It’s true, I’ve desperately missed my Gothic muse.
My soul strengthens in her presence, and the darkness lifts from my brain.
While my chopped-up table burns in the hearth behind me, I tuck my beloved manuscripts into my trunk and murmur to the wall of art in front of me, “I need to concentrate on my examinations these next two weeks, and then I’ll bring you home with me to Richmond.”
“You had better,” a voice whispers behind me, but when I turn around, I find myself alone.
Again.
The examinations commence. Each night I’m a beggar fighting to warm himself in the glow of the dismembered corpse of his table, but during the daylight hours I’m a scholar trumpeting his knowledge of languages and literature, of ancient lore and lost translations. My professors never see the desperation thrashing about inside me. They don’t detect the shivering that never ceases, even when I’m seated in lecture rooms heated with howling fires and throngs of bodies perspiring from nerves.
On the eve of the second week of examinations, Miles George appears at my door with a small table made of cedar.
“You said you lost your table in a drunken wager,” he says, “and I can’t imagine studying without some sort of desk.”
My face flushes with guilt over the lie I told about my other table—and with shame over his pity for me.
“I can’t accept your charity,” I say. “And I have my writing box.”
“I don’t need two full-sized tables, Poe.”
I shake my head. “No, this is an unnecessary kindness.”
“Please, take it!” Miles scoots the table toward me and pushes back his hair, which now hangs long enough to reach the middle of his nose. “It was a foolish purchase I made at the beginning of the term when I thought my dormitory was understocked. I won’t have room for it in the carriage ride home. You’d be doing me a favor.”
“Well . . . thank you,” I say, and I maneuver the table through my doorway.
“Good luck with the last week of examinations.”
“Good luck to you, too, Miles.”
I long to tell him I’ll likely not return the next session but can’t bring myself to do so.
Instead of leaving, Miles leans a shoulder against my doorframe. “I wish I could see more of that astounding muse of yours. Do you think she originated by crawling out of your head?”
I plunk the table down in the center of the room. “I beg your pardon?”
“If that’s what’s inside your head at the age of seventeen, my friend”—Miles cracks a wry grin—“I can’t wait to see what’s yet to come.”
“You’re far too generous.” I run my fingertips across the table’s grain, envisioning how best to slice the wood.
“I’m sure you’ll finish at the top of your classes.” Miles pushes himself off the doorframe. “I’ll see you around.”
“I’m thankful I met you, Miles.”
He smiles. “I’ll be sure to say only good things about you when someone inevitably interviews me about our time here together, years from now.”
I chuckle. “Then everyone will think you’re a teller of tales, too.”
He snickers and meanders away, and I scoot the desk over to the space where my former table stood. I won’t slam a blade through it just yet.
Let’s save the wood for a night when the cold turns tortuous.
On the fifteenth of December, we’re freed from our studies, liberated from examinations, and I learn that my name appears on the lists of students who excelled in both the senior Latin class and the senior French class.
I celebrate at the private house of a friend in Charlottesville and converse at length with the university’s librarian, Mr. William Wertenbaker, who’s also a student, albeit one twelve years older than myself. He attended my Italian, French, and Spanish lectures with me. We get along so well, in fact, that upon our return to the university grounds, I invite him to my room.
“I hope you don’t mind sitting on my floor,” I say as I light three tallow candles on the mantle.
“Not at all.”
Mr. Wertenbaker lowers himself down in front of the unlit fireplace that’s nothing more than a wasteland of ashes. I’m conscious of the candles’ black smoke blowing around the room.
The librarian tips back his head to view my drawings on the walls and whistles in appreciation. “Fascinating! I think I recognize the illustration on the ceiling from a collection of Byron’s poetry.”
“Yes!” I lift a hatchet off the floor, tip Miles’s table onto one side, and hack at one of the legs with blows that produce satisfying cracking sounds. “That’s precisely what it’s from.”
“What are you doing to your table there?”
“Kindling.” I chop off the leg and admit, with a sigh, “I’m a man deep in debt. I owe over two thousand dollars to various individuals, some of them fellow students and university staff, some of them lenders in Charlottesville. Others are nefarious creatures who want me either jailed or dead. You should see the threatening letters I’ve been receiving.” I nod toward the ashes of said letters, lumped in the grate.
“Oh, Edgar.” Mr. Wertenbaker sucks air through his teeth. “That’s not a safe way to live.”
“I intend to do the honorable thing and pay off every cent.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.” With a grunt, I slam my blade into a second leg. “How large of a blaze do you think we can build with this table?”
Mr. Wertenbaker stands up and brushes sawdust from his trousers. “You’d have the warmest room on Rowdy Row. It’s so bitter cold tonight, you might even be able to charge admission.”
“I wager we’ll have a bonfire before long.”
He titters. “I’m not going to wager, but I’ll happily help you demolish the table.”
We fetch a second hatchet from the janitor and break up the wood until poor Miles’s beautiful cedar table splinters into sticks small enough to ignite with a match in the grate.
We stoke the infant flames.
We even toss in two of the tallow candles, and our efforts aren’t undertaken in vain, for Hestia rises up in her robes of gold. She swells into an inferno that smells of sweet cedar and meat. Her flames flash bewitching patterns of light and shadow across my walls, and my charcoal illustrations wriggle and squirm, wiggle and worm. Sparks shoot out of the hearth with startling pops that nip the backs of our hands, and we laugh and whoop in appreciation each time we’re singed—so proud are we of our conflagration.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see a figure in black dart past my window, and I remember a line of poetry that once flitted through my head back in Monumental Church.
Once upon a dark December, in a year we must remember,
Morbid mounds of ash and ember told a gruesome tale of gore—
“Have you heard of the Richmond Theater fire of 1811?” I ask the librarian over the roar of the flames, and I wipe the perspiration pouring from my forehead with a handkerchief.
“Of course, I’ve heard of it,” he says. “The fire affected most everyone in Virginia.”
“I attend a church that was built over the crypt that holds the remains of all seventy-two victims. Every Sunday of my youth, I’ve worshipped above the ashes and bones of those poor, wretched souls.”
The librarian cringes. “Oh. God.”
“My mother died in the fire,” I say, even though it’s a lie. It’s simpler, and more likely to elicit sympathy, to attach her death to our infamous American tragedy than to say she was an actress who wasted away from tuberculosis. “My life ended that December, before it scarcely began.”
“I’m so sorry, Edgar.”
“Thank you, Mr. Wertenbaker. You’re a good man.”
I throw the last of my candles into the flames and watch the final pieces of my life at the University of Virginia sizzle into oblivion.
On the morrow, Pa arrives at my dormitory, and I confess to my debts and my gambling.
He responds with a sigh that crushes me down to a nubble of a man. “I sent you that extra one hundred dollars.”
“What alchemy was I supposed to use to turn one hundred dollars into thousands?” I ask. “The university billed me for the cost of books and a thousand other expenses throughout the entire year.”
“What possessed you to think that gambling was the answer?”
“What else was I supposed to do?”
Pa covers his eyes, as though my recklessness has blinded him, and again he sighs with a cutting breath. “Haul your belongings out to the carriage. I’ll settle the sums of the university fees, but the gambling debts are yours to pay.”
“I owe too much to pay them off on my own.”
“You should have thought of these consequences when you first sat down at a card table, Edgar.”
He shoves his hat over his head and leaves my room to pay my university fees (at long last!). I cart my trunk and writing box out to Dabney and the carriage waiting at the south end of the Lawn, but I see no signs of my muses anywhere on the grounds. A sense of panic grips me and throws off my step.
But, let’s be honest, I tell myself, Pa would never allow Lenore or Garland to climb into our carriage and accompany us back home. He’d kill them if he saw them.
I hand my trunk to Dabney and bid a silent farewell to my neoclassical Eden, to the sage and exasperated professors, to the Rotunda and pavilions, to my cohorts in dissolution, to the Ragged Mountain, and most distressing of all, to my future.