December 5

December 5 places West Point under its first snow, offering Edgar Allan Poe and his fellow cadets a day of play and giving Poe and Lea Marquis an evening alone together. Yet the date’s winter idyll is threaded with the deaths of Leroy Fry and Randolph Ballinger, and ends in Augustus Landor’s recognition of blood on his finger—a quiet return from romance and festivity to the investigation.

Snowfall at West Point

In a report to Augustus Landor dated December 5, Poe describes waking to find trees and rocks covered by the first snow. The cadets quickly turn the morning into a snowball fight, which threatens to become as bloody as Thermopylae before the company commanders restore order. The day’s ordinary routines take on a wintry cast: the mess serves ice soup, and white powder falls during Sunday chapel as the cadets sing a hymn.

Poe sets the clamor of the snowball skirmish against a silence beyond it. In the new snow, marching boots become muffled steps and even invective is softened. The contrast makes the Academy seem briefly transformed, its familiar military order softened by weather into a place of play and stillness.

Poe and Lea Marquis

The snowfall extends into an evening excursion in an Albany cutter. When the vehicle pauses on a hill overlooking Cornwall and the horse’s harness bells fall silent, Lea sets down the reins and lets Poe rest his head in her lap. Poe describes the moment as carrying his happiness beyond fancy, belief, and life, making the day’s winter quiet the setting for an intimacy that feels, to him, nearly transcendent.

During the outing, Poe raises the deaths of Randolph Ballinger and Leroy Fry. Lea says she regarded Ballinger only as an intimate of her brother, Artemus Marquis, and was more saddened for Artemus than by her own loss. Fry is harder for her to discuss. When Poe suggests visiting the cemetery and seeing Fry’s newly dug grave, Lea asks why he concerns himself with Fry. Poe explains that he understood Fry to have admired her and, as her lover, feels bound to pay his respects. The conversation places the dead within the new relationship: Poe frames his concern as a matter of honor, while Lea’s response exposes how differently each of them understands Fry’s connection to her.

Dinner and the return of evidence

Landor’s narrative also marks December 5 as the evening he and Poe attend dinner at Dr. Marquis’s residence. Landor regards Poe’s assumptions about people’s capacity for both light and darkness as a subject for later debate; for now, he sees the dinner as an opportunity to judge how observant his young informant really is.

At the gathering, Mrs. Marquis calls out for Daniel to bring champagne and declares that she wishes to be twenty again. Landor looks down at his hands and notices copper-colored, granular residue on a finger: material he had wiped from an officer’s coat in Artemus Marquis’s closet. He identifies it as blood. The recognition closes the day on a sharp contrast: snow has muffled the Academy’s noise and Poe has found a private happiness, but a trace carried from the closet keeps the unresolved violence close at hand.