my name to Hattie, for she had persisted in her friendship to me throughout my stay in prison when others had abandoned me. It might seem small compared to the fact that my life could end as a criminal, and she was marrying another man anyway, but my goal now was to prove myself to Hattie.

I would not dry thoroughly for days; my ears, lungs, and insides were swimming long after I'd waded and splashed through the treacherous streets of Baltimore. It felt as though the Atlantic had broken over the shores and was moving across to unite with the Pacific. I was able to locate Edwin, and he secured me changes of linen and modest suits of clothing. He wished to assist me in obtaining a place safer from the eyes of the police. He had brought clothing in bundles to an empty packinghouse, once belonging to my father's firm, where I took refuge by remembering a loose door hinge from years ago that had never been repaired.

"You have helped me enough, Edwin," I said, "and I should not wish to risk your safety any further. I have called down enough trouble on everyone's heads for a lifetime."

"You have done what you believed right, you have bet your life on it," he said. "Poe is dead. A man has been shot. Your friend, disappeared. And enough people have been hurt. You must stay safe, at least, so there is someone sure of the truth."

"You must not be thought committing any crime, for aiding me," I said. This was a serious point. If a free black was convicted of a significant offense, he could be punished in the worst way imaginable for a freeman: by being entered by the authorities back into slavery.

"I was not born in the woods to be scared by an owl." Edwin laughed his reassuring laugh. "Besides, I think not even Baltimore has punished a man yet for giving some old duds to a man whose linen is out at the elbows. Now, will you be able to rest here for the night?"

Edwin continued to lend his aid and searched me out at the packinghouse at regular intervals. Although tempted to do so, I refrained from trying to make any calls on Hattie out of concern that they might endanger her. My outings were severely restricted, and I knew not to go anywhere near the grounds of Glen Eliza for fear of being seen. I still had in my possession the issue of Graham's from 1841 that I was holding in my hand when I fled from Neilson Poe's house-the issue in which "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" first introduced Dupin. I was thankful for this as though it were a talisman. I would reread the tale and wonder what Duponte might have already discovered about the Baron's death. Yet this magazine was, for the time, all I had to read. So I read the other pages, too, though it was ten years old.

One time, Edwin came at an appointed hour and found me staring at the Graham's.

"All right, Mr. Clark?"

I could not stop reading these pages-reading and reading. I could hardly speak. I do not know how to describe my heart-wrenching discovery that night-I mean the truth about Duponte-or Dupin (you see I hardly know how to swallow all I understood, I hardly know where to begin)-that Duponte never was the real Dupin at all.

Once I had read the Baron Dupin's handwritten lecture notes several times in my cell at the Middle District station house, and had ensured that every word remained forged in my memory, I had thrown the pages to the fire that sizzled in the hall separating the men's and women's cells. I had not assassinated the Baron, of course, but I eagerly murdered his handiwork. After all that had happened, the possibility of his fictions about Poe's death spreading was a risk not to be borne.

It was not that his words were not convincing as to Poe's death. They were quite convincing, but not the truth-the opposite of Poe, who wrote only the truth even when many were not ready to believe. We shall come to the Baron's theories of Poe's death later. The Baron Dupin, in his notes, had also taken the occasion to defend his claim as the real Dupin.

Here is a sample: "You know the Dupin of these tales as forthright, brilliant, fearless. Those qualities, I must admit, Mr. Poe derived from my own humble adventures in truth-telling…For that is what Dupin really does, isn't it? In a world where truth is hidden by the mountebanks and swindlers, by the lords and the kings, Dupin finds it. Dupin knows it. Dupin tells it. But those who tell the truth, my friends, shall always be met with ridicule, neglect, death. That is where we have found Edgar-no"-here I imagined the Baron shaking his head somberly, perhaps a leaden tear dropping from the corner of one eye-"that is where we have lost Edgar Poe. Edgar Poe has not left us, but has been taken away…"

Now, before Edwin's arrival, as I sat in the empty warehouse's small splash of light, I picked up that April Graham's, that magazine containing the first appearance of Poe's Dupin. "How fortunate for Graham's to have Poe then," I thought, "for he not only contributed his tales but also he was their editor." Then my thumb stopped on a particular page. I strained in the light to see. It was not even a page I had meant to look at.

In the same number that "Rue Morgue" appeared, in that same April '41 number, the editor of the periodical-that is, Poe-reviewed a book entitled Sketches of Conspicuous Living Characters of France. This collection of biographical sketches, we find, includes a number of French persons of distinction. The one that attracted my eye was George Sand, the famed novelist. I should not know how it raced into my mind from some distant article or biography I had read about her-but I somehow recalled that her given name, which she changed to the masculine George Sand to allow her to publish without prejudice, was Amandine-Aurore-Lucie Dupin. Poe, in his review of Sketches, delights in an anecdote that involved Madame Sand/Dupin sitting dressed up in a gentleman's frock coat and smoking a cigar.

Another name in Poe's review arrested my attention: Lamartine. You may hardly know the name, for his reputation as a Parisian poet and philosopher I doubt will persist in memory. But look here. I turned back through our magazine to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," that first tale of ratiocination.

We reached the little alley called Lamartine, which has been paved, by way of experiment, with the overlapping and riveted blocks.

Was it a coincidence, that in the same number of the magazine that Poe published his first Dupin tale, he used the name of another prominent French writer in both the Dupin tale and this review he wrote? Do not stop there. Look at "Rue Morgue" further, and read about one of the witnesses to the beastly violence, as told by the narrator:

Paul Dumas, physician, deposes that he was called to view the bodies about day-break…

Should this Dumas not make us all think of Alexandre Dumas, the inventive novelist of French romances and adventures? And there was this:

Isidore Musèt, gendarme, deposes that he was called to the house about three o'clock in the morning…

Yes: a name much like Alfred de Musset, the French poet, intimate companion of George Sand herself.

You have probably already guessed at the conclusion now ready to be drawn. My mind spiraled down without warning. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"-I can almost hear Poe chuckling cleverly at the real hidden mystery of this tale-was actually built as an allegory for the modern state of French literature. The references to George Sand (a.k.a. Dupin), Lamartine, Musset, and Dumas were the most prominent of the network of quiet, clever allusions.

If this was so, as I was instantly certain it was, Poe had not drawn on a real investigator to invent this hero, not Auguste Duponte, not Baron Claude Dupin, but had worked wholly from his head and his thoughts on the various literary personages. When I first found all this, I made bold to walk openly to a book stall and pillage various books; I found that not only was my recollection correct about George Sand's real name, not only was her given name Dupin, but also that she had lost a brother in infancy named-yes, but you probably already guessed-Auguste Dupin. Auguste Dupin. Would Poe have known this detail? What was Poe's message to us? He re-created her lost brother in the form of a genius against death and violence. Had Poe thought of his own brother William Henry, taken from him while poor Edgar was yet a boy?

In frantically reading again through "Rue Morgue" I found new meaning in the narrator's description of his living circumstance with C. Auguste Dupin: "We admitted no visitors. Indeed the locality of our retirement had been carefully kept a secret from my own former associates; and it had been many years since Dupin had ceased to know or be known in Paris. We existed within ourselves alone." Wasn't Poe trying to tell us? The astounding ratiocinator existed only in the imagination of the poet.

We have been informed by a "Lady Friend" of the brilliant and erratic writer Edgar A. Poe, Esq. that Mr. Poe's ingenious hero, C. Auguste Dupin, is closely modeled from an individual in actual life, similar in name and exploit, known for his great analytical powers… amp;c.

I thought of that newspaper extract, the one given to the athenaeum clerk by John Benson and then to me, with blurry vision and brewing contempt. How vague it was, these sentences, this flighty rumor that had taken me in. Who was this "lady friend" of Poe's? How was it we could know she should be trusted? Had she ever existed at all? I searched my mind for answers to these singular questions, but all the while the larger reality possessed me like an unholy spirit-it seemed to say, "Duponte was nothing more than a fraud, Poe is dead, and you too will die, will walk the ladder to the gallows, will die for wanting more than you already had."

Duponte was no more.

" Clark, are you unwell? Perhaps I should bring you to a doctor." Edwin was trying to shake me from my spell.

"Edwin," I gasped, with just this peculiar phraseology: "I am nearly dead."

I should say something more, by way of an interlude, about what began all this-Poe's death. For several chapters, I have mentioned knowing the Baron's full lecture on the subject, and it would be stingy of me to withhold it any longer from the reader. As I say, I remember every word of the Baron's notes. "‘Reynolds! Reynolds!' This shall ring in our ears as long as we remember Edgar Poe, for it was his valedictory address to us. And he might have just said: ‘This is how I died, Lord. This is how I died, friends and fellow sufferers of the earth. Now find out why…'"

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

29

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet now we have Truth come back to us.

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

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

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

30

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

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

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

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

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

I found Edwin waiting for me.

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

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

Edwin frowned. "Where?"

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

I began to walk away when Edwin touched my arm.

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

"No."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No answer.

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

"Don't you know me?" came the question in fine French.

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

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

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

"Quentin Hobson Clark. Yes, you remember."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"They told me you were in prison!"

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

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

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

"I do not stand at the harbor peeping into the windows of ships, Monsieur Clark! Do you know the police will look for you for this…this outrageous trespassing." He frowned, remembering they would already be looking for me for a far worse offense. "You seem very different from when we met, monsieur."

I stood above him and looked over him coolly. "I believe you know where men like them would hide, and who would shelter them. You know all the important French citizens who reside in the region of Baltimore. Perhaps some dangerous characters like these rogues would even find you."

"Monsieur Clark, I work directly for Louis-Napoleon since he has become president. If there were French outlaws here, and they wished to hide from your authorities and ours, they would not come to me. You see that, don't you? Think of it." He noticed that I listened seriously to this point, and now tried to switch topics to gain my sympathies. "Didn't I help you research Auguste Duponte, the real Monsieur Dupin? Yes, what of that? Did you find him in Paris?"

"This has nothing to do with Auguste Duponte," I said. I made no threatening motion, no sudden gesture toward him. Yet he cowered; that he believed me wild and violent made me almost inclined to prove him right.

It wasn't even necessary to demand that he tell me whatever he knew. "Bonapartes!" he suddenly babbled.

"What do you mean?" I asked, annoyed.

"In Baltimore," he continued. "Monsieur Jérôme Bonaparte."

"You introduced me to some Bonapartes at that dress ball you took me to before I left for Paris. Jérôme Bonaparte and his mother. But why would someone like Jérôme Bonaparte know more about such rogues? They are relatives of Napoleon's, aren't they?"

"No. Yes. Not ones that Napoleon acknowledged, I mean. You see, when the brother of Napoleon-the true Napoleon, Emperor Napoleon, I mean-when this brother was traveling through America as a soldier at nineteen, he courted and married a wealthy American girl, Elizabeth Patterson. You met her at the ball-the ‘queen.' They had a son, named Jérôme after his father, and that is who you met with her, the man dressed as the Turkish guard. When he was no more than a baby, Emperor Napoleon ordered his brother to abandon the poor bride, and after a brief struggle the brother at length obeyed. Elizabeth Patterson, now abandoned, returned with her son to Baltimore, and this family would never again be recognized by the emperor. They have been separated from their proud family line ever since."

"I understand," I said. "Continue please, Monsieur Montor."

"Outlaws would not seek to find me, an official government minister, as I say, with Louis-Napoleon as the current head of government. But such criminals might seek out those who are estranged from the name of Napoleon. Yes." His mouth loosened and he became excited, as though understanding this was now his mission too. "They might, monsieur!"

"Do you have the city directories for Baltimore?" I asked.

He pointed to a shelf in the corridor. His eyes traveled away from me shiftily, toward the window and door. He'd been caught up momentarily in my questions, but I could see he was now preparing in his mind an indignant report to the police.

It did not matter. I stopped my finger at the right page and tore it out. I could still reach the train depot before Montor's reports reached the ears of the Washington police.

And indeed, the conductor of the train did not seem at all concerned with me upon my boarding. As a precaution, I sat in the last passenger car, and to observe more I opened the window at my seat, provoking malevolent stares when pockets of cold air rushed inside. One fellow spit his tobacco pointedly close to my boots, but I only shifted my legs farther from him.

I looked for any signs of something unusual, having to will my eyes not to close for longer than a few seconds. At one point, as the train made a turn, I saw a young boy running along the front of the train boldly grab hold of the cowcatcher-this was the device in front that forced away animals like sheep, cows, and hogs that strayed onto the track-and, gripping onto this, he managed to swing into the first car. I was startled, but told myself this was just a stowaway. I soon forgot the sight of the boy dangling in front of the train through a short spell of sleep.

I was jolted awake as the train shook with a violent shudder and soon began to nudge into a slower speed as it approached a bridge over a ravine. I jumped to my feet and was about to ask what had happened when I overheard another man as he questioned the conductor and engineer. The conductor had a harum-scarum look about him, as though he were frightened even of himself.

"The train went over a chaise and horse," the engineer said coolly. "Two ladies were thrown out, and pretty well smashed, too. The chaise broken to pieces."

The conductor passed by this engineer and scurried to the next car.

"Good God, mister!" cried the other passenger, looking back to me for the same reaction. I took a few steps backward and checked the door to the freight car that was attached to the end of the train. It was locked.

My eyes were fixed on the engineer's face. I tried to think whether I had heard a crash at all, and cursed myself for having fallen asleep. The engineer seemed unnaturally calm for just having been part of a terrible accident, possibly killing two women.

"Chaise was broken to pieces," the engineer said, then looked flustered as he realized he had already said this.

I interjected casually, "I didn't hear a crash." Of course, I had been asleep, but I felt it was a test worth trying. Could they be lying? Were they slowing down for the police to come aboard?

"Funny, mister," murmured the fussy passenger in front of me. "I didn't hear any crash either, and doesn't everyone say I have the finest hearing in Washington!"

This decided it. I swung myself to the door as the train continued to cut the speed of its engine.

"You there! Stop! What do you think you are doing?" The engineer shouted this at me as he grabbed hold of my arm, but I shook him away hard and he stumbled over a piece of luggage. The passenger who had been speaking, from an overload of confusion, motioned to try to restrain me but stopped cold when he saw from my face that I would not be deterred.

Forcing the door open, I leapt onto the bank of grass alongside the tracks and rolled myself down the side of the steep arched ravine below.

31

LATER, I WOULD learn more about the Bonapartes and their quiet residence over the decades in Baltimore. Now, I wished only to find them. I could remember faintly my parents speaking of the scandal, so many years earlier-long before I was born-that ensued when the brother of Napoleon Bonaparte married Baltimore 's richest young beauty, Elizabeth Patterson. That brother had long returned to luxury in Europe. It was the American descendants of Napoleon's lighthearted brother that I had to confront-the Jérôme Bonaparte I had met in costume and his family and allies-to see if they knew those rogues whose presence would prove my innocence.

But I had no particular concern for the Bonaparte family's history or ambitions at the moment. Today the question of my survival was too real.

These American Bonapartes and their offspring had multiplied and spread themselves around the city, and had maintained many homes across Baltimore through their great wealth from the Patterson family and the stipend the jilted wife received from Napoleon. The first address I visited no longer belonged to them at all-but the domestic who answered, a plump Irishwoman, received enough mistaken callers to know where to direct me. Still, it was several jaunts into different quarters, meeting various affiliated persons, before I found the most promising residence: one of the homes of Napoleon's brother's grandsons, estranged great-nephew to the legendary Napoleon himself and cousin, by my rough calculations, to the current French president.

Following the incident on the train, I felt confident I'd eluded any police agents from Washington, but I still proceeded slowly and methodically, which was maddening for such an urgent affair. It was not safe to be out in the light of day. After my escape from the train, I had waited until night in a frigid ditch and then found safe passage back to Baltimore in a covered mail-sleigh, lodging myself in the straw at the bottom of the cart with a few servants and a sleeping Hungarian peddler who, in the apparent throes of a dream, repeatedly kicked me in the stomach with a hobnailed boot. The driver rode through the night over rough stones and paths at a dashing rate as quick as any train.

Out of caution, I waited another day before going to the next Bonaparte address. The house was empty-or, rather, there were no servants and nobody responded to my knocking at the door. But I noticed the carriage house door was open and, as I stood outside, I could see shapes through the windows of the house. Propping myself on a ledge, I pressed against a window and thought I could hear men speaking in French.

When the door opened, I could see two of the figures inside more clearly. I knew one as the rogue who had almost killed me in the carriage factory, and the second to be his partner. The first wore a large bandage fastened around his arm where he had been crushed by the carriage after I had stabbed him.

A different man, the one closer to the street door, was handing over money to the two rogues, who were nodding and soon departed into the carriage house. This third man had the demeanor of being their leader. I waited until they had driven away and then rang.

The man returned to the door. He was grander than the two rogues. Not bigger, exactly, but better fashioned to provoke respect rather than mere fear, with perfectly squared shoulders. For a moment I stood paralyzed as he waited for some word from me. He looked back at me as I stared at him with a vague air of recognition.

"Mr. Bonaparte," I said finally, choking back a gasp. "You are Monsieur Bonaparte?"

He shook his head. "My name is Rollin. Young Monsieur Bonaparte is away, at West Point. You would like to leave word?" He instructed more than asked this, but I declined. There was something in his tone…

I promised to return another day and hastily began backing away, terrified that one of the rogues would have occasion to return and see me at the door. But even more I feared that third one, the man calling himself Rollin. He lifted his hat, slowly, to bid me good evening, and before he returned it to its place I knew exactly where I had first seen him. It had been so brief, and long before, halfway across the world.

Remembering that first vision of him, I comprehended, gradually, as I walked through the street, how it had all happened, how it had all been connected from Paris until now. How the Bonapartes had come to be involved. How in one attempted assassination in Baltimore indeed lay the future of France…

As these thoughts gathered themselves together, I walked rapidly, but somewhat carelessly, toward another boardinghouse Edwin had arranged for me upon my return from Washington. Suddenly, I felt a stinging pain travel across my back. I fell forward, then rolled onto my back. Above me, I saw flashes of a white horse, rearing upward to the sky, and a tall and powerful man on top. He unrolled his whip and this time caught my arm.

"Mr. Clark, attorney, isn't it? What a thing to see such a finely bred man wanted for murder." It was Slatter, the slave-trader, riding a perfect specimen of the largest Pennsylvania horse. I attempted to stand, but he kicked the side of my head with his boot. I writhed in pain on the ground and coughed up blood.

Slatter jumped down from the horse and, while holding me down with his dark mahogany cane, placed my wrists and ankles in shackles.

"Your sands are nearly run down, my friend! I've cleared two thousand dollars in the last month but will enjoy this even more."

"I did not shoot anyone! And I have no business with you!" I cried.

"But you had business with me the other week, didn't you? With that woolly-head young friend of yours? No, your business is not with me. It is with the city. It is always a pleasure for me to serve the police of Baltimore." The leading slave-traders often received the rolls of men and women wanted for arrest, since many of those were escaped slaves. "Perhaps you'd like to spend a night in my pen with the stock that are about to be shipped off, before you go to the police. I'm sure they will be anxious to see you again-we know you're such an avowed lover of their kind. Perhaps you even speak their nigger-tongue."

The shackles were immovable, and I had no choice but to walk along toward his slave pen as he pulled me by a long chain from his horse. Slatter seemed to relish the slow pace we took, as though he were parading me to thousands of onlookers, though, in fact, the flooded and dark streets were empty, and he bent his neck around often in order to take delight at the sight of me.

I was looking down in despair when I heard a sound of footsteps. I glanced up, and I suppose he must have seen my eyes widen with surprise. Turning around swiftly, he saw what I'd seen-a man springing from the ground with a yell to knock him over. Slatter's head hit the ground hard. He lifted his neck briefly, and then his eyes closed with a moan. Edwin Hawkins stood over him and searched Slatter's coat for the keys to my shackles.

"For goodness' sake!" I cried out. "I am desperate glad to see you, Edwin!"

Retrieving the keys, he freed me from my restraints. "Mr. Clark," he said, interrupting my exclamations of gratitude, "I must make tracks." He looked back at Slatter.

"Do not worry. He is unconscious," I said. "He won't be awake for a while yet."

"I have to leave Baltimore. Now, Mr. Clark. He knew me in my youth."

Then I realized. If Slatter had seen Edwin, and recognized the attacker as a man whom he had sold years before, or had just looked long enough to remember his face…Edwin would not only be convicted, he would be entered back into slavery. "Did he see you?"

"I don't know, Mr. Clark. But I can't risk finding out. I am sorry I won't be able to help you any longer. I know you will find the evidence you need."

"Edwin." I took his arm. "If only I had not shown surprise! He would not have turned at all, and you would never have been at risk of him seeing you. You have done this for Poe!"

"No. This I have done for you." He took my hand with a warm smile. "You will prove your name, and that will be reward for this. For me, you must go ahead. With heaven speed."

I nodded. "Leave here quickly, my friend," I whispered, "and be silent on your way." He disappeared into the streets.

I shackled Slatter's hands but left his feet and legs free so he could find help when he awoke. He did not look as tall as he had on the horse; in fact, he was a decrepit old man lying there, with a blank and sloppy expression. I could hardly move from this spot. With Edwin gone, I felt inconsolably alone, and I remembered longingly the comforts of Hattie's visits in prison, and Bonjour's appearance there, and the burst of strength I'd received from them.

A sudden thought forced me to my feet. "Bonjour," I gasped to myself. I heard Slatter coming to life in a series of groans, but I did not stop to look back at him. I raised myself onto the side of his horse and rode back in the direction I had come from.

"My horse!" Slatter cried. "You! Bring back my horse!"

My fears were realized when I saw that the door to the Bonaparte house I had just left was wide open. I tied the slave-trader's horse to a post outside and walked circumspectly through the front hall. It was quiet except for the sounds of audible, pained breathing. If there had been any other noises it's unlikely I would have heard them. They would have folded into the background of my mind, along with the furnishings. I was transfixed.

In the parlor, there had clearly been a struggle only minutes, maybe seconds, before I arrived. Chairs, lamps, curtains, and papers were scattered over the floor. The chandelier still shook with the violence. The victor was clear. Bonjour stood over the large figure of Rollin, who was perspiring pitifully. From the disarray at a nearby window, it was clear he had tried to jump out of it. Bonjour, though perhaps half his size, was holding him down and had a blade touching his throat.

His eyes met mine and I wondered: did he know me now too?

I had been leaving Paris with Auguste Duponte to begin our investigation of Poe's death. Climbing aboard the ship, Duponte announced there was a stowaway. You remember.

"Do request," he said to me, "Monsieur Clark, that the steward inform our ship's captain there is a stowaway on board."

"You shall want to know what I know!" cried this stowaway, Rollin, when he was revealed and accused of trying to steal the steamer's mail shipment. There was something in his tone that may have rekindled the memory in me when the same man asked, in a voice far too aggressive, "You would like to leave word?" at the door of the Bonaparte mansion. But more than that, it was the lift of his hat-revealing the square baldness that had been unwillingly shown that day at sea when he was flung from the rails. It was that sight that made me remember where I had seen him that time.

By the time I had discovered Bonjour there, the implications of this man's presence on the Humboldt had settled into my imagination. But to answer my previous question for myself: no, I do not think he knew me now. He had been watching for someone else that earlier day at sea.

Now he was staring right at me. Rollin's eyes burned with ghastly interest, his legs wet with water and spotted with flower petals that had spilled on the rug from a shattered vase.

Bonjour peered around. She smiled slightly, almost apologetically, at me. I could almost feel all the passion and regret of her kiss again while I looked upon her face.

"I am sorry, Monsieur Clark." She said this as though I were the one prostrate and pleading for my life.

"You," I said, standing upright with the revelation. "You poisoned me. It was not the police or the prison guards! It was you. You slipped the poison into my mouth when we kissed."

"After I found a way inside the prison, I saw that the walls of the hospital chambers were already giving way to the floods," she said. "I felt you could get out through the sewer passage, but I needed to find a way for you to be transferred there. You may say I helped you, monsieur."

"No, you did not do it to help me. You wanted to follow me to Duponte so he would find the men who shot the Baron, and whoever ordered it. You thought Duponte could still help and that I'd know where Duponte was."

"I wanted the same thing as you, Monsieur Clark. To find the truth."

"Please," begged the man on the floor. Bonjour kicked him fiercely in his stomach.

I looked on as the man twisted in pain. I took a step closer. "Bonjour, this will help nothing. The police can arrest them now."

"I have no trust in police, Monsieur Clark."

The man swallowed down some further plea and trembled pitifully.

Bonjour crouched on the floor, positioning her blade. "Leave," she said to me, pointing to the door.

"You do not owe the Baron vengeance, mademoiselle," I said. "You have fulfilled your obligations by discovering the man who ordered his killing. Murdering this villain now will only make your life wretched, will only force you to run, as you have had to before. And," I added, "I will be the sole witness to this crime. You will have to kill me, too."

I was surprised when Bonjour, after remaining dead still in the midst of contemplation, turned slowly to me with a tear at the corner of her eye. It seemed a true affection had arisen in her expression. She stepped gingerly toward me like a scared deer. She seemed to be holding her breath when she threw her arms around my shoulders with a low moan. It was less of an embrace, somehow, than when our bodies were brought together at the fortifications in Paris. It was more a need for support, and I stood straight as a pillar. "Bonjour. It will be made right. We have both helped ourselves. Let me help you." She then shoved me away as though I had been the one to pull her to me. I nearly fell against the edge of a sofa. There was something lost from her eyes that made me know that I would not see her again.

Bonjour let her dagger drop and, after a moment of looking over the scene she had created, she began kicking the man brutally across the face several times in a flurry of blows. Then she ran from the room. I breathed in relief that she had not killed him. And yet it was not my monologue that had moved her not to do so. Approaching the place where Rollin lay crumpled like a corpse, I saw what Bonjour had seen: one of the objects that had crashed to the floor during their struggle was a newspaper from that morning. On the first page was announced the death of the mysterious French baron in the hospital.

The slave-trader had not been mistaken, as I had thought, when he'd said I was wanted for murder. Bonjour, for her part, must have felt her obligation to avenge the Baron somehow burn and fade upon his death-perhaps, for the thief in her, the reward, his honor, disappeared past redemption. Perhaps, for the true criminal mind, honor did not continue beyond death; nothing continued beyond death-there was no heaven or hell for persons who sought those same territories here. Or perhaps true sorrow had made all else pale in comparison. Whatever the reason, she had abandoned her revenge.

I leaned down at the side of Rollin and found that he was insensible but only superficially injured. I wrapped his wounds with a piece of fabric I tore from a fringed curtain. Then, before leaving, I found the washbasin to try to expunge his blood from my hands.

My mind circled vigorously around what I had learned. Though I had made great strides in understanding all that had happened, I still had no evidence against the men who'd killed the Baron. I had nothing in my possession to convince the police of what I now had uncovered. Even if I waited for the two villains to return to the Bonapartes', they would not hesitate to eliminate me. Indeed, this would perhaps be Rollin's first order to them if he regained consciousness. Since the police would only want to arrest me, I would have no protection if I sent for them.

And I would remain forever the man who killed the real Dupin. That was what people would think. I was destroyed. I would hang for someone else's sins and, at the moment, I could not even decipher whose-these men, or Duponte's. Worst of all, I had let all this mess forever prevent the resolution of Poe's death.

With these thoughts, I walked up and down the streets of Baltimore, stopping only at intervals to rest. I walked until the early hours of the morning, and then sunrise came and still I walked.

" Clark?"

I turned around. As I did I realized I was not far from one of the district station houses, and so you can imagine that I was not entirely unprepared to see what I did.

"Officer White," I said, and then I greeted his clerk, too.

I looked down half bemused at the blood splattered like stains of guilt across the sleeves and buttons of my ragged coat, as they grabbed me.

32

ONE WEEK LATER, as I was sitting in the most comfortable armchair of my library, my mind turned to Bonjour, whom I had not seen since I had first left to visit the Bonapartes' address. Although she had been driven by her desire to avenge the Baron's death, and had not had any design of assisting me in my own plight, I harbored no ill will. In fact, I had little doubt I would see her again and believed she truly cared for me. There was no earthly reason to fear for her safety, wherever she was. I suppose if I had been able to fathom something about her through all of this, it was her complete self-sufficiency in surviving, though she believed she had depended on the Baron since he had exonerated her in a Paris court. She was, in the end, purely composed of the criminal character. All means were open to her to meet threat with threat, death with death.

When Officer White discovered me after the incident at the Bonaparte house, I would have fallen at his feet if he and his clerk had not caught me. My body was debilitated. I had not realized how long it had been since I had experienced any true rest. I awoke in one of the upstairs rooms of the Middle District station house. When I stirred and lifted myself, the police clerk appeared and brought in Officer White.

"Mr. Clark, are you still unwell?" the clerk asked solicitously.

"I feel stronger." Though I am not sure this was true, really. Still, I did not want to seem ungrateful for the kindness of placing me in their comfortable apartments. "Have you arrested me again?"

"Sir!" Officer White exclaimed. "We had been searching for you for several hours to ensure your well-being."

I saw that a box of various objects that had been removed from Glen Eliza was sitting on the floor. "I escaped from prison!" I exclaimed.

"And we were quite determined to restore your place there. However, in the meantime witnesses were discovered who had seen the murderers on the night of the Frenchman's lecture. They saw two men, including one badly injured and bandaged, and thus sticking in the memory of the witness. Both had pistols drawn as they stood at the wings of the lyceum. This was quite evidential of your innocence, but we were unable to find the men. Until yesterday." The clerk explained that a horse belonging to a prominent slave-trader had been reported stolen. It was located by a police officer at a house of an absent Baltimorean where there were, remarkably, also two men just returning from some errand who met the exact description of the witnesses to the Baron's murder! Though the men fled, and were suspected of boarding a private frigate with a third man, their behavior strongly demonstrated my innocence in the matter.

I learned, furthermore, that Hope Slatter, embarrassed to report that a black man had put him down, claimed the assault on him had been by some German foreigners. German seeming a nationality close enough to the police to French, and the horse being found in front of the house where the rogues were returning, the police felt certain that the assault on Slatter had been perpetrated by the same parties who had killed the Baron.

"So I am not to be arrested?" I asked, after some contemplation.

"Heavens, Mr. Clark!" the police clerk responded. "You are quite free! Don't you wish to be driven home?"

Others had not forgiven me for the long period of public denunciation against me. This became clear over the next months.

All that I had in possession would soon be at risk.

Glen Eliza felt empty and worthless without Hattie Blum. She and Peter were to be married and I could not in the inmost regions of my mind seek to disrupt that. They were both better people than I could be, perhaps; they had tried to steer me away from trouble, and had been deeply united by that very thing that had pushed me away from them. Hattie had risked her own reputation with her visits to my prison cell. Now that I was free, I wrote a brief letter thanking her with all my heart and wishing her happiness. I at least owed them tranquillity and peace.

For myself, I had none. My great-aunt had come to visit after I was restored to Glen Eliza, where she questioned me repeatedly about the "delusions" and "fanatical" ideas that had, in my long despair over my parents' death, ultimately led to my imprisonment.

"I did what I thought was right," I said, remembering Edwin Hawkins's words to me when I was hiding in the packinghouse.

She stood with her arms folded, her long black dress a great contrast to her snow-white hair. "Quentin, dear boy. You were arrested for murder! A jailbird! You are fortunate if anyone in Baltimore will keep your society. A woman like Hattie Blum needs a man as worthy as Peter Stuart. This house has become the very castle of indolence."

I looked at my great-aunt. She had been thrown into more of a passion over this than I had realized. "I'd have wanted nothing more than to marry Hattie Blum," I said, which was even more outrageous to her, since I was now talking about a woman shortly to be married. "Anything you can say meant to punish me further is far too little. I am happy for Peter. He is a good man."

"What would your father say! God forbid we should visit upon the dead the errors of the living. You, dear boy, are a great deal your mother's blood," she added with a dull mutter.

Before leaving that day, she flashed a glare at me intended, I later realized, as a threat. She examined Glen Eliza as though at any moment it could crumble from the moral dilapidation I had perpetrated.

Soon after, I was informed that my great-aunt had brought suit to claim possession of most of what I had inherited from my father's will, including Glen Eliza, on the basis of the mental incompetence and imbalance exhibited in my conduct since the irrational resignation of my position in Peter's practice…and my strong neglect of the Clark family investments and business interests, which had resulted in severely diminished value over the last two years…culminating in my wild, raving interruption at the fatal assembly of the Baron Dupin…my outrageous escape from prison, my rumored attempt to dig up a grave and encroach on a home on Amity Street…and all of this was proved by my complete lack of comprehension of the whole chronicle of actions.

I learned further that she had been helped in all this by Auntie Blum. It seemed that Auntie Blum had intercepted my letter of gratitude to Hattie. Inflamed to learn through my letter of Hattie's visits to my prison cell, Auntie Blum had immediately called upon Great-Auntie Clark.

Great-Auntie wrote me a letter, explaining that she was fighting for the honor of my father's name and because she loved me.

I began to ready my defense. I worked feverishly, hardly leaving the library, calling to mind the former times when Duponte would sit at the table sometimes for days without interruption.

I prepared as well as I could to defend my actions. The process was strenuous. Not only to produce responses to each accusation that my great-aunt would allege as evidence that I had squandered and misused my good fortune and name in society; but also to frame it in the language of the law that I had thought I had abandoned.

Auntie Blum had reportedly advised that the case against me emphasize the disregard of my family's wealth. She calculated that polite Baltimore would not brook the injustice of any such pecuniary offense. This was Baltimore 's lynch law.

Meanwhile, I contemplated the many witnesses and friends I might call to my defense, but sadly concluded that many-like Peter, of course-could no longer speak in my favor. The newspapers, having only recently finished with the sensational news of my arrest, escape, and exoneration, now looked happily upon this lawsuit as containing an interesting sequel to my affairs, and always wrote about it with a tone of suspicion that it might prove me guilty yet of some other, larger misdoing.

At times, I felt convinced that I should peacefully leave this shattered house, Glen Eliza, which I seemed now to float inside rather than live in. As I loped through the upper stories, and climbed up one set of stairs and down another, it only seemed to confirm this feeling-word of my great-aunt's suit, indeed, left me asking myself, "Where in the land am I?" The house, with all its rambling divisions and subdivisions, with its wide spaces, still seemed to have room for only a few particles of myself.

I do not know why I stopped before one particular framed silhouette. It was one I had rarely noticed before. Even if I were to reproduce it here, it would look unremarkable to my reader's eye: an ordinary man's profile, with an old-fashioned three-point hat. It was my grandfather, who had turned furious upon hearing of my father's intention to marry Elizabeth Edes, a Jewish woman. He threatened and fumed, and stripped my father of family money rightfully owed to him. No matter, my father said, for it put him as a young man in a position not so different from my mother's family, who had built their own foundations. Through his packinghouses-"through my enterprise," he said-Father prospered enough to build one of Baltimore 's unique mansions.

But while my father always spoke of his Industry and Enterprise, the traits he found opposite of Genius, I realized, looking upon this picture, that he was the pioneer he had always claimed not to be. For he and Mother had created this world from nothing for the sake of their happiness-and how much impatience and insistence, how much genius, this entailed it could not be said. My father had the very pains of genius he warned against. This is why he tried so hard to keep me away from any but the ordinary path-not because he had embraced it, but because he had deviated from it and found himself, though victorious, also wounded.

The grand old patriarch in the silhouette even unto death did not retract his objections to my mother's Jewish blood having been interjected into our orderly family line. Yet my parents had hung his silhouette in a central place in Glen Eliza, the place erected for our happiness, rather than hiding it, abandoning it, or destroying it. The meaning of this had never struck me fully until this moment. I felt an instant possession of this place and of my family and returned to my desk and to the work at hand.

I received no visitors until the evening Peter arrived.

"No servant to open the door, I see?" he commented, then frowned at himself, as though confessing he could not regulate his mouth sometimes. "Glen Eliza is still as magnificent as when we were children, playing bandits in the halls. Some of my happiest times."

"Think of it, Peter. You, a bandit!"

"Quentin, I want to help."

"How do you mean, Peter?"

He regained his usual bluster. "You never were meant to be a single attorney; you're too excitable. And perhaps I was not meant to have another partner other than you-I have been through two men in the last six months, by the bye. In all events, you need help."

"You mean with my great-aunt's case against me?"

"Wrong!" he exclaimed. "We will turn it into your case against Great-Auntie Clark, my friend." He smiled broadly, like a child.

I proudly welcomed Peter in that day, and he devoted as many hours as he could each evening after completing his work at the law offices. His help was of tremendous value, and I began to feel more optimistic about my chances. Moreover, it seemed I had never known anybody so intimately as my friend, and we talked as people only can before the flickering light of a fireplace.

Still, we both refrained from mentioning Hattie. Until one night, in our shirtsleeves, while making our strategies. Peter said, "At this point in the defense, we shall call Miss Hattie to testify, to show your honest bearing and-"

I looked at Peter with an alarmed expression, as though he had just screamed loudly.

"Peter, I cannot. What I mean-well, you see how it is."

He sighed anxiously, and looked down at his drink. He was taking a nightcap of warm toddy. "She loves you."

"Yes," I said, "as does my great-aunt. Either those who love me fail me, or I fail them, as with Hattie."

Peter stood up from his chair. "My engagement with Hattie is dead, Quentin."

"What? How?"

"I ended it."

"Peter, how could you?"

"I could see it every time she would look in my direction, as though she wished to be looking past me over to you. It is not that she doesn't have love for me; in a way she does. But you have something stronger, and I must not be in your way."

I could hardly stammer a response. "Peter, you mustn't…"

"None of your hums and hahs. It's done. And she agreed, after much discussion. I always thought she loved you because you were handsome, and so took a bit of queer joy in having won her after all. But she believed in you when there was nothing to believe in and nobody else to believe." He chuckled morbidly, then clapped his large hand around my shoulder. "That is when I realized she is a great deal like you."

I talked through in a rush what I should do, and whether I should immediately drive to Hattie's… He waved me back into my seat.

"Not that simple, Quentin. There is still her family, which forbids her from communing with you, particularly now that you are under threat of losing all your possessions, even Glen Eliza itself. First, you must prove yourself, and Hattie will be yours again. Until then, it is better that they think Hattie and I are to be married. If even you see her on the street, turn the other way-do not be seen together."

I was ecstatic, and propelled into a new frenzy of industry, more determined than ever to overcome the new obstacles engendered by my great-aunt's lawsuit.

But Peter was soon oppressed with business at the office, which cut severely into his time available to give me assistance. Moreover, once the trial began, the matter became increasingly intricate and grim. Peter's clever strategy of proving Great-Auntie Clark hypocritical and malicious was stricken by the amount of support she had from the population of good society in Baltimore, especially from friends of Hattie's family. In addition, there were simply too many points of the chronology that could not be cleared up sufficiently to the public eye.

"Then there is the entire episode of spying on this baron that her lawyer has mentioned," said Peter one evening during the trial.

"But that can be explained! To find the correct conclusions about Poe's death-"

"Anything can be explained-but can it be understood? Even Hattie, for all that she loves you, wants to understand this, and is pained that she does not. You talk of seeking the conclusions about Poe's death, but what are they? Here lies the difference between success and insanity. To make out your case, you must adapt your argument to the understanding of the dullest man of the twelve in that box."

At length, as the case against me worsened, it became clear that Peter was correct. I could not win. However hard I labored, I could not save Glen Eliza. I could not win Hattie back. I could not accomplish any of this without a solution to Poe's death-without showing that in all of this I had found the truth that I had sought for so long.

I knew what I must do. I'd use the one persuasive story of Poe's demise that had come out of this ordeal: the Baron Dupin's. It was my last hope. It had been kept in my memory, and now I wrote it out, word for word, in the form of an address I would make to the court…

I present to you, Your Honor and Gentlemen of the Jury, the truth about this man's death and my life. The narrative has not been told before…

I could see immediately that this would do it. Indeed, the more I read what I'd scribbled into my memorandum book, the more the Baron's story seemed possible-then plausible-likely! I knew it could not be trusted, that it had been manipulated and fashioned for the hearing and satisfaction of the public; I knew, too, that it would now be believed. All that follows will be the plain truth. I would speak fictions, out and out fables, probably lies. Yet I would be believed again, respected again, as my father would want. And I must tell you this story because I am the one nearest the truth. (Duponte, if only Duponte were here.) Or, rather, the only one still living.

33

DECEMBER SAW SOMETHING new and familiar in France. Louis-Napoleon, president of the Republic, decided to replace his prefect of police, Monsieur Delacourt, with Charlemagne de Maupas. He would serve as a stronger ally. "I need some men to help me cross this ditch," Louis-Napoleon reportedly told de Maupas. "Will you be one of them?"

That was a sign.

So were the new secret policemen assigned by Louis-Napoleon to monitor both the prefecture and the palace of the government.

President Louis-Napoleon assembled a team to carry out his coup. On the first of the month, he gave each member half a million francs. Early the next morning, de Maupas, the prefect, and his police arrested the eighty legislators who Louis-Napoleon feared could most effectively oppose him. They were held in the prison at Mazas. They would not have been legislators anymore, in any event, for what Louis-Napoleon did next was to dissolve the assembly, meanwhile seizing printing presses and sending his army to kill the leaders of the Red Republicans as soon as they showed themselves in the streets. Other opponents, mostly those of fine old French families, were immediately exiled from the country.

It was all rather quick.

Louis-Napoleon declared France an empire again. It was remembered that Louis-Napoleon as a boy was reported to have pleaded with his uncle, the first emperor of France, not to go off to Waterloo, at which the emperor commented: "He will be a good soul, and perhaps the hope of my race."

On my way to the courthouse each morning I read more news of the political affairs in France. It was said that Jérôme Napoleon Bonaparte of Baltimore (called "Bo"), cousin of the new emperor-the man I had met flanked by two costume swords, the man never acknowledged by his now deceased uncle Napoleon Bonaparte because of his American mother-was to travel to Paris and meet with Emperor Napoleon III to repair the lengthy breach.

Americans were entranced with these stories from Paris, perhaps because the coup seemed so different from any upheaval that could take place here. My interest was slightly more narrow or, rather, more pertinent.

I wrote several cards to the various Bonaparte homes, hoping to find out that Jérôme Napoleon Bonaparte had not yet left for Paris and would speak with me, even though I presumed he would not remember our brief meeting at the dress ball with Monsieur Montor. I had questions. Though they might not do me any good in particular, I wanted the answers anyway.

Meanwhile, many onlookers came to court to see the continuation of my earlier humiliations. It seemed unfortunate to them, I suppose, that my previous appearances in the press had been inconclusive and had not reached an appropriate climax. Fortunately, many spectators were eventually driven away by the tedium of the technical matters that filled most of the opening days of the trial. It was around this time that I was surprised to receive a note with the Bonaparte seal, assigning me a time to come to one of their residences.

It was a larger house than the one I had seen the rogues in; it was more secluded, surrounded by wild trees and uncultivated grassy hills. I was ushered inside by a very willing servant, and on the grand stairway met at least two other servants (it was a long stairway), whose shared trait was their nervousness undertaking some task or another. The mansion was grand and in no way subdued or timid in its grandeur-showing the most marvelous chandeliers and gold-bordered tapestries, which always kept the eye looking up.

I was surprised to find seated in a massive chair burnished with silver not Jérôme Napoleon Bonaparte-the leading male of the Baltimore branch of the family-but his mother, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. As a young girl she had captured the heart of Napoleon's brother and was married to him for two years before Napoleon, through various machinations, including calling in the pope to annul it, ended the relationship. Though she was not now costumed as a queen, as the first time I'd met her, the regal attitude remained.

This matron, now in her sixties, had bare arms with the most luminous bracelets, too many to count, spiraling up and down her wrists. Upon her head she wore a black velvet bonnet from which orange feathers jutted out, giving her a frightening and wild aspect. Several tables of jewels and garish garments surrounded her. On the other side of her chambers, a girl I took to be a servant rocked in a chair like an invalid.

"Madame Bonaparte." I bowed, feeling for a moment that I should lean down on one knee. "You would not remember meeting me, but I was at a ball where you were dressed as a queen and I was not in a costume."

"You are right, young man. I do not remember meeting you. But it was I who answered your card."

"And Monsieur Bonaparte, your son…?"

"Bo is already on his way to meet the new emperor of France," she said, as though it were the most pedestrian reason for a tour abroad.

"I understand. I have read in the papers of the prospects for such a meeting. Perhaps monsieur could be kindly informed that I should be most obliged to arrange an interview upon his return."

She nodded but seemed to forget the request as soon as I had spoken it. "I would not quarrel with an attorney," she said, "but I wonder that you should have time to be here when you are quite occupied each day at court, Mr. Clark."

I was surprised that she knew anything of my situation, though I reminded myself of the interest taken by the press. Still, though my claim to sanity and my life's fortune was hanging in the balance, for a woman whose son was reported by the newspapers as journeying to meet an emperor, my troubles seemed rather trifling business. I sat in a particular armchair as instructed. I surveyed the rest of the room and noticed a bright red parasol, gleaming as brilliantly as her jewels, leaning against the side of a large chest. Underneath was a mostly dried puddle of water, indicating its recent use. In my mind, I saw again the scene before me at the Baron's doomed lecture hall, and the indistinct lady under a bejeweled red parasol.

Had it been she?

I realized, with a sudden chill, why this woman must have come to the lecture. As a witness not to the Baron's revelations on Poe's death, but to the revelation of a new death.

I thought I had understood most of the history of events when I'd read of the recent tales of power and death in Paris in the newspapers. Louis-Napoleon, when told of Duponte's re-emergence in Paris, a re-emergence I had stimulated, thought back to the legends of the analyst's abilities. He and the leaders of his plan for a secret coup must have believed Duponte could jeopardize it, could ratiocinate and expose their goals of a coup too early. Napoleon had ordered Duponte eliminated at about the time we were leaving for Baltimore. It was meant to be an easy task for one of the men of abandoned character known to the police, with whom they sometimes made mutually advantageous arrangements.

They missed their opportunity while Duponte was still in Paris, and soon he was leaving with me. Many years later, I heard reports that they had thoroughly raided and torn apart all of Duponte's rooms while we were on the way to the harbor. Frantic, they planned his elimination at sea, only to find the expulsion of their assassin, the stowaway, one of whose aliases was Rollin. They had lost us to America.

Yet there were Bonapartes in Baltimore; indeed, there was Jérôme Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been denied his birthright. Bo had been waiting his whole life to realign himself with the branch of his family in France, to be royalty. Now came his chance to prove his worth to the heir to the power of their ancestor, to this soon-to-be emperor. The men following the Baron Dupin, the men who killed him under the guidance of the original stowaway, had not come for him at all. Rollin had hidden himself in Baltimore because he knew Duponte might recognize him from that incident on board the ship. I had seen him in my poison-induced haze in prison, where he had been incarcerated briefly for some involvement with a local criminal element. The stowaway Rollin-and his two henchmen-had been here to kill Duponte. For the sake of the future of France.

Except the Baron had made the mistake of disguising himself as his rival. And had been killed in his stead.

That was how I had come to understand the events since encountering the stowaway Rollin at the house of the Bonapartes. But now, meeting this woman, I had to wonder: what had she done in all this?

I turned from the parasol back to its keeper. "You knew the part of the plot your son was designing?"

"Bo?" She let out a chirp of amusement. "He is too busy with his garden and his books for such things. He is a member of the bar but never saw fit to practice. He is a true man of the world. Certainly, he wishes to assume his proper place, to regain our property and our rights as Bonapartes, but he has not the strength of spirit to be a leader."

"Then who?" I asked. "Who saw to it that you would hunt Duponte to win favor back with Napoleon?"

"I would not expect such a want of courtesy in my home from a strikingly handsome young gentleman as yourself." But her reprimand seemed light. Indeed, she leisurely passed a glance up and down my body in a way that gave me discomfort. She had been grinning, but now her face became flat and serious as she talked about her son. "Bo…I had endeavored to instill in my son that he was too high in birth to ever marry an American woman. Yet he disgraced himself by doing so. I wished for him in his youth to take the hand of Charlotte Bonaparte, a cousin of his, to return us to the seat of influence, but he refused."

"You refused the wishes of your parents, too, when a girl," I noted.

"I did so to be brought under the wings of an eagle!" she said passionately. "Yes, the emperor had dealt with me in a hard fashion, but I long ago forgave him. What did he say of me to Marshal Bertrand before he died? ‘Those whom I have wronged have forgiven me; those whom I have loaded with kindness have forsaken me.' Ah, Napoleon, I have not let my grandsons forget that their grand-uncle was the Great Emperor!"

She lifted her hands upward and I could now observe more closely a gown that hung behind her. It was the wedding dress she had worn in 1803, in the ceremony in Baltimore that had ignited the world into consternation, that had sent emissaries from America scuttling across an ocean to try to appease the fury of the French leader. I had read about this dress recently when educating myself on the history of these episodes. It was India muslin and lace, and had caused something of a scandal as there was only one garment underneath it. "All the clothes worn by the bride might be put in my pocket," a Frenchman reported in a letter to Paris.

It hung on the wall in perfectly fossilized condition, seeming, if one were not close enough to see signs of age in the fabric, as though it was quite new, and might be rushed to a church at any moment.

Suddenly there were the sounds of a baby, a rough, brittle cry that grew increasingly loud. Startled, I looked around for its source, as though it were some supernal happening, and found that the young servant girl rocking and swaying in the corner was in fact holding a baby, no more than eight months old. This, it was explained to me, was Charles Joseph Napoleon, the youngest child of Bo and his wife, Susan. Madame Bonaparte was caring for her new grandchild while Bo and his American wife traveled to Paris to beseech the emperor for the long-awaited rights of the Baltimore members of the family.

The woman took the baby from the nurse and curled her fingers around him tightly. "Here is one of the hopes of our race. And have you ever seen my other grandson? He attended Harvard and now studies at West Point. He is everything that my husband was not. Tall, distinguished, soon to be a soldier of the most capable order." Madame Bonaparte cooed at the little creature then said, "He would make a very presentable emperor of the French."

"Only if Louis-Napoleon agrees to return your offspring to the line of succession, madame," I pointed out.

"The new emperor, Louis-Napoleon, is a rather dull man, on the order of George Washington. He shall need to secure a far stronger ingenuity for the empire to survive."

"From your family, you mean?" The baby had now begun howling, and Madame Bonaparte returned him to the nurse.

"I am too old to coquette, as was once my only stimuli. I have been tired of killing time, Mr. Clark. To doze away existence. Once I had everything but money. Here, I have nothing but money. I shall not let men of my blood be mere American colonists like my son has mistaken himself for."

"You did this, then. You agreed to eliminate a man, a genius, because Louis-Napoleon worried he could foresee his plot to overthrow the Republic."

She shrugged slightly. "We have given money and comfort to travelers from France, under my direction-yes-if that is what you mean. Their orders came from other parties, not from me."

"And did they accomplish what they were directed to do?"

She waved the nurse out of the room and frowned. "Dolts," she said. "They mistook one man for another. I understand they were told by the Paris police to expect your presence around this Duponte they were after, yet they saw you waiting around the hotels of this other-this false Baron, this false Duponte. No matter, for what was needed was achieved: no one interfered with Louis-Napoleon's plans, and now he has ascended." She examined me closely again and I could feel the acute judgment of her eyes growing.

"Tell me," she said. "From what we have understood, you brought along these two men of genius in some attempt to find a poet that you fancy. I have heard about this Poe. His talent has mostly been dismissed by America."

"Not for long," I said.

She laughed. "You do have faith. Perhaps you will be interested that I have heard that young poets and writers in Paris are now reading him in great numbers, your Poe. It seems he was like their own Monsieur Balzac-brilliant but luckless, doomed to be a puppet of fate. He will be brought into the European spirit, as all the better American minds are. Yet this is not enough for your Poe-worship, is it, Mr. Clark? My son is not dissimilar from how you must be; he believes books are written primarily for his personal readership."

"Madame Bonaparte, my motives are not important. This is not about me."

"But, stay! Think of it, dear Mr. Clark. You have helped by giving us an important task to perform, which has allowed us to prove our loyalty to France. We have ensured a new emperor from this, and he will create an empire in which my family can survive forever! I have spent a lifetime to see to it that my children have their proper inheritance, and would give my life for it now. What about you? You were but a chrysalis and you made the mistake of giving up what your family made you into. Tell me, what did you find?"

I rose from my chair without answering. "I have only one other question, Madame Bonaparte. If they came to know they assassinated the wrong man at the lyceum that night, did they then locate the right one? Has Duponte been killed, too?"

"I have told you," the woman said slowly, "I only provide comfort. I provide a place to start, you might say, a birthplace for noble plans. Others must decide the rest for themselves."

I had written and discarded a whole notebook of letters to Auguste Duponte. I detailed for him not only the hard reality-that Poe, apparently, had not modeled his character C. Auguste Dupin from any real person, but rather and remarkably only from imagination. I included not just this, but also the steps of thinking that had led me to reach this conclusion, knowing he would have an interest in the line of reasoning. However, if Duponte was still alive and escaped, I did not know where to address any letters. Not to Paris, not to his former residence, I felt certain. He would not be in this Paris, not in Louis-Napoleon's Third Empire, where his genius was seen as an enemy to the emperor's unending ambitions.

It was seeing the anxiety in Madame Bonaparte's face at the close of our interview, when I asked whether Rollin and his rogues had found Duponte, that made me decide Duponte was probably closer than I'd considered. He had been patiently waiting-not for me, exactly, but it would be me he would have to see.

Passing the bustle of porters and guests at the massive Barnum's Hotel one day, these various thoughts dissolved into an idea. Returning to Glen Eliza, I considered that my time to act might be short. I started on my way back to Barnum's. I did not leave, though, without remembering to reach into the closet for the old pistol that the police had returned along with my other possessions. This time I checked-before slipping it into my pocket-that its age and disuse had not left the hammer entirely immobile.

"Sir?"

An ashen clerk with tight whiskers glared at me suspiciously and waited for me to say something.

"Monsieur," I said abruptly and, as I'd hoped, he raised an eyebrow of interest at the French word. "There is a member of the French sovereign class currently residing in your hotel."

He nodded with all the depth of his responsibility. "Indeed, sir. He has been staying in the room once occupied by the Baron who visited Baltimore earlier this year. This is his brother. The Duke." He leaned in to whisper this last word confidentially. "The noble lineage is most evident in both of them."

"The Duke." I smiled. "Yes. But when did our imperial Duke begin his stay?"

"Oh, as soon as his brother, I mean the noble Baron, left. His current presence is most covert-with all that is happening in France, you know."

I nodded, amused at the ease with which he'd yielded his secret. As though having the same thought, he now declaimed that he was not able to supply the location of the royal guest's room.

"You do not have to, sir," I said, and we shared a confidential nod. Of course I knew the room. I had spied on the Baron when he had stayed there.

I ascended the staircase with expectations racing through my blood.

I now remember Duponte as looking rather pale and haggard during our meeting, as though he had been all used up since we'd first met, or half used up at least. He was sitting serenely in the Baron Dupin's old hotel room when I came in. He didn't appear disappointed in having been discovered by me. I suppose I'd imagined that his remarkable composure would come unfurled by my surprise appearance, that he would speak in anger and threaten me if I seemed likely to expose him with the knowledge I now possessed of his whereabouts and his deeds. He had known the Baron would be killed in his place, and he had done nothing to prevent it.

He politely offered me a chair. The truth is, he was no less composed than ever. Then he pulled the bell for the hotel porter and told the man to take his trunk. I looked at him inquisitively.

"I had long given up on you," I said.

"It is time for me to leave," he replied.

"Now that I have come, you mean?" I asked.

He looked over at me. "You have seen the newspapers. All that has occurred in Paris."

I removed the pistol from my coat, studied it as though I had never seen it before, and placed it near him on a table.

"They might have followed me-if they are still looking for you, I mean. I have no desire to endanger you, Monsieur Duponte, despite the fact that I have been endangered by you. Keep this close to you."

"I do not know if they have still been looking for me, but if they have, they will not much longer."

I understood. The Baltimore Bonapartes had traveled to Paris in hopes of being rewarded for their loyalty to the new emperor. If they'd succeeded, they would have no motivation to continue supporting a search for Duponte, even though Madame Bonaparte and her rogues knew now they had failed to kill the real object of the assassination.

"The Baron is dead. You knew all along he would be killed in your place, and allowed it," I said. "You, monsieur, you have been the murderer."

A gong rang uproariously through the hotel. Duponte said, "Shall we dine? I have kept myself in my rooms too long. For the sake of fine food, I can afford the risk of being seen in public."

The vast dining room held approximately five hundred people sitting down to Chesapeake Bay shad. A colored "major-domo" signaled a gong to sound at each course, and all the covers on the next dishes were lifted simultaneously by waiters posted at each table.

At length I peered around to find a waiting assassin or perhaps a person who had known the Baron Dupin and would now think he's seeing his ghost. Yet, the tired countenance my companion now wore held as little resemblance to the Baron's vivid imitation of Duponte as to the old Duponte himself.

"No. I am not the murderer," Duponte now answered my earlier remark evenly. "I am not, but perhaps you are, you and the Baron, if you like. The Baron wished to disguise himself as me. Had I control over that? I tried to keep it away. I had remained in my rooms in Paris. But you needed ‘Dupin,' for your own purposes, Monsieur Clark. The Baron needed ‘Dupin' for his. Louis-Napoleon needed a ‘Dupin' to fear. Your arrival in Paris and your persistence made me accept that however much I remained dormant, the idea of ‘Dupin' would not. It was, as you said, something sort of immortal."

Ah, but you are not Dupin! Never were!

It was at the end of my tongue. I was ready to seize the conversation and wrest it into my power. My thoughts were still buzzing with questions, though.

"When did you know? When did you know they were coming after you? That those men, supported by the Bonapartes, wanted to murder you."

Duponte shook his head as if he did not know the answer.

"But on the Humboldt you knew there was the stowaway aboard, that villain Rollin. It started then. Monsieur, I am witness to it all!"

"No, I did not know there was a stowaway. Rather, I knew that if there was a stowaway there, they were hunting me."

"I suppose you guessed!" I exclaimed.

Duponte grinned just for a flash. He nodded.

I believe that day I felt the inner pain of Duponte that had made him the way he was when I'd first discovered his stationary life in Paris -alone, unintentional in all things. Everyone had believed that he possessed extraordinary powers after he had deciphered the Lafarge poisoning case. The young Duponte was an unnaturally confident man, and he himself began to believe that his abilities were of the almost supernatural nature that others wrote about in the newspapers. The stories about him enhanced his genius, perhaps even allowed for it in the first place. Yet I still could not answer whether genius had been created through the faith of the outside world. Readers often feel that the Dupin of Poe's tales finds the truth because he is a genius. Read again. This is only part of it. He finds the truth because someone has faith in him throughout-without his friend, there would be no C. Auguste Dupin.

"Each time I saw Louis-Napoleon review his troops," said Duponte, "I could see not the future, as the superstitious fool would believe about me, but the present-he was not content with being elected president. I suppose Prefect Delacourt warned him of me after I was seen out in Paris, with you, by his spies."

"The Baron told me of what happened to Catherine Gautier. Did Prefect Delacourt warn Louis-Napoleon because you were against him in that case? Did you wish vengeance on him by escaping him?"

"The prefect's actions were motivated by him having done me wrong, not my having wronged him. Our own past perversity, not that of others, sets us against someone for life. Prefect Delacourt was removed in favor of the new prefect for many reasons, I am certain-one of those may have been the failure to successfully find me before you and I left Paris together. De Maupas is not as astute a man as Delacourt, but he is far more competent, the two traits having no bridge between them-and, as a hobby, de Maupas is quite ruthless."

"Do you believe they learned they had murdered the Baron instead of you?"

Duponte now trimmed away a piece of Maryland ham, the second course brought by our waiter. "Perhaps. You certainly proclaimed the Baron's identity to the police loud enough, Monsieur Clark! It was never clear to the public, and is likely still unclear to those concerned in Paris. Chances are, the rogues who killed the Baron here heard of the truth. For their own sakes, they probably kept the fact secret from their superiors in Paris. Instead, their leader-that stowaway sent here to have charge over the mission-has quietly hunted me. However, I knew this would be the one place in Baltimore they would not look for me: the Baron's last rooms in the city. I came here during the Baron's lecture and have shown myself in the streets only now and then at night. The hotel believes I have come to mourn for my ‘brother,' the noble Baron, in peace, and has left me alone. Now that Louis-Napoleon has successfully surprised Paris into becoming an empire, and has presently held a successful vote to that effect, the stowaway surely is beginning to believe that their mistake concerning me and the Baron has passed its time of relevancy. If the American Bonaparte son succeeds in his mission, the stowaway may quietly stay in France for the rewards due to him before there are any further political changes. He and the American Bonapartes shall say nothing of their own errors, you can be sure. To Paris, I will be terribly dead."

I thought about the plain apartments of his hotel room upstairs and rehearsed in my mind what Duponte's life would have been like in the months since the Baron's murder, hiding here in plain view. He had books-in fact, the place was littered with books, as though a library had collapsed and disbursed itself at will. All of the titles seemed to relate to sediment, minerals, and general characteristics of rocks. In the darkness and gloom of these weeks, he had turned to the workings of geology. This struck me as horribly base and useless, that tomb of books and stones, and I was irritable that he was now implying a demand for my sympathies.

"Do you know the pinch my life has been in, Monsieur Duponte, since beginning our adventure?" I demanded. "I was presumed guilty of killing the Baron Dupin until the police came to their senses. Now I must fight or lose my entire estate, Glen Eliza itself, all that I possess."

I explained, through a last course of watermelon, what had happened in prison and upon my escape and my discovery of Bonjour and the rogues. After we finished our large meal, we walked upstairs to return to his rooms.

"I must relate the full story of Poe's death in court," I said to him, "in one last bid to show that in all this I acted with reason and not imbecile dreams."

Duponte looked at me with interest. "What will you say, monsieur?"

"You never intended to resolve Poe's death, did you?" I asked sadly. "You used it as a distraction, knowing it would soon enough look to the world as though you had been killed here. You were inspired when you read the Baron's newspaper announcement in Paris that he would set the trap for himself that would free you from the expectations of others. That was why you thrilled at the idea of that Von Dantker being sent to Glen Eliza by the Baron-so his imitation of you could be perfected. You only went out of the house at night to ensure the Baron's charade would succeed. You simply wanted to kill the notion, once and for all, that you were the real ‘Dupin.'"

Duponte nodded at this last statement, but would not look directly at me. "When I met you, Monsieur Clark, I was angry at your insistence to see me in that light, as ‘Dupin.' I then realized that only through studying Poe's tales and studying you would I understand what it was you and so many others perennially looked for in such a character. There is no real Dupin anymore, and never will be." He had a strange mix of relief and horror in his tone. Relief that he no longer carried the burden of being the master ratiocinator, of being the real Dupin. Horror at having to be someone else.

I would tell him the hard truth. "You are not Dupin!" I would say. "You never were. There was no such man ever alive; Dupin was an invention." After all, perhaps that was why I had searched so lustily to find him again. To make him feel with me the sting of what had been lost. To take away something and thus leave him more alone.

But I did not say it.

I thought about what Benson had said to me about the dangers to the susceptible imagination of reading Poe. To believe you were in Poe's writings. Perhaps, along the same lines, Duponte had once believed himself in a mental world created by Poe, had thought he was in the tales of Dupin. Yet he was more present in a world like the one Poe had imagined than most of us, and who was to say that did not make him the real embodiment of the character whom I had met first on a page in Graham's magazine? Did it matter whether he was the cause or the effect?

"Where?" I asked Duponte. "Where will you go?"

Instead of answering, he said musingly: "There is much admirable in you, monsieur."

I do not know why, but this statement astonished me, lifting my spirits, and I asked him to elaborate.

"Some people, you understand, cannot get out of their positions. They cannot be among the missing, even if desired. I could not, here or in Paris, until now, and Monsieur Poe could not even until death. You could have left all along and you did not." He paused. "What will you say in court?"

"I will tell them the answers. I will give them the Baron Dupin's story of Poe's death. People will believe it."

"Yes, they will. You will win the case if you do this?" Duponte asked.

"I will win. It will be as true to them as anything else. It is the only way."

"And as for Poe?"

"Perhaps," I said quietly, "it is as good as any other ending."

"How very like an attorney you are, after all," said Duponte, with a faraway smile.

At length the porter came to secure the balance of the Duke's belongings. Duponte gave him various instructions. I retrieved my hat and bid him good evening. My steps lingered a bit as I entered the hall, but though wanting a last sight by which to remember Duponte, I only saw him struggling to arrange some unwieldy geological instruments to be transported. I wished he would turn and remind me I was not seeing any ordinary man. Call out an insult-"Dolt!" perhaps. Or "numskull!"

"I thought much of you, Duke," I muttered to myself, and bowed.

34

THE DAY SOON came for me to sit upon the witness stand and tell the full "truth" of Poe's death. To provide convincing evidence that the actions alleged as delusional and fantastical were in fact fruitful, rational, and conspicuously normal on my part. Peter had worked assiduously in my aid throughout the trial, particularly as to these points, and we had at least come to be held even with our legal adversaries in the prevailing judgment of the populace. The opposing lawyer had a lion-like voice that roared the jury into submission. Peter said that my presentation of Poe's death would be needed to obtain our victory.

Hattie, her aunt, and additional Blum family members arrived each day to court. They were perplexed by Peter's insistence on laboring over my defense ("and that after young Clark 's behavior!"), but came dutifully to support the man they expected to marry their Hattie. I believe they also came to watch my disgrace and financial collapse. Hattie and I were able to have private words at intervals but never for long. Each time, the eye of her aunt found us, and each time she innovated new techniques to prevent any further intercourse.

This morning's testimony was widely anticipated among our society. The courtroom audience swelled from its usual numbers. I was, in particular, to prove that all of this was indeed an attempt to seek answers to a mystery about Poe's death by showing the reality of this claim: by answering the mysteries themselves. On some nights, I'd had dreams about it. In them, I thought I could see the literary figure C. Auguste Dupin-who resembled quite precisely, though not uniformly, Auguste Duponte-and could hear him dictate each particular. Yet when I woke I could describe no conclusions, could re-create no ratiocination, could find only conflicting fragments of ideas and sentences, and felt helpless and frustrated. That is when the Baron would reappear to my mind, and I would be grateful that I had his firm answers, his reliable and dramatic answers, answers that would satisfy any public demand.

Mere words that would save all I possessed.

There were stares from the onlookers, the same species of stares that had greeted the Baron on the lyceum stage. Stares of greed, the signs of a bargain between speaker and hearers to reach into the lowest part of the souls of both. Many Poe spectators who had once longed to hear the Baron were here. I would reveal how Poe died, it was said throughout the city. I could see Neilson Poe and John Benson coming into the room, men who, in very different ways, had needed those answers, any answers. I saw Hattie-for whom I would be saving a life we could have together, keeping for us a home in Glen Eliza, just by licking my lips with the Baron's honey of persuasion. Just by telling a story.

The judge called my name, and I looked down at the lines I'd written. I took a breath.

"I present to you, Your Honor and Gentlemen of the Jury, the truth about this man's death and my life. The narrative has not been told before. Whatever has been taken away from me, one last possession remains: this story."

Could I insist, as the Baron had, that what seemed true must be true? Yes, yes, why not? Wasn't I a lawyer? Wasn't it my job, my role?

"There are those of our city today who tried to stop it. There are those sitting here among you who still believe me a criminal, a liar, an outcast, a clever, vile murderer. Me, Your Honor: Quentin Hobson Clark, citizen of Baltimore, member of the Bar, a fond reader.

"This story is not about me…" Here I looked down at my notes, and skipped ahead, reading almost to myself. "It was about something greater than I am, greater than all this, about a man by whom time will remember us though you had forgotten him before the earth settled. Somebody had to do it. We could not just keep still. I could not keep still…"

I opened my mouth to say more, but I could not. There was another choice here, I realized. I could tell the story of what had failed. Of finding Duponte, of bringing him here, of the Bonapartes' men hunting him and mistakenly murdering the Baron. My words on this subject would reach the press, the Bonapartes would be in a scandal, Duponte would be stalked again wherever he had fled in the world, perhaps really extinguished from existence this time. I could completely finish what I had begun and banish it all to history.

I gripped my Malacca cane at both ends and almost felt it begin to come apart again. Then a shot rang out.

It seemed close enough to be inside the courtroom, and commotion instantly ensued. There were immediate suggestions and rumors that the courthouse was under siege by a madman. The judge directed his clerk to investigate, and then ordered all persons present to leave the courtroom until a state of calm could be returned. He said that all of us should return in forty minutes. At length there was a universal hubbub and a pair of officers began to herd everyone out of the room.

After a few moments, I was the only one remaining in the room-or I thought I was. Then I noticed my great-aunt. She wrapped her dark bonnet over her hair and straightened its peak. This was the first time since the start of the trial we were alone together.

"Great-Aunt," I pleaded, "perhaps you love me still, for you know I am the child of my father. Please, reconsider this. Do not contest the will, or my capabilities."

Her face looked cramped, withered with distaste. "You have lost your Hattie Blum-have lost Glen Eliza-lost all, Quentin, for a notion that you were a poet of some type instead of a lawyer. It is the old story, you know. You will think you have done something courageous because it was foolish. Poor Quentin. You can tell your complaint every day to the Sisters of Charity at their asylum after this, and you will not be able to afflict others anymore with excitement and worry."

I didn't reply, so she went on.

"You may think I act out of spite, but I tell you I do not. I act out of sorrow for you and for the memory of your parents. All of Baltimore will see that at my late age this is the last act of compassion I can provide, to stop you from being that most dangerous of monsters: the bustling do-nothing. May the folly of the past make you contrite for the future."

I remained at the witness stand, and was somewhat relieved and saddened when the courtroom had become absolutely silent. However, it gave me a peculiar feeling, for a courtroom was one of those places, like a banquet hall, that never felt empty even when it was. I slumped into the chair.

Even when I heard the door opening again, and heard my great-aunt murmur, "Pardon," with some offense, as she left, passing someone on their way inside, I found myself too lost in a staring spell of contemplation to turn around. If the madman who'd fired gun shots outside had come in, I suppose he could have me. Only when I heard the door closed from the inside did I start.

Auguste Duponte, dressed in one of his more elegant dark cloaks, took a few steps inside the court.

"Monsieur Duponte!" I exclaimed. "But did you not hear there is a madman in the courthouse?"

"Why, it was me, monsieur," said Duponte. He gestured outside. "I would rather the crowd not be here, in all events. I paid a vagrant to fire a few harmless shots into the air with the pistol you'd brought me so the people would have something to look at."

"You did? You used an accomplice, an assistant?" I marveled.

"Yes."

"But why did you not leave Baltimore the other day when you had planned? You can't remain here while they still may be looking for you. They may wish you harm."

"You were right, Monsieur Clark. About something you said at my hotel. I traveled to America never intending to resolve your mystery, which seemed as likely to not have a solution as to have one. I came here, as a point of fact, to end the conviction that I could do such things; the conviction that kept me for so long from living in any ordinary fashion. The conviction that frightened people, even the president of a republic, about what I might know that they wished to keep unknown. Yet people believed in the idea of it all, people wanted and feared it, even if I never appeared outside my chambers again. I suppose I could not remember if I believed in it before they did, or someone else was first."

"You wished to keep me diverted, while you plotted an escape from your pursuers and planned a sequence of occurrences that would leave behind your identity as the real Dupin. That was the nature of our inquiry to you-a distraction."

"Yes," he replied forthrightly, "I suppose at first. I believe I was tired: tired not of living but of having lived. Yet you persisted. You were certain we were here to resolve something-not only that we could, but that we were meant to. Did you tell them about the Baron's version? That mob outside the courthouse, I mean."

"I was about to tell them," I replied, with a humorless laugh, looking down at my memorandum book, where I had transcribed the Baron's entire lecture as I remembered it. Duponte asked to see it. I watched as he examined the pages.

"I will destroy this," I said when he put it back on the table. "I have decided. I will not lie about the death of a man of truth. It will never be repeated."

"But it will, Monsieur Clark," Duponte said gloomily. "Many times, probably."

"I have told no one the Baron's version!" I insisted. "I do not think he was able to tell Bonjour, or anyone else before he died. He wanted to glory in speaking it first in front of a crowd. The original document is destroyed, monsieur; I assure you, that was the only record of it."

"It is not a matter of whether he informed any associates of his conclusions. You see, the Baron is different from most only in his qualities of diligence and indelicacies and, if you wish, a certain bull-dog pertinacity not unlike your own. His ideas, however-wholly unoriginal. Thus we discover your mistake. Whether his speech burns in the prison stove or the Great Fire of Rome, his ideas shall return in the commonplace thoughts of others who inquire after Poe's death."

"But there are none-"

"There will be. Of course there will be. Other investigators, scores, hundreds of them. It may be many years, but the Baron's conclusions, and those equally appalling in their misperceptions and equally appealing in their humanity, shall rise again. They will not be stopped as long as Poe is remembered."

"Well, then, I will start with eliminating this one," I said, and tore out the first page where I had written the Baron's lines.

"Stay." He put out his hand.

"Monsieur?"

"They should not be stopped. Remember what I've said about the Baron?"

"We must see his mistakes," I said, a great, unexpected hope rising again in me, "to learn the truth."

"Yes. An example: I see from your memorandum book that the Baron mistakenly believed that Poe had arrived in Baltimore after being harassed on his way to New York. He concludes this merely because it was reported in the newspapers that Poe was on his way to New York to make arrangements for Muddy, the mother of Poe's deceased wife, to come live in Virginia with Poe and Poe's new fiancée, Elmira Shelton of Richmond. The Baron believes that because Poe did not board a train to New York immediately, a problem had arisen. The Baron demonstrates the common confusion of a plan that has been ruined with one that has been reconsidered. Let us follow."

"Follow?" My heart beat faster than Duponte's words.

Duponte turned stern. "Because you found me, Monsieur Clark."

"What?"

"You ask why I have risked coming today instead of fleeing safely. Because you found me. They were searching for me and you found me. Good fellow, if you will please!"

At this signal a porter wearing the Barnum's uniform now entered, pulling in one of Duponte's steamer trunks with such great effort it could have contained a human body inside. It was the very same trunk from which, in utter bewilderment, I had first picked up the Malacca cane. Duponte placed some coins in the man's hand for his labor and dismissed him, bolting the door to the courtroom after him.

"Now, as to the Baron…shall we follow?"

"Monsieur Duponte, do you mean…You confessed a moment ago that you did not in fact come here to resolve the particulars of Poe's death!"

"Dupe! Intentions are irrelevant to results. I never said we have not resolved it, Monsieur Clark, had I? Ready?"

"Ready."

"The Baron imagines that the ruffians at the harbor hounded Poe until the poet fled to the home of Dr. N. C. Brooks, where the same villains started a fire that all but burned down that home. The Baron's chain of natural errors begins with presuming that Poe's stop in Baltimore, because unplanned, was unintentional, that is, without intended purpose-and so only violent action could explain the extension of his stay. In fact, by the evidence of Poe's first destination, the Brooks home, we can draw an entirely different conclusion."

Duponte had discussed this with me before. "Brooks is a known editor and publisher," I added. "Poe was looking for support for his magazine, The Stylus, which would raise the standards for all periodical publication to follow."

"You are correct, as well as a bit dreamy as to its potential effects. In all events, if Poe were truly in danger at this point, and cognizant enough to flee as the Baron would have us believe, he may have reported it to a member of his family, however detestable they were to him-or even the police. Instead, Poe searches for an influential magazine editor! We may now erase those imagined ruffians from our picture and instead escort Poe to Dr. Brooks's house on his own will. Come."

I took my seat again at the witness table.

35

"YOU HAVE OBSERVED that the Baron was determined to understand the last days of Poe as a result of a sequence of increasingly violent events. Here the Baron was gazing into a looking-glass. It is how the Baron wished people to see his own troubles. He wished to remove from Poe all possibility of indictment for his death by locating the cause of his misfortune with external parties only."

"Then are you saying that the burning of Brooks's house had nothing to do with Poe's search for sanctuary? A coincidence?"

"Not so, although we must reverse the connection in your statement. Poe's failed search for sanctuary has everything to do with Brooks's house burning down. Since we suspect that Poe started immediately for Dr. Brooks's from the harbor, with his trunk, it is most certain that he anticipated finding not only literary assistance but a bed as well."

"Instead, he discovers that the house has burned, or is still burning, depending on the exact day and hour of Poe's arrival, which we do not know."

"Yes, and, either way, if the fire happened the very minute he came or two days before, he is left to wander. Here is the difficulty. The doctor, John J. Moran, who treated Poe days later at the hospital recalls that Poe did not know what he was doing in Baltimore or how he had gotten there. The temperance periodicals, in their search for a persuasive and inculcating lesson, employ this inference to suggest that Poe had begun drinking, had been absorbed entirely in a binge or spree, and this, their logic runs, explains why he lost track of the days."

"You do not believe this?" I asked.

"It is the weakest kind of argument, not just flawed but obesely flawed. It would be similar to you seeing me on the street one day, and then again one week later, at which time I ask you for directions, and you wonder how it is I had been lost for an entire week. You shall remember we have already discussed the fact that an offer had been extended to Poe to travel to Philadelphia and edit a book of poems by Mrs. St. Leon Loud for a fee of one hundred dollars. An offer we know he accepted. Poe wrote to Muddy: ‘Mr. Loud, the husband of Mrs. St. Leon Loud, the poetess of Philadelphia, called on me the other day and offered me one hundred dollars to edit his wife's poems. Of course, I accepted the offer. The whole labor will not occupy me three days.' These are Poe's words from earlier that summer, as we learn from the letters that have since been in print.

"If, as we have already decisively determined, Poe was in the process of collecting more capital for his magazine; and if, as we additionally surmised, Poe had added a stay in Baltimore to his itinerary at a late moment in search of enlarging this capital; and if whatever funds he did have would be diminished not by theft but by the necessity of securing a room at a hotel, then it is quite likely that, with this editing offer still standing from nearby Philadelphia, and his hoped-for conference with Dr. Brooks inhibited by the untimely fire, Poe would soon leave for Philadelphia to complete this easy work for the eager and wealthy poetess. Rather than several days ‘lost,' as the temperance editors would like, no doubt Poe spent at least one night, possibly several, in a hotel here in Baltimore before securing an available train to Philadelphia. In this way, when Poe says to the hospital doctor while on his deathbed that he does not know how he came to be in Baltimore and why he is there, he is referring not to his arrival from Richmond, for which he would plainly know the purpose of his journey, but a second arrival to Baltimore. A journey back, at an indefinite time, but as early as the night before Poe's collapse at Ryan's hotel or as late as a few hours before that collapse, taken in some self-obscurity, resulting from a trip to Philadelphia."

"But you have shown, monsieur," I reminded him, "by examining her book of poetry and the poem about his death, that Poe did not edit Mrs. Loud's poems, and that, calling him a ‘stranger,' she had not seen him in Philadelphia at any time in close proximity to his death. You remarked to me that this was only the first document of two proving this. But now you speak of Poe's trip to Philadelphia. Have you changed your mind?"

Duponte raised one finger. "Careful. I did not say Poe arrived in Philadelphia."

"You are correct that I have in the past alluded to a second demonstration that Poe did not arrive in Philadelphia, if any evidence is needed beyond that culled from Madame St. Leon Loud's lyrical productions. You will now remember that Poe instructed Muddy to write him in Philadelphia as ‘E. S. T. Grey Esquire.' Would you re-peruse from your portfolio these apparently obscure instructions from Monsieur Poe?"

I did so: "‘Write immediately in reply and direct to Philadelphia. For fear I should not get the letter, sign no name and address it to E. S. T. Grey Esqre.'" I paused and put the extract down. "Monsieur, do say you have an answer to such a strange and indecipherable code!"

"Code! Strange! The only cipher here is in the eyes of those who look and do not understand, and so decide they must be solving some puzzle."

Duponte opened the lid of the trunk that had been brought in by the porter. It was filled to the very top with newspapers. "Before coming to find you here, I stopped at Glen Eliza. Your girl, Daphne, a domestic of excellent character and dry wit, very kindly allowed me to remove a considerable portion of our newspaper collection which had sat untouched in your library these last months. Indeed, she insinuated that I should advise you to discard such papers, for they have made housekeeping in that chamber impossible. Now," he said, turning back to me, "describe for me, if you please, where precisely lies the mystery of Poe's instructions to his darling Muddy?"

I read it again silently. For fear I should not get the letter… "First, he seems to have a striking and unusual fear of not receiving the letter."

"True."

"And, in addition, he contrives a rather elaborate method by which he imagines he can prevent this. Resorting, indeed, to using this false name, E. S. T. Grey!"

"Some might say this is our best clue yet that Poe, in the end, was mad-delusional."

"You do not agree though?"

"The contention would be entirely backward! Choices, my good Monsieur Clark, are both less rational and far less predictable than they seem, and this is what makes them so very predictable to the thinking man. Monsieur Poe, we should remember, is no ordinary specimen; his decisions which appear so irrational seem so because they are, in truth, utterly rational. We may benefit from being reminded about where Poe is going, when he writes these words in the fall of 1849, and where his mother-in-law is receiving his letters."

"Easy enough. Poe, upon writing, plans to start on his way to Philadelphia prior to continuing home to Fordham, New York, to bring Muddy back to Richmond, where he will marry Elmira Shelton. Muddy receives the letter in their small country home in New York. As I say, though, that seems easy enough."

"Then so is your answer to his unusual instructions. You have spoken before of the many cities where Poe had lived in his adult years."

"After Baltimore, he had moved with Sissy and Muddy to Richmond, Virginia, for several years. Then to Philadelphia for around six years. And finally, in the last years of his life, he was living in New York with Muddy."

"Yes! Therefore, you see, Muddy must write ‘E. S. T. Grey, Esquire.'"

I looked at my companion incredulously. "I don't see at all!"

"Why, Monsieur Clark, do you refuse outright the simplicity of the thing when it has been uncovered for us? I have been fortunate that on several occasions during my stay you have described in some precise and exacting detail the workings of your American post offices. In the year in question, 1849, if I have understood you, letters in your country were never delivered to particular residences but still only to the post office of a city, where one could then retrieve mail waiting for him. If a letter arrives in 1849 in New York for Edgar A. Poe, E. A. Poe comes and receives it. If a letter arrived in 1849 at the Philadelphia post office addressed to ‘Edgar A. Poe,' consider then what would unavoidably follow. The postmaster in Philadelphia, consulting his list of names of those former residents of the city, and finding that a name matches one on that list, would forward it to the post office at the location of that person's current residence. That is to say, a letter sent from Muddy in New York to Philadelphia addressed to Edgar A. Poe would upon receipt at the post office in Philadelphia be treated as a mistake and instantly be returned to New York!"

"Of course!" I exclaimed.

He went on. "Muddy, being also a former resident of Philadelphia, would understand this and find nothing strange in Poe's instructions that appear so peculiar to us. Poe's apparently outlandish fear that he would not receive a letter sent by Muddy to Philadelphia is, in fact, completely reasonable. If Edgar Poe presented himself with his own name at the Philadelphia post office, there would surely be nothing waiting for him, for any such letter branded with his name would have been sent away; however, if he offers a fictitious name, arranged in advance with his correspondent, and a letter has been sent to that name, he would duly receive it."

"But what of his instructions to Muddy not to sign the letter?"

"Poe has been anxious. Muddy is the last remnant of his family connections. Write immediately in reply, he says. Receiving this letter is crucial, and here he exhibits signs of some excess of care-once again, not of illogic, but of excessive rationality. He knows that, in the process of folding and sealing a letter, the signature and the address may be confused. If such a confusion were to take place, and the Philadelphia postmaster mistakenly believed the letter addressed to Maria Clemm, rather than signed by her, the letter, once again, would take route directly back to New York. You might notice that Monsieur Poe was generally anxious about mail in your own occasional correspondence with him, when at several points he expresses worry that a letter was lost or misplaced. ‘Ten to one I misdirected the letter, for I am very thoughtless about such matters,' he writes in one instance (if I rightly recall) when speaking of someone who had not replied to one of his letters. We know, too, from Poe's history that his first infamous heartbreak was caused when his letters as a young man never reached his young love, Elmira; and that another early courtship, of his cousin Elizabeth Herring, was disrupted by Henry Herring reading the letters, which contained his poetry. Indeed, the confusion over the placement of a letter, the anxiety over who possesses it, and the perplexing variety of folding and addressing through which a letter's identity might be misapprehended form the topic of one of Monsieur Poe's better tales of ratiocination and analysis, with which I know you are quite familiar.

"Still there is the question of the pseudonym that Poe chooses, this E. S. T. Grey. In truth, it matters not what name he chooses as long as it is not Edgar Poe, and is not so common as a George Smith or a Thomas Jones, which would put it at risk to be taken up by another person in a pile of other mail. Thus, Monsieur Poe desires Muddy to use a name with not one but two middle initials so that it may be that much more likely to reach him.

"Still you desire more significance to the name, I suppose? Very well. You will see, in some of the late numbers of the failed magazine Broadway Journal, of which Poe was editor, that he twice inserts an advertisement asking for capital to help secure the (doomed) future of that publication. In these notices he asks that correspondence for such purposes be addressed to ‘E. S. T. G.' at the office of the journal. Perhaps he wished to be discreet in the collection of any money. At all events, when he writes Muddy this letter four years later, he is once again engaged in a hopeful attempt to control his own magazine-this time The Stylus-and the same nom de plume of E. S. T. Grey perhaps automatically recurs to him from the similarity of his situation, and the corresponding position of his hopes for his delayed success. The letters of the name themselves-E. S. T. G.-need no more meaning, no more code, than the connection they hold for him between the two epochs of his life. Codes and symmetries are for those who think too much of thinking. The mystery of Poe's instructions to his mother-in-law, then, we have entirely dismissed." Duponte, with a hint of satisfaction, returned the papers related to the topic to the trunk.

"Except…" I began. Seeing a flash in Duponte's eyes, I stopped myself.

"Except?"

"Did you not once say, Monsieur Duponte, that this point would form a second piece of proof most sure that Poe did not arrive at Philadelphia?"

"I did. You will remember that one of the obituaries you collected after Poe's death was from the Philadelphia Public Ledger? I believe you will find it also in the selection I've brought from Glen Eliza."

The obituary was in an issue of the Ledger from October 9, 1849, two days after Poe's death in Baltimore. I located the newspaper and passed it to Duponte.

He handed it back. "What is this?"

"Why, the very paper you asked for, Monsieur Duponte!"

"I asked for no such thing! I merely stated that it would be found in the trunk. Return it there. This obituary of Monsieur Poe in itself is as flimsy as most of the others. But you will not fail to remember that I instructed you, soon after our arrival in Baltimore, to retrieve all issues of newspapers a week before and after each article."

"I cannot fail to remember," I agreed.

"It is the set of numbers prior to that obituary to which you should direct your interest. As you find them, recall that you have already read Poe beseeching his Muddy to ‘write immediately in reply' to his letter. In the very same note, he closes by pleading again, as though she could forget: ‘Don't forget to write immediately to Philadelphia so that your letter will be there when I arrive.' Surely she could not ignore his urgent entreaties to hear a kind word from her along his journey."

I took up all the issues of the Philadelphia Public Ledger I could find in the contents of the chest. Duponte instructed me to open the paper dated October 3, 1849-the very day Poe was discovered at Ryan's inn in Baltimore. He directed me further to the post office column on the last page-the place in the paper where the postmaster cataloged names of persons with letters waiting to be retrieved. List of Letters Remaining in the Phil. Post-Office, it said. There, in the small print of the lengthy gentlemen's list, I found the following entry:

GREY, E. S. F.

Turning quickly to the next date that contained a post office's advertisement of remaining letters, I found the same name again.

"It must be him!" I said.

"Of course it is. Here we see E. S. F. Grey, rather than E. S. T. The letter F, we may be sure, may be readily mistaken for ‘T' in the hand of those who write with flare, as Poe exhibits in his letters to you, Monsieur Clark. Muddy mistook Poe's T for an F; or the Philadelphia post office mistook her own T for an F; or the Ledger mistook the postmaster's T for an F. Poe's changing name has changed again-but have no doubt. This is Muddy's very letter to Poe, arriving in Philadelphia precisely, if one were to calculate the speed of mail, at the expected time after Muddy would have received Poe's letter of September 18 and, in ordinary haste, composed and deposited her letter in reply to Monsieur Grey with the New York post office."

"And the Ledger lists it on two separate days."

"Significant, Monsieur Clark, if I understand the regulations of your postal office as you have explained them."

"That's true. The first time a letter must be advertised one is charged two cents additional in postage. If it must be advertised a second and final time, one will be required to pay another two cents. Soon after, it becomes a ‘dead letter'-discarded by the postmaster."

"October 3, when the letter is first listed in the Philadelphia Ledger, was the last day Poe was ever to see outside a hospital room again," Duponte mused absently. "On that day, we could have idly strolled through the door of the Philadelphia post office and announced ourselves as E. S. T. (or F., if you please) Grey-Esquire-for you are no less Grey than Poe was-and received this letter."

"Likely this was the last letter ever written to Edgar Poe," I said sadly, looking again at the name of the addressee, and thinking it sadder still that this last, unseen, and now long-abandoned letter did not even have his name on it and, presumably, went unsigned with the name of that woman who loved him.

"Likely it was," Duponte said, nodding.

"I would like to have seen it."

"But you need not. I mean, not for our purposes. This listing in the newspaper demonstrates that, for the period reflected by the postmaster's advertisements, Edgar Poe was not in Philadelphia. For remember how strongly he insisted that Muddy write immediately so the letter would be there at the point of his arrival; if his arrival had occurred, we must not doubt, he would have called there with an eager heart."

"Therefore we have another reason to confidently testify that Poe did not reach Philadelphia," Duponte continued. "But we have many reasons, as we already enumerated, to believe he would have tried, and we may believe him to have come close."

"But if he tried and did not make it there, what happened?"

"You remember what we have said of Poe's drinking habits."

"Yes. That Poe was not intemperate but constitutionally intolerant to a degree unknown to most people. The fact that Poe's entire nature could be reversed by a single glass of wine, as attested by numerous people who knew him well, indicated not that Poe was habitually intoxicated, but rather the opposite-that Poe carried a rare sensitivity. Too many persons, in disparate places and times, have testified to this fact for one to believe it is only a polite excuse by those friendly to him. One glass, we have learned, was enough to produce a frightful attack of insensibility which could lead him to other uncertain and uncontrolled behavior. Could this have happened before he arrived to Philadelphia?" I proposed.

"Let us see in a moment. We have now surmised, using all the information available, both that Poe would have in all likelihood attempted to travel to Philadelphia and yet, despite this, that he would not have arrived. The question remains how Poe returns to Baltimore. The Baron, if his reasoning had reached this far, would then proclaim a guess, no doubt, that once Poe was aboard the train to Philadelphia, a rogue accosted him and forced him, for some inconceivable malicious motive, to return on another train to Baltimore, where Poe was later found. The Baron is romantic in the same way the writers of love tales and sketches are. It would make no sense at all for an assailant of any stripe to put Poe back on a train to Baltimore.

"Yet this does not mean that someone else, someone with no malicious motives, did not do so. In fact, it is an activity that a railroad conductor engages in regularly for a variety of reasons, for persons who are unruly, unconscious, sickly, stowaways, and the like. Far more likely than meeting such an aggressor on the train for someone who, like Poe, has previously lived both in the point of origin, Baltimore, and in the destination, Philadelphia -is to meet an acquaintance that is traveling on the same route.

"It is not much more than a guess, you will say, but sometimes that is all that is there, Monsieur Clark, to make sense of events. We speak of the word as inferior to trained practices of reasoning-in fact, to guess is one of the most elevated and indestructible powers of the human mind, a far more interesting art than reasoning or demonstration because it comes to us directly from imagination.

"Now, we shall imagine Poe meeting an acquaintance, rather than an enemy; and that acquaintance, by nature someone who is acquainted with Poe but does not know Poe intimately, inviting him for a drink on the train, or in an intervening railway station. We can imagine Poe, perhaps hoping to procure further financial support for his magazine, accepting the invitation, the insistence from this potential benefactor, of one drink-presented, no doubt, by one unfamiliar enough with Poe as an adult not to know his problems with the intake of spirits. Perhaps, then, a childhood friend, or let us say a classmate from West Point since, more than any other institution, former members of the army are likely to be scattered throughout the different states. Or, perhaps, a classmate from earlier, in Poe's days at college. Perhaps we have heard the name of one of such school-friends already in the facts we have collected."

"Z. Collins Lee!" I said. "He was a classmate of Poe's from college and is now the district attorney, and he was the fourth man who attended Poe's funeral."

"Monsieur Lee is an interesting possibility, a member of the funeral party we have overlooked for three others who have been more readily notable. Consider this. Besides the sexton, Mr. Spence; the undertaker; the grave digger; and the minister, there were exactly four mourners at Poe's small funeral ceremony."

"Yes-Dr. Snodgrass, Neilson Poe, Henry Herring, and Mr. Z. Collins Lee. Those were all who came."

"Think of what the first three mourners have in common, Monsieur Clark-that they knew Edgar Poe, of course. But this would be true for many people in Baltimore, certainly more than four individuals, since Poe lived in this city for several years. Former teachers, lovers, friends, other relatives. No. More notable is the common fact that each of the three was involved in some way with Poe's final days. Monsieur Herring was at Ryan's hotel, where Poe was discovered and where, afterward, Snodgrass was called to assist; and Neilson Poe was present at the hospital after being notified of his cousin's condition. The funeral was not announced in advance in the newspapers or by other means and, surely, these three gentlemen could have encouraged more people to attend if they wished.

"Should we not think it highly likely, then, noticing what is true of all three other mourners, that our Z. Collins Lee would also have seen Poe sometime in his last days before his death? Lee is a wealthy man, and indeed as good a candidate as any to have been on the train and, remembering college days, which are always rather debauched, taken a single drink with Poe. Poe, on his part, would know Monsieur Lee was a person of consequence in the field of law, and would seek to be convivial in order to solicit needed support for his magazine campaign. If true, this would instantly explain two facts: not only the incident on the train, but Monsieur Lee's presence at the funeral about which so few people knew. After their meeting, if we continue, Poe begins a bout of insensibility, as you term it, from this single indulgence. This is what our other temperance group, the Richmond Sons of Temperance, to which your Monsieur Benson belonged, did not wish to accept long enough to complete their inquiry. They wished Poe not to drink a drop as much as the other traders in temperance wished him to drink a barrel. Thus Monsieur Benson seemed to you to be hiding something. No doubt he had discovered, after arriving to Baltimore so soon after Poe's death, this small incident."

"But stay! Back to the one drink on the train. Would not the friend," I said indignantly, "whether Mr. Collins Lee or someone unknown to us, tend to Poe when he fell ill?"

"If, as we might envision, this friend knows nothing of Poe's special circumstance in relation to drink; and if Poe, embarrassed by it, attempts as much as possible to suppress his mental and rational degradation for the sake of his personal dignity, then the friend may walk away, having little or no indication of leaving behind a person in distress. Though Poe may still feel abandoned by such an incident, that would be hardly noticeable to the innocent acquaintance. A man like Z. Collins Lee, a much-occupied attorney, might only discover something wrong days later, upon encountering his fellow attorney Neilson Poe and mentioning having seen Neilson's cousin earlier. Recall for a moment how the poet responds, if you would, when Dr. Moran at the Baltimore hospital, thinking to soothe his distressed patient, promises to find Poe's friends?"

"The best thing my best friend could do would be to blow out my brains with a pistol!"

"Yes! A friend, it seems to Poe at this late moment, can only harm him, Monsieur Clark. Can we not tell why? Can we not find the origin of these sentiments in the final footsteps of the poet? He ventures to find Dr. Brooks, and instead finds only homelessness. He meets an old friend on the train, only to feel obligated to partake in a dangerous temptation. He mentions his friend Dr. Snodgrass once he is at Ryan's, only to be confronted with Snodgrass's disapproving stares and obvious, if silent, accusations that Poe is a drunken sot. His own relative Henry Herring stands over him at Ryan's, but rather than bringing him to his own house, sends him alone to a declining hospital.

"Do you believe, we should ask the temperance press as an aside, that Poe would have summoned Dr. Snodgrass, of all people on earth, were he indeed in the midst of this supposed spree? We shall not deny that Monsieur Poe confessed to excessive drinking during periods in his history, and also will readily admit that he established a pattern of reforming himself alternating with a return to excess. Yet it is because of this, as an experienced drinker and reformer, that we can intelligently interpret his specific mention of Snodgrass made to Monsieur Walker at Ryan's-we can read this mention with proper spectacles. Were Poe in the middle of a binge, were he breaking his pledge, the last person he would name is a principal leader of the local temperance movement like Snodgrass. Moreover, Poe may have overheard in a conversation around Ryan's, while there, that Monsieur Walker was attached in the capacity of a printer to the Sun, so that Walker would be a direct witness to his situation. Moreover again, had Poe read any numbers of the recent papers, he would see that Snodgrass had only one day earlier been forced to renounce his organization's candidate, John Watchman, for drinking, and would be seeking to counterbalance this event as would any politician. No, Poe said Snodgrass's name to Walker as a message, as if to remark in so many words: ‘I have not been in the cups; in fact, I have been so moderate, if not quite wholly abstemious, that the one name I shall single out to come to my aid will be an avid and strict temperance man, and I shall do so to a fellow who works for the press.'"

Duponte continued: "Back to our train. Poe has separated from his friend-who, let us suppose, leaves the train first, or merely returns to a different carriage. Distressed at his physical shakiness, Poe is observed by a solicitous railroad conductor, who determines that Poe has become ill-how, the conductor cannot know. This conductor for whatever reason presumes Poe is more likely to have some persons as caretakers back in Baltimore, or Poe perhaps mumbles something interpreted in this fashion by the conductor. The conductor, seeing this as an opportunity to be benevolent, places Poe in an opposite-moving train at the next depot (as I notice Americans always call your stations), perhaps at Havre de Grace.

"With this in mind, we may think of the facts at the hospital with more confidence. Poe replies to the doctor's questions that he does not know how he has come to Baltimore or why-he cannot explain these facts. It is not because of successive days of bingeing. Nor is it because he has been given opiates by political fiends, as the Baron says. It is because Poe refers to his second arrival to Baltimore, after he had left, and had been in a cloud of confusion about how he ended up on a train back. We have thus countered the temperance press's claims about Poe, as well as the Baron's argument that Poe had to be kidnapped by a political club."

I could see how we had demonstrated the temperance claims untrue, but had not related this to the Baron's argument. I proposed the question to Duponte.

"Do you recall the Baron's conclusion on this point, Monsieur Clark, as you wrote it down in your book?"

I did.

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

"Do you see, touching the issue of recognition, the Baron's misplaced logic? As a result of the Baron's own actions in relation to the press of Baltimore and elsewhere, and because of the numerous biographical volumes and articles since Poe's death, Poe's portrait has been widely circulated among the masses and his visage becomes known even as his death has begun to be studied. But before this, when Poe was alive, he would have been recognized, as a rule, only by literary fellows and avid readers, who at the very least would have been somewhat less likely to be out in the street and more likely to spend their daylight hours indoors, in offices, libraries, and reading rooms. Thus, that Poe was not reported to be seen over the course of these days becomes far less surprising, if even at all notable. Moreover, as he was a visitor to Baltimore, in an unannounced stay, no one would have anticipated seeing Poe around the city, even among his relations. This, if we think of the way of the human mind and eye, greatly reduces recognition. Have you ever had occasion to notice how, when you unexpectedly happened upon a close friend in a locale where you did not expect to see him, some greater than usual amount of time was required to register the identity of this person in your brain-indeed, more time than if you had seen someone with whom you were far less intimate? For the latter's status remains closer to the stranger on the street, and thus more easily identified among them.

"This is a general fault that the newspapers make, too, Monsieur Clark. Re-peruse the New York Herald extract and you will see."

I opened my memorandum book, where I had written the testimony I had planned to give to the court that day. The relevant portion from the week of Poe's death, written by their correspondent in Baltimore, read as follows:

On last Wednesday, election day, he was found near the Fourth Ward polls laboring under an attack of mania a potu, and in a most shocking condition. Being recognized by some of our citizens, he was placed in a carriage and conveyed to the Washington Hospital, where every attention has been bestowed on him.

"You notice the fault, don't you, Monsieur Clark? The correspondent from Baltimore tries hard to maintain facts in their true form. For instance, it is quite accurate and specific that Poe was placed in a carriage by others who did not drive with him, as we shall witness shortly. And yet we know, on the other hand, that Poe was not recognized by citizens. This has been written down for us by a first-hand witness."

"Do you mean the note from Walker to Dr. Snodgrass, which we found among Snodgrass's papers?"

"I do. Walker writes, ‘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' and so on. To Walker, Poe is ‘a gentleman'; it is only through some communication by Poe of his proper name that Walker knows who to tell Snodgrass is in distress. Indeed, Walker 's language-‘who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe'-suggests he has some suspicions that the man is called something else entirely! As though it were an alias. Should he not write, ‘The gentleman Edgar A. Poe appears in great distress' instead?"

At Duponte's request, I continued reciting to him the Baron's account of Poe's last days.

"The miscreants probably drugged Poe with various opiates. When election day came, they took him around the city to various polling stations. They forced him to vote for their candidates at each polling venue and, to make the whole farce more convincing, the poet was made to wear different outfits each time. This explains why he was found in ragged, soiled clothes never meant to fit him. He was permitted by the rogues to keep his handsome Malacca cane, however, for he was in such a weakened state that even those ruffians recognized that the cane would be needed to prop him up… In fact, he would be found with this very cane…"

Duponte, listening to this, pointed out with some satisfaction that the Baron's argument, though clever, seeks to find a reason for Poe's location at an election polling station and for Poe's clothing, rather than to use reason to find the truth behind that location and appearance.

"Without a home, in a place where his family once lived, where some of his family lived still, the effect on Poe's senses to be back in Baltimore, where he was once most at home-combined with the effects of his single indulgence in the company of Z. Collins Lee or another friend-is to make him now feel utterly alone. Without shelter he has no choice but to walk through the dreadful rain looking for it, thus soaking his clothing and exposing him to the onset of any number of additional maladies. You have already seen first-hand, I believe, the special quality of clothing most people fail to consider. When soaked, we say of our clothes, ‘My shirt is useless, it is ruined.' Unlike any other ‘ruined' article, its desolation, shall we say, like the great Sphinx, is temporary; you have seen that these special qualities allow Poe to trade his own outfit for dry clothes, which of course do not fit him as does a usual tailored outfit. This occurred likely near Ryan's. We may note that of all the detailed descriptions of Poe's clothes upon his discovery, for all the adjectives chosen to show his dejection, none call the dress wet, though this should be the first word otherwise used. The special cane with the expensively designed sword we know Poe did not sell or trade-for even in his state of mind he remembered that it did not belong to him. He had to take care to return it to its owner, Dr. Carter, in Richmond. It was his dignity, not his fear of violence, that kept his friend's cane clutched to his chest.

"In considering Poe at Ryan's hotel, we now reach the Baron's suspicion of the Herring family, George and Henry. It will not do, as the Baron would have it, to confuse collateral events with the subject of our inquiry. As you have observed in your report to me after hearing the account of Dr. Snodgrass, when Dr. Snodgrass saw Poe's condition, he walked upstairs to secure a room for Poe before sending for Poe's relatives, whom he knew lived in the vicinity. Yet no sooner had Snodgrass done this than Henry Herring was standing at the foot of the stairs-before Snodgrass had sent for him. Snodgrass, occupied with his private concerns and with the state of Poe's health, did not seem to think much of this startling fact when relating it in your presence. But we know better.

"George Herring, Henry's uncle, has been identified as the president of the Whigs of the Fourth Ward, the group who used Ryan's hotel on several occasions in the weeks before the election for a rally, including once two days before the election. The Baron makes the assumption that after such efforts, George Herring would have also certainly been at Ryan's, this Whig fortress, on election day itself, the day Poe was found. In this his reasoning is sound. However, the Baron then determines that Henry and George Herring, knowing that Edgar Poe experienced bad effects from any intoxicant, conspired to chose him to ‘coop' and thus become one of their voters to be brought throughout the city."

"Still, it is remarkably coincidental, I would venture to say suspicious, Monsieur Duponte, if George and Henry Herring were both present at Ryan's before Dr. Snodgrass even called for Poe's relatives!"

"There is one coincidental event there, Monsieur Clark, and this one in fact is rather merely a coincidence, and renders the other occurrence quite natural. The coincidence I mean is George Herring's presence in the same place that Poe is discovered. George Herring is here because he is the president of the Fourth Ward Whigs, and Ryan's is the Fourth Ward polling station on that day. His presence is natural. Why Poe is present here we will address in a moment. Henry Herring is Poe's cousin by marriage, to a woman who has now been deceased for some years; and whose decease was followed, very shortly after, by another marriage, contributing, we can presume, to Poe's characterization of Monsieur Henry in a letter as a man of ‘unprincipled character.' Generally speaking, then, Poe ends up in quite a threefold busy place-that is, a hotel, tavern, and polling station-with a man who is the uncle of a former cousin. I fear this is not in itself so much a coincidence as the Baron would like.

"At all events, the Baron proposes that George Herring selects Poe to be a member of this voting coop because Monsieur George possesses from his family knowledge of Poe's vulnerability when under the influence of even normal intoxicants. A notorious idea! Because Monsieur George is likely to know of Poe's unpredictability with intoxicants, that would be the precise reason not to choose Poe for a coop, where only men who could tolerate alcohol well would do!

"But, leaving behind the Baron's tales of the coop, we return to our so-called coincidences. Given that George Herring would have some knowledge and perhaps acquaintance with Poe through Henry Herring, upon seeing Poe in distress, Monsieur George would almost certainly send for Monsieur Henry Herring. Our mere coincidence, the presence of George Herring and Edgar Poe in the same tri-purpose building, gives rise very naturally to our second incident, the odd arrival of Henry Herring before Snodgrass has called for him.

"And what mean the subsequent events that led to Poe's being sent to the hospital? Snodgrass has offered to engage a room upstairs in the hotel portion of the building. George Herring would not want Poe to stay at Ryan's in poor condition, for as Whig president he would want to avoid precisely the sort of accusations of fraudulent or rough use of voters that the Baron would in fact later allege. Henry Herring was not particularly a boon companion to Poe, as the Baron is right to say-and would rather not invite Poe to his house, where Monsieur Henry still remembers with disapproval Poe's courtship of his daughter Elizabeth years before. Snodgrass could not remember whether there were one or two relatives of Poe's at Ryan's-this is almost certainly because both Henry and George Herring stood before him. Poe is therefore sent to the hospital, whose attendants then send word to Neilson Poe."

"If there was nothing insidious, if the Herrings did nothing, Monsieur Duponte, then why would Henry Herring and Neilson Poe, cousin to Henry Herring as well as Edgar Poe, be so reluctant to speak on the matter, or for the police to make inquiries?"

"You have answered your question in asking it, Monsieur Clark. Because they did nothing-that is, strikingly little-they had no wish to call attention to the matter. Think of it. George and then Henry Herring were present even before Dr. Snodgrass, and did nothing. When something was done, it was to send Poe to the hospital alone, in the prostrate position across the carriage seats. They forgot, even, to pay the driver, as you heard from Dr. Moran. They have sealed his fate, too, by assuming Poe was merely boozy, and excessively in liquor, for they no doubt passed this assumption to the doctors through the note that accompanied Poe to the hospital-so that the care given to the patient, rather than for the complex illness and perhaps multitude of illnesses that have set in from his exhaustion and exposure, would be that superficial kind given to all those who come in with too much drink. Neilson Poe came to the hospital, but could not even see the patient.

"This narrative is not one of pride for the family, particularly for an ambitious man like Monsieur Neilson, who did not want to tarnish the name Poe. This explains, too, the lack of attempt from the family to produce a larger funeral. They would not wish to draw attention to their roles in his final days, nor wish to remind anyone that Edgar Poe himself had formerly said caustic words about both Henry Herring and Neilson Poe. There is some ‘shame' in it, which is the word Snodgrass writes in his poem on the subject. The methods by which it is often necessary to understand someone's motives are not by what they have done, but what they have simply omitted to do and neglected to consider."

"And yet," continued Duponte, "the Baron is not wholly misguided in looking to the fact of Poe's discovery falling on an election day as more than chance. The Baron wishes to find cause and effect; we, on the other hand, shall look for cause and cause. How, monsieur, would you describe the city of Baltimore on days elections are held?"

"A bit unpredictable," I admitted, "wild at times. Dangerous, in certain quarters. But does this mean Poe was kidnapped?"

"Of course not. The mistake of men like the Baron, who apply their giddy thoughts to creating violence, is to imagine that most violence contains sense and reason, when, by its nature, this is just what it is lacking. Yet we must not dismiss the secondary effects that may come from outside disruptions. Think of Monsieur Poe. Exposed to the deplorable weather, having failed to secure the ready money from Philadelphia, his constitution weakened and confused by his single glass of spirits, Poe would have been vulnerable to the greatest detriments to our health: first, fear, and second, dread.

"Now, those local newspapers that you went out to collect shortly after our arrival from Paris, will you put them on this table?"

The first cutting that Duponte selected was from the Baltimore Sun, October 4, the day after the election. Very little excitement, it read, reporting the events of the election. We heard of no disturbance of the polls or elsewhere.

Another cutting from the same day read as follows:

Yesterday afternoon a fellow with about as much liquor in him as he could conveniently carry, stationed himself at the foot of Lexington market, and for an hour assailed and assaulted every man that passed by, all of whom, very fortunately for the poor inebriate, appeared to be exceedingly good-natured, or they would have "tripped him up." He struck several of them in the face, but they forbore to resent it on account of his having "seen the elephant." He afterwards went in a tavern, and thence proceeded to the office of Justice Root, which was closed (it being dinner hour) seeking perhaps for justice.

And finally this, reported of the same afternoon:

Assault. About dusk on Wednesday evening, as a carriage containing four persons amongst whom was Mr. Martin Rudolph, engineer of the steamer Columbia, was proceeding past the corner of Lombard and Light Street, some atrocious miscreant threw a large stone, which struck Mr. R on the head, fortunately occasioning nothing more than a severe bruise.

"The first article," Duponte said, "insists there was no disturbance anywhere in the city. Yet here, separately, we find some samples of what we can only label disturbances. You see, in a newspaper, especially the finest ones, one hand hardly notices the other or, rather, one column hardly notices the other, and so only by reading the entire newspaper-never just a single article-can we claim to have done any reading at all. They likely were told of the lack of disturbances by some policeman. Police in Europe want all criminals to know they are there; police in America want people to believe there are no criminals.

"Let us examine these two separate disturbances. First, we have a loud and rude fellow, alleged to have struck in the face several men passing by, and yet left without molestation by his fellow citizens. While the editor from the leisurely position of his desk would prefer to believe that the lack of outrage from the surrounding public was caused by the fact that the inebriate was ‘good-natured,' I would ask how many good-natured fellows have been classified to be so after they punched men in their faces. Rather, we can safely surmise that the nature of the disturbance, remarkably, was common enough that day as to not sufficiently arrest the attention either of the authorities or the common people. That is, there were so many like this one that he could not claim much public response. This may give us more idea of the goings-on during election day in the rest of the city than the editors imagine.

"Taking now the third extract, describing a scene not far in distance, I believe, from the location of the polling station where Poe was discovered on Lombard and High; read again this cutting, which describes an engineer and his fellow carriage passengers being struck by a large stone thrown by some miscreant. We may imagine Poe, too, having to dodge a tempest of wild stones on those streets or, perhaps, now ill from the drink, the terrible exposure of many hours to the weather, and complete lack of sleep, Poe may have himself been disoriented enough to be throwing stones at perceived or real villains, thugs, and rascals that filled the streets that day. It hardly makes a difference if we think of Poe as target or as targeting, or involved in this incident not at all. What we know is that Poe would likely possess a manic fear at this point in reaction to whatever wild and disorderly actions he might witness along the streets that day. The polling station, rather than being a dark dungeon of cruelty-as your Baron finds it necessary to envision it-may well have been seen by Poe as a sanctuary, a place where there would likely be the semblance of some order. Poe went in for help that, alas, was too late to be found. In this way, we have thoroughly followed Poe from his disembarking to his futile rescue by Snodgrass."

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

Duponte's face broke out in genuine amusement.

"Do you not believe it?" I asked.

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

"That Poe called this word, ‘Reynolds,' for many hours the night of his death in the hospital is exactly what we should not pay attention to-if our purpose is to understand how he died. Poe was not in his clear mind, arising from the joining of disparate circumstances that we have already enumerated. That the Baron, that other observers might fixate on it demonstrates the common lack of understanding about how and why people think and act as they do. Even without profound consideration of the matter, we may remember that Poe is in a state of feeling completely alone. In truth, he could have been calling for anybody. It might have been the last name he had heard, perhaps belonging to that same carpenter who visited us in your parlor, or it might have been the name of a man whose part in a deadly affair of several years past renders it far too dangerous for either of us to speak about. [2] Most likely, though, it has something to do with a matter far distant from his death that we must never know about, for that is what Poe would be thinking about, just as a man trapped in a pit would be thinking of escape, not of the pit. Not about the death that is all too close upon him, but about life left behind.

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

"I reach'd my home-my home no more-

For all had flown who made it so."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Monsieur Duponte," I began with gratitude.

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

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

I did not reply.

"It was him. Auguste Duponte. Wasn't it?" he asked.

I denied it, but was not very convincing.

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

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

"No," I whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter grabbed my arm. "What is this?"

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

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

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

"Quentin, Quentin! Think of what you're doing!"

36

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Poe," I said, "it is Poe…"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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