"Walter Jon Williams - No Spot of Ground" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

The politicians were counting on the Northern elections to save them, but Poe had no more confidence


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 No Spot of Ground

in George McClellan as a candidate than as a general--Lincoln could outmaneuver him at the polls as
handily as Lee had in the Seven Days' Battle.

No, the South was doomed, its Cause lost. That was obvious to anyone with any ratiocinative faculty
whatever. But there was nothing else to do but fight on, and hope the North kept giving armies to the
likes of Ben Butler.

"Massa Poe?" Sextus was at his elbow. "Will we be sleeping outside tonight?"

Poe cocked an eye at the sky. There was a heavy dew on the ground, but the few clouds in sight were
high and moving fast. There should be no rain.

"Yes," Poe said. "Set up the beds."

"Whatever you say, massa."

Sextus was used to it, poor fellow. Poe hadn't been able to sleep alone since Virginia died, and he had
always disliked confined spaces. Sleeping out of doors, under a heavy buffalo cloak, with Sextus
wrapped in another robe nearby, was the ideal solution. Poe loved to look up at the sweep of brilliant
stars, each an eye of God, to feel his soul rising beyond the atmosphere, through the luminiferous ether
to merge with the Eternal, the Sublime"┬ж

****

How he came to the gutter in Baltimore he would never know. He had apparently given a lecture there a
few nights before, but he couldn't remember it. Perhaps he would have died there, had not a passing
widow recognized him, drunk and incapable, and brought him into her carriage. She had talked with him
after his lecture, she told him, and found his conversation brilliant. He couldn't remember her either.

Her name was Mrs. Forster. Her late husband had been addicted to alcohol, and she had cured him; she
would apply her cure as well to Mr. Poe.

Her plantation, within a half day's journey of Baltimore, was called Shepherd's Rest; she owned close to
two thousand slaves and the better part of a county. She loved poetry and philosophy, read French and
German, and had a passing knowledge of Latin.

She had a daughter named Evania, a green-eyed girl of fourteen. When Poe first saw her, sitting in the
east parlor with the French wallpaper only a shade darker than her eyes, Evania was playing the guitar,
her long fingers caressing the strings as if they were a lover's hair. Her long tresses, falling down her
neck, seemed to possess the mutable spectrum of a summer sunrise.

Once before Poe, at the end of his wits and with the black hand of self-slaughter clutching at his throat,