Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru

by Karen Lee Street

  Mrs. Carr smiled. “You must bring her again. The gardens are ever-changing through the year. We have many exotics in the glasshouses and a very extensive collection of native plants.”

  A serving girl came in with a tea tray and a lovely aroma suffused the air as she poured. When she handed me my cup, I greedily drank down the warming beverage.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Poe.”

  I looked up to see Helena Loddiges swathed in a large pinafore. “Miss Loddiges.” I jumped up and the cup rattled as I placed it back on the tray. “I am so sorry. I did not hear you enter.”

  “She speaks and walks as quietly as a mouse,” Mrs. Carr said. “She would make a fine bird collector herself, for she can creep up on man or beast unnoticed.”

  Miss Loddiges frowned slightly. “Except that I would find it impossible to kill the birds.”

  I found this declaration more than odd given her work as a taxidermist and her penchant for wearing adornments made from creatures that had once soared the skies.

  “To extinguish the life of an animal is quite different to reviving a dead creature through my art,” she said as if she had read my mind.

  “Indeed it is.” Mrs. Carr rose to her feet. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Poe. I will let you two get on with your business while I attend to my own.” She nodded her head and left the room.

  Miss Loddiges perched on her chair and picked up the tea that had been poured for her. She sipped and waited as if expecting me to speak.

  “Have you been at work?” I asked, nodding at the pinafore.

  She glanced down at her attire and seemed surprised for a moment. “Yes. I should have left the pinafore at my work table,” she said ruefully. “But it seems quite clean.”

  “Yes, very. Fear not.” I was certain that a pinafore stained with bird entrails was not polite attire for any Philadelphia drawing room, even one owned by scientists, but Mrs. Carr had not seemed affronted by her guest’s clothing. “Is your project something for the Carrs?”

  “For Colonel Carr. He rescued an injured Trochilus colubris, and kept it for several months in a heated glasshouse, but it succumbed when the temperature dropped one night, just before I arrived.”

  “Quite the coincidence.”

  Miss Loddiges’s eyes flashed with indignation. “Not a coincidence. It is much more than that.”

  I remembered the light-hearted remark Andrew Mathews had made about her belief in ornithomancy. “You think it to be a sign?”

  Miss Loddiges stared as if I were profoundly slow-witted. “A Trochilus colubris is attacked by a Falco sparverius—most uncom-mon—but is rescued by Colonel Carr. He keeps the creature alive in the simulacrum of a jungle paradise for several months, but it expires a day before I arrive in Philadelphia?” She said it as if delivering a lecture.

  “You believe the uncommon attack on the hummingbird is some kind of message regarding Jeremiah Mathews’s death?”

  “Murder.”

  “Murder,” I echoed. “And was Jeremiah’s expedition to Peru conducted on behalf of your father?”

  “Yes,” she said mournfully. “He was to bring back bird skins for me to mount for my father’s collection.”

  I could not think what words might console her, so said nothing. She finished her tea and abruptly stood up. “Perhaps it would help your investigation if you understood the process?”

  As first I was baffled, then realized with some horror what she meant, but could not politely refuse the lady.

  “Yes, it would be illuminating to see your work.”

  Miss Loddiges led me down a hall to the back of the house. We exited the door into a garden area with scattered heaps of stubborn snow and entered the door to a large glasshouse, which was kept warmer than the Carr family home. It was filled with exotic plants and the winter light gleamed with a sharp, blue brilliance through the glass. Miss Loddiges made her way to a table stationed under a palm, and I followed.

  On the table was an open box which contained a needle and thread, some cotton wool, a pot of some mixture, a jar of white powder and a variety of delicate scissors, knives and pliers all neatly arranged with their tips pointing upwards, ends aligned with precision. Somehow this looked oddly familiar to me, although I had not seen the lady’s work station at Paradise Fields.

  To the right of the glinting implements was a small cone of paper. Miss Loddiges unfurled it with long fingers made ugly by savaged cuticles and nails, and despite my knowledge of what that delicate paper would hold, my heart still jittered. The luminous corpse, with its emerald back and wings, its pearly-white breast slashed with scarlet at the throat, looked so forlorn, so very dead.

  “The Trochilus colubris. Colonel Carr named it Ruby,” she said softly. “Although of course the bird is a male.” She placed the hummingbird onto a piece of clean paper and then pointed out each of the implements on the table. “Tow, preservative mixture, scissors, a skinning knife, French cutting nippers, two pliers—bell-hangers’ and feather—tow forceps and stuffing iron. All essential.”

  And then it occurred to me where I had seen such a table before—I had been sent one, in miniature, as part of the macabre diorama. But why? Was Miss Loddiges included in the threat against me?

  Fierce concentration overtook my benefactress, and she began to work quickly and confidently, despite the minuscule proportions of her subject, explaining in her whispering voice each of her actions.

  “First I must renew the cotton in the mouth, nose holes, ear cavities, vent and shot hole, if there is one,” she said, as her fingers executed the delicate task. “One must not disarrange the feathers or stretch the neck.” She sprinkled the tiny carcass with cornmeal. “To absorb any blood or grease that might soil the feathers.” Miss Loddiges then measured and recorded every aspect of the hummingbird before she fastened its beak together with a tiny piece of bee’s wax. I had the most terrible vision of the poor creature swallowing down its shrills of fear.

  “Now we may begin properly.” She pointed at the hummingbird’s tiny wing. “I leave the humerus intact—to break the humerus in any wing is to cripple the most spiritual part of a bird. It is never truly necessary.” She briefly looked up to check that I understood. I nodded despite my confusion, and she returned her focus to the bird, gently twisting its legs out of joint and parting the feathers away from each side of the sternum. With a knife’s point placed exactly at the center of the bird, she sliced tenderly down along the right side of the breast bone to just under the tail. With the metal tip, she then loosened the skin in every direction, reversed the bird and repeated the process on the left side. “One must persuade the skin from the flesh. Do you see?” She delicately pushed until the legs could be cut away from the skin with the scissors. Her knife teased the skin away from the root of the tail, the wings, neck, ears and eyes until, finally, the skin was severed from the body. Miss Loddiges paused for a moment, pointing with a scalpel to emphasize her soft words. “Now I must cut the skull from the neck, pull out the tongue and excise the brains.” As she spoke, the heat became increasingly oppressive, the light draining away into darkness. “And then I will remove the eyes, but great care must be taken not to burst them as the vitreous humor will stain the feathers.”

  I do not know how her instructions went from there for queasiness overcame me, and I rushed to a potted palm where I thoroughly disgraced myself. When at last I felt less wretched and reasonably sure that I had tidied myself as best I could with my handkerchief, I made my way back to my benefactress’s dissecting table, my face burning with embarrassment.

  “I am so sorry. I do not know what came over me.” I searched for a convincing excuse, but Miss Loddiges shook her head, dismissing my apology.

  “It is I who must apologize. I forget that the minutiae of taxidermy unsettles many people. Jeremiah was fascinated by the process of bringing the birds back to life, but my father will not watch me at work, despite his extensive avian collection. Come, sit and drink some water.”


  She led me to a chair next to a small table with a pitcher of water upon it and poured some for me. As she handed me the cup, the downy wisp of a feather adhered to her finger caught my eye and bile rose up into my throat again. I pressed my hand to my mouth and coughed, setting the cup back on the table.

  “Thank you, I feel much recovered now.”

  “Very good,” she said, her eyes full of concern. “Perhaps I should simply tell you as much as I know about the murders?”

  “Yes, although I confess I feel unconvinced that I shall be able to assist you.”

  She ignored my deprecation. “Andrew Mathews was killed on the twenty-fourth of November 1841 when on an expedition in the Chachapoyan mountains of Peru,” the lady announced.

  I heard her words with some shock. “Chachapoyan mountains, you say?” I pictured the diorama with its mountainous backdrop and the man with the sack of miniature birds interred in a rough grave. And then there was the table with the implements, the female figure all dressed in black that was in my coat pocket, and the dead raven parts. How could I have missed the connection earlier? So shaken had I been by the reappearance of my nemesis that my mind could focus on nothing else. “I believe you are in terrible danger, Miss Loddiges,” I blurted out.

  “My father may think so too,” she said calmly. “Or he does not trust me. Or he considers me an embarrassment. I really do not know. But as he refused to allow me to communicate with anyone outside of our home, I was forced to travel here without his knowledge and to alert you of my arrival so cryptically.”

  “But I did not receive a letter.”

  Miss Loddiges stared at me with round green eyes that might have belonged to some exotic species of owl. Her gaze was solemn and infinitely patient. After a long minute of silence, I understood at last.

  “The diorama? It was from you?”

  “Of course.” She looked at me as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  I could not think of anything to say for a time, such was my confusion. Certainly Miss Loddiges was eccentric, yet she had seemed logical in our previous dealings, a student of the scientific arts to her core. But her story of murder with no proof, the strange diorama with cryptic message and her unannounced arrival in Philadelphia strongly suggested that the lady had lost her wits.

  “It was a most complicated message,” I finally said, “which would have caused you great trouble to put together. Why not simply send a letter?”

  “My father confiscated all the letters I tried to send. He refuses to believe the truth—that Andrew and Jeremiah Mathews were murdered.”

  I was not surprised at all by this. From what I had heard about George Loddiges, he was a man of science and logic who was unlikely to put much stock in his daughter’s wild fantasies.

  “When I told him that I would approach the authorities in London myself, he refused to let me leave the house. Of course I immediately wrote a letter to you about my fears, but he intercepted it. And the next one I wrote. He instructed all who work for him to confiscate any notes written by me and to turn them over to him. Truly, I was treated like a criminal,” she said indignantly.

  Or a woman who had lost all reason. “He was trying to protect you, I’m sure.” And I truly meant my words, for Miss Loddiges’s tale of murder in the wilds of Peru was unlikely to solicit a sympathetic response from the authorities if her own father did not believe her tale.

  Miss Loddiges stared at me with her disconcerting eyes. “My father is hiding something, that is for certain. And I promise you that I am being objective when I say that. He is distracted and indecisive, which is most unlike him. Something preys upon his mind, and I believe it is the suspicious deaths of Andrew and Jeremiah Mathews. But he will not confide in me, and I will not bury my head in the sand. That is why I had to contact you in such a surreptitious manner. I remembered how you admired the bird dioramas I constructed and said you could read the stories within them—indeed you fully gathered my intentions for each of them. I knew you would grasp the dark tale behind this one.”

  I thought back to the afternoon when I met Miss Loddiges in her parlor full of birds and recalled how I had briefly improvised my interpretation of the bird displays she showed me, simply to make conversation. Her confidence in me to interpret the bizarre diorama of waxen figures had been utterly misplaced.

  “But how did you manage to send the Wardian case and its contents if you were stopped from sending a letter?”

  “I secreted them in two shipments of plants and seeds to Bartram’s Gardens. They were wrapped in paper and addressed to you. I told the boy who helps our gardener pack the crates that they were birds I had worked on—a special order for a friend of Mrs. Carr.”

  “And you believed that Mrs. Carr would forward the packages to me?”

  “Of course. She is very reliable. We often send my taxidermy for clients in Philadelphia or New York in crates to Bartram’s, as they tend to be better accounted for than when shipped on their own. Mrs. Carr simply has them taken to the post office and they are forwarded on or collected.”

  “Which is what she did with the five packets addressed to me,” I murmured. I wondered what Colonel and Mrs. Carr thought of Miss Loddiges’s tales of murder, for she must have told them why she had come. “And have the Carrs sent your father notice as to where you are?”

  Miss Loddiges scowled. “Of course, but it will take two weeks or more for her letter to reach him and longer still for someone to come and fetch me. I am certain we will capture the villain by then.”

  Miss Loddiges looked so earnest and determined that I did not bother to repudiate her assertion, despite my own lack of faith in the enterprise she had ensnared me in.

  “Of course I would like to be of assistance,” I said, “but truly I have little idea of how I might help you.”

  “You are too modest. I read about your successes with the villainous ourang-outang and the murder of that poor girl who sold cigars. You will find out the culprit.”

  I was taken aback by her words. Did she not understand the boundaries between fact and fiction? That the tales I wrote were not directly based on my own adventures?

  “So let us begin our quest as soon as you are able.” Miss Loddiges retrieved a leather-bound book from her pinafore pocket and placed it before me. “This is for you to study. It is Jeremiah’s journal from the 1843 expedition. It notes their route, the birds he observed and those he collected.”

  I opened the book and found pages of Jeremiah Mathews’s precise handwriting and admirable illustrations of plants, birds and other creatures.

  “But please take great care of it. It was my gift to Jeremiah before he left for Peru and now it is all I have to remember him by.”

  “It will be my pleasure to read this, and I will take immense care of it.”

  She nodded, her pain at relinquishing the journal clear. “He sent it to me from Panama. I received it in late November and was glad of his imminent return. Just two weeks later we had news of his death.”

  “I am so sorry,” I murmured.

  “His letter is at the back,” she added.

  I turned to the back of the journal and found a folded piece of paper. Miss Loddiges gestured for me to open it.

  Colón, Panama

  4 October 1843

  Dear Helena,

  The expedition was a success. I have retraced my father’s footsteps to the lost city and have gathered a quantity of specimens that is sure to please your father. The journey to Cuzco was, in many ways, more arduous than that into the Chachapoyas, and all that I have witnessed and experienced leads me to believe that our suppositions must be true. We set sail for Philadelphia tomorrow, so I am posting this treasured gift back to you for safekeeping. You will find its contents illuminating, and I trust you will ensure that my work is completed if the journey home is as treacherous as I fear.

  I pray to see you before Christmas.

  Your true friend,

  Jeremiah

  “He sou
nds satisfied with the expedition, and that he accomplished all he set out to achieve.”

  Miss Loddiges dismissed my comment with an impatient flick of her fingers. “Our suppositions were that his father had been murdered. And it is odd that Jeremiah posted the journal to me from Panama rather than simply bringing it home with him.”

  It did indeed seem rather strange, but I could not shake the notion that Miss Loddiges’s imagination had gotten the better of her, and so I felt obliged to challenge her assertions.

  “There could be any number of reasons he posted the journal back to you from Panama,” I said, though I was struggling to think of one. “Perhaps he thought you might like the list of the birds he collected in Peru before his arrival in London?”

  “I don’t think so,” she persisted. “He speaks of the journey being treacherous, and I believe he is referring to a threat from a person rather than the sea. And look here at his entry on the third of October. Surely it is relevant.”

  I opened the journal and leafed through its pages until I found what was the last entry before Jeremiah Mathews’s inventory of birds.

  “‘They seek the Jewel. All is within,’” I read out loud. “A rather cryptic message. Do you understand what he meant by it?”

  “Not precisely, but it must be enormously important, for if you remember, he asked after a jewel on the night of his visitation. I believe that whoever was seeking this jewel murdered Jeremiah and perhaps his father too.”

  I nodded, even though I felt certain that Miss Loddiges’s vision of the drowned Jeremiah Mathews was a nightmare provoked in part by the mysterious journal entry, which had succeeded in piquing my own curiosity.

  “‘They seek the Jewel.’ It sounds as if Jeremiah expected you or perhaps your father to know what he was referring to—that you had spoken of a jewel before his journey. Is that the case?”

  Miss Loddiges thought for a moment, then said, “When Andrew Mathews was visiting with my father before his final expedition, I remember they spoke of old legends regarding a king’s treasure trove hidden in the mountains of Peru, but neither seemed to believe it truly existed. I did not find any other reference to a jewel in his journal, but perhaps Jeremiah uncovered something and was murdered for it. My father complained that some items listed on the inventory were missing, but I cannot tell you which ones.”