The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

by Valerie Martin

  “Miss Petra,” Virginia began. She felt a headache coming on rather fiercely—that would be the import of her remark. But she never got to deliver this bit of personal information. Violet lifted her hands, opening them before her, as if she were lightly pressing on an obstruction. A door. Or a window, Virginia thought. A wave of nausea rose so insistently at this image, which had triggered an intolerable recollection—a woman pressing at a window—that she laid her palm across her waist and sank back in her chair, conscious only of the need to escape. Yet she was also certain that she wouldn’t escape, that she was captured there, every nerve in her body arrested and strained, fixed and fascinated by the silent woman leaning toward her.

  When Violet spoke, her voice was low and intimate, as if she were sharing a naughty secret with a trusted confidante. “There is no death,” she said. “Our loved ones are among us.”

  A moment passed, than another. “Are there …?” she said, then, with a laugh, “Oh, I see. I’m not going to have to ask. This room is crowded with spirits. I wonder how you sleep in this house. Here is that gentleman in the painting. It’s a fine likeness, I see.”

  The clairvoyant’s eyes were closed and Virginia had the opportunity to recover a little of her habitual skepticism. Her terror abated, but she had the eerie sensation that the room was, as Violet suggested, crowded, that the air had taken on substance.

  “Here is a young woman,” Violet continued. “Very attractive. She says she regrets, that she tried, that she hopes you forgive her.”

  What young woman? Virginia thought. Was she expected to believe this was Miss Jekyll?

  “Ah, there they are. I knew they would come when I came in the front door. What pretty children. The little girl says, Tell Mama we are happy here, and the boy, he’s a serious boy, he says, There are many children here. They all long to send messages to their parents. He says that he is well, he misses Papa very much, and Mama very much …” She paused, appearing to listen to something she didn’t quite understand.

  Virginia was coming to herself. Everyone knew how her children had died. There was nothing in these silly messages that distinguished these “spirits” from any other children, of which there were, evidently, so many. She drew herself up, recomposing and resisting the pull of what she now recognized as a frantic and irrational desire to believe that her children might somehow be restored to her. She frowned upon Miss Petra. Guileless, indeed, she thought.

  “The little girl is anxious about someone,” Violet continued. “Is it a friend? No. Oh, bunny. Yes, it must be a pet. She wants you to be sure to take care of Bunny. No. She’s frowning. She’s not a pet. And her name is not Bunny.” She paused, stretching her chin forward, turning her ear as if to identify a sound at the limit of her hearing range. “Not bunny,” she repeated. “It’s Bunchie.”

  Virginia came out of her chair with such force that her hips, colliding with the tea table, sent the cakes and cups flying onto the carpet. In three steps she had crossed the room and flung open the door. Jeremiah, slumped in an uncomfortable armchair in the hall, looked toward her with the dim hope that he might now have his tea. But when he rose to meet his wife, that expectation was dashed. Virginia rushed upon him, one hand outstretched, the other clapped across her mouth, her eyes overflowing with tears, her breath coming in tortured gasps, like a fish suffocating upon air. He opened his arms to her and she collapsed against him, her chilly hands encircling his neck, clinging to him. She was trying to speak; he was trying to understand. She brought her lips close to his ear. “My God,” she croaked in a voice he didn’t recognize. “They are here.” Then her knees gave out and Jeremiah bent over her, clasping her waist as he eased her unconscious body to the floor.

  Bunchie, Jeremiah Babin informed me during a long walk around the placid lake, was his daughter’s doll, which she had so named for her own childish and mysterious reasons. “No one who didn’t know Melody could have known that,” he said. “It was prodigious.”

  I couldn’t deny the prodigiousness of this incident. But what, I wondered, had Violet herself had to say about it?

  “She remembers nothing,” he explained. “When she’s in contact with the spirits she is entirely a medium. They speak through her, without her knowledge.”

  “So she didn’t know what she had told your wife.”

  “Not a word,” he said. “It was …” He chuckled, pausing in the path to call up his sensation at the time. “Well, it was almost comical. Virginia came out of her swoon in such a state that I rang for the maid and we got her up to her bed, where I administered a sedative. I completely forgot that Violet was still in the parlor. When my wife was calm, I went downstairs and found her sitting by the fire. The dishes were all over the floor, but she’d poured herself another cup of tea and was eating one of the cakes, perfectly composed, as if she were at home. I went in, quite agitated, as you can imagine, and she looked up with that odd little smile she has, and she said, “Have I been helpful? I do hope so.”

  THE ENNUI OF THE PSYCHIC

  On my last day at Lake Pleasant, having largely completed my researches into the ways and means of the Spiritualists, I found myself with the opportunity to while away an hour or two before dinner in reading an issue of the British magazine Cornhill. This was a welcome distraction. The weather was stormy, which quite literally dampened the spirits of the Spiritualists, who believe the dead dislike bad weather and seldom materialize when it is raining. It never rains in Summerland where they abide, though miraculously the air is fragrant with flowers.

  I was alone in the reading room. When I heard someone come in at the door, I knew by the stealth of her step that it was Violet. She took a childish pleasure in all manner of pranks and had nearly sent Mr. Babin backward down the stairs the evening before by jumping out from the linen closet in the hall as he came up to escort us to dinner. I pretended I didn’t hear her as she crept up behind my chair and stood silently looking down at me. “I know you’re there,” I said. She made no reply, but leaned forward, scrutinizing the paragraph under the title. “That isn’t correct,” she said. “It was 1872. And the ship wasn’t in tow. They sailed her to Gibraltar.”

  I looked up, holding the journal open with my palm. “Have you read this account?”

  “No,” she replied. “The name is wrong too. It wasn’t the Marie Celeste. It was the Mary Celeste.”

  “You seem to know a great deal about it,” I observed.

  She straightened, but she kept her eyes fixed gloomily on the offending text. “I knew the family,” she replied.

  Then she crossed the room and she threw herself down on a settee near the bookcase, taking up one magazine after another, and paging through them distractedly until I had finished reading the article, which I found preposterous, though suspenseful and engaging. Before I could say a word, she snatched up the journal and disappeared to her room.

  I took out my notebook and ensconced myself at the writing desk, elaborating my notes on Lake Pleasant. The gallery of the hotel was so wide that tables could be set up without fear of damp, and these were soon filled with whist players, chatting and drinking tea. Snippets of their conversations wove their way into my observations. “Hattie has derived great benefit from Dr. Skilling’s magnetic treatment. She says she hasn’t felt so invigorated in years.” “Mr. Leary’s corn is obviously the best, but the price!” “Mr. Whitaker’s son Harvey has come through again. Such a loving boy.” At length I capped my pen, closed my book, and went up to my room. Inside I found a folded sheet of paper wedged against the carpet. Writ large with more than necessary pressure on the page were three words: COME TO ME.

  I crossed the hall and tapped on Violet’s door. “Come in,” she called out. She was collapsed upon the chaise, one hand over her eyes, the other brushing the floor where her shoes were lined up neatly next to the splayed copy of the Cornhill. As I took the chair opposite, she lifted her hand and scowled at me. “Who is this person?” she inquired. “This Dr. Jephson. Have you ever he
ard of him?”

  “He says he’s from Boston,” I observed.

  “It’s an outrage,” she said. “Poor Arthur. I’m sure he’s seen it already.”

  “Who is Arthur?”

  She pulled herself up, dropping her feet to the carpet, poking the journal with her toes. “I thought you journalists had standards. This account is replete with factual errors.”

  “I don’t think Dr. Jephson is, strictly speaking, a journalist.”

  “Well, he’s a doctor. Surely doctors have standards. Surely they’re not allowed to broadcast bald-faced lies in print.”

  “I had the sense that the account was actually intended to be read as a fictional piece.”

  “That’s not what it says,” she snapped. “It says …” She picked up the volume and turned its pages impatiently. “ ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement.’ It doesn’t say story. It doesn’t say anything about it being fictional.”

  “I think that may be the point.”

  “The point of what!”

  “Well, the author isn’t Jephson, but someone pretending to be Jephson. It’s not an entirely new thing. But the Cornhill doesn’t print the names of its contributors, so there’s no way of knowing.”

  “But they know, don’t they? The people who published it must know if it’s meant to be a story or a true account. And they know people will read this—whatever it is—and think it’s true and that the ship actually went to Africa and this lunatic passenger—there were no passengers, by the way—killed everybody on the ship one by one, and that the crew was made up of Negroes, when they were only four Germans …” Here she threw the Cornhill at the breakfast table. “It’s just lies,” she concluded. “How is it possible, after all this time?”

  “Who is Arthur?” I asked again.

  She stood up and began pacing about the room, stopping when she reached an obstacle and turning back again. “He’s Sarah’s orphaned son,” she said. “He must be, let me think, he’s nineteen now. And Benjamin’s mother, Mother Briggs, she’s still alive, poor woman, though everyone she loved is dead. I’m sure she’s read this travesty.”

  “Who is Sarah?” I persisted.

  “Sarah Briggs,” she said, exasperated at my slowness. “Mrs. Benjamin Briggs. The captain’s wife. She was on the Mary Celeste and so was their daughter, Sophia Matilda; she was just two years old.”

  “Jephson says the captain’s name was Tibbs.”

  “He didn’t even get that right. Are there laws?” she exclaimed, stopping before me with her hands spread wide at her sides. “Can this Jephson person be sued? Or the Cornhill? Can the Cornhill be sued?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Not if the author changed the names.”

  Tears filled her eyes and she balled up her hands into fists, which made her look like the child she must have been not so very long ago. She stalked back to the chaise, sat down upon it. Resting her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands, she muttered at the floor. “It just brings that whole awful time back,” she said miserably.

  “Were you close to the family?” I asked.

  A few tears, funneled by her hands, slipped down alongside her nose. “Sarah was my best friend in this world,” she said. Then, sniffing, she sat up straight, wiping her tears away with the backs of her hands. “I shall speak to Mr. Babin,” she said. “He will give me the benefit of his legal counsel.”

  I was less interested in the legal recourse recommended by Mr. Babin than in Violet’s strong reaction to Dr. Jephson’s account, or story, or whatever it was, and whoever Dr. Jephson was. Her exclamation that Sarah Briggs had been her friend was the closest thing to a past she had owned to. I had been under the impression that her home was in upstate New York, but it was unlikely that a seafaring family would live that far inland. So, I concluded, Violet was from the East Coast, possibly Boston. I’d noted that she read the Boston papers assiduously.

  Though all manner of spirits were welcome in Lake Pleasant, the alcoholic variety was forbidden. As the evenings wore on, it was clear that some of the band members and the wild young men who had a clubhouse and dressed up as Indians, terrifying old ladies who thought they were native spirits returning from the dead to scalp them, were clearly under the influence of something stronger than the ubiquitous lemonade. Jeremiah Babin, being a man of sophistication and culture, had provided himself with a bottle of excellent port, which he offered to share with us as a digestive aid after our dinner at the Lakeside Café. No sooner had we taken our seats in Violet’s sitting room and he had poured out three glasses of the ruby potion than she brought the issue of the Cornhill to his attention, expressing her conviction that the lead article constituted an actionable offense. “It’s full of errors and lies,” she avowed. “He doesn’t even get the captain’s name right.”

  Jeremiah, recognizing at once the ship’s name, recalled what he knew of its melancholy fate. “At first they thought it was pirates. Is that right?” he asked. “But then, it was the crew. A mutiny? Was that it?”

  Violet sipped her port, giving him a steady look that betrayed no feelings in the matter. “It was not a mutiny,” she said calmly. “That has been ascertained. But this account says that it was.”

  Jeremiah nodded. “Yes, well. I would have to look into it. But I can tell you that if the names are changed, there’s probably nothing to be done about it, by way of legal action I mean.”

  Violet turned upon me an inclusive smile. “Is there another kind of action?” she asked.

  Jeremiah, seeing my puzzled expression, said, “She’s thinking of investigative journalism.”

  “He has read my mind,” Violet said.

  I considered the matter. “It might be difficult to interest the public in the factual basis of a story that appears in a literary journal, especially as it concerns an incident that happened so long ago.”

  “You call it an incident,” Violet said glumly, reaching for her glass.

  “Whatever it was,” Jeremiah said, rising from his chair. “It was a famous story at the time, and evidently this fellow is using it to put himself forward. I’ll leave you ladies to discuss your scheme of retribution. I have an early appointment with Dr. Plunkett. His magnetic treatment has cured my bad knee. I wonder if I can persuade him to set up in Philadelphia.”

  When we had said our good nights to Violet’s benefactor, she and I sat for a few moments in silence.

  I had enjoyed our dinner on the lakeshore. It was a mild, clear evening, the paper lanterns glowed charmingly, the food, though plain, was good, and the conversation wide-ranging and thought-provoking. Jeremiah Babin was a quirky gentleman, full of enthusiasms, an opera lover, a reader of contemporary poetry, well-traveled and informed about world affairs. There was no talk of spirits or second sight, though the ghost of Sir Walter Scott might have enjoyed the enthusiasm we three discovered we shared for his romances. Jeremiah was a great fan of Robert Louis Stevenson and spoke so highly of his Kidnapped, which I confessed I had not read, that I vowed to take it up at the next opportunity. Violet and I encouraged him to give Mrs. Gaskell his attention.

  The meal ended on a lively note as a sudden breeze whipped in off the lake and set the lamps flickering. Our fellow diners smiled and laughed to one another, saying the spirits were off to bed, and so should we be. Violet had not mentioned her pique about the fallacious article and I assumed she’d forgotten it, but now I understood that she had been waiting to bring it up in a more private setting. Jeremiah’s dismissal irked her; I could feel that as we sat there without speaking, sipping the wine he had considerately left for us. This suited me, as it was my intention to draw her out on the subject, which so conveniently opened a door upon her past. I took up the journal, which Jeremiah hadn’t bothered to examine. “Are you still in touch with the Briggs family?” I asked.

  She gave me a mildly startled look, a clear signal to me that her guard was down. “Not at all,” she said. “There’s not much left of them.”

  “Were they nu
merous?”

  “They were,” she replied. “Mother Briggs had six children. They all died at sea except for James, who had the good sense to go into business. And two of her grandchildren died as well. Well, one died, Maria’s boy, Natie, and then Sophy, Sarah’s little girl. She was on the Mary Celeste.”

  “And Mother Briggs was Sarah’s mother?”

  “Her mother-in-law. Also her aunt. Sarah and Benjamin were first cousins.”

  “How devastating for her, to lose so many children.”

  Violet looked away toward the open balcony, where two night birds were twittering in an overhanging branch of a pine. “Oh,” she said, watching their fluttering movements indifferently. “She had the comfort of her religion.”

  “She was a pious woman?”

  Violet smiled to herself, lifting her glass to her lips, taking, I noted, a healthy swallow. Then she turned to me with an eagerness I recognized—she had decided to reveal something she ordinarily would not. She’d regret it later, I thought. Perhaps we both knew that.

  “People said that family was cursed,” she confided. “Mother Briggs’s husband, Captain Nathan, was an amusing old fellow, something of the town crank. He was killed by a lightning bolt that struck him in the hall of his own house.”

  “Good heavens,” I said. “Was this before Benjamin and Sarah died?”

  “Disappeared,” she corrected. “It was a couple of years earlier. Sarah’s father, Leander, the Reverend Leander Cobb”—she pronounced the title Reverend with mock solemnity—“he died scarcely two months before Sarah sailed on the Mary Celeste.”

  “So he never knew.”

  She frowned. “I was …” The pause was slight, occasioned, I suspected, by some subtle alteration of the actual sequence of events. “I visited Mother Briggs just after the first telegram came. I wanted to send Sarah a letter and I went to ask her for the proper address. She was calm as a clam. She told me the ship had been found derelict, so there was no point in sending a letter. Then James came in with Arthur, Sarah’s son. He was a grim little boy, nervous and timid, and of course, they’d told him nothing. James believed, we all did, that another ship might have picked up the crew and we’d hear from them as soon as they got to a port.”