On Night's Shore Read online

  Poe raised one finger and whispered, “Shh.”

  At the end of the lane, the officer pulled his horse to the right and turned us toward the city. Only after another half minute of travel did he look over his shoulder—it seemed a kind of afterthought—and ask, “Where to?”

  Poe said, “You seem to know without my telling.”

  “Somewhere in the city, right?”

  “Is it necessarily so? Could the man not just as well live north?”

  The officer drew hard on the reins and stopped us so short that I nearly slid off my seat. This time he did not so much as lean toward Poe as lean into him, putting his weight onto Poe’s left shoulder, his mouth so close to Poe’s cheek that he almost seemed ready to kiss him.

  What came from the man’s lips was not a kiss but a snarl. “Where to?”

  I saw Poe’s jawline harden, his teeth clench.

  “Velsor Club,” I quickly said. “Down on Cross Street.”

  Poe would not look at me throughout the remainder of the ride.

  • • •

  The witness was not to be found inside the club. The constable made a show of walking from table to table, scrutinizing each patron in turn. From the hooded glances with which he was answered, the quick cold looks, from the way he swaggered, the chill wave he pushed before him, I knew in a moment that he was not new to this place.

  Poe noticed only that the informant was nowhere to be seen. “Alas,” he said, barely able to suppress his satisfaction, “I fear we have run into a cul-de-sac.”

  But the officer’s charade was only just beginning. He went to the barman, and with a hand conspicuously on his nightstick, he asked several questions we were not privy to overhear, all the while nodding toward Poe. The barman nodded in return and mumbled his answers with head bowed.

  Eventually the officer returned to grasp Poe by the sleeve. “He’s got a crib around the corner. Let’s go.”

  “How could you ascertain as much when you don’t even know the man’s name?”

  “Barman remembered you. Remembered the man you was with.”

  “How wonderfully convenient,” Poe said.

  The room was on the second floor of an adjacent building, a warren of hovels only slightly less odoriferous than those of the Brewery. It was the kind of place wherein people did not so much live as cower, in hiding not only from the laws of society but from each other, and so it seemed odd to me that nearly every door we passed stood open, every doorway occupied with two or three individuals peering out like rats inside their rat holes, safe themselves from the marauding cat but eager to watch a fellow rodent being torn to shreds. How they knew to anticipate our arrival is another question, but they knew.

  The officer led us up a set of creaking stairs. The banister rail was missing, so we hugged the oily wall. Several of the rodents crept up furtively behind us. Others stepped out into the hallway to better hear what might be heard.

  The second floor hallway was even more crowded than the first, more thick with smoke and anticipation. The constable did not pause to peer inside any of the rooms we passed, made no inquiries of the tenants. He led us directly to a closed door three-quarters down the hall. Outside this door a small huddle of bystanders had gathered. One oil lamp hanging from a nail in the wall threw their shadows toward us long and gnarled. Again I noticed that as we came close, they looked upon the officer only fleetingly, with darting glances, but at Poe and me they smiled the kind of smiles that might send a shudder up an undertaker’s spine.

  The constable went without hesitation to the closed door, and without even reaching for the handle, he placed his foot along the door’s edge and shoved it open. But he did not enter. He stood back from the wash of crackery air and jerked his head at Poe.

  Poe stood for a moment outside the cubicle. He knew from the silence within, he knew from the smell of the place, he knew from the gathering of onlookers and the smug demeanor of the constable that he was an actor in a show now. He turned only his head so as to fix the constable with a look as cold as lead. He then turned to me and with a gentler look, a nudge on the arm, signaled that I was to remain in the hallway.

  He then strode forward, three long strides. I followed half a stride behind him.

  I was struck initially by the emptiness of the place, the single crate and saucered candle in the middle of the room, an old coat tossed into a corner. Nothing remained of the candle but an inch-long nub, sputtering erratically, the pool of liquid wax dripping over the saucer’s edge. The only thing revealing about the room was a black stain on the floor, an adumbration made from what first appeared to be a shallow pool of oil but which all of us knew immediately was not.

  And then the constable stepped in behind us, carrying the lamp. Now the color of the stain on the floor changed from black to black-red, carmine. Emanating out from one side of the pool was a tail, a wide smear, and our eyes followed this tail to the corner behind the door. There sat Poe’s informant, his head lolling forward, chin on his chest, his chest and legs soaked black from the blood that had poured from his riven throat.

  The officer held the lamp close to the man’s right ear. “This your witness?”

  Poe spoke with a hand over his mouth. “He bears a small resemblance.”

  A smile flickered on the officer’s mouth. Then he grunted something and turned away, taking the light out of the room. We followed like moths.

  The three of us then rode back toward Poe’s cottage in silence, at least until we came to the southern end of Union Square, where the officer pulled his rig to a halt. “This is as far as I can take you,” he said.

  Poe put both hands on his knees and leaned forward, but did not rise from his seat. He sat with his head cocked, his gaze on the inside of the carriage. “I don’t suppose there will be an investigation,” he said.

  The constable asked, “Of what?”

  “The murder of my witness.”

  “Who said anything about murder? Looked like a suicide to me.”

  “Of course. The man slit his throat in the middle of the room, then dragged himself behind the door. And in the meantime disposed of the razor or whatever implement it was that he had employed.”

  The officer smiled. “Sounds right to me.”

  After a moment’s thought, Poe climbed down one side, and I climbed out the other. He put a hand on the forward wheel. “Am I correct in assuming that the lieutenant will now be released?” he asked.

  “You got any other witnesses?”

  Poe studied the flank of the horse for a moment. Then, without another word, he turned his back to the carriage and stepped away. The officer snapped his reins and drove off.

  I fell into step beside Poe. We walked several yards in silence, until I was rattled by a shiver and spoke in hopes of generating some heat. “I ain’t never seen anything like that before,” I said. “Have you?”

  “And hope to never again.”

  Despite the midday warmth, I felt more chilled than I had in the springhouse, a full-body chill as if my spine were formed of ice. Poe saw me hugging myself and laid a hand on the back of my neck. “We should be able to smell Muddy’s pandowdy soon,” he said.

  “You mean we’re still having that celebration?”

  “Muddy and Sissie have been cooking all day. We mustn’t disappoint them.”

  “But when you tell them about that man…”

  He shook his head. “There are some things we do not share with the people we love. There are some things that, as responsible men, we must keep to ourselves.”

  It was fine with me. I had been keeping most things to myself for most of my life. I only hoped that I could enjoy pandowdy and sweet potato pie without seeing with every swallow the obscene gape of a man’s split throat.

  23

  As it turned out, I had no problem devouring my share of dinner and a double shar
e of treats afterward. The women were obviously tired but pleased by the fuss both Poe and I made over their lavish spread, and they did not remark upon his subdued mood except to ask, upon our arrival, if all had gone well. To which he answered, “Yes, my dears. For we are home again and with our beloveds—what could be better than this?”

  After dinner, in the still of a rose-streaked evening, Poe smoked his pipe and rocked and held General Tom on his lap as the twilight wrapped around us. Virginia sang “Sweet William’s Ghost” and “Rowan Tree.” Had her voice not faded into a breathless whisper, I would have pleaded for a dozen encores. She and Poe talked of Saratoga again, of moving there soon, of the fresher air and stillness, the healing springs, the sunlight uncluttered by dust and smoke.

  “We do not want to be here in the winter,” Poe said, “when every inhalation is a furnace of wood and coal smoke, and when the Canadian winds sweep like banshees across the choked Hudson.”

  “Don’t they have winter in Saratoga?” I asked.

  “We will be safe in our snuggery then,” said Virginia.

  “We will indeed,” said Poe. “Where the cacophonation of this city cannot reach us.”

  “We will have a piano as well, won’t we, beloved?”

  “A piano and a harp,” said Poe. “And two maids to do the bidding of our own sweet Muddy. It will provide me no end of joy, dear Mother, when I am able to give those great strong hands of yours a rest.”

  “Don’t you worry about my hands,” she told him. “They wouldn’t know what to do without some work to fill them. They would only get into some trouble, I’m sure.”

  “Yet how I would love to provide them with the opportunity for such trouble.”

  Mrs. Clemm merely smiled at this and continued her knitting of an afghan blanket. I thought at the time that her silence was a way of savoring the dreams, but in retrospect I think it was perhaps the silence of indulgence. Although but a few years older than Poe, she had long outgrown all romantic naïveté, had probably reconciled herself to the cards she had been dealt, the nine of Toil, the six of Fatigue, the four of Poverty, the king and a queen of Tragedy—a hand that would win her nothing.

  But she had these lovely hours at least, and then the chores that brought her truest joy, a larder full of food, a house suddenly too small for all her goodness. Even the last light of the day seemed a kind of lavender benediction on us, and not, as it would soon turn out, a further diminution of fortune’s glow.

  The brougham came down the road in dusky light, a shiny black box on high wheels, its door and windows gilded in deepest purple. It came moving at full chisel until it reached the mouth of the lane, then ground to a dirge so as to make the turn and come lugubriously to the gate. The single roan mare tossed its head once, snorted, and the coachman set the brake. He then climbed down from his seat and straightened his doeskin breeches, then opened the coach’s side door and offered his hand to the passenger.

  A young lady climbed out and stepped down, and with a rush of petticoats and the swish of fine cloth, she took my breath away.

  In stature she was tall and somewhat slender. With a singular lightness of footfall, she moved toward the gate. The color of her face and neck rivaled that of the purest ivory, was nearly as radiant as the thin white gloves she wore. Her hair was a radiant auburn, her eyes incandescent emeralds. She seemed to me enveloped in a soft and succulent glow, an aura not itself observable but in the sheen and liveliness of the very air around her. The delicate contours of her nostrils, the harmonious and generous mouth—in an instant poor Virginia was rendered a dim and dowdy thing. Mrs. Clemm put out a hand as if to prevent me from falling off the kitchen chair I had dragged outside.

  Poe laid his pipe on the porch rail and rose to stand on the uppermost step. The young lady paused just outside the gate.

  “Mr. Poe?” she asked.

  Her voice, a Dulciana, nearly unhinged my knees completely, but did most of its damage to my ears, and the way they thereafter perceived sweet Virginia’s feeble voice as a bit too shrill, and most other women’s words as tuneless squawk.

  “I am,” he answered.

  “My name is Felicia Hobbs, sir. I wonder if I might intrude upon a moment of your time?”

  The name Hobbs, I am sure, sent a quiver through us all. It was a name that, were the twin gongs of Power and Wealth struck in any part of Gotham, would have been among the first resonation, sounding up and down the length of the island along with Pierrepont, Vanderbilt, and Astor. Renowned for its philanthropy, the Hobbs family supported innumerable events of a musical, artistic, literary, and scientific nature. Nestor Hobbs, the family patriarch and influential Whig paladin, had been a member of the Erie Canal Commission as well as the Manhattan Streets Commission, and had been instrumental in imbuing both projects with the republican values of balance, order, and convenience.

  The name of Nestor’s oldest son, Johnston Hobbs, was in 1840 synonymous with another project intended to transform the look (and smell) of Manhattan Island. Hobbs had kept alive the Croton Water Project through years of Democratic opposition, had pushed the project financially as well as politically, and, aided by epidemics of cholera and fire, had steered it around every obstacle the Tammanyites and Loco Focos could throw in its path. The plebeian dandy Walter Whitman had attempted in his newspaper columns to harpoon Johnston Hobbs as the epitome of a soulless aristocracy, but Whitman’s denunciation of banks and paper money and public works projects fell on too few ears in a city greedy for progress. (Whitman, who failed to make a name for himself as a fop, would later don a slouch hat and coveralls and peddle himself as Walt, the workingman’s poet.)

  By that summer of 1840, a masonry conduit, most of it underground, had been completed from the Croton River in upper Westchester County to the very edge of the city. This aqueduct was expected to begin operation in another two years, conveying clean, fresh water into Manhattan’s homes, flushing out antiquated sewage systems, showering the city with a wealth of fountains and hydrants. In the bargain, Johnston Hobbs stood to be crowned grand potentate as the shepherd of the era’s most magnificent engineering achievement.

  And here before us stood his daughter Felicia, begging to intrude upon our evening.

  “Far more a pleasure than an intrusion,” Poe told her. “Will you join us here?”

  With a dramatic sweep of his hand, he made it clear who among us was expected to relinquish his seat for the lady. I wobbled to my feet and retreated to the corner of the porch. The young lady settled herself beside Mrs. Clemm.

  Only Poe retained a hint of composure in the lady’s presence. During Poe’s introductions, Virginia went even paler and lowered her eyes in a grimace of shyness. Mrs. Clemm blushed and stammered, “Pleased to meet you, miss,” and played a nervous pat-a-cake with the heels of her hands.

  I was no better. At the mention of my name, my ears went red hot, while some invisible force dragged my gaze to my dirty boot tops.

  “Might we offer you a refreshment after your journey?” Poe asked, still standing at attention beside his chair.

  “Thank you, sir, but no. It is a most pleasant ride into the country, and therefore no journey at all.”

  “I trust the traffic did not impede you.”

  “At this hour, no, the traffic was not a hindrance. But please, Mr. Poe, please sit if you will. I have a matter I would like very much to discuss with you, and I have no wish to interrupt your evening a moment longer than is necessary.”

  He sat, I thought, with an overly dramatic flourish, his right hand moving as a maestro’s as if to conduct his buttocks to the cane seat, then left knee lifted and draped over the right, right elbow resting on right thigh, right palm to the side of his face, body inclining forward in what struck me as a burlesque of rapt attention. I cut a glance at Virginia; she was watching Poe sidelong with hooded eyes, and on her mouth the thin smile of a woman who has smelled a scent
too sweet.

  Felicia Hobbs turned to her. “I was in attendance last month for your husband’s presentation at the Moravian Young Ladies Society. I am very much taken with his work, Mrs. Poe. When I hear, for example, such lines as he read to us—‘On desperate seas long wont to roam / Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face / Thy Naiad airs have brought me home’—I cannot help but think I am in the presence of an aesthetic very nearly divine.”

  Poe gave a tiny bow of his head but kept one ear cocked so as to miss not a word of praise.

  “Without the inspiration of your own beauty, of course, he would no doubt find himself bereft of such sentiments.”

  “A poet without his Muse,” Poe told her, “is but a cup without its bottom.”

  Virginia offered only another wan smile. Some time would pass, many years, before I learned the reason for her lack of enthusiasm; the lines Felicia Hobbs had quoted were from a poem Poe had written for his first infatuation, the mother of a friend when he was but a boy, and therefore composed long before he might have roamed any desperate seas other than those of imagination.

  Now Felicia Hobbs turned in her chair to face Poe. “And that is why, sir, your most recent composition has affected me so grievously.”

  His brow furrowed. I could almost hear him rifling through the sheaves of poems in his mind, trying to isolate the one most recently in print.

  “Because of your assertions,” she continued, “which in this one regard are so far off the mark as to constitute slander, an innocent man has been made to suffer the humiliation of arrest and incarceration.”

  “Ahh, you speak of Lieutenant Andrews. An acquaintance of yours?”

  “My betrothed,” she said. “We are to be married in September.”

  It was a good thing I was no longer sitting in a chair, because I would have fallen out of it.

  Poe too was taken aback. His eyes dilated and the vein in his temple began to pulse. He pushed a limp strand of hair behind one ear.