The ravens tale, p.22
The Raven's Tale, page 22
In my mind’s eye I see Elmira, dressed in blue satin and lace, standing at the altar of her wedding ceremony. Alexander Shelton bends his face toward hers to kiss her lips, but Elmira catches sight of me watching her from the back of the church.
She blushes. Oh, how she blushes!
And in that blush, I know she remembers what we shared.
She’ll regret this decision until her dying day.
And in that blush—
A clock down the hall strikes midnight, yanking me out of that train of thought.
With a groan, I roll out of bed, doubtful that inspiration is what I require to heal. I totter toward the door that leads from my bedroom to the upper level of the portico, not drunk, merely unstable.
After heaving a sigh, I yank the curtains aside with both hands.
Light blinds my eyes.
I wince from the glare.
Outside, the world shines as though I’m experiencing noontide in June instead of midnight in December. I throw open the door, stumble out to the portico, and brace myself against one of the wooden columns, careful not to fall over the low rail. Below me, a vision of the interior of a church without a roof has replaced our terraced gardens, and the gentry of Richmond fill the pews.
In front of the pulpit stand a bride and a groom, their hands clasped together, their backs facing me. Reverend Rice from the local Presbyterian church presides over the nuptials, and his voice chugs through the church as a charmless chant.
“ . . . for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part . . .”
The longer I stare, the more the silk of the bride’s pale blue dress warms to the lascivious pink of a blush.
“. . . with this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship . . .”
On the left-hand side of the aisle, amid the crowd of guests, sits a woman in a black bonnet who now, quite curiously, pats her lap in an iambic, eight-meter beat.
pat-PAT-pat-PAT-pat-PAT-pat-PAT
(pause-pause-pause-pause-pause-pause-pause-pause)
pat-PAT-pat-PAT-pat-PAT-pat-PAT
(pause-pause-pause-pause-pause-pause-pause-pause)
The rest of the wedding guests join her in this bizarre rhythmical patting, as though encouraging the creation of a poem or a song set to the beat. The meters of my poems often drum inside my head as I write them, but this is an amplified version of such a rhythm.
pat-PAT-pat-PAT-pat-PAT-pat-PAT
(pause-pause-pause-pause-pause-pause-pause-pause)
pat-PAT-pat-PAT-pat-PAT-pat-PAT
(pause-pause-pause-pause-pause-pause-pause-pause)
When the next round commences, the woman in the bonnet shifts toward me in her seat and says to the beat, “‘I saw thee on the bridal day . . .’”
She turns away just as my brain absorbs the fact that Lenore’s unmistakable nose and cadaverous complexion peeked out from beneath that ruffled bonnet.
The groom—no other than fish-lipped, locust-eyed Alexander Shelton—reels toward the commotion of the guests, but, despite his hisses and glares, the drumming continues.
pat-PAT-pat-PAT-pat-PAT-pat-PAT
(pause-pause-pause-pause-pause-pause-pause-pause)
pat-PAT-pat-PAT-pat-PAT-pat-PAT
(pause-pause-pause-pause-pause-pause-pause-pause)
The bride—Elmira—oh, God! Elmira—peers over her right shoulder, and her eyes swell at the sight of me watching from up in the portico.
Lenore turns toward me again from the pews. “‘When a burning blush came o’er thee . . .’”
“‘I saw thee on the bridal day!’” I call down to Elmira, hugging the column with my right arm, leaning over the railing. “‘When a burning blush came o’er thee/Tho’ Happiness around thee lay/The world all love before thee.’”
Lenore jumps to her feet and jerks a hand at Elmira. “‘I saw thee on the wedding day!’”
“‘When a burning blush came o’er thee . . .’” I leap back into my bedroom and scramble to locate a fresh sheet of paper on my table.
The guests pat-PAT-pat-PAT-pat-PAT-pat-PAT.
“‘I saw thee on the bridal day,’” I say in a whisper, dunking my quill into my inkstand.
“‘Tho’ Happiness around thee lay . . .’” shouts Lenore down in the church, and the rest of the wedding guests echo: “‘Tho’ Happiness around thee lay . . .’”
“‘The world all love before thee.’”
“‘The world all love before thee.’”
I sit down and pen the stanza, tapping my right heel to the beat so my poem doesn’t stray from its metrical feet:
I saw thee on the bridal day;
When a burning blush came o’er thee,
Tho’ Happiness around thee lay,
The world all love before thee.
“‘I saw thee on the bridal day . . .’” chants the crowd outside.
I dash back out to the railing. “‘And, in thine eye, the kindling light . . .’”
“‘And, in thine eye, the kindling light . . . ,’” say the guests, and they cease patting for a change in the meter.
“‘Of young passion free . . . ,’” I say.
“‘Of young passion free . . .’”
Elmira buries her face in her hands, so clearly remembering our passion she’s tossed aside for the dandy standing next to her.
I yank at the roots of my hair. “‘Was all on earth, my chained sight . . .’”
“‘Was all on earth, my chained sight . . .’”
“‘Of Loveliness might see.’”
“‘Of Loveliness might see.’”
The drumming commences against skirts and trousers.
I write down the lines in my bedroom, again tapping out the beat with my feet to make certain every word, every syllable, fits into place.
And, in thine eye, the kindling light
Of young passion free
Was all on earth, my chained sight
Of Loveliness might see.
“‘I saw thee on the bridal day!’” calls Lenore, sounding as though she now stands on the roof above the portico. “‘When a burning blush came o’er thee . . .’”
I burst through my door. “‘That blush, I ween, was maiden shame . . .’”
“‘That blush, I ween, was maiden shame . . . ,’” says the crowd with their pat-pat-patting.
“‘As such it well may pass . . . ,’” Lenore and I cry out in unison.
Elmira raises the hem of her pink skirts and staggers down the aisle toward me. Her blush of shame tells me she still loves me. She wants me, and I want her, but I’m not good enough. I’ll never be good enough!
pat-PAT-pat-PAT-pat-PAT-pat-PAT
“‘Tho’ its glow hath raised a fiercer flame,’” I call down to her, “‘In the breast of him, alas!’”
“‘Who saw thee on that bridal day . . . ,’” says Lenore, and her shadow from the roof claps to the meter.
The wedding guests stand and clap along with her.
“‘It’s glow hath raised a fiercer flame,’” I say, pounding the beat against the sides of my head, “‘in the breast of him—alas!—who saw thee on that bridal day . . .’”
The audience claps and chants, “‘In the breast of him, alas!/Who saw thee on that bridal day.’”
“‘When that deep blush would come o’er thee,’” say both Lenore and I while watching Alexander escort Elmira back to the pulpit.
I shuffle backward toward my door. “‘Tho’ Happiness around thee lay. . .’”
“‘Tho’ Happiness around thee lay . . .’”
“‘The world all love before thee.’”
“‘The world all love before thee.’”
And everyone together, myself and Lenore included, clap and shout, “‘I saw thee on the bridal day!’”
I scrawl the last lines of the poem in the lamplight of my room, and the world grows intolerably silent.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Lenore
In the loft of the carriage house, I kneel in the darkness, buckled over in a sudden onslaught of pain.
My upper back churns and burns, as though a dozen fists are pushing beneath my skin in a frantic fight to rip through my flesh. My poet’s poem for Elmira drums in my head, but the words and the rhythm provide no relief, and in fact, the more the poem beats against my brain, the harder the fists struggle to break through my skin.
My dress tears above my shoulder blades.
I groan, so confused, so scared.
“Do not panic, Raven Girl,” says Morella’s voice from somewhere nearby, and a lantern flares to life.
I dig my forehead against the floorboards and grunt through clenched teeth, my molars rattling, aching. The air thins. The pain heightens. The fists punch with a ferocity that makes my ears ring. I rise up on hands and knees and arch my spine, and the loft shudders and creaks from the violence of my shaking.
All I can do is moan and pray for a swift death, and the moment I believe I’ll collapse, my back bursts open with a satisfying surcease of my agony. Something flaps into the air behind me.
I drop to my stomach, exhausted, drenched in sweat, still inexplicably confused. A blanket of feathers falls against me.
Morella crouches down in front of my head. The light of her lantern swings across the backs of my closed lids.
“Lenore,” she says in a voice that intrigues me enough to open my eyes. “I’ve never seen such ravishing feathers as these.” Her own feathered head nods to something behind me, and she guides me up to a seated position, despite the buttery consistency of my body.
I manage to twist around, and my lips part in shock at the sight of my shadow on the wall—the image of a girl with a bald head, yes, but from her back there now rises a pair of wings.
Voluminous, voluptuous wings, varnished in the velvety sheen of night.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Edgar
In the misty, mid-December morning hours, Pa and I leave Moldavia for the counting room of Ellis & Allan. A wheel needs mending on our carriage after our travels from Charlottesville, so we’re to walk the nine blocks to the office, out in the open, offering everyone a view of Pa ushering me into the life he’s planned for me.
Our breath fogs up the air in front of us, as though we’re puffing on pipes.
Our footsteps fall in the same meter as the poem I penned the night before.
I saw thee on the bridal day . . .
I peek across the street at Elmira’s house, which exudes the exhausted air of a night well spent. A lost glove loiters on the lawn. Broken glass winks from the front drive. Smoke sighs from the chimneys with little coughs of fatigue.
Up ahead, a piece of paper flutters across the road. We pass it, and I spy a title written in the heading of a handbill: “The Prodigal Son of Richmond.”
I pay the thing no heed, until I notice similar papers posted to various doors around the city, and a twinge of dread pinches at my stomach. Once upon a time, I distributed my poem “Don Pompioso” around town in such a manner to lambaste a fellow who told me he wouldn’t associate with the son of itinerate theater players. And I did so again with “Oh, Tempora! Oh, Mores!” a satire that ridiculed an ass of a clerk named Robert Pitts, who both insulted me and stole one of my sweethearts.
On the door of Ellis & Allan, Tobacco Merchants, hangs another copy of the handbill, the paper a burnished cream.
“‘The Prodigal Son of Richmond’?” asks Pa, ripping the page from the nail. “Is this another one of your satires you’ve posted across town?”
“No! I haven’t had time for any such thing. I just arrived home yesterday.”
Pa frowns down at the thing, and the more he reads, the deeper the wedge between his eyebrows puckers. He raises his eyes. “This appears to be a poem about you.”
I grab the paper and read, aghast, a poorly penned mockery of my shameful return to Richmond. The poem pokes fun at my debt and my “excesses,” as well as my failed romance with Elmira. Our names aren’t mentioned, but I’m identified as the “moody child of strolling players,” and she “the Richmond lady fair with riches beyond compare.” Briefly, I fear that Garland followed me into town and devised this attack as some sort of revenge for my infidelity as an artist, but I realize that a hack with an underdeveloped prune for a muse obviously vomited up this twaddle.
“Who wrote this?” I ask, spitting as I speak.
Pa unlocks the door. “Someone whom you surely insulted in the past.”
“Did you or James Galt speak about my debt publicly?”
“Why would James know about your debt?”
I gulp at my mistake of bringing up James.
“Did you write to him about your problems?” asks Pa.
I lower my eyes back to the letter.
Pa shakes his head in disappointment. “Let this be a lesson to you about begging family members for money.”
“Do you think he would have told people about it?”
“Let this, furthermore, teach you the dangers of ridiculing anyone whom you believe inferior to your intellect in a public and demeaning manner.”
Pa rattles the latch and pushes open the door. “Come inside. Light a fire, so you may burn that monstrosity. We’re already wasting time.”
I crouch down in front of the grate, throw this attack on my character onto the firewood, and grab the tinderbox to strike a spark in the char cloth. I make a dozen failed attempts before a flame huffs to life. Two men pass by the window, chuckling, so I stay down on my knees, stoking the fire long after it needs stoking, so no one will see me, laugh at me, mock me for my fall from grace.
My spirits wither in the stacks of ledgers and dust. All I smell, all I taste, is the tobacco smoke embedded in the knotty panels of the walls from the thousands of pipes Pa and Mr. Ellis smoked in this room to sample the product and to survive the strains of their business. Pa doesn’t need the mercantile anymore, now that he’s sitting on his fortune from old Uncle William, but during the more difficult years of the business, oh, how Ma fretted! How Pa snapped at all of us and paced his chamber late into the night as he battled bills and plummeting profits.
Merchants and tradesmen are gamblers, too, I remember.
It is not just poets who risk financial ruin.
By noon, the weather darkens. Rain bats at the window beside me, and I see my soul standing out in the mud of Tobacco Alley. She wears the feathers of a raven and answers to the name “Lenore,” but I recognize an intimate part of myself in her eyes.
Kill her, and you shall kill me.
She places a finger to her lips, as though she wants me to remain quiet, and then she rotates around to face the brick wall of the mercantile across from me. My stomach leaps, for a pair of wings—a tremendous expanse of pitch-black feathers that would put the Morrigan to shame—drape her frame from her shoulder blades down to the backs of her knees.
Pa taps the ledger in front of me. “Stop daydreaming, Edgar.”
I gasp. “I’m sorry.”
He cranes his neck and peers out the window, but my Psyche has flitted away.
Whenever I’m not writing, time trudges forward with the maddening pace of a funeral procession.
On Christmas day I’m called away from my desk in my chamber and asked to join the family at the dining room table, where I sit as a ghost of the former inhabitant of Moldavia known as Edgar A. Poe. Surrounded by Ma, Pa, Aunt Nancy, and the late Uncle William’s grown children—William Jr. and James—along with William Jr.’s wife, Rosanna, and their infant son, I feast on oysters on the half shell, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, mince pies stuffed with beef suet and apples, candied sweet potatoes, baked celery, spiced cranberries, plums soaked in wine jelly, plum pudding, and port.
No one speaks to me.
I don’t speak to them.
Pretty Rosanna avoids looking at me, as though the gloom dripping off me makes her uncomfortable—as though my melancholy might splatter onto her and stain her dress.
James catches my eye over the plum pudding but flinches, perhaps remembering the loan he denied me—or perhaps he’s, indeed, the hack who wrote that twaddle about me and posted it around town. He shifts toward Aunt Nancy and tells her about his recovery from a recent case of the mumps—a conversation involving ghastly swollen glands and sweat stains on his pillow—a topic, evidently, more palatable than conversing with the beggar at the table.
Whenever I’m not writing, time trudges forward with the maddening, mortifying pace of a funeral procession.
During the daylight hours, I toil under John Allan’s thumb, without any wages. If I ever complain or ask him to help me obtain some other position outside of this Gehenna, he shows me letters from creditors, shopkeepers, and Mr. Spotswood, demanding payments of my debts.
“You owe me years of work for what you’ve done, Edgar,” he tells me. “Years!”
I seek respite in the drawing room of Miss Mackenzie’s boarding school with my sister and her schoolmates. Rose enjoys playing music on the piano for me and tells me, “I’ve embraced my muse of music, Eddy,” and she nods to a bright yellow warbler with a mask of black feathers, perched outside the window. Rose prefers—and she’s much better at playing—somber melodies that pluck at the heartstrings rather than compositions of joy, so I leave the boarding school wiping my eyes with a handkerchief. My sorrows stick to my lungs like tar.
I receive no comfort from my Richmond friends, who shun me for my recklessness.
“He isn’t home this morning,” their servants or mothers say at their doors every time I knock. “I’m sorry, Mr. Poe.”
Whenever I’m not writing, time trudges forward with the maddening, mortifying, miserable pace of a funeral procession.
My mind strays in the counting room. I feel a tug on the right leg of my pantaloons and discover Lenore crouched down beneath my desk, her wings cloaked around her like sable robes, her skirt a mound of feathers that reminds me of the stately ravens of the Tower of London.
