The Poe Shadow

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