have done this for Poe!"
"No. This I have done for you." He took my hand with a warm smile. "You will prove your name, and that will be reward for this. For me, you must go ahead. With heaven speed."
I nodded. "Leave here quickly, my friend," I whispered, "and be silent on your way." He disappeared into the streets.
I shackled Slatter's hands but left his feet and legs free so he could find help when he awoke. He did not look as tall as he had on the horse; in fact, he was a decrepit old man lying there, with a blank and sloppy expression. I could hardly move from this spot. With Edwin gone, I felt inconsolably alone, and I remembered longingly the comforts of Hattie's visits in prison, and Bonjour's appearance there, and the burst of strength I'd received from them.
A sudden thought forced me to my feet. "Bonjour," I gasped to myself. I heard Slatter coming to life in a series of groans, but I did not stop to look back at him. I raised myself onto the side of his horse and rode back in the direction I had come from.
"My horse!" Slatter cried. "You! Bring back my horse!"
My fears were realized when I saw that the door to the Bonaparte house I had just left was wide open. I tied the slave-trader's horse to a post outside and walked circumspectly through the front hall. It was quiet except for the sounds of audible, pained breathing. If there had been any other noises it's unlikely I would have heard them. They would have folded into the background of my mind, along with the furnishings. I was transfixed.
In the parlor, there had clearly been a struggle only minutes, maybe seconds, before I arrived. Chairs, lamps, curtains, and papers were scattered over the floor. The chandelier still shook with the violence. The victor was clear. Bonjour stood over the large figure of Rollin, who was perspiring pitifully. From the disarray at a nearby window, it was clear he had tried to jump out of it. Bonjour, though perhaps half his size, was holding him down and had a blade touching his throat.
His eyes met mine and I wondered: did he know me now too?
I had been leaving Paris with Auguste Duponte to begin our investigation of Poe's death. Climbing aboard the ship, Duponte announced there was a stowaway. You remember.
"Do request," he said to me, "Monsieur Clark, that the steward inform our ship's captain there is a stowaway on board."
"You shall want to know what I know!" cried this stowaway, Rollin, when he was revealed and accused of trying to steal the steamer's mail shipment. There was something in his tone that may have rekindled the memory in me when the same man asked, in a voice far too aggressive, "You would like to leave word?" at the door of the Bonaparte mansion. But more than that, it was the lift of his hat-revealing the square baldness that had been unwillingly shown that day at sea when he was flung from the rails. It was that sight that made me remember where I had seen him that time.
By the time I had discovered Bonjour there, the implications of this man's presence on the Humboldt had settled into my imagination. But to answer my previous question for myself: no, I do not think he knew me now. He had been watching for someone else that earlier day at sea.
Now he was staring right at me. Rollin's eyes burned with ghastly interest, his legs wet with water and spotted with flower petals that had spilled on the rug from a shattered vase.
Bonjour peered around. She smiled slightly, almost apologetically, at me. I could almost feel all the passion and regret of her kiss again while I looked upon her face.
"I am sorry, Monsieur Clark." She said this as though I were the one prostrate and pleading for my life.
"You," I said, standing upright with the revelation. "You poisoned me. It was not the police or the prison guards! It was you. You slipped the poison into my mouth when we kissed."
"After I found a way inside the prison, I saw that the walls of the hospital chambers were already giving way to the floods," she said. "I felt you could get out through the sewer passage, but I needed to find a way for you to be transferred there. You may say I helped you, monsieur."
"No, you did not do