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

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THE THREAT CAME on a Monday afternoon. There were no guns, no daggers, no swords, no near hangings involved (nor would I have believed these were coming for me). The utter astonishment on this day proved more forceful.

My visits to the Baltimore athenaeum reading rooms were becoming regular. A certain prominent debtor's lawsuit, commenced around that time, obliged us to gather diverse news clippings. In times of pressing business, Peter would have been happy to construct a bunk in our chambers and never meet with a ray of sunlight, so it fell to me to travel the short distance to the reading room to perform the researches. While I was there, I would also research Edgar Poe and his death.

A typical biographical account on Poe, which had increased as news of his death spread, might name some of his poems ("The Raven," "Ulalume"), where he had been discovered (Ryan's hotel and tavern, which on that day of election was also a polling place, at High and Lombard streets), when he had died (Sunday, October 7, in a hospital bed), and so on. More Poe-related articles began appearing in the larger presses of New York, Richmond, and Philadelphia that preferred events with a bit of sensation to them. I was able to find some of these mentions at our reading room. Mentions! Mentions indeed!

His life was a regrettable failure. He was a gifted mind who squandered all his potential. Whose fantastical and affected poems and weird tales were too frequently tainted by the fatal, miserable fact of his life. He lived as a drunkard. Died a drunkard, a disgrace and a blackguard who injured sound morals through his writings. Not to be missed by many (said one New York journal). Not long to be remembered.

Have a look with your own eyes:

Edgar Allan Poe is dead. We have not learned the circumstances of his death. It was sudden, and from the fact that it occurred in Baltimore, it is to be presumed that he was on his return to New York. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it.

I could not watch this desecration. I wanted to look away, yet at the same time I found myself thirsting to know everything that had been written, however unjust. (Or-think of the peculiarities of the human mind-the more unjust it was, the more I needed to see it, and the more unfair, the more essential it seemed to me!)

Then came that cold, drizzling afternoon when the noon-day sky was the same at six in the morning as it would be at six at night. Fog everywhere. It drifted like fingers in your face and jabbed in your eyes and down your throat.

I was on my way to the athenaeum reading rooms when a man bumped into me. He was approximately my height, and probably the age my father would have been. The stranger's collision would not have normally seemed deliberate but for the fact that he had to coil his body in rather an unnatural way in order to extend his elbow against me. It was not a blow but rather a drifting tap, actually tender. I listened for an apology.

Instead, there came this warning.

"It is unwise to meddle with your lowly lies, Mr. Clark."

He flashed a glare at me that cut right through the dense air, and then, before I could think, he had vanished in the fog. I turned to look behind me as though he had been addressing someone else.

No, he had said "Clark." I was Quentin Hobson Clark, twenty-seven years old, an attorney chiefly in cases of mortgages and debt. I was Mr. Clark, and I had just been threatened.

I did not know what to do. In my confusion, I had dropped my memorandum book, and it opened promiscuously on the ground. It was at that moment, retrieving it before it could be trampled by a mud-crusted heel, that I recognized how much I had been researching Poe. The name Poe was written on practically every page. I apprehended with sudden clarity what the stranger had meant. It was about Poe.

I confess that my own response astonished me. I grew calm and collected, so notably calm that Peter would have grasped my hand with pride; that is, if this were relating to any other affair. I could never be a lawyer like Peter, a man who had passion for the dullest affidavit or suit, especially the dullest of them all. Though I had a respectably quick mind, ability could never outdo passion however much one memorized the pages of Blackstone and Coke. But in this moment, I had a client and I had a cause that I would not see extinguished. I felt like the finest lawyer ever known.

Regaining my senses sufficiently I plunged into the crowd of umbrellas and soon located the back of the man. He had slowed to a stroll, almost a summer saunter! But I was deceived; this was not the same man. Upon gaining ground, I noticed that in the clouds of fog everyone looked approximately like the subject of my search, even the fairest ladies and darkest slaves. That creeping mist concealed and blended us together, disturbing the regulated order of the streets. And I own that each person tried their best to hold their heads and to stride in perfect indifferent imitation of that one man, that phantom.

There on the corner a stream of gaslight broke through the thick air from a window half hidden underground. It came from the outside lamps of a tavern, and thinking this might be a beacon to attract someone of conniving motives, I rushed down and burst inside. I pushed through the clusters of men intent on their drinks, and at the end of a long row I saw one crumpled over a table. His once-fancy coat was just the one I'd noticed worn by my phantom.

I took his arm. He weakly lifted his head and gave a start upon seeing my intent countenance.

"A mistake. Sir. Sir! A grave mistake on my part!" he cried. His words died together drunkenly.

This was not the man either.

"Mr. Watchman," a nearby inebriate explained to me in a sympathetic loud whisper. "That's John Watchman. I drink to him, the poor fellow! And I drink to you, too, if you'd like."

"John Watchman," I agreed, though at that point this name meant nothing to me (if I had seen it in the newspaper columns, it was with only passing attention). I left some copper coins for the continuation of the man's indulgences, and quickly returned above to the street to press ahead with the search.

I saw the true culprit revealed to me where the fog lessened. At one given time it seemed, in my distress, that all the inhabitants of the street were giving chase to him, summoning their courage to hunt him.

Did I say our Phantom was my height? Yes, and that is true. But this is not to suggest that he resembled me in any way. Indeed, I was perhaps the only one on the streets then not bearing a strict similarity to my subject. I, with dusty hair of a color like the skin of a tree, which I kept well-groomed, and small, reasonable, clean-shaven features too often called boyish. He-this Phantom-had different proportions to his body. His legs seemed nearly double mine in length, so that however briskly I went along, I could not reduce that gap between us.

As I ran through the prickly mist, I was filled with frantic and excitable thoughts with nothing tying them together except that they thrilled me beyond any logic. I collided with a shoulder, another, and once almost the entire body of a large man who could have flattened me out on the red brick of the side pavement. I slipped on a track of dirt, coating my left side with mud. After that I was all at once alone-nobody in sight.

I stood perfectly still.

Now that I'd lost my prey-or he had lost his-my eyes focused, as though I had put on a pair of spectacles. Here I was, not twenty yards away from it: the narrow Presbyterian burial ground, where the thin slabs of stone sloping out from the ground were only barely darker than the air. I tried to think whether the interloper had actually led me here through half of Baltimore as he fled my pursuit. Or had he been gone for the whole length of the chase, before I came near this place? This place where Edgar Poe now rested, but could not.

Many years earlier, when I was but midway through my teen years, there was an incident on a train I should recount. I was riding with my parents. Although the ladies' car permitted family members of women to sit with them, it was quite full, and only my mother was able to stay. I sat with my father a few cars away, and we walked through the train to visit Mother at regular intervals, into that compartment where no spitting and cursing could take place. After one such excursion, I returned to our seats ahead of Father and found two gentlemen in the seats moments ago occupied by us. I politely explained to the men their mistake. One of the men flew into a violent passion, warning me that I would have to "walk over his dead body" to get our seats back.

"I shall do that very thing if you do not step aside," I replied.

"What did you say, lad?"

And I repeated the same absurd statement with equal calm.

Imagine me as rather a thin boy at fifteen-stringy, you can say. Typically, I might have begged the pardon of the occupant and diligently searched out inferior seats. You wonder meanwhile about the second interloper in this episode, the other thief of our seats. He, it appeared by a similar look around the eyes, was the brother of the first; from his bobbing head and stare, I believed him to be slow-witted.

You may wonder also as to my reaction. I had been enveloped in my father's presence shortly before. Father was always a sovereign to all around him. You see, in the moment, it was perfectly natural to me to assume that I, too, could adjust the world as fit my sense of things. This had been the sneaking nature of the delusion.

I may as well finish the story. The villain did not stop landing severe blows to my face and head until my father's return to the train car. Less than a minute later, my father and a conductor had banished the men into another train of the car to be removed at the next depot.

"Now, what did you do, my boy?" my father asked me afterward as I lay prostrate across our seats in a haze.

"I had to, Father! You were not here!"

"You provoked someone. You might have been killed. What would you prove then, Quentin Hobson Clark?" I looked back at the blurry image of this man lecturing me, standing above me with his usual composure, and knew the difference between us.

Now I thought of the new warning I had received. It is unwise to meddle… The Phantom's image locked up my mind beside the demon of the train from my childhood. How I burned to talk about it! My great-aunt at this time was residing with me for a few days to help oversee the housekeeping. Could I tell Great-Auntie Clark about the threat?

"You ought to have been caught young and trained carefully," she would say-or something along those lines. She was a great-aunt on my father's side, and applied the sternness of my father's business principles to promoting sober behavior more generally. Great-Auntie Clark praised Father for his "strong Saxon thoughts." Her affection for my father seemed to accrue partially to me, and she watched over me with dutiful vigilance.

No, I did not tell Great-Auntie Clark and soon she had departed from Glen Eliza. (Could I have told my father if he were alive?)

I wanted to tell Hattie Blum. She had always been pleased to hear of my personal enterprises. She alone had been able to speak to me after my parents' deaths in a tone and confidence that understood that though my parents had died, they were not corpses to me. Yet, as I had not seen her since the day we were supposed to have been engaged, I could not fathom how she would perceive my interest in this.

In a way, the Phantom's words attracted as much as they startled me. It is unwise to meddle with your lowly lies. Though he was warning me away, the cryptic words acknowledged that the perception of Poe could be meddled with-in other words, they could still be changed by me. In a way, that warning encouraged me.

I felt an excitement that was only remotely familiar and only half unwanted. It was different from anything I had known in our work.

One long afternoon at the office I sat looking at the street from my desk. Peter was nearby. He was in the middle of reprimanding our copying clerk over the quality of some affidavit when he glanced over at me. He returned to his speech, then glanced abruptly at me again. "All right, Quentin?"

It was a habit of mine that I occasionally fell into a sort of staring spell, glaring in the air at nothing in particular. Peter was especially fascinated and appalled whenever these reveries occurred. He noisily shook the bag of ginger-nuts I'd been eating. "All right, Quentin?"

"All right," I assured him. "Tolerably well, Peter." Upon seeing that I would say no more, he returned to the clerk with the precise word of reprimand where he had left off.

I could no longer keep buttoned up. "All right, certainly! If there is anything all right about being threatened!" I cried out suddenly. "All wrong!" Peter quietly dismissed our clerk, who gratefully scurried from the room. When we were alone, every detail spilled from my tongue. Peter sat at the edge of his chair, listening with interest. At first, he even shared in the thrill of the incident, but soon enough remembered himself. He declared the Phantom nothing but a cracked lunatic.

I somehow felt the need to defend, even commend the threatening party. "No, Peter, he was no lunatic in the least! In his eyes was a rational purpose of some kind-a rare intelligence."

"What cloak-and-dagger business! Why-? Why should he bother to-? What, one of our mortgage cases?"

I responded with a hoarse laughter that seemed to offend Peter-as though denying a would-be lunatic's potential interest in our mortgage disputes devalued the whole legal profession. But I was sorry for the tone, and I more calmly explained that this affair was something to do with Edgar Poe; I explained that I had been studying clippings about Poe and had noticed important inconsistencies.

"For instance, there is the common innuendo, the suggestion, that Poe died of his ‘fatal weakness,' they say, meaning drinking. Yet who was a witness? Hadn't some of the same newspapers reported, only a few weeks earlier, Poe joining the Sons of Temperance in Richmond and successfully keeping their oath?"

"A thorough scamp and a poet, that Edgar Poe! To read him is like being in a charnel-house and breathing the air."

"You say you never read him, Peter!"

"Yes, and that's precisely why! I would not be half surprised if more people never read him each day. Even the titles of his tales are nightmares. Just because you cared about him, Quentin Clark, should that mean anyone else did? None of this is about Poe, it is about you wanting it to be about Poe! Why, this warning you think you heard surely had nothing to do with him at all, except in some disordered current of your mind!" He threw his hands in the air.

Perhaps Peter was right; the Phantom hadn't specifically said anything pertaining to Poe. Could I be so certain? Yet I was. Someone wanted me to stop inquiring into Poe's death. I knew someone had to hold the truth of what had happened to Poe here in Baltimore, and that is what others must have feared. I had to find that truth to know why.

One day, I was checking over some of the scrivener's copies of an important contract. A clerk thrust his head into my office.

"Mr. Clark. Mr. Poe. Here."

Startled, I demanded to know what he meant.

"From Mr. Poe," he repeated, waving a piece of paper in front of his face.

"Oh!" I gestured to him for the letter. It was from one Neilson Poe.

The name had been familiar to me from the newspapers as a local attorney representing many defaulters and petty thieves and criminals in court and, for a time, as a director on the Baltimore amp; Ohio Railroad committee. Addressing a note to Neilson a few days earlier, I had asked whether the man was a relative of the poet Edgar Poe's, and had requested an interview.

In this reply, Neilson thanked me for my interest in his relation but averred that professional duties made any appointment impossible for some weeks. Weeks! Frustrated, I recalled an item about Neilson Poe I had read in the latest court columns of the newspapers and quickly gathered up my coat.

Neilson, according to the paper's advance report of the day's activities at court, was at that very moment defending a man, Cavender, who had been indicted for assault with attempt to commit an outrage against a young woman. The Cavender case had already adjourned for the day when I reached the courthouse, so I looked in the prisoners' cells that were housed in its cellar. Addressing a police officer with my credentials as an attorney, I was directed to the cell of Mr. Cavender. Inside the chamber, which was dark and small, a man garbed as a prisoner sat in deep communion with one wearing a fine suit and a lawyer's fixed expression of calm. There was a stone jug of coffee and a plate of white bread.

"Rough day at court?" I asked collegially from the other side of the prison bars.

The man in the suit rose from the bench inside the cell. "Who are you, sir?" he asked.

I offered my hand to the man I had first seen at the funeral on Greene and Fayette. "Mr. Poe? I am Quentin Clark."

Neilson Poe was a short, clean-shaven man with an intelligent brow almost as wide as the one shown in portraits of Edgar, but with sharper, ferret-like features and quick, dark eyes. I imagined Edgar Poe's eyes having more of a flash, and a positively opaque glow at times of creation and excitement. Still, this was a man who, at a casual glance in these dim surroundings, could almost have doubled for the great poet.

Neilson signaled to his client that he would be stepping outside the cell for a few moments. The prisoner, whose head had been in his hands the moment before, rose to his feet with sudden animation, watching his defender's exit.

"If I'm not mistaken," Neilson said to me as the guard locked the prisoner's door, "I'd written you in my note that I was pressed with business, Mr. Clark."

"It is important, dear Mr. Poe. Regarding your cousin."

Neilson set his hands stiffly on some court documents, as though to remind me there was more pressing business at hand.

"Surely this is a topic of personal interest to you," I ventured.

He squinted at me with impatience.

"The topic of Edgar Poe's death," I said to explain it better.

"My cousin Edgar was wandering about restlessly, looking for a life of true tranquillity, a life as you or I are fortunate enough to possess, Mr. Clark," Neilson said. "He had already squandered that possibility long ago."

"What of his plans to establish a first-rate magazine?"

"Yes…plans."

"He would have accomplished it, Mr. Poe. He worried only that his enemies would first-"

"Enemies!" he cut me short. Neilson then paused as his eyes widened at me. "Sir," he said with a new air of caution, "tell me, what is your particular interest in this that you would come down into this gloomy cellar to find me?"

"I am-I was his attorney, sir," I said. "I was to defend his new magazine from attacks of libel. If he did have enemies, sir, I should like very much to know who they were."

A dead man for a client… I heard Peter in my ear.

"A new trial, Poe!"

Neilson appeared to be weighing my words when his client threw himself against the cell door. "Petition for a new trial, Mr. Poe! A fair shake, at least! I'm innocent of all charges, Poe!" he cried. "That wench is an out-and-out liar!"

After a few moments, Neilson pacified his despondent client and promised him to return later.

"Someone needs to defend Edgar," I said.

"I must attend to other work now, Mr. Clark." He started walking briskly through the dismal cellar. He paused, then turned back to me, remarking grudgingly, "Come along to my office if you wish to speak further. There is something there you might like to see."

We walked together down St. Paul Street. When we entered the modest and crowded chambers of his practice, Neilson commented that when he'd received my letter of introduction he'd been struck by the resemblance between my handwriting and his late cousin's. "For a moment I thought I was reading a letter from our dear Edgar," he said lightheartedly. "An intriguing case for an autographer." It was perhaps the last kind word he had for his cousin. He offered me a chair.

"Edgar was rash, even as a boy, Mr. Clark," he began. "He took as his wife our beautiful cousin, Virginia, when she was thirteen, hardly out from the dew of girlhood. Poor Sissy-that's what we called her-he took her away from Baltimore, where she'd always been safe. Her mother's house on Amity Street was small, but at least she was surrounded with devoted family. He felt if he waited, he might lose her affections."

"Edgar surely cared for her more dearly than anyone," I replied.

"Here, Mr. Clark, is what I wanted you to see. Perhaps it will help you understand."

Neilson removed from a drawer a portrait that he said had been sent by Maria Clemm, Sissy's mother (and Edgar's aunt and mother-in-law). It showed Sissy, a young woman of around twenty-one or twenty-two with a pearly complexion and glossy raven-black hair, her eyes closed and her head tipped to the side in a pose at once peaceful and unspeakably sad. I commented on the life-like quality in the portrait.

"No, Mr. Clark." He turned pale. "Death-like. It is her death portrait. After she died, Edgar realized they had no portrait of her and had this done. I do not like to show this, though, for it poorly captures the spirit she possessed in life-that pale and deathly look about her. But he valued it beyond measure. My cousin, you see, could not relinquish her even to death."

With the portrait were some verses written by Virginia to Edgar the year before her death, speaking of living in a blissful cottage where the "tattling of many tongues" would be far away. "Love alone shall guide us when we are there," her tender poem read. "Love shall heal my weakened lungs."

Neilson put aside the portrait and poem. He explained that during her last years Virginia had required the utmost medical attention.

"Perhaps he did love her. But could Edgar have properly provided for her care? Edgar might have done better all along finding a woman of wealth." Neilson paused at this thought and seemed to shift topics. "Until I was about your age, you know, I myself edited newspapers and journals and wrote columns. I have known the literary life," he said with fallen pride. "I know its appeal to the raw spirit, Mr. Clark. Yet I have always had dealings with reality, too, and know better than to keep at something for personal gratification after it proves a losing proposition, as Edgar's writing did. Edgar should have stopped writing. This alone might have saved Sissy, might have saved Edgar himself."

Regarding Poe's final months, his final attempt to obtain financial success, Neilson referred to his cousin's aim to raise money and subscriptions for the proposed Stylus magazine by delivering lectures and visiting people of good society in Norfolk and Richmond. It was in the latter city that he renewed an acquaintance with a woman of wealth, as Neilson described her approvingly.

"Her name was Elmira Shelton, a Richmond woman whom Edgar had loved long before." In their youth, Edgar and Elmira had promised themselves to each other before he left to attend the University of Virginia, but Elmira's father disapproved, and confiscated Poe's constant letters so his daughter would not see them. I interrupted Neilson to ask why.

"Perhaps," he replied, "it was that Edgar and Elmira were young…and that Edgar was a poet…and do not forget, Elmira 's father would have known Mr. Allan. He would have spoken with him and he would have known Edgar was likely to receive no inheritance at all from the Allan fortune."

When Edgar Poe was forced to return from college after John Allan would not pay his debts, Edgar attended a party at Elmira's family home only to find, to his heartbreak, that Elmira was engaged to another.

By the summer of 1849, when they met again, her husband had died, as had Virginia Poe. The carefree girl of so many years ago was now a wealthy widow. Edgar read her poems and reminisced with good humor about their past. He joined a local chapter of a temperance society in Richmond and swore to Elmira to keep their oath. He said love that hesitated was not a love for him and he gave her a ring. Theirs would be a new life together.

Only weeks later Edgar Poe would be found at Ryan's, here in Baltimore, and rushed to the hospital, where he'd die.

"I had not seen Edgar for some years toward the end. It was a great shock, you will imagine, Mr. Clark, when I was told he was found at one of the places of election in Old Town in poor condition and carried to the college hospital. My relation, a Mr. Henry Herring, was called to the scene at Ryan's. At what time Edgar arrived in Baltimore, where he spent the time he was here, under what circumstances, all this I have been unable to ascertain."

I showed my surprise. "You mean you sought this information on your cousin's death, and could not find it?"

"I felt it my duty to try, relationships and so on," he said. "We were cousins, yes, but we were also friends. We were the same age, Edgar and I, and he was not old enough to see the end of his life. I hope my own death is peaceful and in plain sight, somewhere surrounded by my family."

"You must have found something more?"

"I'm afraid that whatever happened to Edgar has accompanied Cousin into the grave. Is this not sometimes the course of a life, Mr. Clark, for death to swallow a man up so wholly there are no traces left? To leave not a shadow, not even the shadow of a shadow."

"That is not all that is left, though, Mr. Poe," I said, insistently. "Your cousin will be remembered. His works are immensely powerful."

"There is a kind of power to them. But it is usually the power of disease. Tell me, Mr. Clark, do you know something more about Edgar's death?"

I did not tell him about the man who warned me to stop looking at Poe's death. Something stopped me. Perhaps this hesitation was the true beginning of the investigation. Perhaps I already suspected that there was more to this situation, more to Neilson Poe, than I'd yet been able to see.

He could not even say much about Edgar Poe's condition after he was rushed to the doctors from Ryan's. Once Neilson had arrived at the hospital, the physicians advised that he not enter Edgar's room, saying the patient was too excitable. Neilson only saw Poe through a curtain, and he looked from that vantage point like another man altogether, or a ghost of a body he had known. Neilson did not even have the chance to view the body before it was closed into the coffin.

"I'm afraid there's nothing more I can tell you about the end," he sighed. Then he said it. The eulogy that I could not forget. "Edgar was an orphan in every way. He had seen much of sorrow, Mr. Clark, had so little reason to be satisfied with life that, to him, the change, death, can scarcely be said to be a misfortune."

My frustration at Neilson Poe's complacency inspired me to call on the offices of a few newspapers with a faint hope of persuading them to at least pay better tribute to the genius of Poe. I described Poe's paltry burial and the many erroneous facts in the short biographies so far published in the papers, hoping they would improve. But these visits were useless. At the office of one of the Whig newspapers, the Patriot, some reporters overheard me and, calling to mind that Poe wrote for the press, suggested with great solemnity that they take up a subscription to pay for a marker on Poe's grave to honor a fallen fellow. As though Edgar Poe were simply another spinner of newspaper tales! Note, too, that I would not make the error of saying, as the periodical press had taken to doing, Edgar Allan Poe. No. The name was a contradiction, a chimera and an unholy monster. John Allan had taken in the poet as a young child in 1810, but later ungenerously abandoned him to the whims of the world.

Passing the Presbyterian burial yard on my way home late one afternoon, I decided to see the poet's resting place again. The old cemetery was a narrow block of graves on the corner of Fayette and Greene streets. The location of the grave was near the fine marker of General David Poe, a hero of the Revolutionary War and Edgar Poe's grandfather. But there was something disconcerting.

Poe's own spot was still unmarked. It looked as though it had never been prayed over.

Invisible Wo! I could not stop from thinking of the ravages of the "conqueror worm," as Poe had called our bodies' final attacker. And the angels sob at vermin fangs in human gore imbued.

With sudden purpose, I marched deeper into the burial ground. Peering around I saw steps leading down into one of the old underground vaults. Following these steps straight down, I found the sexton, Mr. Spence, reading a book in a low-arched granite crypt deep below the surface. There was a table, a bureau, a washstand, a medium-sized looking-glass. Even once a church was built on the burial ground a few years later, it was said that George Spence still preferred these vaults. But it rather astonished me then.

"You don't live down here, do you, Mr. Spence?" I asked.

He was troubled by my tone. "When it is too cold down here, I stay above. But I like it better here. It's more quiet and independent. This vault, in all events, was emptied out some years ago."

Several decades earlier, he explained, the family who owned this particular tomb had wanted to move the bodies of their ancestors to more spacious accommodations. But when the tomb was opened, it was discovered-by the previous sexton, Spence's father-that one of the bodies exhibited that rare occurrence: human petrifaction. The body, top to bottom, was entirely stone. Superstitions spread quickly. No member of the church since would agree to bury their dead in that particular vault.

"Devilish horror, coming upon a stone man when you are no more than a boy," the sexton said. He found a chair for me.

"Thank you, Mr. Spence. There is something wrong. The grave of Edgar Poe, buried last month, is still unmarked! The grave lies level with the ground."

He shrugged philosophically. "It is not my decision, but that of the party that had charge of burying him. Neilson Poe and Henry Herring, Poe's cousins."

"I passed here the day of the funeral, and could see it was small. Were there other relatives of Poe's besides them present?" I asked.

"There was one other. William Clemm, of the Caroline Street Methodist Church, performed the service and I believe he was a distant relation of the family. Reverend Clemm had prepared a lengthy discourse, but there were so few present for the funeral, it was decided he would not read it. There were only two mourners in addition to Neilson Poe and Mr. Herring. One was Z. Collins Lee, a classmate of Poe's. Peace be to his ashes!"

"Mr. Spence?"

"That is something I remember the minister said over Poe's grave. Peace be to his ashes. I was surprised to hear about Mr. Poe's death at first. He will always be a young man in my mind, not much older than you."

"You knew him, Mr. Spence?"

"When he lived in Baltimore, in Maria Clemm's little house," the sexton replied musingly. "It was years ago. You would have been hardly older than a boy. Baltimore was a quieter city then; one could keep track of names. I used to see Edgar Poe wander about the burial ground now and again."

He said Poe would stand before the graves of his grandfather and his older brother, William Henry Poe, both of whom he'd been separated from in childhood. Sometimes, said the sexton, Edgar A. Poe would examine names and dates on the tombs and quietly ask how this one was related to that one. When Spence would meet Poe out on the streets, the poet would sometimes say "good morning" or "good evening," and sometimes he would not.

"To think such a fine gentleman should look as he did at the end." Spence shook his head as he spoke.

"How do you mean, Mr. Spence?" I asked.

"I recall he always had a fastidiousness about his dress. But that suit he was wearing when he was found!" he said as though I should know perfectly well. I motioned for him to continue, so he did. "It was thin and ragged and did not fit him at all. It could not have been his. It was for a body perhaps two sizes larger! And a cheap palm-leaf hat one would not bother to pick up from the ground. A man from the hospital offered a better black suit to bury him in."

"But how did Poe come to be wearing ill-fitting clothes?"

"I cannot say."

"Do you not think it utterly strange?"

"I suppose I have not thought of it much since then, Mr. Clark."

Those clothes were not meant to be worn by Poe. Poe's death had not been meant for him, I thought, an irrational and abrupt notion. I thanked the sexton for his time and began rapidly to ascend the long stairs that rose from the vaults, as though once I'd secured the top there would be some immediate action to take. Suddenly seized by a momentary foreboding, I stopped in the middle of the stairs, tightening my grip on the handrail. The wind had grown worse outside, and as I reached the top I could barely direct myself to cross back into the upper world.

When I emerged, my eyes drifted to the spot of Poe's unmarked grave for one last look. I nearly jumped at what I saw. I blinked to make certain it was real.

It was a flower, a fragrant, blossoming flower lying incongruously atop the grass and dirt of Edgar Poe's plot. A flower that had not been there just a few minutes before.

I gasped for Mr. Spence, as though there was something to be done, or as though he could have seen something I hadn't while we were both sitting together below the earth in that tomb. Down in the vault the sexton could not hear me calling. Dropping to my knees, I inspected the flower, thinking perhaps it had blown from another grave. But no. Not only did the flower sit there, there, but also its stem broke firmly through the dirt on top.

Suddenly there was the noise of horses stepping and wheels clicking slowly to life. I peered around and could see a medium-sized carriage cloaked by the mist. I ran toward the gates to try and see who was there, but I was instantly blocked. A dog bounded into view. The dog barked voraciously at my ankles. I tried to steer around her, but the canine pounced to the side, growling and snarling from behind the gravestones.

The dog had clearly been trained to prevent Baltimore's "resurrection men" from attempted thefts of our corpses, and perceiving me run had identified me as one of those miscreants. Finding some ginger-nuts in my coat, I offered them up, and the mongrel soon befriended me. But by the time I could safely reach the street, the carriage had vanished into the distance.