Mrs. Poe (39 page)

“Help!”

The sleigh driver looked around as if he heard, but not thinking to look up, drove on.

My soul slid into my body. I yelled with all my force. “Help! Help!”

Mr. Poe dashed to the top of the steps. Seeing me on the ladder, he launched himself toward me. “Frances! Look out!”

I gazed up just as the minute hand of the clock hit my neck.

I fell backward. All went black.

•  •  •

I opened my eyes. The log pendulum swung sedately in its appointed path. Mr. Poe’s dark-rimmed eyes came into view. He smiled tenderly, smoothing my temple with leather-gloved fingers. My head was cradled in his lap.

I tried to roll free of him, setting off a pain in my shoulder.

He frowned as if worried. “My darling. You took a terrible fall.”

Remembering the sight of the gigantic oncoming minute hand, I shrank away from him.

Mrs. Clemm bustled up behind him, her perpetual frantic look amplified with emotion. “Let her go!”

I shrugged free of Mr. Poe’s arms and threw myself into the protection of Mrs. Clemm’s embrace. “Don’t come near me!”

He reached out to me. “Frances!”

I shrank into Mrs. Clemm. “Don’t!

Slowly, the concern on his face melted into anguish. “Frances, no. Do you think that I meant to harm you? Oh, my darling. Oh, my darling.” The light went out of his dark-lashed eyes. I could feel his soul receding into its shell. “Oh, my love, you thought it was me.”

Mrs. Clemm stroked my arm. “Do you think you can walk, dear?”

“What are you going to do with her?” Mr. Poe demanded.

“Where is Mary?” I drew away from her. “What happened to Mary?”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Clemm, “she’s at the house.”

Mr. Poe drew a sharp breath, then lunged at his aunt. He wrestled me from Mrs. Clemm’s arms. I wriggled free and faced them both, not knowing who to trust.

“Frances,” said Mr. Poe wearily, “whatever you think, it’s wrong. Muddy has become very . . . ill.”

I blinked. It could be a trick. “Ill?”

He sighed deeply. “When I went to the asylum this spring, I was there to place her in their care. I only got the idea for a story set there after one of my many trips. But Virginia flew into pieces when she heard that I was arranging to commit her mother, and she was so ill with her weakened lungs, I feared she could not bear the strain.” He sighed again. “Virginia needed her mother and I could not deny her.”

Inside her white widow’s bonnet, Mrs. Clemm’s face crumpled with fury. “Monster! How could you think of doing that to me? I took you in when you had nothing. I gave you the apple of my eye—Virginia is worth two of you! She could always lead you down the primrose path.”

Mr. Poe spoke soothingly as if to a child. “Muddy, I know you’re trying to do what’s right for Virginia now. I don’t blame you for trying to mesmerize her. Of course you would want to forestall her death. None of us want her to go.”

“You do!”

“No. I don’t. Although she tortures me to my core. She is the me I would be if I’d never grown up. But she remained as a child—easily wounded, spiteful, vindictive, crude.”

“I knew you wouldn’t help me to save her!”

He breathed in with a shudder. “Transferring her soul into Mary’s body is not the way.”

Mrs. Clemm gave him a guilty scowl. “It could work.”

“Muddy,” he said, nearly whispering, “it’s madness. You are basing your attempts on fiction. ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ is just a story. You cannot catch Virginia’s soul when she dies any more than you could transfer her soul into Mary.”

“Why Mary?” I asked. “Why poor, innocent Mary?”

Mrs. Clemm looked down with a sheepish grin. “Because she was available. I couldn’t believe my luck when I found her drifting along our street this morning, mooning around for Mr. Bartlett. Who would come to the aid of a servant girl whose master couldn’t keep his hands off her? Poor thing, she couldn’t think straight after giving up her baby. You’ve never seen such a desperate creature! All I had to offer her was a hot meal and she was mine.” When she raised her face, her round blue eyes had gone black with hatred. “Don’t worry, I was going to let her go once we got you. I just needed her for practice, or in case Virginia’s health did not hold out until I could harvest you.”

Harvest?

“So you thought you’d kill Frances in the manner I had dreamed up in ‘The Predicament,’ ” he asked bitterly, “by the strike of a church clock’s hand?”

Mrs. Clemm laughed. “I knew I could get you up that ladder, you stupid, gullible girl—your type has had the brains bred right out of you. I just didn’t know that Eddie’d be the one to do it for me, shouting at you like that.”

She turned to Mr. Poe. “I did not want to kill her, Eddie. Just wound. Just enough to nurse her back to health in time to transfer Virginia’s soul into her when Virginia’s body expired. Then, just for fun, I’d have sent her back to those snooty Bartletts.” She chuckled. “So when you
thought
you were dallying with your whore, you would really be dallying with Virginia.”

She ignored my look of horrified incredulousness. “That’s all Virginia ever wanted, Eddie, just to be treated like a wife. Why couldn’t you have taken her in your arms once in a while?”

Mr. Poe shook his head as if trying to release an imp from his brain. “Muddy, Muddy, you are more ill than I knew. Souls cannot be moved around from body to body like so many peas in a shell game.”

“I talked to that nice Mr. Andrew Jackson Davis about it. He said that the principles are sound.”

“He’s a charlatan.”

Her face contorted. “You think you’re better than us because your mother was from Boston. She thought she was so important. Leaving you that picture of Boston, writing on it that all her friends were from there, that you should turn to Boston if you needed help. Lot
of good they did you! My brother, David, was the better of the two of them but she never respected him. She’s the one who drove him to drink. He’d still be alive if she hadn’t have ruined him, just like she ruined you, putting such big important ideas in your head.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” he whispered icily.

“I don’t have to listen to this anymore.” Mrs. Clemm trundled toward the stairs.

Mr. Poe sprung forth and caught her arm. “You’re not getting away with this!”

“Let go!” She fought against him, the lappets of her bonnet swaying. Her reticule fell to the floor, releasing a hammer that went sliding across the boards. A hammer meant for me. I sagged to my knees as if my bones had turned to jelly.

I looked up at Mr. Poe, the pain in my heart so sharp that I could hardly breathe. “But how did you know to come save me?”

The regret and wonder in his dark-lashed eyes cut through my heart. “Virginia told me.”

Winter 1847

Thirty-four

We were on our way to Yorkville. The snow fell from the bright gray sky in soft pats, dampening the bearskin robe Samuel had tucked around me, moistening my frozen cheeks under my fur hat. It settled heavily upon the fields, upon the bare branches of the trees, upon the bony backs of the cows huddled at a fence. As our sleigh went jingling under the crooked spreading bough of an ancient oak, a sodden mound of it slid down onto our heads. Samuel laughed and shook the snow off his shoulders, reins still in hand.

“I’m sorry, darling. Did you get wet?”

“I’m fine.” I brushed at my face with the beaver muff he’d given me at Christmas a few weeks earlier.

“Well, it’s nothing that a sherry flip can’t fix. Don’t worry, we haven’t far to go.”

I smiled complacently. I could play the role of Samuel’s well-bred wife to help him climb up into the rarified circles of New York society to which he aspired. I owed him that much. He had insisted that I live with him and to claim that the baby was his when he had found out that I was with child, a lie that I would have resisted had not Mrs. Ellet loudly and publicly announced that I had written scandalous letters to Mr. Poe. Once I had a child without a husband, who would have believed my claim of innocence? Even Miss Lynch and Miss Fuller, thinking they were acting as friends, had gone to Mr. Poe’s house to demand them back. Not even they believed me when I protested that the letters didn’t exist.

It touched me that my friends had tried to shield me. In truth, I would have welcomed my shame. I deserved it for doubting the only man who truly loved me. But for my girls, for the well-being of his
child, I’d had to permanently sever all ties to Mr. Poe, and pretend that he meant nothing to me. I’d had to laugh it off as a joke when the poem he’d written to me in Boston, ‘To Her Whose Name Is Written Within,’ a poem I kept at the center of my heart, was read as a valentine at Miss Lynch’s, sent by Edgar, evidently, the week before our falling out. I had come to realize that you must do what you must for your children, even if it called for the sacrifice of your very soul.

Now I listened emotionlessly to the runners slicing through the sodden snow. I thought of the girls back home with our serving girl, Lizzie, who I hoped would change the baby before she got too wet. I wondered which of Samuel’s society ladies would come calling on me while we were gone, and dreaded having to go through the motions of returning the favor of visiting them. Out of old habit, I thought about writing, then winced at the numbness in my head. Odd how a brain cannot be goaded into creativity without a soul to give it a nudge.

“A good crowd,” Samuel said.

Up the road, sleighs were jammed higgledy-piggledy before a white-painted frame building. It appeared that much of fashionable New York had escaped along with us to Wintergreen’s, a roadhouse in the hamlet of Yorkville, several miles outside of town. A venture inside confirmed this. Crammed shoulder to shoulder in a room redolent with the smell of woodsmoke, perfume, and wet fur were Roosevelts, Fishes, and Rhinelanders, busily snubbing the New Money folk whose loud laughter rang from the rustic rafters. Among them, I saw Reverend Griswold enter with Miss Lynch. All sipped upon hot flips and toddies as a harried young man in an apron threaded through the crowd with a tray of steaming cups, while a violinist fiddled in a corner and a collie worked the patrons for pats.

The drink soon worked its magic. I found myself happily chatting with Mr. Phineas Barnum, the famed showman himself, who was enjoying new social cachet having had audiences with Queen Victoria while in England the previous year. I thought fleetingly how Mr. Poe would have been amused by my conversationalist. It occurred to me that I should suggest to Mr. Barnum that he add a bust of Mr. Poe to his pantheon of heroes. I chased away the thought with a gulp of warmed sherry.

“What was the queen like?” I asked. Out of the corner of my eye
I could see Samuel, beaming his relentless charm upon the young Schermerhorn girl. Although she kept haughtily turning away her head, her cheeks had gone rosy with pleasure. Would I ever become accustomed to this marriage of convenience? I breathed deeply and smiled at Mr. Barnum.

“The queen’s much like any other mother,” he was saying. “Mostly she just wanted her children to get a good look at the general.” A grin lit up the bulbous features bunched in the front and center of Mr. Barnum’s great shiny egg of a head. “Tom gave the performance of a lifetime. He played with the little ones and sang for the queen, then engaged her poodle in mock swordplay before backing out of the room at a run. Now that’s an entertainer!”

“I must come see his show sometime.”

“I admire him. He took being small and made a mint out of it—well, I helped him with that part—but he’s the one who milked it. The hamming it up is all him. For anyone else, being little could have been a disaster, but not him. He glories in his size.” His exuberance flashed into seriousness as he looked me in the eye. “It takes a lot of spunk to spin gold from heartache, Mrs. Osgood. A lot of drive. Most of us can’t do it. It’s a mean world, Mrs. Osgood, mean and spiteful.”

I nodded, sipping.

Still, he did not release his piercing blue gaze. “Fortunate is the person who can succeed in extracting honey from such a flower as this life, whose root and every petal is bitterness. Are you that person, Mrs. Osgood?”

Had he read the sadness in my eyes? Yet I did not wish to flee from him. What
was
the secret of turning bitterness into honey?

I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around to find Reverend Griswold, holding out a glass to me in his fawn-gloved hand. “A toddy to warm you, Mrs. Osgood?”

I shivered at the sight of his handsome smug face. “I have a drink already, but thank you.”

“My timing has always been off with you,” he said. He took a sip of the drink that he offered. “A pity.”

“Nice gloves,” said Mr. Barnum. “Where’d you get them?”

“Brooks Brothers. On Catherine Street. I buy them by the box. I have rather a fondness for hand wear.”

I was trying to remember where I’d seen a Brooks Brothers glove box when Miss Lynch came up behind him. “Hello, Frances,” she said. “Hello, Mr. Barnum. I see you have found the most beautiful woman in the room.”

Mr. Barnum laughed. “You caught me out, madam. I haven’t yet ascertained as to whether she can sing or dance.” He winked at me, but not before he shot me a private look of sincere encouragement.

“She’s a poet,” said Reverend Griswold, not catching Mr. Barnum’s playfulness. “She would never besmirch herself on the stage. Have you not read her collection that came out last year?
Cries of New-York
—a rather interesting title.”

The book had done well. The scandal Mrs. Ellet had stirred up had increased the public’s appetite for the poems of Poe’s lover. No one had taken it seriously. I smiled to myself. Now I knew how Edgar felt, finding his success from a poem that he felt trivial.

“I gave it my best reviews. Got it seen by all the right people.” Reverend Griswold turned to me. “You can thank me now, dear.” He smiled expectantly.