Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

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.