The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (20 page)

Jeremiah, munching one of the cakes and wondering why Miss Petra had contradicted his effort to bring Virginia into a more receptive frame of mind, considered the best method of encouraging his wife to speak of what he believed was always nearest her heart. Virginia poured out, added a dash of cream, and offered the filled teacup to her guest, who rose lightly from her chair to receive it. As Violet settled back, she looked up at him and he thought she would speak, but she didn’t. Instead Virginia, who had her back to him, addressed him. It gave him the odd sensation that Miss Petra was somehow speaking through his wife. But her voice was her own, calm, agreeable, and firm: the voice, he recalled, she had used when advising the children’s governess. “I wonder, my dear,” she said, “if you would be so very kind as to leave Miss Petra alone with me for half an hour.”

Jeremiah swallowed his cake. After all, this was exactly what he wanted. That his wife should actually express a desire to talk to someone, really anyone, was a much longed for event. Yet as he looked down upon Virginia’s unmoving head, a tinge of resentment at this cool dismissal pulled the corners of his mouth down—an unconscious reflex Violet was quick to notice. In the next moment he recovered his good humor, wiped his fingers against a napkin, and replied cheerfully, “Of course, of course. I’ll be off. You ladies have much to discuss.”

Turning hard on his heel, he crossed the carpet and let himself out at the hall door, closing it with exaggerated care behind him. Then he stood there, gazing mournfully up at the staircase. What was he to do for half an hour? He hadn’t even gotten his tea.

Virginia Babin and Miss Petra both knew why they had been brought together, but for several minutes neither of them alluded to it. The time-honored niceties of tea occupied them. Violet admired the painting of a dour ancestor over the mantel, correctly guessing the artist’s name, a name that had been fashionable during his life, but had languished in obscurity since his death, some half-century ago. Virginia asked a few polite questions about Bertha Bakersmith and her family. Neither woman mentioned what both knew: that Bertha’s oldest daughter, Margaret, had died from complications attendant on childbirth scarcely a year earlier. They spoke instead of Bertha’s son, who was studying at Harvard Divinity School, having turned his back, to his father’s chagrin and his mother’s delight, on the Law School.

Violet appeared so content to gossip that Virginia began to wonder if her guest might not be relieved to have no immediate demand for an exhibition of her celebrated powers. She chattered pleasantly, she was respectful but slyly amusing. She observed that Bertha wrote long and frequent letters to her son and received short and infrequent responses, whereas the epistolary exchange between Mr. Bakersmith and said son was exactly the reverse; the son wrote at length and often to his father, but received only brief and scarce replies. “It may seem odd that I know this,” Violet concluded, “but I am much entrusted with the mails at the Bakersmiths’. It’s a small service to offer when they have been so generous to me.”

“I’m sure having you there is a great comfort to Bertha,” Virginia said only to say something. She wasn’t sure of anything about Miss Petra, and she was out of practice at conversation. The young woman appealed to her, but there was something disturbing about her presence.

“I believe she has formed an attachment to me,” Violet confessed. She sipped her tea; her eyes, engaging Virginia over the edge of the cup, were as affable as a dog’s. Guileless, Jeremiah had said. Was it possible? When Violet had drained the cup and set it down on the side table, she dabbed her napkin against her lips. Was she preparing some polite formula for parting?

“May I pour you more tea?” Virginia asked, turning her attention to the pot.

“No, thank you,” Violet replied. She pressed her palms against the edge of her chair, lifting herself slightly and shifting forward on the cushion. “Perhaps a little later.”

Virginia took up the glass plate. “You haven’t tried these cakes. I believe they are excellent.”

But her guest made no answer, so she eased the plate back onto the table. When she looked back, Violet was leaning toward her, her back straight, her hands resting on her knees; her head, lifted on the slender, pale stalk of her neck, rotated oddly from right to left. She took no notice of Virginia. Her eyes were lowered, almost closed, her lips slightly parted. She was listening. A log fracturing in the fire gave a sharp pop, which startled Virginia, but Violet, who had now reversed her head’s trajectory from left to right, only fluttered her eyelids.

Virginia could feel her own brows knitting together and her mouth went dry.
Oh, no!
she thought, but she could not have said what she meant by this mental exclamation, only that she was suddenly swarming with fear. Violet completed her circuit and came to attention, resting her wide, calm eyes, like caressing fingers, upon the furrowed brow of her hostess.

“Miss Petra,” Virginia began. She felt a headache coming on rather fiercely—that would be the import of her remark. But she never got to deliver this bit of personal information. Violet lifted her hands, opening them before her, as if she were lightly pressing on an obstruction. A door. Or a window, Virginia thought. A wave of nausea rose so insistently at this image, which had triggered an intolerable recollection—a woman pressing at a window—that she
laid her palm across her waist and sank back in her chair, conscious only of the need to escape. Yet she was also certain that she wouldn’t escape, that she was captured there, every nerve in her body arrested and strained, fixed and fascinated by the silent woman leaning toward her.

When Violet spoke, her voice was low and intimate, as if she were sharing a naughty secret with a trusted confidante. “There is no death,” she said. “Our loved ones are among us.”

A moment passed, than another. “Are there …?” she said, then, with a laugh, “Oh, I see. I’m not going to have to ask. This room is crowded with spirits. I wonder how you sleep in this house. Here is that gentleman in the painting. It’s a fine likeness, I see.”

The clairvoyant’s eyes were closed and Virginia had the opportunity to recover a little of her habitual skepticism. Her terror abated, but she had the eerie sensation that the room was, as Violet suggested, crowded, that the air had taken on substance.

“Here is a young woman,” Violet continued. “Very attractive. She says she regrets, that she tried, that she hopes you forgive her.”

What young woman? Virginia thought. Was she expected to believe this was Miss Jekyll?

“Ah, there they are. I knew they would come when I came in the front door. What pretty children. The little girl says, Tell Mama we are happy here, and the boy, he’s a serious boy, he says, There are many children here. They all long to send messages to their parents. He says that he is well, he misses Papa very much, and Mama very much …” She paused, appearing to listen to something she didn’t quite understand.

Virginia was coming to herself. Everyone knew how her children had died. There was nothing in these silly messages that distinguished these “spirits” from any other children, of which there were, evidently, so many. She drew herself up, recomposing and resisting the pull of what she now recognized as a frantic and irrational desire to believe that her children might somehow be restored to her. She frowned upon Miss Petra. Guileless, indeed, she thought.

“The little girl is anxious about someone,” Violet continued. “Is
it a friend? No. Oh, bunny. Yes, it must be a pet. She wants you to be sure to take care of Bunny. No. She’s frowning. She’s not a pet. And her name is
not
Bunny.” She paused, stretching her chin forward, turning her ear as if to identify a sound at the limit of her hearing range. “Not bunny,” she repeated. “It’s Bunchie.”

Virginia came out of her chair with such force that her hips, colliding with the tea table, sent the cakes and cups flying onto the carpet. In three steps she had crossed the room and flung open the door. Jeremiah, slumped in an uncomfortable armchair in the hall, looked toward her with the dim hope that he might now have his tea. But when he rose to meet his wife, that expectation was dashed. Virginia rushed upon him, one hand outstretched, the other clapped across her mouth, her eyes overflowing with tears, her breath coming in tortured gasps, like a fish suffocating upon air. He opened his arms to her and she collapsed against him, her chilly hands encircling his neck, clinging to him. She was trying to speak; he was trying to understand. She brought her lips close to his ear. “My God,” she croaked in a voice he didn’t recognize. “They are here.” Then her knees gave out and Jeremiah bent over her, clasping her waist as he eased her unconscious body to the floor.

Bunchie, Jeremiah Babin informed me during a long walk around the placid lake, was his daughter’s doll, which she had so named for her own childish and mysterious reasons. “No one who didn’t know Melody could have known that,” he said. “It was prodigious.”

I couldn’t deny the prodigiousness of this incident. But what, I wondered, had Violet herself had to say about it?

“She remembers nothing,” he explained. “When she’s in contact with the spirits she is entirely a medium. They speak through her, without her knowledge.”

“So she didn’t know what she had told your wife.”

“Not a word,” he said. “It was …” He chuckled, pausing in the path to call up his sensation at the time. “Well, it was almost comical.
Virginia came out of her swoon in such a state that I rang for the maid and we got her up to her bed, where I administered a sedative. I completely forgot that Violet was still in the parlor. When my wife was calm, I went downstairs and found her sitting by the fire. The dishes were all over the floor, but she’d poured herself another cup of tea and was eating one of the cakes, perfectly composed, as if she were at home. I went in, quite agitated, as you can imagine, and she looked up with that odd little smile she has, and she said, “Have I been helpful? I do hope so.”

On my last day at Lake Pleasant, having largely completed my researches into the ways and means of the Spiritualists, I found myself with the opportunity to while away an hour or two before dinner in reading an issue of the British magazine
Cornhill
. This was a welcome distraction. The weather was stormy, which quite literally dampened the spirits of the Spiritualists, who believe the dead dislike bad weather and seldom materialize when it is raining. It never rains in Summerland where they abide, though miraculously the air is fragrant with flowers.

I was alone in the reading room. When I heard someone come in at the door, I knew by the stealth of her step that it was Violet. She took a childish pleasure in all manner of pranks and had nearly sent Mr. Babin backward down the stairs the evening before by jumping out from the linen closet in the hall as he came up to escort us to dinner. I pretended I didn’t hear her as she crept up behind my chair and stood silently looking down at me. “I know you’re there,” I said. She made no reply, but leaned forward, scrutinizing the paragraph under the title. “That isn’t correct,” she said. “It was 1872. And the ship wasn’t in tow. They sailed her to Gibraltar.”

I looked up, holding the journal open with my palm. “Have you read this account?”

“No,” she replied. “The name is wrong too. It wasn’t the
Marie Celeste
. It was the
Mary Celeste
.”

“You seem to know a great deal about it,” I observed.

She straightened, but she kept her eyes fixed gloomily on the offending text. “I knew the family,” she replied.

Then she crossed the room and she threw herself down on a settee near the bookcase, taking up one magazine after another, and paging through them distractedly until I had finished reading the article, which I found preposterous, though suspenseful and engaging. Before I could say a word, she snatched up the journal and disappeared to her room.

I took out my notebook and ensconced myself at the writing desk, elaborating my notes on Lake Pleasant. The gallery of the hotel was so wide that tables could be set up without fear of damp, and these were soon filled with whist players, chatting and drinking tea. Snippets of their conversations wove their way into my observations. “Hattie has derived great benefit from Dr. Skilling’s magnetic treatment. She says she hasn’t felt so invigorated in years.” “Mr. Leary’s corn is obviously the best, but the price!” “Mr. Whitaker’s son Harvey has come through again. Such a loving boy.” At length I capped my pen, closed my book, and went up to my room. Inside I found a folded sheet of paper wedged against the carpet. Writ large with more than necessary pressure on the page were three words:
COME TO ME
.

I crossed the hall and tapped on Violet’s door. “Come in,” she called out. She was collapsed upon the chaise, one hand over her eyes, the other brushing the floor where her shoes were lined up neatly next to the splayed copy of the
Cornhill
. As I took the chair opposite, she lifted her hand and scowled at me. “Who is this person?” she inquired. “This Dr. Jephson. Have you ever heard of him?”

“He says he’s from Boston,” I observed.

“It’s an outrage,” she said. “Poor Arthur. I’m sure he’s seen it already.”

“Who is Arthur?”

She pulled herself up, dropping her feet to the carpet, poking the journal with her toes. “I thought you journalists had standards. This account is replete with factual errors.”

“I don’t think Dr. Jephson is, strictly speaking, a journalist.”

“Well, he’s a doctor. Surely doctors have standards. Surely they’re not allowed to broadcast bald-faced lies in print.”

“I had the sense that the account was actually intended to be read as a fictional piece.”

“That’s not what it says,” she snapped. “It says …” She picked up the volume and turned its pages impatiently. “ ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement.’ It doesn’t say story. It doesn’t say anything about it being fictional.”

“I think that may be the point.”

“The point of what!”

“Well, the author isn’t Jephson, but someone pretending to be Jephson. It’s not an entirely new thing. But the
Cornhill
doesn’t print the names of its contributors, so there’s no way of knowing.”