by Louis Bayard
“No man in his right mind would demand such a condition, Miss Marquis.”
“But you are different from other men,” she said. “I mean only that the chance of loving . . . again . . . is not where you find your purpose, I think.”
My eyes swerved past her, to the river, where a blue barge was making its way southward in a coat of haze. A mourning dove was skipping like a stone over the water’s troughs.
I thought then of Patsy. How she’d recoiled from me the last time I saw her. And how part of me had mourned and part of me . . . had rejoiced. At getting what it had always wanted.
“It’s true,” I confessed. “I seem to have pulled myself out of that little hunt.”
“Only to take up arms in another hunt. You mean to chase down my brother and claim my whole family as your spoils.”
“I mean to see justice done,” I said, levelly.
“Whose justice, Mr. Landor?”
I stopped just as I was about to answer. For a change had come over her. Not all at once, no; I saw it first in her eyes, which were simmering in their sockets. I saw her cheeks go white as sugar, saw her mouth open like a bear trap.
“Well, now, that’s a very full question,” I said, taking care to keep my voice light. “I suggest you take it up sometime with your friend Mr. Poe, he’s awfully good at that sort of thing. In the meantime, I have work to do and not much time to—”
“ You can’t!”
The words roared out of her, almost before her mouth was ready to receive them. They shattered the air and sent the fragments spinning.
“No!”
It was not the cry she had uttered in Gouverneur Kemble’s study. No, that was her own sound, a human sound. This one came from a place I’d never been.
And I suppose it was almost a relief, Reader. To know that whatever was harrowing her had nothing to do with me.
“Miss Marquis . . .”
But she was beyond hearing me now. And all the same, you might have thought she was embarrassed by her conduct, for she began to totter away from me. As if she were being driven by some private sense of failure.
“Miss Marquis!” I called after her.
I can’t believe how gingerly I followed her at first. I think I knew even then what her body was trying to accomplish, and still I couldn’t make my limbs answer the call.
Her limbs were answering, though, even as they began to stiffen and fail. Somehow, somehow she hauled herself to the overlook . . . stood there on the brink, tottering and quivering . . . and then flung herself over the side.
“No!” I shouted.
I caught her arm just as the rest of her disappeared—and it was already too late, for the purpose of her body was carrying everything else before it, carrying me, and over we went, the two of us, in a gush of rocks and a burn of wind. And still I held on, even as I felt the earth drop away.
And then, out of nowhere, the earth reappeared. Caught us once more in its grip.
I opened my eyes. Nearly laughed to feel the gouges in my back and knees. Because it was such a small price to pay, after all! We had dropped some eight feet onto a granite outcropping, and we were—we were saved, weren’t we? Still bound in our human chain but—saved.
How wrong I was. We were in even greater danger than before.
Lea hadn’t landed at all, she had swung clear of the outcropping, and she was now—how slow I was to understand!—hanging in midair, completely suspended. And I—I was her sole lifeline, and a poor excuse for one, perched at the rim of that granite shelf and holding on for both of us.
And under us: nothing but air—gallons and gallons of it—and the water-sanded rocks lying hundreds of feet below, waiting to smash us to atoms.
“Lea,” I gasped out. “Lea.”
Wake up! Those were the words I wanted to scream. But I knew enough of her condition to know how futile that would have been. She had passed into full seizure now—her body was hard as a pulpit, bucking in fast brutal spasms that made it nearly impossible to keep my grip on her. Her hand had curled into a fist, her pupils had rolled up into her head, and a fine line of foam was skimming across her teeth. There was no calling her back.
And even now, I could feel her slipping away, in tiny tiny increments.
“Lea!”
I never once called for help; I called only for her, because I knew she was the only one, finally, who could help. We had chosen too remote a drop to be seen by anyone. Even the dugouts and skiffs that came feathering down the river, even they would pass us by without another thought, bent on their own errands.
Indeed, in that moment, I felt just as helpless as I had in Artemus’ closet. Once again I was locked in a private contest, with nothing to call on but my own wits and mettle, and how unequal they seemed to this. To the prospect of a life—two lives—dangling by a few fingers.
More and more of her was slipping away, and more of me was going with her. Inch by inch, I was being dragged from that shelf, drawn closer and closer to the wet black rocks that waited so patiently below. . . .
And then at last my hand succeeded in locking round her wrist. The slippage ceased, and buoyed by the stillness, I began to canvass my surroundings, flailing in the dark, as it were, groping for a fulcrum . . . anything, anything to attach to . . . and nothing would come . . .
Until my fingers closed round something hard and dry and calloused.
I read it as Blind Jasper might, with my skin. It was a root. The exposed root of a tree, jutting from the rock face.
Oh, how I grasped it! Oh, how I squeezed . . . while with my other hand, I began to haul Lea up.
There were moments, I admit, when I thought I might be torn apart, so fierce were the forces on each side of me. I soon learned, though, that they weren’t quite equal. The root, under the combined drag of our two bodies, was starting to bend.
Please, I entreated it. Please hold. But it paid me no mind, just bent further and further back, began cracking like a spine, and before long, my silent plea had been replaced by another, spoken out loud this time: the same words, again and again. It was days before I remembered what they were.
“You can’t. You can’t.”
Something of a divine petition, you might say, Reader. And from me! A man who wouldn’t have been caught dead in prayer. I will only say that when the root finally broke, my hand was already climbing—by intuition, by miracle—to the next outcropping of root, and that this root held fast, and that the next thing I knew, I was straddling the ledge, and before me lay Lea Marquis, still trembling . . . still alive.
I had the luxury then of some time before I had to contemplate the rest of the journey. It would be no skip and jump, that was clear: we still had eight feet to scale before we reached level ground, and Lea was still unconscious, though no longer shaking so violently as before.
We had one thing in our favor: a line of exposed roots that made a zigzagging trail to the top. How to get us both up, that was the trick. After some trial and error, I found that if I kept my back to the cliff face and locked my legs round Lea’s waist, I could turn us into a single unit and drag us both up the side without throwing her against the rocks.
Oh, but Christ, it was hard work! Slow, sweaty, mulish. More than once, I had to claim a spot of rest by bracing myself against one of the roots.
Too old, I recall thinking at one point. You’re too damned old for this.
It must have taken us a good fifteen minutes to climb half as many feet. But I was measuring the journey in inches, and every inch we seized somehow made it possible to seize another inch: no matter how much the rock face was slashing my flesh, no matter how my legs wobbled under the burden of Lea’s body, I could still go one more inch, couldn’t I?
And so the inches added up, and at last we reached the plateau, where we collapsed into a jumble of arms and legs. After pausing to catch my breath, I picked her up and carried her to the stone bench. Stood over her for several minutes—panting—aching and bleeding in every corner. Then
gathered her into my arms. And as I felt her twitches subside and her arms unlock and her body slowly return to her, the terror in me gave way to a kind of tenderness.
For I understood her better now. I understood, at least, a little of the sadness that clung to her even in her gayest moments. And this, too, I understood: how little I knew of her. Or would ever know.
When next I looked down, her pupils had scrolled back into place, and her eyelids had begun to blink of their own accord. But still her body trembled against mine, and it seemed to me this must be the worst time for her, coming out of the darkness—not into light but into some nether region, where she could be drawn back in either direction.
“You should . . . ,” she managed to say.
“Should what?”
A full minute passed before she was able to complete her sentence.
“You should have let me go.”
And, yes, it was another minute before I could say anything in reply. The words kept wedging in my throat.
“What would that have solved?” I at last managed to ask her.
I ran my fingers back and forth along her brow, and her features began to shimmer into life. The light came back to her eyes, and she gazed at me with a look of bottomless pity.
“Never fear,” she whispered. “He said it will all turn out. Everything will.”
Who said? That should have been the next question out of my mouth, but no, I was too struck by her words to think of anything else.
After some minutes, she was able to raise her head, and after another minute, she could sit up. She passed a hand over her brow and said, faintly:
“I wonder if I might trouble you for some water.”
My first thought was to go to the spring. But just as I was about to dip my hat in, I heard her voice, a little stronger, coming after me.
“And a morsel of food, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“I’ll be back directly,” I said.
Up the steps I climbed, two at a time. Glad to be on my feet again— moving, doing—and wondering where I might be able to roust up food at that hour of day. I was almost at the hotel when I reached in my pocket and came up with a small, hard square of pemmican. Brown and hard and wizened as a beggar, but better than nothing, I thought, as I reversed course and headed back down the steps to the garden.
She was gone.
Quite thoroughly gone: I looked for her behind shrubs and trees, I followed the gravel walk past Battery Knox, past the Lantern Battery, all the way to the Chain Battery; I even, yes, peered down the escarpment to see if she had made a second attempt. She wasn’t to be found. My only remaining company was her voice, calling to me wherever I turned.
It will all turn out.
The very thing my daughter had said.
Narrative of Gus Landor
36
Professor Pawpaw doesn’t care for surprises—mainly, I think, because it leaves him no time to prepare his own. And without surprises, he is . . . well, all I’ll say is I nearly failed to recognize the man who opened his door. After searching in vain for Lea, I’d climbed on Horse and traveled straight to the professor’s house, arriving a little before dusk. The jasmine and honeysuckle had died away. Gone were the frog bones; gone were the birdcages hanging from the pear tree; gone was the dead rattler over the doorway.
And gone, too, was Pawpaw. Or so I thought when I saw the man standing in the doorway, with his drab pantaloons and vaguely striped stockings. Nothing round his neck but a bare ivory crucifix.
So this is how he looks, I thought, when no one’s around. Like a retired sexton.
“Landor,” he growled. “I’m not disposed.”
We weren’t, I knew, such good friends that he would let me in anytime I wished. So it was a measure, I suppose, of the desperation that rose from me like stink that he did, in the end, yield. Took a step back from the door and, by his very stillness, ushered me inside.
“If you’d come yesterday, Landor, I could have offered you some bullock’s heart . . . .”
“Thank you, Professor. I won’t keep you long.”
“Well, then, come to it.”
And having traveled all this way, I found myself wondering, not for the first time, if I was wasting time and breath over something of no more substance than a whim.
“Professor,” I said. “Last time I was here, you mentioned a witch hunter who went over to the other side. A fellow who was burned at the stake and . . . something about casting his book into the flames. . . .”
“Of course,” he answered, waving a vexed hand. “Le Clerc. Henri le Clerc.”
“He was a priest, I believe you said?”
“Indeed.”
“Well, now, I was wondering if you had a picture of him somewhere. An engraving, maybe.”
He eyed me closely. “That’s all you want? A picture?”
“For now, yes.”
He took me then to his library. Went right to the shelf he wanted and, with no boost from me, scaled the thing like a squirrel. Came back down with a half-crumbling duodecimo.
“Here,” he said, holding the book open. “Here’s your devil worshipper.”
I looked down at a man in a priest’s collar and a richly pleated dark robe. Lightly chiseled bones, clement eyes, a full and level mouth: agreeable manly open features—a face made for taking confessions.
Pawpaw, old fox, saw the light go on in my eyes.
“You’ve seen him before,” he declared.
“In another rendering, yes.”
We looked at each other then. Not a word passed between us, but after a minute, he reached round the back of his neck and unsnapped the chain with the ivory crucifix. Dropped it into my hand and closed my fingers round it.
“As a rule, Landor, I’m not one for superstitions. But once a month or so, I take them like sweets.”
I smiled. Pressed the crucifix back into his palm.
“I’m already beyond the pale, Professor. I do thank you, though.”
The envelope was propped against my hotel-room door, waiting for me when I got back that night. Not a moment’s doubt as to who had written it, not with that flourish of cursive, not with the very angle of the thing (a crisp forty-five degrees) announcing its author as clearly as any signature.
For a moment, I stood over it, wondering if I could safely ignore it. And decided, with some sadness, I couldn’t.
Landor:
I owe you no earthly obligation, but as you once—or so I believed!— took a wholesome interest in my affairs, I supposed that you might be curious to learn of the new course upon which I have resolved. Not five minutes ago, Lea and I plighted our troth. In short order, I shall resign my Academy commission and take my wife—as soon she shall be—far, far from this wilderness.
I desire from you neither congratulation nor commiseration. I desire nothing from you. I wish you only surcease from the hatred and recrimination that have so disfigured your soul. Farewell, Landor. I go to my beloved.
Yrs,
E.A.P.
So! I thought. Lea has wasted no time.
And indeed, it was the very suddenness of the news that began to unnerve me. Why was it happening so quickly? So soon after Lea’s brush with death? Poe, of course, would be ready to act at the first sign from his beloved, but what would Lea gain from eloping? Why would she abandon her brother and family in the hour of their greatest need?
Unless this had nothing to do with matrimony. Unless some greater urgency was screwing everything to a higher pitch.
And then my eyes came to rest on those words—Farewell, Landor—and they jumped at me like grapeshot and sent me spinning down the hallway, leaping down the stairs.
Poe was in danger. I knew that as I’ve never known anything. And to save him, I’d have to find the one man who could—or, under the right pressure, would—answer my questions.
It was a half hour before midnight by the time I reached the Marquis house. I pounded on the door like a drunken husband back from the
tavern, and when Eugénie, bleary-eyed in her nightgown, planted herself in the doorway and opened her mouth to chide me, something in my face made the words lock in her throat. She invited me in without a sound and, when I asked where her master was, pointed with vague alarm to the library.
A single taper was burning. Dr. Marquis was seated in a large velvet armchair, a monograph spread open on his lap. His eyes were shut, and he was lightly snoring, but his arm remained just where he had left it: fully extended, with the fingers curled round a glass of brandy, the brandy itself level as a pond. (Poe used to fall asleep the same way.)
