The man tightens the reins and sends his horse galloping away with a whistling wind that tousles my hair.
A black cat leaps over a brick garden wall and stops in my path. With piercing green eyes like the two pools of Hades, the beast traps me in a stare that congeals the new blood in my veins.
“What is that?” I hear a woman ask from the house connected to the garden wall, and I assume she must mean this foul feline.
The beast arches its back, its ebon hair standing on end, and it hisses with a show of needle-sharp fangs.
I bare my own teeth and hiss back with a breath that sends the cat rolling over, mewling with the cries of a frightened kitten. It then bolts across the street on a blur of dark legs, and I lean forward and shriek from the depths of my belly to ensure that the scoundrel never crosses my path again.
“Oh, God! What is it?” asks the woman again, and I look up to discover small gatherings of men, women, and children—mortals with complexions of black, white, brown, and pink—huddled together on the stoops and porches surrounding me. The woman speaks of me, I realize. I’m the dreaded “it.”
Everyone watches me, judging me, wondering what I am, their mouths agape, arms corded around each other. Again, I lift the hem of my skirt to keep the soot-powdered fabric from dragging in the snow, and I rotate around for all to view me, proud of the purple-and-green iridescence of the feathers on my skirt—impressed with the ability of my slippers to smear smudges of charcoal across the virgin white powder.
As I turn I call out:
Beware, a maiden unrefined,
Leapt out from a darkened mind,
Lo! She sees yon gawking faces,
Feed her fear, not charming graces,
Watch her!—creeping, sweeping o’er,
Reaping rhymes of death and horror!
“Who brought this grotesque girl into the city?” shouts a man from behind me, and I whirl around in his direction.
The Right Reverend Bishop Moore plods toward me in the snow, his thin strands of white hair blowing against the shoulders of a gray woolen cloak, a rust-colored scarf coiled around his neck. A breeze ushers the musty smell of his church ahead of him.
He balls his gloved fists by his sides and tromps toward me as though he aims to knock me down. “Who is responsible for her?”
“Come inside,” says a mother in a house on the corner up ahead, dragging her children indoors. “This is far too horrible for you to see.”
“This is all in bad taste!” calls a man from an upstairs window. “We don’t tolerate anything bizarre here in Richmond. And on a Sunday, no less.” He swings his shutters closed with a thwack that makes me flinch.
“Shall I fetch my musket?” asks the woman at the house beside me, and I notice she’s a sturdy specimen of the human race with broad shoulders, massy hands, and shrewd-looking eyes that might excel at focusing on a moving target.
“Whose trick of sorcery are you?” asks the bishop, stomping closer, his voice echoing across the houses. “Did the devil send you?”
I lean forward, my hands clenched on my skirts, and respond with another howl that could summon the dead. Ha! I hope it summons the dead!
Something explodes nearby, and an object whizzes past my right arm with a scream of hot air. I stumble backward, the world brightening, loudening for a dizzying moment, and a metallic taste scours my tongue. When I come to my senses, I find the source of the attack: across the street stands a man in a dun-colored hat who holds a smoking pistol.
“Did you just try to shoot me?” I shout at him.
The fellow doesn’t respond. Doors slam shut around me.
I march toward the assassin. “I said, did you just try to shoot me?”
He shuffles backward in the snow, slipping for a moment, his hat sliding down his forehead, then he breaks into a run in an eastward direction. I tear after him, but another gunshot rings out from behind. I dive to the snow, swallowing a mouthful of slush, and the woman who threatened to fetch her musket says, “I almost hit the demon!”
“Leave this city!” calls the bishop. “I don’t know who summoned you or what you are, but someone will pay for this egregious sin. Richmond is no playground for devilry!”
Someone throws a stone at the back of my head. My eyes sting with tears. These fools aren’t simply frightened—they’re violent.
I push myself to my feet and run northward to a place I know well—the Burying Ground on Shockoe Hill—that city of the dead high on the crown of Richmond.
CHAPTER FIVE
Edgar
A path of charcoal footprints leads away from Moldavia, starting in a drift of snow piled next to the northeastern corner of the portico, below my room. I stuff my drawing of Lenore into my breast pocket, grab a spade from the toolshed, and bury her tracks beneath heaping scoops of fresh powder, fearing that Pa will trace the dirty prints back to my chamber—fretting that all of Richmond will know what I’ve released.
An explosion, like the firing of a pistol, ricochets across the city. I flinch, and then a second blast rings out from the same easterly direction.
It can’t be! I keep shoveling. No! That had nothing to do with that phantasm from my room prowling the streets—or Pa witnessing her out there.
Perspiration drips from my pores, despite the freezing air. My heart pounds. My arms ache. Too many months have passed since I’ve had opportunities to run, swim, and box, to exercise my muscles and my lungs—and yet, despite the discomforts of my frantic shoveling, I focus my attention on the University of Virginia, waiting ahead, almost within reach.
Bury this evidence of your macabre fancies, I tell myself with each scoop, and by early next week you’ll be living a three-day’s journey away from Pa and the Castle Moldavia, immersing yourself in ancient tomes, feasting on historical research for the epic poem that will inspire everyone to finally appreciate you: “Tamerlane.”
Lenore’s footprints journey out to the main street of Richmond and travel into the heart of the city. I cringe at the thought of shoveling snow for the next eight to ten blocks and abandon my spade in our vegetable garden.
Using only my feet, I kick away the charcoal tracks until I reach Seventh, where I realize how suspicious this all must look: that eccentric Edgar Poe, son of strolling players, amateur thespian, writer and reciter of poetry, covering the marks of his guilt in the middle of the street for all to see.
I shove my hands into my pockets and walk like a normal human being—not a desperate, murderous fiend. I’m aware of the cacophony of my boots crunching across the snow and the clangs of a bell on a steamer in the James, but my ears strain to hear any cry or howl that might reveal the location of Lenore. A pall of chimney smoke drapes the city, bleeding into a fogbank that drifts up from the river in a chilling shroud of mist that soon wracks me with shivers. The farther I stalk through the neighborhood, the more the smoke builds inside my nose, and I worry I may be smelling her.
“Eddy!” calls my sister, Rosalie, from behind me—a sister I scarcely ever see, even though she lives a mere block from me at Miss Mackenzie’s boarding school. The Mackenzie family took Rose in when she was a one-year-old babe in arms, back when the Allans staked their claim over me. And our older brother, Henry—a seldom-seen shadow—has lived in Baltimore with our Poe grandparents ever since our parents left him there as an infant.