The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (9 page)

The sound paused, then resumed, paused again. I was barefoot and the floorboards were chilly under my feet. I stepped along quickly to her door. The scratching took up again. What was she doing? “Hannah,” I said softly, laying my palm against the door panel. The latch was up and the door drifted open before me, revealing bit by bit a nightmare far worse than the one I’d just escaped. Would that it had been a dream.

Hannah was seated at her writing table, where the lamp burned brightly, with a pen in her hand and a page before her. Strangely, her body leaned away from the table, supported by her right arm propped rigidly against the seat of her chair. Her head was thrown back as if she had been struck, her loosened hair tumbled past her shoulders, her mouth was agape, and her eyes, unnaturally wide, fixed on a corner of the ceiling. The muscles of her face were so strained and tense she was hardly recognizable. Her left hand, holding the pen, scribbled hurriedly, moving from right to left on the page, seemingly without her knowledge or her will.

I had the sense that I was entering the equivalent of a gale at sea. Nothing moved, save that demonic hand. My skin tingled the
way it does when the barometer drops suddenly and those with old injuries claim to feel them anew. “Hannah,” I said again, firmly this time, but she gave no evidence of hearing me. I approached—what else could I do?—and though I stood looking down at the writing spiraling from the pen, I couldn’t read it. It was that same cryptic language I’d seen in her journal. I looked at her face, which was turned away from the light, as if to keep as far away as possible from the writing hand. Her eyes were utterly vacant, flat, and unmoving as the false eyes in a china doll.

I brought my palm down hard upon the writing hand. There was no resistance, her fingers sprawled. Hannah screamed, rose from the chair, and collapsed in my arms. I heard Father’s feet hit the floor in his bedroom, and then his hurried steps coming toward us in the hall.

C
ONCERNING THE
R
ECOVERY OF THE
B
RIG
M
ARY
C
ELESTE
, F
OUND
D
ERELICT
E
AST OF THE
A
ZORES ON
D
ECEMBER
4, 1872

Cable: Gibraltar, December 13, 1872

To: Board of Underwriters, New York

Cable: New York, December 13, 1872

To: Horatio J. Sprague, United States Consul at Gibraltar

Cable: Gibraltar, December 14, 1872

To: Parker, New York

New York Times
—Dateline Gibraltar

December 14, 1872

New Bedford Evening Standard
—Marine Intelligence

December 21, 1872

The Boston Post

February 24, 1873

The Boston Journal

March 15, 1873

Letter: April 4, 1873

To: Department of State, Washington, D.C.

Letter Enclosure

March 21, 1873

A loud rap at the house door startled the young doctor, who was carefully embellishing architectural curlicues in the margins of a page half-filled with his own neat cursive script. As there was no one but himself to answer, he crossed the small parlor in three steps and pulled the door open wide. There he found a thin, bedraggled boy, dressed in a dark-green woolen jacket bearing some resemblance to a uniform and some to a jockey’s coat, stovepipe pants that ended well above his bare, scrawny ankles, and dusty brown boots with the nail heads exposed around the soles. In his gloved left hand he held out a yellow envelope. “Dr. Doyle, innit?” he inquired.

“So it is, my boy,” said the doctor, taking the envelope. It was a telegram. The doctor produced a penny from his coat pocket and
pressed it on the boy, who, taking the coin without a word, dashed off down the street.

A telegram. Was it the longed-for hospital appointment? Was it evil news concerning his poor father? The doctor carried the envelope back to his writing desk, where the half-finished page rebuked him. Ignoring it, he tore open the flap and drew out the brief message.

Here was news. The African Steam Navigation Company was cordially responding to his now ancient and nearly forgotten query with orders for Dr. Conan Doyle to proceed at once to Liverpool and there take medical charge of the steamer
Mayumba
, bound for Madeira and the West Coast of Africa.

Africa. He glanced down at the page he had yet to finish, a tale of the American West, a place he had visited only in his imagination, or, more correctly, in the imagination of Bret Harte, whose adventure stories had brightened many a gloomy hour of his youth. Africa meant Stanley and Livingstone, Victoria Falls, jungles screaming with monkeys, villages populated by naked cannibals, so black they could not be seen in the dark and the whites of their eyes disembodied in the humid night air accosted the unwary. As ship’s surgeon, he was unlikely to see much beyond the coast; the interior of the continent would be closed to him. The experience would be geographically speaking the opposite of his previous post on the Arctic whaler
Hope
, during which he had clubbed seals and gone out with the harpooner in the boat, holding fast to the rope beneath the mountainous side of a right whale. The blue sky, the white gleam of the drift ice, the endless daylight, the intoxicating air—for seven months every moment had been filled with wonders, and the work so constant and challenging that in none of those moments had he been idle or bored.

The steamer
Mayumba
would be an adventure of a different order, his function an official one, doubtless requiring a coat of blue serge, gilt buttons, white duck trousers, and shoes that would slip on the decks and take on water when the ship did. The captain wouldn’t encourage him to participate in the business of the voyage,
which was purely the transport of goods and passengers to Africa, discharging them, taking on new goods and passengers, and turning the prow for home. His work would be among and at the behest of these passengers, and he was unlikely to visit the forecastle unless a man was dying there. Instead of shifting ice and sparkling skies, there would be beaches, rivers, and tropical jungles. The doctor’s brain buzzed pleasantly over the contrast between his seagoing excursions, the first to the white world, where men pursued and slaughtered beasts as big as houses, the next to the dark continent, on a mission to administer quinine and morphine to various valiant servants and civilizers of the Empire.

In a week he was in Liverpool, lining up his books on the narrow shelf in his berth. Compared to the cramped and heavily populated whaler, the
Mayumba
was enormous, with space for twenty passengers and two saloons; the passengers’ saloon was as ponderously furnished as a hotel lobby. But unlike the
Hope
, she was dirty. Rust had a grip on her rails and spars, the skylights were streaked, and the upholstery faded and dingy.

The passengers would equally have benefited by a sprucing up. Among them were a parson named Fairfax, his wife, and two cadaverous boys of eight and ten, bound for Lagos; a pretty brunette, Miss Fox, not in her first youth, possessed of an educated air and an oversize bonnet, going out to meet her father in Sierra Leone; a Scottish crone, forever nameless, with bad lungs and a face like an ailing horse; two Negro tradesmen, dressed showily in the worst possible taste and escorted to the gangway by a phalanx of evil-smelling prostitutes; a British Negress with the manners of a she-wolf, who was betrothed to a missionary in the interior; and finally an Englishwoman, Mrs. Rowbotham, lively, cheerful, neatly dressed, and immediately flirtatious upon meeting the doctor as she was passing out of the saloon.

The captain, Duncan Henderson Wallace, a small man, bald on top with a flowing, well-tended white beard that thrust out from his face suggesting the prominent chin beneath, promised to be good company. He moved gracefully, without fuss, inside a force
field of authority. He greeted the doctor with a firm handshake and a bright eye that ran over his new colleague appreciatively, as if he’d seldom seen such a fine figure of a man, and indeed, the doctor was several inches taller and stones heavier than his commander. “Come and have a brandy in my office,” said Captain Wallace. “First time to Africa, is it?”

“It is,” said the doctor, following the captain into his private quarters, which were cleaner than the rest of the ship, and neatly appointed. In the conversation that followed, Doyle learned Mrs. Rowbotham was en route to her husband in Sierra Leone, and the querulous Negress was some madman’s idea of a desirable wife.

“I’ve had Parson Fairfax and his family before,” Wallace continued. “They go out once a year for six weeks, then back at the missionary work. It’s killing the wife, but she doesn’t complain.”

“The boys don’t look fit for much either,” the doctor observed.

“It’s the beastly climate. If they left those boys in Edinburgh, or better yet, Dundee, they’d fatten up in no time. But you’ll see, as we go on.”