Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru

by Karen Lee Street

  There was a groan, a thrashing of bedclothes, and the caretaker sat up. I moved swiftly toward him, clutching my pistol.

  “Hands up—now!”

  I could not truly see what Jimmerson was doing until a faint light bled into the gloom. Miss Loddiges had lit the lantern that was on the small table, and I was at once glad of her presence. Jimmerson’s face was the picture of terror, eyes darting from the pistol in my hand to the fire poker Miss Loddiges brandished.

  “What do you want?” he stuttered. “I have nothing to steal.”

  “Do not play the innocent,” Miss Loddiges said sharply. “You know very well who I am. Your victim has escaped and will bring you to justice. Now put on your trousers and coat. You must come with us.”

  “Where?”

  “The police will wish to speak with you,” I said. “We have captured your employer and you must testify against him.”

  “And confess your crimes,” Miss Loddiges added.

  “But I did nothing,” he declared. “I am innocent.”

  “Do not lie. You were Renelle’s accomplice when he kidnapped me. You carried me to the coach!” Miss Loddiges protested indignantly.

  Shame-faced, the man said nothing more as he climbed cautiously out of bed and pulled on his trousers, then put on a coat over his nightshirt. He took his time lacing his boots until Miss Loddiges shook the poker at him.

  “Do not believe that I am afraid to use this weapon,” she said.

  Jimmerson got quickly to his feet and walked outside with his hands on his head, while I followed behind him, my pistol directed at his back. Jimmerson whined and whimpered the entire walk toward the house, but he was not fully moronic for he had judged my character accurately. When we were about ten yards from the door, he took to his heels, leaving me with the option of shooting him in the back.

  “Fire before he reaches the woodland!” Miss Loddiges cried out.

  I do not know if she truly meant what she said or was merely trying to frighten the man, but the caretaker’s speed doubled and he disappeared into the trees.

  “You had a clear shot,” she snapped, wheeling to face me, pure anger on her face.

  “A clear shot at murder and I am in no hurry to commit such an act.”

  “He deserved it!” she shouted, hurling the poker as if it were a spear.

  “No, he did not,” I said quietly. “He was but a pawn. Now, let us go find a night watchman and inform him of Renelle’s treachery.”

  “Fine,” Miss Loddiges muttered. “But I would not have hesitated in your position.”

  I was aghast at the lady’s vehemence and very glad she did not have her own pistol. Through her work she had become inured to the sight of dead creatures, and I wondered if that made her equally inured to the thought of murder.

  44

  The long walk to the night watchman’s station house in Germantown was made in relative silence as my attempts at conversation were met with monosyllabic answers. Miss Loddiges’s tangible fury at my failure to shoot the caretaker was most disconcerting. When we found the watchman, she described all that had happened in precise detail, and when the watchman roused an officer of the police, she repeated her story; the officer immediately agreed to make his way to Renelle Mansion to apprehend her abductor.

  The night watchman secured us a carriage to take us back home, and we arrived to a worried but joyful Sissy, who threw her arms around each of us before ushering us to the parlor fire. Muddy brought in cups of steaming broth, which improved Miss Loddiges’s humor greatly, and she recounted her abduction to Sissy when gently pressed.

  “It was incredible,” she told my wife. “I had never imagined that such a thing might occur in nature, that number of birds in one place. And the pigeons themselves are exquisite. The delicate colors, the elegant shape of them, and so unafraid of humans. Which will be their downfall,” she said darkly. “When the men appeared amongst the trees and began to fire their guns, truly it was a massacre. I could not believe that anyone might be so cruel as to slaughter such magnificent creatures, but to the hunters, it was great sport.”

  “It was a terrible thing to see,” I said. “Forgive me for taking you there.”

  “No, no,” Miss Loddiges said, shaking her head. “I needed to witness it. It made me question everything—my father’s collection, my taxidermy work and, dare I say, humanity. Must we extinguish the lives of these wondrous creatures with the aim of fashioning a facsimile? Surely a drawing of the bird alive in its own habitat is preferable to a dead bird used to ornament our parlors. And as these thoughts ran through my mind, I understood that Jeremiah had come to a similar conclusion, that he had found a hummingbird so extraordinary he had wished to bring it back to us alive—that he hadn’t killed and skinned it. And just as that thought came into my mind, someone grabbed me and stuffed a handkerchief into my mouth so that I nearly choked. He then hoisted me up and his accom-plice—the caretaker—held my feet. As they carried me through the woodland, I tried to struggle and could not believe that no one seemed to notice what was happening to me, all were so focused on shooting the birds. I managed to drop my gloves on the path and then a hummingbird ornament, which I thought would be clues that I had been abducted if you managed to find them.”

  “My word,” my mother-in-law mumbled.

  “Excellent clues indeed,” I said. “We searched every inch of the ground, but it was only when we came across your gloves and the bird that we had any notion of what might have happened to you and the direction in which your abductor had taken you.”

  “When we arrived at Renelle Mansion, the professor pretended that my father had sent him. Quite why he thought I would believe that my father would want me hoisted over a man’s shoulder, bundled into a carriage and locked in a room before I was escorted home is a mystery to me.”

  “He made quite a mistake in presuming that you are lacking in intelligence,” Sissy declared. “Truly, it is a trial to be continually underestimated.”

  “Indeed,” Miss Loddiges said. “Although in this instance it was, perhaps, an advantage. As much as it pained me to play the imbecile, I thought doing so might provide an opportunity to escape, but my plan did not succeed.”

  “You cannot imagine how sorry I am that we did not discover where you were more quickly,” I said, brimming with guilt.

  “That was nearly impossible,” Miss Loddiges replied with great magnanimity. “I myself knew nothing of my father’s dealings with Professor Renelle until I met the man, and it is to my infinite shame that I now perceive the lengths men will go to in order to claim a prize in the name of science, when truly they wish to aggrandize their reputation and profit from it.”

  It was then that Dupin arrived at our door with the news that Renelle had been safely escorted to Moyamensing Prison. I felt great pleasure in hearing that.

  “I warned the officer of the police that Renelle has a prison guard in his pay, and he pledged to spend the night there to ensure the professor remains locked up. He is not as admired in Germantown as he or we presumed,” said Dupin with a smile. “You will need to identify the guard in the morning if the man has the audacity to return to the prison, or provide a description of him if he is not there.”

  “I should be only too glad to. I will go at the crack of dawn.”

  Dupin then produced a bottle of very fine brandy, which he had mysteriously procured, presumably from Renelle Mansion, and handed Jeremiah Mathews’s journal to Miss Loddiges.

  She gasped and held it close to her heart. “Thank you,” she said. “I thought I would never see it again, and that pained me more than I can describe.”

  Sissy fetched five glasses, which Dupin filled with brandy. “Let us toast Miss Loddiges’s liberty,” he said.

  We raised our glasses then drank deeply from them.

  “Please, continue your story,” he added.

  Miss Loddiges took another large gulp of brandy, then said, “Initially, Professor Renelle treated me well enough. As I exp
lained earlier, he pretended that my father had hired him to bring me back to England. That was almost credible, although I could not believe my father would sanction such rough treatment no matter how angry he was with me.”

  “Of course not,” Sissy murmured.

  “The professor told me he had booked passage back to England and that I would be his guest until we sailed, for he would accompany me. In the meantime, he had some work that my father wished me to undertake. When he showed me the spatuletail and claimed he found it on the expedition, I knew he was lying, for it had to be the Mathewsii nubes noted in the inventory of birds Jeremiah had collected—the ‘live’ Mathewsii nubes. He must have named it to honor his father. Of course, I had not found the pages from his father’s journal that you say were hidden inside the binding.”

  “They are here.” I picked up the collection of drawings that was wrapped in a protective envelope of paper and handed it to Miss Loddiges.

  “They hold vital clues that Andrew Mathews knew his son would spot,” Dupin said. “Birds that are not endemic to Peru. The first letter of each bird spelled out ‘Renelle’.”

  “How exquisite,” she murmured when she saw the first sketch from Andrew Mathew’s journal. “Jeremiah’s father had such skill in bringing the birds to life on the page.” She leafed through the beautiful drawings, intently studying each one. The silence was bruised by her pain, but none of us wished to interrupt it with some unworthy platitude. “How alone Jeremiah must have felt, traveling such a distance with the man who took his father’s life,” she finally said. “It will be difficult for me to forgive my own father for financing the expeditions of the dissembler responsible for our friends’ deaths.”

  “Your father will have invested in Renelle’s expeditions in good faith, for the professor is charismatic and more than charming when it suits him,” I said. “And he does have an impressive reputation as an adventuring scholar, as we witnessed at the Philosophical Hall. But Renelle must have revealed his true colors to Andrew Mathews in Peru. Indeed, he made Mr. Mathews fear for his life enough to leave the hidden message in his journal.”

  “And he was proved right,” Miss Loddiges murmured.

  “We didn’t put together the clues until we came to know of Professor Renelle’s role in the expedition,” I continued, “but I believe your friend quickly spotted the rogue birds and worked out Renelle’s name, which he took as a warning. He told the professor nothing and was very guarded in his own journal, writing only of the birds and plants he saw, but no specifics regarding the lost city or his discovery of la Joya.”

  “Renelle is an obsessive and dangerous man,” said Dupin. “So convinced was he that Andrew Mathews had found the legendary treasure, that he took Jeremiah’s involvement in the 1843 expedition as confirmation that his father had sent him a map before he died.”

  “And he was not entirely wrong.” Sissy indicated the drawing of the tree full of birds. “This might not be the fantastical picture it initially appears. There are elements in it that correspond with descriptions in Diego Fernández’s book of the chamber where the Spaniards saw the enormous emerald. We wonder if this Peruvian pepper tree subsequently grew in the chamber and Andrew Mathews searched for the emerald here, but found what was in his eyes a more extraordinary treasure.” She drew a circle around the hummingbird with her finger.

  “And Jeremiah used this drawing to locate the chamber and took the white spatuletail to honor his father,” Miss Loddiges murmured.

  “And you,” Sissy added.

  Miss Loddiges nodded slowly, absorbing all we had told her. “What of the emerald and the king’s treasure Professor Renelle was searching for. Is it truly there?”

  “There was nothing in Jeremiah’s journal to suggest he found it, or in the pages we have seen from his father’s journal, so it is impossible to know without traveling to the Chachapoyas and finding our way to the lost city,” Dupin said, his expression leading me to think that he might try that very thing some day. “But I would not be surprised to learn that the last king of the Cloud People is buried in a hidden chamber beneath the roots of the Schinus molle, as Mrs. Poe wisely suggested.”

  “Surrounded by baskets full of silver and gold and emeralds, and watched over from above by ghostly hummingbirds,” my wife said.

  Miss Loddiges tried to smile, but her lips trembled and her eyes began to brim. “So both Andrew and Jeremiah died for what might merely be a dream, a vision of a king’s treasure that truly must be cursed if it exists at all.”

  My wife reached out and embraced her. Miss Loddiges hid her face as her grief turned into tears.

  45

  SUNDAY, 24 MARCH 1844

  We were huddled around the kitchen table, warming ourselves with coffee, waiting for Miss Loddiges to eat the poached eggs Muddy had insisted on feeding her. I had been to Moyamensing prison to identify the guard in Renelle’s employ, but he was nowhere to be seen. The description I had prepared of the fellow was read with knowing glances. I doubted that the man would be called to account for his actions, but equally I did not think he would return to his position at Moyamensing to assist Professor Renelle in any way.

  “Helena has been a prisoner for two weeks. She needs sustenance,” Muddy declared when she saw me glance at my pocket watch. I knew from her tone that nothing I could say would persuade her that Renelle had fed the lady on anything but bread and water. I sighed, poured myself more coffee and settled back to watch as Miss Loddiges mopped up every bit of egg with her bread and finished a second cup of coffee.

  “That was delicious. I thank you with all my heart for your kindness,” she said to Muddy, which pleased her enormously. “And I have not slept so well since I arrived in Philadelphia,” she added. Muddy had done her best to make up a comfortable bed for Miss Loddiges on the sofa, relinquishing her own pillow.

  “My dear, I am relieved you are safe and sound,” my mother-in-law said. “If Virginia had been in your position my heart would ache with worry.”

  “As would mine, knowing how distressed you would be,” my wife said, stroking her mother’s arm. “But we must press on. We will have to leave here at half past eleven for Bartram’s estate if we are to arrive in time for the assignation with the mysterious doppelgánger.”

  Before retiring for the night, Miss Loddiges had penned a letter to the Carrs to inform them that she was out of harm’s way and to suggest that Colonel Carr might help to modify a Wardian case for the Chachapoyan to transport the ghostly hummingbird. Early that morning, on my way to the prison, I had taken her missive to an old man with a decent horse who could be relied upon to courier urgent letters and wait for the response. True to his promise, he brought back a note from Mrs. Carr, who was relieved to hear that Miss Loddiges was safe and promised to assist.

  Dupin looked at his pocket watch for the third time with ill-disguised impatience. “It is nine o’clock. We should make our way to the officers of the police now to report the activities of Renelle’s accomplices. If Father Nolan learns of Renelle’s capture he might find a way to disappear, as might the two priests in his command who may have had a hand in Jeremiah Mathews’s murder.”

  Dupin’s words had the intended effect on Miss Loddiges. She leapt to her feet and immediately made her way to the hall, where her outerwear, which we had recovered from Renelle Mansion, was hanging up. She put on her bright blue cape and bonnet, and with her determined expression and commanding posture transformed into the image of an exotic adventuress, quite in contrast to the delicate English eccentric I had met almost four years previously.

  Fifteen minutes later, we entered the office of the police. Lieutenant Webster and Captain Johnson looked as if they hadn’t moved since Father Keane and I had first reported Miss Loddiges’s abduction.

  “Good morning, sirs,” I said. “I am Edgar Poe, this is C. Auguste Dupin, and this is Miss Helena Loddiges, the lady I reported missing two weeks ago.”

  “Well, it appears she’s been found, doesn’t it?”
Lieutenant Webster shrugged.

  With no assistance from you, I wanted to add, but instead answered, “Yes, that was accomplished last night and Professor Frederic Renelle is now in Moyamensing Prison charged with her abduction and accused of Andrew Mathews’s murder. We are here now to ask that you apprehend his accomplice, Father Nolan of St. Augustine Church, on suspicion of the murder of Father Michael Keane and for the theft of valuable treasure books from St. Augustine’s library.”

  Lieutenant Webster and Captain Johnson stared at me as if I were a madman escaped from Old Blockley.

  “Here is a signed statement that summarizes in detail what Mr. Poe just outlined,” Dupin interjected, placing it in front of Webster. “I was with Mr. Poe at the Philosophical Hall on the nineteenth of March when we witnessed Father Nolan selling stolen treasure books to Professor Frederic Renelle. Evidence we have gathered during our efforts to rescue Miss Loddiges strongly suggests that Nolan was responsible for the murder of Father Michael Keane in St. Augustine’s library, where he was found dead on the morning of the fifteenth of March. He may have committed the act himself or instructed his two known accomplices, Fathers Carroll and Healey, to murder their colleague after Father Keane discovered their illegal activities at St. Augustine’s. We fear the priest may abscond when he learns that Renelle is in prison.”

  “A thieving, murdering priest at St. Augustine’s?” Lieutenant Webster said with interest.

  “I too have written a statement that explains in detail what I reported to an officer of the police in Germantown last night,” Miss Loddiges announced. “In addition to all that Mr. Dupin has just told you, it is likely that Father Nolan, together with Professor Renelle, was involved in the murder of my friend, Jeremiah Mathews, on the twenty-sixth of October 1843 while he was on a ship anchored at the Lazaretto in Philadelphia.” She placed several ink-filled pages before Lieutenant Webster. “I want justice for my friend,” she said fiercely.