I splash my hair with water from the ivory basin in my bedroom and attempt to tame my curls with a comb. I’m still breathless from my flight through the city; still dizzy from Lenore. My entire body trembles with a dire need to visit Elmira—to embrace life instead of shadows.
My mirror reflects my agitated state. The grayish eyes that women call “beautiful” and “stirring” strike me as pale and protruding this afternoon. They look like they’ve witnessed a murder.
“My God, you need to leave Richmond,” I whisper to myself, and I scoop water into my mouth to calm my parched throat.
I fetch my gift for Elmira—a purse that the clerk at the shop sealed up in brown wrapping paper and tied with a blue satin ribbon. After bidding Ma adieu, I cross the street to the Roysters’ residence—another brick behemoth that occupies an entire city block. Shutters as black and as glossy as granite frame the dozen windows monitoring my approach. Twin pairs of Ionic columns cast their shadows upon me during my climb up the steps to the mahogany front door.
I hold my breath and clang the iron knocker.
One of the Roysters’ house slaves, a fellow not much older than I named Arthur, allows me to enter, takes my hat, and escorts me to Elmira and her mother in the reception room with its scarlet walls that squeeze around me like the chambers of a heart. Oil lamps with crystal icicles flicker in silence against the blood-red paper, giving the distinct impression of pulsations. A fire roars in the hearth. Perspiration puddles on my forehead. My eyes stray to the windows, fearful of the return of Lenore, but I force myself to think of only love and goodness.
Elmira alleviates my anxiousness by saying in that rich voice of hers, “Good afternoon, Edgar.”
I sit down beside her on the sofa, cradling her gift in my lap. “Good afternoon, Elmira . . . and Mrs. Royster.”
Elmira’s mother—a paler, older, blond-haired version of her daughter—mutters a listless welcome from a high-backed chair across from us, the family terrier tucked beneath a tartan blanket in her lap. A red rug lies unfurled like a tongue between my shoes and Mrs. Royster’s slippers, and I notice that she slides her feet beneath her chair, pulling herself farther away from me.
This cold reception has nothing to do with the manifestation of Lenore in the city. I often find myself wondering, while seated in the houses of friends and sweethearts, if a low-born odor wafts off me, despite the expensive wool of my coat, the embroidered silk of my vest, the impeccable straightness of my posture. Pa paid for me to attend the finest schools for young gentlemen in both Richmond and London. I speak Latin and French, I’ve been celebrated for swimming six miles in the James River—against the tide—at the mere age of fifteen, and I live in a damned mansion, but nothing I do or say will ever erase the stink of poverty these people smell on me.
“So . . .” I clear my throat and hand Elmira the present. “As I mentioned before, I have a gift for you.”
“How thoughtful and sweet you are, Eddy.” Elmira smiles and shakes the package near her ear. “Hmm—it doesn’t rattle enough to sound like a box of candies, and yet it’s heavier than a garment . . .”
“Family will be arriving soon, Elmira,” says Mrs. Royster. “Please open the package without turning the process into a charade.” She pets the terrier’s head with firm strokes that stretch the poor dog’s eyes into the back of his head.
Elmira lowers the gift to her lap and unties the ribbon, her face bright with anticipation.
My chest suddenly tightens with a fit of panic and self-loathing. Just like at home, I’m surrounded by statues, tapestries, fabrics, fripperies, and furniture hauled out of chalets and castles halfway across the world—luxuries I’ll never be able to afford for a wife.
Elmira sets the ribbon aside and unpeels the brown paper. She doesn’t notice the way my breath catches in my throat.
I want to marry this girl, but, my God, Pa is right: I will struggle to pay bills if I pursue the life of a poet. I’ll drag her down into the mire of my abominable penury. Like the father who sired me, the two-bit actor David Poe, I’ll turn to drink to survive the pain of watching my life descend into squalor. I’ll abandon my darling to the clutches of death while offering my entire soul to my muse—while drowning myself in whiskey and wine until I die.
“Oh, how lovely,” says Elmira, and she lifts the mother-of-pearl purse out of the wrappings. “Oh, Eddy! It’s beautiful. And what is this?” She leans forward and reads the silver plate mounted on the front. “It’s engraved with our initials . . . or . . .”
I blush and squirm, for there’s been a mistake with the engraving.
Elmira lifts her face. “Why does it say ‘S.P.R.’ instead of ‘S.E.R.’?”
I fold my hands in my lap and fight off the urge to shrink down into the sofa’s velvet cushions. “The engraver made a mistake.”
“You weren’t intending to give this purse to another girl, were you?” asks Mrs. Royster.
“No! Of course not. He made a mistake. I specifically told him our initials were ‘S.E.R.’ and ‘E.A.P.’ I must beg your forgiveness, Elmira. Do you want me to return it?”
(I do not mention that Pa has already refused to pay for the remediation of the error.)
“No, it’s still beautiful,” says this charming angel. “I’ll just pretend it’s an E.”
Mrs. Royster lowers the dog to the floor. “As I said, the family will arrive for Sunday dinner soon. Time to see Edgar off.”
Elmira reaches her hand out to me across the sofa, but her mother’s gaze stops me from touching her fingers.
“I intend to study diligently at the University of Virginia and return a success,” I say to remind them both that I’m a serious candidate for marriage. To remind myself. The statement sounds rehearsed and forced, even to me.
Mrs. Royster rises to her feet, casting the blanket aside, and states once again, “Family is coming.”
“I’ll walk Edgar to the door.”
“You need to change into your other dress.”
“I’ll only be a minute, Mother.”
Before Mrs. Royster can balk any further, Elmira walks me out to the grand hall. The soles of our shoes clap against the floorboards in unison, and the backs of our wrists brush against each other, but we don’t dare hold hands.
“I’ve been thinking of what you said to me in church,” she says in a whisper near the front door.
My heart leaps. “You have?”
With a lift of her slender eyebrows, she casts a glance back toward the reception room. Before I can even blink, she pulls me out to the front stoop and swings the door shut behind us.
“Will you meet me in the garden before you leave for Charlottesville, Eddy?”
“Yes, of course. Will you give me your answer there?”
She slides her fingers around the lapel of my coat and leans her lips close to mine, her breath deliriously sweet and warm. “If I engage myself to you, it would need to be in secret.”
For a moment I can’t articulate any words—I’m too spellbound by her nearness to even breathe—but, somehow, I manage to say with a stammer, “You’re—you’re considering my proposal, then?”
She nods and smiles.
I cup my hands around her face and kiss her lips—those soft and gentle rose-petal lips that melt my legs into a pool of wax. Warm little breaths flutter through her nose, and I can’t help but sigh against her. We come up for air, and she clasps me to her breast, clinging to the back of my coat. I bury my nose into her neck, inhale her luscious lilac scent, and allow the tip of my tongue to taste her bare skin.
The door opens.
We untangle in an instant.
Mrs. Royster’s forehead furrows into a geological marvel of crevices and peaks.
She hands me my hat. “Go home, Edgar.”
“Yes, ma’am. Good afternoon, ladies,” I say in my finest Virginian drawl, and I scramble down the front steps.
Upon my return to the front drive of Moldavia, a gust of cold air knocks the hat off my head. I bend down to fetch it and detect a strange acridity in the wind.
The ripe pungency of damp earth.
The smell of an open grave up in the Burying Ground.
My heart hasn’t yet calmed from Elmira, but now it pounds with a thunderous rhythm.
I stand back up, and against the bleak clouds, Moldavia degenerates into a frail and decrepit shade of its former self. The red bricks fade to gray. The mortar binding them together greens with a film of moss and slime. The white paint of the pillars of the double portico brown up like roasted apples, and I can hear the wood creaking and straining as the columns fight to bear the weight of the house’s sagging bones.
I clutch my hat by my side and jog up to the front door before a voice that vibrates with the notes of a cello can call out from behind, Let them see me!
Inside the house, instead of my macabre muse, I’m welcomed by the dulcet tones of Aunt Nancy, Ma’s sister, conversing with Ma in the reception room to my right. My posture relaxes, and my stomach settles, for the presence of women—mortal, living women who care for me, despite who I am—always soothes my soul like a balm.
At three o’clock, I embark upon a feast beneath the bright Argand oil lamps of Moldavia’s dining room with Ma, Pa, Aunt Nancy, and our guests: the late Uncle William’s adopted, grown children—William Jr. and James—and William Jr.’s new golden-haired wife, Rosanna. We dine on barley soup, Virginia ham, chicken pudding, peas Francoise, roots a la crème, candied sweet potatoes, puff pastry, fruit, wine, and port.
“Did you hear about the disturbance in town earlier today?” asks William.
I try not to drop my fork.
Ma pales and asks, “A disturbance?”
Pa slices his ham with his eyes fixed upon the meat. “What disturbance might that be?”
“A frightful girl,” says William. “Well, not precisely a girl—a ghost, or a madwoman, or a dark harbinger of evil—ran about town, threatening residents with some sort of execrably bad jingle.”
Pa’s own fork clangs against his plate. “‘Execrably bad’?” he asks. “How do you mean?”
I lift my face toward him, wondering why it’s the criticism of the poem that worries him about Lenore.
“I don’t know,” says William, dabbing his face with a napkin. “I simply heard she was both a horrifying spirit and a facile rhymester. The night watchman proclaimed that he’ll be walking the streets tonight with bloodhounds and a fellow sentinel, armed with a musket.”
“Lock your doors, Jock,” says William’s younger brother, James, with a low chuckle. “We all know about this sensitive poet over here.” He nudges my foot under the table. “We wouldn’t want him to fall under the influence of a Gothic muse, if that’s what this rhymester was. I heard that Bishop Moore preached against muses just this morning.”
“Don’t be foolish,” says Aunt Nancy. “Who ever heard of a muse running around for all to see?”
“Precisely,” says Pa, still sawing at his ham.
William lifts his glass of port and asks, “What have you written lately, Edgar?”
I don’t say a word in response—not a word.
“Edgar has put his poems aside,” says Pa. “He leaves for the University of Virginia at the end of the week and will cast off such nonsense henceforth. Although I still believe the tobacco business is the route he ought to take instead of the university. I could use him in the counting room while we dissolve Ellis & Allan.”
“I’ve heard you write lovely love poems, Edgar,” says Rosanna—another sweet balm to the sting of this house, and I can’t help but notice how much the curve of her neck resembles Elmira’s.
To her I speak: “Thank you, ma’am. That’s kind of you to say.”
Pa steers the conversation toward the dissolution of his partnership—the most boring and banal topic in the entire history of dinner conversations.
My gaze strays toward the branches of the trees, sleeved in snow, rustling outside the windows. My eyes relax into a lull, and my mind again swims toward rhymes of death and sorrow, of red lips and deep blue eyes like those of Elmira and Rosanna, sealed beneath the lid of a coffin. I tip toward the brink of summoning that “Gothic muse,” until Ma breaks into another fit of coughing beside me.
After dinner, we retire to the reception room overlooking the James for music at the piano and more drinking. I hear the low tones of the darkness stealing over the horizon, as I tend to do in the evenings—a foolish fancy, perhaps, but it’s what I hear.
Before he settles into a chair, Pa claps a hand on my left shoulder, pulls his pipe from his mouth with a fleshy sound, and leans close to my ear, his breath sour and wretched.
“I need to speak to you after the guests leave,” he says, and his words settle into my bones, where they chill and writhe.
“Yes, sir,” I say, for Ma sits nearby.
I long to take a swig of the wine that’s making its way around the room—the smell of it burns across the air with an incendiary sweetness that tempts—but alcohol, even in small doses, affects me more than it does other people. I can’t bear the thought of falling into a stupor in front of the entire family, especially Rosanna, who’s just smiled in my direction, a light blush on her cheeks. Pa would chide me again. I’d collapse to the floor or spend the night in my room flopped across my bed, gripped in the throes of a ghastly headache, forgetting everything that happened after I drew the glass to my lips and tasted the first sip.
My God, I can’t even drink liquor like a man! I’ll never be able to earn a proper living like a man, stave off tears like a man, listen to music without succumbing to emotion like a man, please my family like a man . . .
The Galts depart after dark, but Aunt Nancy stays, for she’s resided with us as long as I’ve been a member of the Allan household. I disappear upstairs to my bedroom and clear my mind of the Galts, the Allans, and that muse up the hill by lighting a lamp and leaning back in my chaise longue with a volume of Horace’s poetry.
“Edgar,” says Pa.
I give a start and sit upright. I’ve left the door open a crack and see Pa tottering into my bedroom, his nose flushed with the ruddy shine of spirits. His lips look wet, and the whites of his eyes burn a liquid red.
I set my book aside, my heart thumping, my neck perspiring, despite winter’s cold breath beating at my windows.
Pa reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out a crumpled piece of paper.
“What is that?” I ask.
He staggers over to my desk and slams the paper down as though he’s killing a spider. He then proceeds to smooth out the page with a crinkling commotion until it resembles a flat sheet of parchment again.
I rise and discover it’s my “Tamerlane” manuscript, including the two new lines he instructed me not to write. Amid my ordeal with Lenore, I forgot about the rogue couplet.
Oh, God!
Pa rubs the back of his neck and sighs through his nostrils. “I forbade you to write down those two new lines, Edgar. Why did you disobey me?”
“The lines . . .” I clear my throat and attempt to deepen my voice. “They simply wanted me to write them down. That’s how poetry works, Pa. I can’t silence inspiration.”
He grimaces as though he’s just tasted a half-regurgitated piece of ham and brushes a hand through his hair. “My God, Edgar. Your chance to attend the university hinged on your ability to obey me, and you just ruined this opportunity—killed off your entire future—with two insipid lines of poetry. There’s no way—no way in hell—I’m sending you to Charlottesville now.”
I lift my chin and stare him in the eye, and before I can even think to hesitate, I open my mouth, and I finally say it—
“I know you’re spending time with another woman across town.”
Pa blanches. Once again, he runs his hand through his hair, his fingers now quivering. He seems to shrink five inches. “What . . . what are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Elizabeth Wills, the pretty widow you visit. I also know you’ve fathered and financially supported more than one illegitimate child right here in Rich—”
Before I can finish that sentence, he’s on me, his hand around my throat.
“Ever since you turned fifteen,” he says, the fumes of wine and tobacco pummeling my nostrils, “you’ve been nothing but a sulky, ill-tempered burden who’s making your ma sicker than she already is. You’re making me sick.”
I dig my fingernails into his knuckles and struggle to pry his fingers off me, but his hand is so large, so clamped around my throat.
“I’ll send you away at the end of the week,” he says, spittle wetting my face, “not because I care a damn about your education anymore, but because I want you out of my house. Forget about poetry, and painting, and all your other nonsense. Study like a damn monk. Make yourself a useful, working member of society instead of a vagabond in the gutter. And after you graduate, I’m not giving you a single penny from my pockets, I don’t care how destitute you are. You’ll not receive one cent from me. Do you hear me?”
He’s squeezing my throat too much for me to speak, so I nod, and gasp, and fight to breathe.
He lets me go, but before he retreats, he twists his knife all the deeper into my heart by saying, “What a disappointment you are, Edgar. Such a disappointment!”
He leaves my room with a slam of the door that makes the lamplight shudder. I rub my throat and attempt to swallow, but the pain brings tears to my eyes.
Pa tromps downstairs, and I hear him shout at Ma and the servants. “Tamerlane” lies in a crumpled heap on my desk, but I don’t care. My head spins, and Pa’s still shouting at everyone because of me, even though he instigated every single battle in this war of ours when he first climbed into another woman’s bed—when he first called me an ingrate—when he ignored the agonizing bout of grief I suffered after Jane Stanard’s death.
Ma’s crying. Aunt Nancy’s pacing the upstairs landing. I throw open my back door to the upper portico and escape into the night.