The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (30 page)

The truth, Violet thought, was that the Bakersmiths’ library was not so very extensive, and as Mr. Bakersmith’s passion was maritime law and his wife had been known to express her conviction that no one ever need look beyond the complete works of Dickens for moral edification and entertainment, the range was not wide, but Violet felt no desire to contradict this attractive, evidently sensitive young man. “It suggests your tastes are old-fashioned,” she said. “I thought young men preferred Mr. Meredith these days.”

“I’m not so young as all that,” he replied. “Nor do I prefer cynicism to passion.”

Not yet, thought Violet, liking him for his combativeness. “ ‘Modern Love’ is stringent,” she agreed.

“What are you reading? Is it ‘Maud’?”

She opened the book to the ribbon, allowing the pages to fall open before him. “It’s ‘In Memoriam.’ ”

He touched his hand to his breast and recited,
“I sometimes hold it half a sin to put in words the grief I feel.”

“I never tire of it,” Violet said. “Such a patient, determined grappling with a great loss; grief stricken but without self-pity. I think that’s rare.”

“It is,” he agreed. “The first time I read it, I wept. I felt it was my friend who had died.” He bent over her, easing the book from her hands. “May I?” he said.

“Of course.”

“I love these lines …” He turned the pages back, searching for what he knew was there. As he scrutinized the neatly printed
verses, Violet gazed up at his face. She noted that what made him handsome was not the regularity of his features, though these were fine enough—a wide smooth brow shaded by thick brown curls, thickly lashed dark eyes, a sharp bony blade of nose, a shapely mouth and solid jaw—but the animation with which he occupied them. His gaze was intense; his nose visibly breathed, his lips, when he alighted upon the exigent verse, pressed together as his brows lifted. He straightened his spine and bowed his head over the book in preparation for reading. Violet drew back, expecting some stentorian blast, but his voice, like the verse he had chosen, was soft, almost a whisper. “Here it is,” he said.
“Calm on the seas, and silver sleep, / And waves that sway themselves in rest, / And dead calm in that noble Breast, / Which heaves but with the heaving deep.”

“Yes,” Violet said. “His dear friend’s body returning in the hold of the ship.”

And so it began.

Ned wasn’t as young as Violet had thought, but there was still a decade between them. For a time their attraction to each other passed as an innocent shared enthusiasm. Ned was still out every evening, as tantalizingly eligible as a rich young man could be, but in the afternoons he invariably sought Violet’s company. He had spent two years on the Continent, perfecting his French and German, and he introduced her to the great poets of these languages by seeking out English translations, which he borrowed from a lending library that specialized in such titles. Violet had school French and so they pored together over the poems of Musset, Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Rimbaud. Ned read the French aloud in his soft, husky voice while she followed the English translations, many of which, they agreed, were inadequate. They discussed the perils of translation and one day he showed her his own effort at this most exacting science—a short poem by Mallarmé titled “Brise Marine.”
The flesh is sad, alas, and I’ve read all the books
.

She suspected that he wrote poetry himself, and of course it
wasn’t long before he confided that he did. To be a poet was the great longing of his soul, but not one he dared to reveal to his parents, or even to most of his friends, especially his lady friends, who were mostly interested in the latest fashions and thought the poetry of Mrs. Wheeler Wilcox the height of artistic sentiment. Together they scoffed at the pedestrian sensibilities of the average reader. They viewed the ordinary world from a distance.

Violet was wise enough to keep her own ambitions along these lines to herself; indeed, she had no desire to expose her efforts to the critical eye of her cultivated friend. But it wasn’t long before he arrived at the library with an envelope containing a sheaf of carefully printed pages and asked her if she would be willing to “pass judgment, showing no mercy,” on his poor verses. She agreed, taking the pages away to read in her room while he was dining at the home of yet another fashionable heiress.

It was an unseasonably warm, wet, windy night, and she opened her window for the fresh air, loosened her corset, and propped herself upon her pillows so that she could hold the pages close to the lamp.

Ned’s poems were imitative and competent, neither good nor bad. The subject matter was sometimes frustration and/or loneliness, sometimes rage against the hypocrisy of society, which, thought Violet wryly, must be difficult for a young man of means to endure. There were three pretty sonnets on dawn, noon, and sunset, which she thought the best of the lot; she would marvel at his strengths as a nature poet. Two poems, one titled “Affinity,” and the other “His Muse,” were dedicated “to VP.” “Affinity” described their first meeting.
That book was flown. He found to his surprise, true poetry in those lambent, knowing eyes
.

As she allowed this sheet to slip through her fingers and join the others scattered on the counterpane, she saw the future as clearly as if she’d just lived through it. It ended badly; it could not do otherwise. It was preordained, requiring no exercise of psychic powers to discern. How long would it be before Bertha Bakersmith realized that her son was smitten with the treacherous clairvoyant she
sheltered under her own roof? A title—“The Fury of Bertha”—ran across her mind and made her smile. She gathered the pages together and replaced them in the envelope.

So be it, she thought. Ned might never be more than a middling poet, but she wouldn’t be the one to tell him. And indeed it wouldn’t be difficult to encourage him. He wasn’t vain; he was charming, perhaps too earnest, but his passion for poetry was sincere and he had introduced her to great poets she wouldn’t have found without him. Most wonderful was his complete lack of interest in her psychic powers. He knew she was occasionally closed up with his mother for some kind of consultation that included conversations with his dead sister, but he was as indifferent to this as if he’d been told they were occupied in sewing a quilt. She realized, with a shiver that should have been a warning to her, that she was never bored in his company.

Violet rose up on one elbow, passed the envelope to the nightstand, and fell back upon the pillows, resting her fingertips against her eyelids.
Those lambent, knowing eyes
, she thought. A smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “So be it,” she said to the empty room.

The first touch, his hand brushing hers, the first glancing kiss, his lips upon her cheek on parting. The first outing together, a chilly spring day, a long ramble near the river, stopping for tea at a charming teahouse. The first tender embrace, stolen behind a column in the picture gallery; the first passionate fumbling on the sofa in the library. The declarations: of affection; of devotion, commitment, determination; of love. Their passion had a deadline; Ned would be returning to Boston in a few short weeks. They contrived not to talk about this. One day he brought her the volume of Miss Rossetti’s poems—he’d found it at a bookstall and thought it an excellent edition. She opened it, read the incautious inscription. “I’ll treasure this,” she said.

Violet kept her head, allowing herself to be adored. It was an agreeable secret, because, of course, it must be kept a secret. On
the occasional evenings when Ned dined at home, they addressed each other over the roast lamb with a distant politeness that was as shiny and impenetrable as steel armor. Ned really was a talented actor, Violet observed. The next day in the library, they choked with laughter over their performance.

They went out separately, meeting at appointed places so as not to be seen arriving and going out together. Ned complained that they were never alone. He wanted to find a place where they could meet without fear of apprehension.

Violet recognized this wish as what it was, a scandalous proposition, and it surprised her that Ned, who, in spite of his contempt for bourgeois respectability, was a conventional young man, would suggest it. More alarming was her realization that, should he actually come up with a plan, she would not refuse him. This revelation came to her late one evening after a particularly torrid session in the library from which they had both emerged—he to dress for an evening entertainment, she for a quiet dinner with his mother—shaken to their depths. She sat at her dressing table, languidly brushing out her hair, feeling again the pressure of his mouth against her lips, her neck, his fingers fumbling with the buttons of her bodice, her own palm resting on the warm flesh of his neck, the sensation of heat, of swelling in her lips and her breasts. She gazed at her own reflection, her hair loose, her eyes dreamy, the dressing gown loose over her shoulders. He should see me like this, she thought. Tears welled up. She laid the brush down and took up her handkerchief. “Don’t be a fool,” she chided her reflection, dabbing at the too ready tears. But then she thought,
Heaven help me; I love him
.

It was a week before his return to college. He said he didn’t want to go back, that he hated Boston, the college, and, most of all, the law. Yet he was miserable in his father’s house and bored by the endless social obligations, the rounds of dinners, dances, the banality of the conversations, the overheated, overconfident mothers plying their daughters like trade goods. It was inconceivable that he should spend his life yoked to one of these petty, indolent creatures with the endless tedium of the law as his only diversion.

They were walking along the river, bundled up in their coats, their heads beneath their hats inclined toward each other. Patches of crocus and snowdrops sparkled on the bank, the sun was bright, but the air was bitterly cold. Like the lovers, all nature was betwixt and between. Ned, holding her arm in his, pulled her in close, stopping her, so that they stood face to face. “I think we must run away,” he said. “We can go to New Jersey and be married by a judge there. Will you come?”

She laughed. “What an odd proposal,” she said.

“Is it? Oh. Of course it is. Violet, will you marry me? I can’t live without you; you know that. Shall I go down on my knee?”

“I think the ground is wet.”

“I don’t care,” he said, dropping to one knee, pressing her gloved hand to his lips. “Say, yes,” he said. “Say you’ll be my wife.”

She felt a sharp constriction in her chest and she thought, in a panic, That’s my heart breaking. “Oh, get up, get up,” she cried. “Come to your senses.”

He rose, grasped her arm, and pulled her along the path without speaking. They walked quickly, huddled against the cold. “So you won’t even consider it?” he asked, in a voice cold with injury.

“My dear,” she said. “You know nothing about me. I have no money. I have no family. I’m too old for you. Your father would disown you.”

This brought him up short, and he turned to her, holding her about the waist, his lips pressed against her cheek. “But you love me,” he insisted. “You can’t say you don’t love me.”

She raised her mouth to his. “No,” she said. “I can’t say that.”

They had drawn back into the shelter of a cherry tree laden with fragrant blooms. The drive to the teahouse was just beyond, and as their lips met, a cab pulled up and at a command from its passenger came to a halt. The driver leaped from his box, yanked open the door, and extended his hand to the large lady within, who was wrapped in furs from her neck to her pudgy ankles. She ignored his hand, glaring past him at the appalling sight of a man and a woman brazenly embracing beneath a tree. As she struggled
for breath, the gentleman, if such he could be called, raised his head, glancing toward the cab. To her horror she recognized him—it was her nephew Ned Bakersmith. In the next moment he released the woman he held in his arms and steered her toward the river, but as they made their way to the path, the woman cast a fearful glance over her shoulder.

And fearful she should be, thought Ned’s aunt Lydia. Bertha would be apoplectic when she learned her son was disgracing himself in broad daylight with that too clever little clairvoyant friend of hers, Miss Violet Petra. And she would receive this unpleasant information before the afternoon was out. Aunt Lydia waved away the driver, who stood with outstretched hand, still as a statue. “Go back up at once, sir,” she said impatiently. “I’ve changed my mind.”

The fury of Bertha Bakersmith turned out to be a much colder, more calculated, and implacable force than Violet had reckoned upon. There were no scenes. At breakfast Ned was closed up with his father in the office. Over a plate piled with scrambled eggs and smoked trout, Bertha announced that she was planning an evening at-home at which she would present Violet to a select circle of the family’s friends. “So many have expressed interest in your abilities, I’ve begun to feel selfish for keeping you to myself,” she said pleasantly.

At dinner—the gentlemen dined in town—Bertha expressed her annoyance that her son had been called back urgently to his college, as his course of study appeared to be under some sort of review. “I don’t understand it myself,” she confessed. “He’ll miss the dance at the Pendergasts’, which is a shame, as Irene is so fond of him.”

In the afternoon Bertha insisted that Violet accompany her on a shopping expedition. “I want your advice about my gown for the at-home,” she said. “Mrs. Green tells me she has a few very fine Paris creations. Perhaps we’ll find something wonderful for you to wear as well.”

At supper it was revealed that Ned had departed for Boston,
and that his father would follow him on the morrow. When Mr. Bakersmith joined them a little later, his wife regaled him with the successes of the day’s shopping. She had not been able to choose between two gowns that were equally stunning on Violet, so she had ordered them both. And the shoes this year were so thinly soled, she’d purchased two pairs for Violet and three for herself, as they would surely wear out before summer.