The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

by Valerie Martin

“I see,” said Doyle. “What sort of object is it?”

  “I believe it’s a book.”

  “But you don’t have it with you.”

  “No,” she admitted. “My friend wouldn’t entrust it to me. She wants to put it in your hands herself.”

  “Is it extremely valuable?”

  “You may think so.”

  There was a tap at the door. “Here’s our tea,” said Doyle, rising to let in Mrs. Corrie, who bustled about, taking in the pretty visitor with surreptitious glances and giving Doyle a curt nod as she went out. He returned to his chair, smiling to himself. The servants were working out wonderfully well. He’d hired them all in London and hadn’t regretted for a moment the expense of bringing them down to Hindhead. They were city-bred and knew what was what. He resumed his seat and poured out tea. There were oat biscuits on the tray and marmalade, his favorite, put up by his sister Dodo from the shipment of Seville oranges he’d sent his mother. “Does your friend think I would be interested in purchasing the volume? Sugar?”

  She accepted the cup, holding it out for one lump of sugar. “I believe she means to give it to you. She has a great respect for your work.”

  Doyle sat back in his chair, stirring his cup, looking thoughtful. He was thinking about several things at once: the revelation, when Miss Briggs moved her legs to cross them at the ankles, that her petticoat was of mauve silk shot with gold, the impenetrability of her accent, the clearly spurious “friend” for whom she pretended to be acting, the likelihood that Matilda Briggs was not her real name. “I really must ask you,” he said. “I hope you won’t take it amiss, but you speak with a charming accent that I fail to identify, and I flatter myself that I’m good at that sort of thing, so I’m wondering where you might have learned your English.”

  She smiled, revealing strong white teeth packed in so tightly that the canines were twisted. “I’m from the island of Madeira.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Portuguese is your native tongue.”

  She nodded but made no comment.

  “I have a fond memory of Funchal Bay,” he said. “I was a surgeon on an old steamer bound for Africa. We’d had a week of heavy weather, so the harbor lights—this was years ago, and I was very young—were a welcome sight, as you can imagine. I remember the pretty town; the hills rising behind it, and over all there stretched a lunar rainbow—quite a magical phenomenon I had never seen before. Nor have I since. Have you ever seen a lunar rainbow, Miss Briggs?”

  “No,” she said indifferently. “I grew up in Santana, in the north.”

  So much for reminiscence, he thought, and natural wonders. “Is it your first visit to our shores?” he asked.

  “Oh no,” she replied. “I’ve been here often. I have family connections in Sussex and a few friends in London.”

  “You are staying with your friend, then. The one who has the book.”

  “I always stay at Morley’s when I’m in London,” she said.

  “Yes, it’s the best,” he agreed. “When we go down as a family, we always stay there. It’s comfortable and unpretentious.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He was conscious that his interest in his attractive guest had faded. She was too immobile, too monosyllabic, and he hadn’t much interest in her mission, which evidently involved his going to some unknown woman’s house to receive the last thing he needed in the world—another book. He wished he could simply tell her to go away now, but rudeness to ladies was not in his character.

  “Will you have a biscuit?” he asked, purposefully leaving the next conversational gambit to her.

  “No, thank you,” she said. She sipped her tea, her dark eyes flashing over the cup rim momentarily, and he thought, Is it possible that she’s as bored as I am? She set the cup down and slid her beaded bag into her lap. “I won’t take up any more of your time,” she said. “My friend asked me to deliver this message to you.” She snapped open the bag and extracted a folded envelope. “I believe it contains information about the book. You may decide for yourself if you wish to pursue it. She will make no further attempt to contact you, you may be assured.”

  He raised himself from the chair, reached out to take the envelope, sank back down, then came up again, this time to his feet, as she stood before him, slipping the chain of the bag over her wrist. “It was so kind of you to invite me to tea,” she said. “Truly, I expected to be turned away at the door, and I’ve left the cab waiting. But now I can tell my friend I’ve had tea with Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle and put her message into his hands. She will be immensely gratified.”

  He made for the door, as she evidently expected to pass through it, and pulled it open before her. Relief and gloom vied for dominance as he followed her into the hall. He felt like a rejected suitor in his own home. “Let me see you out,” he said. As they passed the billiard room, he thought to say, “Here is the billiard room,” because he was fond of pointing out the delights of his house to visitors, but as she didn’t so much as glance at the open doorway, he decided against it. In a moment they were upon the gravel drive, where the cab was indeed waiting, the driver napping in his box in the afternoon sun. Doyle was alongside Miss Briggs now and hastened ahead to open the carriage door and hand her in. “I apologize for interrupting you again,” she said. “My friend isn’t able to go out, and she was so certain her book would interest you, I couldn’t refuse her. I gather it has some bearing on a long unsolved mystery.”

  He felt a chill about the heart. “Did she write the book?” he asked.

  Miss Briggs laughed. “Oh no. I don’t think she could write a book. She’s nearly blind.” She slipped her hand into his and lifted her boot to the step. “It was such a pleasure to meet you here at your beautiful home.”

  At last, a remark he could entertain. “You are most welcome,” he said. Then, as she settled herself in the interior of the cab, he closed the door and spoke sternly to the driver, who was rubbing his eyes with his fists. “Look sharp,” he said. “This lady is going to Morley’s Hotel.”

  When he got back to his study, he found he had the folded envelope in his coat pocket. “An unsolved mystery,” he muttered, tearing open the flap impatiently. It occurred to him that Miss Briggs had not once mentioned Sherlock Holmes—a point decidedly in her favor. He drew out the folded page and flapped it open. It took scarcely a moment to read it. He carried it to his desk and laid it open on the blotter, staring down upon it with a knitted brow. In the center was a simple line drawing of a fish, with a hook and line stretching up from the protruding lip. Neatly printed in the fish’s body were the initials A.C.D. At the bottom of the page, two words writ large in red ink with a calligraphic pen comprised the message: MARY CELESTE.

  “Not that again,” he said softly.

  At supper he failed to mention his unexpected visitor. His wife, having slept in the afternoon and finished a bit of needlework, felt well enough to join the family at the table, and she drew the children out about the events of their day, so the subject of his didn’t arise. He had slipped the cryptic message into his desk and out of his mind, reproving himself for having wasted time better spent on his new novel. This was the best, the most original, work of his life, and he was already anxious about its critical reception. It concerned a man who is tempted by an old liaison to betray a gentle, loving wife of many years—a domestic drama—and as such, utterly new terrain. He only wanted the children to stop chattering and his wife to ascend to her aerie so that he could get back to it.

  In the next few days Miss Briggs and her heliotrope imposition crossed his mind lightly, and with it the name of the ship, and with that the recollection of his own connection to the Mary Celeste. It was fifteen years ago that he’d written the story in South-sea, hoping to bring in a little money. He’d placed a few stories, one in Bow Bells and a few in All the Year Round, making two pounds here, five there, then he’d written a ghost story based on his Artic adventure, “The Captain of the Polestar,” and sold it to Temple Bar for … te
n pounds, was it? So he thought to try another spooky tale. The public, he knew, demanded a strong plot, adventures at sea went well, also ghosts and mysteries of all kinds. Why not put them all together? A ghost ship. The Mary Celeste. A survivor’s tale. Through the shifting mists of his imagination, the image of the ship hove into view, a few of her sails torn away, but otherwise in perfect trim, coming into the wind, then falling away, at the mercy of the currents and the wind, and no one aboard. When the trial at Gibraltar was in the news, there wasn’t a schoolboy in Britain who hadn’t asked himself the unanswerable question: Why did the crew leave the ship?

  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.

  The actors will come regardless of danger to encourage and applaud sixty-five giant rats of Sumatra dancing in the road.

  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.