The multitudinous newspapers we had transported from Montague’s residence were piled, helter-skelter, on the floor of my study. Taking a large bundle of these publications in my arms, I carried them to my desk, settled into my chair, and began to read. Soon, I was wholly absorbed in this undertaking, poring over innumerable accounts of long-ago theatrical productions. I read about Mrs. Broadhurst’s winning depiction of Constance Macintosh in Cumberland’s charming comedy Everyone Has His Fault. About Clifton Tayleure’s riveting interpretaton of the titular rôle in Gilmore’s Gustavus Vasa. About Edward Sinclair Tarr’s somewhat disappointing début performance in Wignell’s The Busy-Body. Thus did the hours speed by.

It was not until the sky outside my uncurtained window was already beginning to manifest the first, faint gleams of daylight that—with bleary eyes and pounding heart—I rose from my chair, clutching in my trembling hands an issue of the Baltimore Daily Advertiser from the year 1810—an issue in which I had discovered, only moments before, the significance of the fateful word “Nevermore.”

CHAPTER 28

Twenty-four years earlier, almost precisely to the day—on Saturday, May 3, 1810—a troupe of itinerant thespians appeared on the stage of the New Theatre on East Baltimore Street. For several years, this company had made its home in Boston; but with the completion of that city’s theatrical season in early April, its members—impelled by the precarious financial circumstances inherent to the artistic life—had embarked on a tour of the southern states.

The play performed on that occasion (an evening which—though seemingly unremarkable at the time—eventually proved to have consequences that were nothing short of momentous) was a then-popular, now wholly forgotten, farce entitled Sebastian Barnwell, or the Brazen Lover. In the leading female rôle—as the desirable young noblewoman, Lady Amelia, whose hand is sought in marriage by a variety of suitors, including the Duke of Cornwall—was the gifted and much-beloved actress Eliza Poe, who, less than four months earlier, had served as the dear, maternal agent of my own nativity.

In a minor, if not entirely negligible rôle, as a courtier named Belmore who functions as the Duke’s intermediary, was the being whom I am compelled, much to my own chagrin, to acknowledge as my father: the vain, ambitious, but hopelessly inept play-actor David Poe the younger.

I knew these facts from the dramatic review I had just discovered during my long, laborious perusal of Alexander Montague’s collection of old newspapers. This review, published on the Monday after the evening in question, contained a vivid description not only of the production itself but of the audience’s reaction to it.