The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (35 page)

He’d meant no harm. He was desperate for money; it was that simple. He could easily have gotten a loan from his rich uncle, but it came with strings attached to the pope and he was through with that. The Jesuits had driven the love of Christ right out of his soul and he wouldn’t pretend to be a believer, no matter what it cost, no matter how his mother protested. The family had withdrawn their support—well, let them, he told her.

Writing that story had filled a few pleasant days when there was nothing to eat but potatoes and no patients ringing his bell. The bell that never rang—he could have spun a mystery out of that. He sat at his table recalling his African adventure, Captain Wallace and the Negro American consul—Garner? Garnett?—a civilized and erudite gentleman who evidently harbored a resentment so profound against his native country that he had dragged his dying body across the sea to die in Africa. Doyle had taken up his pen to sketch out his impressions, to set out upon a tale. What he hadn’t done was any research.

He wasn’t thinking that the captain of the
Mary Celeste
might have a family who wouldn’t be pleased to see their lost loved ones treated to summary execution. All he had wanted was to entertain the public and especially to attract the attention of James Payn at the
Cornhill
, and he’d been successful beyond his dreams. Payn had paid twenty-nine guineas for that story. He could still feel the relief, like cool water washing over his shoulders, when he’d opened the check. Twenty-nine guineas! It was half a year’s rent.

That story had changed his life, but as his name wasn’t on it, no one knew it for some time. For a brief period he followed the flutter of reviews and opinions, the little fuss about what it was, a true account or a fantasy, the joy when all the London papers reported the telegram from the proctor at the salvage trial in Gibraltar, who was evidently still hot on the trail of the mystery.
Solly Flood
, the item ran,
Her Majesty’s advocate-general at Gibraltar, telegraphs that the statement of J. Habakuk Jephson is nothing less than a fabrication
.

The success of Jephson’s “Statement” didn’t make it easier to sell the next story—James Payn turned down the subsequent three submissions—but it made it easier to write it. A door he had been knocking upon for years had flown open before him, and he was ready and eager to pass through.

Miss Matilda Briggs called on a Saturday, a fine April day when spring beckoned to summer with its spritely allure, but by Monday, when Doyle went up to London to make arrangements for a jaunt to the Continent, the wind was wet and the air chill. He dropped his bags at the Reform Club, ran out to his banker, and returned in time for supper with his comical friend James Barrie, who always had enough hilarious theater gossip to get them through to cigars. When they had crossed the mosaic floor beneath the darkening crystal dome and stepped into Pall Mall, they found the rain had stopped and a thin fog settled in. They went out for a stroll regardless, pausing at Trafalgar to enjoy the glow of the lamps, the cab lanterns like oversized fireflies, the eerie faces of the horses materializing from the white vapor and disappearing into it again. Barrie went on to the Strand and Doyle turned back, thinking he would have a look at the papers before retiring, and there he was, at the very door of Morley’s Hotel. Out of the dull fog in his own brain, Miss Briggs and her cryptic message emerged, as ghostly as the horses’ heads. The porter held the heavy hotel door open before him. Uncertain of his own intentions, but with the ticklish and pleasing sensation of following a lead, he turned in to the familiar lobby and approached the desk.

A few guests, lounging about in the deep couches and chairs scattered across the wide expanse of carpet, cast languid glances as he passed. He heard one woman say to another, “That’s Conan Doyle.” His spine stiffened, he lifted his chin and dropped his shoulders, his stride widened; he was invigorated by the consciousness of who he was. Unfortunately the clerk at the desk, a dull young man, didn’t recognize him, forcing him to make his inquiry as if he were
a person of no consequence. “Would you mind telling me,” he said, as the fellow presented a simulation of attention, “if you have a Miss Matilda Briggs staying with you.”

“I’ll see,” said the clerk, pulling the register in close and bending over it so that his large nose nearly touched the page. High myopia, Doyle thought. Best not trust him in the kitchen with a knife. He inspected the clerk’s index finger, moving down the list of names, and there was the proof; two thin white scars, and an unhealed cut on the thumb, a nasty slice still red and slightly open. “We’ve no Matilda Briggs,” said the young man, not looking up. “We have a Miss Sophia Briggs, but she checked out this morning.”

This was odd, thought Doyle. Why would she change her first name and not her last if she hoped to escape detection? Now the clerk looked up from the book, making his face a bland mask of subservience. “Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?”

Meaning, thought Doyle,
Would you please be gone, you daft old dog, snooping around after a woman who has slipped out on you, as you deserve
.

“No,” he said. “No, thank you for your trouble.” As he was turning away, a voice from the far end of the counter called out, “Dr. Doyle, sir,” and he followed it to find Jeffrey, the desk manager, who knew him, who knew his poor wife and the children and even his mother, and who never failed to ask him when the public might expect a new “masterpiece” from his pen. This reliable and efficient Jeffrey approached, cheerful and expansive, his bald pate gleaming in the diffuse light of the electric lamps, the wide white expanse of his immaculate shirtfront bulging with the pride he took in his station. “I’ve been on the lookout for you, sir,” he said, pausing in his passage behind the counter to pull an envelope from a box beneath the wall of keys. “The lady said she thought you’d be in sometime today, and I was to give you this message.” He swept the bemused clerk aside with a wave of one hand, brandishing the envelope with the other. “And here you are,” he concluded.

Doyle reached out to receive the envelope, which he tucked into his frock coat pocket without looking at it. “Thank you, Jeffrey,” was all he needed to say.

“Very welcome, sir. Happy to be of service. Family all well, sir, I hope?”

“Very well,” he said.

“And we’ll soon be seeing a new masterpiece fresh from your pen, I hope, sir.”

“Not too soon,” he replied, because Jeffrey amused him. “I’m working in a new vein.”

“Not a Sherlock Holmes vein then, sir.”

“I fear the great detective has few of those left in him,” he replied.

Jeffrey’s eyelids fluttered, taking in the pun, savoring it. “Have you bled the fellow dry, sir? I surely hope not.”

Doyle chuckled. “Not completely,” he said. “But he is somewhat anemic and I fear may require a transfusion of fresh blood.”

“Well, if it can be done, sir,” Jeffrey said, “you are the doctor to do it.”

“I’m hoping it won’t come to that,” replied Doyle. “For the time being I’m recommending citrate and bed rest.”

“Bed rest is never amiss, sir,” agreed Jeffrey heartily, “as I’m constantly reminding the wife.”

Remarkable, thought Doyle, how skillfully this manager had brought the conversation to a convenient and agreeable close. “Very right,” he said, and with a brief exchange of thanks and best wishes to the family, he was on his way out the door. As he sailed across the carpet, nodding to the doorman, who flung the portal open before him, he could feel the pointed edge of the envelope protruding from the shallow inner pocket of his coat, pricking irritatingly against his sternum.

For the fifth time Doyle read this sentence; the entirety of the enigmatic message left for him by the exasperating Miss Briggs. He turned to the envelope—hotel stationery,
Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle
printed neatly across the front—noting for the fourth time that the address was written in different ink and by a different hand than that of the single sentence on the page inside. So Miss Briggs wasn’t working alone; she and her accomplice were having him on. What he found more disturbing than the message was Miss Briggs’s evident confidence that he would appear at the hotel to claim it. How could she be so well informed of his whereabouts? He had entered the hotel on a whim because he happened to be in the neighborhood. Her visit to his home had not been—she must know—a great success; she had failed to charm him. He had, in fact, found her wanting on nearly every score, apart from beauty, and even in that she was too icy and humorless to kindle any spark beyond the natural interest aroused by her figure, her face, and her style. The card she’d delivered for the friend—and clearly now there was a friend—wasn’t provocative enough to move a busy man to more than a few moments of recollection. The fish, the name of a ship, his initials. It was nonsense, and this message was more nonsense. They thought he was a fish and they could make him bite.

“They’ve been reading too many detective stories,” he said, folding the page and stuffing it back into the envelope.

He resolved to give it no more thought and stretched out on his bed, his brain abuzz with travel plans. In a few days he would be in Rome. His brother-in-law had written to say Wells was there, and a dinner planned—it would be a gathering of authors and the talk would doubtless be of politics and war. Wells had fantastical ideas, some of which were as practical as the umbrella. But the Naval Office ignored him, possibly at their peril.

In the morning he breakfasted alone at the club, feeling, as he buttered his scone, the absence of James Payn in the world. He was gone to his reward only a few weeks previously, and this was Doyle’s first occasion to be in London without a visit to Maida Vale. He mused upon their long association, which had begun all those years ago when he was a struggling young doctor, churning out stories by gaslight, laid low for days on end by the microbe that had climbed aboard his body in Africa and the neuralgia that made light unbearable.
His thoughts drifted again to that first acceptance. The
Cornhill
, it was the gold standard. He sliced his sausage in three neat pieces and his mind sailed upon the
Marie Celeste
back to the message he’d left in his room. Giant rats of Sumatra. Were there giant rats in Sumatra?

After his breakfast he had an hour before the travel agent’s office opened, so he returned to his room. There was time to get a note off to her, to tell her of his plan for their meeting, to tell her of his longing for a meeting every minute of his day. On the desk the envelope—it was clearly some sort of silly female prank—caught his attention, and he read the queer message once again.

It was a code, he thought. Of course, that was obvious. He tried the first letters of every word—
t a w c r o d t e a a s f g r o s d i t r
. He shuffled a few letters, got
Crows eat fast
with some letters left over. Not much to be made of that.

He read it backward; nothing there. Clearly it wasn’t mirror writing.

He pushed it away. Nonsense.

Was it every other word?
Actors come of to
 … No.

And then he saw it. It was as clear as a windowpane—every fourth word.

Come to sixty-five Sumatra road
.

Why not? That was the question that got him to Sumatra Road that afternoon. He had cleared up his travel business, dined with his agent, and his afternoon was his own. As always, before a meeting with her, he was restless. Their reunion—public, as required, brief, as necessary—was scheduled for the following morning; he would meet her train and escort her to her sister’s house near Regent’s
Park. They would have twenty minutes in the cab, half an hour if there was, as he prayed there would be, traffic.

So rather than wander the streets or drowse about at the club jabbering with any gentleman who happened to be at loose ends, why not take a pleasant drive to West Hampstead, where, the club porter assured him, the housing market was being cornered by such a lot of Jews and bohemian types a workingman might wonder what country he was in?

The fog had cleared off, the sky, a flat gray sheet with a smudge of yellow in the west, promised nothing, and the air was freshened by a westerly breeze. He could walk across the park and find a cab at Lancaster Gate. He was curious about the area, the bohemians and the Jews, about the promised book, and he wanted to demonstrate to Miss Briggs that he had cracked with dispatch her childish code. Some paltry species of honor had come into play, and it spurred him on.

One knew, without trying to, that the great thrumming metropolis was spreading, that grand country estates had been swallowed up by building associations, that the appetite of the working classes for a neat housefront and a walled yard had no limits, and that tradesmen and clerks of all sorts now schooled themselves in the finer points of freeholds and leases, but as his cab turned in to the third long rank of redbrick terraced houses, their identical bowed windows like drooping eyes looking out at the hip-high stucco walls punctuated by identical iron gates, he grasped for the first time the magnitude of the development. He saw no signs of Jews or bohemians; in fact few humans of any condition were about on the bleak, treeless pavement. Everything was fresh, even the geraniums in the upper-story window boxes looked brighter than the ones in town, and there was something dulling and cruel about all this newness. Behind the neat, narrow housefronts the residents were packed in tight, though not as they were in the stinking, overcrowded slums of Shoreditch or Cheapside, where poverty made the rules and the street was often safer than the wretched domicile. Here they were
packed in decorously, like shiny little fish lined up in tins, and they were packed in willingly, because the point of all this clean brick and glass was that they were not poor, starving little fish anymore, and living in this place proved it.