"On your request, Doctor," said Bonjour, "and you have accepted it in exchange for the information my master asks for."

The Baron, sotto voce, leaned in to Moran: "You can see you had the wrong sow by the ear, Doctor."

The heroism of the doctor's voice deflated. "I see the gist now. Very well. Back to Poe then. I told him, in trying to comfort him, that he would soon enjoy the society of his friends. He broke out with much energy and said, I remember, The best thing my best friend could do would be to blow out my brains with a pistol. When he beheld what had become of him, he was ready to sink into the earth, and so on, as one talks when depressed in spirits. He then slipped into a violent delirium until Saturday evening, when he began calling for ‘Reynolds' again and again, for six or seven hours until the morning, as I have told you the other day. Having enfeebled himself from exertion he said, ‘Lord help my poor soul' and expired. That is all."

"What we wonder now," said the Baron, "is whether Poe had been induced to have taken some sort of artificial stimulus, a drug-opium, perhaps-that put him in this condition?"

"I do not know. The truth, sir, is that Poe's condition was quite sad and strange, but there was no particular odor of alcohol on his person, that I can remember."

During this exchange, I alternated between careful attentiveness to their words and desperate attempts to calm my pounding heart and breathing from my near discovery by Bonjour. When they closed the interview to the Baron's satisfaction, and I felt convinced by listening for footsteps they had left the fourth floor, I climbed past the body and heaved myself through the opening in the wall. I checked that the coast was clear and dropped into the lecture room. Flattening myself on the floor, I coughed out the air of the dead and gulped in rapid, grateful bursts.

You will perhaps judge me harshly for not immediately relating my adventures to Duponte, and yet you have seen yourself the frequent inflexibility of his philosophies. I am not of a particularly philosophical cast. Duponte was born an analyst, a reasoner; I, an observer. Though it may occupy only a lower rung of the ladder of wisdom, observation requires practicality. Perhaps Duponte, and our investigations generally, needed a light shove toward the pragmatic.

I should have explained above, when I was searching for the mention of Henry Reynolds, how it was I had free access to the newspapers we kept in the library without Duponte taking notice. Since the first day we had disembarked in Baltimore, Duponte had inhabited the library and oversaw all the contents of his sanctum. However, when he was reading other things he would remove himself from the increasingly cramped library to different chambers and bedrooms of Glen Eliza I had forgotten existed. He would choose the odd book that I had on my shelf; or one of my father's atlases of an obscure province of the world; or a pamphlet in French that my mother had brought from abroad. Duponte also read Poe, a practice that did not escape my interest.

At times the concentration with which he read Poe reminded me of the sheer nourishment the tales had provided me for so many years. But usually it was far more scholarly than that. Duponte read mechanically, like a literary critic. The critic never lets his reading overtake him; he never pulls the pages promiscuously close to his face and never wishes to be brought into the crevices of the author's mind, for such a journey would relinquish control. Thus, often a reader will read a magazine critic's notice of a book, after having already read the book himself, eager to compare perspectives, and think, "This cannot be the book I read! There must be another version, in which everything has changed, and I shall have to find it, too!"

I thought a dispassionate survey of Poe's works by Duponte quite fitting. I believe it allowed Duponte crucial insights into Poe's character and into the mysterious circumstances that we had begun to examine.

"If only it was known which ship Poe arrived to Baltimore on," I said one afternoon.

Duponte became instantly animated. "The local papers speak of it as the unknown details of his arrival. That they do not know, monsieur, certainly does not confine it to the bounds of the unknown. The answer is plainly presented in the articles from the Richmond newspapers published in the last months of Poe's life."

"When Poe was lecturing on various subjects of poetry and literature."

"Precisely. He was doing so in order to raise money for his proposed magazine The Stylus, as he mentioned also in his letters to you, Monsieur Clark. We may not know on which ship Poe sailed from Richmond to Baltimore, but this is hardly what is important, and hardly qualifies as making the purpose of his trip unknown. His reason for coming to Baltimore is quite knowable to any person employing thought. From the rumors in the newspapers over the last two years before his death, Poe had been involved in various romantic unions since his wife's death. In this last period, he had just engaged himself to a wealthy woman in Richmond, and so his trip to Baltimore would likely not have been for the purposes of any romantic interlude. Now, in view of the fact that his intended, one Mrs. Shelton, was known as wealthy by all periodical editors, and thus naturally by everyone else (for editors rarely know something the mob does not know first); in view of this fact that her wealth was widely known, Poe might properly feel the need to deflect any perception by the public that he was set to marry her because she was ‘bankable.'"

"He would certainly never marry someone for money!"

"Whether or not he would, and your indignation on the question is quite beside the point, the result is exactly the same. This makes it easier for our review. If Poe were marrying her for money, it would be all the more reason to deflect the perception of it in order to avoid ruining the engagement if she suspected it. If his motives were pure ones, as you believe, his goal would remain identical-to raise money, this time in order to provide for his own expenses rather than rely unjustly on hers. Either way, finding he had not earned as much as he hoped in Richmond, he would come to Baltimore to gain professional support and subscribers for The Stylus, and thus bolster his financial prospects independently of Mrs. Shelton's."

"Which explains why he went first to see Nathan Brooks, for Dr. Brooks is a well-known magazine editor. Except," I said grimly, "that, as I saw for myself, Dr. Brooks's house had caught on fire."

"Poe came here with plans, Monsieur Clark, to remake his life. I think we shall find that he died in a state of hope, not in despair."

But I remembered Dr. Moran's statement about Poe: he did not know when he had come to Baltimore or how he came to be here. How did this conform to the other particulars now before us?

The above conversation with Duponte occurred a few days after my secret call to the hospital. Meanwhile, in my visits to the reading rooms and my various errands around the city, I felt an increasing number of eyes on me. I thought that perhaps it was an unconscious product of my guilt at hiding my previous discoveries from Duponte, or my distraction whenever I remembered Hattie's distressed behavior in my last encounter with her at the gates to her house.

There was one man in particular, a free black of about forty years old, whom I observed near me on more than one occasion in crowds on the street or from the window of a carriage I was riding in. He had sharply angled features and was of solid physical dimensions. It was usually easy to differentiate between the free and enslaved blacks by the superior and often quite fashionable dress of the former, although certain city slaves-slave dandies, as they were known-were provided exquisite clothing to fashionably match that of their owners.