The American Boy (63 page)

I have not seen or heard from Sophia Frant from that day to this. In the first six months after her disappearance, I was sedulous in my attempts to discover her whereabouts. Flora said she had heard nothing of her cousin, and promised she would let me know if she did; she professed herself as puzzled as I.

Charlie had long since been withdrawn from Mr Bransby's in Stoke Newington, and they knew nothing of his present whereabouts at the school he had briefly attended in Twickenham. I tried Mr Rowsell, who informed me he was unable to put me in communication with either Mrs Frant or Mr Shield. When I passed through Gloucester on my way to Clearland, I inquired after Sophie's property, only to learn that the freeholds in Oxbody-lane had recently changed hands. I hired the services of others better qualified than I to make inquiries, but they were equally unsuccessful.

You must not fancy from this that my subsequent life has been one long, dying fall, that I have done nothing except mourn the loss of Sophia Frant. It would be true to say that I have always been aware, in some corner of my being, of her absence. I have found it fatally easy to dwell on what might have been: if, for example, I had had the courage to propose to her at Monkshill, despite her lack of fortune, despite her son and despite her first husband's notoriety. George and our mother had united to dissuade me, pointing out, though not in so many words, that I did not have enough to live comfortably as a married man, that I must look for a wife with a little money of her own, and that in any case I would be unlikely to find happiness in the arms of an embezzler's widow.

So I joined our diplomatic service and served first at several of the smaller German courts and later in Washington, a post which the climate of the American capital sometimes made profoundly disagreeable. While I was in the United States I met Mr Noak again, increasingly eccentric but so wealthy that he could not help but wield considerable influence. A year later he was dead, and it was found that he had dispersed the bulk of his enormous fortune to a number of charities, with the exception of one substantial legacy to his former chief clerk, Salutation Harmwell.

My diplomatic career, never distinguished, came to an end when my brother unexpectedly died in 1833. His marriage had been childless – and Mr Shield's narrative, of course, hints at a possible reason for that, as it does for other qualities that distinguished my sister-in-law. I was my brother's heir.

With a title and a fortune, I found myself the eligible bachelor. I married my second cousin, Arabella Vauden, a match considered advantageous for both parties. Our union has not been blessed with children, and when I die the title and the entailed part of the estate will pass to a cousin in Yorkshire. My wife regrets this circumstance extremely.

Flora did not remarry, though she had several offers. She could afford to please herself. She passed most of her long widowhood in London, where she entertained widely if not wisely in her house in Hanover-square. When she died of inflammation of the lungs, much of her wealth passed to me by the terms of her marriage settlement. Now she lies where we have laid her, in the cemetery at Kensalgreen.

I run ahead: I must not forget her father. As soon as the law allowed, Flora closed down the house in Margaret-street and moved Mr Carswall and his nurse down to Monkshill. The mansion-house was let, so she settled them at Grange Cottage, where Mrs Johnson had dragged out the last years of her unfortunate life.

Stephen Carswall never recovered his powers of speech and movement. I saw him twice in his decline and he was as useless as fruit rotting on the tree. Mrs Kerridge bullied him mercilessly, and at the time I wondered that Flora did not intervene. He lingered for seven long years, until February 1827. At his demise, his fortune was found to be much depleted.

I come now to David Poe, Mr Iversen, Junior, of Seven Dials, the father of the American boy who when he grew to manhood was buffeted by fame and misfortune in equal measure. Having read Mr Shield's manuscript, I instituted inquiries about this gentleman, both here and in America. I found no
certain
trace of him whatsoever. As far as the world knows, he vanished in 1811 or possibly 1812.

But I did uncover an intriguing hint that, many years earlier, Mr Noak had attempted to trace David Poe's later career, and that the old gentleman had learned that there were those who preferred to let sleeping dogs lie. One of these was Mr Rush, who in 1820 had been the American Minister in London, a man with whom Noak had many dealings while he was in England, and whom he certainly would have pressed for information concerning David Poe.

Another gentleman who wished David Poe to remain buried in obscurity – and here we come at the matter from quite a different angle – was General Lafayette himself, the venerable hero of both the American and French Revolutions. Though of course Lafayette had no official standing in the United States, his reputation and achievements gave him influence in the most unexpected places.

My correspondent in the United States drew my attention to the fact that Lafayette and David Poe's father had been comrades in arms in the great revolutionary struggle. The connection between the two men was clearly close. When the old General visited the United States for his triumphal tour in 1824, he visited Baltimore, Maryland, where he singled out for particular attention the wife of his old comrade, who had died some years earlier. A few weeks later, Lafayette was in Richmond, Virginia, where he was assigned a guard of honour composed of boys in the uniform of riflemen; one of these was Edgar Allan Poe.

These are facts, but they prove nothing except that Lafayette had a kindness for the Poe family. But, if one takes this in conjunction with hints and whispers from other directions, it is impossible to ignore the suspicion that several surprisingly prominent gentlemen were perfectly happy that David Poe should remain a lost sheep.

It was, I suppose, the worst of ill luck for Henry Frant that his villainy led him to an even greater villain than himself. God knows, he paid heavily for his vices and suffered for his crimes. Before I allow David Poe to return to obscurity, however, I must record one speculation that occurred to me. Shield seems strangely well informed about David Poe's life. Is it possible that there were subsequent meetings between the two men?

I come at last to the American boy. Edgar Allan Poe was like the pintle of a hinge – barely visible, yet the still point around which the whole business revolved. He waits at almost every twist and turn of Shield's narrative.

The American boy knocks on Mr Bransby's door on the occasion of Shield's very first visit to the Manor House School. He is Charlie's particular friend and indeed champion. He is the unwitting cause of his father's introduction first to Tom Shield and then to Henry Frant, and hence brings Frant to his murderer. He is in the ice-house at Monkshill-park, desperate to search it for treasure. He and Charlie make their midnight expedition to the ruins, without which the events of that night must have turned out very differently. He helps to carry Charlie's parrot across London, and the bird with its cry of
ayez peur
is the clue that draws Shield back to Seven Dials and provides the link between Carswall and David Poe. It is Edgar who whispers to Shield that Sophie may be found visiting her late husband's grave in the burying ground of St George's, Bloomsbury. All in all, it is hard to quarrel with Shield's assertion that the boy “acted as the proximate cause of much that had happened”.

I have followed Edgar Allan Poe's subsequent career as a poet and critic with interest. I heard with regret of his tribulations in later life and his death. I wondered whether traces of his boyhood experiences in England may be descried in some of his work. With the help of American correspondents, I even attempted to explore the circumstances of his death, which was shrouded in mystery. I failed to dispel the mystery. But I did acquire a piece of information that Flora never had.

The facts, such as they are, appear to be these. On the 26th of September 1849, Edgar Allan Poe dined at a restaurant in Richmond, Virginia. Friends and associates believed that on the following day he intended to set out for Baltimore, a voyage of some twenty-five hours by steamer. Not only is the precise time of his departure disputed, but so are his means of travel and the time of his arrival.

In short, Poe vanished. There are no confirmed sightings of him whatsoever between the evening of 26th September in Richmond and his reappearance, a week later, in Baltimore. A printer named Walker noticed him at Gunner's Hall, a tavern in East Lombard-street. The city was in the throes of an election which brought with it a drunken orgy of corruption and intimidation. Gunner's Hall was one of the polling stations.

Poe was “in great distress”, and asked Walker to notify a friend, Joseph Snodgrass, who arrived in due course with several of Poe's relations. They assumed that Poe was drunk. “The muscles of articulation seemed paralysed to speechlessness,” Snodgrass recorded in 1856, “and mere incoherent mutterings were all that were heard.”

They arranged for Poe to be taken to the Washington College Hospital where he was treated by the resident physician, Dr John J. Moran. According to a letter Moran wrote a few weeks afterwards to Poe's aunt Mrs Clemm (the sister of David Poe), his patient was at first unconscious of his condition. Later his limbs trembled and he was seized with “a busy, but not violent or active delirium – constant talking – and vacant converse with spectral and imaginary objects …” By the second day, he was calm enough to listen to questions but “his answers were incoherent and unsatisfactory”.

Dr Moran tried to cheer his patient by saying that soon he would be well enough to receive friends. Edgar Allan Poe “broke out with much energy, and said the best thing his friend could do would be to blow out his brains with a pistol.” Soon he became violently delirious – despite his weakness, two nurses were required to hold him down.

Poe continued in this state until the evening of Saturday the 6th of October, “when he commenced calling for one ‘Reynolds', which he did through the night up to
three
on Sunday morning.” Then, “enfeebled from exertion”, he became quieter for a short time. At last, “gently moving his head he said
‘Lord help my poor Soul'
and expired!”

The precise cause of death is unknown – no death certificate was issued. No one, then or now, knows who “Reynolds” is or was. My agents state that, while neither Snodgrass nor Moran may be entirely trustworthy as a witness, there seems no reason to doubt the essential veracity of their accounts. They add that Poe appeared in good spirits in Richmond, where he had lectured to great applause and become engaged to be married. They also drew my attention to rumours current in Baltimore to the effect that when Poe arrived in the city he fell in with old friends, who persuaded him to take a drink to celebrate their reunion. Poe had eschewed alcohol for some months, and it is said that he was yet another victim of
mania à potu.
.

Perhaps. But may there not be another explanation for Edgar Allan Poe's disappearance and for the extraordinary prostration that led to his collapse and death? Remember Poe's despair – his wish for suicide – his repeated calls for “Reynolds”. Remember that according to the Parish Register, Tom Shield's middle name was Reynolds, the surname of his mother's family.

Was Shield in Baltimore in 1849?

As a man, Edgar Allan Poe was frail in mind and body. What if he had suddenly learned the true history of those months in England in 1819–20? Above all, what if he had come face to face with the terrible truth about his father?

It could drive a stronger man to drink. It could drive a stronger man to death itself.

It is time to lay down my pen. I shall lodge this narrative with my lawyers and leave instructions that it is to be opened by the head of the family seventy-five years after my decease. After such an interval of time, neither Shield's account nor these notes I have appended to it will have the power to hurt anyone.

The older I become, the more I wonder about Sophie herself. Is she alive? Is she with Thomas Shield? If they were lovers, and I think there can now be little doubt of that, did they marry? If they married, what became of their lives? Which continent gave them a home? Are there children, grandchildren? Is she happy?

Mr Carswall's watch has informed me with its tiny chime that it is two o'clock in the morning. If I blow out the candles and pull back the curtains of the library's bow-window, I shall look out over mile after mile of nothing, a night without boundaries.

I wrote earlier that if truth is infinite, then any addition to our knowledge of it serves also to remind us of what is unknowable. And that of course brings me back to what might have been, to Sophie, for ever unknowable, for ever hidden in the illimitable darkness.

JRR

Clearland-court

“Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history,” wrote Novalis, a remark Penelope Fitzgerald chose as the epigraph to her novel about him,
The Blue Flower
. The history of Edgar Allan Poe is littered with shortcomings and also richly overlaid with myths, speculations and contradictions. It would be irresponsible wilfully to add to them: hence this attempt to describe where the history ends and the novel begins.

Poe's grandfather, David, Sr, was born in Ireland in about 1742. The family emigrated to America, eventually settling in Maryland. David became a shopkeeper and manufacturer of spinning wheels. During the Revolutionary War he was commissioned as Assistant Deputy Quartermaster General for Baltimore, and given the rank of major. In 1781 he used his own money to buy supplies for American forces under Lafayette, and his wife is said to have cut 500 pairs of pantaloons with her own hands for the use of his troops. In David Poe's old age he may have taken part in the defence of Baltimore against British attack in 1814, during the War of 1812.