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of February, Poe tried another approach. He asked Allan to assist him in obtaining a cadet's appointment at West Point, the academy for the training of officers in the American army, which would then expedite “an honourable and highly successful course in my own country.” There is no doubt that he was serious about his application. Completion of the course at West Point would allow him to become an officer in the army; it would grant him a measure of financial independence as well as much needed social status. His enlistment as a common soldier might otherwise have left him, as he put it, “degraded & disgraced.”
    His letter arrived at Richmond in a most unhappy time. Frances Allan was dying and, in the final stages of what a local newspaper described as a “lingering and painful” illness, she asked to see the young Poe to hold and kiss him for the last time, but, if she died before he could reach her, she requested that her foster sonhave the opportunity of seeing her body before she was buried.
    On the day of Frances Allan's death at the end of February, Poe was still on the muster roll of his regiment. John Allan had left it to the last minute.
    Poe heard of the death on 1 March and left on the afternoon stage from Norfolk to Richmond. When he arrived, on the following day, Fanny had already been buried. His surrogate father had purchased for Poe a suit of mourning clothes. In that dress he visited the new grave in Shockoe cemetery. He collapsed upon the spot, and was helped back into the carriage by the family's slaves.
“Your love
I never valued,” he wrote to John Allan at a later date, when all seemed hopeless, “but she I believed loved me as her own child.” Another mother had been taken away from him, a double orphanhood that increased the burden of his woe. It is worth noting that the Shockoe cemetery was the resting place of Jane Stanard, his schoolfriend's young mother to whom Poe had been devoted.
    His relationship with John Allan entered a new phase. It seems that his guardian had been softened by the death of Fanny, and that the presence of Poe was no longer objectionable to him. Poe related his plans to enroll at West Point, and he obtained Allan's consent. The way was now open for him to be honourably discharged. He left Richmond a week later, and on his return to Fortress Monroe he sent a letter to Allan as “My dear Pa” rather than as the “Dear Sir” of his previous correspondence.
    • • •
    At the end of March the process of discharging Poe began. He was obliged to find a substitute for his service, and informed the colonel of the garrison that he was “one of a family of orphans whose unfortunate parents were the victims of the conflagration of the Richmond theatre,” a flagrant lie designed to cover up what he considered to be his dubious origins. The explanation was accepted, however, and in the following month he returned to Richmond.
    The path to West Point, however, was not easy. In the first weeks of his return Poe set about gaining political referees to bolster his application, among them a local major and the representative in Congress for his district. Allan must have materially assisted him, but wrote a reference that was curiously impersonal: “Frankly, sir,” he wrote to the Secretary of War, “I do declare that he is no relation to me whatever … but I do request your kindness to aid this youth in the promotion of his future prospects.” Allan did have some interest, however, in dispatching Poe to West Point; he would be out of the house and, more important, no longer a financial burden.
    Poe submitted a formal application to West Point in May and, with a gift from Allan of fifty dollars in his pocket, travelled to Washington in order to present in person his letters of recommendation to the Secretary of War. He learned that there were some forty-seven candidates already on the list of appointments, but that it stillmight be possible for him to enroll in