The Blackest Bird Read online

  “I don’t know your offense, but whatever you did to this gent, you got his dander up. This was sent over a few minutes ago from the Herald offices with a special note it be delivered directly to you, Mr. James Gordon Bennett’s signature. Wants you to have first gander straight off the press. Story about you it is.”

  “I don’t want to see it.”

  “Can’t say that I blame you. Not particularly a flattering portrait. I’ll leave it just the same.”

  The warden pushes the newspaper through the bars, where Dillback stoops to pick it up off the cold, damp floor.

  In his cell Tommy Coleman is napping, the soft, steady hum of his peaceful snoring audible.

  Colt is back with his dinner. He picks up the public print from where Dillback has left it on his dinner tray, cannot help it, peruses the headline, set in glaring 48-point type.

  WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?

  it asks, the byline beneath Bennett’s.

  Let us take a stroll through Murderers’ Row in the Tombs and glance in on Homicide Colt.

  Alas, Master John’s not at home just now. He’s departed his cell, performing his daily exercise, a stint about the yard.

  Finally he appears, booted and gloved. He may have his seal-skin coat on, or he may appear in a light autumn affair of exquisite cut and softest tint. In his hand is a gold-headed switch, which he carelessly twirls during his promenade.

  Upon his return he changes shoes, now he wears his feet encased in delicately worked slippers and his body swathed in an elegant dressing gown, faced with cherry silk. Certainly his prison garb is not of the common taupe and black variety.

  Lunch for Mr. Colt is not usual prison fare either, it is something other than bread and water. No, lunch is quail on toast, game pâté, roasted reed bird, fowl, vegetables, coffee and cognac, and, of course, following, might come a visit from the beautiful Miss Caroline Henshaw, his mistress, in whose wake he may retire to his patent extension chair, of his brother’s invention, lolling there, puffing an aromatic Havana, pondering the indignities of Life.

  Colt throws down the paper in disgust. The nerve of him! He knew Bennett could not be trusted. The man is shunned by all society. He shouts for the manservant Dillback, pushing away what is left of his dinner in a fury, his appetite gone. Following which angry exertion he sits quietly in the gloom.

  All is silent, all is still. His mind is so beheated, so besotted with rage, it is not functioning clearly. Everything seems a fog.

  In the courtyard a horse whinnies. The hammering on the gallows has begun anew despite the late hour and lengthening shadows. A priest is standing staring at the carpenters in the waning vestiges of oil light.

  “They don’t want no screwups like the way they did my brother.”

  The voice startles. Tommy Coleman speaks to John Colt as they both peer into the half-light. “They already had enough screwups. That’s what’s on the damn warden’s mind.”

  “Silence! How many times do you have to be told?”

  “Nobody gets out of life alive, boyo. You, me, nobody.”

  Colt can’t help himself, he shudders. He carefully gets down from his perch on his cot, where he could peer out the high barred window, collapses into his reclining chair, and closes his eyes.

  This has been a strenuous day for him. For most of the afternoon he has been either talking to newspaper hacks, eating, drinking, or smoking. Now, with the diffuse light of the lamps shining in the high window of his cell, he is feeling the fatigue.

  He packs his pipe with Anderson cut tobacco and calls for his servant, loudly requesting reading material.

  Dillback responds almost at once.

  “The latest effort of Mr. Poe,” the manservant announces. “I thought you might like it, sir. A second tale of ratiocination, following the magnificent ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue.’ And I know how much you admired that. This one you may find of even greater interest, sir. It’s the Mary Rogers case, thinly disguised.”

  Colt sits up. “You can’t be serious?”

  “I am.”

  “Mary Rogers!” He scratches his face, coughs. “He mentioned he thought to work on something of the kind, but I gleaned it just a lark. What has he to say?”

  “He claims he will unmask the killer. This is but the first installment of three.”

  “Let me see it! Where is the man anyway? Wasn’t he supposed to be here already?”

  “Mr. Poe is late. As you well know, Mr. Poe is often late, and cannot be trusted, among other things, to be on time. Especially if he’s on one of his sprees.”

  Colt stared down at the magazine: Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion. He thumbs to the story, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” and reads and rereads nonstop for some forty-five minutes, all the while puffing away on his pipe in great fury, impervious to all interruption, until, quite late, a man is led down the corridor and admitted to his cell.

  He is a rather elegantly attired gentleman, dark mustache, with a full expanse of forehead, but his apparel threadbare and darned, his overcoat a veritable Joseph robe of discreet reweavings and patches. He is slightly stooped in physique, not standing to his full height, as if life has taken its toll, pressing its heavy weight down on his narrow shoulders.

  “Mr. Colt …” The man has a southern accent, quite charming in its way.

  “Poe! How nice to see you again! How nice of you to come!”

  “I told you before, sir, I would not, for the life of me, pass up the opportunity,” Poe is saying. “I remain intrigued. To be beckoned, sir, by one in such distress, under such duress.”

  “Distress? Duress?” Colt laughs with pleasure. “You speak poetry, monsieur.” He grins sharply. “You know, that’s not how it is, sir, we are friends. Need I remind you, for men like us, as we both know, all is puzzle, all is enigma. I am a writer comme vous. Still I take pride that I am a fatalist. I hope full well that I can take anything the cosmos offers. After all, what is my death to me, but my life? You flatter me, Poe. You flatter,” and Colt once more laughs at himself richly.

  A bottle of spirits appears in the hands of the manservant, and a foil of powder, laudanum, from the fob pocket of Colt’s smoking jacket.

  Colt shows the foil, taking the bottle, holding it out for Poe to admire, a last word, “Armagnac,” hanging in the still air across the expanse of cell block.

  24

  Anderson’s Segar Shop

  He knew not how or where he spent the night, but upon the light of day Edgar Poe awoke in a muddy alley below the Five Points, his tongue swollen, his body stiff and debilitated, a filthy wad of laudanum-soaked cotton wool hanging out of his ear.

  Eventually he struggled to his feet, his soiled clothes wet and cold. He managed to stumble to the street, where he encountered two urchins, who, when asked the name of that alley in which he had been lying, replied, “Paradise.”

  By late afternoon he had found his way somehow to stand next to a statue of the eminent explorer and writer Sir Walter Raleigh, patron saint of the tobacco trade, outside John Anderson’s segar shop on Broadway, the very shop where Mary Rogers had once worked.

  Despite the cruel autumn weather, as darkness came on and the lamps were well lighted, the throng rushing past Anderson’s door increased behind him on the sidewalks, two dense and continuous tides of population, one flowing uptown, one down.

  Poe stood, his nose pressed to the glass, his bright eyes peering wistfully through the square panes at the display of twist and plug tobacco, his features obscured, a dark shadow cast across his face from the gas lamp.

  At that moment, a carriage with the golden initials of John Jacob Astor on the crest pulled up opposite him at the kerb, and the city’s laureate poet, Fitz-Greene Halleck, who worked as Astor’s personal secretary, descended to the sidewalk and approached the shop.

  Halleck stopped dead in his tracks, momentarily taken aback by the apparition looming in front of him, for that is what Poe looked, despairing and desolate, hovering in front of the shop: a
ghost, a spectre.

  “Great heavens, Poe!” Halleck exclaimed. “Is this you?”

  Poe’s eyes rolled wildly beneath his knit brows. He smiled ruefully, squinting at Halleck through red-rimmed orbs, much bloodshot and unfocused, and nodded that it was indeed he.

  “‘Come to the bridal chamber, Death!’” intoned Poe in trembling voice. “‘Come to the mother’s, when she feels for the first time her first-born’s breath!’”

  Halleck stood markedly unnerved, chilled by his own words directed back at him by this strange presence.

  “Are you making light of me, Poe?” demanded Halleck. For it was from a verse Halleck himself had penned in regard to the murdered Mary Rogers from which Poe quoted.

  Going into a spasm of coughing, Poe fished a filthy handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped his mouth. His chin fell upon his breast. “I have had a difficult time of it this night past,” he mumbled. “And all this day I have walked several miles through the cold and rain, and, seeing a light here, thought that perhaps Mr. Anderson would let me warm up somewhat.”

  “Why of course, Poe. I’m sure. Come with me.”

  Holding tight to the suffering fellow’s elbow, Halleck helped Poe inside.

  “Here is the stove behind the tea boxes, almost red hot. Take off your coat and dry it by the warmth. What will you have, some of this port? You know Mr. Anderson surely. Mr. Anderson! A glass for Mr. Poe.”

  Poe looked helplessly to Anderson, standing openmouthed behind his display cabinet. “A feeling for which I have no name has taken possession of my soul, sir,” Poe explained. “I know not what to do. Please excuse me.”

  Anderson jumped forward. “Poe! Heaven above, I didn’t recognize you. What state you’re in, man! Sit down. Sit down.”

  Poe allowed himself to be led by Halleck and Anderson to a bentwood chair near the stove. The stove was one of the Franklin design, made of cast iron and set on half-inch-thick masonry tiles. The stove was positioned near the rear of the shop, behind the handsome oak and glass display cases, surrounded by a number of chairs and a rough table, with plenty of room for a group of talkative men to gather. Halleck and Anderson managed to sit Poe down where it was warm and he could dry himself and his clothes.

  “That’s all right, Poe. That’s all right,” Anderson said. Poe settled uneasily, Anderson doing his best to prop him up. “Here, some of this port will warm your inner humours,” the proprietor said, patting Poe’s back.

  An uncontrolled shiver ran through Poe’s body.

  The wine, provided by Anderson for the pleasure of his customers, shimmered red as blood in a decanter of cut crystal. He poured out a goblet for Poe, another for Halleck, and one for himself, and the three bent their elbows in homage to the old port.

  Poe drank his wine very quickly, without lip or smack, and as the warmth spread, he was simultaneously flushed with the dual feeling of both thankfulness and resentment for the attention and camaraderie the other men paid him.

  Keeping a guarded lowness of tone, Halleck made attempt at soothing the dispirited wretch, inquiring of his writing, the progression of his editorial career in Philadelphia, the state of his wife’s health, what had brought him to New York.

  Poe responded monosyllabically.

  “Are you hungry?” Anderson asked. “Here are some crackers, and here is some English pineapple cheese to go with them.” He cut slices from a great orange wedge and laid the crackers out on a platter in front of the poet.

  Poe gobbled a half dozen in rapid course. His mouth still full, he took a gulp of the sweet wine, before beginning quietly to again mumble lines of verse, more to himself than the others. His voice, tremulous and unsteady at first, became increasingly rich and melodious, indeed assuming the attributes of an actor commanding the stage. The port had taken hold, and his tone was now a more civil one, his charming accent bespeaking America’s southern reaches, soft, and less marred by the difficulties of drink, drugs, and the harrowing night previous.

  And so he went on in the singsong that so transfixed his listeners:

  “The loveliness of loving well.

  When falsehood was a ten-fold crime

  I held no doubt—I knew no fear

  Of peril in my wild career.

  Uncheck’d by sarcasm.

  Uncheck’d by scorn.

  So plighted in my early youth

  What was there left me now? despair—

  A kingdom for a broken—heart.”

  Upon completion, Poe looked sheepishly toward Halleck.

  Halleck nodded, moving his great head but an inch, down and up.

  The front door opened. The effete editor and poet Lewis Gaylord Clark of the Knickerbocker entered, quietly took off his coat, and sat by the fire, silently mouthing his hellos so as not to disturb.

  “You’ve committed my poem to memory!” Halleck was saying. “My God, Poe, why? My concern with the why and wherefore of your memorization of this, my homage to the memory of our Mary, one and all, prevents me from being more obstreperous. I didn’t know you to suddenly be so taken up by my poesy.”

  “I commit to memory much I judge of worth.”

  “Is that so? I’m much touched and honored,” Halleck smiled. “And surprised. How things have changed. As I remember last time I fell under your scrutiny, sir, you condemned me. Your appraisal of my poems after the reissuing of ‘Alnwick Castle’ was to deem them ‘unintelligible and banal,’ if my recollection is kerrect.”

  “We all make our mistakes, Halleck,” Poe winked grotesquely, “and we all in our turn have been driven to preserve our reputations and write of our Mary, too. Isn’t that right, Clark?”

  Poe glanced at the newly arrived gentleman while downing another long draught from his port glass, which Anderson had seen fit to refill.

  Poe returned his gaze to his benefactor. “Would it alarm you, Halleck, if I were to state that I am not, in fact, so impressed with your work? Does it not strike you odd, old fellow, especially now with our friend Clark joining us in the room, how many of we writers who frequent this welcoming shop of Anderson’s have seen fit to write of our dear departed Mary?” He glanced at Clark contemptuously. “Some better than others, sir.”

  A poem of Clark’s in tribute to she whom he called “the Beautiful Segar Girl,” had appeared on the third interior page of the Commercial Advertiser a few weeks after the discovery of the murdered girl’s body.

  Poe had condemned Clark many times over while editor at Billy Burton’s. Nevertheless, without further send-up, and without allowing Clark time to react, Poe now began to recite his turgid homage:

  “She moved amid the bland perfume

  That breathes of heaven’s balmiest isle;

  Her eyes had starlight’s azure gloom

  And a glimpse of heaven—her smile!

  Who that has loitered up Broadway

  But marked her mid the evening light

  (Encircled by the young and gay)

  With the face that said her soul was right!”

  Here, the shop’s proprietor, Anderson, was seen to wipe a tear from his eye. “She was just so,” he blurted. “I truly never met a girl with soul so right and beautiful as Mary. You have put it perfectly, Clark.”

  The others remained silent. It was well mentioned among the gossips that Anderson had been very much in love with Mary. In some circles there had even been talk that he was in some way implicated in her demise. “My Mary! My poor Mary!” he now cried, looking around, unable to contain himself as tears welled. “I miss her so. You know I cannot even bring myself to hire another in her place.”

  At that moment, saving the man further embarrassment from this sentimental outpouring, four noisy and animated gentleman entered the shop, caught up in their own personal conversation in regard to a business transaction just completed; they were all four well known to the lot: the Harper brothers—James, John, Fletcher, and Joseph—from the printing and publishing house of the same name.

  These gentlemen
were much aflutter, having just secured the deeds to a number of buildings that would extend their firm from Cliff Street down John as far as Pearl, making theirs the largest publisher in the land and the largest employer in the city.

  James Harper, the eldest brother, with his eye unapologetically on the mayoralty, was an acquaintance of the troubled Poe, if not much of an admirer. He greeted him sourly, going over to the stove where the poet was convalescing to engage him in conversation, asking what he was doing in New York.

  Poe answered quietly he was in the city to see John Colt.

  Joseph Harper, the youngest brother, much full of himself and also not much a fanatic of Poe or his reputation, snorted. “Word is the Colt family has engaged you for some quick-form portrait of gallant John in hopes of saving his pitiable self from the gallows. Is there any truth to that talk?”

  Poe looked at him through half-closed eyes. “There are some secrets, sir, which do not permit themselves to be told,” he said.

  “Quite so. Quite so,” James Harper interrupted. “But set the record straight, Poe. This is the story in circulation. You look all to hell, Poe. Tell us, what has befallen you now?”

  All of the Harper brothers had by now poured themselves ample tumblers of port and retired to the segar case.

  “Now and then,” Poe said, looking back from Joseph Harper to James, “the conscience of man takes up a burden so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. Thus, the essence of all crime is divulged. Alas! … We all believe what we will, eh, Mr. Harper?”

  “I’ve seen the first installment of your ‘Marie Rogêt’ story in Snowden’s,” interrupted Halleck, looking over from the segar case, where he had risen to choose a rhum-soaked crook. “To a man, we all stand in admiration of your work, Poe. You’ve brought back the wondrous Dupin from the ‘Rue Morgue’ murders. Bravo!”

  “There is certain talk that you will unmask the murderer of Mary Rogers in your final chapters,” Joseph Harper said. “Is it true, Poe?”

  Anderson almost dropped the decanter. “The murderer unmasked!” he exclaimed. “Who?”