their small country home in New York. As I say, though, that seems easy enough."
"Then so is your answer to his unusual instructions. You have spoken before of the many cities where Poe had lived in his adult years."
"After Baltimore, he had moved with Sissy and Muddy to Richmond, Virginia, for several years. Then to Philadelphia for around six years. And finally, in the last years of his life, he was living in New York with Muddy."
"Yes! Therefore, you see, Muddy must write 'E. S. T. Grey, Esquire.'"
I looked at my companion incredulously. "I don't see at all!"
"Why, Monsieur Clark, do you refuse outright the simplicity of the thing when it has been uncovered for us? I have been fortunate that on several occasions during my stay you have described in some precise and exacting detail the workings of your American post offices. In the year in question, 1849, if I have understood you, letters in your country were never delivered to particular residences but still only to the post office of a city, where one could then retrieve mail waiting for him. If a letter arrives in 1849 in New York for Edgar A. Poe, E. A. Poe comes and receives it. If a letter arrived in 1849 at the Philadelphia post office addressed to 'Edgar A. Poe,' consider then what would unavoidably follow. The postmaster in Philadelphia, consulting his list of names of those former residents of the city, and finding that a name matches one on that list, would forward it to the post office at the location of that person's current residence. That is to say, a letter sent from Muddy in New York to Philadelphia addressed to Edgar A. Poe would upon receipt at the post office in Philadelphia be treated as a mistake and instantly be returned to New York!"
"Of course!" I exclaimed.
He went on. "Muddy, being also a former resident of Philadelphia, would understand this and find nothing strange in Poe's instructions that appear so peculiar to us. Poe's apparently outlandish fear that he would not receive a letter sent by Muddy to Philadelphia is, in fact, completely reasonable. If Edgar Poe presented himself with his own name at the Philadelphia post office, there would surely be nothing waiting for him, for any such letter branded with his name would have been sent away; however, if he offers a fictitious name, arranged in advance with his correspondent, and a letter has been sent to that name, he would duly receive it."
"But what of his instructions to Muddy not to sign the letter?"
"Poe has been anxious. Muddy is the last remnant of his family connections. Write immediately in reply, he says. Receiving this letter is crucial, and here he exhibits signs of some excess of care-once again, not of illogic, but of excessive rationality. He knows that, in the process of folding and sealing a letter, the signature and the address may be confused. If such a confusion were to take place, and the Philadelphia postmaster mistakenly believed the letter addressed to Maria Clemm, rather than signed by her, the letter, once again, would take route directly back to New York. You might notice that Monsieur Poe was generally anxious about mail in your own occasional correspondence with him, when at several points he expresses worry that a letter was lost or misplaced. 'Ten to one I misdirected the letter, for I am very thoughtless about such matters,' he writes in one instance (if I rightly recall) when speaking of someone who had not replied to one of his letters. We know, too, from Poe's history that his first infamous heartbreak was caused when his letters as a young man never reached his young love, Elmira; and that another early courtship, of his cousin Elizabeth Herring, was disrupted by Henry Herring reading the letters, which contained his poetry. Indeed, the confusion over the placement of a letter, the anxiety over who possesses it, and the perplexing variety of folding and addressing through which a letter's identity might be misapprehended form the topic of one of Monsieur Poe's better tales of ratiocination and analysis, with which I know you are quite familiar.
"Still there is the question of the pseudonym that Poe chooses, this E. S. T. Grey. In truth, it matters not what name he chooses as long as it is not Edgar Poe, and is not so common as a George Smith or a Thomas Jones, which would put it at risk to be