Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

"I cannot fail to remember," I agreed.

"It is the set of numbers prior to that obituary to which you should direct your interest. As you find them, recall that you have already read Poe beseeching his Muddy to ‘write immediately in reply' to his letter. In the very same note, he closes by pleading again, as though she could forget: ‘Don't forget to write immediately to Philadelphia so that your letter will be there when I arrive.' Surely she could not ignore his urgent entreaties to hear a kind word from her along his journey."

I took up all the issues of the Philadelphia Public Ledger I could find in the contents of the chest. Duponte instructed me to open the paper dated October 3, 1849-the very day Poe was discovered at Ryan's inn in Baltimore. He directed me further to the post office column on the last page-the place in the paper where the postmaster cataloged names of persons with letters waiting to be retrieved. List of Letters Remaining in the Phil. Post-Office, it said. There, in the small print of the lengthy gentlemen's list, I found the following entry:

GREY, E. S. F.

Turning quickly to the next date that contained a post office's advertisement of remaining letters, I found the same name again.

"It must be him!" I said.

"Of course it is. Here we see E. S. F. Grey, rather than E. S. T. The letter F, we may be sure, may be readily mistaken for ‘T' in the hand of those who write with flare, as Poe exhibits in his letters to you, Monsieur Clark. Muddy mistook Poe's T for an F; or the Philadelphia post office mistook her own T for an F; or the Ledger mistook the postmaster's T for an F. Poe's changing name has changed again-but have no doubt. This is Muddy's very letter to Poe, arriving in Philadelphia precisely, if one were to calculate the speed of mail, at the expected time after Muddy would have received Poe's letter of September 18 and, in ordinary haste, composed and deposited her letter in reply to Monsieur Grey with the New York post office."

"And the Ledger lists it on two separate days."

"Significant, Monsieur Clark, if I understand the regulations of your postal office as you have explained them."

"That's true. The first time a letter must be advertised one is charged two cents additional in postage. If it must be advertised a second and final time, one will be required to pay another two cents. Soon after, it becomes a ‘dead letter'-discarded by the postmaster."

"October 3, when the letter is first listed in the Philadelphia Ledger, was the last day Poe was ever to see outside a hospital room again," Duponte mused absently. "On that day, we could have idly strolled through the door of the Philadelphia post office and announced ourselves as E. S. T. (or F., if you please) Grey-Esquire-for you are no less Grey than Poe was-and received this letter."

"Likely this was the last letter ever written to Edgar Poe," I said sadly, looking again at the name of the addressee, and thinking it sadder still that this last, unseen, and now long-abandoned letter did not even have his name on it and, presumably, went unsigned with the name of that woman who loved him.

"Likely it was," Duponte said, nodding.

"I would like to have seen it."

"But you need not. I mean, not for our purposes. This listing in the newspaper demonstrates that, for the period reflected by the postmaster's advertisements, Edgar Poe was not in Philadelphia. For remember how strongly he insisted that Muddy write immediately so the letter would be there at the point of his arrival; if his arrival had occurred, we must not doubt, he would have called there with an eager heart."

"Therefore we have another reason to confidently testify that Poe did not reach Philadelphia," Duponte continued. "But we have many reasons, as we already enumerated, to believe he would have tried, and we may believe him to have come close."

"But if he tried and did not make it there, what happened?"

"You remember what we have said of Poe's drinking habits."

"Yes. That Poe was not intemperate but constitutionally intolerant to a degree unknown to most people. The fact that Poe's entire nature could be reversed by a single glass of wine, as attested by numerous people who knew him well, indicated not that Poe was habitually intoxicated, but rather the opposite-that Poe carried a rare sensitivity. Too many persons, in disparate places and times, have testified to this fact for one to believe it is only a polite excuse by those friendly to him. One glass, we have learned, was enough to produce a frightful attack of insensibility which could lead him to other uncertain and uncontrolled behavior. Could this have happened before he arrived to Philadelphia?" I proposed.

"Let us see in a moment. We have now surmised, using all the information available, both that Poe would have in all likelihood attempted to travel to Philadelphia and yet, despite this, that he would not have arrived. The question remains how Poe returns to Baltimore. The Baron, if his reasoning had reached this far, would then proclaim a guess, no doubt, that once Poe was aboard the train to Philadelphia, a rogue accosted him and forced him, for some inconceivable malicious motive, to return on another train to Baltimore, where Poe was later found. The Baron is romantic in the same way the writers of love tales and sketches are. It would make no sense at all for an assailant of any stripe to put Poe back on a train to Baltimore.

"Yet this does not mean that someone else, someone with no malicious motives, did not do so. In fact, it is an activity that a railroad conductor engages in regularly for a variety of reasons, for persons who are unruly, unconscious, sickly, stowaways, and the like. Far more likely than meeting such an aggressor on the train for someone who, like Poe, has previously lived both in the point of origin, Baltimore, and in the destination, Philadelphia -is to meet an acquaintance that is traveling on the same route.

"It is not much more than a guess, you will say, but sometimes that is all that is there, Monsieur Clark, to make sense of events. We speak of the word as inferior to trained practices of reasoning-in fact, to guess is one of the most elevated and indestructible powers of the human mind, a far more interesting art than reasoning or demonstration because it comes to us directly from imagination.

"Now, we shall imagine Poe meeting an acquaintance, rather than an enemy; and that acquaintance, by nature someone who is acquainted with Poe but does not know Poe intimately, inviting him for a drink on the train, or in an intervening railway station. We can imagine Poe, perhaps hoping to procure further financial support for his magazine, accepting the invitation, the insistence from this potential benefactor, of one drink -presented, no doubt, by one unfamiliar enough with Poe as an adult not to know his problems with the intake of spirits. Perhaps, then, a childhood friend, or let us say a classmate from West Point since, more than any other institution, former members of the army are likely to be scattered throughout the different states. Or, perhaps, a classmate from earlier, in Poe's days at college. Perhaps we have heard the name of one of such school-friends already in the facts we have collected."

"Z. Collins Lee!" I said. "He was a classmate of Poe's from college and is now the district attorney, and he was the fourth man who attended Poe's funeral."

"Monsieur Lee is an interesting possibility, a member of the funeral party we have overlooked for three others who have been more readily notable. Consider this. Besides the sexton, Mr. Spence; the undertaker; the grave digger; and the minister, there were exactly four mourners at Poe's small funeral ceremony."