Church bells chime five o’clock.
Two hours have passed since my poet shut yet another door in my face.
Morella brings me a sheet of white parchment, addressed to “Cassandra,” which she found in an emptied box of tobacco, wedged into a lump of snow at the entrance of the Burying Ground on Shockoe Hill. I pluck away pine needles and unfold the paper, and then I swallow down the syrupy sweetness of John Allan’s imitation of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18.”
May I compare thee to a winter’s morn?
Thou art colder and wilder in temper,
Harsh winds blight fair roses sleeping ’mid thorns,
And winter’s beauty fades past December . . .
“By the pricking of my talon,” I say, digging the sharp curves of my right fingernails into the parchment, “something wicked named John Allan fetters Poe with fears of failure while Jock knocks on pleasure’s door. Edgar Poe will never choose me; much too frightened, he shall lose me—‘You have now ceased to amuse me!’ Allan shouts and slams the door.”
Says Morella, “Hush, Lenore.”
She crouches on her knees at Judith’s window, her head ducked beneath the yellow muslin draping the pane, and she whispers, “Here comes John Allan now.”
I crawl to her side and peek through the window with only my forehead and eyes raised above the sill.
John Allan marches toward a tree that’s languishing near the carriage house, his chest so puffed with peacockish pride that his back slopes unnaturally backward. His brass walking stick squelches through the slush.
Even though he’s several yards away, even though he’s preoccupied with the blight of the tree and isn’t coming for me, I feel the pressure of his fingers squeezing around my trachea.
I glance at Morella for comfort, but she, too, rubs her throat with a grimace of pain.