Mrs. Poe (40 page)

It came to me where I’d seen the glove box: Mrs. Poe had kept her poetry in it. Had Reverend Griswold been visiting her? Had he been fanning the flames of her jealousy in hope of getting at me and Edgar? I swallowed. He could have written the love letter that Virginia had read to Mrs. Ellet, the one that had served to sever us forever.

No, no. It couldn’t possibly be. It was too thin of a connection.

A coincidence.

“Look at her turn her face down in modesty!” exclaimed Reverend Griswold. “I’ve made her a star and still she’s shy of her creator.”

Miss Lynch crumpled her elfin face in a frown. “I wish this past year had worked out as well for Mr. Poe. It was as if he had hoped for his own ruin. He lost his magazine by antagonizing anyone who might have written for it. Could he have made any more bitter enemies than by writing a series of articles for
Godey’s
about his friends, painting them only in the most critical light?”

“ ‘The Literati of New York City,’ ” Reverend Griswold cried. “ ‘The Little Lies of New York City’ is more like it! Poor Willis! ‘Neither his nose nor forehead can be defended: the latter would puzzle phrenology.’ And
what Poe said about Bryant was unconscionable. He wasn’t kind about Miss Fuller, either. What he said about her long upper lip was inexcusable.”

Miss Lynch unconsciously brushed at her own lip. “It was obvious that he wanted to provoke. He was like a wounded animal, lashing out. It was heartbreaking, really.”

“You’re too kind,” said Reverend Griswold. “They were personal attacks, plain and simple. Why would he want to cut himself off from everyone like that?”

“Self-promotion?” suggested Mr. Barnum.

“Well, you can’t blame
me
for ruining him,” said Reverend Griswold. “He’s done it all by himself. Soon he’ll have no one in the world on his side.” He slid me a sidelong look. “I’ve heard Mrs. Poe is close to death.”

“They’re in a very bad way,” said Miss Lynch. “She’s on her deathbed and he hasn’t even the money to buy firewood to keep her warm. I understand that some admirers took up a collection to buy blankets.”

Reverend Griswold sniffed. “It didn’t have to be this way.”

I tried to keep my voice from shaking. “How is Mr. Poe?”

“Poor Edgar?” Miss Lynch grimaced. “Not so well. He seems to be declining as quickly as his wife.”

“Too bad,” said Reverend Griswold.

“Don’t gloat,” snapped Miss Lynch. “When he goes, America will lose one of its most original minds. We will all be poorer without the likes of Edgar Poe.” She looked at me. “I fear the both of them have but only a few days.”

“Where is he?” I asked.

“You don’t know?” She seemed surprised. “In the village of Fordham, north of here a few miles—in the middle of nowhere. I went to see him a few months ago.” She sighed. “It’s a terrible scene. At least it will be over for him soon.”

I blindly thrust my glass into Reverend Griswold’s hand. “Take me there, Anne. I must go to him. Now.”

“Now?” bleated Reverend Griswold. “What good can come of it? For your own reputation, I beg you to reconsider.”

“Tell Frances’s husband that she’s gone, will you, Rufus? As for
anyone else, they won’t know unless you talk.” Miss Lynch glanced at Mr. Barnum. He shook his head as if to deny his involvement.

Miss Lynch handed Reverend Griswold her own teacup. “Surely,” she said as he juggled the three vessels, “one of your many dear friends will give you a ride home.”

She bid Mr. Barnum good-bye, took my arm, and walked with me toward the door. “Honestly, Frances,” she said as we shrugged on our coats. “I was wondering how long it would take you to ask.”

•  •  •

At first appearance, the tiny cottage, perched upon the crest of a steep hill and sheltering in a grove of bare trees, appeared to be charming, with its wide porch and rough shingle roof capped with snow. But then I saw that no smoke curled merrily from the chimney. The steps were piled with snow, the windows glazed over with frost. Was anyone living here?

Miss Lynch glanced at what must have been a look of dismay on my face. She hopped out of her cutter to tie her horse to a tree. “I’m sorry. I know this must not be easy.”

We crunched through the snow and up the steps and across the porch. Miss Lynch knocked on the door. We waited. Behind us, her horse pawed the snow, snorting. A pair of crows cawed in the bare trees.

“Maybe they’ve left,” I said.

“Oh, they’re here.” Miss Lynch knocked again.

Someone tugged the door from the inside, sending a sheet of ice from its surface. I glimpsed the starched white lappets of a widow’s bonnet through the sliver of opening.

“Go away!” bleated Mrs. Clemm.

“We’re here to help,” said Miss Lynch.

A round blue eye appeared in the opening. She saw me. “Help? She’s the one to blame!”

“Let us in,” Miss Lynch demanded. “Now, if you please!”

Wrapped and pinned within a ragged plaid blanket, Mrs. Clemm opened the door and stood aside, glowering at me.

We stepped directly into the kitchen, a low-ceilinged room dominated by a cold iron stove. Miss Lynch went over to it, opened the
wood grate, and then stepped over to inspect the empty fireplace. “You’ve got no wood.”

“He’s freezing us!” cried Mrs. Clemm. “He is trying to kill us all by freezing us.”

“Do you know where I can buy wood?” said Miss Lynch.

Miss Clemm nodded. “The Jesuits. In the village.”

“Take me there.”

So desperate was Mrs. Clemm’s need that she left immediately with Miss Lynch, without a further thought of me.

I was alone in the frigid kitchen, my only companion the acrid smell of long-cold ashes. My feet burning from the cold, I crossed the wide plank floor to the adjoining room—a parlor, bare of a rug and bereft of furnishings save for a little shelf of books, a rocking chair, and Mr. Poe’s small, fine desk. I heard a scratching.

I glanced around wildly. A branch was scraping against the window-pane. Why was I so nervous? It was just a little cottage in the woods. But where were Mr. Poe and his wife?

“Hello?” I called out.

I took one step forward and listened. From behind the door on the other side of the room, I heard a raspy choking sound. A person laboring to breathe? The strangulated inhalation rose with a wheeze, then after a perilously long pause, subsumed into a bubbling exhalation. Then the process began again, each respiration seemingly the person’s last.

“Mr. Poe?”

I received no answer.

Shaking more from anxiety than from the brutal cold, I inched across the creaking floorboards. I stopped at the door, drew a breath, then put my hand upon the knob. The handle chilling me through my glove, I eased the door open.

Immediately to my right was a tiny closet of a room, just large enough to hold a bed barely larger than a child’s cot and the narrow chair beside it. The bed was spread with a patchwork quilt and on top of that a butternut-colored cover—Mr. Poe’s military greatcoat. On its skirt sat his tortoiseshell cat, serene as a sphinx, rising and falling with the terrible respirations of the person beneath it.

The upended collar of the coat obscured the person’s face.
Swallowing, I leaned forward until I got a glimpse of black hair splayed upon the pillow, then, one more inch forward, I saw a visage more skull than face.

Virginia smiled.

I covered my mouth.

She did not move. Indeed, to speak seemed to take excruciating effort. “I knew . . . you’d come.”

“Mrs. Poe! You need help!”

“No. Come . . . here.”

Shivering so hard that every muscle ached, I drew nearer. The cat hissed.

I flinched back. Virginia latched on to my arm.

“I wanted,” she gasped, “to be you.”

Inwardly, I writhed from the pinch of her fingers. Or was it from guilt? “I can get a doctor. Please, let me get a doctor, before it’s too late.”

She dug her fingers tighter. “Help him. Help him. He doesn’t know . . . how to be alone.”

“Virginia, please, I must go get you help.”

She stared fiercely, her lungs bubbling with fluid. “Help him. Then you have helped . . . me.”

I heard the slow approach of footsteps. I turned to see Mr. Poe ducking down the low flight of stairs just behind me. He stopped when he saw me. He was so pale and thin that I gasped.

Virginia fell back on the bed. Her fingers slid from my arm. “Now . . . I am free.”

I watched her drift into sleep, my heart aching. I followed Mr. Poe into the desolate little parlor.

He sank onto the rocker, his head upon his hands. “I cannot forgive myself.”

Kept from him for twelve long months, I drank in the sight of him, although what I saw wounded me to my core. His illness had hollowed his cheeks and lined his noble forehead. His wild black curls were shot with gray. When he looked up at me, his eyes burned in his pallid face. Tears sprang to my throat.

I dropped to my knees before him. “Edgar.” My voice broke. “What has happened to you?”

He hungrily searched my face. “Fate.”

I took his hand. The sight of his beautiful fingers, so sensitive, so intelligent, made me want to weep. I had thought he was one of his murderers from his stories. I could never forgive myself.

He lifted his hand to my face. As if he had heard me, he said softly, “It’s true what they say, you know. No matter how fictitious, writers’ stories are always about themselves. Not that we know it when we’re writing them. Far from it, usually. Do you think that I thought of myself as the murderers and madmen in my tales?”

“You are the kindest, gentlest man in the world. I was mad to think otherwise.”

He brushed a wisp from my cheek then put down his hand. “Don’t punish yourself. We had all gone mad.”

We gazed quietly at each other.

“But I have learned something about myself,” he said, more firmly now. “In story after story, my dark heroes must come undone, whether it be by the imp of the perverse, the wronged sister, a vengeful cat. But it’s not the imp or sister or cat who destroys them. No. It’s their guilt. My guilt. I was writing about me after all.”

“We all make mistakes.”

He laughed mirthlessly. “Do we all marry our little cousins because we’re lonely? Do we all keep her at arm’s length when we realize that she’s weak and childish, scorning her every touch? Do we all throw in her face the woman she could never be, and upbraid her for her pitiful attempts to emulate her superior? She loved me, and I was cruel.”

I bowed my head, absorbing my part in his shame. How many times over the past year had I punished myself by recounting the instances in which I had blamed Mrs. Poe for deeds she had not done? I saw now that her mother had been part of every scene in which I suspected Virginia. It was Mrs. Clemm who had pushed me into the water, Mrs. Clemm who had arranged for the ice to crush me. Surely it was she who had used Virginia’s coughing as a means of distracting Catherine while lighting the gaslight. The acts that Virginia herself had committed—ruining my daguerreotype, hanging it on their wall—were the ploys of a desperate child and no more. I had been looking at Virginia through green-colored glasses and seen a monster because I needed to.

But there was one other thing—

“Edgar,” I asked gently. “Who had started the fire at Madame Restell’s?”

Mr. Poe frowned. “What fire?”

“Before you moved.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I was at my office when it happened. Why?”

I stared at him, trying to understand. Had Virginia burned her hand while lighting the fire? Or had she burned it while pulling her mother back from it?

He sat back, seeming to withdraw into himself. After a while, he said, “I hope that I go with Virginia.”

Anger flared up from my gut. “Go? Edgar! No. You cannot cheat at life. You must deal with the cards you’ve been given. You have to go on, Edgar. The world needs you. The world needs your mind.”

“What good is my mind if I haven’t a soul? You took it, Frances. No—I gave it to you. I wanted you to have it.”

“Then we must go on, as empty as we are.”

His eyes were wells of pain. “Why?”

I drew a breath. “Because we have a child.”

He stared as if he could not believe it. “I heard it was Samuel’s.”

“I had to say that,” I said softly. “For her sake. But even Samuel knows the truth.”

Tears filled his eyes. “I have a daughter? We have a child?”

“Yes, Edgar.”

We clasped each other tight. I savored the beating of his heart, the dear musky smell of his skin, the feel of his arms around me.

After a moment, he loosened his hold to look at me. “What did you name her?”

“Fanny Fay.”

He nodded slowly as if becoming used to its sound. Soft light flickered within the dark frame of his lashes, warming his broken face, until at last, a smile nudged at his mouth. “You sure you don’t want to call her Ulalume?”

My laughter threatened to spill into tears. I hid my face against his shoulder. I loved this man.

Tenderly, he lifted my chin. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, Frances Sargent Locke, but loving you isn’t one of them.”

I kissed him softly. He tasted like the salt of tears.

When he pulled back, I could hardly breathe for the lump in my throat.

“Frances?”

I nodded, unable to speak.

“Do you think you could tell little Fanny about me?”

My soul cried out, desolate to leave its mate. “Yes, my dearest darling. Of course.”

He gathered me to him. I listened to his heart, memorizing its sound, then let him go.

He was hers now.

•  •  •

The baby was crying when I arrived back home. Although immediately tensing from the internal alarm triggered by her cry, I rushed to the desk that I kept by the parlor window. I uncapped the inkwell, a crust of dried ink crumbling from the lid from disuse. I dipped in a pen then impatiently scribbled to get it to flow.

The maid, Lizzie, ran up from the basement, wiping her mouth on her apron. “She just woke up from her nap, ma’am.”

“I’ll get her.”

“Are you sure, ma’am?”

I needed to write quickly, before I forgot, for into the drained silence that Miss Lynch had been wise enough to honor, an inspiration had come. As the runners of her cutter had sheared through the snow, drawing me homeward, a poem had formed itself in my mind. A voice whispered from that inner place that every writer knows and no writer understands, the voice for which all of us live.