"The Poe Shadow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pearl Matthew)

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 her 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?"

She smiled as though it were self-evident.

I ascended a few rungs of the ladder that I had seen her climb and removed the book that she had placed on the shelf. It was an edition of Poe's tales.

"It is opposite from my custom. Putting valuable things into a place." She laughed with child-like enjoyment at the idea. When she smiled she had the air of a little girl, particularly now, as her hair had been cut shorter.

"Valuable? These are only valuable for readers who can appreciate Poe!" I said. "And why place them so high up, where they are difficult to find?"

"People like to reach for something, Monsieur Quentin," she said.

"You have done this under the direction of the Baron Dupin. Where is he?"

"He has begun the work of resolving Poe's death," Bonjour said. "And shall end it in triumph."

My head was pounding. "He has no business with that! He has no business here!"

"Consider it fortunate," she replied cryptically.

"I do not consider his using this serious matter for his entertainment fortunate."

"Still, he has found an activity more useful than murdering you."

"Murdering me? Ha!" I tried to sound cavalier. "Why should he do that?"

"When you wrote your letters to Baron Dupin, you spoke at length of the urgent assistance needed to decipher the beloved Mr. Poe's death. ‘The greatest genius known to American literary journals, who will be endlessly and forever mourned,' and so on."

This was a true rendition of my sentiments.

"Imagine the Baron's surprise, then, when we arrived here to Baltimore some weeks ago. No ladies weeping in the streets for the postmortem of poor Poe. No riots demanding justice for the poet. Few people we could find knew, with particularity, who Edgar Poe was other than to say a writer of some queer and popular fantasies. Indeed, most didn't know that Monsieur Poe had gone to his long home."

"It is true," I said defiantly. "There are many, mademoiselle, who will greet genius with jealousy and indifference, and Poe's uniqueness made him an especial target for that. What about it?"

"Baron Dupin had come here to answer the demand to understand Poe's death. And here no demand at all could be found!"

I fell silent. I suppose I could not argue against the Baron's frustration, as I had experienced the same kind.

"He blamed me," I muttered.

"Well, do not imagine my master felt very forgiving toward you. In fact, finding we had traveled so far and at great expense without purpose, the Baron grew very warm very quickly."

I think I must have shown apprehension, because she smiled.

"Nothing to fear, Monsieur Quentin," she said. But her smiling, somehow, made me feel less safe. Perhaps it was the scar that divided her mouth into two. "I do not think you are in the shadow of any harm-at the moment. You have no doubt seen what has happened, since that time, to the awareness of Poe in your city."

"You mean, in the newspapers?" I began to put it together. "You have something to do with all that?"

She explained. First the Baron had placed notices in all the newspapers in the city, offering substantial rewards for "vital information" in the "mysterious and untoward death" of the poet Poe. He did not expect to actually hear from witnesses at once. Rather, the notices served their real purpose-to stir questions. The editors of the papers sensed excitement, and they followed its path. Now the people were clamoring for more and more Poe.

"We are helping to enliven the public's imagination," Bonjour said. "I believe Poe's books are met with a ready sale now."

I thought back to the woman in the park…the Poe enthusiast in the reading room…and now Bonjour planting books for more people to find.

She turned to leave, and I grabbed her. If anyone was watching us, my hand wrapped around the gloved wrist of a young woman, it would occasion a small scandal and would travel with the speed of a telegraph to Hattie Blum's aunt. In Baltimore, the cold breezes of the North met the hard etiquette of the South, and the gossip that came along with it.

It was a twofold compulsion that made me reach for her hand. First, being seized once again by her careless beauty, so strikingly relocated in Baltimore, so distinct from the normal lady's-magazine appearance of local girls. Second, she might know something of Poe's death already. Third-for I suppose the compulsion should be called threefold-I knew that where she came from in Paris, touching the hand of a lady was hardly a noticeable act, and this emboldened me. But her eyes burned at me, and at a breath I pulled my hand away.

I find it difficult to describe the sensation that passed through me upon touching, even for a moment, this lady. It was the sensation that at any moment I could be transported anywhere in the world, into anyone's life, almost that I was not restricted to my own body-it was a spiritual feeling, in a sense, feeling as light as a star in the sky.

Much to my surprise amid the bookstalls, as soon as I released her, both her hands sprung toward me and gripped me far more firmly than I had seized her. I could not pry her fingers off my hands, and we stood facing each other for a long moment.

"Sir! Remove your hand, if you please!" she burst out in an outraged, virginal voice.

Her cry prompted the Argus-eyed inquisitiveness of everyone in the store, at every table and bench. After she released me, I attempted to appear occupied by commonplace interest in the nearest books. By the time the stares dissipated, she was gone. I raced into the street and spotted her, the back of her head now covered by a striped parasol.

"Stay!" I called out, hurrying to her side. "I know you are well intentioned. You kept me safe from the shooting at the fortifications. You saved my life!"

"It seemed you wished to assist me when thinking the Baron forced my service to him. This was"-she tucked her lip under her small front teeth to consider this-"unusual."

"You must know that this is far too important a matter to cheaply excite the periodical press. No good shall come of that. Poe's genius deserves more. You must stop this now."

"Do you think you can shuffle us off from our task so easily? I have read some of your friend Poe. It seems it consists chiefly of him saying plain things in a fashion that makes them hard to understand, and commonplace things in a mysterious form which makes them seem oracular." Bonjour checked her speed momentarily to look at me. I also came to a stop. "Are you in love, Monsieur Clark?"

I had lost my concentration on Bonjour. My gaze had landed nearby, where a woman was striding along the sidewalk. She was woman of around forty, attractive enough. My eyes followed her path down the street.

"Are you in love, monsieur?" Bonjour repeated gently, following the object of my gaze.

"That woman…I saw her with Neilson Poe, a cousin of Edgar's, you see, and she looks remarkably like-"

I had not meant to blurt this out.

"Yes?" Bonjour said. Her softer tone compelled me to finish the sentence.

"Remarkably like a portrait I've seen of Virginia Poe, Edgar's deceased wife." The fact was, even seeing this woman seemed to bring me closer to the life of Edgar Poe.

My view of her was soon blocked by the rest of the crowd. I then realized that Bonjour was no longer standing by my side. Looking around, I saw that she was approaching the woman-that Virginia Poe copy!-and I felt angry at myself for having revealed what I had.

"Miss!" Bonjour called. "Miss!"

The woman turned and faced Bonjour. I stood aside, not believing that the woman had seen me at the police station house, but wishing to be safe.

"Oh, I'm sorry," said Bonjour, in a convincing southern accent that she must have imitated from some of the belles she had heard around the city. She continued, "You looked so much like a lady I used to know-but I was mistaken. Perhaps it was only that lovely bonnet…"

The woman gave a kind smile and started to turn her back to Bonjour.

"But she looked so much like Virginia!" Bonjour now said as though to herself.

The woman turned back. "Virginia?" she asked with curiosity.

I could see a look of enjoyment spread across Bonjour's face, knowing that she had achieved her object. "Virginia Poe," Bonjour said, adopting a somber aspect.

"I see," the other woman said quietly.

"I met her only once, but Lethean waters will never erase it from my memory," gushed Bonjour. "You are as beautiful as she was!"

The woman lowered her eyes at the compliment.

"I am Mrs. Neilson Poe," the other woman said. "Josephine. I am afraid no one shall ever be as beautiful as my darling sister was when she was still alive."

"Your sister, ma'am?"

"Sissy. Virginia Poe, I mean. She was my half-sister. She was all courage and confidence even at her weakest. Whenever I see her portrait…!" She stopped, unable to continue the thought.

So that was it! Neilson was married to the sister of Edgar Poe's late wife. After a few words of condolence, they walked together and Josephine Poe quietly answered Bonjour's questions about Sissy. I followed behind to listen.

"One evening while Edgar and Sissy were residing happily in Philadelphia on Coates Street, darling Sissy was singing at her beloved piano when a blood vessel ruptured. She collapsed in the middle of her song. There was an almost hourly anticipation of her being lost. Especially by Edgar. The winter of her death, they were so poverty-stricken that the only thing that could keep Sissy warm in their badly heated rooms was to be wrapped in his great-coat with a tortoise-shell cat lying on her bosom."

"What happened to her husband since?"

"Edgar? The oscillation between hope and despair for so many years had driven him insane, I believe. He needed womanly devotion. He said he would not live another year without true and tender love. People say he ran about the country looking to find a wife several times since Sissy's death, but I believe his heart still bled for Sissy. He was engaged to be married again only a few weeks before his death."

The women exchanged a few more words before Josephine departed with a graceful farewell. Bonjour turned back to me with a girlish giggle. "It is too bad for you, that you must be against the Baron in one of his plots, Monsieur Clark. You see, we do not hide in the shadows, lingering over small details."

"Mademoiselle, please! Here, in Baltimore, in America, you do not have to retain your association with the Baron and his schemes! I would flee him at once. There are no bonds here!"

Her eyes widened with interest. "Is there not slavery?"

She was clever.

"Just so!" I said. "There are no bonds for a free Frenchwoman. You do not owe any duty to the Baron."

"I do not have duty to my husband?" she said. "This is useful to remember."

"The Baron. Your husband?"

"We have full swing over this, and beginning now there will be no letup. If I were you, Monsieur Clark, I would try not to get in our way."

Wherever you travel in the world, you are sure to find the same limited number of species of lawyers, as surely as a naturalist finds his grass and weeds in every land. The first sort of lawyer views the intricacies of the rules of the law as profound and unshakable idols of worship. There is a different species of attorney, a carnivorous one to whom the first is prey, who instead treats rules as the principal barriers to success.

The Baron Claude Dupin was such a good specimen of the latter category that his skeleton might be hung in the Tuileries Cabinet of Comparative Anatomy. The legal codes were the weaponry he utilized to wage battle; they were his pistols and knives, nothing more hallowed. When he required a delay to his advantage, the Baron was known to have ended an appointment or even a trial by sneaking out an anteroom window. When such sinister methods were not sufficient, the Baron Dupin employed actual pistols and knives through his networks of rogues to secure the information or confession needed. The Baron was a lawyer, yes, but only secondarily; he was a heartfelt impresario, first, who worked as a lawyer. A showman on his box, a huckster of the law.

Duponte had told me one day, during our transatlantic journey, the story of Bonjour, though he had neglected to mention her marriage. In France, Duponte explained, there is a type of criminal known as the bonjourier, whose method entails the following: in fashionable clothing, the lady or gentleman thief will enter a house, moving past the servants as though present for an important appointment, take whatever objects they can quickly seize, and then walk right out the street door. But if a servant or other member of the household notices them between entrance and exit, they bow, say "Bonjour!" and ask for the resident of the house next door, having researched that name. They are, of course, assumed to merely have come in at the wrong door, and are directed away without suspicion and with as many stolen valuables as they'd managed to collect. The young woman who had stood before me in the fortifications was the best bonjourier in Paris and so had eventually become known to all simply as Bonjour.

Bonjour was said to have been raised in a rural village of France. Her mother, a Swiss woman, died a few months before the child had reached one year. Her French father, a hardworking baker, cared for his daughter. He spent most nights wailing, however, and the young girl soon had little patience for her father's endless grief. This, in combination with the lack of a maternal instructor, forged a young girl who was as fiercely independent as any Frenchman. Soon, the father was arrested and taken away before her eyes in the chaos of one of the country's smaller revolutions. She made her way to Paris to live on her own and survived through cleverness and physical strength. There were many assaults against her as a young thief, and one of these resulted in the prominent scar on her face.

"But how is it such a beautiful woman persists as a common thief?" I had asked Duponte one evening as we sat at the long dining table of the steamer.

Duponte raised an eyebrow at my question and seemed to consider leaving it unanswered. "She has not remained a thief, in fact, and has not been common. She has for many years been an assassin of the most efficient character. It is said that, because of her former practice, in her role as assassin it is her habit to call out ‘bonjour' before sending a knife through a man's throat. However, this is mere speculation, for nobody living can confirm it."

"Yet she was womanly and courageous enough at the fortifications on my behalf," I said. "I believe poor health and environments create such lapses in character in women."

"She has been most poor then," replied Duponte.

It happened one winter that Bonjour, brought in by the Parisian police after a botched theft that left one gentleman dead in his parlor, was threatened with execution to be made an example to the growing race of female thieves. The Baron Dupin, at the height of his eminence, represented her with overpowering zeal. He demonstrated with skill that the police of Paris had quite mistakenly victimized Bonjour, a delicate and angelic creature whose physical appearance, petite girlish form, and comeliness added not a little to the general effect for observers.

You shall not now wonder, considering this example, how the Baron accumulated faithful rogues. When he secured their release from prison, as he did Bonjour's, their loyalty accrued to him as a matter of honor. You shall think this a contradiction, but all people need rules to live, and criminals can only have a few-loyalty is one they favor. The Baron had been married before, but the women were said to have motives ranging from simple love to, at one time in his life, his great wealth. It remains anyone's guess whether with the loyalty of Bonjour also came love, or one superseded the other, or they mingled together in some heartless combination.