The Blackest Bird (18 page)

W
hy she had never married, Olga Hays could not have said. There had been a gentleman, a scrivener, in her life some years before, but then she had experienced a change of heart. After that there had been no men, and after her mother’s death she had devoted herself to her father, although she would never have said she had sacrificed herself in any way for him. Nor would she ever confess it unsettled and frightened her to see him getting old, as if it reflected on her.

As her father had told her, it was the Mary Rogers case barely disguised. Olga read the first section from the November
Snowden’s
in its entirety that night by lamplight at the kitchen table, and then reread it and took notes in her bed, although not under the covers, but sitting up against the feather pillows. It was not one of Poe’s horrors or grotesques, a dark and perverse story that lent itself to such delights as being frightened out of your wits while devouring the text nonstop by candlelight in bed.

No, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” was unlike the author’s “The Masque of the Red Death” or “The Pit and the Pendulum.” And
although the narrative featured the same character, the investigator Dupin from “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” it was not of that masterful level.

The next morning, with as little sleep as she had, Olga rose early and put the fire on, but before preparing breakfast, she went out to the offices of
Snowden’s
on Dutch Alley, to beg from a printer’s imp with whom she had some acquaintance the latest issue of the
Ladies’ Companion
, the December, with the second installment.

She then returned home, steeped her tea, sat at the kitchen table, and read the second installment before her father awoke, making notations both on paper and in the margins as she went along.

What Poe had done, his tactic as it were, had been to take the real-life murder of Mary Rogers and transfer the crime to Paris. He renamed Mary “Marie,” slightly changed her age, the dates of the crime, and her place of business, substituting a Parisian
parfumerie
for John Anderson’s New York segar emporium.

The body of the work began with the author discussing coincidence, what he called the “Calculus of Probabilities,” highlighting specifically the extraordinary details of an atrocity against a young woman in Paris which he contended with little opacity would serve to mirror in the minds of all readers the murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers in New York City.

In the story, Marie is the daughter of the widow Estelle Rogêt. Her father is dead, as Olga knew was Mary Rogers’ own father. Madame Rogêt runs a Parisian pension, a small hotel, assisted by her daughter.

Poe wrote that when Marie reached the age of twenty-two years, her beauty attracted the attentions of a Monsieur Le Blanc (the character meant to stand in for John Anderson) who ran a perfume shop in the basement of the Palais Royal. She went to work there, and thanks to her, the business became a sensation. But after a year of employ, suddenly all Marie’s admirers, who were myriad, were thrown into a state of confusion when she inexplicably disappeared.

At the time, Poe continues, Madame Rogêt was terrified that the
worst had befallen her child. The Parisian public prints had taken up the story, and the police were called in. But just as the investigation was to begin full pitch, the missing Marie unaccountably reappeared in good health, saying she had spent the week of her disappearance with a relative in the country.

What followed then, Poe relates, was much gossip, and Marie, not able to withstand the snide innuendo, left the
parfumerie
and the employ of Monsieur Le Blanc, retiring to run her mother’s pension on the Rue Pavée Saint-André.

Five months later Madame Rogêt is once more thrown into a fit of anxiety, as are her daughter’s friends and admirers. Marie has again disappeared. After three days, nothing is heard from her, but on the fourth, her body is found floating in the Seine.

“The atrocity of the murder,” Poe writes, “the youth and beauty of the victim, and, above all, her previous notoriety, conspired to produce intense excitement in the minds of the sensitive Parisians.”

Olga puts down her pen. Her father, in his dressing gown, his feet bare to the cold floor, stands in the kitchen doorway, staring bleary-eyed at her.

“Olga, is there any Javanese?”

She stands immediately. “Yes, Papa, certainly.”

“And some dry toast? That’s all I think I can bear right now.”

“Of course.”

“What time is it?”

She still has the kettle on and is reaching for the bread knife. “Are you feeling all right? It is almost noon.”

Hays looks at her. The whites of his eyes are alarmingly red, the hanging folds of skin beneath an amalgam of blue and black, almost bruised. “Certainly, I feel fine.” He glances at the kitchen table, to her notes and the two issues of open
Snowden’s
. “So, have you gotten to it?”

“Yes, I have read it,” she says. She had a thin slice of bread, the way her father liked it, on the toasting rack in the oven.

“And?”

“I went out this morning and begged a printer’s imp I know at
Snowden’s
the second issue. What Mr. Poe has done is impressive, Papa, but perhaps not his best work.”

“I do not need literary criticism, Olga,” he snaps. “I need to know the content. Is it possible that this man knows something I do not?”

“Most of it seems to be taken from the public prints, almost directly.”

“So the answer is no?”

“I cannot be certain yet, Papa.”

She can see clearly Poe’s construct. The chevalier C. Auguste Dupin is with certainty modeled after her father. “The Chevalier’s remarkable analytical ability was so highly touted by the local Parisian constabulary,” Poe writes in “Marie Rogêt,” “that they gave him credit for intuition,” an observation gleaned almost word for word from a profile of her father published in the
Police Gazette.

“The story is related by an unnamed narrator,” she explains to him, “the same who narrated the story of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’ This fictional individual does all the chevalier’s legwork while the chevalier remains in his comfortable Parisian apartments. The narrator visits all the newspaper offices in Paris ferreting out every word published having to do with the crime. Dupin then reconstructs the timeline and all movement using this press and the vast and varied published accounts. Mr. Poe, I suspect, has done the very same thing, Papa, used the New York prints, mainly, it seems, along with the weekly compendium the
Brother Jonathan
to cobble the story together. He basically admits as much within the context of the story.”

Hays nods. “Go on.”

She sets down her father’s coffee and burnt toast in front of him.

“On Sunday morning, June 22, in a year Mr. Poe chooses not to name, at nine a. m., the grisette Marie Rogêt leaves her mother’s residence. She says goodbye to no one but Monsieur Jacques St. Eustache—the character representing Mr. Daniel Payne—and to him, and to him only, does she remark that her intentions are to visit
her aunt on the Rue des Drômes, two miles away, and not far from the banks of the Seine River. Arrangements had ostensibly been made by St. Eustache to meet Marie later that evening to escort her home, but heavy rains fall in the afternoon, and assuming she would stay with her aunt that evening as she has in previous similar instances, he does not feel it necessary to keep his promise. Later that evening, however, when apprised of Marie’s failure to return home, Madame Rogêt, who is described by the author as an infirm old lady, seventy years of age, is heard to express, as I know did Mary’s own mother, to the effect she feared she would never again see her daughter alive.

“The next day, when still Marie has not made appearance, St. Eustache sets out, only to ascertain she never arrived at the Rue des Drômes. A tardy search is instigated at several other points in the city, but with no result. It is not until the fourth day that a Monsieur Beauvais—Mr. Alfred Crommelin—making inquiries for Marie on the shore of the Seine, is informed that the corpse of a young girl has been found floating in the waters. After some hesitation Beauvais identifies the corpse as that of the missing perfumery girl.

“Following several days’ passage without a mention in the press, one of the local weekly papers takes up the theme of the murder, kindling an outpouring of public emotion. As a result, several individuals are quickly arrested on suspicion. There is no evidence, however, and they are released.

“The family’s colored maid then comes forward. She testifies she overheard Madame Rogêt and Marie in furious discussion, Madame unflinching in desire for her daughter to break off her prospective marriage to St. Eustace, which, according to the maid’s account, in the end Marie concedes to do.

“St. Eustache is now detained by the French authorities, and at first gives an unintelligible account of his whereabouts during the Sunday on which Marie left home. Under further scrutiny by the local gendarmes, however, a more thorough affidavit is submitted, and every hour of St. Eustache’s whereabouts adequately accounted for.

“Mr. Poe’s tale continues to do nothing more than follow fully the course of known events, Papa. As in your investigation, in the end both the characters representative of Mr. Payne and Mr. Crommelin will be fully exonerated by the Parisian gendarmerie. As time progresses and all remains fallow, a thousand contradictory rumors are circulated through Paris, and the city’s journalists busy themselves with specious speculations.

“Dupin contends because there was no person whatever who came forward who saw Marie after she left her mother’s door, there is no evidence that Marie Rogêt, in fact, was in the land of the living after nine o’clock on that Sunday. Therefore, there is no proof that, up to that hour, she was alive.”

Olga refers to her notes, then directly to the text. “‘On Wednesday noon,’” she reads, “‘at twelve, a female body was discovered afloat on the shore of the Barrière du Roule. This was, even if we presume that Marie was thrown into the river within three hours after she left her mother’s house, only three days from the time she left her home—three days to an hour. But it is folly to suppose that the murder, if murder was committed on her body, could have been consummated soon enough to have enabled her murderers to throw the body into the river before midnight. Those that are guilty of such horrid crimes choose darkness rather than light. Thus we see that if the body found in the river was that of Marie Rogêt, she could only have been in the water two and a half days, or three at the outside. All experience has shown that drowned bodies or bodies thrown into the water immediately after death by violence, require from six to ten days for sufficient decomposition to take place to bring them to the top of the water.’” Olga looks up. “Is all this true, Papa?”

“He belabors his point, Olga. Go on, please.”

“Parts of the story are excruciating, but it is presumably science the author is after, Papa. Or some semblance of it. Mr. Poe would most certainly have us believe the scientific method is the key to detection.”

“I would argue instinct in intimate collusion with science and logic
might better serve the shadow, but who am I to disagree with Mr. Poe and the advance of his sophisticated methodology?”

“Stop, Papa. The theory that engenders the most notice is an idea that Marie was not dead at all, but still lived, and that the corpse found in the Seine was not hers, but that of another. In the story Mr. Poe conspires to have the newspaper
L’Etoile
, correlating to the
New
York Star
, allege it could not have been Marie in the Seine, but the body of another, making reference to the apparent apathy of the Rogêt family toward the corpse, surmising this apathy inconsistent with the supposition that these relatives believed the corpse to be hers. According to the print, the most telling point is that no one from the family bothered to go across the river to view the body. ‘For an item of news like this,’ Poe quotes
L’Etoile
, ‘it strikes us as very coolly received.’

“Dupin takes exception. To him, this is not the case. He defends Madame Rogêt. He makes excuses for her, saying she was exceedingly feeble, and was so agitated by the circumstances of her daughter’s death she could not possibly attend to any duty. St. Eustache, rather than receiving the news coolly, according to Poe, was so distracted with grief Beauvais had to prevail upon friends and relatives to attend him lest he commit harm upon himself.

“But for his supposed compassion,” Olga continues, “Monsieur Beauvais now becomes the prime suspect.”

She returns to read from a marked excerpt from the magazine text. “‘Monsieur Beauvais appears to have the whole matter locked up in his head. A single step cannot be taken without Beauvais. For some reason, this individual determined that nobody should have anything to do with the proceedings but himself. He seems to have been very much averse to permitting the relatives to see the body.’

“Emphasis is added to this suspicion, Papa, after the character based on Archibald Padley comes forward to say a few days prior to Marie’s disappearance that he had observed a rose in Beauvais’s keyhole, and the name ‘Marie’ inscribed on the slate outside his door.”

“All this has been thoroughly investigated, Olga. Arthur Crommelin
did receive a rose from Mary Rogers. Her name was inscribed on his chalkboard in her hand. There is nothing new here,” he grumbles.

“Indeed, as you say, Papa, in the story, as in real life, all these men and admirers of Marie are eventually exonerated, and so, despite all else, the generally held opinion falls back on a gang of desperadoes, that they had seized Marie, borne her across the river, maltreated her, and then murdered her.

“After still further analysis of the facts, however, a newspaper Poe here christens
Le Commerciel
—obviously, the
Journal of Commerce
—weighs in, concluding that because a piece of one of Marie’s petticoats had been torn from her dress and tied under her chin and around the back of her head, evidently in order to prevent screams, the murder could not have been committed by such a gang of common ruffians. Mr. Poe reasons these fellows too much revere their pocket handkerchiefs, so this act must have been carried out by fellows who had no pocket handkerchiefs. The correlation being, that if rogues such as these had had pocket handkerchiefs, they would have used them. The reasoning, therefore, the deed was not carried out by ruffians of the common sort.