She had impressions, she told them. She went into a space, a very clear, still, close space and she concentrated and listened. The messages, whatever they were, didn’t come to her; they came through her. Neither the living nor the dead had much interest in the medium.
She felt she had been created by the demands of others, by their insatiable appetite for something beyond ordinary life. They craved a world without death and they had spotted her, in their hunger, like wolves alert to any poor sheep that might stray from the fold and stand gazing ignorantly up at the stars.
“There she is,” someone said, and Violet’s thoughts were so turned inward that she assumed the remark referred to her. “Oh, look!” another passenger exclaimed. A murmur of approbation circulated along the deck. She looked up, following the eyes of her companions. It was Bartholdi’s statue, holding high her torch to light the world to her shores. Again the illusion was that the statue, not the ship, was moving, that she was floating toward her captive audience eerily over the water, her mouth stern, her heavy-lidded eyes beneath the starry crown serious and sad. Holding up a torch, Violet thought. Forever. She sent the severe lady a sympathetic smile. The tugs let off a few cheerful hoots from their short stacks, saluting the symbol of liberty, as she, appearing to change her mind, slid silently away. On the saloon deck an orchestra struck up a march—what was it from? Aïda? What an odd choice to commence an ocean voyage.
A ship’s officer holding a bugle appeared at the dining room door and latched it open. As the passengers alerted each other to his presence, he brought the instrument to his lips and blew three quick blasts, which collided out of tune with the strains of Aïda’s Triumphal March pouring out from the gods above. Dinner was served.
As the passengers filed toward the dining room they could see the first-class passengers descending from above to their own superior accommodation, which the brochure promised had seating for four hundred and a crystal dome glittering above a room three decks high.
Violet had half a mind to skip dinner and spend the time leaning on the rail watching the outskirts of the city drift by. She’d heard one experienced passenger remark to another that it would be hours before they were on the open sea. But it was a cloudy, damp night and there were fewer and fewer lights from the shore. After a few minutes there was nothing to see and it seemed the best option to join her fellow passengers in the dining room. Meals, after all, were included in her ticket.
The room was long, the ceiling low, but it was brightly lit, with white-clothed tables flanked by lines of upholstered swivel chairs. One sat, evidently, anywhere. She stood back as families or clutches of friends commandeered blocks of seats. Her goal was to find a place near the end of a row, preferably next to a woman.
A toothy young lady, in company with a burly white-haired matriarch, whose black-satin-encased bulk put Violet in mind of the ship’s prow, took two seats at a near table, leaving one empty at the end. Violet slipped past a trio of gentlemen, who were bemoaning the state of the economy, and dropped into the chair. A paper menu lay in front of her and, at some invisible signal, waiters appeared in a line, working their way up and down the lengths of the tables, bending low to hear the orders over the din of conversation. Violet scanned the menu—boiling and roasting appeared to be the preferred methods of cooking. On the back of the page was a wine list, blessedly inexpensive. The prices brought a smile to her lips. Her stomach felt too weak for heavy food, of which there was plenty on offer, steak and oyster pie, roast beef, roast stuffed pork, boiled beef tail. Spaghetti in cream appealed to her, and boiled potatoes, a white meal. She could feel her seatmate’s eyes upon her, intent on opening a conversation. Bath, she reminded herself, my sister. Her name is Laura. I’m a widow, going out to visit. She raised her eyes to meet the candid scrutiny of the toothy lady—poor woman, it was an underbite that forced her lower lip to protrude so far her teeth were always visible. “Is this your first crossing?” this lady asked. Her accent told Violet she was on a return trip.
“It is,” Violet admitted, then, nodding at her menu, added, “What do you recommend?”
Her name was Celia Durham and she recommended the boiled cod. She accepted Violet’s story of the sister in Bath without question, eager to get to her own biography. She and her aunt Tilda, the satin-clad lady, were returning from a visit to her grandparents, who live in Maine. She was trained as an illustrator and was going to London to finish her studies at the Kensington Design Institute.
Violet gave herself over to the pleasure of not having to attend too closely to the conversation. She wanted nothing from this young woman but that she shield her from the scrutiny of other passengers, which Celia was clearly eager to do. After the food and the wine appeared, it was easier still. Celia knew a lot about ocean travel; she had been crossing once or twice a year since she was ten years old. She’d come over on this same ship the month before and it was the best crossing she’d ever experienced. The ladies’ lounge was comfortable, and there was a good piano. She encouraged Violet to make an appointment with the steward for a bath. The tubs were divine and the hot and cold water came out of one spout, so you had no fear of being boiled or chilled.
Violet expressed surprise, interest, pleasure; she hardly had to say a word—it was perfect. It was a pity, Celia insisted, that Violet’s first crossing was so late in the year, because the weather could be very rough and it was often too wet and cold to walk out on the deck. A summer crossing was delightful and one could walk as much aboard ship as one might in town.
At some point Aunt Tilda distracted Celia with a question, and Violet was left to her spaghetti. She was on her second glass of wine; the familiar, welcome lassitude set in, and she felt positively cheerful. She looked about the room at her fellow diners, catching snatches of their conversation. Two young men, clean-shaven and foppish—one had a checked silk scarf tied around his throat—were collapsed in laughter at some shared witticism. When the hilarity threatened to subside, one barked out a further inducement to the other and they were off again. Violet smiled, it was impossible not to, until her eyes fell on a hirsute, bespectacled gentleman a few seats down who was clearly not amused. As he lifted his fork, on which he had speared a wad of pork, dripping with juices, he glowered at the joyful young men. Then he stuffed the meat into the shocking red, wet hole in the black bramble of his beard, which opened and closed like a trap baited with the pinkish-gray flesh of his tongue. She clamped her stomach muscles tight over a surge of nausea. A waiter leaned over her shoulder, lowering a plate of potatoes.
At the conclusion of the meal, Violet declined Celia’s invitation to join her in the ladies’ lounge by pleading fatigue. She made her way along the deck, glancing out at the sparkling lights of the tugs, like strings of fallen stars leading the way to the open sea. Various passengers strolled up and down in twos and threes. A gentleman with white whiskers doffed his hat on passing, as if she were meeting him in the street. The sea was of secondary interest to these voyagers, but Violet found she could think of little else. She could feel it out there, pressing and pushing at the ship, vast and changeable and cruel.
In her cabin she sat on the sofa, opened her travel bag, and took out her writing book, thinking she might work on a poem she’d begun at the hotel, and her copy of The White Company, which she was finding heavy going. Then she paused, looking down at the spine of a slim volume bound in dark brown cloth, tucked in between the folds of her mauve dressing gown and the tortoiseshell lid of her dressing case. Tenderly, as if it were fragile, she drew it out and held it in her open palm, resting her hand on her lap. The title engraved in gilt on the spine and again on the front board was A Pageant and Other Poems, by Christina Rossetti. She opened the cover and turned the blank page to the title page, inscribed in a clear, bold hand: For Violet, my muse, my love, from your Ned.
She touched her fingertips lightly to the handwriting.
How long ago, that brief, ecstatic time.
He was home from college for the
school break. Bertha had been in a fever of anticipation for a week. Violet, who had an artistic sensibility, had been entrusted with the flower arrangements, and she was carrying a vase of daffodils into the dining room when he arrived. He passed swiftly from the door to his mother’s embrace, but his eyes met Violet’s over her shoulder in an éclat of recognition that he would later describe as “souls colliding on eyebeams.” She continued to the dining room, where she could hear him, calming his mother as he climbed the stairs to his room. In the afternoon, at the family gathering, she was introduced to him—“My dear friend Miss Petra, my son Ned Bakersmith”—and he took her hand, but they hardly spoke. For three days, though she heard him on the stairs or going out the door or conferring with his father in his study, she didn’t see him. He was a busy, popular, handsome, and wealthy young man about town. Once he completed his law studies at Harvard College, he was destined for great things.
On the fourth day of his visit, Violet sat alone, as she often did in the afternoons, reading in the library. She heard footsteps approaching from the hall. She was seated in a high-backed chair with her back to the door, so he didn’t see her as he strode purposefully into the room, directly to the glass case containing the Bakersmiths’ modest collection of poetry. He opened the case and raised his hand to the very shelf from which Violet had taken the volume she had in her hands. His fingers paddled the empty space, as if to conjure what wasn’t there.
Violet placed the ribbon of her open book into the spine and snapped the cover shut, making a soft rap that sounded largely in the quiet room, startling the youthful poetry enthusiast, who wheeled about, his widened eyes taking in the unexpected challenge: a woman reading a book. “Miss Petra!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t know you were there.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t think of a way to let you know without alarming you.”
“Please,” he said. “There’s no need to apologize.” His face softened and a gentle interest drew his brows together. He took her in, puzzled, intrigued, and she looked back, amused, imperious.
“I believe this must be the volume you’re looking for,” she said, turning the book so that he might read the cover.
“Yes. The Tennyson.” Wonder slackened his jaw. “That’s amazing, don’t you agree? That I should come at this moment in search of the very book you’ve chosen from all these …” He gestured at the cases lining the walls.
The truth, Violet thought, was that the Bakersmiths’ library was not so very extensive, and as Mr. Bakersmith’s passion was maritime law and his wife had been known to express her conviction that no one ever need look beyond the complete works of Dickens for moral edification and entertainment, the range was not wide, but Violet felt no desire to contradict this attractive, evidently sensitive young man. “It suggests your tastes are old-fashioned,” she said. “I thought young men preferred Mr. Meredith these days.”
“I’m not so young as all that,” he replied. “Nor do I prefer cynicism to passion.”
Not yet, thought Violet, liking him for his combativeness. “ ‘Modern Love’ is stringent,” she agreed.
“What are you reading? Is it ‘Maud’?”
She opened the book to the ribbon, allowing the pages to fall open before him. “It’s ‘In Memoriam.’ ”
He touched his hand to his breast and recited, “I sometimes hold it half a sin to put in words the grief I feel.”
“I never tire of it,” Violet said. “Such a patient, determined grappling with a great loss; grief stricken but without self-pity. I think that’s rare.”
“It is,” he agreed. “The first time I read it, I wept. I felt it was my friend who had died.” He bent over her, easing the book from her hands. “May I?” he said.
“Of course.”
“I love these lines …” He turned the pages back, searching for what he knew was there. As he scrutinized the neatly printed verses, Violet gazed up at his face. She noted that what made him handsome was not the regularity of his features, though these were fine enough—a wide smooth brow shaded by thick brown curls, thickly lashed dark eyes, a sharp bony blade of nose, a shapely mouth and solid jaw—but the animation with which he occupied them. His gaze was intense; his nose visibly breathed, his lips, when he alighted upon the exigent verse, pressed together as his brows lifted. He straightened his spine and bowed his head over the book in preparation for reading. Violet drew back, expecting some stentorian blast, but his voice, like the verse he had chosen, was soft, almost a whisper. “Here it is,” he said. “Calm on the seas, and silver sleep, / And waves that sway themselves in rest, / And dead calm in that noble Breast, / Which heaves but with the heaving deep.”
“Yes,” Violet said. “His dear friend’s body returning in the hold of the ship.”
And so it began.
Ned wasn’t as young as Violet had thought, but there was still a decade between them. For a time their attraction to each other passed as an innocent shared enthusiasm. Ned was still out every evening, as tantalizingly eligible as a rich young man could be, but in the afternoons he invariably sought Violet’s company. He had spent two years on the Continent, perfecting his French and German, and he introduced her to the great poets of these languages by seeking out English translations, which he borrowed from a lending library that specialized in such titles. Violet had school French and so they pored together over the poems of Musset, Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Rimbaud. Ned read the French aloud in his soft, husky voice while she followed the English translations, many of which, they agreed, were inadequate. They discussed the perils of translation and one day he showed her his own effort at this most exacting science—a short poem by Mallarmé titled “Brise Marine.” The flesh is sad, alas, and I’ve read all the books.
She suspected that he wrote poetry himself, and of course it wasn’t long before he confided that he did. To be a poet was the great longing of his soul, but not one he dared to reveal to his parents, or even to most of his friends, especially his lady friends, who were mostly interested in the latest fashions and thought the poetry of Mrs. Wheeler Wilcox the height of artistic sentiment. Together they scoffed at the pedestrian sensibilities of the average reader. They viewed the ordinary world from a distance.
Violet was wise enough to keep her own ambitions along these lines to herself; indeed, she had no desire to expose her efforts to the critical eye of her cultivated friend. But it wasn’t long before he arrived at the library with an envelope containing a sheaf of carefully printed pages and asked her if she would be willing to “pass judgment, showing no mercy,” on his poor verses. She agreed, taking the pages away to read in her room while he was dining at the home of yet another fashionable heiress.
It was an unseasonably warm, wet, windy night, and she opened her window for the fresh air, loosened her corset, and propped herself upon her pillows so that she could hold the pages close to the lamp.
Ned’s poems were imitative and competent, neither good nor bad. The subject matter was sometimes frustration and/or loneliness, sometimes rage against the hypocrisy of society, which, thought Violet wryly, must be difficult for a young man of means to endure. There were three pretty sonnets on dawn, noon, and sunset, which she thought the best of the lot; she would marvel at his strengths as a nature poet. Two poems, one titled “Affinity,” and the other “His Muse,” were dedicated “to VP.” “Affinity” described their first meeting. That book was flown. He found to his surprise, true poetry in those lambent, knowing eyes.
As she allowed this sheet to slip through her fingers and join the others scattered on the counterpane, she saw the future as clearly as if she’d just lived through it. It ended badly; it could not do otherwise. It was preordained, requiring no exercise of psychic powers to discern. How long would it be before Bertha Bakersmith realized that her son was smitten with the treacherous clairvoyant she sheltered under her own roof? A title—“The Fury of Bertha”—ran across her mind and made her smile. She gathered the pages together and replaced them
in the envelope.
So be it, she thought. Ned might never be more than a middling poet, but she wouldn’t be the one to tell him. And indeed it wouldn’t be difficult to encourage him. He wasn’t vain; he was charming, perhaps too earnest, but his passion for poetry was sincere and he had introduced her to great poets she wouldn’t have found without him. Most wonderful was his complete lack of interest in her psychic powers. He knew she was occasionally closed up with his mother for some kind of consultation that included conversations with his dead sister, but he was as indifferent to this as if he’d been told they were occupied in sewing a quilt. She realized, with a shiver that should have been a warning to her, that she was never bored in his company.
Violet rose up on one elbow, passed the envelope to the nightstand, and fell back upon the pillows, resting her fingertips against her eyelids. Those lambent, knowing eyes, she thought. A smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “So be it,” she said to the empty room.
The first touch, his hand brushing hers, the first glancing kiss, his lips upon her cheek on parting. The first outing together, a chilly spring day, a long ramble near the river, stopping for tea at a charming teahouse. The first tender embrace, stolen behind a column in the picture gallery; the first passionate fumbling on the sofa in the library. The declarations: of affection; of devotion, commitment, determination; of love. Their passion had a deadline; Ned would be returning to Boston in a few short weeks. They contrived not to talk about this. One day he brought her the volume of Miss Rossetti’s poems—he’d found it at a bookstall and thought it an excellent edition. She opened it, read the incautious inscription. “I’ll treasure this,” she said.
Violet kept her head, allowing herself to be adored. It was an agreeable secret, because, of course, it must be kept a secret. On the occasional evenings when Ned dined at home, they addressed each other over the roast lamb with a distant politeness that was as shiny and impenetrable as steel armor. Ned really was a talented actor, Violet observed. The next day in the library, they choked with laughter over their performance.
The Ghost of the Mary Celeste Page 23
