The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (21 page)

“But they know, don’t they? The people who published it must know if it’s meant to be a story or a true account. And they know people will read this—whatever it is—and think it’s true and that the ship actually went to Africa and this lunatic passenger—there were no passengers, by the way—killed everybody on the ship one by one, and that the crew was made up of Negroes, when they were only four Germans …” Here she threw the
Cornhill
at the breakfast table. “It’s just lies,” she concluded. “How is it possible, after all this time?”

“Who is Arthur?” I asked again.

She stood up and began pacing about the room, stopping when she reached an obstacle and turning back again. “He’s Sarah’s orphaned son,” she said. “He must be, let me think, he’s nineteen now. And Benjamin’s mother, Mother Briggs, she’s still alive, poor woman, though everyone she loved is dead. I’m sure she’s read this travesty.”

“Who is Sarah?” I persisted.

“Sarah Briggs,” she said, exasperated at my slowness. “Mrs. Benjamin
Briggs. The captain’s wife. She was on the
Mary Celeste
and so was their daughter, Sophia Matilda; she was just two years old.”

“Jephson says the captain’s name was Tibbs.”

“He didn’t even get that right. Are there laws?” she exclaimed, stopping before me with her hands spread wide at her sides. “Can this Jephson person be sued? Or the
Cornhill
? Can the
Cornhill
be sued?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Not if the author changed the names.”

Tears filled her eyes and she balled up her hands into fists, which made her look like the child she must have been not so very long ago. She stalked back to the chaise, sat down upon it. Resting her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands, she muttered at the floor. “It just brings that whole awful time back,” she said miserably.

“Were you close to the family?” I asked.

A few tears, funneled by her hands, slipped down alongside her nose. “Sarah was my best friend in this world,” she said. Then, sniffing, she sat up straight, wiping her tears away with the backs of her hands. “I shall speak to Mr. Babin,” she said. “He will give me the benefit of his legal counsel.”

I was less interested in the legal recourse recommended by Mr. Babin than in Violet’s strong reaction to Dr. Jephson’s account, or story, or whatever it was, and whoever Dr. Jephson was. Her exclamation that Sarah Briggs had been her friend was the closest thing to a past she had owned to. I had been under the impression that her home was in upstate New York, but it was unlikely that a seafaring family would live that far inland. So, I concluded, Violet was from the East Coast, possibly Boston. I’d noted that she read the Boston papers assiduously.

Though all manner of spirits were welcome in Lake Pleasant, the alcoholic variety was forbidden. As the evenings wore on, it was clear that some of the band members and the wild young men who had a clubhouse and dressed up as Indians, terrifying old ladies who thought they were native spirits returning from the dead to
scalp them, were clearly under the influence of something stronger than the ubiquitous lemonade. Jeremiah Babin, being a man of sophistication and culture, had provided himself with a bottle of excellent port, which he offered to share with us as a digestive aid after our dinner at the Lakeside Café. No sooner had we taken our seats in Violet’s sitting room and he had poured out three glasses of the ruby potion than she brought the issue of the
Cornhill
to his attention, expressing her conviction that the lead article constituted an actionable offense. “It’s full of errors and lies,” she avowed. “He doesn’t even get the captain’s name right.”

Jeremiah, recognizing at once the ship’s name, recalled what he knew of its melancholy fate. “At first they thought it was pirates. Is that right?” he asked. “But then, it was the crew. A mutiny? Was that it?”

Violet sipped her port, giving him a steady look that betrayed no feelings in the matter. “It was not a mutiny,” she said calmly. “That has been ascertained. But this account says that it was.”

Jeremiah nodded. “Yes, well. I would have to look into it. But I can tell you that if the names are changed, there’s probably nothing to be done about it, by way of legal action I mean.”

Violet turned upon me an inclusive smile. “Is there another kind of action?” she asked.

Jeremiah, seeing my puzzled expression, said, “She’s thinking of investigative journalism.”

“He has read my mind,” Violet said.

I considered the matter. “It might be difficult to interest the public in the factual basis of a story that appears in a literary journal, especially as it concerns an incident that happened so long ago.”

“You call it an incident,” Violet said glumly, reaching for her glass.

“Whatever it was,” Jeremiah said, rising from his chair. “It was a famous story at the time, and evidently this fellow is using it to put himself forward. I’ll leave you ladies to discuss your scheme of retribution. I have an early appointment with Dr. Plunkett. His magnetic
treatment has cured my bad knee. I wonder if I can persuade him to set up in Philadelphia.”

When we had said our good nights to Violet’s benefactor, she and I sat for a few moments in silence.

I had enjoyed our dinner on the lakeshore. It was a mild, clear evening, the paper lanterns glowed charmingly, the food, though plain, was good, and the conversation wide-ranging and thought-provoking. Jeremiah Babin was a quirky gentleman, full of enthusiasms, an opera lover, a reader of contemporary poetry, well-traveled and informed about world affairs. There was no talk of spirits or second sight, though the ghost of Sir Walter Scott might have enjoyed the enthusiasm we three discovered we shared for his romances. Jeremiah was a great fan of Robert Louis Stevenson and spoke so highly of his
Kidnapped
, which I confessed I had not read, that I vowed to take it up at the next opportunity. Violet and I encouraged him to give Mrs. Gaskell his attention.

The meal ended on a lively note as a sudden breeze whipped in off the lake and set the lamps flickering. Our fellow diners smiled and laughed to one another, saying the spirits were off to bed, and so should we be. Violet had not mentioned her pique about the fallacious article and I assumed she’d forgotten it, but now I understood that she had been waiting to bring it up in a more private setting. Jeremiah’s dismissal irked her; I could feel that as we sat there without speaking, sipping the wine he had considerately left for us. This suited me, as it was my intention to draw her out on the subject, which so conveniently opened a door upon her past. I took up the journal, which Jeremiah hadn’t bothered to examine. “Are you still in touch with the Briggs family?” I asked.

She gave me a mildly startled look, a clear signal to me that her guard was down. “Not at all,” she said. “There’s not much left of them.”

“Were they numerous?”

“They were,” she replied. “Mother Briggs had six children. They all died at sea except for James, who had the good sense to go into
business. And two of her grandchildren died as well. Well, one died, Maria’s boy, Natie, and then Sophy, Sarah’s little girl. She was on the
Mary Celeste
.”

“And Mother Briggs was Sarah’s mother?”

“Her mother-in-law. Also her aunt. Sarah and Benjamin were first cousins.”

“How devastating for her, to lose so many children.”

Violet looked away toward the open balcony, where two night birds were twittering in an overhanging branch of a pine. “Oh,” she said, watching their fluttering movements indifferently. “She had the comfort of her religion.”

“She was a pious woman?”

Violet smiled to herself, lifting her glass to her lips, taking, I noted, a healthy swallow. Then she turned to me with an eagerness I recognized—she had decided to reveal something she ordinarily would not. She’d regret it later, I thought. Perhaps we both knew that.

“People said that family was cursed,” she confided. “Mother Briggs’s husband, Captain Nathan, was an amusing old fellow, something of the town crank. He was killed by a lightning bolt that struck him in the hall of his own house.”

“Good heavens,” I said. “Was this before Benjamin and Sarah died?”

“Disappeared,” she corrected. “It was a couple of years earlier. Sarah’s father, Leander, the Reverend Leander Cobb”—she pronounced the title Reverend with mock solemnity—“he died scarcely two months before Sarah sailed on the
Mary Celeste
.”

“So he never knew.”

She frowned. “I was …” The pause was slight, occasioned, I suspected, by some subtle alteration of the actual sequence of events. “I visited Mother Briggs just after the first telegram came. I wanted to send Sarah a letter and I went to ask her for the proper address. She was calm as a clam. She told me the ship had been found derelict, so there was no point in sending a letter. Then James came in with Arthur, Sarah’s son. He was a grim little boy, nervous and timid,
and of course, they’d told him nothing. James believed, we all did, that another ship might have picked up the crew and we’d hear from them as soon as they got to a port.”

She glanced up at me to see how I was responding to her story. Wanting to give the thin edge of agitation in her voice room to expand, I said nothing.

“It was so dreadful,” she continued. “Benjamin’s brother Oliver—he was a charming man, full of gaiety—he had sailed from New York a week later than Benjamin and Sarah. They all had plans to meet in Messina. Oliver had even told his mother what songs he planned to sing at their reunion—she told me that later. He had a fine voice. He and Sarah loved to sing together. What we didn’t know then, when they got that first telegram …” Again she paused, this time to raise her glass for another bracing draft of wine. “What we didn’t know was that Oliver’s ship—it was the
Julia A. Hallock
—went down in a storm in the Bay of Biscay. He and the first mate clung to some pieces of the deckhouse for four days before Oliver gave up and let go. The mate was rescued not two hours later.” Tears gathered in her eyes and she extracted a handkerchief from her sleeve.

When a heartfelt account moves the teller to tears, the natural response of anyone with ordinary human feeling is to offer kind words of sympathy and consolation, but my profession precludes such natural expressions, and the sight of tears tends to stir in me nothing so much as a sense of predatory anticipation. I watched Violet without comment. She dried her tears, sniffed mightily, coughed. Her eyes fell upon the journal, which was resting on my lap. “How could that person, that Dr. Jephson, how could he make such a mockery of other people’s suffering? People he didn’t even know.”

“Did the Briggs family live in New York?” I asked.

She gave me a look of consternation. She was having a difficult time getting anyone to share her outrage at the scurrilous Dr. Jephson. “They lived in Massachusetts. Why would you think they lived in New York?”

“I thought you grew up in New York. I seem to remember reading that. Upstate somewhere. Isn’t that correct?”

“Gloversville,” she said, too quickly. “We lived there until I was twelve. Then we moved to Marion.”

“I see,” I said. “And that’s where you met Sarah Briggs.”

“We went to the Academy together.”

“Do you still have relatives there?”

Her eyes narrowed slightly and she lifted her chin, contemplating me for a moment before speaking. “I have an aunt,” she said. “But she disapproves of me, so we’re not in contact.”

“She lives in Marion?”

“I don’t know where she lives now,” she replied. “Nor do I care.”

I smiled, thinking of my mother’s sister Claire, who had refused to help us when we were destitute because mother had married, in her view, beneath her.

“Have I said something funny?” Violet asked, looking pouty.

“I have such an aunt,” I said.

A snort of glee escaped her. “Do you?” she said. I nodded wisely. “Bad luck to them both.” She was now relaxed and warmed to me. We were two of a kind—orphans with heartless relations. I wondered if she had any money of her own.

“May I ask you a personal question?” I said.

“I think I know what it is,” she replied.

“What do you think it is?”

“You want to know if I have an income.”

It surprised me that she should have guessed my thought. “Yes,” I said. “I understand you don’t charge for the services you render, so I wondered …”

“I have a little money from my grandmother,” she replied. “Not enough to live on. But I can’t charge for what you call my services because if I did the people who really matter wouldn’t seek me out. They would assume I was a fraud, that I was in it for the money.”

“I notice at these séances advertised here, the psychics all charge admission.”

“Exactly. Twenty-five cents. How many of those would one have to do to make up the price of a pair of shoes?”

“Yes. I had that same thought.”

“Those people are hobbyists, and many of them are just ludicrous, obvious frauds. They make disembodied hands appear, or instruments play themselves. It’s entertainment.”

“I see,” I said. And I did, though I didn’t understand why people found being roundly duped an activity worth paying even twenty-five cents to enjoy.

Violet cast me a look tinged with desperation. “Oh, I wish I could be like you and earn my living by my pen!” she exclaimed.

“I fear you’d find it dull and tiring.”

“You’re out in the world, editors send you off to find out things and write up what you find, doors open to you, people respect you. No one patronizes you. Jeremiah said he thought you a brave sort of person. Level-headed and sound.”

“Did he?”

“Yes. He admires you.” She plucked at her skirt peevishly. “You may be sure no one ever thinks of
me
as level-headed.”

“Do you want to be level-headed?”

She raised her eyebrows as if the question bore consideration, then sighed, dropping back in her chair. “They tire of me,” she said. “At first it’s very exciting and I’m in a trance half the time, keeping them in touch with their loved ones. But after a while …” She raised her hand to her hair, patting a straying curl back into place absentmindedly. “Often the gentlemen develop little crushes on me. At the Bakersmiths’ it was the son. You should see some of the letters I’ve received! Then the wives begin to think of how much good I could do for their friends, a soiree is arranged, and I know I’m about to pack my bags.”