The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (29 page)

Outside the visitors were advised to repair to the wharf, the tugs drew alongside, and the lines were secured to haul the great steaming hulk out of the harbor. Violet could hear the deep thrumming horn announcing the imminent departure of the vessel. When she looked outside, the corridor was empty, the other passengers having made their way to the deck. She pulled her coat back on and hurried along the plush carpet to the staircase, compelled by a confusing combination of excitement, fear, and curiosity.

It was early evening and the lamps were glittering in the seedy establishments along the wharf, though there was enough light to make out the upturned faces of the gathered crowd, waving and calling out their farewells as the space between the dock and the ship’s hull gradually widened and the prow veered steadily away from the harbor. Steamer chairs were strewn on the deck nearest the house,
and a handrail separated the lounging from the promenading area nearer the sea, where her fellow passengers were gathered in groups, chatting, leaning over the rail, pointing out the various features of the ship to each other. The intermittent fire of champagne corks and the lilting strains of a violin on the upper deck suggested that a ship’s departure was a joyful occasion, though, Violet thought, the crew must look on it as the commencement of responsibility and labor. The strip of dark water widened, but she had no sensation of motion; it was as if the dock was being pulled away from the ship. A mother and her teenage son, standing nearby, burst into laughter at some droll remark from the father. Violet smiled, turning to look at them, and catching, momentarily, the father’s gratified eye. She looked back at the wharf, where the crowd had begun to thin.

She had no special consciousness of being alone. She had spent much of her life among strangers and was accustomed to fitting herself to the habits and whims of her various patrons. She had a public identity that shielded her from their occasional thoughtlessness and cruelty. She kept up with the world—it was important to do so and indeed she was interested in literature, music, painting, even science. Being informed and engaged deflected the disquietude people felt around her—her urbanity set them at ease. When she met a doctor or a lawyer, or a suffragette, she had no particular feelings about their professions, but she knew they were convinced of the necessity to take a stand about hers. And what a range of emotions the presence of Miss Petra provoked in those who doubted the continuity of life. A little distance had to be declared, a social desperation set in when she entered the room. It was as though she practiced some shameful art: black magic, voodoo, or poetry. She knew things she shouldn’t know; she was not of this world. She had powers—she was to be envied; she was sensitive and suffered—she was to be pitied; she had visions, the dead talked to her—she was to be shunned.

When all she really was, she thought, as the night descended and the ship’s lights futilely stabbed at the darkness, was weary. The investigators had worn her down to a bundle of quivering nerves.
They wanted her to tell them how she produced her effects, but it was like asking a composer to explain exactly how a sequence of musical notes appeared on the staff. Obviously he put them there. Did he hear them in his head? Well then, who put them
there
?

She had impressions, she told them. She went into a space, a very clear, still, close space and she concentrated and listened. The messages, whatever they were, didn’t come to her; they came through her. Neither the living nor the dead had much interest in the medium.

She felt she had been created by the demands of others, by their insatiable appetite for something beyond ordinary life. They craved a world without death and they had spotted her, in their hunger, like wolves alert to any poor sheep that might stray from the fold and stand gazing ignorantly up at the stars.

“There she is,” someone said, and Violet’s thoughts were so turned inward that she assumed the remark referred to her. “Oh, look!” another passenger exclaimed. A murmur of approbation circulated along the deck. She looked up, following the eyes of her companions. It was Bartholdi’s statue, holding high her torch to light the world to her shores. Again the illusion was that the statue, not the ship, was moving, that she was floating toward her captive audience eerily over the water, her mouth stern, her heavy-lidded eyes beneath the starry crown serious and sad.
Holding up a torch
, Violet thought.
Forever
. She sent the severe lady a sympathetic smile. The tugs let off a few cheerful hoots from their short stacks, saluting the symbol of liberty, as she, appearing to change her mind, slid silently away. On the saloon deck an orchestra struck up a march—what was it from?
Aïda
? What an odd choice to commence an ocean voyage.

A ship’s officer holding a bugle appeared at the dining room door and latched it open. As the passengers alerted each other to his presence, he brought the instrument to his lips and blew three quick blasts, which collided out of tune with the strains of Aïda’s Triumphal March pouring out from the gods above. Dinner was served.

As the passengers filed toward the dining room they could see
the first-class passengers descending from above to their own superior accommodation, which the brochure promised had seating for four hundred and a crystal dome glittering above a room three decks high.

Violet had half a mind to skip dinner and spend the time leaning on the rail watching the outskirts of the city drift by. She’d heard one experienced passenger remark to another that it would be hours before they were on the open sea. But it was a cloudy, damp night and there were fewer and fewer lights from the shore. After a few minutes there was nothing to see and it seemed the best option to join her fellow passengers in the dining room. Meals, after all, were included in her ticket.

The room was long, the ceiling low, but it was brightly lit, with white-clothed tables flanked by lines of upholstered swivel chairs. One sat, evidently, anywhere. She stood back as families or clutches of friends commandeered blocks of seats. Her goal was to find a place near the end of a row, preferably next to a woman.

A toothy young lady, in company with a burly white-haired matriarch, whose black-satin-encased bulk put Violet in mind of the ship’s prow, took two seats at a near table, leaving one empty at the end. Violet slipped past a trio of gentlemen, who were bemoaning the state of the economy, and dropped into the chair. A paper menu lay in front of her and, at some invisible signal, waiters appeared in a line, working their way up and down the lengths of the tables, bending low to hear the orders over the din of conversation. Violet scanned the menu—boiling and roasting appeared to be the preferred methods of cooking. On the back of the page was a wine list, blessedly inexpensive. The prices brought a smile to her lips. Her stomach felt too weak for heavy food, of which there was plenty on offer, steak and oyster pie, roast beef, roast stuffed pork, boiled beef tail. Spaghetti in cream appealed to her, and boiled potatoes, a white meal. She could feel her seatmate’s eyes upon her, intent on opening a conversation.
Bath
, she reminded herself,
my sister. Her name is Laura. I’m a widow, going out to visit
. She raised her eyes to meet the candid scrutiny of the toothy lady—poor woman, it was
an underbite that forced her lower lip to protrude so far her teeth were always visible. “Is this your first crossing?” this lady asked. Her accent told Violet she was on a return trip.

“It is,” Violet admitted, then, nodding at her menu, added, “What do you recommend?”

Her name was Celia Durham and she recommended the boiled cod. She accepted Violet’s story of the sister in Bath without question, eager to get to her own biography. She and her aunt Tilda, the satin-clad lady, were returning from a visit to her grandparents, who live in Maine. She was trained as an illustrator and was going to London to finish her studies at the Kensington Design Institute.

Violet gave herself over to the pleasure of not having to attend too closely to the conversation. She wanted nothing from this young woman but that she shield her from the scrutiny of other passengers, which Celia was clearly eager to do. After the food and the wine appeared, it was easier still. Celia knew a lot about ocean travel; she had been crossing once or twice a year since she was ten years old. She’d come over on this same ship the month before and it was the best crossing she’d ever experienced. The ladies’ lounge was comfortable, and there was a good piano. She encouraged Violet to make an appointment with the steward for a bath. The tubs were divine and the hot and cold water came out of one spout, so you had no fear of being boiled or chilled.

Violet expressed surprise, interest, pleasure; she hardly had to say a word—it was perfect. It was a pity, Celia insisted, that Violet’s first crossing was so late in the year, because the weather could be very rough and it was often too wet and cold to walk out on the deck. A summer crossing was delightful and one could walk as much aboard ship as one might in town.

At some point Aunt Tilda distracted Celia with a question, and Violet was left to her spaghetti. She was on her second glass of wine; the familiar, welcome lassitude set in, and she felt positively cheerful. She looked about the room at her fellow diners, catching snatches of their conversation. Two young men, clean-shaven and foppish—one had a checked silk scarf tied around his throat—were collapsed in
laughter at some shared witticism. When the hilarity threatened to subside, one barked out a further inducement to the other and they were off again. Violet smiled, it was impossible not to, until her eyes fell on a hirsute, bespectacled gentleman a few seats down who was clearly not amused. As he lifted his fork, on which he had speared a wad of pork, dripping with juices, he glowered at the joyful young men. Then he stuffed the meat into the shocking red, wet hole in the black bramble of his beard, which opened and closed like a trap baited with the pinkish-gray flesh of his tongue. She clamped her stomach muscles tight over a surge of nausea. A waiter leaned over her shoulder, lowering a plate of potatoes.

At the conclusion of the meal, Violet declined Celia’s invitation to join her in the ladies’ lounge by pleading fatigue. She made her way along the deck, glancing out at the sparkling lights of the tugs, like strings of fallen stars leading the way to the open sea. Various passengers strolled up and down in twos and threes. A gentleman with white whiskers doffed his hat on passing, as if she were meeting him in the street. The sea was of secondary interest to these voyagers, but Violet found she could think of little else. She could feel it out there, pressing and pushing at the ship, vast and changeable and cruel.

In her cabin she sat on the sofa, opened her travel bag, and took out her writing book, thinking she might work on a poem she’d begun at the hotel, and her copy of
The White Company
, which she was finding heavy going. Then she paused, looking down at the spine of a slim volume bound in dark brown cloth, tucked in between the folds of her mauve dressing gown and the tortoiseshell lid of her dressing case. Tenderly, as if it were fragile, she drew it out and held it in her open palm, resting her hand on her lap. The title engraved in gilt on the spine and again on the front board was
A Pageant and Other Poems
, by Christina Rossetti. She opened the cover and turned the blank page to the title page, inscribed in a clear, bold hand:
For Violet, my muse, my love, from your Ned
.

She touched her fingertips lightly to the handwriting.

How long ago, that brief, ecstatic time.

He was home from college for the school break. Bertha had been in a fever of anticipation for a week. Violet, who had an artistic sensibility, had been entrusted with the flower arrangements, and she was carrying a vase of daffodils into the dining room when he arrived. He passed swiftly from the door to his mother’s embrace, but his eyes met Violet’s over her shoulder in an éclat of recognition that he would later describe as “souls colliding on eyebeams.” She continued to the dining room, where she could hear him, calming his mother as he climbed the stairs to his room. In the afternoon, at the family gathering, she was introduced to him—“My dear friend Miss Petra, my son Ned Bakersmith”—and he took her hand, but they hardly spoke. For three days, though she heard him on the stairs or going out the door or conferring with his father in his study, she didn’t see him. He was a busy, popular, handsome, and wealthy young man about town. Once he completed his law studies at Harvard College, he was destined for great things.

On the fourth day of his visit, Violet sat alone, as she often did in the afternoons, reading in the library. She heard footsteps approaching from the hall. She was seated in a high-backed chair with her back to the door, so he didn’t see her as he strode purposefully into the room, directly to the glass case containing the Bakersmiths’ modest collection of poetry. He opened the case and raised his hand to the very shelf from which Violet had taken the volume she had in her hands. His fingers paddled the empty space, as if to conjure what wasn’t there.

Violet placed the ribbon of her open book into the spine and snapped the cover shut, making a soft rap that sounded largely in the quiet room, startling the youthful poetry enthusiast, who wheeled about, his widened eyes taking in the unexpected challenge: a woman reading a book. “Miss Petra!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t know you were there.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t think of a way to let you know without alarming you.”

“Please,” he said. “There’s no need to apologize.” His face softened and a gentle interest drew his brows together. He took her in, puzzled, intrigued, and she looked back, amused, imperious.

“I believe this must be the volume you’re looking for,” she said, turning the book so that he might read the cover.

“Yes. The Tennyson.” Wonder slackened his jaw. “That’s amazing, don’t you agree? That I should come at this moment in search of the very book you’ve chosen from all these …” He gestured at the cases lining the walls.