Lenore invoked such a palpable sense of terror on the university grounds that I hide away in my room for the rest of the day to keep from admitting I had anything to do with the spectacle. I sleep off the brandy with fitful naps full of nightmares about my penury.
By suppertime, my schoolmates still murmur of the “specter.”
In the hotel where we dine, I sit myself next to Tom Tucker, who himself looks cadaverous this evening, his eyes bruised, his cheeks gaunt.
“Do you know what everyone is talking about, Poe?” he asks with his head sagging in his hands. “I don’t remember a damn thing that happened between knocking at your door and waking up a few hours ago.”
I chuckle. “You look like the brandy punched you in the eyes.”
“I think Will and I might have gotten into a fight.” Tom shakes out his head. “I don’t recall why.”
Miles joins us, also claiming to suffer from peach-and-honey–induced amnesia, although I catch him studying me out of the corner of his eye at one point as we dine on our pink slices of beef, as though he remembers . . .
On Monday morning, Garland waits for me at the pavilion door of my Latin lecture. A pair of green-tinted spectacles conceals the unearthly glow of his eyes.
“Good morning,” he says, pinching the brim of his gray hat between his right thumb and index finger.
“Where did you get those spectacles?” I ask.
He shrugs, which I interpret to mean, I stole them, of course.
“I need to concentrate on this lecture.” I walk past him. “I don’t have time to converse.”
He grabs my left shoulder and stops me from entering the pavilion. “She caused quite a sensation.”
“She showed me the rips you made in her sleeves.”
“May your tongue remain sharp, Poe, and your enemies, dull.”
“Why do I get the impression you’re one of my enemies, O’Peale?”
“Au contraire. I’m your salvation. I’ll liberate you from your desire to write nonsense.”
I wriggle out of his grip. “I may write nonsense, but at least it’s exquisite nonsense.”
Garland coughs up a laugh that draws the attention of John Lyle, one of Miles’s well-mannered chums from the East Lawn. I lower my face as John slips into the pavilion behind me.
“I need to devote all my thoughts to my studies,” I say to Garland. “I’m still waiting to hear Pa’s response to my request. I shall see you Saturday night, and no sooner.”
Garland tips his hat with a wobble of the feathers in the band. “I’ll go walk among your fellow humans, then, and observe the eccentricities of your kind.”
“Observe unobtrusively please.”
“I’ll be as quiet as a rat.”
He scuttles away before I can remark that he’s botched up the idiom, remembering that Lenore once also skewered that same phrase.
Pa’s response to my letter arrives at the end of that second week at the university. His correspondence bears his scarlet seal of wax, monogrammed with an ornate A—a sight that fills me with both hope and uneasiness. I sit down at my table in my room and draw a series of long breaths before gaining the courage to break the seal.
I unfold his crisp parchment.
My stomach sinks.
In his letter, addressed, at least, as “Dear Edgar” and not a cold “Dear Sir,” Pa berates me for asking for more money.
He chides me for not contriving to manage to pay one hundred forty-nine dollars with one hundred ten!
I will enclose an additional $40, he states toward the end of the letter, but no more. Do not write to Ma and trouble her about the money. She is confined to her room with a bad cold. I will order a uniform in Richmond and send it to you instead of paying the university’s exorbitant prices. Be more prudent and careful.
The harsh scent of tobacco drifts from the pulp of the parchment, and I envision Pa hunched over the paper, puffing on his pipe, the shadow of his head seeping across his handwriting.
I pick up the bills he enclosed with the letter.
He left me with only one damn dollar for pocket money—a dollar that will disappear as soon I answer the university’s demand to be paid for a packet of books.
Oh, and there’s Mr. Spotswood banging on my door again, about to tell me I owe him money for the use of his servant, and for the washing, and for the firewood so I don’t freeze to death, and a thousand other necessaries . . .
“Poe!” calls Mr. Spotswood through my door. “I need to speak to you about your fees . . .”
No more than an hour later, I’m standing in a smoky little lending office in Charlottesville, signing an agreement to borrow money at a rate of interest I’ll never be able to afford. My neck sweats, and my heart won’t stop twitching. Mr. Blumenthal, the lender helping me with the paperwork, peers through his wire spectacles at me with a look of disdain, as though he holds no pity for an Anglo-Saxon, Episcopalian boy dressed in the finest wool and satin that money can buy. John Allan accomplished his goal of presenting me to the world as an ingrate—as an eater of the bread of idleness.
But I refuse to leave the university.
I’m doing too well in my classes.
I depart the lending office with my hat in my hand, my borrowed cash tucked away in my breast pocket, a sharp pain digging at my chest beneath my sternum. The snow has melted, and the windows of the city reflect a warm sunlight, but rain clouds brew in the distance, threatening to drench me by the time I reach the university grounds if I don’t hurry.
With my arms wrapped around myself, I walk down a street that squishes with mud, my optimism drained, and I pray for the seraphim in heaven above to send me a respite from my troubles—to free me from my trepidations about the money, so I may concentrate on my education and finally live.
Around the next corner, a song reaches my ear—Thomas Moore’s “Come, Rest in This Bosom,” the same melody Lenore sang in the professor’s garden. A soprano with the voice of an angel now sings the tune within the white walls of a wooden tavern across the square.
“Oh! what was love made for, if ’tis not the same
Thro’ joy and thro’ torment, thro’ glory and shame?
I know not, I ask not, if guilt’s in that heart,
I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art.”
On the mossy shingles of the tavern’s sloped roof, two and a half stories into the air, stands Lenore in her high-waisted black dress with the heart-shaped bloodstain. I don’t see her long ebon hair, but a tall silk hat that matches the hue of her dress rests upon her head. She braces the soles of her boots against the shingles, her hands planted on her hips, her face directed my way—an unsettling silhouette that reminds me of a crow perched on a roof or a funereal weather vane.
Now she turns her head away, facing the western storm clouds sagging over the hills and mountains, and the soprano within the structure beneath her breaks into the Scottish ballad “Barbara Allen”—a tune that’s apt to bring tears to my eyes even more than “Come, Rest in This Bosom.”
Too moved by the singer’s voice, too tempted by curiosity, I cross the square, daring to tread closer to my runaway muse. Lenore’s face remains turned away, yet I sense that she’s watching me, which makes me shiver.
A deep porch welcomes visitors to the tavern, and at the far end of it, to my left, a white man—a peddler of saddles—barters with a black man who specifies that he’s been a free man since birth, and he knows “what is and isn’t a fair price.” I step onto the boards at the opposite end and peek through a tall window.
A brunette in a green-and-gold dress that offers a plentiful view of her bosom sings amid tables constructed of long planks of wood. She’s surrounded by an audience of men with pink faces—drunkards who somehow have time to spend afternoons imbibing beer instead of working. Two whiskered musicians, one playing a fiddle, the other strumming a guitar, accompany the woman, and, by God, even though she has gaps in her teeth and pock marks on her face, the lady’s voice—the way she sings Barbara’s plea to her mother to make her own coffin, so she can die like the man who loved her—reduces me to tears right there on the porch.
I shift away from the peddler and his potential customer and wipe my face with a sleeve, planning to tell the men that I miss my fiancée if they question my crying. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse the shadow of the tavern’s roof, stretched out across the street, as well as the silhouette of Lenore atop it. A breeze flutters her skirt, but her torso and head, topped by that unfathomably tall hat, stay so chillingly still, it could be the shadow of a statue.
Her shadow head turns, and I shudder, wondering if she sees that I’m crying over “Barbara Allen.” She’s arranged all this, I realize. Lenore stole that soprano from some other muse who’s probably flitting around, panicking about its singer—a singer more likely attuned to the “bawdy songs” that Bishop Moore railed against in his sermons.
Lenore’s shadow crouches down on the roof and slides out of view.
I round the tavern.
“Lenore!” I call with my hands cupped around my mouth, traveling around the perimeter of the building. “Where are you?”
She neither answers nor shows her face.
I drift back to the front of the tavern, where I hear the soprano now singing “I Am the King and Prince of Drinkers”—a much more appropriate ditty to pour from the windows of an alehouse than a tragic ballad.
“Are you looking for someone?” asks the customer on the porch.
“Are you crying, lad?” asks the peddler.
“I just buried my fiancée,” I say, wiping my cheeks once again, my tears renewed by the lie that just slipped from my lips. “Since my love died for me today, I’ll die for her tomorrow.”
The men’s foreheads wrinkle—they’re too stunned to even speak, so I bid them farewell and saunter away, wondering if they’ll realize I just quoted “Barbara Allen.”
I return to the university, my hands crammed in my coat pockets, my head stuffed with the tale of Barbara and her lover, the sad tune on my lips, and it’s not until the clouds dump rain on my head near my dormitory door that I realize she answered my prayer.
Lenore was the seraph that allowed me a respite from my troubles with money.
I’d forgotten all about John Allan, even though his surname galloped through the ballad.