With a gasp, my eyes fly open in the stark chill of Judith’s bedroom.
The heart cut from glass hangs around my neck and glows in the firelight of the hearth beside me. I’m curled on my left side on a braided rug, while Judith, my far-too-generous protector, snores in her bed above, bone tired from toiling away in Moldavia. Her clothing and hair carry the spices and smoke of the kitchen into her bedroom, and I daresay she never truly leaves that kitchen except through her stories spun after dark.
Morella has slipped off into another realm—her reward for the tales told.
The stone heart beats against my breast with a low and ominous pulse. You will not belong in Charlottesville, it seems to warn. He’ll reject you; neglect you, even worse than he does here. Go, soak up the spirits of Richmond tonight. Absorb every morsel of your poet’s memories of this city so you may pour them back into his soul when he no longer lives here—when he struggles and avoids you—so the two of you may reap a bounty.
I tiptoe out of the cabin and leap into the night.
The red earth of Richmond bleeds through the slush of the roads. I wander through the muck and the cold toward the city’s oldest public cemetery, the churchyard of St. John’s.
Drink up the memories, says the wind that lures me to the hallowed grounds up another hill to the east, until they drench your heart with a deep and dreary darkness. Drink up the memories until you can’t bear another dismal drop.
Amid the headstones and footstones and the tabletop markers that protect the graves of St. John’s, linger the souls of old Richmond, their forms gauzy and glimmering in a pale, pearly blue, almost white, but not quite. They emit the scents of mist and rosemary, of sorrow and revival, and I taste the bittersweetness of their deaths on the back of my tongue.
The spirits stir when they see me and stare at my approach. A bewigged man in a cocked hat dives back into his grave with a yelp, as though I’m the devil incarnate, come to drag him down into the putrid bowels of hell. Several spirits straighten their posture and smooth out the wrinkles in their clothing, as though they understand what I am—as though they know I possess the skills to allow the living to remember them, to celebrate them, to immortalize them in the potent blood they call “ink.”
A girl near Edgar’s age in a dress with a full skirt reaches out her right hand and asks, “Will you inspire your artist to tell my story?”
She’s so pretty and poised, he just might want to tell her tale, but I walk onward to an unmarked grave at one of the farthest edges of the churchyard.
A beacon of light and fog awaits in that region. The nearer I travel, the more the luminescence forms into the shape of my poet’s deceased mother, the actress Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, dressed in a Grecian-inspired gown with a sash wound around her ribs, beneath her bosom. Her eyes resemble my poet’s eyes, and she and he have the same hair, but Eliza Poe’s curls fall well past her shoulders.
His mother observes my approach, beaming as though she recognizes me, emitting a love so mighty, so maternal, the force of the emotion knocks me to my knees. I kneel before her, my eyes closed, humbled, speechless, my soul satiated by her outpouring of affection, so different than even Morella’s concern. I’m bathed in the fragrance of cinquefoil petals.
“Edgar?” asks his mother.
I peek up at her, uncertain whether I heard her correctly.
She leans forward and squints through the light of her own celestial mist. “I don’t always see the living all that clearly, but you look like . . .” She stretches her neck. “Yes . . . you most certainly look like my younger son.”
“Do I?” I ask with a swallow. “What do you see?”
“A somber young man, collapsed on his knees, dripping in shadows that spill from his soul.” She steps off her plot of land, a hand pressed to her heart, her eyebrows pursed. “Edgar, my dear, what has happened to you?”
I gaze down at myself to see what she sees, finding my body altered, now dressed in my poet’s black frock coat and cream-colored cravat, as well as his narrow gray pantaloons, stretched over a pair of muscular thighs. Vaporous shadows, indeed, seep from my sleeves and my hands—his sleeves, his hands—drifting to the ground as heavy plumes of smoke that pool around my legs.
“Mother,” I say, my voice shifting into Edgar’s soft Virginia drawl, “tomorrow I’m leaving Richmond to attend a university. What should I do about my dark muse while I’m amid scholars who might hurl stones and insults at her?”
Eliza Poe blinks several times, as though confused. “I did not know you follow a dark muse.”
“I’m ashamed of her. I asked her to alter her appearance so she won’t humiliate me. Even you sounded appalled by the idea of her just now.”
“You look like you’ve been ravaged by sorrows, my darling.” Mrs. Poe trembles, the warmth of her affection shifting into cold fear. “Your muse should elevate your sufferings into works of art, not add to your worry. Together, you ought to create poetry and music that lift you out of your pain and struggles, even if only for a short while. That is the beauty of art.” Eliza clambers over a tree root and walks toward me. “Where is this dark muse of yours?”
I back away on the ground. “I don’t want you to see her.”
“Where is she?” Eliza reaches out and grabs my right wrist. Her lips part with a gasp, and her eyes expand as though she now views me for who I am. Her fingers chill to frost on my flesh, and the light of her spirit dims to a pale pewter gray that makes my ears ring, my teeth buzz.
She lets go of me and shrinks back. “Who are you?”
“He named me Lenore,” I say, my voice small, no longer sounding like his. “I’m your son’s muse—his macabre spirit—his poetic obsession with madness, and weirdness, and the most delicious horrors.”
“When did you emerge in his life?”
I avert my eyes from hers. “You don’t want to ask me that question.”
She wraps her arms around herself, her shoulders hunched, her head bowed, folding into herself as though she understands that I first sparked to life in the firelight and shadows of a strange house—a cold house—when she died in a bed in front of her wee boy.
The other spirits, obviously affected by her pain, either hide behind headstones or breeze toward another section of the churchyard, the air souring as they leave.
“Eddy could have suffered a far worse fate,” I say to his mother, “than to have developed a dark muse.”
Eliza Poe turns away from me and weeps with the sound of the wind in my ears.
I venture closer to her. “I intend to make his life extraordinary, Mrs. Poe, if he’ll only agree to commit himself to his art.”
She still will not face me.
“He can give everyone what they so desperately crave: hope for life beyond death.” I inch even closer. “Love poems fall out of fashion over time, often turning maudlin in the ears of future listeners. Humans’ enjoyment of satire and humor is equally fickle, and epic adventures stop seeming so epic when new heroes accomplish new feats. Yet mortals’ fear and bewilderment of death will never die—not as long as people keep dying.”
At that, Eliza Poe turns around.
“I can’t soften my appearance and change who I am, because this”—I slap my palms around my cheeks—“is already a more palatable façade that hides what I am. I’m not a young woman. I’m a shadow.”
Eliza Poe nods in understanding. “If you’re what his muse needs to be, then, I agree, you should not alter one thing about you for the sake of what others might think.”
“How did your muse convince you to pursue your art?” I ask.
“Ah . . . my muse . . .” Edgar’s mother smiles a wistful smile, and her color brightens to a cerulean glow. “My mother was an actress, so I wasn’t frightened at all when he made himself known the very first time I performed on a stage. I was nine, and during the music of the applause, he stepped out of a candelabra—a beautiful creature, radiant and angelic, with a wry grin that hinted at his humor. He transformed into a nightingale before my eyes.”
I blink. “It happened that suddenly?”
“Everyone told me thereafter that I sang like a nightingale.”
A sense of panic seizes me. “How did it happen that suddenly? Why didn’t it happen to me that quickly?”
Eliza returns to the site of her unmarked grave. “He allowed me to experience the incomparable rush of elation—the pure joy and the pleasure of performing in front of an audience. The moment he showed his face, my art turned vital, and I forsook everything else to pursue him.” She sits down on the mantle of snow that blankets her bones. “That’s why I left my first-born son, Henry, with his grandparents in Baltimore all those years ago. I couldn’t live without my muse. He was too much a part of my blood and soul, even more than my own flesh and blood.” She lies down on that cold patch of earth. “This conversation saddens me too much. I’m too tired to speak of such memories anymore. And you shouldn’t wander the city in that delicate state. Go home, Lenore, and transcend the sorrows of this world with my dear Edgar.”
I step forward to inquire whether she has any advice for surviving Edgar’s new life at the college, but she fades from view while singing the opening verse of “Nobody Coming to Marry Me”—an English theater ditty I’ve often heard Eddy whistle.
I journey up Shockoe Hill to visit Jane Stanard’s spirit, intent on absorbing her appreciation of Eddy’s poetry—to drink up her chaste admiration for him—perhaps even to imbibe more draughts of his sorrow that lingers at her gravesite.
A night watchman calls out, “Ten o’clock, and all is well!”—one block to the north. Dogs snarl and bark from the same direction.
Oh, God!
I abandon my plan and break into a run back to Moldavia, afraid to encounter either man or beast, glancing over my shoulder to be sure no one follows.
I slam into something hard.
A pair of hands grab me in the dark.
“Cassandra?”
I shake out my head to regain my senses and discover I’ve crashed into none other than John Allan. He clutches my forearms and gazes down at me.
“Were you looking for me?” he asks.
I pull out of his arms, repulsed by his odors of perspiration and tobacco. His forehead gleams with a slick layer of sweat, and the gold buttons of his vest are fastened all wrong, as though he dressed himself in a hurry.
“Ten o’clock and all is well!” the watchman again calls, now closer. Footsteps both animal and human pad through the slush in the streets in the dark.
“I must hide,” I say, covering the teeth around my neck. “Hide me!”
“Hey!” calls the watchman from behind. “Is that the same monstrosity that ran through town the other day?”
John Allan’s eyes bulge. He’s been caught with a muse—a fate he clearly can’t bear, for his mouth stretches into a grimace.
“Hide me, please, Eddy,” I say, ducking behind him.
“Eddy?” he asks.
My blood chills at my mistake.
“Is that the demon?” asks the watchman.
“Please, Jock,” I say. “I didn’t mean to say Edgar’s name. Please don’t—”
“Yes!” John Allan clasps me by my elbows and swings me around. “This putrid little serpent just tried to attack me.”
He shoves me toward the watchman, who lifts his lantern and recoils at the sight of me. At his side a ruddycheeked companion, armed with a musket, helps him wrangle a pack of bloodhounds straining at the ends of their leashes. The curs bark and snarl, tails down, ears laid back, teeth bared, eager to rip at my flesh—this hideous, constricting human flesh I should have never inhabited. I should have never rushed to be seen.
I push John Allan aside and bolt toward the south.
“Get her!” shouts the watchman, and the men set the dogs free.
The bloodhounds chase me down a sloped street, a quagmire of snow and mud.
My poet is a runner, thank heavens, so I have his ability to sprint with the swiftness of Atalanta, but the dogs bear down on me with velocity and power, snorting and growling, their paws pounding the ground behind me. I fly through the night in my borrowed brown boots, raising my skirts up to my hips so my legs may stretch to their full length, and I whimper and wheeze, desperate to reach the sanctuary of the James—terrified of slipping and falling.
The smell of the wharf emerges—the sharp scents of tar, pitch, and water.
I splash through puddles in alleyways, dart between warehouses and breweries, the darkness thickening, mist clinging to my skin. The dogs bark at my heels, so close!
Oh, God! So close!
Up ahead, moonlight shimmers across black waters. My heels pound across the planks of Ludlam’s Wharf, where my poet once escaped my shadow—fled his grief for Jane Stanard—took on a naysayer who wagered he couldn’t swim all the way to Warwick—all by diving into the river in front of a crowd of dozens and swimming six miles beneath a blistering June sun.
Following his lead, I hurtle myself off the end of the wharf, and with a deadening splash that floods my head and lungs with a torrent of freezing water, I plummet—confused, disoriented, weak, and groaning—down into the depths of the James.