signed each new register. If I ever found myself doing the same, and could not give the actual reason-'You see, sir, my creditors are looking to make me a head shorter'-I would have claimed I was writing a guidebook for strangers to Baltimore, and required a basis to compare lodging choices. The proprietors would shower you with advantages. This was such a good idea, I was tempted to write of it as an anonymous suggestion to the Baron.
Meanwhile, Duponte instructed me to find out more information about Newman, the slave the Baron had engaged, and so I insinuated myself into a discussion with him in the anteroom one afternoon.
'I gonna leave Baltimore after he spring me,' Newman said to my questions about the Baron. 'I got a brother and sister in Boston.'
'Why not run away now? There are northern states that will protect you,' I commented.
He pointed to a printed notice in the entrance hall of the hotel. It stated that no colored person, 'bond or free,' could leave town without first depositing his papers and taking a white man to be his surety.
'I ain't no dumb nigger,' he said, 'to be hunted down and dead. I'd as good as go to my owner and beg to be shot.'
Newman was right; he would be traced even if his owner did not especially care about the loss.
I should include an additional note, to avoid any perplexity, about the language of the young slave. Among the Africans, both slaves and free, in the southern and in northern states, the use of the word 'nigger' was not about race. I have heard blacks talking of a mulatto with that term and even calling their masters 'them white niggers.' 'Nigger' was used by blacks to mean a low fellow of any sort, color, or class. This rather ingeniously redefines the ugly word, until it will no doubt be removed from our language altogether. For those who ever doubted the intelligence of that mistreated race, I point to this linguistic stroke and wonder if whites would have thought of the same.
'And what of the other Negro?' I asked.
'Who?'
'The other black engaged by the Baron,' I replied. I had become sufficiently convinced that the stranger I had seen once before with the Baron had been assigned by him to watch me-spying on me even as I spied on him.
'There ain't no other, sir, black or white. Baron D. don't want too many people to know him real close.'
With my new proximity, I was surprised, and not a little pleased, to find a diminishment in the bluster the Baron displayed. On several occasions in my hearing, Bonjour would pose a rather elementary question about the Baron's conclusions regarding Poe; the Baron Dupin would demur. This brightened my hopes at our own success. But I suppose this also placed something of a negative and unsettling fear over me that Duponte would also be at a loss, as though there was a mystical connection between the two men. Maybe this was a subtle consequence on my mind of the new and startling resemblance between Claude Dupin and Auguste Duponte, as though one were real and one an image in the mirror, as in the doomed last encounter of Poe's own William Wilson. Other times it seemed both were mirror images of the same being.
Their behaviors, though, were different enough.
In the public eye, the Baron continued his loud, obnoxious proclamations. He began raising a subscription for a broadsheet he proposed to publish, and a lecture series he would give, on the true and sensational details of Poe's death. 'Come, fly around, fly around me, gentlemen and gals, you shall never believe what happened under your noses!' he proclaimed in taverns and public houses, like a showman or mountebank. I must own, he was convincing, superficially; nearly another Mr. Barnum. You half expected him to announce to some street crowd that he would now transform this container of bran into a…live…guinea pig!
And the money that followed him wherever he went! I could not fathom the number of Baltimoreans who willingly forked over hard money into the hands of this storyteller; Baltimoreans, I sadly say, who exhibited no signs of doing the same for a book of Poe's poetry. Yet a veritable fortune was lent to the notion that the Baron Dupin would unveil the events of the same poet's last and darkest hours on this earth. Culture was enjoyed as long as it came with conflict. I recalled the time two actors simultaneously played Hamlet on nearby stages in Baltimore and everyone argued with passion about his own favorite Hamlet, not for the play itself but for the competition of it.
The lyceum lecture would be held at the Assembly Rooms of the Maryland Institute. The Baron began sending wires to repeat the same announcements of lectures to be subsequently held in New York, Philadelphia, Boston… His plans were expanding, and ours seemed to fall more and more in his shadow.
The Baron, along the way, had further pried open Pandora's box of rumors in the newspapers.
Some samples: Poe was found robbed in a gutter by a watchman; or the dying Poe was lying across some barrels in the Lexington Market covered entirely with flies; no, said another, Poe met with former cadets from West Point, where the poet had learned musket and munitions, dealing now in some private governmental operation that introduced Poe to a dangerous intrigue and probably related to his reported roles in his wild youth fighting for the Polish army and with the Russians; not so: Poe's vain end had been a debauch at an acquaintance's lively and intemperate birthday party; or he had been guilty of suicide. One female acquaintance claimed that as a ghost Poe had sent her poems from the spiritual world about being fatally pummeled in an attempted theft of some letters! Meanwhile, a local paper had received a wire from a temperance newspaper in New York that claimed to have met a witness to Poe's raging debauchery in the day before he was discovered at Ryan's, proving for the recorder at Judgment Day that all was Poe's own fault.
While I sat surveying these articles in the reading room, that reliable, ancient clerk came over to me.
'Oh, Mr. Clark! I am still thinking of who had given me those articles on your Mr. Poe. Indeed, I
Suddenly, I lost all attention to the papers before me. 'What, sir?' It had never occurred to me that those cuttings had been given to the clerk with specific instructions that they be delivered to
'Right.'
'This is startling!' I cried, thinking of how that single extract alluding to the 'real' Dupin had completely changed the course of events.
'How so?'
'Because someone-' I did not finish the statement. 'It is a matter of moment that you tell me more of this person, whoever he is. I am much occupied these days, but will call on you again. Try-please do try-to remember.'
My imagination was fired by this new revelation. Meanwhile, I found a less speculative distraction in determining to settle matters with Hattie. I wrote her a long letter, acknowledging that Auntie Blum's cruel though well-meaning tactic had encouraged me, and proposing that upon my receiving word from her we should commence again the plans for our union.
16
TRACING THE ACTIVITY of the Baron Dupin, through covert observation and interviews, I learned that nearly a week earlier, Bonjour had insinuated herself as the chambermaid at the home of Dr. Joseph Snodgrass, the man whom Dr. Moran remembered had ordered the carriage that brought Edgar Poe to the hospital from Ryan's on that gloomy October day. The Baron Dupin had paid a visit to Snodgrass earlier to find out the details of that stormy October afternoon. Snodgrass adamantly declined an interview. He insisted he would not contribute to the industry of gossiping about the worthy poet's death.
Soon after, Bonjour had secured the position among the help in Snodgrass's house. Remarkably, she did this with no position open. She had appeared in neat, unostentatious dress, on the doorstep of the fashionable brick house at 103 North High Street. An Irish servant girl opened the street door for her.
Bonjour said that she had been told the house was looking for a new upstairs girl (assuming, rightly, that this was the downstairs girl-and imagining it likely she had a rivalry with the current upstairs girl).
Was that so? replied the servant.
