A path of charcoal footprints leads away from Moldavia, starting in a drift of snow piled next to the northeastern corner of the portico, below my room. I stuff my drawing of Lenore into my breast pocket, grab a spade from the toolshed, and bury her tracks beneath heaping scoops of fresh powder, fearing that Pa will trace the dirty prints back to my chamber—fretting that all of Richmond will know what I’ve released.
An explosion, like the firing of a pistol, ricochets across the city. I flinch, and then a second blast rings out from the same easterly direction.
It can’t be! I keep shoveling. No! That had nothing to do with that phantasm from my room prowling the streets—or Pa witnessing her out there.
Perspiration drips from my pores, despite the freezing air. My heart pounds. My arms ache. Too many months have passed since I’ve had opportunities to run, swim, and box, to exercise my muscles and my lungs—and yet, despite the discomforts of my frantic shoveling, I focus my attention on the University of Virginia, waiting ahead, almost within reach.
Bury this evidence of your macabre fancies, I tell myself with each scoop, and by early next week you’ll be living a three-day’s journey away from Pa and the Castle Moldavia, immersing yourself in ancient tomes, feasting on historical research for the epic poem that will inspire everyone to finally appreciate you: “Tamerlane.”
Lenore’s footprints journey out to the main street of Richmond and travel into the heart of the city. I cringe at the thought of shoveling snow for the next eight to ten blocks and abandon my spade in our vegetable garden.
Using only my feet, I kick away the charcoal tracks until I reach Seventh, where I realize how suspicious this all must look: that eccentric Edgar Poe, son of strolling players, amateur thespian, writer and reciter of poetry, covering the marks of his guilt in the middle of the street for all to see.
I shove my hands into my pockets and walk like a normal human being—not a desperate, murderous fiend. I’m aware of the cacophony of my boots crunching across the snow and the clangs of a bell on a steamer in the James, but my ears strain to hear any cry or howl that might reveal the location of Lenore. A pall of chimney smoke drapes the city, bleeding into a fogbank that drifts up from the river in a chilling shroud of mist that soon wracks me with shivers. The farther I stalk through the neighborhood, the more the smoke builds inside my nose, and I worry I may be smelling her.
“Eddy!” calls my sister, Rosalie, from behind me—a sister I scarcely ever see, even though she lives a mere block from me at Miss Mackenzie’s boarding school. The Mackenzie family took Rose in when she was a one-year-old babe in arms, back when the Allans staked their claim over me. And our older brother, Henry—a seldom-seen shadow—has lived in Baltimore with our Poe grandparents ever since our parents left him there as an infant.
This is what happens when artists follow their muses, I think as I observe the approach of my sister—a girl who resembles me in coloring and facial features, from her large gray eyes to her broad moon of a forehead. Families get torn asunder. Siblings grow up as strangers. Children are forced to rely on the charity of people who may choose to throw them out on the streets when the sweetness of youth sours.
I shake off this thought with a shudder, shocked at the sudden doubts about my future as an artist—knowing it’s Pa talking, not I.
Rose strolls close enough for me to see that she’s carrying a pair of ladies’ walking boots and a blanket, both an unremarkable shade of brown, similar to the coloring of our hair. Both items are frayed at the seams and obviously well worn.
“Did you hear about the girl?” she asks.
My back muscles tense. “What girl?”
“One of my schoolmates just returned from church with her mother and said she witnessed a fantastic creature—a girl made of ash and raven feathers—tromping and shrieking through the snow. Everyone thought she was a demon. Two people fired at her with weapons.”
My legs buckle, but I hold my arms out to my sides to avoid swooning. “They—they fired at her? Did they hit her?”
“No. She ran off. Do you think she might be a muse?”
“W-w-why do you ask?”
“I believe I’ve had muses of my own slip into the world like weird and wondrous demons. Mary said the girl seemed dangerous. A bit silly, too—but terribly dangerous.”
“Silly?” I ask.
“Mary said that the girl spoke some sickly rhymes that weren’t very good.”
I wince and cover my mouth with both hands, mortified at the city’s reaction to Lenore.
“Have you seen John Allan anywhere out here?”
She shakes her head. “I just snuck out to leave shoes for the girl, so she won’t keep making these charcoal tracks. I worried she might be your muse.”
I snort at her assumption and scratch the back of my neck. “I write of romance and epic adventures, Rose. If a muse of mine were to step into the world, it would appear in the elegant form of Calliope, a writing tablet in hand.”
Rose frowns. “I know what it’s like to be haunted by dark muses, Edgar. My life began in the same manner as yours, remember?”
“I’m not haunted by dark—”
“I try to write poetry,” she says, “just like you and Henry, but I don’t always feel clever enough. Sometimes I wonder if my muses of poetry once stepped out of the shadows of the boarding school walls, and one of the other girls poisoned them out of fear or jealousy. I imagine them as twins—neither boy nor girl, but something in between—and I think someone poisoned them. I truly do.”
My forehead creases at her ramblings; her odd theories—even though, considering the feverish spell of the morning, I think I might believe her.
“John Allan won’t let me leave for Charlottesville if I keep writing, so please”—I grab her arms and lower my voice—“please, Rose, don’t speculate in front of anyone else that this vision has anything to do with me.”
“Do you want to help me deliver these shoes to her?” She lifts the walking boots, which tap together at the heels.
I swallow my frustrations. “I told you, John Allan can’t see me searching for her.”
“The very least you can do is ensure that no one will hurt her.”
“If I can only make it to college, everything will be fine. This will all be fine. No one has witnessed me with her. I’m certain of it . . .”
“Our mother wouldn’t approve of you abandoning your poetry.” Rose casts a sidelong glance that cuts me to the quick. “Would she?”
“Rose!” I drop my hands from her arms. “What a cruel, unfeeling thing to say!”
“Our mother chased her muse all the way to America from England. And our father gave up his future as a lawyer to follow both Mother and his muse onto the stage.”
I brace a hand against my stomach. “I’m not abandoning my muse or my poetry. I’m protecting them. I’m ensuring that Pa doesn’t see what’s spilled from the depths of my depraved brain.”
“Come along!” Rose hurries down the path of charcoal, the shoes and blanket bouncing in her arms. “Before John Allan spies her tracks!”
“Oh, God.” I groan, for I know she’s right—Lenore’s prints might lead him to her.
I trail after my sister, my head dizzy, my ears alert for the scraping or squishing of footsteps following behind us in the snow.
The black tracks cease to exist twelve feet away from the tombstones and evergreens of the Burying Ground on Shockoe Hill, a rural field of mourning at the crest of the city, near the poorhouse and the Hebrew graveyard. To my left lies a pair of charcoal slippers, clearly kicked off in haste. Clean prints in the snow reveal Lenore’s continued travels—possibly on bare feet—into the hallowed grounds. My toes freeze just from thinking about walking through the powdered ice without the protection of shoes.
“Do you think she’s crouching behind one of the stones in there?” asks Rose with a swallow.
I can’t answer. An intolerable sadness has just stolen the breath from my lungs, for I know this graveyard all too well.
I stood amid those very tombstones nearly two years earlier, clinging to my friend Rob Stanard, watching a half-dozen men in stovepipe hats feed his mother’s casket down into the gaping maw of the earth. The dankness of the soil, the preternatural chill emanating from the hole where they placed that angelic woman, the mourners clad in black like ominous crows, the painful shrinking of my windpipe—every suffocating second of that morning haunts me whenever I wander up this hill. Jane Stanard—my Helen, as I call her in my mind—never disparaged my mother for her profession. She never told me my poems were anything less than exceptional. She wouldn’t loathe my muse or call her “silly.”
A flutter in my heart tells me that Lenore hides behind Mrs. Stanard’s grave. In my bones, I know I’ve fallen under the spell of my dark muse more than once in this field before, when I’ve held vigils for my Helen with her son—when Lenore dwelled inside the Burying Ground’s shadows, supping on the marrow of my melancholy.
“Stay here until I’m safely at the university, Lenore!” I call toward the stones—keeping my distance from them. “Don’t come near me. Stay hidden. And don’t wear those shoes ever again. My sister brought you a pair that won’t leave behind a carbon trail.”
At first, we hear not a sound in response. A light wind breathes against my neck, above the back of my stiff collar.
But then a low bellow, like the growls of Cerberus, emanates from somewhere behind the stone markers. Rosalie glances my way, her face pallid, her eyes wide, and my breath leaves my lips as a weak shudder.
“Toss them,” I say. “Toss them quickly!”
Rose throws the blanket and boots toward the graveyard, and we turn away and run.