herself free and rushed toward me. Peter was required to hold back the Blum family with explanations and assurances.
"What have you done?" Hattie said to me in a nervous whisper. The throng had become louder, and the judge was now straining to silence them.
"Proved my great-aunt correct, perhaps," I said. "Your family will give us nothing, and I have already entered debt. I may have thrown away all we have, Hattie!"
"No. You've proved me right. Your father would be proud today-you are a chip off the old block, Quentin." Hattie kissed me quickly on the cheek and, pulling herself from my grasp, hurried to try to soothe her family.
Peter grabbed my arm. "What is this?"
"Where is he?" I asked. "Have you seen where Duponte went?"
"Quentin! Why did you not simply repeat whatever it was that Frenchman told you? Why did you not tell the court the truth of what you and he found?"
"And to what purpose, Peter?" I asked. "To save myself. No, this is what they hope for me to do so they might feel they know me, and that I am inferior because different. No, I do not think I will. Send public opinion to the devil today-this history will remain unspoken for now. There is one person I will tell today, Peter. I wish her always to understand me, as she has before, and she must hear for herself."
"Quentin, Quentin! Think of what you're doing!"
Chapter 36
I DID NOT share the narrative of Poe's death with that courtroom, not that day or any other. Instead, I worked alongside Peter and became, as he later liked to say, an unrecoverable lawyer, finding each item of inconsistency and weak supposition in the case against me. In the end, we won. I received official recognition of my sanity and did so quite handily, by the judgment of most who observed the entire proceedings. Though there were few who believed I was, in fact, completely sane, they admitted that the trial pointed to that fact.
My reputation for an original bent of legal acumen spread. I rejoined Peter as an equal partner and we became one of the more successful law practices in Baltimore in mortgages, debts, and the contesting of wills.
The practice also added a third attorney, a young man from Virginia of habitual industry, and Peter soon married the equally industrious sister of that gentleman.
Though the police did not look for Edwin Hawkins in relation to the infamous assault on Hope Slatter, the slave-trader was said to have privately declared that he would know the man when he met him. But only a few months after the incident, Slatter decided that Baltimore had begun to be unreliable for his line of business, and he moved his slave-trading firm to Alabama, permitting the safe return to Baltimore of Edwin Hawkins. Edwin, meanwhile, deprived of his situation at the newspaper offices, had begun reading more books on the law and became a first-rate clerk in our expanding practice and later, at age sixty, an attorney.
Nearly nine years after my last visit, I returned to Paris with Hattie, and brought along Peter Stuart's young daughter, Annie. There was none of the general surveillance and spying that I had once experienced. Indeed, in some ways Paris was a more comfortable place to be as an empire under Louis-Napoleon than as a republic under the same man. As an American from a nation that was a republic, I had been an unwanted influence by a man planning an overthrow of that very form of government. As an emperor, Louis-Napoleon had the power he wished for, and so no longer thought to exercise its full range from day to day.
The Baltimore line of the Bonaparte family, after Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte's conference with the new emperor, received by decree the right to the Bonaparte name for all of the descendants of Madame Elizabeth Bonaparte. But the emperor would yield no rights to succession or imperial property as Madame Bonaparte had instructed her son to demand. When Louis-Napoleon died years later, neither of Madame Bonaparte's two grandchildren, both as handsome and as tall as could be hoped for, became emperor of the French. She lived for many years in Baltimore, and could be seen often in her black bonnet and red parasol in the streets, outliving even her son Bo.
Bonjour, meanwhile, had become a popular member of the small French circle in Washington, and was much admired and sought after for her independence and wit. She found she had