As I lay, head enpillowed, in the darkness of my bedroom, I was suddenly struck by the realization that a distant and indirect, but nonetheless real, connection existed between the Ashers, the Macreadys, and myself. The common thread that united me, however tenuously, to the others was our shared affinity with the still-nascent world of American theatre, of which my own angelic mother, Eliza Poe, had been, during her all-too-brief existence, one of the shining ornaments.

I threw back my bedclothes and rose from the mattress with a groan; then—barefooted and clad only in my nightdress—made my way slowly through the tomb-like darkness of my chamber and into my study. Seating myself at my writing table, I struck a match and enkindled my oil lamp, which cast a dull circle of light over the crowded surface of the table.

My work space—like that of every true littérateur—was fairly blanketed with a wild miscellany of books, writing implements, loose sheets of blank paper, and thick piles of manuscript pages. Balanced atop one of these piles—where it served as an exceedingly convenient paper weight—was a small casket-shaped box of antique mahogany. Extending both of my hands across the table, I removed this object from its perch and placed it directly before me.

This box had been in my possession for many years, having been bestowed upon me—in one of his rare acts of generosity—by my recently deceased guardian, the churlish Richmond merchant John Allan. It was an exceedingly handsome object of rare and elegant design, its smooth, highly polished lid secured by a miniature lock of the most delicate workmanship. Sliding open the middle drawer of my writing table, I reached inside and extracted a tiny brass key on a slender chain. Then—carefully inserting the key into the corresponding hole in the lock-plate of the little box—I opened the latter and slowly raised the lid.

Since receiving it as a gift on my sixteenth birthday, I had employed the box as a sort of “treasure chest”—a receptacle for those articles and documents most significant to me. Among its other contents, it contained the sparse mementoes—all the more precious to me for their pitiable meagreness—of my mother’s tragically brief life and aborted career: a handbill from a production of David Garrick’s Miss in Her Teens, in which she played the ingenue rôle of sixteen-year-old Biddy Belair; a miniature portrait of her as the doomed, grievously wronged Desdemona; and several yellowing newspaper reviews of her performances in the plays Time Tells a Tale, The Provoked Husband, The Belle’s Stratagem, and sundry of Shakespeare’s timeless tragedies.

Removing these fragile notices from the interior of the box, I laid them out carefully before me and began to peruse them. It did not take me long to discover what I was searching for.