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dearly than anyone,” I replied.
    “Here, Mr. Clark, is what I wanted you to see. Perhaps it will help you understand.”
    Neilson removed from a drawer a portrait that he said had been sent by Maria Clemm, Sissy’s mother (and Edgar’s aunt and mother-in-law). It showed Sissy, a young woman of around twenty-one or twenty-two with a pearly complexion and glossy raven-black hair, her eyes closed and her head tipped to the side in a pose at once peaceful and unspeakably sad. I commented on the life-like quality in the portrait.
    “No, Mr. Clark.” He turned pale. “
Death-
like. It is her death portrait. After she died, Edgar realized they had no portrait of her and had this done. I do not like to show this, though, for it poorly captures the spirit she possessed in life—that pale and deathly look about her. But he valued it beyond measure. My cousin, you see, could not relinquish her even to death.”
    With the portrait were some verses written by Virginia to Edgar the year before her death, speaking of living in a blissful cottage where the “tattling of many tongues” would be far away. “Love alone shall guide us when we are there,” her tender poem read. “Love shall heal my weakened lungs.”
    Neilson put aside the portrait and poem. He explained that during her last years Virginia had required the utmost medical attention.
    “Perhaps he did love her. But could Edgar have properly provided for her care? Edgar might have done better all along finding a woman of wealth.” Neilson paused at this thought and seemed to shift topics. “Until I was about your age, you know, I myself edited newspapers and journals and wrote columns. I
have
known the literary life,” he said with fallen pride. “I know its appeal to the raw spirit, Mr. Clark. Yet I have always had dealings with reality, too, and know better than to keep at something for personal gratification after it proves a losing proposition, as Edgar’s writing did. Edgar should have stopped writing. This alone might have saved Sissy, might have saved Edgar himself.”
    Regarding Poe’s final months, his final attempt to obtain financial success, Neilson referred to his cousin’s aim to raise money and subscriptions for the proposed
Stylus
magazine by delivering lectures and visiting people of good society in Norfolk and Richmond. It was in the latter city that he renewed an acquaintance with a woman of wealth, as Neilson described her approvingly.
    “Her name was Elmira Shelton, a Richmond woman whom Edgar had loved long before.” In their youth, Edgar and Elmira had promised themselves to each other before he left to attend the University of Virginia, but Elmira’s father disapproved, and confiscated Poe’s constant letters so his daughter would not see them. I interrupted Neilson to ask why.
    “Perhaps,” he replied, “it was that Edgar and Elmira were young…and that Edgar was a poet…and do not forget, Elmira’s father would have known Mr. Allan. He would have spoken with him and he would have known Edgar was likely to receive no inheritance at all from the Allan fortune.”
    When Edgar Poe was forced to return from college after John Allan would not pay his debts, Edgar attended a party at Elmira’s family home only to find, to his heartbreak, that Elmira was engaged to another.
    By the summer of 1849, when they met again, her husband had died, as had Virginia Poe. The carefree girl of so many years ago was now a wealthy widow. Edgar read her poems and reminisced with good humor about their past. He joined a local chapter of a temperance society in Richmond and swore to Elmira to keep their oath. He said love that hesitated was not a love for him and he gave her a ring. Theirs would be a new life together.
    Only weeks later Edgar Poe would be found at Ryan’s, here in Baltimore, and rushed to the hospital, where he’d die.
    “I had not seen Edgar for some years toward the end. It was a great shock, you will imagine, Mr. Clark, when I