Authors: Matthew Pearl
“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
known the literary life,” he said with fallen pride. “I know its appeal to the raw spirit, Mr. Clark. Yet I have always had dealings with reality, too, and know better than to keep at something for personal gratification after it proves a losing proposition, as Edgar’s writing did. Edgar should have stopped writing. This alone might have saved Sissy, might have saved Edgar himself.”
Regarding Poe’s final months, his final attempt to obtain financial success, Neilson referred to his cousin’s aim to raise money and subscriptions for the proposed
Stylus
magazine by delivering lectures and visiting people of good society in Norfolk and Richmond. It was in the latter city that he renewed an acquaintance with a woman of wealth, as Neilson described her approvingly.
“Her name was Elmira Shelton, a Richmond woman whom Edgar had loved long before.” In their youth, Edgar and Elmira had promised themselves to each other before he left to attend the University of Virginia, but Elmira’s father disapproved, and confiscated Poe’s constant letters so his daughter would not see them. I interrupted Neilson to ask why.
“Perhaps,” he replied, “it was that Edgar and Elmira were young…and that Edgar was a poet…and do not forget, Elmira’s father would have known Mr. Allan. He would have spoken with him and he would have known Edgar was likely to receive no inheritance at all from the Allan fortune.”
When Edgar Poe was forced to return from college after John Allan would not pay his debts, Edgar attended a party at Elmira’s family home only to find, to his heartbreak, that Elmira was engaged to another.
By the summer of 1849, when they met again, her husband had died, as had Virginia Poe. The carefree girl of so many years ago was now a wealthy widow. Edgar read her poems and reminisced with good humor about their past. He joined a local chapter of a temperance society in Richmond and swore to Elmira to keep their oath. He said love that hesitated was not a love for him and he gave her a ring. Theirs would be a new life together.
Only weeks later Edgar Poe would be found at Ryan’s, here in Baltimore, and rushed to the hospital, where he’d die.
“I had not seen Edgar for some years toward the end. It was a great shock, you will imagine, Mr. Clark, when I was told he was found at one of the places of election in Old Town in poor condition and carried to the college hospital. My relation, a Mr. Henry Herring, was called to the scene at Ryan’s. At what time Edgar arrived in Baltimore, where he spent the time he was here, under what circumstances, all this I have been unable to ascertain.”
I showed my surprise. “You mean you sought this information on your cousin’s death, and could not find it?”
“I felt it my duty to try, relationships and so on,” he said. “We were cousins, yes, but we were also friends. We were the same age, Edgar and I, and he was not old enough to see the end of his life. I hope my own death is peaceful and in plain sight, somewhere surrounded by my family.”
“You must have found something more?”
“I’m afraid that whatever happened to Edgar has accompanied Cousin into the grave. Is this not sometimes the course of a life, Mr. Clark, for death to swallow a man up so wholly there are no traces left? To leave not a shadow, not even the shadow of a shadow.”
“That is not all that is left, though, Mr. Poe,” I said, insistently. “Your cousin will be remembered. His works are immensely powerful.”
“There is a kind of power to them. But it is usually the power of disease. Tell me, Mr. Clark, do you know something more about Edgar’s death?”
I did not tell him about the man who warned me to stop looking at Poe’s death. Something stopped me. Perhaps this hesitation was the true beginning of the investigation. Perhaps I already suspected that there was more to this situation, more to Neilson Poe, than I’d yet been able to see.
He could not even say much about Edgar Poe’s condition after he was rushed to the doctors from Ryan’s. Once Neilson had arrived at the hospital, the physicians advised that he not enter Edgar’s room, saying the patient was too excitable. Neilson only saw Poe through a curtain, and he looked from that vantage point like another man altogether, or a ghost of a body he had known. Neilson did not even have the chance to view the body before it was closed into the coffin.
“I’m afraid there’s nothing more I can tell you about the end,” he sighed. Then he said it. The eulogy that I could not forget. “Edgar was an orphan in every way. He had seen much of sorrow, Mr. Clark, had so little reason to be satisfied with life that, to him, the change, death, can scarcely be said to be a misfortune.”
My frustration at Neilson Poe’s complacency inspired me to call on the offices of a few newspapers with a faint hope of persuading them to at least pay better tribute to the genius of Poe. I described Poe’s paltry burial and the many erroneous facts in the short biographies so far published in the papers, hoping they would improve. But these visits were useless. At the office of one of the Whig newspapers, the
Patriot,
some reporters overheard me and, calling to mind that Poe wrote for the press, suggested with great solemnity that they take up a subscription to pay for a marker on Poe’s grave to honor a fallen fellow. As though Edgar Poe were simply another spinner of newspaper tales! Note, too, that I would not make the error of saying, as the periodical press had taken to doing, Edgar
Allan
Poe. No. The name was a contradiction, a chimera and an unholy monster. John Allan had taken in the poet as a young child in 1810, but later ungenerously abandoned him to the whims of the world.
Passing the Presbyterian burial yard on my way home late one afternoon, I decided to see the poet’s resting place again. The old cemetery was a narrow block of graves on the corner of Fayette and Greene streets. The location of the grave was near the fine marker of General David Poe, a hero of the Revolutionary War and Edgar Poe’s grandfather. But there was something disconcerting.
Poe’s own spot was still unmarked. It looked as though it had never been prayed over.
Invisible Wo!
I could not stop from thinking of the ravages of the “conqueror worm,” as Poe had called our bodies’ final attacker.
And the angels sob at vermin fangs in human gore imbued.
With sudden purpose, I marched deeper into the burial ground. Peering around I saw steps leading down into one of the old underground vaults. Following these steps straight down, I found the sexton, Mr. Spence, reading a book in a low-arched granite crypt deep below the surface. There was a table, a bureau, a washstand, a medium-sized looking-glass. Even once a church was built on the burial ground a few years later, it was said that George Spence still preferred these vaults. But it rather astonished me then.
“You don’t live down here, do you, Mr. Spence?” I asked.
He was troubled by my tone. “When it is too cold down here, I stay above. But I like it better here. It’s more quiet and independent. This vault, in all events, was emptied out some years ago.”
Several decades earlier, he explained, the family who owned this particular tomb had wanted to move the bodies of their ancestors to more spacious accommodations. But when the tomb was opened, it was discovered—by the previous sexton, Spence’s father—that one of the bodies exhibited that rare occurrence: human petrifaction. The body, top to bottom, was entirely stone. Superstitions spread quickly. No member of the church since would agree to bury their dead in that particular vault.
“Devilish horror, coming upon a stone man when you are no more than a boy,” the sexton said. He found a chair for me.
“Thank you, Mr. Spence. There is something wrong. The grave of Edgar Poe, buried last month, is still unmarked! The grave lies level with the ground.”
He shrugged philosophically. “It is not my decision, but that of the party that had charge of burying him. Neilson Poe and Henry Herring, Poe’s cousins.”
“I passed here the day of the funeral, and could see it was small. Were there other relatives of Poe’s besides them present?” I asked.
“There was one other. William Clemm, of the Caroline Street Methodist Church, performed the service and I believe he was a distant relation of the family. Reverend Clemm had prepared a lengthy discourse, but there were so few present for the funeral, it was decided he would not read it. There were only two mourners in addition to Neilson Poe and Mr. Herring. One was Z. Collins Lee, a classmate of Poe’s. Peace be to his ashes!”
“Mr. Spence?”
“That is something I remember the minister said over Poe’s grave. Peace be to his ashes. I was surprised to hear about Mr. Poe’s death at first. He will always be a young man in my mind, not much older than you.”