Ma and I ride back home in a carriage that rocks us through ruts in a road ravaged by years of trade merchants rolling into Richmond in four- and six-horse wagons. Several inches of snow on the ground worsen the lurching and swaying, and despite our driver Dabney’s skilled guidance of the mares, Ma and I cling to the brass straps near our heads to avoid flying off the seat.
“As of this morning,” I say through my teeth amid the tumult, “I’ve learned that my artistic aspirations might not simply stop Pa from sending me to the university next week, but they might also impede me from both marriage and heaven.”
“You already knew the bishop’s opinion about secular entertainment, Edgar.” Ma withdraws an embroidered handkerchief from her purse. “He’s been preaching such sermons since the earliest years of Monumental Church. I’m sorry if his mentioning the Placide & Green Company upset you. We both know your late mother was a sweet, lovely soul.”
“I see beauty and godliness in poetry.” I tighten my grip on the arm-strap. “God gave me this brain that longs to create art.”
“I know, my dear.” Ma unfolds the handkerchief in her lap. “I don’t believe Bishop Moore specifically spoke of your aspirations. You write of the stars in the heavens and the purity of love. Isn’t there a holy friar in the first line of your poem ‘Tamerlane’?”
I gaze out the carriage window at a drunkard staggering out of the Swan Tavern.
“Yes,” I say, “there’s a friar, but I don’t believe Bishop Moore would like ‘Tamerlane.’”
Ma emits a sudden cough that makes me jump. I watch her face redden as she draws a horrifying gasp that sounds like she’s inhaling all the oxygen in the carriage, and then she bends forward at the waist and hacks into her handkerchief, her shoulders lurching, shuddering.
“Ma?” I place a hand on her back and endure the convulsions of her spine beneath my palm. “Do you want a doctor?”
She gasps again and forces herself upright by pushing one hand against the seat and using the other to grab the brass strap. “No, darling.” Her eyes water and spill over. “I’m fine.” She wipes her cheeks with the cloth. A troubling purple hue darkens her lips.
I dare a glance at her handkerchief, fearing the sight of blood—the telltale sign of tuberculosis—the disease that killed my mother.
The cloth looks clean. Thank God!
I hook an arm through hers and sicken with fear that she’ll die while I’m away at the university. She pats my hand and bellows a low wheeze that fills my eyes with tears.
Ma and I enter the front doorway of our brick beast of a house.
Our mansion, to be precise.
Pa purchased this hilltop Camelot—named “Moldavia” by the original owners—just the summer before, after inheriting an obscene amount of money from his uncle William, who seized up and died one morning in the middle of tea and pancakes. We moved here from a smaller Richmond residence shortly after the purchase.
“Go wish a good morning to Pa,” says Ma in the grand hall that amplifies the post-coughing croaks of her voice.
My throat tightens at her suggestion, and again I fuss with my cravat. My Adam’s apple lodges above the knot, and for a moment I’m caught in a mad struggle to breathe.
“What are you doing, Edgar?” She pushes my hands away and reties the bow as though I’m still a child. Years of illness—as well as over two decades of marriage to an ass—have darkened the skin beneath her brown eyes and deepened the furrows of her forehead, and yet she’s remained a handsome woman, despite all. Her mouth and nose are so petite, they make her husband’s face look like an ogre’s in comparison whenever his head hovers beside hers.
“I heard you two fighting again last night,” she says.
I peer straight ahead without blinking. My arms hang by my sides, my shoulders stiff, the blades aching. I smell Pa’s tobacco in every particle of air inside the house.
“Go wish him a good morning, Eddy.” She fluffs the bow at my throat. “Set things right.”
I swallow. “He accused me again of ‘eating the bread of idleness.’”
“He’s just urging you to fulfill your potential.”
“That doesn’t explain all the countless times he threatens to stop me from attending the university. I’m so close to leaving. So damn—”
“Edgar! The Sabbath.”
“So maddeningly close.”
Ma wraps her hands around my shoulders and leans toward me. “It’s difficult for him to imagine you receiving the type of education his parents were never able to afford for him. He’s giving you opportunities he only dreamed of for himself.”
“Then why is he threatening to take it all away? Just look at this place he’s put us in.” I jerk my head toward the oil portraits glowering from the walls, the bronze statues, the monstrous furniture imported from Europe, the mahogany staircase that winds up to the second floor, where a mirrored, octagonal ballroom awaits. From inside the dining room down the grand hall, I hear the house servants—two of Pa’s three slaves, the other being our aforementioned driver. They clank silverware against dishes and speak in low tones as they prepare the room for our Sunday dinner.
“How can he say he may not be able to afford my education,” I ask, “when he’s rolling around in piles of money? He’s one of the richest men in Virginia right now.”
“All he wants is for you to show him gratitude for what he’s done for you. Please, go upstairs and wish him a good morning. Start the day together on a peaceful note.” Ma smooths out the lapel of my coat. “For me.”
“He keeps calling himself a ‘self-made man.’ What a laugh!”
“Go! We have family visiting later today. And Aunt Nancy will return from her visit to the countryside soon. I don’t want tension in the house.” She backs away two steps and folds her hands in front of the skirt of her gray dress, watching to see whether I’ll obey.
I do, for her sake, not because I want to show any gratitude to Pa.
“The gay wall of this gaudy tower,” I say in my head during my climb up the winding staircase, my soles sinking against plush velvet runners, “Grows dim around me—death is near.”
I linger in the doorway, my fists clenched at my sides, feeling small and insignificant in this cold, garish tomb of a house. Near my right elbow, a bust of Pallas surveys the room from her post upon a marble pillar. A pair of medieval swords hang in a crossed position on the bricks of the fireplace, and above Pa’s head, a Revolutionary War musket awaits further action in its wooden mounting on the wall, next to an anxious clock that ticks away the seconds.
“Good morning, Pa,” I say, my voice shattering the near silence.
Only his eyes move, shifting in my direction. “How was church?”
I shrug. “Bishop Moore preached once more about God punishing Richmond through the fire.”
“How is Ma’s cough?”
“It worsened when we rode in the carriage through the snow. She sounds better now, though.”
Pa nods with a grunt and returns his attention to his book. The echoes of our shouting match from the night before thrum across the walls, which, just like downstairs, house shadowy oil paintings from centuries past, as well as faded yellow tapestries that smell of dust and mildew. Pa is a ferocious consumer of art—a wolf that feasts on the carcasses of long-dead geniuses. And yet he calls me a disappointment whenever I insist of late that I aspire to make my living as an artist.
I turn to leave.
“Where are you going?” he asks, that Scottish brogue of his making it hard to tell whether his tone is stern or light.
“To my room.”
My neck bristles. “I’m simply going to jot down two harmless little lines. They came to me during my climb up the stairs just now.” I peek over my right shoulder to gauge his reaction. “I remember what you told me last night about my writing, but it’s the revised opening couplet for the second stanza of ‘Tamerlane.’”
He closes his eyes with a wince and a belch, as though “Tamerlane” just gave him indigestion.
“Well,” I say, remembering Ma’s request for peace, “good morning to you.”
“You said the lines just came to you?” he asks before I slip away.
“Yes.” I turn back around.
Pa sits perfectly still in his chair, but something about the way he’s staring at me, his mouth pensive, his mind obviously churning, gives the impression that he’s trembling. He lifts his chin with a stare so cold, so devoid of emotion, he injures me more than if he were yelling at me or whipping me.
This is precisely how John Allan keeps me in his clutches. All the pride he once showered upon me when I was his intelligent little pet with long ringlets—his wee, charming fellow, whom Ma dressed in bright yellow trousers and a purple jacket to show off to their friends—drains from his eyes. He glares at me with the contemptuous stare he’s honed so well, as though I’m a stranger who’s swindled him out of his happiness.
“I never asked for you to bring me into your life,” I say.
Well, no, that’s not true. I don’t actually speak the words aloud. I long to remind him that he—a grown, free, relatively sharp-witted man—agreed to bring me into his home a month before my third birthday. And yet I don’t.
“I used to be just like you, Edgar.” He points at me with a long, crooked finger that rocks to and fro. “I believed myself a talented god—an artful wooer of women—who could seduce the world with language.”
My father, I now realize, is already a tad drunk this fine February morning.
“Yes, I know,” I say. “You’ve told me several times of your talent for writing. You were the next William Shakespeare.”
“Just like you’re the next Byron.”
I respond with a smile to deflect the sting of his barb.
With a lazy, languid movement, Pa reaches out to a candle that burns in a pewter stick on the table beside him. He pinches the flame between his fingers and snuffs it out. The soft sizzle of protest, the sudden whiff of smoke, make me gasp. I recall Bishop Moore’s warnings of muses inspiring us from firelight and shadows.
“What are the two new lines of ‘Tamerlane’?” Pa then asks, which throws me completely off balance, and before I can even think to hesitate, I respond:
“‘The gay wall of this gaudy tower/Grows dim around me—death is near.’”
Pa leans forward in his chair, his head tilted to his right, his elbows creaking against the armrests of his burgundy throne. His jaw waggles back and forth; he appears to swish my poetry around in his mouth and taste the flavor of every syllable and letter. His shaggy red eyebrows rise with interest, and for a moment I believe he might proclaim that he approves of the lines.
“Don’t write them down,” he says instead.
I blink, confused. “I beg your pardon?”
“We went over this very thing last night, Edgar. Quell the urge to compose these poems of yours. Snuff out your literary ambitions. Do something industrious for once in your life.”
“I know you don’t want me making a living as a writer, but why must you insist I refrain from at least enjoying the one thing that makes me happy in this wretched life of mine?”
“Oh, please.” He huffs and leans back in his chair. “Stop your melodrama.”
“It’s not melodrama, Pa. It’s the truth. I’m not happy unless I’m writing.”
“I’m the one who’ll be paying your expenses for the University of Virginia. I’m the one who’s been pouring money into your future for years. I don’t want to see you penning any more lines of poetry.”
“But—”
“If I walk into your room later today and find that new couplet penned in fresh ink, you’re through with your education. Do I make myself clear?”
My fists again clench. “I don’t understand why we keep having this same fight.”
“Because you’re seventeen years old now. You can’t keep wasting your time like this. I refuse to invest in expensive university tuition if you’re planning to live the life of a pauper.”
“You used to encourage me to write. When I attended Master Clarke’s school, you sat beside me in front of his desk and laid out my poems in front of him. You asked if he thought they were good enough for publication.”
“You were a child, Edgar. A clever child with a spark of talent, but you’re not going to seem so clever and charming when you’re a grown man falling behind on your bills.”
“But—”
“You’re a well-bred Southern gentleman, educated in both London and Richmond, for God’s sake. Fight off the urge to write these terrible Byron imitations of yours before you turn into a sickly, filthy burden on society, just like your—”
The word he wants to say hangs in the air between us with a chilling weight.
He longs to compare me to my mother. My poor mother, Eliza Poe, who struggled to ensure that her young children would be sent to good homes as she withered on her death bed. A woman whom less-charitable snobs viewed as a whore because she trod the boards as a working actress.
My foster mother’s footsteps whisper across the hall downstairs. She hears us, I’m certain of it. She tries to stifle a cough, but it erupts from her throat like the bark of a dog.
Pa inhales a long sniff through his cavernous nostrils and raises his book back in front of his face.
“Are you referring to my long-dead mother, Pa?” I ask, my chin lifted.
The book remains in place.
“Pa, are you insulting her memory?” I swallow. “On the Sabbath, no less?”
“Edgar!” calls Ma from the bottom of the staircase. “Go out to the kitchen and ask Judith and Jim if they have everything they need for Sunday dinner. They’ve just finished preparing the dining room.”
“Ah, yes,” I say as I back away from the Lord of the Manor. “I can see why I should strive to model myself after you, dear Pa. Such a fine, loving gentleman, faithful and utterly devoted to his family.”
Pa lowers his book. “Do you want me to kick you out of the house this morning, boy?”
I freeze.
“I’m not legally bound to raise you, Edgar. Don’t you ever forget that.”
“How can I possibly forget when you constantly remind me?”
“If you don’t want to find yourself homeless and penniless today, then shut your damn cocky mouth and show me respect. You’re a charity case, and I’ve been generous enough to raise you like a prince.”
I turn and escape down the hall, hurling my coat onto the table outside my room with a flutter of the flame in the agate lamp. I slam my door shut behind me, hard enough to rattle the books on my shelves, and I sequester myself inside my chamber—my library and sanctuary overlooking the Allan kingdom of orchards and terraced gardens that slope down into the fog of the James River valley.
I pull out my draft of “Tamerlane” and, with fresh ink and a goose-feather quill, I scribble down my new couplet, despite that man’s threats and games.
The gay wall of this gaudy tower
Grows dim around me—death is near.
A log shifts in the hearth behind me. Startled, I turn around, fearing that Pa followed me into the room. The only movements I detect are the flames in the grate, as well as the dance of shadow and light the fire casts on the maroon fleur-de-lis of my wallpaper.
I turn back around, fetch a clean sheet of paper and a charcoal crayon, and expurgate myself of the restless abominations chewing on my soul by drawing a fiendish young woman in a black dress of mourning. I sketch long, snaking tendrils of ebony hair, smirking lips, a strong chin raised in defiance, and a pair of deep-set eyes that seem to tease: I dare you to show me to the rest of the world. I dare you to show them your morbid fancies, Eddy Poe.
The scent of smoke from my hearth—of ashes decomposing—sends me down once more into that basement crypt beneath Monumental Church, and I’m forced to remove my cravat to breathe.
My fantastic lady isn’t wicked enough, I realize, and so, instead of adorning her throat with a necklace made of pearls, I draw for her a macabre piece of jewelry that inspires a pleased chuckle from the back of my throat: a necklace beaded with twelve perfectly white, utterly hideous human molars.
I rub a hand across my mouth and ponder what more fineries the lady requires, tasting a smudge of charcoal on my bottom lip.
Something scratches at the wall behind me.
Again, I jump.
Once more, I turn, and I freeze with fear, for the glow of the fire on the shadows of my wall seemingly wriggles and yawns into the shape of a mortal being who sways to the mesmerizing rhythm of the flames. At the center of the figure beats a tiny pulse of light.
A heart.
A silent, beating heart.
“No, that’s madness,” I whisper, and I return to my drawing, now appalled at what I’ve just sketched on the paper, my eyes locked on the string of teeth encircling the girl’s neck.
What if Ma sees this? Or Elmira? So much horror. Oh, God, the attention—the fretting that would ensue!
Behind me, the lungs of the fire exhale a loud breath, perturbed by the wind stirring in the chimney—perturbed by me, perhaps. A sudden rain pelts my windows with a tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap that heightens my anxiety. The seething clouds in the sky extinguish the sunlight, and all four walls of my chamber reflect the orange of the flames—the radiant, wriggling orange of the flames.
I crumple the drawing into a ball, rise from my chair, and turn for the fire to burn this revolting excuse for art that’s just oozed from my fingers, but my feet come to an abrupt halt.
I’ve just heard a voice.
A voice in my room—near the fire—just uttered four words:
“Let. Them. See. Me.”
I inch backward, my legs stiff, my head shaking in denial, and the small glow of light within the figure on my wall brightens and pulsates with the same tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap as the beats of the rain.
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap . . .
The drawing falls from my fingers, dropping to the floor. I clasp my hands beneath my chin, and instead of merely mouthing words of prayer, as I did in church, I call out in full voice, “‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . .’”
Another loud breath gusts from the flames, and to my horror—to my wonder—the wriggling reflection of a figure made of fire thickens, solidifies, and steps out of the wall. Yes! A girl in a dress made of soot and black feathers climbs out of my wall! Her narrow sleeves and skirts drip with shadows that plunk against the floorboards to the same anxious rhythm as the rain’s tap, tap, tapping. Her eyes glimmer with firelight; her maroon lips match my wallpaper; her hair hangs to her waist in tangles of inky black curls. Her skin is the dismal gray of ashes, and I gulp in response to the sight of her nails—long, and hooked, and metallic.
My mouth falls open, and the trembling worsens. My pulse throbs inside my ears.
“I’m awfully hungry,” says the girl in a low voice that vibrates with a sound like a cello. “I want more words. I want the attention and fretting you’ve just promised.”
My legs weaken. I open my mouth but can’t even shriek.
The creature saunters toward me on the hard soles of slippers carved out of charcoal, and with every clomp of her feet, my spine grows colder, colder, colder . . .
My eyes water.
I still can’t speak.
She stops right in front of me, the shadows bleeding from her sleeves like gallons of black paint, staining my rug, and the smells of hot coals and charred wood engulf my nose. My knees fail me; my head dizzies. With a thump, I drop down to my chair, and the wickedest, the most brilliant lines of prose and verse hum inside my head.
The girl clasps my face in her hands, her palms fiery and firm, and she breathes down on me with a heat that singes the wiry little hairs inside my nostrils.
“Why are you shaking so much, Eddy?” she asks. Rings of fire radiate from her pupils, pulsating out to the edges of obsidian irises.
I squeeze my lips together to suppress the tremors in my chin. My eyes veer toward the necklace clasped around her throat, just inches from my face—a necklace strung with a collection of human teeth that clink together with each of her movements.
“Wh-wh-who are you?” I ask in a strained whisper that pains my tonsils.
“I’ve been with you for so long, Eddy,” she says. “You know who I am.”
I shake my head. “You can’t be here.”
“I’m hungry.”
“No, you must leave! Pa could walk into this room at any minute.”
“Why are you suddenly so afraid of me?” She cocks her head, and the fire in her eyes dims. “I’ve been with you every single time a macabre verse or a grotesque image flickers through your brain. I’m with you in graveyards and during bleak midnight—”
“You can’t be here!” I grab her wrists and fight to pull her hands off my face. “I’m so close to escaping this place. Please! Get out!”
Her fingers squeeze down on my cheekbones. “At the very least write down my name.”
“You have no name. Please, for the love of God! Leave!”
She bends closer, and those teeth at her neck again clatter together. “Don’t leave me standing here as a nameless creature, Edgar. I might be able to pass myself off as a decent muse if you christen me with a poetic appellation that falls from the tongue like satin.” She glances at the goose-feather quill resting in my brass inkstand, revealing the profile of her aquiline nose—a nose curved into the shape of a beak, even more so than Pa’s hawkish proboscis.
“Give me a name that means ‘light,’ not shadow,” she says, “and we may be able to show them there’s beauty in horror.”
She drops her hands from my face and steps two feet away.
I touch my cheeks, for they now itch like mad. A chalky film of soot coats the tips of my fingers.
The girl fetches my charcoal drawing from the floor, lays it out on the desk beside me, and, with a slap of her left palm against the paper, she says, “Name me.”
I scoot around to face my desk, wiping sweat from my brow with the back of my right sleeve. Naming her might chase her away, I reason. If all she wants is a name, then give it to her. For heaven’s sake! Give it to her!
My hand shakes when I slide the gray quill from my inkstand.
“Edgar Poe,” she says so softly, and I peer at her once more. “Bestow on me a name that they shall sing forevermore.”
Hearing this, I write:
Lenore
Someone raps upon my door.
I leap up from my chair. “It’s Pa!”
“Are you certain?”
“Leave!” I grab her by the arms and shove her toward the door that leads from my bedroom out to the upper level of Moldavia’s double portico. “Get out!” I swing the door open. “Don’t ruin my chances for the university. Please! Go hide somewhere. Disappear!” I push her outside and hear the swish and rustle of all the feathers flocking her skirt. “He’ll kill you if you stay!”
I slam the door shut, bolt the latch, and pull the purple curtains shut to stop seeing her stunned black eyes peering in through the glass.
Ma opens the main bedroom door. “Edgar?” she asks. “Were you just shouting?”
I wipe more soot off my cheeks and clear my throat. “I’m sorry. I’m . . . um . . . I lost my temper over Pa’s latest insults and abuses.”
Ma stands in my doorway with one hand on the latch, the other at her breast. The sadness elongating her eyes, the redness of her nose that betrays recent tears, pains me to no end, and yet I don’t want her lingering here inside my chamber, hearing any sounds that might arise from that . . . creature I’ve just thrown outside.
“Where’s Pa?” I ask, moving away from the back door, even though I feel the curtains looming behind me.
Ma drops her hand from her chest. “He just stepped out.”
My heart jumps into my throat. “He’s . . . Pa? . . . P-P-Pa’s somewhere outside?”
“Yes. He went into town.”
We lock eyes. Pa’s escapes into town typically mean he’s visiting his newest mistress, the widow Elizabeth Wills—and yet that disgusting possibility isn’t the predicament that horrifies me at present.
He’ll see what just emerged from my room.
He’ll see her. Dear God, he’ll see my demon muse!
I wheel around and yank open the curtains, hoping to pull the wraith back inside, to hide her somewhere in the house.
But she’s gone.