The name of light he bestowed upon me.
Lenore.
My name forevermore.
I feel almost human—almost wanted—and valued. But then the rest of his words seep into my brain with the sizzling sting of acid.
“Don’t come near me!” he yelled.
Don’t!
Don’t!
DON’T!
I crouch down behind my favorite stone in this city of sleeping souls and growl from the back of my throat with a satisfying rumble that vibrates through the trees and the family plots.
The Poe siblings fly away across the snow, repulsed. Horrified.
“I’m not meant to be hidden, Edgar Poe!” I scream after him, clinging to his darling Jane Stanard’s monument with the uncapped urn. “Let them see me, you coward!”
An object of some sort now lies in a heap beyond the graveyard’s boundary.
A pile of fabric, dark chestnut in hue.
A sniff of the air assures me that the grounds are free of any whiffs of gunpowder or malice. No one crouches in the evergreens, poised to shoot me.
For luck, I kiss the tombstone and inhale the rose-tinged perfume that drifts from the spirit of Eddy’s “Helen.” I hope her protectiveness toward him extends to me. His grief for this woman burns in the center of my charcoal heart, as it has for years.
With jarring creaks in the joints of my human ankles, I creep around the tombstone and slink toward the Poe siblings’ offering on the soaked feet of my stockings, which match the maroon hue of my poet’s chamber walls.
They’ve left me a cotton blanket and a pair of boots with scarlet socks stuffed beneath the tongues. I sift through the items, in search of a poem or a drawing—anything to appease the hunger now hissing inside my belly—but all I touch and see are sublunary nothings composed of leather, wool, and cotton. The boots reek of perspiration. The socks require darning in both heels. Yet I plop down on my rump in the snow and pull the coverings over my feet, relieved by the embrace of warmth around my soles and ankles. I wrap the blanket around my shoulders and cast my eyes toward a fogbank rolling toward me.
A line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth tumbles from my lips:
“By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.”
I draw a breath and brace for the chill and the sonorous wind.
A twig snaps.
I jump to my feet, the blanket spilling from my shoulders, and spy a man in a forest-green coat and an umber hat watching me from the fog, several yards away. I can’t quite see his eyes beneath the shadow of the hat’s brim, but he’s just standing there, staring at me, his mouth stretched into a taut line of concern, shoulders hiked. I don’t detect any hate emanating from his direction, and yet his presence—his sudden manifestation in the murk—makes my heart give a shudder.
The fog drifts across the gentleman, who, from behind that misty, meandering curtain has acquired a sudden, certain look of a spirit come to warn me of some fast-approaching horror. Ah, a luscious rush of shivers chills my spine with thrilling quivers; the small fright this man delivers piques my interest to learn more.
“Show yourself, sir,” I implore.
He ambles my way, emerging from the fog with a slight limp that strikes me as familiar. I shrink back, now recognizing the approaching face—the hawkish eyes, the curved nose, the enormous chin punctuating an unfathomably long head. He removes his hat to reveal a whitening crown of coarse red curls.
John Allan.
“I followed your footprints up here,” he says in the same deep Scottish brogue he uses to roar at my poet, and it stirs up a tempest of hate and sorrow inside me.
I trip backward over a tree root and take shelter behind a pillar of stone a foot taller than I.
The soles of John Allan’s boots grind across the snow, and he asks, in a voice that quavers with an unexpected tremble of emotion, “Cassandra?”
Baffled, I peek around the stone at him.
He steps closer, struggling to clamber over the mounds of powder and ice piled around the graves. “Do you remember me?”
Has he mistaken me for someone else? I wonder. Has he not come to strangle me?
With the brim of his hat pressed against his chest, he stands before me and tilts his head to his right, evaluating my face, which I pray resembles Cassandra’s.
“I heard about the sighting of a bizarre young woman down there in the city,” he says, his voice breathy, tremulous. “They said she appeared to have sprung straight out of the embers of Hell. I wondered if it might be you—if your appearance had altered after what I did all those years ago. Do you . . .” He rests his hat against his right hip and leans against his good leg. “Do you remember me, Cassandra?”
Knowing it wisest to play along, I ask, “Jock?”—uttering the nickname I’ve heard his wife and friends call him within the walls of Moldavia.
“Och! You do remember!” He smiles and inches closer. “I’ve often looked for you—even though I’ve known I shouldn’t. I offer my humblest apologies, Cassandra.” He bows his head, crinkles his eyes shut, and sniffs with a liquidity that suggests he might drop to his knees and bawl. “Don’t think I don’t remember your screams when I pushed you into that hearth . . .”
I back away.
“I’m sorry.” He edges closer. “I was young. I needed to focus on my work. You were a distraction. A chimera. A dangerous dream.”
“I don’t thrive on apologies, Jock. Art nourishes me—not guilt.” Imagining those hands of his forcing his muse into flames, I leap onto a sarcophagus and call down to him, “Give me poetry, John Allan! Now—before I frighten you so horrifically, I stop that cruel heart of yours from beating.”
He wipes his eyes with the back of a sleeve and coughs up two lines of a sonnet:
“When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field—”
“That’s Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 2,’ you dirty plagiarist. Give me an original composition, and hurry!” I claw at my stomach, my nails ripping at my dress. “I’m famished!”
He tugs at his collar and squeaks out another attempt at versification:
“The gay wall of this gaudy tower
Grows dim around me—death is near.”
My face sobers. I jump off the stone and glare at this thief of words.
“That’s Poe,” I say.
He blinks, clearly startled. “What name did you just say?”
“Poe.” The word leaves my rounded lips as a puff of air that makes him blink again and tilts him backward. “Edgar Allan Poe.”
John Allan’s mouth hardens. “How do you know about Edgar and his poems?”
“I’ve been watching you from the shadows, Jock.” I raise my chin, which I point at him like an accusatory finger. “You’re a jealous man. An unkind man. You long to kill another muse—his muse—but you shall rue the day you do, for I will ensure, with every ounce of power I possess, that your name goes down in history as the man who harmed and hindered a haunted young genius.”
He lowers his face and fusses with his hat. “I will not apologize for the way I choose to raise Edgar.”
“Take me to your house for supper. Invite me in. Prove to me you’re not an enemy of art.”