The Poe Shadow

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 Maelstrom,'' 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