Using his penknife, my poet whittles down the nib of a goose-feather quill while seated at a table in an unfamiliar room with walls the color of a weak claret wine. The fireplace behind him lacks wood and, therefore, heat, and the only furniture in the chamber seems to be the table he occupies and the bed on which I’m lying, tucked beneath the meager warmth of his university coat.
Rain taps against the window.
Mildew scents the air.
“Where are we?” I ask.
Edgar lifts his head, his eyes rimmed in red.
“Boston,” he says.
“How long have we been here?”
He closes his eyes, and his forehead creases. “Over a month. It’s now April.”
“Wasn’t Ebenezer with us?”
“He sobered up at the first port after Richmond and sailed home.”
I roll onto my right side and gasp at a sharp pain in my breastbone, reminded of the horror and the agony of John Allan firing a musket at me in Eddy’s bedroom. My skirt crumples against the mattress, and I taste metal on my tongue. No wings drape my back, and their loss makes me shiver.
“How are you feeling?” asks Eddy.
“Uninspiring.”
He gives a sad smile and sets the quill aside without writing a word.
“I’m working as a clerk but plan to join the army soon,” he says. “I’ll enlist as Edgar A. Perry to avoid the creditors. To disappear. My grandfather, David Poe Sr., was a quartermaster general in the Revolutionary War. The army’s in my blood just as much as the arts.”
His voice doesn’t quite sound like his own. He may as well be speaking the lines of a play he doesn’t care for in the slightest.
“Have you been eating?” I ask.
“A little.”
“Writing?”
“I’ve been trying.” He presses his palms against his forehead. “I’ve sworn I’d persevere and not let Pa silence us, but . . .”
Another sharp ache grips my chest. I curl into a ball and gasp for air, but my breath escapes my lips as an icy mist that stings my mouth.
“Eddy,” I say through a spasm of chills, “let me go.”
He moves in his chair with a screech of the legs against the floorboards, but he does not answer.
“We’re both dying,” I say. “Please . . . at least allow yourself to live. He’s injured me beyond repair.”
“I can’t let him do that.”
“Please . . .” I shudder, which makes my head throb, and another icy breath burns my lips. “Let me go.”
Edgar sits down beside me on the bed and clasps his arms around me. He rests his head against my left shoulder and lulls me a little with the ticking of his heart, but he’s so cold himself, he only makes me tremble more, and he turns my brain into a block of ice.
“You won’t even need to worry about burying me,” I say, my teeth chattering. “I’ll simply smolder out and return to the fire and shadows from whence I came, and you’ll be freed of me. You can concentrate on living . . . and on loving all those pretty women you adore.”
“No.”
“Please! I hurt so much, and I’m so dreadfully cold.”
Another bout of ice erupts across my skull and freezes me down to the bottoms of my lungs. We’ve so much left to write—so many poems and tales yet to start—but to breathe one second more would be a torture I cannot endure.
Eddy whispers near my ear, “Lenore . . .”
“Let me go,” I say again. “Kiss all those pretty women for me.”
He cradles me against his chest and shakes with silent tears . . . but, like the obedient artist he sometimes proves to be, he does what I ask.
He lets me go, and the ice burns down to my toes.