The Pale Blue Eye

by Louis Bayard

  The wounds to her body healed soon enough. Something else didn’t heal, or maybe it simply changed into a deeper silence. A silence of a singularly watchful kind, as if she were waiting for the sound of wheels on the road.

  * * *

  Her brow was clear and untroubled, she never failed in her devotion to her father, was never less than attentive, and yet beneath her acts, there lay this biding. What was she expecting? He kept catching fragments of it, like a familiar face slipping in and out of a crowd, but he could never put a name to it.

  Some days he would come home to find her on her knees in the parlor, her eyes closed, her lips moving soundlessly. She would always deny she was praying—she knew how little use he had for the religion of his father—but after each of these times, she would grow still quieter, and he had the uneasy sense that he had caught her in the middle of a conversation.

  One afternoon, she surprised him by suggesting a picnic. Just the thing, he thought, for drawing her out of her reveries. And what a day it was! Sunny and cloudless, with an incense-breeze coming over the mountains. They packed ham and oysters and hasty pudding and peaches and some of Farmer Hoesman’s raspberries, and they ate in peace, and it seemed to him that the specters began to recede from them a little as they sat there on the bluff overlooking the river.

  One by one, she put the plates and silverware back into the picnic basket: she’d always been a tidy child. Then she pulled him to his feet and, after looking into his face, embraced him.

  He was too surprised to embrace her back. He watched her walk to the lip of the bluff. She gazed north, east, south. Turned round and, with a face free and smiling, said, Everything will be all right. It will all turn out.

  And then she raised her arms over her head and arched back, like a diver. And with her eyes still fixed on him, she flung herself over the side. Went blind, never once looking where she was going.

  The body was swept away by the river. Afterward he would tell neighbors that his daughter had run off with another man. A lie that hid a truth. She had run off. She’d thrown herself right into his arms and done it with a serene heart, as though this had been the true end of her days. She went knowing he’d be waiting for her.

  There was this much to be said for the maiden’s death: it freed her father to pursue the idea that had been forming in his head without his quite knowing it.

  One morning, he opened a volume of Byron’s poetry—opened it only because she had once loved it—and found there a chain. It was the chain she had clutched in her hand the night she came back from the ball. She’d taken it from one of the men who set upon her, and she’d held it so tightly it gouged a circle in her palm. Still, she would part with it only when her father wasn’t looking.

  Why had she kept such a dark token, tucked away in her most treasured volume? Unless she had meant for him to find it. Use it.

  The chain was attached to a lozenge-shaped brass plate, and this plate was embossed with a coat of arms. The arms of the Corps of Engineers.

  And after all, why shouldn’t they have been cadets? Three young men, coming out of nowhere, wearing ill-fitting clothes, hungry for women. And with a perfect alibi if anyone ever came asking questions. They’d been in barracks all night! And no cadet ever left the Academy reservation without permission. . . .

  This cadet had carried his undoing with him. A brass plate engraved with the initials L.E.F.

  It was easy work finding the owner. The names of West Point cadets were a matter of public record, and only one cadet had those initials: Leroy Everett Fry.

  * * *

  That very week, by chance, the father heard the name mentioned in the precincts of Benny Havens’ tavern. This Leroy Fry was one of the barmaid’s legion of cadet admirers, though among the least noteworthy. Night after night, the father went back to the tavern, hoping for a glimpse of him. Until he found him.

  A smallish fellow. Mild and pale and redheaded and spindle-shanked. No one would have thought him a threat to anyone.

  The father stayed the whole evening, watching this cadet as closely as possible without being watched himself. By the time he went home, he knew what he would have to do.

  And every time he faltered in his undertaking, every time he fretted for his soul, he realized he had nothing left to fret over. God had taken her. God had nothing more to claim from him.

  Mathilde was her name—Mattie for short. Her hair was chestnut, and her eyes were of the palest blue, shading sometimes into gray.

  Narrative of Gus Landor

  42

  On his previous visit, Cadet Fourth Classman Poe had come like a man walking into an art gallery. Senses flung open, moving in straight lines from the Venetian blinds to the ostrich egg to the peaches, interpreting each in turn. . . .

  This time, he came as a commander. Crossed the floor in long strides and tossed his cloak on the mantel as if he didn’t care whether it stayed there and turned his back on the Greek lithograph he’d never much liked and folded his arms . . . and dared me to speak.

  I did speak. With a calmness that surprised me.

  “Very well,” I said. “You know about Mattie. What has that do with anything?”

  “Oh,” he said. “It has everything to do with everything. As you know full well.”

  He took a slow turn of the room, letting his eye graze off each object without sticking. He cleared his throat and straightened his spine and said:

  “I wonder, Landor, if you’d care to know how I found you out. The complete trajectory of my inferences, would that interest you?”

  “Of course. Certainly.”

  He eyed me closely, as though he didn’t quite believe me. Then resumed his tour.

  “I began, you see, with a rather startling fact. There was but one heart in that icehouse.”

  He paused—for dramatic effect, I assume, and to wait for my response. Meeting with none, he pressed on.

  “Initially, I found myself unable to recollect anything of what had occurred in that infernal chamber. Everything lay cloaked in a—a beneficent amnesia. But as the days passed, I found more and more of that strange proceeding returning to me in detail of the finest grain. And if I yet shrank from contemplating that—that particular horror, I mean, which . . .”

  And here he shrank once more. Stopped to collect himself.

  “If I could not look directly into that, I could at least travel round its perimeter in the manner of a tourist, with a mind sharply attuned to everything I’d seen. And in the course of these reconnaissances, I found myself drawn time and again to that conundrum, that . . . single heart.

  “Let us suppose it to have been Leroy Fry’s heart. Very well, then, where were the others? The hearts of those farm animals? Ballinger’s heart? Where was that—that other part of Ballinger’s anatomy? Those were nowhere to be seen.”

  “Stored away,” I suggested. “For future ceremonies.”

  A slow dark smile. What a fine professor he would have made.

  “Ah, but you see, I don’t believe there were meant to be future ceremonies,” he said. “That was to be the final rite, isn’t that obvious? And so the vexing question remained. Where were those missing hearts? And then I made a second and apparently unrelated discovery. It happened while I was . . .” He stopped to let a ripple pass through his throat. “. . . while I was looking over Lea’s letters. As I had declined the privilege of attending her memorial service, these devotions were the closest I might come to honoring her memory. In the midst of these—these loving offices, I chanced upon the poem she wrote for me. Perhaps the sole surviving remnant of her verse. You may remember it, Landor, I copied it out for you.

  “In reading through it once more, I recognized—for the first time, I blush to confess—that the verse was, in addition to its other virtues, an acrostic. Did you notice, Landor?”

  From his pocket, he removed a scroll of stationery. The faintest breath of orrisroot blew over us as he spread it across the table. I saw at once that the first lett
er of each line had been written over, enlarged.

  Ever with thee shall my glad heart roam—

  Dreading to blanch or repine.

  Gather our hearts in a green pleasure-dome,

  All wreathed in a rich cypress vine—

  Richer still for that you are mine.

  “My own name,” said Poe. “Staring me in the face, and I never knew it.”

  He rested his hand on the page, then gently rolled it up again and returned it to the pocket by his heart.

  “Perhaps you can guess what I did next. Would you like to guess, Landor? Why, I took out a copy of that other poem, the—the metaphysically commissioned verse which you were at such pains to damn. And I read it with new eyes, Landor. See for yourself.”

  Out came that length of foolscap, the one he’d scratched out in my hotel room. It took up nearly twice as much space as Lea’s letter had.

  “I didn’t catch it right off,” Poe allowed. “You see, I was trying to incorporate the indented lines into my calculations. But once I had removed those from the picture, the message shone forth plain as the sun. Look, won’t you, Landor?”

  “I don’t think I need to.”

  “I insist,” he said.

  I lowered my head over the paper. I breathed over it. And if I were a more fanciful sort, I might have said it breathed back.

  ’Mid the groves of Circassian splendor,

  In a brook darkly dappled with sky,

  In a moon-shattered brook raked with sky, Athene’s lissome maidens did render

  Obeisances lisping and shy. There I found Leonore, lorn and tender

  In the clutch of a cloud-rending cry. Harrowed hard, I could aught but surrender

  To the maid with the pale blue eye

  To the ghoul with the pale blue eye.

  In the shades of that dream-shadowed weir,

  I trembled ’neath Night’s loathsome stole. “Leonore, tell me how cam’st thou here

  To this bleak unaccountable shoal

  To this dank undesirable shoal.” “Dare I speak?” cried she, cracking with fear.

  “Dare I whisper Hell’s terrible toll? “Each new dawn brings the memory drear

  Of the devils who ravished my soul

  Of the demons who ravaged my soul.”

  Down—down—down came the hot thrashing flurry

  Of wings too obscure to descry. Ill at heart, I beseeched her to hurry . . .

  “Leonore!”—she forbore to reply. Endless Night caught her then in its slurry—

  Shrouding all but her pale blue eye. Darkest Night, black with hell-charneled fury,

  Leaving only that deathly blue eye.

  “Mathilde died,” murmured Poe. And after letting the quiet gather, he added, “An unequivocal message. Once again hiding in plain sight.”

  I felt the ghost of a smile on my lips. “Mattie always was fond of acrostics,” I said.

  I could feel his eyes on me now. I could hear his voice struggling to keep its balance.

  “You saw it yourself, didn’t you, Landor? That’s the reason you tried to persuade me to change those lines. The beginnings of the lines only. You wished me to rewrite this—this dispatch from the Elysian Fields—before it could be read.”

  I showed him my palms. Said nothing.

  “Of course,” he went on, “I had but a name and a predicate. I was soon to discover, however, that I had more than that. Two additional pieces of text, Landor! Allow me to show them to you.”

  He fished a pair of scraps from his pocket and set them side by side on the table.

  “Now this—this is the note that was found in Leroy Fry’s hand. You were careless enough to leave that with me, Landor. And this, well, this is the other note you left for me, do you remember?”

  There it was, Reader. The message I’d written to ease my conscience, knowing it couldn’t be eased.

  TAKE COURAGE

  “I found it just the other day,” said Poe. “In Kosciusko’s Garden, right under our secret rock. A noble sentiment, Landor, and one that does you all credit. But I’m afraid I was most struck by the shape of your characters. Capital letters, as you know, are every bit as unique—and as damning—as lower-case letters.”

  His index finger moved back and forth between the two messages.

  “Do you see? The A, the R, the G, and the E. Virtually identical to the ones in Leroy Fry’s note.”

  His brows ran together in a crease of surprise, as though he were making the discovery for the first time.

  “You may well imagine my astonishment. Could the same man have written both notes? How could that be? Why would Landor have any reason to correspond with Leroy Fry? And how could any of this relate to Landor’s daughter?” He shook his head, made a soft clucking sound. “Well, as luck would have it, I was patronizing Benny Havens’ establishment that night. La divine Patsy was once again in attendance, and knowing of her innate truthfulness, I deemed it perfectly natural to ask her what she knew about—about Mattie.”

  He stopped at my chair. Rested his hand next to my shoulder.

  “That was all it required, Landor, a question. She told me the whole story, or at least as much of it as she knew. The three nameless ruffians—a ‘bad bunch’ indeed, just as Leroy Fry had said.” He drew his hand away. “You sought her out, didn’t you, Landor? The day Mattie died. You swore her to secrecy, and then you blurted out the whole terrible business. And she kept your secret, Landor, you must credit her with that. Until she decided it was killing you to keep it.”

  I knew now what it was like to be on the other end—to be Dr. Marquis, listening to someone peel away your hidden life. Not so terrible as I would have guessed. Something close to sweet about it.

  Seating himself on the maple settee, Poe stared at the ends of his boots.

  “Why did you never tell me?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “It’s not a story I enjoy telling.”

  “But I might have—I might have comforted you, Landor. I might have helped you as you helped me.”

  “I don’t think I can be comforted. On that particular subject. But I do thank you.”

  Whatever had softened in him was stung back into hardness. He stood. Knotting his hands together behind his back, he took up the recital once again.

  “You can see, I’m sure, what a curious affair this had become. A young woman, beloved of you, Landor, speaking through the medium of poetry. For what purpose? I asked myself. Why should she have wished to awaken me to her existence? Was it to announce a crime? A crime in which her own father was most intimately involved?

  “Well, then, I did exactly what you would have done. I set about reexamining all my assumptions, beginning with the very first one. I believe it was you who phrased it best, Landor: ‘What were the chances,’ you asked, ‘that two different parties would have had designs on the same cadet in the same evening?’”

  He inclined his head toward me, waiting with great patience for my answer. Receiving none, he sighed with the faintest trace of exasperation and answered for me.

  “Small. Small indeed the chances. Coincidences of that sort can’t be admitted into logical analysis. Unless . . .” He wagged a finger at the ceiling. “Unless we see one party as being contingent upon the other.”

  “You’ll have to speak more clearly, Poe. I’m not so educated as you.”

  He smiled. “Yes, the vein of self-deprecation. You do work that quite ruthlessly, don’t you, Landor? Allow me to put it like this, then. What if one party is simply on the lookout for a dead body? Not as yet feeling extreme urgency, perfectly amenable to waiting until an opportunity presents itself. And then, on the night of October twenty-fifth, an opportunity magically does just that.

  “To this first party—let us provisionally call them Artemus and Lea— to such a party, the identity of the dead man is strictly irrelevant. Leroy Fry per se means nothing to them. He might be a second cousin once removed, for all they care. They would appropriate any body that came along, provided it ha
d a heart. The one thing they won’t do is kill for it. No,” he said, “it is the other party who is willing—and ready—to kill. And to kill this man in particular. Why?

  “Might it be revenge, Landor? As motives go, that boasts one of the most ancient of pedigrees, and I can reliably report that in the last several weeks alone, I have desired the death of at least two separate personages.”

  He began to circle me—just as I had circled him in that hotel room and so many others in the old days—weaving loops round the guilty. Even his voice was beginning to sound like mine: the lilting rise and fall, the soft press of statements. An homage! I thought.