Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru

by Karen Lee Street

  “You have nothing to fear, Billy,” my wife immediately said. “We just have some questions for you.”

  Billy nodded cautiously, mistrust stamped upon his face.

  “Have you seen your mother recently?” Sissy asked. “She is here too, isn’t she?”

  Billy’s only response was to shrug, which Sissy took for sorrow.

  “Would you like us to take a message to her? I’m sure Mr. Cowperthwaite will allow us to deliver a note.”

  Billy shook his head. “She cannot read, miss.”

  “Well, I could read the note to her, and certainly she would treasure something written in your hand even if she cannot read the sentiments within.”

  “What are the names of the men you met with at the Mermaid tavern?” Dupin interjected, before Sissy could ask another question. He was as abrupt as she had been gentle and Sissy’s face tightened with annoyance. The boy’s mouth dropped open, giving him the unfortunate look of an expiring fish.

  “We followed them to St. Augustine’s,” I said, “so please do not lie.”

  The boy considered this for a moment, then said: “Father Healey and Father Carroll.”

  “Why must you do what they bid?” Dupin asked.

  The question surprised me as I had presumed the fee for his nefarious work was persuasive enough.

  The boy was stricken with shame and mumbled: “When my pa left, my ma had trouble getting work, so it was up to me. Father O’Byrne in the kitchen at St. Augustine’s would give me food if I worked in the garden for him. But it wasn’t enough. So I did jobs for Old Skipper too. He taught me and some others to pick locks and would send us to fetch things that he would sell at the Mermaid. Father Healey and Father Carroll drink there and never bothered Old Skipper about his business, but when they saw him give me money at the Mermaid one night, they said they ought to turn me in for stealing and both me and my ma would die in prison.”

  “And so you are indentured, in a sense, to Fathers Carroll and Healey,” I said.

  The boy nodded grimly. “That’s what they told me. And it didn’t stop when we were sent here two years ago. Or even when Mr. Cowperthwaite got me a proper indentureship. They would find me and give me jobs and then I would be sent back here for sneaking out at night,” he said bitterly. “My ma told me we left Ireland for food and freedom and we couldn’t find neither here and that’s the truth of it.”

  “Surely the priests can’t make you steal. Why not just refuse them?” Sissy asked.

  “I can’t abscond from them. God will help them find me and will send me and my mother to hell.”

  Dupin snorted at that.

  “What else have they made you do?” Sissy asked.

  “Deliver messages. Show people where to bring supplies for St. Augustine’s. Open some locks.”

  “And you just come and go as you please?” I asked.

  “As the fathers please,” he said. “They send me a message and I show it to whoever is on the gate and I’m let out.”

  “Who do Fathers Carroll and Healey work for?” Dupin asked. “Who wanted the journal they sent you to steal? Surely it was not for them.”

  Billy shrugged. “They said it was for their lady friend, as I told you.”

  “Do you not see how untrue that is likely to be?” Sissy asked.

  “I thought it was a lady from the church,” Billy said, his hesitancy indicating that he’d given it no thought at all.

  “Are they good friends with the pastor of St. Augustine’s, Father Moriarty?” I asked him. “Have you observed them talking together much?”

  The boy looked mightily confused by this. “Father Moriarty doesn’t seem to have friends, sir. At least not true ones. The priests listen to him because they have to. And I don’t think he would try to get a lady’s journal back for her.”

  “The best dissimulators are the most difficult to recognize,” Dupin observed. “We therefore have some work we would like you to do for us in recompense.”

  Billy nodded warily.

  “You said that Father O’Byrne gave you work in the church gardens. Is that still the case?”

  “When I go to Mass he does—Mr. Cowperthwaite lets us go, but he doesn’t truly like it.”

  “I want you to watch what Fathers Carroll and Healey do and to whom they speak when you are next at St. Augustine’s or called upon to work for them. Then report back to us. Take this for your efforts.” Dupin took out a small purse and retrieved some coins that he spilled into Billy’s palms. The boy looked stunned by the amount and quickly secreted the coins in his pockets.

  “Yes, sir. I will do it, sir. You have my word.”

  “You know where to find us should you learn anything at all,” Dupin added.

  The boy nodded guiltily.

  Silence settled down on us, and naturally we turned to make our way back into the workshop.

  “One other thing,” I said, as a thought occurred to me. “How do Fathers Carroll and Healey summon you when they wish for a job to be done? You mentioned receiving notes from them. Does Mr. Cowperthwaite deliver them? Is he friendly with the priests?”

  “No, sir, not at all,” Billy said, his eyes widening at the thought. “He is a Quaker, not of the faith. He would not support the fathers’ activities.”

  “Then how?” I persisted.

  “The birds,” Billy answered. “They send a bird and Mr. Cavelli gives me the message.”

  Sissy and I exchanged a confused look but Dupin instantly understood. “Pigeons? There are pigeons here?”

  Billy nodded. “I help Mr. Cavelli with them and sometimes Father Healey makes me wash out the pigeon house at St. Augustine’s.” He grimaced. “He tends the birds there.”

  “Where are these pigeons? Show us,” Dupin instructed.

  “Just over here.” Billy took us across the yard to a set of stairs that led to a flat roof, upon which a pigeon loft was situated. “Mr. Cavelli!” he called out.

  Moments later, a wizened, elderly man peered down at us. He exhibited a toothless grin when he saw Billy. “Good afternoon,” he said, his accent still flavored with the sound of his homeland.

  “We are very interested in your pigeons,” Dupin said. “Where do you fly them to?”

  “Many places,” Mr. Cavelli said. “We are quite far from the city and it is safer and faster than sending messages by boat.”

  “Do you exchange messages with St. Augustine’s?” I asked.

  “Yes, certainly. Would you like to see one fly?”

  “Please,” Sissy answered.

  The man disappeared and returned later with a bird in his hands. “The message is put here,” he explained, indicating the bird’s leg. “She takes it with her when she flies back to her home.” He threw a bird up in the air and it flapped noisily skywards, circled over us once, then disappeared into the blue. The old man and Billy gazed wistfully after it.

  “‘Even the birds of the air will carry thy voice, and he that hath wings will tell what thou hast said,’” Dupin murmured.

  “Father Keane’s warning,” my wife said.

  “I believe so,” Dupin agreed.

  26

  Lamplight shimmered over feathers of red, purple and green, beaks of orange and yellow, and staring eyes, heads cocked with curiosity. So life-like were Andrew Mathews’s drawings that it seemed the birds on those pages might suddenly take to the air and swoop around us.

  “I can almost feel the breeze in their wings,” my wife said, voicing my thoughts.

  Dupin, Sissy and I were grouped around the table in the parlor, examining the pages torn from the bird collector’s journal. Dupin’s hands sifted through each of the sheets yet again, his brisk movements revealing a certain frustration, then he returned his attention to the paper on which he had written out the names of the birds alien to the Chachapoyan mountain region.

  “Ephippiorhynchus senegalensis, Euphagus carolinus, Euptilotis neoxenus, Larus delawarensis, Leucogeranus leucogeranus, Numida meleagris, Rhynchopsitta
pachyrhyncha,” Dupin murmured. “The eared quetzal, helmeted guineafowl, ring-billed gull, rusty blackbird, saddle-billed stork, Siberian crane, thick-billed parrot.”

  “We have established that two of the birds are found here in Philadelphia. Another two are from West Africa, a further two are from Mexico and the final bird lives in Siberia and winters in China,” I said. “Is there some pattern to be found in the different habitats? Or was Andrew Mathews merely attempting to make it obvious that the birds noted could not be found in the mountains of Peru?”

  Dupin grimaced. “There may be a pattern, but I cannot see it. Certainly it would seem relevant that two birds are found in this area, particularly as Jeremiah Mathews died here. Why did he travel back via Philadelphia? He was bird collecting for George Loddiges, as was his father. Might it have been a jointly funded expedition with someone here? You mentioned the Bartram estate. Were they somehow involved?”

  “In truth, the thought had not occurred to me. Miss Loddiges was staying with Mrs. and Colonel Carr before she was abducted and certainly the Loddiges and Bartram nurseries conduct business together, but Miss Loddiges made no mention of their involvement in the expedition.”

  “I believe Helena would have told us if that were the case,” Sissy added with a touch of over-formality, which meant she was still annoyed with Dupin for talking over her when at Old Blockley. Dupin was not a man who took much note of the fairer sex’s subtle emotions, but surprisingly he noticed her frosty tone.

  “Mrs. Poe, I beg you to forgive me for my rudeness this afternoon and for my unpardonable lateness in offering my apology. I am so quickly immersed in the process of ratiocination that I lose sight of decorum. While there is no excuse for rudeness to a lady, may I at least offer an explanation?”

  Sissy nodded with a touch of reluctance.

  “You were making an admirable effort to assist the boy in communicating with his mother, but in the course of your conversation and in watching the boy, I came to realize that his mother is not in the almshouse, but rather the asylum for the insane. In attempting to spare the boy embarrassment, I fear I offended you.”

  Sissy caught her breath with a soft gasp. “Oh, my word. I did not see it. How awful of me.”

  “Not at all,” Dupin said. “I am certain he understood your good intentions.”

  “Of course he did,” I added, feeling my face redden, for I too had failed to perceive what Dupin had fathomed and now it seemed absurdly obvious. “But let us not dwell on our errors; let us instead solve this puzzle. Doing so will not only allow us to rescue Miss Loddiges, but might also assist Billy in escaping those rascals.”

  “Yes,” Sissy agreed firmly.

  “What about the bird names themselves. Might they be a cryptograph of some sort?” I wondered.

  Dupin nodded. “I thought something simple like an anagram using the first letter of each bird name.” He pushed a sheet of paper toward us. “E-E-E-L-L-N-R. I cannot see any meaning in this. If we add the first letters from the full scientific names, we have: C-D-E-E-E-L-L-L-M-N-N-P-R-S.” He tapped the letters he had written neatly upon the page.

  “Perhaps this will assist us.” Sissy reached into her sewing box and took out a pair of scissors. “Shall I?”

  Dupin handed her the paper and my wife quickly cut the letters into individual squares, then grouped them on the table, the consonants in one pile, the vowels in another. We scrutinized the letters for a time, as if willing them to arrange themselves into a message, and when that failed we took turns pushing the letters this way and that to form words: men, creep, speed, spree, scree.

  “Should we use all the letters in the bird names?” Sissy wondered.

  Dupin shook his head. “That would be rather complex and Andrew Mathews was a bird collector not a cryptographer. But of course it might not be the first letter, but rather the last, for example.”

  “Given that ‘Larus’ is the shortest word with only five letters, perhaps we should try the fifth letter of each?” I suggested.

  Dupin shrugged. “Overly complicated, I fear, but let us try.”

  He quickly wrote down the fifth letter of each word and Sissy cut them into squares. We examined the jumble of letters before us: A-A-C-D-E-G-I-L-O-O-P-S-W-Y. The word legacy seemed promising, given the journal and its contents. The remaining letters formed aid and swoop or paid and woos, but we could not discern a message within those words. Go copse waylaid also seemed to have potential, but if this were a summary of something that had happened to Andrew Mathews, it did not reveal the identity of the perpetrator or anything else particularly useful.

  “I believe this is a cipher and we are missing the key,” Dupin said in frustration. “It is either hidden in these pages or it is in some other part of the journal that Jeremiah Mathews left behind in England.”

  “Let us hope that is not the case. I would like to study the journal pages tonight. May I suggest that you read the passages I marked in Las Costumbres de la Gente de las Nubes that relate to the Chachapoyan mountains,” I said to Dupin, handing him the tome.

  “Yes, of course.”

  Sissy gathered up the letters scattered on the table and a page upon which she had copied down the names of the rogue birds in both Latin and common English.

  “And I will experiment with these a bit longer. I feel we have missed something.” Sissy ran her fingers lightly across Andrew Mathews’s bird drawings and her hand paused at the sketch of the Peruvian pepper tree and its flock of disparate birds. She stared at the page for a moment, then said, “This drawing caught the attention of Jeremiah Mathews, but not because of any non-native birds hidden in plain sight on the page. I wonder if it was because these Peruvian birds would never roost together in the same tree, particularly a tree that is growing inside what appears to be a cave. The drawing looks fantastical and might be easily dismissed as such, but what if it too has something of importance hidden in plain sight? Some valuable clue? Might it represent an actual location of significance that is disguised by these elements of fantasy?” she said, indicating the birds. “The king’s tomb, perhaps?”

  I half-expected Dupin to dismiss Sissy’s comment, but he went very quiet and stared into the flames, politely ignoring her hypothesis, or so we thought. Sissy’s face dropped and I said, “You’re correct that those birds would never roost together, and surely no tree could grow inside a cave, for that is what the structure appears to be. It seems to be an artist’s idle daydream, unless it is a metaphor of some sort.”

  “If there were a hole in the cave roof that let in light and water, as depicted in the drawing,” Dupin said slowly, “it would not be impossible to find a Schinus molle in such a location. The Peruvian pepper tree often lives several hundred years and, as we know, they were used to mummify the dead. The trees may have been important to the Cloud People in their burial rituals.”

  Sissy nodded slightly and picked up the drawing of the Schinus molle. She examined it for a time then placed it back on the table. “Diego Fernández’s description of the hidden chamber behind the mud brick wall they knocked down—he mentions primitive wall paintings,” she said, indicating those depicted in the drawing. “And a gap in the chamber’s roof through which a shaft of light fell, illuminating a large emerald on an earthen altar.” She pointed at the branches of the pepper tree reaching up toward the hole in the roof of the cave in Andrew Mathews’s drawing. “What if this is a drawing of the hidden chamber that the Spaniards explored and Fernández described in his book? If a Schinus molle seed sprouted in the earth after their discovery, might there now be a tree something like this?” She gently traced the roots of the tree snaking into the earth. “And if so, might its roots have grown around the emerald Fernández saw on the altar?”

  Dupin gave my wife a curious glance and leaned in to study the drawing. “It is not an impossible theory,” he finally said.

  My wife smiled and added, “If this tree exists, Jeremiah Mathews may indeed have found the legendary jewel and perhaps even t
he entrance to the king’s tomb. What if the stone at the front of the altar that Fernández mentioned hid yet another chamber, and the emerald was situated there to mark its location?” Her eyes were gleaming with excitement.

  I stared at the drawing, my own imagination ignited. Sissy’s theory did not seem to me any more fanciful than Fernández’s descriptions of what he had seen in the burial chamber of the Cloud People so many years previously. Had Jeremiah Mathews been led to the jewel of Peru by his father’s peculiar drawing? Dupin’s distracted expression suggested that he was pondering those same thoughts. Sissy ran her finger lightly over the edge of the drawing then stood up.

  “Unfortunately we will not, tonight, solve the mystery of whether Andrew Mathews truly did discover the king’s tomb or if he or his son found the notorious jewel,” she said with a smile. “Perhaps we should visit Bartram’s estate in the morning and speak with the Carrs. Helena told me that they knew Andrew Mathews very well and met Jeremiah—perhaps they will see something in the journal pages that we missed, or have a thought that might help us find Helena. Mrs. Carr must be deeply worried about her and will be eager to assist us. Goodnight, gentlemen.” And my wife was gone before we could wish her the same.

  27

  MONDAY, 18 MARCH 1844

  We did not make the journey to Bartram’s estate the next morning, for a smartly dressed boy arrived at the door with a letter.

  “From the United States Hotel, sir.” He handed it over and was off down the road before I could muster my thoughts to question him. I brought the letter to the kitchen table, where Dupin sat with Muddy, the oppressive silence alleviated only by the chatter of teacups on saucers.