The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

by Valerie Martin

  In the morning he breakfasted alone at the club, feeling, as he buttered his scone, the absence of James Payn in the world. He was gone to his reward only a few weeks previously, and this was Doyle’s first occasion to be in London without a visit to Maida Vale. He mused upon their long association, which had begun all those years ago when he was a struggling young doctor, churning out stories by gaslight, laid low for days on end by the microbe that had climbed aboard his body in Africa and the neuralgia that made light unbearable. His thoughts drifted again to that first acceptance. The Cornhill, it was the gold standard. He sliced his sausage in three neat pieces and his mind sailed upon the Marie Celeste back to the message he’d left in his room. Giant rats of Sumatra. Were there giant rats in Sumatra?

  After his breakfast he had an hour before the travel agent’s office opened, so he returned to his room. There was time to get a note off to her, to tell her of his plan for their meeting, to tell her of his longing for a meeting every minute of his day. On the desk the envelope—it was clearly some sort of silly female prank—caught his attention, and he read the queer message once again.

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

  It was a code, he thought. Of course, that was obvious. He tried the first letters of every word—t a w c r o d t e a a s f g r o s d i t r. He shuffled a few letters, got Crows eat fast with some letters left over. Not much to be made of that.

  He read it backward; nothing there. Clearly it wasn’t mirror writing.

  He pushed it away. Nonsense.

  Was it every other word? Actors come of to … No.

  And then he saw it. It was as clear as a windowpane—every fourth word.

  Come to sixty-five Sumatra road.

  Why not? That was the question that got him to Sumatra Road that afternoon. He had cleared up his travel business, dined with his agent, and his afternoon was his own. As always, before a meeting with her, he was restless. Their reunion—public, as required, brief, as necessary—was scheduled for the following morning; he would meet her train and escort her to her sister’s house near Regent’s Park. They would have twenty minutes in the cab, half an hour if there was, as he prayed there would be, traffic.

  So rather than wander the streets or drowse about at the club jabbering with any gentleman who happened to be at loose ends, why not take a pleasant drive to West Hampstead, where, the club porter assured him, the housing market was being cornered by such a lot of Jews and bohemian types a workingman might wonder what country he was in?

  The fog had cleared off, the sky, a flat gray sheet with a smudge of yellow in the west, promised nothing, and the air was freshened by a westerly breeze. He could walk across the park and find a cab at Lancaster Gate. He was curious about the area, the bohemians and the Jews, about the promised book, and he wanted to demonstrate to Miss Briggs that he had cracked with dispatch her childish code. Some paltry species of honor had come into play, and it spurred him on.

  One knew, without trying to, that the great thrumming metropolis was spreading, that grand country estates had been swallowed up by building associations, that the appetite of the working classes for a neat housefront and a walled yard had no limits, and that tradesmen and clerks of all sorts now schooled themselves in the finer points of freeholds and leases, but as his cab turned in to the third long rank of redbrick terraced houses, their identical bowed windows like drooping eyes looking out at the hip-high stucco walls punctuated by identical iron gates, he grasped for the first time the magnitude of the development. He saw no signs of Jews or bohemians; in fact few humans of any condition were about on the bleak, treeless pavement. Everything was fresh, even the geraniums in the upper-story window boxes looked brighter than the ones in town, and there was something dulling and cruel about all this newness. Behind the neat, narrow housefronts the residents were packed in tight, though not as they were in the stinking, overcrowded slums of Shoreditch or Cheapside, where poverty made the rules and the street was often safer than the wretched domicile. Here they were packed in decorously, like shiny little fish lined up in tins, and they were packed in willingly, because the point of all this clean brick and glass was that they were not poor, starving little fish anymore, and living in this place proved it.

  The horses’ hooves clopped briskly on the long expanse of Dennington Park Road, and then slowed as the cab turned onto Sumatra Road, the last street before the rail tracks. In fact, as they made the turn, Doyle could see that the wee yards of these smaller, taller houses backed right up to the tracks. The tracks, he thought, which carried the trains, which moved the men who lived in the houses that Dennington built.

  Number 65 Sumatra Road was distinguished from its neighbors by a Mediterranean panache. The small front plot was abloom with geraniums. Fragrant rosemary bushes pruned into pyramids defined the four corners, a hedge of lavender lined the walk, a lush bougainvillea overpowered a trellis fastened to the wall, and two enormous pots of exotic striped cannas occupied pride of place on either side of the door, which was painted an unusual sea-foam blue. Doyle alighted from the cab and asked the driver to wait, as his visit would be a brief one. He didn’t want to get trapped in this monumental maze of brick with no easy way out. As he strode up the walk, he noticed the curtain at the window of number 64 dropping back into place. Neighbor-watching. There must be a lot of that, he thought.

  He rang the bell. There was no sound from within. The absurdity of his mission touched him, but he brushed it away. It was a lark. He could set a crime in this place; no telling how much professional and personal disgruntlement festered behind the endless succession of smartly painted doors. As he waited, a tomato-red door two fronts down opened and the rear end of a pram issued from within. Then he heard a bolt turning in the blue door and looked round to see it open.

  The small woman who stood before him didn’t look at him, or anything else for that matter, as her eyes, clouded with cataracts, had the unsettling milky appearance that sometimes frightens children. “Here you are, Dr. Doyle,” she said cheerfully. “I thought I might find you at my door this afternoon.” She stepped aside, holding the doorknob with one hand and a walking stick in the other. “You are most welcome,” she continued. “Do come in.”

  “If you knew I was coming,” he said jovially, passing her in the narrow entry hall, “you know more about my plans than I do, as I only resolved to pay you a visit an hour ago.”

  She closed the door, plunging the hall into gloom. “I know gentlemen don’t generally credit the ladies with much capacity for deductive reasoning,” she said. “But it’s my opinion that we are rather good at it than not. Especially where gentlemen’s motives are concerned.” She turned to him, extending her frail, bony hand, which he took in his own, careful not to crush it. “I am Mrs. Blatchford,” she said.

  He observed her closely, from the old-fashioned bonnet fastened over her wispy mouse-gray hair to her plain Mother Hubbard and clean white apron to the black stockings and practical brogans peeking out beneath the skirt. She was, he guessed, in her sixties, fair complexion, not excessively wrinkled, something Welsh about the downturn at the outer corners of her eyes and the weakness of her chin. She was thin, her spine straight, her movements confident, in spite of her blindness, and sprightly in her manner.

  She was a little character, he thought, tucked away behind her bougainvillea-festooned blue door. This was going to be entertaining. Curious old ladies were one of his strong suits.

  “I’m afraid I must ask you to follow me to the kitchen,” she said, as he released her hand. “I have our tea laid out, but I can’t manage the tray.”

  “With pleasure,” he said.

  Moving quickly, as she was familiar with the territory and doubtless careful that all objects stayed in their places, she led him past the staircase and the parlor door. Doyle set himself to noticing everything, the Chinese silk carpet runner—he’d rarely seen a finer one, very delicate i
n its colors and smooth in its weave—the embossed wallpaper largely hidden by all manner of pictures: Japanese prints, maps, prints of sailing ships, framed photographs of harbors—he recognized Liverpool and another he took to be Gibraltar—a very good painting of Vesuvius, seen from Naples, and another of Mt. Fuji, with its neat snow-capped peak. A lacquer chest against the wall, hand-painted with chrysanthemums in the Japanese style, sported a bowl in the shape of bundled leaves, hand-painted with chrysanthemums in the English style. A mahogany salver with a few envelopes and cards scattered upon it suggested that, in spite of her blindness, Mrs. Blatchford kept up with her correspondence.

  There was more light in the kitchen and a view of the back garden, which was as exuberant as the front. Honeysuckle swarmed over the wall and a shady corner was thick with blue-green hosta, clumps of wild ginger, and pots of begonias, shiny as porcelain. Mrs. Blatchford skillfully poured the boiling kettle into the pot and spooned in the tea—she accomplished this by keeping one fingertip near the rim of the opening. Sensing his interest she said, “I can see shapes.”

  “I wondered,” he said.

  “For example, I can see your shape and it is a large one. Shall we proceed to the parlor?”

  He took up the tray and followed her back through the hall to the room where the large front window, curtained in old lace, admitted the afternoon light. “Your garden is paradisiacal,” he said. “And very unusual. I wonder how you keep it—”

  “With my poor eyesight,” she finished for him. “My husband, Captain Blatchford, planned it, and he brought back many of the bulbs and seeds from his travels. When he passed away two years ago, my niece took over what work there is to do. I’ve been in this house five years and the plants are well established. They don’t need much care, though I do bring in the cannas if it freezes.”

  Doyle set the tray on a beaten-brass table of a Moorish design and took his seat in the plain Queen Anne chair facing his hostess. Here, too, the walls were crowded with pictures of all sorts. In a tall wrought-iron cage near the window, two canary birds twittered, hopping in their incessant, febrile way from bar to bar. From the large oil painting over the mantel, a serious gentleman with long whiskers and heavy-lidded eyes gazed past the viewer, contemplating the horizon, or perhaps a distant sail.

  “That’s my husband,” said Mrs. Blatchford. How did she know he was looking at the painting?

  “Yes, I thought so,” he said. “And Miss Briggs is your niece?” He poured out the tea and handed her a cup.

  Mrs. Blatchford lifted the cup from the saucer and held it between her palms. “Matilda Briggs is not her real name,” she said, evidently amused by this fact.

  “No. I didn’t think so,” he said.

  “We were surprised you didn’t recognize it.”

  “Is there some reason I should?”

  Carefully his hostess tilted the cup to her lips, making a sucking sound as she sipped the steaming liquid. She lowered it with a soft chuckle. “Sophia Matilda Briggs was the child who disappeared from the Mary Celeste,” she said.

  “I didn’t know that,” Doyle said. “I only know what I read in the papers. I was really just a boy when it happened.”

  “Yes, we realized that. We thought—even my husband thought—that you changed all the names and didn’t mention that the child was a girl because you wanted to disguise the facts. It didn’t occur to us that you simply didn’t know the facts.”

  Was she trying to offend him? She looked so cheerful and sly. She was positively chortling over her teacup.

  “It was a fantastic tale,” he said. “I never intended it to be anything more than that.”

  “It was the only story of yours my husband didn’t care for,” she said, “and that was for reasons that will soon be obvious. Apart from that one, he was a great admirer of your work. He read everything you wrote, that is, while he was alive. He enjoyed the Holmes stories, but he really admired your historical novels, and he even said you were better at the sea than anyone, except perhaps Stevenson. Do you know what story was one of his favorites?” She turned her face toward him, blinking her sightless eyes. “I think it will surprise you.”

  Mollified by this praise from the dead captain, Doyle gazed up at the portrait of his fan. Was that merriment he detected in those far-seeing eyes? “Perhaps one of the Brigadier Gerard stories?” he ventured.

  “It was ‘De Profundis,’ ” Mrs. Blatchford announced joyfully.

  Now it was his turn to chuckle. “That grisly little tale?” he said.

  “ ‘The shark is a surface feeder and is plentiful in those parts,’ ” she quoted. “George thought ‘De Profundis’ a perfect gem of a story.”

  “Well, I’m gratified to hear it,” Doyle replied. “Though it wasn’t a tale that cost a great effort.” A silence fell as they both sipped their tea. Somewhere a clock was ticking; one of the canaries let out a high-pitched trill. They always sounded so mad with joy, those birds, Doyle thought.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Blatchford, setting her cup back on the tray. “Now that you’ve followed our trail and cracked our code, I’m sure you’d like to know why you’re here.”

  “The code did briefly stymie me,” he admitted.

  “Until you recognized it as a variant of the message in ‘The Gloria Scott.’ ”

  “Was that it? I knew I’d used something like it somewhere.”

  “Which, most interestingly, is another tale of mutiny at sea,” she reminded him.

  “Yes. I’d forgotten. You have been thorough.”

  “Since George passed on and my sight declined, I’ve tried to keep my mind alert, and I have a great deal of time.”

  “And your niece …”

  “Her name is Annie Blatchford. She is the daughter of Captain James Blatchford, my husband’s brother. He married a Portuguese lady whose family lived in Madeira, and as they had no children, they adopted a little girl from an orphanage there, so Annie is not related to me by blood. James died nearly ten years ago now. His ship—it was the Theodore—was lost with all hands in a hurricane near Mauritius. Then Annie’s mother died two years ago now of pneumonia. Annie was just seventeen. We were both alone in the world, so I invited her to come to me. She’s been an enormous help and comfort to me. I don’t know what I should do without her.”

  “And she lives with you here?” Doyle asked.

  “Yes. She’s very much the modern woman. She wasn’t here six weeks before she found a position at the telephone exchange. She takes the train in every day and comes home in time for supper. We’ve had good fun with our scheme to entice the great detective to our little hideaway in West Hampstead.”

  Doyle flinched at the conflation of his person with his creation, but Mrs. Blatchford’s story interested him, so he let it pass. He found it hard to picture the immobile and chilly Miss Briggs having good fun at anything.

  “Annie’s a great reader as well,” she continued. “She reads to me before bed. She adores Mrs. Gaskell and Mrs. Braddon. She writes stories herself and sends them round to the journals. Very pretty things they are.”

  Doyle poured out more tea as his interest flagged like a sail entering the doldrums. So that was it. Miss Briggs fancied herself a writer. “Mrs. Braddon is very good at plots, isn’t she?” he said.

  “I find her work a bit overwrought and sensational,” replied Mrs. Blatchford. “Just between us.”

  Doyle made no response, gazing hopelessly at the canaries. How was he to get to the cab without one of the niece’s stories in his pocket?

  “George,” his hostess continued, changing tack, and then, “my husband,” as if there might be some doubt as to her relationship to the captain. “George liked to fancy that Annie might actually be Sophia Briggs. She was three when they took her from the orphanage and that was a year after the ship turned up derelict. So she’s the right age. But there’s no evidence for such a claim. The nuns didn’t know where she was born, or they wouldn’t say.”

  Doyle was only half-
listening, consumed now by his desire to get back to the club, but his brain picked up a discrepancy that puzzled it and he asked without thinking, “How did your husband come to know the child’s name?”

  “Ah,” said Mrs. Blatchford brightly, holding up one index finger to call attention to her point. “That’s the question, isn’t it? That’s the very detail you need to know to understand why you’re here in this room.”

  Doyle smiled, giving in a little to the engaging manner of his hostess. “And what is the answer to this vital question?” he asked gamely.

  “George Blatchford,” she said, “was the captain who took command of the Mary Celeste in Gibraltar. He sailed her to Genoa, unloaded the cargo there, and then sailed her back to Boston.”

  Doyle looked up at the portrait. “Really?” he said. “I’ve always wondered what happened to the ship after the salvage hearing.”

  “She sat on the wharf in Gibraltar for three solid months while that hearing went on and on. Near the end, George was retained by the owner, a Mr. Winchester. It took him three weeks to raise a crew because the sailors were all shy of the ship. All he could get was Basques. She was a bad-luck ship.”

  “And did George have bad luck with her?”

  “Not a bit of it. He said she was tight as a drum and a fair sailer. Not much speed to be gotten from her. He had an easy crossing, brought her into Boston without a hitch, and then to New York, where word had got out and a crowd turned up to have a look at her.”

  “And he left her there?”

  “That’s right. The owner paid him off and George caught a steamer back as he couldn’t find another ship, and he was eager to get home.”

  “I see,” said Doyle. But then he didn’t see and he said so. “But that still doesn’t explain why he knew the name of the missing child.”

  “No,” she agreed. “There’s still that little missing piece to the puzzle, isn’t there?” Her expression was as smug as a cat before a dish of cream.