My Clockwork Muse (4 page)

"Mr. William Evans Burton, yes," the man said
stiffly, disapproving of my familiar tone.

Then I heard the man's voice itself. "Is that
you, Poe?"

I looked up and saw none other than Billy
Burton striding out of his office. A few years my elder, he was a
heavy-set man with long side-whiskers. If anything, he looked to
have gained weight since I had last seen him. He had certainly
gained weight since I fancied I had last seen him. And he had
gotten his lips back too. And he smelled a damn sight better! But
he looked none too happy to see me, though I expected that.

I rushed past his appointment secretary, much
to the man's loud chagrin. I ignored his protestations, for I had
to reach Burton, to touch him with my own hands. I saw him, but I
scarcely believed it. "Burton!" I cried.

He took a step back. "Now look here, Poe," he
said in a warning tone. When I didn't stop, he raised his fists and
adopted a pugilist's stance.

He must have feared that I had come to punch
him in the nose, as I had so often threatened. But punching was the
last thing I had on my mind. I had hardly even considered the idea
that I would find him here in the flesh. I certainly had not
foreseen my emotions upon doing so. With a feeling of unmitigated
happiness, I flung my arms around him. He was tense as a board and
I could feel his clenched fists pressed against my chest. But when
he realized that I embraced him out of joy and not a desire to
squeeze the life from his lungs, he relaxed and gave me a pat or
two on the back, his befuddled version of a return embrace.

"You would never believe how happy I am to
see you, Burton!" I cried, holding him at arm's length. "I had
heard you were missing."

Burton began to stammer. "I had—I had gone to
England..." Then he straightened and looked at me crossly, his
nostrils twitching as he seemed to sniff at my breath. "Look here,
Poe! Have you been drinking?"

"I am drunk on happiness and relief at your
safe return," I replied, in high spirits.

"Yes, I thought I detected more of cabbage
there than cocktail." Burton disentangled himself from me and took
a step back, maintaining his cross expression. "Tell me what this
is about, Poe? Since when are you happy to see
me
?"

"Since you have been reported missing," I
explained. "Why should I not be happy at your safe return?"

"If it's about the hundred you owe me, I will
gladly accept payment any time."

The man was wholly unlikable, even in the
midst of a joyful reunion. But my relief at finding him alive would
not permit his irascibility to dampen my happiness. I had the
feeling of a man who awakens from a nightmare to find himself safe
in his own bed. Part of me wanted to run to Gessler to tell him.
Another part of me felt liberated from the man and the detection of
his ghastly crimes once and for all. Now that I was assured the
victim bore no connection to me whatsoever, I felt I was a free
man.

Still, what I had just heard spill from
Burton's lips was a slander that could not go un-remedied.

"It is not one hundred," I assured him, "but
sixty. Minus the nine you unjustly deducted from what you owed me
for the publication of my stories."

"Unjustly? What right have you to my
money—money which you have no intention of repaying?"

Burton's chubby face had gone red. If I
hadn't been tempted to strangle the man on the spot, I might have
laughed at his apish expression. "I have every intention of
repaying. But
sixty
, not a hundred!"

"How dare you, Poe? How dare you come in
here—?"

"How dare I? It is robbery, sir!
Fifty-one
is what I will repay—"

Burton's appointment secretary grasped me in
a bear hug or I would certainly have broken Burton's nose. For one
who wrote in such a flowery script, the secretary had strong arms,
and I strained against them, struggling to get my hands on his
apish master.

"
'Faulty construction and poorness of
style'
indeed!" I cried. "Oh, yes, I knew it was you, Burton.
Who else would write such twaddle?"

"Such twaddle as your Narrative of
Arthur-whatsit-Pym, you mean!"

"
Gordon
, you oaf!" I shouted.

By the time the secretary had wrestled me out
the door, I wished it
had
been Burton I'd seen bricked up in
the boarding house basement. Whatever relief I'd felt upon finding
him alive was now squandered in anger.

Still, for better or worse, Billy Burton
lived. Now, I had only an unknown corpse to occupy my mind. As my
anger began to subside, my feeling of relief returned. I made my
way to the train station for home, glad, at least, not to know who
it was who had been interred in the boarding house basement.

The route to the train station took me past
the boarding house where I had seen—where I had
fancied
I'd
seen Burton dead. I slipped to the opposite side of the street and
tried to make myself small behind the foot traffic on the sidewalk.
I had a feeling Gessler's men were probably looking for me, that
after they had thrown me to the curb, they had turned their backs
only to look again and find me missing, having wriggled from their
grasp. It was just a matter of time before they showed up at
Briggs' again and I wanted to be well away before they realized
where I had gone.

A throng of the curious had gathered around
the door of the boarding house and above the teeming mass, I
glimpsed the brawny Irishman. The brass badge on his policeman's
hat glinted in the sun as he looked one way and then another. I had
to laugh when I saw his puzzled expression, for I knew then that I
had indeed given him the slip. No doubt Gessler was down in the
corpse-scented cellar blustering that he had lost his Dupin, never
realizing that while his men looked off in one direction, Dupin was
walking away—
in plain sight!
—in the other. This idea lifted
my spirits. I soon found myself whistling a little tune as I dug a
coin from my pocket for the flower-seller in front of the station:
a single red rose for Virginia's tomb.

As the train began huffing and chugging
towards my cottage in Fordham, the idea that I had seen the
detestable Billy Burton walled up dead wearing a fool's cap seemed
a comic, if not altogether desirable, notion. I saw his fat red
face and his eyes bulging beneath the idiotic hat, all the
criticisms that dripped from his vile tongue reduced to a harmless
jingling of bells. Ha-ha! It almost seemed funny now that I thought
about it on the train.

Still, the idea that I had seen Burton where
there was none troubled me. Briggs was right, of course. My
anxiety, already piqued by the burdens of my work, had been
heightened by Gessler's crime scene. Who could blame me? What man,
roused from a troubled sleep and thrust into the company of a
moldering corpse, would not be prone to disturbing visions?

But the only vision I had now was of Burton
in motley. As I listened to the wheels clicking and clacking along
the tracks, I began to recount my adventure in my mind, cast in the
humorous light I now believed it deserved.

I must have laughed aloud at some point, for
I caught one of the other passengers, a young girl, eying me
curiously. Suppressing my grin, I gave her a nod and she buried her
face bashfully in her mother's blouse. I then spent the remainder
of the thirteen-mile journey lost in pleasant reverie as I composed
the story in my mind as I would surely tell it in cheerful company
when the occasion next arose.

My good humor was tempered only by the fact
that where I was going, there would be no one to tell.

Virginia had been interred in the Valentine
family vault in a church graveyard not half a mile from our
cottage. The Valentines owned the house I had rented and the
poverty in which we lived there had become well-known. I had been
publishing little and the
Journal
had just started and
seemed destined to forever teeter on the brink of bankruptcy. We
had become the objects of pity. Worse still, news of Virginia's
death after her long illness of consumption had made us the
recipients of charity as well: linen grave clothes for Virginia,
suitable mourning attire for me, a coffin, even a borrowed grave.
To such a state had our pitiable existence fallen!

Dusk was approaching by the time I arrived at
the burial ground. The air had grown chill and the sky was
beginning to darken. It was autumn. Even though the weather had
been dry, the ground in the churchyard, under the perpetual shadow
of massive twisted oaks, was constantly damp. Wet leaves clung to
the toes of my shoes.

I knew the path to Virginia's vault well. I
could have walked it with my eyes closed, for I had made the trip
often enough, even in the dead of night. Once, I had visited her in
my sleep. I had awakened at her graveside with my stocking feet in
the snow and no knowledge of how I had come to be standing there.
Oh, my Virginia! No man had ever experienced a grief as deep as I
had for the loss of his beautiful little wife. As I turned a corner
and saw the structure of Virginia's vault at the end of the path
before me, I regretted that I had but a single red rose to lay upon
it.

And I saw something else, too: a figure that
seemed to glide soundlessly across the graveled path and vanish
behind the very structure to which I was bound. I had caught only
the briefest glimpse of the form, but it was enough to cause my
heart to quicken. Had I seen a ghost? Or merely some overdue
mourner to Virginia's grave?

Neither seemed likely. As I pondered the
issue, noting that the phantom failed to re-appear from either end
of the vault, I became convinced that the mysterious figure must
have been a Valentine, come to pay respects to one of their
own.

Of course!
, I thought, chuckling at my
foolishness. That imbecile Gessler had me jumping at shadows. Had I
not had enough of ghosts for one day?

Out of respect for the mourner's privacy, I
contemplated turning back, but decided that I wouldn't mind a
little company, even if we had nothing to share but our grief, and
thus continued boldly along the path. But when I came to the corner
of the vault, I was shocked to see not a Valentine, but a
Coppelius.

The daughter of Coppelius, that is. It was
Olimpia.

It was a chilly autumn day, but she was
dressed as if it were the middle of winter. Her elegant coat nearly
touched the ground and she wore upon her head a luxurious
snow-white fur hat. She removed her hand from a matching muff long
enough to place a long-stemmed red rose on the ledge at the base of
Virginia's slab. Her lips and her flower seemed to be only splashes
of color in an otherwise dreary landscape of the dead.

I looked down at my hand and saw that our
roses matched. I placed mine alongside hers, both of them standing
upright. She noticed me and looked up with watery, soulful
eyes.

"To the most beautiful woman I have ever
known." The words spilled from me before I had time to consider
them, and I began to stammer like a fool. "
Had
...ever known,
I mean. To the most beautiful woman I
had
ever known. To
Virginia..."

The corners of Olimpia's mouth twitched
upward in a bewitching ghost of a smile. Of course, she had loved
Virginia as I had. Though it was her father, Dr. Coppelius, who had
tended Virginia through her illness, it was Olimpia who had often
remained at her bedside into the wee hours. She brought broth and
wine to ease her suffering and to keep her warm had replaced my old
military cloak with a new soft comforter. Throughout Virginia's
illness, I had grown so used to finding Olimpia at her side that
after Virginia's death I found that I missed her presence almost as
much as I missed Virginia herself.

God help me for saying so, but it was
true.

"She..." I began, feeling my cheeks grow hot.
"...Virginia, that is, expressed to me often how much she treasured
your visits, Miss Coppelius."

Now her soft cheeks reddened. "My father..."
I heard her begin to say, but she spoke in such a low tone that the
rest of her words were lost to me, though I leaned in close to hear
her. As far as I knew, she never spoke in anything above a low
whisper. In all the time I had watched her tending Virginia and
listened to them conversing, I don't think I'd ever heard a single
intelligible thing fall from her lips.

Her voice was nevertheless like music to me.
She seemed like something not of this world—though that might have
just been a fancy of mine, for I had never seen her outside the
context of the dead or the dying. In my mind, she had become a kind
of mythic being that straddled the chasm between the living and the
dead and not a mere flesh and blood woman.

"And I can assure you," I said, hoping her
comment—"Times New Roman" \s 12whatever it had been—did not require
a direct response, "that she would appreciate your coming here. My
Virginia loved to have company. I wish you had known her before she
got sickR12 \f "Times New Roman" \s 12"

"My father..." she said again before her
voice trailed off. I inclined my head to hear her words, but my ear
was filled only with the faint music of her unintelligible
voice.

"Yes," I answered, "Dr. Coppelius, your
father. I would love to have you both as guests sometime. I see so
little of anyone now, and I did so enjoy the company of you and the
doctor. I would be honored to have you as guests to my house. I
don't have to be ill to warrant a visit, do I?"

I tried to utter a casual little laugh, but
my nerves caused me to lose control of my voice and I feared I
might have cackled like a madman. I pursed my lips and leaned
forward, hoping for an audible reply.