Edwin replied, "It is not a question of what a man writes. Especially a man who writes to earn his dollar, as Poe was beginning to do then. It is a question of what a man does that says who he is. I was only twenty years old. Mr. Poe was twenty, also, only a few months older. Whatever he thought on slavery, he was quiet about it in the little time I was acquainted with him. He was quiet altogether, actually. He was a man with few associates, and if he had associates, they were not friends. He saw something of himself in me, and he decided right there that he would free me if he could.

"I never saw Mr. Poe again, but I'll never forget what he did. I loved him for it and love him still, even though I knew him a short time. I began employment for several of the local newspaper offices when I was freed. Now I assist in wrapping the papers to be delivered to various points around the city. It was in one of those offices that I overheard your complaints to the editors, around the time Poe died, that Poe had been used up by the press, and that even his grave was unmarked. I had not known where he was buried until then. After finishing work that day, I walked there and left a token at the place you described."

"The flower? Was that you who left it?"

He nodded. "I remember Eddie was always neatly dressed, and sometimes wore a white flower like that one in his button-hole."

"But where did you run to once you left the flower?"

"It is not a Negro cemetery, you know, and it would attract suspicions to loaf there in the evening. While I knelt at the grave I heard a carriage coming fast and made haste exiting."

"That was Peter Stuart, my law partner, out looking to see where I was."

"Every day after that as I readied the newspapers for delivery, I saw another ungentlemanly article about Poe's character-having long ago been taught to read by the Ridgeways and their Webster's spelling-book, I could decipher all of this unkindness. The living like to prove they're better than the dead, seems to me. Much time had passed when another fellow, a foreigner, began coming around to the newspaper offices, filled with blusteration about Poe. He claimed he wanted justice for Poe, but to my eye he wanted to spread base excitement."

"That is Baron Dupin," I explained.

"I talked to this man, more than once, asking that he should respect Poe's memory. But there is a saying he reminded me of: all sham-skin and no possum. He merely dismissed me, or tried to persuade me there was cash to be made for helping him." I remembered the day I'd seen the Baron with his arm snaked around Edwin's and thought they were conspiring.

"It was around this time that I saw you again, Mr. Clark. I saw you and this Baron, as you call him, arguing over Poe. I decided to learn more about you, and I followed you. I saw you bring that young slave to the depot, and stand up to that slave-trader, Hope Slatter."

"Do you know Slatter?"

"It was Slatter who arranged my own sale to my second owner. At the time I did not blame Slatter in particular, for I was just a boy and it was the life I knew. He had his job. But I came back to his pen once years later to ask who my parents were-for he had sold them and had split us apart, though he had promised all the owners he would never separate families. Slatter was the one man who knew, yet he refused to answer, and drove me away with his cane. Since then, I can never look up when I see him with his rumbling omnibuses on the streets, bringing slaves to his ships. It is strange, but he sits always with Poe in my head-I knew neither man's heart, I guess, but I know one put me in chains and the other took me out of them.

"I saw you defy Slatter. It seemed as though you might need help-and so when I happened upon you out this evening in the storm, I followed again."

"You probably saved my life, Edwin."

"Tell me about those men."

"Villains of the first order. The Baron owes large amounts of money to powerful interests back in Paris. This is why he pursues the mystery of Poe-for money."

"And your involvement, Mr. Clark?"

"I have no involvement with those men who wished to leave me under the sod! Whatever ideas they have formulated in their minds, they're fables. They don't know me from a bull's foot."

"I mean your involvement in all of this. You say this Baron pursues the mystery of Poe to feather his own nest. Very well. What do you pursue?"

I thought of the past reactions, the disappointed gazes of my lost friends, of Peter Stuart and of Hattie Blum, and hesitated to reply. But Edwin did not seem to want to judge me. His open manner had put me at ease. "I suppose my reasons are not very different from yours for helping me tonight. Poe freed me from the idea that life had to follow a fixed path. He was America -an independence that defied control, even when being controlled would have benefited him. Somehow, Poe-truth is all personal to me, and all-important."

"Then brisk up, sir. There may still be more for you to do for the good cause." Edwin signaled the waiter, who placed a steaming cup of tea in front of me. I don't believe I'd ever tasted anything so marvelous.

25

MY WAY HOME was more leisurely than you would think after a night like this. I was filled with relief. I had left both of my pursuers far behind somewhere in Baltimore. Yet there was more than this, more even than Edwin's camaraderie, that brought me my new sense of relief.

The day had been long. I had been brought into the Baron Dupin's sanctum, had heard the painful secret of Auguste Duponte's past, had discovered something of Poe through revelations of dress and cane, the full meaning of which my mind was still receiving. Something else had happened, too. As I walked through the streets, through a rain that was now no more than an occasional mist, I saw that particular flyer-a yellow flyer with black print, hanging on boards and lampposts all over the city. Some were floating in puddles from the storm. There was a vagrant looking at one under the trickle of gaslight, with his hands deep in the pockets of his threadbare suit.

I stepped in front of him and touched the paper to ensure that it was real. I saw that he was shivering and removed my overcoat, which he wrapped around himself with a grateful nod.

"What does it say?" he asked. He took off his bent hat, which had the crown knocked in. I realized the pauper could not read. "Something remarkable," I commented, and read aloud with a vibrancy that would have rivaled any one of the Baron's presentations.

What a sight I must have been. In my shredded, drenched, untailored, unmatched suit, coatless, my hair uncovered and straggled down the middle, leaning my tired body on the precious but bruised Malacca cane. The glimpse of myself in the looking-glass inside the front hall of Glen Eliza seemed to be from another world. I smiled at this thought as I climbed the stairs.

"Poe was not robbed," I said to Duponte even before any salutation. "I see your drift now. The cane he had, this type of Malacca, has a sword concealed inside. He had ‘played' with the cane at Dr. Carter's office in Richmond, according to the press. That means he would have known of the sword. If he had been robbed of his clothes, or violently treated, he would have tried to use it."

Duponte nodded. I wanted to show him more.

"And the clothes. His clothes, Duponte, would have been soaked through from the weather the day he was discovered. There are clothiers across the city who would change his suit for another."

"Clothing is a unique commodity," said Duponte, agreeing. "It is one of the few possessions that can be worthless and valuable at the same time. When wet, a suit of clothing is quite worthless to the wearer; but, as experience teaches us it will inevitably dry, it is just as valuable as a comparable dry suit in the eyes of the clothier, for whom the value comes only when he sells it later."