The Poe Shadow Page 13

  Driving away from the boardinghouse was a carriage that I could see was loaded above with baggage. I cried out without success for the coach to return but could only throw up my hands limply as it passed into the street. What a surprise when I found no sign of my own coach and driver—whom I had ordered to wait. Stewing over this final insult, I was jarred by seeing that Duponte’s coach was driving back—and that it was not Duponte’s coach at all; well, he sat inside and his baggage wobbled on top, so now it was his, but it had been my driver and my carriage.

  The horses stomped to a halt in front of me.

  “Just wanted to turn the horses around to pull away easier, monsieur,” the driver said to me, “so we’d not lose time.”

  He climbed down and opened the door opposite Duponte’s, but first I had to see him. I walked to Duponte’s side and opened his door. The analyst sat with a fixed gaze. Had the Baron Dupin’s deceitful claims on C. Auguste Dupin’s character finally affected him in a way none of my enticements or rewards could?

  “Monsieur Duponte, does this mean…are you…?”

  “You’ll be late,” shouted the driver, “for the train to your ship, monsieurs. You’ll lose your passage. Come in, come in!”

  Duponte nodded to me. “Now it is time,” he said.

  10

  THE CUNARD STEAMER Humboldt to America had seventy-eight officers and seamen aboard and a sufficient number of accommodations—narrow staterooms entered from the sides of the richly carpeted main saloon—for more than one hundred passengers. There was also a labyrinth of ancillary chambers—the library, the smoking rooms, and the sitting rooms, as well as the sheltered pens for cattle.

  Duponte and I had been among the earliest passengers to arrive at this floating palace, and I brimmed with anticipation, gazing upon the ark that would carry us to the New World. Duponte remained standing in place as soon as he reached the upper deck. I froze too. I imagined he was experiencing some sudden doubt, a premonition, and would back out of our voyage.

  “Monsieur Duponte?” I said attentively, hoping I could oblige him. “All right?”

  “Do request, Monsieur Clark,” Duponte said, taking my elbow, “that the steward inform our ship’s captain there is a stowaway on board this ship. Armed.”

  My anxiety flitted away into utter astonishment. When I had sufficiently regained my calm, I commanded an interview with the steward in a private corner.

  “Sir, there is a stowaway on board the ship,” I whispered urgently, “possibly armed.”

  He lowered his brow at me, showing no concern. “How do you know that?”

  “Whatever does that matter?”

  “We checked all stowage and cabins already, sir, as always. Did you see someone on board?”

  “No,” I replied. “We have only just arrived!”

  He nodded, persuaded that he had proven his argument.

  I looked back at Duponte across the deck. I could not fail him so soon, not after all that had been required to secure him. I wanted him to feel that anything he asked was no sooner suggested than done. “Sir, what do you know of ratiocination?” I asked the steward.

  “Aye. That is a new sea-beast, sir, with six hundred legs and a hunched back.”

  I ignored this. “It is the rare ability of knowing, by a process of reasoning not only using logic, but through the higher logic of imagination, that which is outside the mental function of most ordinary people. There is—I promise you—an armed and most villainous stowaway here. I suggest the captain be informed double-quick and that you look more carefully.”

  “I was going to have another look anyway,” he said importantly. He walked with a deliberately slow step.

  A few minutes later, the steward was calling—or, rather, shrieking—for his superior to come to the mail chamber. Soon the burly old captain and the steward had wrestled a struggling, shouting man from down below.

  The stowaway thrust both his elbows out, breaking loose and shoving the steward flat on his back. The few passengers lolling about went immediately scurrying below in fear for their lives, or at least in fear for their jewels. Others, along with Duponte and myself, clustered together to watch the scene. There was a moment of stillness as the captain stood across from the intruder.

  “Trying to steal our mail?” the captain barked out. Our steamer, like most crossing the ocean, supplemented its finances in large part by transporting mail.

  The stowaway seemed for a moment a phantasm from another world, large and red in the cheeks. Perhaps the captain experienced a similar effect looking at him, as he put his hands in front of him in a soothing gesture. “Peace,” said the captain.

  “You shall want to know what I know!” warned the stowaway, looking beyond the captain toward the passengers, seeming to be assessing which one of us to take prisoner. We all took a step back, except for Duponte.

  The captain did not jump at the man’s declaration, but the foolish steward was intrigued by the bluff. “Like what?” he asked. “What could you know?” The stowaway lost his footing on some wet boards and the captain and steward charged again, overwhelming their victim. After a few awkward attempts and to the cheers of some passengers, they heaved him straight overboard.

  The captain leaned over the side and observed the fellow, whose lost hat had left his baldness to shine in the sun. I rushed to the rails, too, and stood watching for a long while. I could not help feeling some pity for the shocked, flailing rogue. The captain, believing his own crew member responsible for the discovery, shook the steward by the hand probably more heartily than ever before.

  Later that same day, after we’d pushed away to sea, the steward found me alone and said with a snarl, “How the deuce did you know about him?”

  I held my tongue.

  “How in the devil could someone know there was a stowaway here, just after stepping on deck? How in the devil? How did you get this ration-sin-ation?”

  He would take his small-minded revenge by giving Duponte and me undesirable seats at the dining table. But that day I could not help but wear a peculiar grin, which reappeared whenever I saw the steward during all three weeks of our voyage to America.

  Book III

  BALTIMORE 1851

  11

  Ratiocination. NOUN. The act of deliberate, calculated reasoning through the imagination and spirit; the intimate observation and forecasting of the complexities in human activity, especially the frequent simplicity in that activity. Not interchangeable with mere “calculus” or “logic.”

  IN THE BEGINNING, I watched constantly for some error on my part that would divert the path of Auguste Duponte’s ratiocination (the above being my own definition, which Webster and other publishers might use to correct their own, and which I compiled as I watched Duponte on our transatlantic journey). I wanted to assist without being an obstacle. As it happened, I had made my first mistake long before we had begun.

  I was sitting across from him in my library on our third morning after arriving in Baltimore. He was settled in the most comfortable armchair. I saw the analyst in a state of complete leisure. To say “leisure” conjures an incomplete impression, since he was constantly busying himself. But his efforts were unhurried and peaceful.

  Duponte read through all the newspaper articles I had collected about Poe’s death. I also gave him other materials relevant to Poe—biographical notices from journals and magazines, engravings, as well as my personal correspondence with the author. Duponte read the papers like the governor of a state would read the news over breakfast, with that strong grip on the page that suggested mastery over it.

  On this day, when he acknowledged me from across the room, it was with such a sudden movement of the head that I half expected him to pronounce his conclusion about Poe’s death.

  “I shall need the rest,” he said.

  “Yes.” I hesitated. I thought I understood his reference, and its surprising error, but I did not want to appear discouraging. “Monsieur Duponte, from the vagaries of the press
, it is unlikely many additional items have been published about Poe’s death.”

  Duponte handed my memorandum book to me and then tapped the large portfolio of cuttings. “Monsieur Clark, I require not just these articles—but the newspapers from which they were excised. And, perhaps, the numbers of those newspapers for a week before and after each article.”

  “But I examined the entire newspapers whenever possible for the smallest reference to the poet in the most out-of-the-way column, even the simple mention of his name. I assure you these were all the items concerning Poe that could be found.”

  “Dunce!” he said, sighing.

  It is impossible to convey, I suppose, without knowing him personally, but I had grown accustomed to Duponte’s frequent exclamations of this kind, and they no longer seemed like insults.

  Duponte went on: “The cuttings are not enough, monsieur. There is as much to reveal from what surrounds information as the information itself. Skip the columns that make the heart of the populace palpitate with excitement—read everything besides this, and much shall be learned. You have sacrificed a great portion of the intelligence in each article by divorcing it from its sheet.”

  To be perfectly honest, it was difficult to keep from showing restlessness at Duponte’s pace. I suppose I should have predicted it. Poe had recognized the requirements of an intelligence this sophisticated. In his tales, C. Auguste Dupin undertakes meticulous reviews of newspaper reports of the respective crimes before he ventures to resolve the cases.

  But here was the difference, in the line of timing, between those literary tales and our undertaking: we were not alone. In the back of my mind at all times there stood the ghostly image of my kidnapper, Dupin. (Looking at that sentence, I see I must not write “Dupin” like that, or I shall think automatically of the C. Auguste Dupin of Poe’s tales. Though it costs more in ink, “Claude Dupin” or “Baron Dupin” it shall be.) Sometimes, I even thought I saw his face, in the open window of a building, in a crowd on Baltimore Street, grinning cunningly at me. Had the Baron truly come to America, or had his announcement been a hoax to confuse his creditors in Paris?

  I began to collect all the newspapers Duponte had requested. The imposing Baltimore Sun building had been the first iron structure in Baltimore. Although some judged the five-story edifice beautiful, that was the wrong sort of term. Impressive: that’s what you thought while walking through the newspaper offices, the presses and steam engines whirling below in the basement, heating your boots; the cracking of telegraph machinery raining onto the ceiling from the second floor above. You were in the middle of something powerful, something demanded by the mass of our citizens.

  Visiting also the Sun’s competitors, the Whig papers Patriot and the American, and those known for Democratic leanings, the Clipper and the Daily Argus, I gradually furnished Duponte with everything he had asked for from Baltimore. Then I started for the athenaeum to search for more from other states and any new reports about Poe.

  I had not yet sent word to Hattie or Peter of my return. Auntie Blum’s prohibition on Hattie writing to me had remained for the balance of my time in Paris. Peter, in his last few letters, had said little of Hattie or anything else of interest, but had alluded to certain sensitive matters of business he needed to speak with me about. I had a strong desire to commune with both of them. But it was as though the world outside my involvement with Duponte was suspended; as though I had been caught in a universe made only from Duponte’s mind and his ideas and could not return to my usual place until the task at hand had been achieved.

  Though I had been abroad for only a season, I noticed every change in Baltimore acutely. The city was growing bigger by the day, so it seemed. There was the rubble, ladders, joists, and tools of construction in every direction. Warehouses five stories high had overtaken old mansions. All that was brand-new, like the dust of the construction, cast a dull pallor over the city. There was something else, I know not what to call it. An unrest. A cheerless restiveness. This is how it seemed passing through the street.

  At the reading room, I situated myself at a table with my memorandum book and opened a newspaper. I scanned the columns, stopping several times to study some interesting bit of news that had transpired in my absence. Then I saw it. My heart quickened with—surprise, exhilaration, fear. I could not have said which. I switched to the next paper, then another. There was not just a chance mention in the back sheets of one paper. No. There were mentions everywhere! Each paper featured some item about the death of Poe! There were many details yet to learn in the mysterious circumstances of the late poet’s death, wrote the Clipper. “The prominent topic of conversation in literary circles, has been the death of that melancholy man Edgar A. Poe,” said a weekly dollar magazine. “He was altogether a strange and fearful being.”

  The articles provided almost no factual details. Instead, each page was like a newsboy who shouted ad infinitum of some sensational hanging without saying how it had come to be.

  I rushed to the front of the room, where the ancient clerk sat. Another patron of the reading room stood across from the desk, but as he was not yet addressing the clerk, I felt free to proceed.

  “What is all of this about Edgar Poe? How has this come about?” I asked.

  “Mr. Clark,” replied the clerk, with a look of great interest, “you have been away quite a while!”

  “My good sir, not many months ago,” I said, “there was hardly any concern for the death of Edgar Poe. Now it forms a topic in the columns of every paper.”

  The clerk appeared ready to answer when we were interrupted.

  “Yes, yes!”

  We both turned to the other patron, whose spot I had taken. He was a bulky man with wiry eyebrows. He blew his large nose into a handkerchief before continuing.

  “I have read of it, too,” he said collegially, nudging me, as though we had shared snuff from the same box.

  I looked at him blankly.

  “Of Poe’s death!” he said. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  I studied this stranger. “Wonderful?”

  “Certainly,” he said suspiciously, “you think Poe a genius, sir?”

  “Of the greatest degree!”

  “Certainly you think there is no better prose written in the world than ‘The Gold-Bug’?”

  “Only ‘A Descent into the Maelström,’” I replied.

  “Well, then, it is wonderful, is it not, that it is finally receiving the attention it deserves from the editors of the newspapers? Poe’s sad sorrowful death, I mean to say.” He touched his hat to the clerk before leaving the reading room.

  “Now, you say…what is it that has come to your attention?” the clerk asked me.

  “The newspapers, why…” My thoughts were lost in the memory of what the other man had just said. I pointed to the door. “Who was that gentleman standing here before, who has just bid us farewell?”

  The clerk did not know. I excused myself and hurried to the corner of Saratoga Street, but there was no sign of him.

  I was so struck by these combined phenomena—the newspapers, the strange Poe enthusiast, the restiveness that seemed to have overtaken the city—that I did not initially direct much attention to a woman, with puffed cheeks and silver hair, on a bench not too far from the athenaeum. She was reading a book of poems by Edgar A. Poe! Here, I should say, I was in command of a unique advantage of observation. Having purchased every volume of Poe’s writings published, I could recognize the editions from great distances by small attributes of appearance, size, and engravings unique to each of them. I suppose my boast is lessened by the fact that there were not many collections. Poe did not like the few that were published. “The publishers cheat,” he lamented in a letter to me. “To be controlled is to be ruined. I am resolved to be my own publisher.” This would not happen, though. His own finances were in disarray, and the periodical press remained miserly in what they would pay him for his writings.

  I stood over the woman’s bench and watched h
er propping her finger to turn the dog-eared and spotted pages. For her part, she did not notice me, so rapt was she in the tale’s final pages, the sublime collapse of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Before I realized it, she had closed the book with an air of deep satisfaction and scurried away as though fleeing from the crumbled ruins of the Ushers.

  I decided to inquire to a nearby bookseller to see whether he had followed the new public discussion of Poe. It was one of the booksellers less likely to fill his shelves with cigar-boxes and portraits of Indians and anything else other than books, which had become a growing trend among these establishments since more people were buying books through subscriptions. I paused inside the front vestibule when I saw another woman, this one committing the most peculiar crime.

  She was standing on one of the store’s ladders used to examine the higher shelves. The crime, if it qualifies as that, was not the theft of a book, which should be noteworthy and strange enough, but the placement of a book from the folds of her shawl onto the shelf. Then she moved to the next higher rung of the ladder and added yet another book from her shawl to the store’s selection. The sight of her was obscured to my view by the rays coming through the large skylight, but I could see she was wearing a fine dress and hat; she was not one of the gaudy butterflies to be found promenading on Baltimore Street. Her neck hinted at golden skin, as did the sliver of arm beneath her glove. She descended the ladder and turned down a row of bookshelves. I walked down the next aisle in a parallel line and found her waiting at the end.

  “It is impolite,” she said in French, the scar-crossed lips posed in a frown, “for a man to stare.”

  “Bonjour!” My former captor in the fortress of Paris, the Baron Dupin’s compatriot, stood before me. “Many apologies—you see, I seem to be staring sometimes in a sort of haze.” But this had not been one of my staring spells. Her killing beauty rushed back to me at first sight, and I looked elsewhere to break her hold on me. After recovering myself, I whispered, “What in the world are you doing?”