Mrs. Poe (35 page)

“The day of her husband’s presentation in Boston. When you were gone.” She frowned nervously. “They were looking for you.”

Panic constricted my chest. “What did you tell her?”

“She arrived at five,” said Eliza, “a rather odd time, I thought then. But you know Mrs. Poe.”

“What did you tell her?” I asked again.

“I had the children come down and join us in the parlor—I’ll admit, to serve as a distraction. I’m sorry now that I did so.”

“Eliza, where did you say I was?”

“I didn’t tell her anything. But then Vinnie volunteered that you’d gone to see your mother.” She sighed. “In Boston.”

Every shaft of my hair prickled with fear.

She glanced at Russell, who was scowling as he chewed, before she continued. “We were having one of those awkward conversations so
typical of Mrs. Poe and that frantic mother of hers when Catherine came in to light the lamps, as it was growing dark. Catherine had drawn down the chandelier and opened the gas cocks when Mrs. Poe started coughing.”

She shook her head with a bounce of ringlets. “ ‘Coughing’ does not begin to describe it. You have never heard such an alarming sound! It was as if she were being strangled. She clutched at her throat and clawed for air. I rushed to her side and shouted for Catherine to bring some brandy. Catherine, who’d been standing there in shock, sprang from the room. No sooner than Catherine was gone, than did Mrs. Poe straighten. Her mother, in near hysterics, claimed that they must go home that instant—
that instant!
—it would be Mrs. Poe’s only cure.

“Over my protests that she must not leave until a doctor could be fetched, they departed. Mrs. Clemm was nearly wailing and could hardly get out the door. When Catherine returned with the bottle and a glass, I told her never mind, Mrs. Poe had left. We were staring at the door, dumbfounded, when Russell arrived. He said, ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost—’ ”

“That’s exactly what I said,” Mr. Bartlett interjected.

Eliza glanced at him, too wrapped up in her story to acknowledge him. “Then he went to his chair, laid down his paper, and got out his pipe. He was readying to strike a safety match to light it, when your Ellen shouted, ‘The gas!’ ”

I covered my mouth.

“We all rushed outside—”

“I threw open the windows,” said Mr. Bartlett.

“—and we didn’t go back in for hours.”

“You were all right?” I asked.

Eliza nodded. “But it was horribly upsetting. We’d come that close to an explosion. I wish you’d give up smoking, Russell.”

“That’s not the problem,” he said.

Eliza drew a breath. “I know this sounds absurd, but it’s almost as if Mrs. Poe meant to harm us. You should have seen her face when Vinnie said you were in Boston. I have never seen such venom. It was frightening.”

“We must not allow her in!” I cried.

“Now, now,” said Mr. Bartlett, “you two are getting hysterical. She doesn’t scare me. She’s a little odd, yes, but to blame her for Catherine’s absentmindedness is wrongheaded.”

I thought of Edgar’s words about madness coloring all those around them. Had Mrs. Poe unbalanced me? Surely she was not capable of wishing harm to my family and friends just to get at me. Surely.

Thirty-one

At first it seemed like the debacle at the Boston Lyceum had done nothing to dim Mr. Poe’s popularity. It appeared, in fact, to have the opposite effect. At an afternoon tour of the Five Points slums that Miss Lynch had arranged in lieu of a conversazione that following week, everyone crowded around him when he arrived, alone, and rigid-faced, at our meeting place at City Hall Park. They wanted to know what had possessed him to try such a prank.

“Thumbing your nose at the Walden Pond group.” Mr. Greeley had to speak up to be heard over the rumbling din of Broadway traffic and the gush of the great Croton Fountain, where we were waiting for the Municipal Police officer who was to protect us as we navigated the slums. “That took guts, as seriously as they take themselves.”

“That’s exactly why it needed to be done.” Mr. Bartlett came forward to get closer to Mr. Poe, as if staking his claim on his special friendship with him. You would never guess that, at my request, Mr. Bartlett had turned Mr. Poe away from his door several days ago. “They think they have the edge over us here in New York. But we aren’t afraid of them, are we, Poe?”

“H’m? No.”

Mr. Poe stepped toward where I stood apart from the group. I turned away, into the spray that the wind blew from the fountain. I welcomed the sensation of the frigid mist needling my face. Better to dwell on it than on the heartbreaking feeling that he was reaching out for me with his mind. I could not look at him. To look at him would undo me. For the safety of my children and friends, I knew that I had to end it with Edgar after his wife had endangered them, but that did not mean that I didn’t love him. He was all I ever
wanted. I would never get over adoring him, never get over yearning for him, never get over the wounding to my soul when he called to me so pitifully outside the Bartletts’ house after I had refused to see him. He had stood hatless in a drenching storm, shouting out my name, the very picture of misery as rain poured down his wretched face. I winced now at the memory.

“Well, Edgar’s little ploy certainly was effective advertising,” said Miss Fuller. “If you weren’t already on everyone’s lips, Edgar, you surely are now.”

“I don’t know,” said Reverend Griswold, “that if being on people’s lips in this way will not leave a bad taste.” He had been newly restored to our circle since his brief foray into holy wedlock and now was pinkly handsome in a new beaver top hat. “I don’t know if I’d want to become known for cheating an audience out of respectable material. They paid good money to hear what amounted to a joke. Don’t be surprised, Poe, if people never pay to see you again.”

“One thing I’ve seen in my line of work,” said Miss Fuller, “is that there is no predicting what people will do. But your little system of mutual log-rolling has certainly worked for you, Rufus.”

Reverend Griswold flared his fluted nostrils. “I’m not ashamed to puff and be puffed, if that’s what you mean. Those who think that they are above it are destined to perish.”

“Perish?” said Mr. Greeley. “They might lose sales, but perish?”

“Same thing in our world,” said Reverend Griswold. “And those who say it’s not aren’t being honest.” He looked at me pointedly as he twisted one of his rings around a gloved finger. “But I cannot help everyone. Not if they won’t let me.”

“I think all of you are missing the point.” Miss Ellet expanded with importance when everyone looked at her. “If you really want to understand what Mr. Poe was up to,” she said, “read his work.”

I plucked at my mantle, wishing I could pluck Mrs. Ellet from my sight. Who
was
this irritating woman, claiming to know my Edgar?

But Edgar only said, “How is that, madam?”

Beneath her small net veil, her smile was smug and flirtatious at once. “Obviously, you are dramatizing the same motivation that drove the narrator in ‘The Imp of the Perverse.’ The narrator had escaped detection of the murder he had committed. The case had been closed
and he was completely safe. The only way he could get caught was to confess the murder—an impossibility. Who would damn himself? Yet, he did. The imp within him—the imp who is within everyone—did.”

“
I
have no such imp,” Reverend Griswold protested.

Mrs. Ellet ignored him. “You did the very thing that would damn you, Mr. Poe, in your case, call down the wrath of the Boston elite upon you.”

“And why would I want to do that?” he said coldly.

She came over and offered up her face to Mr. Poe as if it were beautiful. The netting of her veil trembled as she spoke. “Because it terrifies you.”

He stared at her.

“Why would anyone want to terrify themselves?” Reverend Griswold scoffed.

“Read his story,” snapped Miss Fuller. “It’s brilliant, Edgar. Who doesn’t at one time or another find themselves on the brink of disaster, and instead of pulling away, leaps headlong into it?”

“I did,” said Mr. Greeley, “when I married my wife.”

Only Reverend Griswold, and Mr. Poe and I, did not laugh.

“What else do you know about me from my stories, madam?” Edgar asked Mrs. Ellet.

“Everything.” She lifted her chin to him in challenge. “That death is constantly on your mind. That you think people are gullible. That you think people are, at heart, evil.”

He stared at her. “You err. I think people are, at heart, good.”

The group laughed as if he were joking. I knew better.

“She got you, Poe,” said Mr. Greeley, trying to make light of it.

The police officer arrived with apologies for his lateness. As he accompanied the group toward Chambers Street and beyond, to the festering boil on the city that was the slums of Five Points, I broke away from the group.

I was hailing a hackney cab on Broadway when Mr. Poe caught up with me.

“Why did you leave?”

“I cannot stand these hellish tours. I know that Miss Fuller means to educate by leading this one, but how many people go ‘slumming’ just to be titillated?
What does it say about the fashionable of New York that it is sporting to observe the most wretched?”

“Then why did you come?”

I watched as two riders galloped by. Why had I come? I looked at Mr. Poe.

“Why won’t you see me, Frances?”

“I have to go home, Edgar. I am tired tonight.”

“Do not lie to me. I cannot bear your lying to me.”

“Then because your wife frightens me.”

He stared at me. A hackney approached, its mustachioed driver slumping at the reins. I flagged it down. When it stopped, I got in. Edgar climbed in behind me and flung himself on the opposite bench. There was no use to protest.

After the carriage jolted away from the curb, Edgar said, “What do you mean that Virginia frightens you?”

The carriage lamp cast just enough light through the window to reveal the anxiety on his face. I sighed. “To end it now would be the kindest for us all.”

“What did she do?” he demanded.

“If we no longer see one another, she’ll leave me alone. She is your wife. She needs you. It’s only right that you care for her.”

“What did she do?”

I longed to reach across the darkness and touch his anguished face. “Edgar, we had a beautiful night together. Most people never have such a night in their entire lives. Let’s be glad for what we had.”

“Frances, tell me.”

My heart thumped to the clop of the hooves. I drew a breath. “She nearly caused a gas explosion at the Bartletts’. When we were in Boston.”

He blinked as if slapped. “How?”

“She just did.”

“I’ll get rid of her.”

“Don’t say that! That makes it worse!”

He dug his hand through his hair. “I won’t then!”

I wanted to tell him that I knew, now, that I had not imagined she had tried to drown me. Unless fear and paranoia had eroded my
mind, I knew I was not dreaming that she had engineered my headless portrait to intimidate me. She’d had a hand in the burning of Madame Restell’s quarters, I suspected, simply because she disapproved of her. It seemed that she had even somehow set up my nearly being crushed by the block of ice outside her door, although how she had achieved that, I could not imagine. Who knew what other sly acts of violence she was capable of? But I could not say these things to Mr. Poe. I could not further enrage him against her. I did not know what he might do.

“I’ll do whatever you say, Frances, but I cannot bear for you to leave me.” He sprang across the space between us and pressed me to him. “Promise you will not leave me, Frances.”

I breathed in his sweet leathery smell. How I loved his valiant soul, fighting for his place in the world in the face of crushing hardship, fighting for me. But how could I risk my family’s safety to keep him?

“Edgar, we can’t.”

He pulled away. “We’ll be more careful, that’s all, at least for a while. We’ll be as invisible as ghosts. Frances, say that you will see me. I shan’t let her hurt you. I promise.” He squeezed my fingers. “Do you think that I would endanger my soul’s true mate?”

The carriage came to a halt. I removed my hand from his. Even that disconnection was painful in its intensity.

“Oh, Edgar. All right. We can try. But we must be scrupulously careful.”

He kissed my forehead, letting his lips linger, then pulled back. His smile was meant to be brave but I could see the worry in his eyes. “I will not let her hurt you, my love. You know that you can trust me.”

Thirty-two

“I don’t know how he does it!” cried Mrs. Mary Jones, the hostess of the Christmas ball that I was attending that evening with the Bartletts. Her effusive bulk, amplified by vast wealth, seemed to invade the air around her. That her flesh was now shoehorned into a purple velvet gown only emphasized the effect. She was fond of expensive feather headdresses and wore a scarlet one now upon her gray curls, giving her the appearance of the plumed dapple mare that had drawn Mr. Barnum’s lion wagon. Now the plume bobbed jauntily as she nodded toward Mr. Poe, enthralling a group of ladies over by the pianoforte, a group I had been certain to avoid. “How does he come up with such imaginative stories?”

“I’m sure Mrs. Osgood would not know.” Reverend Griswold slid up and stood as close to me as would a husband. “She has dropped him like everyone else has.” He offered me a slice of cake, his well-groomed face smug with possessiveness.

I forced myself not to move away as I took the plate. It was best that Reverend Griswold felt some ownership of me. If he thought I was not involved with Edgar, maybe no one did. Edgar and I had taken great pains to appear to have been disconnected over the past two months. Oh, we had to see each other—to not do so was as sure to kill us as withdrawing water and sunshine—but our stolen moments together were at the wharves along the Hudson, or in the muddy lanes near the slaughterhouses, or in the chapel for sailors downtown, places where our set did not venture. Even there we settled for merely exchanging a few longing words or a touch upon the arm. It had to be enough. As a further precaution, Edgar had not attended the conversaziones for fear of being linked with me, and I
had not attended his lectures. If I had known that he was going to be at Mrs. Jones’s ball, I would have refused to come. At least Mrs. Poe was not there, or I would have immediately fled.