The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (32 page)

Violet leaned for support on a nearby column, resting her hand on the cold metal of the rail. A passing steward stopped to inquire if madam would like to make an appointment for a bath. “Not just yet,” she said, relieved to hear her own voice so calm, so normal. “I haven’t planned the day.”

“Certainly, madam,” he said, touching his hat in some version of a salute and passing on. Violet peered past him, along the deck, where everyone appeared cheerful, animated, absorbed by reading and conversations. Their voices rose and fell; she could hear them in the ordinary way. The other voices, which dominated the airwaves, as an orchestra might drown out a string quartet, did not, evidently, distract them from their pleasant pursuits.

How was it possible? Violet thought. She pushed past the handrail, dodging a young couple so deep in conversation they didn’t notice her, and crossed the promenade deck to the outer rail. A gentleman in a felt cap and Norfolk jacket, leaning, as was the fashion, with his elbows propped behind him on the balustrade, the better to watch the passing parade, nodded approvingly at her as she found an open space nearby.

She gripped the rail and faced, at long last, the vast, churning expanse of the open sea. Her heart contracted as the voices rose, howling now, insistent and unintelligible, furious and terrible. She stood very still, breathing in slowly, allowing the roar to wash over her, recognizing the futility of resisting the cruel irony of her fate. The voices came from the sea. They had been waiting for her there. No one could hear them but her.

By the time she got back to her stateroom, Violet’s dress was soaked with a cold sweat. She shrugged off her coat, rushed to the WC, and vomited twice, then staggered to the basin to cup cool water into her mouth. Over the static of the voices she heard the bugle call to breakfast. The thought of food, and especially of fried
fish—the sickening odor still wafting into her room left no doubt that fish was on the menu—made her stomach shudder. She collapsed on the sofa, falling over on her side. A numbing lethargy invaded her. Groaning, she sat up, unbuttoned and pulled off her shoes, unfastened her corset, and fell back among the cushions, where, attended by the timbreless drone of the voices, she lay in a fitful sleep for the rest of her first day at sea.

She woke in the night to the murmuring voices, punctuated by the repeated booming blasts of the foghorn. It was a dolorous sound, a long moan with a sharp
m
sound at the end, as if some wounded giant, struggling for breath, pressed his lips together after each painful exhalation. She recognized it from her youth on Buzzards Bay, where the fog socked in the coast like cotton batting and you couldn’t see your own feet. Had she been dreaming of that place, that sparkling little town where most of the men were sea captains and every house had some exotic article, a lacquer table from Japan, a tin lamp from Peru, linens from Brittany or Italy, a tea service from Britain, wooden sabots from Holland, a crystal vase from France? She remembered one cold winter afternoon, coming back home from school in a fog so thick she had to feel her way, one hand caressing the familiar fences and walls as she went along, smiling to herself at the unhelpful blaring of the lighthouse horn at Ned’s point. When she got to the garden gate, she ran smack into her sister, who was coming out to find her.

She sat up, moved by this vivid recollection to a sense of well-being, which stayed with her for some moments, filling her senses like the scent of a fragrant flower carried on a current of nostalgia from the past.

A sharp rap at her stateroom window startled her so that she leaped to her feet, uncertain which way to turn. She stood stiffly, while the voices grumbled and the foghorn wailed, unable to move. Gradually who and where she was came clear to her, and her brain busily manufactured sensible explanations for the knock on the window—it was the steward, come to warn her about the fog, or
perhaps he was still anxious for her to bathe, or it could be that the sway of the vessel, which she noted was much increased, had thrown some passerby off balance and caused an outflung hand to meet her window pane. She crossed to the curtain and pulled it aside, peering out in time to see a woman turning away from her door.

There was something familiar about the curve of the woman’s jaw, the slope of her shoulder, which was all Violet could see, something that confused her. She patted her hair and glanced back moodily at her shoes lying on the carpet. Then she unlatched the lock, yanked the heavy door open, and stepped into the corridor. The woman moved briskly down the passage. As she approached the stairs to the deck, she pulled up the hood of her old-fashioned woolen cloak. Violet paused, one hand still on the door handle, as the lock clicked into place and she realized she’d left her key in the pocket of her coat. She would have to find a steward to get back in.

“Did you knock for me?” she called out to the woman, who paused on the stairs without looking back. Violet hurried after her, conscious of her stocking feet padding along the carpet. When she reached the stairs, the woman pushed the door open and stepped out ahead of her onto the deck.

Violet followed, bracing herself for cold air and wet feet, the raised volume of the murmuring voices, but she was unprepared for the curtain of white that hid everything—including the woman—from sight. The foghorn’s melancholy moan wasn’t so much louder as more penetrating; it seemed to go through to her bones. She put her hands out before her and took two steps, careful to put one foot in front of the other. That was all it took to leave the visible world behind. “Are you there?” she called out, for surely the woman must be close by. But there was no answer. A few more steps and her fingers found the inner rail, which she clutched, bringing her body in to press against it and standing with her feet apart, for the ship was rolling in a rhythm that felt calibrated to the blasts of the horn.

There might be other passengers on the deck, she thought, perhaps a sailor or two, and indeed she had the sense that there were
others near, though shrouded in fog. “Is anyone there?” she said, but softly this time, as if there might be, unbeknownst to her, a comrade standing an arm’s length away.

She heard a sound, separate from the others, a sharp crack of metal against wood, such as a chain might make dropped on a plank floor. She stepped toward it, one hand lightly resting on the rail, straining her eyes to see into the fog, and she made out something, a darker patch, just ahead. She let go of the rail, took a few more steps, feeling the empty air before her and reeling as she failed to adjust for the sway of the deck beneath her feet. The woman was there, she could see her dark shape bending over, standing up, bending down again. She stepped up on the crossbar, her hips even with the balustrade and her torso leaning out over the water. She was going to jump.

“No,” Violet shouted, rushing toward her, but the deck was slick and she slid, landing on her hands and knees. As she lifted her head she realized that the voices were stilled, that the blare of the foghorn sounded distant, as if a bell jar had come down and sealed the space around her in a cone of deepest silence.

She rose to her knees. The woman standing high above the water looked back at her, but she couldn’t make out her face inside the hood. Then she spoke in a calm, clear voice, a voice that Violet knew so well, that she had yearned to hear for so long it sliced into her consciousness like a double-edged blade, one side joy, the other terror. “Dearest,” the voice said. “Come home now.”

And she was gone. Violet struggled to her feet and hurled herself at the rail, scrambling up the crossbar and leaning out over the water as far as she could, batting the fog with her hands as if she could remove it. “Sallie,” she cried, “Sallie.” The sea grumbled and the foghorn complained. She thought she saw something moving just ahead, and she pushed up on her toes, leaning out farther into the frigid air. Her feet slipped, losing purchase of the wet rail. She reached down to grasp the wooden balustrade, but as she bent from her waist, the deck tilted and her hand missed its mark. Now gravity
was against her and she fought it with all her strength, wrenching her back up, flailing her arms, but her efforts only served to pull her heels free of the rail. A reflex of self-preservation made her tuck her chin into her chest and fold her arms over her head, as if she feared a blow from behind. Soundlessly her skirts slipped over the wood and soundlessly her body arched out into the white mist, plummeting down, down, to the fathomless and waiting sea far below.

Violet was right: Arthur Briggs hadn’t strayed far from his hometown and it didn’t require the genius of a great detective to track him down. My inquiry to the postal official at Marion drew a quick reply, directing me to an address in Uxbridge, the home of a Rev. William Cobb, who was, my correspondent informed me, the uncle of Arthur Briggs and most likely to know his current address. My letter to Rev. Cobb was answered by his wife, who explained that Arthur Briggs was employed at the First National Bank of New Bedford and could be reached in care of that institution.

I was familiar with New Bedford, that cacophonous city built on whale oil, as I’d spent some weeks there a year earlier covering the trial of Miss Elizabeth Borden, who was accused of murdering her parents with an ax. By the time the famous trial was over, the journalists’ pool filled half the courtroom and greatly augmented the income of a nearby café, which provided us with sandwiches at all hours. I was among the few who thought Miss Borden probably did the deed, but the prosecutor was reckless, at one point tossing the skulls of the dead parents on the evidence table, which caused
Miss Borden to swoon for upward of twenty minutes. The defense was patient, pointing out again and again that hearsay wasn’t evidence. In the end, the judge practically instructed the jury to find the lady innocent, which they promptly did.

In the course of that trial, I had struck up a friendship with the “other” lady journalist, Miss Lucy Dial, who was reporting for the
Boston Herald
, and as I had an invitation to visit her over Thanksgiving and a few days off at the end of the month, I accordingly wrote to Arthur Briggs, describing myself as a friend of a friend of his mother’s, and stating my mission, the delivery of a memento that had belonged to his mother and therefore now rightly belonged to him. I concluded citing my availability to deliver it to him at some time between November 24 and the last day of the month.

Arthur Briggs responded almost at once, a cordial though slightly stiff response, thanking me for my note and informing me that he took a noon meal every working day at a restaurant near his bank and suggesting that this would be “as good a place as any” for the meeting I proposed.

And so, on a blustery day in late November, I found myself looking through the plate-glass window of Darcy’s Café in downtown New Bedford. It was an unpretentious room with no more than a dozen tables, perhaps half of which were occupied by businessmen in twos or threes, eating and talking cheerfully. Two gentlemen were dining alone, and as one was white-haired and crusty, I knew the other, who had chosen a table near the back of the room, where he was dreamily perusing the menu, must be Arthur Briggs. As I opened the door and stepped into the warm, moist, fishy atmosphere, he looked up, met my eyes, and lifted his chin and eyebrows at once, signaling his expectation of my arrival. I made my way through the tables, pulling off my gloves and loosening my coat. The other diners cast quick glances as I passed, the only woman in a male domain and not, their brief surveys informed them, a particularly interesting specimen.

Arthur stood up, a faint smile playing about his lips as he put out his hand to mine and we exchanged a brief, lifeless handshake.
“Miss Grant,” he said. “Thank you for coming.” He pulled out a chair and I sank upon it, setting my briefcase to one side of the table. Arthur frankly stared at my battered old case; most men do. It sets me apart from my sex and, combined with my plain attire and above-average height, makes them check off a few boxes in their catalog of female possibilities. “Have you dined?” he asked politely.

“I haven’t,” I said. “I just got off the train from Boston. If you don’t mind, I’ll join you.” He signaled to a waiter, who instantly brought a paper menu and a glass of water, pointing out that the fried haddock was the special. “I’ll have that, then,” I said.

Arthur, exchanging an approving nod with the waiter, doubtless because my indifference to the menu saved them having to watch me read it, said, “I will too.”

When the waiter was gone, Arthur studied his hands, which were loosely folded on the table. I applied myself to the water glass. I had sensed at once that he suffered from extreme shyness—his encounters with my eyes had thus far been of the briefest duration—and I took him to be screwing up his courage. He was a remarkably plain-looking young man—I knew him to be not yet thirty—neatly dressed in a gray frock coat like the bank clerk he was, with thin brown hair cut square across his forehead, mild brown eyes with long feminine lashes, and a small, thin-lipped mouth. He was clean-shaven, which was unusual. “I wonder,” he said, “that your friend would keep … whatever it is you’ve brought me for so many years.”

“It is odd,” I agreed.

“And why return it now?”

“She has gone abroad and she feared she might not return. She didn’t know your address, so she asked me to find you.”

“Your friend,” he said, with the faint smile I began to understand was his manner of expressing incredulity.

“Her name is Violet Petra. She was a school chum of your mother’s.”

“That’s a peculiar name. I think I’d remember it if I’d ever heard it.”

“It is odd,” I agreed. “Frankly, I suspect it’s not her real name.”