The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (7 page)

I was putting wax seals on a squadron of jars; Hannah was pitting yet another battalion of plums at the table. Benjamin ducked away to the parlor, where we found him when we were done at last. There was casual talk on the most banal subjects. I did my best not to meet Benjamin’s eyes, which I felt steadily upon me, because I knew if I did, I would be too flustered to speak coherently. It was very torture until Dinah came up from the kitchen, brushing down her apron with her palms, and announced that we must set out for
home to serve the reverend his dinner. “I’ll walk out with you,” Benjamin said, and off we went, all four, but we had not gone far before Benjamin, who was walking strangely slow, took my hand and drew me into the shade of a chokeberry tree. Dinah hustled along without pause, but Hannah turned back and cast me a look of perturbation, though she didn’t speak.

I couldn’t think of her, though I knew I would have to, and soon. Benjamin bent down to pick a few wild phlox, which he then presented to me. “What did you think of my poor poem?” he said.

“Not poor at all. And an interesting proposition.” I kept my eyes upon the sweet flowers, turning them between my fingers. They won’t last, I thought.

“Would you like to go to sea, Sallie?” he said softly.

“With you?” I asked, ridiculously, and he nodded. “I wish I could,” I said. “But how could I?”

In the annals of courting was there ever a more transparently leading question?

“You could if you were my wife.”

“I didn’t know you were thinking of marrying.”

“Nor did I. The idea first came to me that evening, when you played …”

“ ‘In the Starlight,’ ” we said together.

“Yes, it was then. And it’s been with me ever since.”

“It was the same for me,” I confessed. A pause came between us, as we each considered what had just been revealed.

“Then your answer is yes,” he concluded.

I looked up from the flowers into my cousin’s inquiring eyes. “It is,” I said.

“Lord, how I love that song!” he exclaimed.

I felt my heart literally swelling in my chest, and for some reason our childhood rambles came to mind, and I recalled how we would wander off from the others and make up games or play out Bible stories and pirate adventures. The final line of the song danced in my head:
Let us wander gay and free
. Benjamin had taken my hand
and pressed it to his lips. “Sallie,” he said softly. I felt the impress of his lips brightly on my fingers and my face flushed with heat.

“What adventures we will have,” he said, leading me now to my father’s house. We had walked a little way without speaking when he said, “I’ll come and talk to the reverend in the morning. Do you think he’ll be pleased?”

Father, I thought. Left with Hannah. “I think he will be,” I said.

We walked on to the gate at the street, where Benjamin released my hand and turned to me. For a moment we looked into each other’s eyes, both of us smiling. Benjamin brought his fingers to my chin, and lifting it, leaned down to kiss my lips.

Merciful heaven! That kiss. In school, sometimes, boys stole kisses, little pecks, and once a brutish boy I disliked amused himself by forcing a kiss upon me in the church cloakroom after service. But this kiss was something of an entirely different order. Part of the pleasure was knowing it to be the first of many. Benjamin’s arm came about my waist, but loosely; he didn’t press me in any way, only our lips lingered together so deliciously. I blush to recall it. At last we parted and I stood, my head swimming with delight, a look of stupefaction on my face, I’m sure.

“Well, Sallie,” he said. “I guess you’d best go in.”

“Yes,” I said, sobering myself by lifting the latch on the gate. He stood watching me to the door, where I turned and blew him a kiss. Then he strolled off, humming to himself. “In the Starlight,” of course.

I stepped into the hall to find my sister, her back against the table, her face in her raised hands, weeping as if her heart were breaking.

All is well, all is explained, all is forgiven, all is arranged. Hannah’s tears, she confessed, were part joy and part sadness. Joy at my happiness and sadness to lose me, both outcomes she had intuited from watching Benjamin draw me aside on the road. In the morning Father conversed with Benjamin for only a few minutes
before he called out the door, “Sallie, come here, this is wonderful news.” I am betrothed. Not this fall, but the next, I will be a bride, and after that, evermore—Mrs. Sarah Cobb Briggs.

This evening we went to Rose Cottage. Benjamin and I were seated on the settee when my uncle came to us and took our hands in his own. “This is a love match,” he observed. “I can see it in your faces.”

I blushed and couldn’t respond, but Benjamin said, “Like yours with Mother.”

“May you be as happy and blessed,” Uncle said, releasing our hands.

I was thinking that Uncle’s love match was with his first wife, Maria, my aunt’s sister, who died, though it can’t be denied that he cares the world for Mother Briggs.

“Where will the wedding be held?” asked that lady.

“At home,” I said. “As simple as possible.”

“She’s in luck there,” Father observed. “The minister comes with the premises.”

Today the weather was fine and in the evening Benjamin and I took a walk along the harbor. How boldly we walk, hand in hand, as we did sometimes as children, though it is very different now, this hand holding, entirely different. We talk of divers matters, having to do with the wedding and our plan for the honeymoon, which is to sail to the Mediterranean Sea. Some of the ports, says Benjamin, are rough, but beyond them the old Italian towns are bathed in sunlight and lemon trees perfume the air.

We fell silent a few moments, both of us watching a fishing schooner swooping into the harbor, and then, as we turned back, Benjamin said in a frank tone, “Sallie, I feel I must talk to you about Hannah.” I thought he might mean her place in the wedding, or perhaps that he knew she admired him and might be jealous of his choice of sisters—though Benjamin and Hannah have never been
that close, being twelve years apart in age. “What about Hannah?” I asked.

“My mother told me something in confidence, but it’s so serious I fear it shouldn’t be kept back, especially from you, so it’s agreed between us that I may tell you.”

“Your mother is very judgmental of Hannah,” I said, without thinking, and regretting it at once.

“Is she? In what way?”

“She was impatient with her when Natie died, because she reacted so emotionally and wasn’t consoled by religion.”

“I didn’t know that,” he said. “But this has nothing to do with that. Quite by chance, Mother has learned that Hannah is corresponding with a man in Boston.”

“How could that be?” I asked. “I pick up the mail …” And then I thought that I didn’t always. Sometimes Hannah stopped at Dr. Allen’s on the way back from the Academy. “What’s the man’s name? Do you know it?”

“Yes, it’s Dr. Horace Chandler. Does that name mean anything to you?”

It did not.

“Mother went in the other day and noticed a letter on the stack waiting to be stamped, with the return address of Hannah Cobb. She asked Dr. Allen about it and he told her that there had been two or three letters from that address to Hannah in the last three months.”

“What shocking behavior.”

“Well, we don’t know that yet. Hannah may have a perfectly good reason.”

“I don’t mean Hannah. I mean your mother and Dr. Allen.”

“I’m sure they were thinking of her best interests. She’s only thirteen, after all. And she’s very vulnerable, I think. Very easily taken in.”

“Isn’t there a law against reading other people’s mail?”

“No one opened the letters,” Benjamin protested, making his
voice serious and patient. “They only read the postmarks, which is public information.”

I knew he was right, but I felt put out that this secret correspondence, for which there was doubtless some reasonable explanation, should have been discovered by my future mother-in-law, whom I knew to be unsympathetic to my sister.

“You seem agitated by this, Sallie,” Benjamin went on. “As well you might. What do you think we’d best do?”

“It’s simple enough,” I said coldly. “I’ll ask her and she’ll explain it.”

We walked a few more steps in silence, and then Benjamin said, “Yes, I think that would be the best course.”

Our charming walk was ruined, though we changed the subject to Olie’s health, which is improved. It irked me that our first argument, for I saw it as that, should come over my sister and my aunt. It didn’t bode well and I was cast down, but when we arrived at the house Benjamin took my hands and pressed his lips to my cheek, so tenderly that I felt reassured, and he said, “Sallie, in all matters of importance, I will always consult you, and you must speak your mind plainly. Others may have secrets, but let there be none between us.”

How my heart lifted at these words. I looked up at him and said, “So let it be, my love.”

And this made my darling smile, and with a last, brief kiss we parted friends, as we have always been and will be forever and ever, amen.

Inside the house was quiet and I felt descend upon me, after the delight of Benjamin’s company, the burden he had put me under. Hannah was at school, Father at a vestry meeting, Dinah, doubtless, napping at the kitchen table as she does these days. Hastily I went up the stairs and stood at my sister’s bedroom door. Though I knew she was not in the room, I rapped my knuckles against the
wood, hesitating as the expected silence greeted me from the other side. I turned the knob and stepped inside.

How many times had I entered this room without a thought, to borrow a book, or a skein of wool from the basket, or to leave a message on the writing table, advising Hannah of a meeting or an errand to be done? But now I stood in the doorway feeling like a criminal, angry at myself for so willingly taking on the role of spy, a role I’d chosen myself and which I evidently required as preparation for the direct confrontation to come.

The room was orderly, as it always was; the counterpane neatly spread, the washstand clean, the cloth folded over the edge of the bowl. The surface of the writing table was clear, but for the pen in its stand, the inkwell, and the blue leather book with the gold pineapple embossed on the cover—like mine that is green—in which Hannah writes her poems. She has often read to me from this book. The poems are on natural themes, the seasons, the beauty of the woods or the sea. They are odd, which they would be given Hannah’s peculiar view of the world. Much circling of death, also great value attached to liberty. There’s a dark romantic in my sister. When we read
Jane Eyre
together, she was sick for Rochester and believed that he was a real man. In Jane she had no interest.

Poor Father, I thought. He gave us each these books to write in daily, as he does, an accounting of our spiritual progress. Hannah fills hers with poems and in mine we have this incessant catalog of my doings. How disappointed he would be if he knew what all our scribbling was about.

Father says Hannah reads too many novels and not enough Bible, in which, he maintains, all the best stories are to be found. There on Hannah’s bookshelf was her small collection of fiction, the ones she borrowed first and then purchased with her allowance: Mr. Scott, Mr. Dickens, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Hawthorne, Mrs. Gaskell, the Misses Brontë, and the poems of Mr. Poe, Lord Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, and Miss Rossetti. On the chest of drawers beneath the window was the sewing basket, on the bedside table, a
book—
The Moorland Cottage
. Nothing hinted at anything amiss in my sister’s small territory.

In search of some evidence of her recent preoccupations, I decided to have a look at the last pages of her poetry book. I opened it from the back. Hannah writes draft after draft, going over them with changes until the lines are nearly indecipherable. Then she writes a final version. I read one titled “Dream Light,” much scribbled upon, but the final version was copied out neatly.

I turned to the last page and read:

This made only thin and unpleasant sense to me. The preceding page was covered in a scrawl that unnerved me, as it was unreadable, not English; though some of the letters were Arabic, others were obscure. What could it mean? Then, on an impulse, I held the book by its spine and fanned the pages. A folded page of newsprint fluttered to the desk.

It was a clipping, but from what source wasn’t clear. Everything but the section title MESSAGES had been cut away. The heading read “Received by Mercy Dale,” and the text was as follows:

A second message followed:

Why had my sister clipped and kept this article and none other? I truly dreaded our confrontation, but that we must have it was borne in upon me by this scrap of print and the strange writing in her book. I folded the paper and stuck it back into the book carelessly. I wouldn’t bring it up if there were a way around it. How much better if I hadn’t come snooping among her things. Shamed, anxious, entirely flummoxed, I left her room.