The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

by Valerie Martin

  “My father will see you in his study.”

  “Really?” he said. “Not here in this charming room?”

  “I’ll show you the way,” I said, stepping back into the hall. He came toward me with an odd creeping step, as if he didn’t want to make a sound, his eyes fixed on his feet. Poor Father, I thought, as I led Mr. Peebles down the hall. He came up close behind me and abruptly pushed out a puff of air from his nostrils, which so startled me, I stopped and looked back. He had brought his hands to cover his face and stood with hunched shoulders, humming through his fingers.

  “Mr. Peebles,” I said. “Are you unwell?”

  “I’m so sorry,” he replied, his face still hidden behind his hands. “I’m so sorry for you.”

  This unnerved me. “I fear it’s not a good time for you to visit my father, Sir. You are not well.”

  The hands came away from his tear-filled eyes. “Forgive me,” he said. “I had a premonition concerning you and it overwhelmed me.”

  “A premonition of what?” I asked.

  “Of loss. Of great loss.” He dabbed his eyes with a handkerchief drawn from his coat pocket and squared his narrow shoulders, coaxing a sad smile to his narrow lips. “Forgive me,” he said again.

  Fueled by revulsion, I stepped away from him and rapped sharply on Father’s door.

  “Yes, come in, Mr. Peebles,” Father called. Without a word, I ushered his visitor through the door and closed it upon him.

  A premonition of great loss! That sounds a fairly safe prediction in this vale of tears.

  Mr. Peebles’s visit has not had a good effect on Father. He has it in his head to preach against the spiritualist doctrine, which has turned the heads of too many good Christians, but as no one in our congregation espouses these views, there’s no point in such a sermon here. It might only alert his audience to the possibility of deviance from the straight path, which, Father points out, is not in the mission of the good shepherd. “Point the way!” is Father’s abstract of pastoral duty.

  After Mr. Peebles left us, Father observed, “Ignoring such people is the best plan. I won’t speak to another of that persuasion. If they can’t get the sanction they seek from any Christian church, perhaps it will dawn on them that these messages they’re receiving are coming from the devil.”

  “Is that what he wants? Your sanction?”

  “He wants me to test his wife. She’s a mighty clairvoyant and he wants a confirmed skeptic to sit down with her in one of her unholy séances and attempt to prove she’s a fraud.”

  “Where does she hold these meetings?”

  “In their home, in New Bedford. He proposes to send a carriage to take me there and back.”

  “I wonder why he’s chosen you. Surely there are skeptics at closer range.”

  “It’s because he heard my sermon, and because he knows we’ve lost your mother. They prey on the bereaved. I hold that very strongly against them.”

  So this Mr. Peebles has promised Father that his wife can put him in touch with my mother. Then he will hear her voice, possibly see her spirit clad in something diaphanous, or at least see her hand scratching out a message to him on a slate. And what might my mother have to say?

  I think I know. “Leander, this is disgraceful. Go home at once!”

  Our cousins have returned from their sea adventures, one after the other. Olie arrived by train from New York on Wednesday and Benjamin on the omnibus three days later. Mother Briggs sent a message that her plum trees are heavy with fruit and we are invited to harvest tomorrow morning. How fortunate that our captains have returned in time. This yearly harvest is a ritual; we’ve come together for it since we were children. We harvest one day and spend the next putting up the jam, of which there is always such a surplus that both our houses have a good supply for winter and there are enough small jars to tuck into the church Christmas baskets for the poor. When we were children, we were more numerous. Mother and Maria and Nathan, all passed away now, and my brother William, who is away at school in Philadelphia, as is our young cousin James. As children Benjamin and I always shared a basket and picked side by side, Benjamin scrambling up the tree to get the plums too high to reach. The family teased us, calling us plum sweethearts. Their teasing made me shy, but Benjamin never protested. It’s been four years since both brothers have been home for this harvest. So tomorrow I will pick plums with my “plum sweetheart,” and he will tell me what he thinks of my silly poem.

  Benjamin has grown a beard! It makes him look serious, but the smile in his eyes as we approached Rose Cottage gave the lie to that impression. He stood in the open door as we made our way along the path and greeted Father with a warm handshake, Hannah with a soft kiss on the cheek. “Come in, come in,” he encouraged us. When my turn came I was surprised at the emotion I felt as he brushed his lips across my cheek and said, “Sallie, at last. Thanks for your message.”

  “I feared I’d sent it too late.”

  “No,” he said. “It was there at Livorno and it cheered me so much. But it was too late to write a reply. I had plenty of time for that on the trip home. I brought it with me. I’ll give it to you later.”

  Of course I thought of nothing else the entire day. When we all set out to the plum orchard, Benjamin brought me an empty basket and Olie—who is frightfully thin, as his voyage was fraught with difficulty—paired up with Hannah, who looked cheerful for a change.

  “Tell me about your voyage?” I said as we walked along.

  “It was smooth enough,” he said. “There was only one incident of note. One of the mates had been on shore drinking his pay for far too long. He was sober when we sailed and he knew it was a dry ship. About three days out, he went raving mad.”

  “Good Heavens,” I said. “What did he do?”

  “He had the idea that he was being eaten by insects. He ran up and down the deck screaming, ‘Captain, save me! Captain, save me!’ and then, somehow, he got into the rigging, yelling that he was going to jump into the sea. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I had him hauled down and tied to his bunk. He screamed through the night, all sorts of profanity, and he shook so much his bunk rattled until morning. I had the steward bring him a pot of hot coffee and when I went in to see him, he was blubbering like a baby, begging me not to report him. I told him if he could do his work without trouble to me for the duration, that would be the end of it as far as I was concerned. And so he did, and a very grateful and subdued fellow he was. When I gave him his pay in New York, I said, ‘Now you see what drinking can do for a man, and I hope you will never touch another drop.’

  “ ‘Nor will I, Captain,’ he promised, but of course, as I was leaving, I saw him ducking into the alehouse with his fellows, out to lose their pay and their wits in one bout.”

  Of the evils of drink, Benjamin is much acquainted. His uncle Daniel has been a dissolute all his life, to the great sadness of his brother, Captain Nathan. Now and then Daniel tries to straighten up, and his brother is ever ready there to encourage him, but it always comes to naught. Though Benjamin is young to be a captain, he has been to sea since he was sixteen, so he has a vast store of experience upon which to draw, and like his father he allows no alcohol on his ship. There are sailors who find this proviso reason enough to stay away.

  As he finished his story, we arrived at the orchard with the others and talked no more of travel. The trees were dripping heavy, dark fruit, and the morning passed quickly with the work. We had our lunch of bread, ham, and cheese at the outdoor table under the big maple in the side yard. Mother Briggs urged Olie to eat more, and he spoke of his adventure. His ship sprang a leak a week out and they pumped it for a fortnight, partly in foul weather that came up so fierce and so sudden, and the sailors so occupied with pumping, that the mainsail split before they could get it down. They limped into the Gulf of Mexico and got a tow to New Orleans, where the ship was pulled up for repairs. They spent ten days in port and every one
was money lost. There was yellow fever in the city, so they stayed at the port and ate only the food they had in their ship provisions for fear of catching the disease. The rest of the journey was rough, a hurricane nearly capsized them and in the frenzy two sailors were lost overboard. “I always hate to write those letters,” Olie said. “One was married just a month before we sailed.”

  Hannah, who had been listening closely with her eyes lowered, said softly, “And the two sailors were lost on June sixth.”

  Olie gazed at her—we all did—with surprise; then he calculated dates in his head and replied, “Yes, it was. How did you know?”

  Hannah blinked rapidly and touched her brow with her fingertips. “I’m not sure.”

  “How strange,” Father said, “that you should know the day.”

  “It came to me as you were speaking,” Hannah said to Olie.

  I glanced at Benjamin, who gazed upon my sister with an expression of profound sympathy.

  “I guess it was somewhere in my head and you read it there,” Olie said, patting her hand with his fingertips.

  Hannah nodded, shy now that she had everyone’s attention.

  Mother Briggs busied herself pulling in empty plates. “It’s a coincidence,” she said, and the matter of my clairvoyant sister was thus closed. But I was thinking Hannah’s premonition worked in reverse, it was a postmonition; she was mysteriously informed about an event already concluded. It was odd that she would announce the correct date, though perhaps it was not so difficult to figure, as she knew the date Olie sailed, the approximate time to New Orleans, the number of days there, etc., so she could, with a little calculation, arrive at a fairly accurate guess. She may have been counting the days of the trip from the start, mentally assigning dates to the chronology of Olie’s story. It probably wasn’t clairvoyance, just plain addition. But if this was so, why did she claim to have no idea how she arrived at the correct date?

  We rose from the table and set out to the field to finish our labors. Just as Benjamin and I arrived at our overflowing baskets, he slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and produced a much-folded envelope. “Here’s my reply,” he said. “Read it when you get home. Let me know what you think of it tomorrow.”

  I took the envelope and unfolded it, my hand trembling with curiosity. He had written SALLIE across the front in his bold script. “I will,” I said, depositing it in my apron pocket. Benjamin turned his attention to our baskets. “We’ll take this one first,” he said. Each of us took a handle and lifted the basket between us; then we began our descent to the house.

  Birds at sea sing tunelessly,

  But I know one who sings on key.

  I long to steal her from the shore,

  That she might sing alone for me,

  And be my songbird evermore

  Sailing on the sparkling sea.

  I’ve read it a hundred times. My cousin wants to take me away! And oh, how willingly I would go.

  I woke this morning with a smile on my face, knowing we would soon be off to Rose Cottage for jam making and there I would see my cousin and tell him what I think of his invitation. Well, not exactly an invitation; his plan is to “steal” me.

  He wasn’t at home when we arrived, but in the afternoon, when the whole house smelled of cooking fruit, he appeared at the kitchen door and looked in at us, highly amused. “Just as I suspected,” he said. “Ladies in a jam.”

  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.”