“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!”