The Pale Blue Eye: A Novel (39 page)

"Oh, you won't denounce us, will you?" she implored. "No one will be harmed by our little masquerade, I assure you."

"No one but Mr. Poe," I said, gravely. "You must know Academy officials dine here on a regular basis."

"Oh, yes, we are en garde for that eventuality. In the meantime..."

Against my will, my judgment, I felt my lips tickling. "In the meantime," I said, "I won't do anything to get in your way. And I'm delighted to find you here, Miss Marquis. I'd thought I was in for another evening of men."

"Yes, this appears to be the one night a year when females may safely tread through Marshmoor. Our annual night of enfranchisement, historic in its implications."

"But surely, as his niece--"

"Oh, "Uncle' is just a term of endearment. I've known him since I was a girl, you see. He's an old friend of the family."

"And where, then, are the rest of the Marquises?"

"Well," she said, breezily, "you will not be surprised to learn that Mother has taken to her bed again."

"Migraine?"

"Wednesday is neuralgia, Mr. Landor. My father is staying with her, my brother is immured in geometry, and I am the sole family emissary."

"Well," I said, "we are all the happier as a result."

Even as I heard myself say it, I felt the heat steal into my cheeks. Weren't these the words of a suitor? I took a step back. Crossed my arms.

"I must say, Miss Marquis, I've always wondered why there aren't more women here. The place could use some."

"Uncle Gouv hates us," she answered simply. "No, don't look that way. I know he professes merely to be mystified by my sex, but what more damning confession can there be? One fails to understand only what one fails to esteem."

"You have many admirers, Miss Marquis. Do they all understand you?"

Her eyes ambled away from mine. When she spoke again, it was with a heavy sort of lightness.

"I've always been told some woman broke Uncle Gouv's heart long ago. But I rather think he's never had his heart broken." She looked at me. "Not like you, Mr. Landor. Not like me." She smiled then, and tilted her head. "It appears we have been abandoned. Shall we throw in our lots with the rest of them?"

On the subject of his dinner table, Gouverneur Kemble had very clear ideas. Women (on the rare occasions when they were present) must sit at one end, men at the other. Of course, in any such arrangement, there must always be two members of each sex rubbing shoulders with their opposites. So it was that the female hymnist sat next to the Shaker woodworker, and I was placed alongside one Emmeline Cropsey.

Married to an unstable Cornish baronet, Mrs. Cropsey had been banished to America on a small allowance and had become a kind of wandering critic, lighting from state to state, deriding all she saw. Niagara had bored, Albany had appalled, and with her Highlands tour nearing an end, she was even now waiting for her husband to send more money so she could find more country to hate. Before we had even picked up our forks, she informed me that she was composing a volume, to be titled America: The Failed Experiment.

"On the assumption that you take no share in the prevailing ethos of this frightful land, Mr. Landor, I freely avow what I could not confess to any of your tobacco-spitting brethren: West Point will be the principal case in my docket."

"How interesting," I said.

From there she went on about, oh, the myth of Cadmus and something about Leroy Fry and Randolph Ballinger's being lambs on the altar of the American demigods. It was a bit like listening to Poe, except not so restful. I'm not sure when, exactly, but at some point Mrs. Cropsey's drone--and indeed the whole welter of accents that crisscrossed Gouverneur Kemble's table--began to give way before one particular voice. No louder than the others but with a natural authority as good as a thousand trumpets. Lieutenant Henri le Rennet--in his absurd mustache and borrowed costume--was taking hold.

"It is true, yes," he said. "France is my pays natal. But I have been a soldier in your country's army long enough to become tolerably well acquainted with your English literature. And I regret to inform you that its condition is dire. Yes, dire, I say!"

The painter, edging out on a shaky limb, asked, "Mr. Scott seldom disappoints, I suppose?"

Poe shrugged, speared a turnip. "If one has sufficiently low expectations, no."

"Mr. Wordsworth?" ventured another.

"He shares the same failing as all the Lake poets: he insists on edifying us. When in fact--" He broke off. Held the turnip aloft like a torch. "When, in fact, the whole end of Poetry must be the rhythmical creation of beauty. Beauty and pleasure, those are her highest callings, and the death of a beautiful woman, that is Poetry's most exalted theme."

"But what of the writers within our shores?" tried one. "Mr. Bryant, let us say?"

"I grant you, he has eschewed the poetical affectations which hobble the majority of our modern poetry. But I cannot say that his work betrays a single positive excellence."

"Mr. Irving, then?" "Much overrated," said Poe, flatly. "If America were truly a republic of the arts, Mr. Irving would be considered nothing more than a backwater tributary."

Here he overstepped. Irving was a divinity in these parts. More to the point, he was a boon companion of Gouverneur Kemble. Even if you hadn't known that, you couldn't have missed (unless you were Poe) the rippling motion of heads as diner after diner hazarded an anxious reading of Kemble's face, desiring to know if offense must be taken. Kemble never looked up--left it to the New York Mirror publisher to do his work for him.

"Lieutenant," said this publisher, "I am beginning to fear you abuse our host's generosity by so freely venting your spleen. Surely there is at least one literary light whom you read with pleasure?"

"There is one." He paused here. Scanned the faces of his listeners, as if to ascertain whether they were worthy. Then, with his eyes narrowed and his voice lowered for prime effect, he said, "I don't suppose you have heard of... Poe?"

"Poe?" cried Mrs. Cropsey, like a deaf invalid. "Poe, do you say?"

"Of the Baltimore Poes," he said.

Well, no one had heard of either Poe or the Baltimore Poes. Which filled our lieutenant with a deep and dark sadness.

"Can it be?" he asked, softly. "Ah, my friends, I am no prophet, but I can safely foretell that if you have not heard of him yet, you shall in time. Of course, I myself have never met the fellow, but I am told he hails from a long line of Frankish chieftains. As do I," he added with a modest lowering of his head.

"And he's a poet?" asked the woodworker.

"Calling him a mere poet is, to my mind, like branding Milton a merchant of doggerel. Oh, he is young, this Poe, of that there is no doubt. The vine of his genius has yet to bear its ripest fruit, but there is harvest enough, my friends, for any refined palate."

"Mr. Kemble!" exclaimed Mrs. Cropsey. "Wherever did you find this charming soldat ? I believe he is the first man I've encountered in your country who is neither imbecilic nor demonstrably insane."

Her remark sailed right over Kemble, for the Irving gibe had cut deeper than anyone might have guessed. In tones stiff with resentment, he voiced his belief that Miss Marquis was answerable for the lieutenant.

"Indeed!" cried Lea from her end of the table. "Lieutenant le Rennet is an old war comrade of my father's. They stood side by side in the defense of Ogdensburg."

An approving murmur ran across the table, stopping dead with Mrs. Cropsey, who frowned and said, "Surely, Lieutenant, you are far too young to have fought in the War of EighteenTwelve."

Poe smiled at her. "I was a mere garcon at the time, madame. Fighting alongside my adoptive father, Lieutenant Balthasar le Rennet. My mother, she tried, yes, to keep me at home, but I said, "Pah! I will not abide with women while there is fighting to be done."" He gazed up at the chandelier. "Thus, my friends, I was present for duty when my father took a cannon-ball to the breastbone. It was I who caught him as he fell. It was I who laid him on the patch of ground that would, all too soon, become his grave. It was I who bent down to hear his dying whisper: "Il faut combattre, mon fils. Toujours combattre...' " He took a long breath. "In that moment, I knew what my destiny was. To be a soldier as brave as he. To be an officer in Columbia's army, fighting for the land that has been a... a... second father to me."

His face sank into his hands, and a silence fell over the table as Kemble's guests took up his tale like a dropped handkerchief and held it before them, wondering whether to keep or return it.

"I cry whenever I think of it," offered Lea.

She wasn't, in fact, crying, but she did tip the scales in Poe's favor. The hymn composer brushed something from her eye, and the painter cleared his throat, and the Newburgh headmistress was so affected as to let her hand rest for a second or two on the sleeve of her woodworker neighbor.

"Well," said Kemble, sullenly. "Your career does... the highest possible honor to--to your father's memory. And to your adopted country." Gathering himself, he twisted his wince into a straight line. "May I toast you, sir?"

Up went the glasses. Out came the smiles. It was all clink-clink and "Hear, hear" and "Well said, Kemble," and I watched as a fine claretlike blush stole across the pale proud cheeks of Lieutenant le Rennet.

And that was how a lowly West Point plebe came to be hated and, in short order, saluted by one of America's great men. Poe's triumph was complete, and like all such triumphs, doomed to end. For in the act of burying his head, he had managed somehow to tear off nearly half his mustache. I didn't notice at first; it was Lea, semaphoring madly in my direction, who sounded the alarm. Then I saw Mrs. Cropsey staring at Poe with a look of groggy shock, as if he were crumbling before her eyes. I had only to follow the line of her gaze to see the hank of black horsehair dangling from his lip--switching in the streams of his breath, like a baby skunk's tail.

I stood at once. "Lieutenant le Rennet? I must beg a brief word with you. In private, if--if you can spare yourself."

"Not at all," said Poe, with some regret.

I led him from room to room, looking for a place that didn't have a servant within listening distance. That takes doing in Gouverneur Kemble's house. I was reduced to dragging him through the study and out onto the front verandah.

"Landor, what are you up to?"

"Up to?" I snatched off the dangling black hank and held it aloft with my thumb and forefinger. "A little more gum arabic next time, Lieutenant."

His eyes jumped from their holes. "Oh, God! Did anyone see?" "Only Lea, I think. And Mrs. Cropsey, who is, lucky for you, despised."

He fumbled through his pockets. "There must be some..."

"What?"

"Some snuff left over from--"

"Snuff!"

"Surely, the--the juice is adhesive, isn't it?"

"If you don't mind smelling like a cuspidor. Come, now, Poe, you've had your show. Time to bring down the curtain and--"

"And abandon Lea?" His eyes made a wolf-flare. "On the first night we've ever spent alone together? I'd sooner resign my commission on the spot. No, I'm in it for the duration, Landor, whether you help me or not."

"Then it will be not. And before I get any angrier, tell me where you found that uniform."

"This?" He looked at the garb on his body as if it had just now settled over. "Why, Lea gave it to me. It belonged to a dead uncle, something like that. Fits me like a charm, doesn't it?" His grin slowly faded as he studied my face. "What is it, Landor?"

I grabbed the bottom of his coatee--ran my finger along the square of bloodied cloth I had discovered in Artemus' closet. The finger came away clean.

"What's wrong, Landor?"

"Did you wipe it off ?" I asked in a simmering voice. "Give it a little scrub, maybe, before you started out?"

"But why would I do that? It's quite clean enough, isn't it?"

"Oh, then maybe Lea did it for you."

His lips began opening and closing. "I haven't--I haven't the slightest... Landor, what's the matter with you?"

I opened my mouth to reply, only to be stopped by a voice that came from behind us. A voice that was neither Poe's nor mine. But familiar all the same.

"Mr. Landor."

The intruder was standing in the doorway, still in his cloak, his boots rimed with ice, his frame silhouetted and, at the same time, fully hidden by the light from the study.

Trust Ethan Allen Hitchcock to make such an entrance.

"I was hoping to find you here," he said. Oh, he was grim as a cow.

"And so you do," I said, waving at Poe behind my back. "So you find me, yes."

"I wish I had happier news to--"

He stopped then. Knitted his brows and considered the small, slender figure that had wheeled itself toward the river and was even now trying to squeeze itself into the night's folds.

"Mr. Poe," said the commandant.

I suppose, if Poe could have jumped straight from the verandah into the Hudson, he would have done it. If he could have heaved himself over the nearest mountain, he would have done that, too. But he had never felt so small, I'd guess, as he did in that moment. So far from superhuman.

His shoulders shook. His head drooped on its stalk. He turned slowly round.

"How well you look in your uniform," said Hitchcock, widening his gaze to enclose both of us. "And what an ingenious entertainment you and Mr. Landor have devised."

Poe stepped forward--I will always remember this--bowed his head, like a vassal to his liege.

"Sir, I must tell you, on my honor, Mr. Landor had nothing to do with this. He was as surprised and--and as dismayed as you, sir. It was... believe me, sir, it was entirely my own initiative, and I fully deserve--"

"Mr. Poe," said Hitchcock, his jaw going hard. "I find I am in no humor just now to administer to you. I have, as it happens, far more important matters to attend to."

He came toward me now, his face flat and blank. Not to be read, except for the eyes, which were tiny and blazing.

"It appears that while you have been availing yourself of Mr. Kemble's hospitality, another cadet has vanished," he said.