Elmira hasn’t yet written.
I’ve now been in Charlottesville for a month.
It’s mid-March. I last saw her before Valentine’s Day.
She hasn’t written once!
I lie in bed before my Saturday class, lazing in my nightshirt and cap, and I chew my nails over her lack of correspondence, convinced that she’s found someone better. She must have found someone better. She’s Sarah Elmira Royster!
I obsess over the idea that I’ve never seen what she looks like when she unpins her hair. Ever since I met her last summer when we moved into Moldavia, she’s always worn her brown locks parted down the middle and plain in front, with an elaborate knot pinned to the top of her head in back.
With my eyes closed, my hands clasped above my head on my pillow, I push away all the whispers of doubt and imagine Elmira—my Elmira—unfastening her hair on a bed built for two in our cottage by the sea. Waves sigh against the rocks down below our chamber, and she sings a dreamy song, while I sift my fingers through each strand that she frees from the pins—strands of pure silk that sweep down past her shoulders. My lips crave the warmth and the pressure of her mouth on mine. I want nothing more than to lay my cheek on the curves of her satin-soft breast, perfumed in her lilac scents, while her hair brushes my skin, while the waves sigh, and she sighs . . .
Someone raps on my door.
I jump out of bed, flushed and flustered, expecting to find a hotelkeeper or a servant—or to hear more demands for money.
Instead, I open the door to the bespectacled face of Garland O’Peale, his eyes again shielded by those green lenses.
“Shall we have another go at a gathering in you room tonight?” he asks, leaning his pointy right elbow against my doorframe.
I blink and fuss with my nightshirt. “Umm . . . yes, I suppose. Miles said he’d come, and he might bring his chum John Lyle, who’s a little more refined than the others. I’m not certain he’s even a drinker.”
“Good. You need less drinking. Keep distracting your friends with new caricatures on the walls whenever they offer you a glass.” Garland nods toward my budding collection of charcoal sketches of professors before adding, “If this Lyle fellow joins you tonight, tell him tales of the five years you spent in boarding schools in London and Stoke Newington. Most of these provincials have never even left Virginia. You’ve led a far more varied life than them. Flaunt your experience.”
“Elmira hasn’t yet written,” I say, even though I’ve never confided in Garland about anything before—certainly nothing of romance.
He shrugs. “Maybe she’s as fickle as you when it comes to love.”
“I’m not fickle.”
“Ha! Before Elmira, you wrote love letters to every single girl in Miss Jane Mackenzie’s boarding school, and I’m sure you had sweethearts in England, and even before England, when you were a spoiled brat of six.”
“Catherine Poitiaux was my sweetheart at age six, but”—I wave away the long list of girls who’ve enraptured me over the years—“no one compares to Elmira. If I lose her, I’ll die.”
Garland groans in disgust. “You probably said the same of little Catherine Poitiaux.”
“If Pa or Elmira’s father had anything to do with this . . .” I rub at my face, which needs a shave. “Her father thinks I’m not good enough for her. I believe he once lent Pa money. He knows of my background.”
“Ridicule these asses in essays instead of crying over girls, Poe. You really need to learn to swallow down these sentimental fancies of yours. They’re not attractive.” Garland steps away from my door. “I’ll see you tonight. Let’s make the show a good one.”
We do, indeed, make the show a good one, as we do every Saturday night.
I draw unflattering portraits of the Reverend John Bransby, who ran the school I attended in Stoke Newington from the ages of nine to eleven, when Pa established the firm Allan & Ellis in England. Most of my stories about the reverend aren’t as true as they could be, and I pepper them with far more offensive oaths than I probably need to, but my friends bend forward at their waists on my bed and laugh, and laugh, and laugh.
Garland sits on my chair, his legs crossed, his posture impeccable, and he nods in encouragement whenever my energy lapses. Even though he wears his green spectacles, I see the fire of his amber irises blazing into an inferno behind the lenses.
A sense of hollowness plagues me, despite the laughter and the praise. The applause sounds tinny. Something’s missing—and not just Elmira.
My monstrous drawing of Mrs. Stanard lingers in the corner of my eye, and my mind strays.
Garland and my companions file out of my room around midnight.
Left to my own devices at last, I pull my sketch of Lenore out of my writing box and loop the glass heart necklace over my head, the silver chain cold to the touch.
I step onto my bed with a charcoal crayon in hand and invoke my macabre muse by quoting the Irish poet William Hamilton Drummond’s The Giant’s Causeway:
“Come, lonely genius of my natal shore,
From cave or bower, wild glen, or mountain hoar;
And while by ocean’s rugged bounds I muse,
Thy solemn influence o’er my soul diffuse.”
The chill of the March night settles over my skin, along with the weight of shadows. The imagined outlines of weird and whimsical wonders rise to the surface of my walls.
Explosions of gunfire echo across the Lawn, and drunken fools push each other against my door. Yet during the entire midnight hour, amid the din of dissolution, I draw whatever my heart asks of me, caring not what my schoolmates might think or what criticism Garland might spew—or even what Pa might comment if he were to stop by for a visit when his business brings him to Charlottesville, as his latest letter implied it might do.
I decorate the wall over my bed and the ceiling above it with sketches of demons, and dragons, and other grotesque and fantastic creatures—wraiths, and Naiads, and the most beautiful women ever witnessed by mortal eyes. And I fall asleep with the scarlet heart dangling around my neck, drifting into a labyrinth of dreadful dreams.