“I intend to study diligently at the University of Virginia and return a success,” I say to remind them both that I’m a serious candidate for marriage. To remind myself. The statement sounds rehearsed and forced, even to me.
Mrs. Royster rises to her feet, casting the blanket aside, and states once again, “Family is coming.”
“I’ll walk Edgar to the door.”
“You need to change into your other dress.”
“I’ll only be a minute, Mother.”
Before Mrs. Royster can balk any further, Elmira walks me out to the grand hall. The soles of our shoes clap against the floorboards in unison, and the backs of our wrists brush against each other, but we don’t dare hold hands.
“I’ve been thinking of what you said to me in church,” she says in a whisper near the front door.
My heart leaps. “You have?”
With a lift of her slender eyebrows, she casts a glance back toward the reception room. Before I can even blink, she pulls me out to the front stoop and swings the door shut behind us.
“Will you meet me in the garden before you leave for Charlottesville, Eddy?”
“Yes, of course. Will you give me your answer there?”
She slides her fingers around the lapel of my coat and leans her lips close to mine, her breath deliriously sweet and warm. “If I engage myself to you, it would need to be in secret.”
For a moment I can’t articulate any words—I’m too spellbound by her nearness to even breathe—but, somehow, I manage to say with a stammer, “You’re—you’re considering my proposal, then?”
She nods and smiles.
I cup my hands around her face and kiss her lips—those soft and gentle rose-petal lips that melt my legs into a pool of wax. Warm little breaths flutter through her nose, and I can’t help but sigh against her. We come up for air, and she clasps me to her breast, clinging to the back of my coat. I bury my nose into her neck, inhale her luscious lilac scent, and allow the tip of my tongue to taste her bare skin.
The door opens.
We untangle in an instant.
Mrs. Royster’s forehead furrows into a geological marvel of crevices and peaks.
She hands me my hat. “Go home, Edgar.”
“Yes, ma’am. Good afternoon, ladies,” I say in my finest Virginian drawl, and I scramble down the front steps.
Upon my return to the front drive of Moldavia, a gust of cold air knocks the hat off my head. I bend down to fetch it and detect a strange acridity in the wind.
The ripe pungency of damp earth.
The smell of an open grave up in the Burying Ground.
My heart hasn’t yet calmed from Elmira, but now it pounds with a thunderous rhythm.
I stand back up, and against the bleak clouds, Moldavia degenerates into a frail and decrepit shade of its former self. The red bricks fade to gray. The mortar binding them together greens with a film of moss and slime. The white paint of the pillars of the double portico brown up like roasted apples, and I can hear the wood creaking and straining as the columns fight to bear the weight of the house’s sagging bones.
I clutch my hat by my side and jog up to the front door before a voice that vibrates with the notes of a cello can call out from behind, Let them see me!
Inside the house, instead of my macabre muse, I’m welcomed by the dulcet tones of Aunt Nancy, Ma’s sister, conversing with Ma in the reception room to my right. My posture relaxes, and my stomach settles, for the presence of women—mortal, living women who care for me, despite who I am—always soothes my soul like a balm.
At three o’clock, I embark upon a feast beneath the bright Argand oil lamps of Moldavia’s dining room with Ma, Pa, Aunt Nancy, and our guests: the late Uncle William’s adopted, grown children—William Jr. and James—and William Jr.’s new golden-haired wife, Rosanna. We dine on barley soup, Virginia ham, chicken pudding, peas Francoise, roots a la crème, candied sweet potatoes, puff pastry, fruit, wine, and port.
“Did you hear about the disturbance in town earlier today?” asks William.
I try not to drop my fork.
Ma pales and asks, “A disturbance?”
Pa slices his ham with his eyes fixed upon the meat. “What disturbance might that be?”
“A frightful girl,” says William. “Well, not precisely a girl—a ghost, or a madwoman, or a dark harbinger of evil—ran about town, threatening residents with some sort of execrably bad jingle.”
Pa’s own fork clangs against his plate. “‘Execrably bad’?” he asks. “How do you mean?”
I lift my face toward him, wondering why it’s the criticism of the poem that worries him about Lenore.
“I don’t know,” says William, dabbing his face with a napkin. “I simply heard she was both a horrifying spirit and a facile rhymester. The night watchman proclaimed that he’ll be walking the streets tonight with bloodhounds and a fellow sentinel, armed with a musket.”
“Lock your doors, Jock,” says William’s younger brother, James, with a low chuckle. “We all know about this sensitive poet over here.” He nudges my foot under the table. “We wouldn’t want him to fall under the influence of a Gothic muse, if that’s what this rhymester was. I heard that Bishop Moore preached against muses just this morning.”
“Don’t be foolish,” says Aunt Nancy. “Who ever heard of a muse running around for all to see?”
“Precisely,” says Pa, still sawing at his ham.
William lifts his glass of port and asks, “What have you written lately, Edgar?”
I don’t say a word in response—not a word.
“Edgar has put his poems aside,” says Pa. “He leaves for the University of Virginia at the end of the week and will cast off such nonsense henceforth. Although I still believe the tobacco business is the route he ought to take instead of the university. I could use him in the counting room while we dissolve Ellis & Allan.”
“I’ve heard you write lovely love poems, Edgar,” says Rosanna—another sweet balm to the sting of this house, and I can’t help but notice how much the curve of her neck resembles Elmira’s.
To her I speak: “Thank you, ma’am. That’s kind of you to say.”
Pa steers the conversation toward the dissolution of his partnership—the most boring and banal topic in the entire history of dinner conversations.
My gaze strays toward the branches of the trees, sleeved in snow, rustling outside the windows. My eyes relax into a lull, and my mind again swims toward rhymes of death and sorrow, of red lips and deep blue eyes like those of Elmira and Rosanna, sealed beneath the lid of a coffin. I tip toward the brink of summoning that “Gothic muse,” until Ma breaks into another fit of coughing beside me.
After dinner, we retire to the reception room overlooking the James for music at the piano and more drinking. I hear the low tones of the darkness stealing over the horizon, as I tend to do in the evenings—a foolish fancy, perhaps, but it’s what I hear.
Before he settles into a chair, Pa claps a hand on my left shoulder, pulls his pipe from his mouth with a fleshy sound, and leans close to my ear, his breath sour and wretched.
“I need to speak to you after the guests leave,” he says, and his words settle into my bones, where they chill and writhe.