Coffins (23 page)

“I see.”

“Is there nothing can be done for the poor soul?”

I shook my head. “Nothing a doctor can prescribe. In time she may return to herself.”

“I will keep her in my prayers.”

“I wanted to check on Sarah, of course, if only as a friend, but my main target is Captain Sweeney. I was told he's taken possession of a room.”

That elicited a girlish laugh from my hostess. “Well spoke, Dr. Bentwood. That's exactly what he's done, the old rascal. I will bring you to him. And then I will flee out of range of his guns.”

“Guns?” I asked, concerned, as she let me up the stairs. There was a small woven rug on each tread, and almost as many cats to be avoided.

“Figure of speech, Doctor. Don't you fret. I doubt he'll do you any actual harm, beyond the usual tongue lashing. He's been in a fearsome bad mood since his precious schooner came to grief.”

Black Jack Sweeney had been given a corner room, with low ceilings, a small but active fireplace, and a window that overlooked the harbor. I found him sitting in a high-backed chair, feet up on a stool. He was covered in one of Mrs. Merriman's crocheted shawls, and staring out the window with a dark, pensive expression. Upon spotting me with his one good eye he sucked on his long clay pipe and put a cloud of pungent smoke between us. “So you didn't go down with my ship,” he said, sounding disappointed.

“I'm afraid I survived. May I visit?”

He scowled and pawed at the smoke. “Suit yourself. But I ain't taking none of your vile medicines, so don't even try me.”

“I won't,” I promised. “You seem better.”

“Do I?” he leered. “You ain't much of a doctor, if you think that.”

“I'm sure you're right. I'm not here as a doctor, Captain Sweeney. I'm here as a friend.”

That gave him pause. “You consider yourself my friend, do you?” he said, scratching at the strap that held his shabby eye patch in place.

“I'd like us to be friends, yes. But I meant I'm here as a friend of the family.”

He snorted grumpily. “I suppose you're that, I'll give you that much. How do they fare, then?”

“Not well,” I said. “Not well at all.”

“Jebediah?”

“Refusing visitors at the moment.”

“Aye? He's a wise man, then.”

“Mr. Barkham is doing his best, but Jeb won't eat. A little barley broth, that's all.”

“That's bad,” said Sweeney, with obvious concern. His gruffness was, I sensed, in part contrived, to mask whatever it was he truly felt.

“I'm sorry about your ship,” I said. “I know how you loved her.”

He swallowed and averted his eye. His voice, when he spoke, was husky with emotion. “Was me in charge of
Raven
she'd still be afloat. She'd be out there right now where I can see her,” he said, pointing at the window.

“No,” I said, disagreeing as gently as I knew how. “It wasn't Tom Coffin wrecked the schooner. I think you know that, even if you don't want to admit it.”

“You do, eh?” he said pugnaciously. “You know a lot for a Boston fella.”

Now or never, I said to myself, fire your broadside while he's dead in the water, unsuspecting.

“I know Cash Coffin was a slave trader,” I said, bearing in. “And I know, or
think
I know, that something terrible happened, long ago. Something that still haunts the family. And I'm fairly certain you know more about it than I do.”

“Eh?” he said uneasily. He sucked nervously upon the clay pipe, unaware that it had gone out. “What makes you think that?”

“Your name. Black Jack. You told me you got it while you were on the slave coast.”

“Hmph. That's no secret,” he said dismissively. “Everybody knows me knows that.”

I pulled up a chair, blocking any chance of retreat. “I didn't come to inquire about your nickname. I came because the Coffins are being destroyed, one by one. Four dead in circumstances that defy rational explanation. I believe that something unnatural is happening, and I think you believe it, too. Something frightened you enough to make you flee the house when you were too sick to leave under your own power.”

That got him bolt upright in his chair, and made his single eye glitter with fury. “You came here to call me a coward?” he snarled, and raised a shaking, sea-gnarled fist.

“No, Captain Sweeney. Never would I say such a thing to a man like you. I came here to ask for your help, because I'm frightened, too. We're all frightened. Some, like Cash and Sarah and Jebediah, have been terrified out of their wits. Please help me. Please help them. I'm begging you, sir. I'll go down on my knees and beg if that's what it takes.”

All at once the old tar's fury dissipated and his face crumpled and sagged. A tear ran from his one good eye and he hastily mopped it away with his sleeve. “You got me right, Doc,” he croaked. “By the good Lord above, I swear I was so fearful I nearly wet my drawers. Wasn't nothing I could see, mind you. But something awful was in the room with me that night.”

Sweeney then recounted, in his halting way, what happened the night his fever broke, the night
Raven
left the harbor without him. He awoke from a sound sleep and knew at once that he was in grave danger. There was, he said, a palpable presence in the room, and though it could not be seen he believed that it was sucking all the goodness from the air.

“I tried to open the window but it wouldn't rise. Then I made for the door, but it was like the air got thick or something, and I couldn't never reach that neither, no matter how I tried. So I commenced to hollering, but it was like the holler was dyin' in my throat, or got swallowed up somehow.

“Oh, I been in a tight spot or two in my time, and more than once I figured to meet my Maker. You sail the seas as long as I have, you're bound to come at a tight spot. I won't say death don't frighten me, but this was different.”

I leaned closer. “Different? Different in what way?”

While Sweeney turned the question over in his mind, he filled his pipe bowl and got it fuming. “Hmm. Now that's a hard one, but let me try.” He puffed some, and then grunted, using the pipe stem to make his point. “I had the feeling—no, no, it were a certainty—yes, sir, I knew in my bones that if I was to die in that room, with that thing so close, I wouldn't ever meet my Maker at all. I'd be dead in some other way. A kind of dead more terrifying and more horrible than regular dead.” He paused and gave me a quizzical look. “Can you make sense of it?”

“No,” I admitted. “But I know exactly what you mean.”

“Do you? Then I'm sorry for you, Doc. It changes a man inside, to feel a thing like that. I ain't the same Black Jack Sweeney that sailed you into this harbor, and that's a fact.”

“Nor am I the same man you delivered.”

“What has happened to us, do you suppose?”

“I've no idea. Or nothing I can put into words. But I feel compelled to find out. I
must
find out, or be damned.”

Captain Sweeney's gnarled hands still trembled, as if vibrating to that memory of fear. “I believe you're on the wrong tack, Doc. Whatever it is that preys upon Coffins, it can't have nothin' to do with how Cash made his pile. Too many years gone by for that.”

“Perhaps,” I said. “But does the word ‘Monbasu' mean anything to you?”

The old tar visibly blanched, and gave me a look that couldn't have been more surprised if I'd pulled out a pistol and shot him. “Monbasu?” he gasped. “What's this got to do with that fella?”

Now it was my turn to be astonished. “Monbasu is someone you know? I thought it was a kind of curse. A word for devil.”

“He were a slave trader,” said Sweeney. “Then he was a slave himself, for a while. As rum a character as ever you wish to meet. He was a lot of things, some of 'em good and some of 'em bad, but he wasn't no devil when I knew him.”

“And when was this?”

Sweeney's brow furrowed. “More than twenty years ago. Just before Cash give up the trade for good.”

I nodded. “So Monbasu was a fellow slave trader. Was he French?”

Sweeney managed to laugh. “Was he French? No more'n I am. No, your Monbasu was an African sort of gentleman. He was black as your hat.”

At that moment Mrs. Merriman threw open the door, put her hand to her heaving chest to catch her breath, and announced that Sarah Coffin had thrown herself into the harbor.

6. Another Kind of Sleep

It was not far to the harbor edge, and all of it downhill. I skidded most of the way on leather boot heels, which could find no purchase on the frosted cobblestones.

Although it was barely noon, the sun was but a small pale presence, a shy visitor to the leaden sky, and the air was cold enough to clot in your chest.

I calculated that the harbor waters could not be much above freezing. It is well known that flowing salt water can be colder by several degrees than frozen blocks of pond ice. One need not drown in such waters: simple immersion will likely result in death. As I ran and skidded my way downhill, I cursed myself for not insisting on a consultation with poor Sarah. Aware of her hysterical state, and of the possibility that she might seek to harm herself, I'd done nothing to help. The fact that her husband had forbidden visitors should not have deterred me. It was my duty as a physician to intercede, as Nathaniel was himself in a confused mental state, and therefore not qualified to make such a crucial decision as to forgo all treatment.

Fool! Charlatan! Those were but two of the names I gave myself, on that headlong race to the harbor.

As it happened, Nathaniel Coffin had got there before me. I found him in shirtsleeves, racing back and forth along the waterfront, frantically searching the harbor waters for a sign of his wife. The most telling thing I saw was a pile of female clothing and undergarments discarded on the pier. That a woman of Sarah's modesty should strip herself naked indicated her desperate compulsion to destroy herself.

“Oh, God! Oh, God!” the poor man wailed, tearing at his beard. Then he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted to the placid, freezing waters. “It is only me, darling! Only me! You can't be afraid of me!”

I attempted to steer Nathaniel away from the edge, fearful that he, too, might decide to end his misery. He was scarcely aware of me, and there was nothing I could do to deter his frantic, hopeless search, for like all the Coffins he had shoulders of oak and limbs of iron.

“I don't know what got into her so sudden,” he muttered anxiously. “Like she didn't know me! Like I was someone that scared her! Why should my lovely Sarah be scared of me?”

I tried to reason with him, telling him we must get boats to drag the harbor, but he would not heed me. “Sarah!” he kept crying out. “Sarah, it's only me! Please come back!”

Apparently his wife had been relatively calm for the last day or so, which was why he had dismissed Dr. Griswold, whose visits only seemed to agitate her. The previous night she had slept soundly for the first time since the baby died, and Nathaniel was hopeful that she'd turned a corner. That morning they had prayed quietly together and then Nathaniel had read to her from a lady's magazine, articles about etiquette and ladylike deportment that seemed to soothe her by suggesting a world far removed from her present reality. Then, just before noon, he went down for a tray of Mrs. Merriman's luncheon sandwiches, convinced that his wife's appetite might return with her newfound composure. But when he entered the room, tray in hand, Sarah shrank from him with a look of horror. He asked her what was wrong. Her reply was devastating. “Where is Nathaniel?” she demanded, shaking with fear. “What have you done to my husband?” When he tried to embrace her she shoved him away with a strength he'd never imagined she possessed, and then fled the room, locking the door behind her. It took him less than a minute to break the door and follow, but in that one precious minute she'd flown headlong to the pier, torn off all her clothing, and vanished under the water.

“I turned the other way when I left the house,” he said mournfully. “I supposed she was headed to the graveyard, to see the baby. Then I heard a splash and ran for the pier, fast as I could.” He reached out to the pathetic pile of her discarded clothing but couldn't bring himself to touch it. He gave me a look of such beseeching misery it broke my heart. “Why'd she think I wasn't me?” he asked plaintively. “Why'd she think a thing like that?”

Before I could formulate an answer—not that I
had
an answer—something caught my eye. A patch of palest white upon the dark water. Nathaniel saw me react and instantly spotted the same object. “Sarah!” he cried, lunging for the handrail.

I tried to grab his legs and manhandle him to the ground, but he shed me effortlessly, and without hesitation leaped over the rail and dove headfirst into the icy harbor fully clothed, boots and all.

The black water closed over him like a shimmering curtain, and all was silent.

I sank back to my knees, convinced that Nathaniel would soon join his beloved wife in death, for her lifeless form floated facedown upon the waters, and betrayed no sign of life. The mere shock of plunging into water that cold—colder than ice, quite literally—was enough to render a man unconscious. I imagined his lungs filling, the weight of his heavy boots dragging him down, down. No pain, no anguish, no ability to struggle, only an overwhelming numbness as the nerves ceased to function.

A splash!
shocked me out of my morbid reverie. There, thirty yards or more from the pier, Nathaniel had surfaced and was propelling himself forward with great, surging lunges of his powerful arms. Very soon he reached the floating body of his wife, locked his hands around her, and began to kick furiously back to the pier.

I, meantime, searched frantically for a boat or dinghy, but there was nothing nearby, and my only hope was to find some object I could extend out into the water, should Nathaniel falter. With that in mind I managed to wrench free a section of the hand railing and stood waiting anxiously.