Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

"This story is not about me…" Here I looked down at my notes, and skipped ahead, reading almost to myself. "It was about something greater than I am, greater than all this, about a man by whom time will remember us though you had forgotten him before the earth settled. Somebody had to do it. We could not just keep still. I could not keep still…"

I opened my mouth to say more, but I could not. There was another choice here, I realized. I could tell the story of what had failed. Of finding Duponte, of bringing him here, of the Bonapartes' men hunting him and mistakenly murdering the Baron. My words on this subject would reach the press, the Bonapartes would be in a scandal, Duponte would be stalked again wherever he had fled in the world, perhaps really extinguished from existence this time. I could completely finish what I had begun and banish it all to history.

I gripped my Malacca cane at both ends and almost felt it begin to come apart again. Then a shot rang out.

It seemed close enough to be inside the courtroom, and commotion instantly ensued. There were immediate suggestions and rumors that the courthouse was under siege by a madman. The judge directed his clerk to investigate, and then ordered all persons present to leave the courtroom until a state of calm could be returned. He said that all of us should return in forty minutes. At length there was a universal hubbub and a pair of officers began to herd everyone out of the room.

After a few moments, I was the only one remaining in the room-or I thought I was. Then I noticed my great-aunt. She wrapped her dark bonnet over her hair and straightened its peak. This was the first time since the start of the trial we were alone together.

"Great-Aunt," I pleaded, "perhaps you love me still, for you know I am the child of my father. Please, reconsider this. Do not contest the will, or my capabilities."

Her face looked cramped, withered with distaste. "You have lost your Hattie Blum-have lost Glen Eliza-lost all, Quentin, for a notion that you were a poet of some type instead of a lawyer. It is the old story, you know. You will think you have done something courageous because it was foolish. Poor Quentin. You can tell your complaint every day to the Sisters of Charity at their asylum after this, and you will not be able to afflict others anymore with excitement and worry."

I didn't reply, so she went on.

"You may think I act out of spite, but I tell you I do not. I act out of sorrow for you and for the memory of your parents. All of Baltimore will see that at my late age this is the last act of compassion I can provide, to stop you from being that most dangerous of monsters: the bustling do-nothing. May the folly of the past make you contrite for the future."

I remained at the witness stand, and was somewhat relieved and saddened when the courtroom had become absolutely silent. However, it gave me a peculiar feeling, for a courtroom was one of those places, like a banquet hall, that never felt empty even when it was. I slumped into the chair.

Even when I heard the door opening again, and heard my great-aunt murmur, "Pardon," with some offense, as she left, passing someone on their way inside, I found myself too lost in a staring spell of contemplation to turn around. If the madman who'd fired gun shots outside had come in, I suppose he could have me. Only when I heard the door closed from the inside did I start.

Auguste Duponte, dressed in one of his more elegant dark cloaks, took a few steps inside the court.

"Monsieur Duponte!" I exclaimed. "But did you not hear there is a madman in the courthouse?"

"Why, it was me, monsieur," said Duponte. He gestured outside. "I would rather the crowd not be here, in all events. I paid a vagrant to fire a few harmless shots into the air with the pistol you'd brought me so the people would have something to look at."

"You did? You used an accomplice, an assistant?" I marveled.

"Yes."

"But why did you not leave Baltimore the other day when you had planned? You can't remain here while they still may be looking for you. They may wish you harm."

"You were right, Monsieur Clark. About something you said at my hotel. I traveled to America never intending to resolve your mystery, which seemed as likely to not have a solution as to have one. I came here, as a point of fact, to end the conviction that I could do such things; the conviction that kept me for so long from living in any ordinary fashion. The conviction that frightened people, even the president of a republic, about what I might know that they wished to keep unknown. Yet people believed in the idea of it all, people wanted and feared it, even if I never appeared outside my chambers again. I suppose I could not remember if I believed in it before they did, or someone else was first."

"You wished to keep me diverted, while you plotted an escape from your pursuers and planned a sequence of occurrences that would leave behind your identity as the real Dupin. That was the nature of our inquiry to you-a distraction."

"Yes," he replied forthrightly, "I suppose at first. I believe I was tired: tired not of living but of having lived. Yet you persisted. You were certain we were here to resolve something-not only that we could, but that we were meant to. Did you tell them about the Baron's version? That mob outside the courthouse, I mean."

"I was about to tell them," I replied, with a humorless laugh, looking down at my memorandum book, where I had transcribed the Baron's entire lecture as I remembered it. Duponte asked to see it. I watched as he examined the pages.

"I will destroy this," I said when he put it back on the table. "I have decided. I will not lie about the death of a man of truth. It will never be repeated."

"But it will, Monsieur Clark," Duponte said gloomily. "Many times, probably."

"I have told no one the Baron's version!" I insisted. "I do not think he was able to tell Bonjour, or anyone else before he died. He wanted to glory in speaking it first in front of a crowd. The original document is destroyed, monsieur; I assure you, that was the only record of it."

"It is not a matter of whether he informed any associates of his conclusions. You see, the Baron is different from most only in his qualities of diligence and indelicacies and, if you wish, a certain bull-dog pertinacity not unlike your own. His ideas, however-wholly unoriginal. Thus we discover your mistake. Whether his speech burns in the prison stove or the Great Fire of Rome, his ideas shall return in the commonplace thoughts of others who inquire after Poe's death."

"But there are none-"

"There will be. Of course there will be. Other investigators, scores, hundreds of them. It may be many years, but the Baron's conclusions, and those equally appalling in their misperceptions and equally appealing in their humanity, shall rise again. They will not be stopped as long as Poe is remembered."

"Well, then, I will start with eliminating this one," I said, and tore out the first page where I had written the Baron's lines.

"Stay." He put out his hand.

"Monsieur?"

"They should not be stopped. Remember what I've said about the Baron?"

"We must see his mistakes," I said, a great, unexpected hope rising again in me, "to learn the truth."

"Yes. An example: I see from your memorandum book that the Baron mistakenly believed that Poe had arrived in Baltimore after being harassed on his way to New York. He concludes this merely because it was reported in the newspapers that Poe was on his way to New York to make arrangements for Muddy, the mother of Poe's deceased wife, to come live in Virginia with Poe and Poe's new fiancée, Elmira Shelton of Richmond. The Baron believes that because Poe did not board a train to New York immediately, a problem had arisen. The Baron demonstrates the common confusion of a plan that has been ruined with one that has been reconsidered. Let us follow."