An Inconceivable Deception

by Sydney Jane Baily

  So why did she wish it was a few hours later when she could go to Finn’s old rooming house? Merely out of curiosity, of course. A compulsion to go preoccupied her as she drifted off to sleep.

  ***

  Ludicrous notion, she scolded herself, as she drove her carriage across Beacon Hill and eventually stood before the front door of Finn’s old rooming house. Utterly absurd, she muttered, going into the foyer and then to the door of his room. Before she could decide whether to knock and be judged a fool, the door opened and an older gentleman came out. He was looking at his feet until he nearly collided with her.

  “Oh! You startled me, young lady. May I help you?”

  “No, sir,” she said, bending down to retrieve a pint milk bottle that sat with a note attached by his door.

  Wordlessly, she handed this to him before turning and fleeing. Not back home, however. No, she directed her horse toward the waterfront, not admitting that she was heading toward East Boston. What was the point in going there? Yet what had been the point in going to his old rooming house? Had she truly thought she would find his ghost had taken up residence at his old bedsit?

  She shook her head at her own foolishness yet couldn’t help taking the Charlestown Bridge all the way up to the Chelsea Bridge and, finally, crossing the small Free Bridge on Meridian Street that brought her into Eastie, as close to the waterfront as possible. It was a path she had taken many times after the sinking except when she took the penny ferry across the harbor.

  Kelly’s, or Finn’s shipyard as she thought of it, was at the end of Saratoga Street. Today, Sunday, it was deserted since Mr. Kelly was Irish Catholic as were most of his workers. Finn, had been an anomaly amongst them, a French Canadian, whom they’d apparently accepted. He’d spoken fondly of his fellow builders and their after-hour shenanigans at the many pubs in the neighborhood.

  Rose shivered. Jovial times for Finn and his shipmates were far in the past. She tied up her horse at the main entrance to the shipyard’s docks. It was achingly familiar. For months after he’d died, she’d haunted these docks, senselessly looking for him. On this side of Boston’s harbor, they’d all known she was Finn’s woman. Thus the other men, those left behind at the yard, had allowed her to stay, as close as was safe — though she’d spoken to none of them.

  Purposefully, she hadn’t gone anywhere near Finn’s old workplace for years.

  So what was she doing there at that moment? Not merely an idle walk by the water to clear her head. She could have done that without riding all the way to Eastie.

  Perhaps Finn was the one now haunting her.

  She walked the same path she’d first taken with Claire and found herself pausing to look up at the closest ship, a large cargo clipper whose steel sides were being repaired. She glanced up at the three masts towering above her.

  In her mind’s eye, there he was, exactly as before. Strong, handsome, capable, catching her eye and holding it. She smiled at the memory, but the vision disappeared as quickly as it had come, along with her good humor.

  Of course Finn wasn’t up the rigging. He was at the bottom of the Atlantic.

  Rose wandered farther along, breathing the ocean air and listening to the sounds of the gulls and of the seawater lapping against the wooden pilings.

  Up ahead, at the very end of Kelly’s dock, a lone figure sat on a bench and was looking out to sea — a black knitted hat pulled down over his hair despite the sunshine and barely discernible warm morning breeze. He wore well-worn dungarees and a blue shirt rolled up at the sleeves to reveal muscular arms.

  Rose hesitated. These imaginings were becoming tedious. This man’s body reminded her of Finn’s with his broad shoulders and the way he held his head. Even the way he lifted his arm to shade his eyes with his palm as he looked at the shimmering, sun-dappled horizon, was exactly as Finn would have done.

  She was inexorably drawn to the silent figure. No matter the impropriety. No matter the danger. Rose walked closer, then closer still. Eventually, she drew up level with the end of the bench.

  Precisely when she would have either spoken to him or turned away, a white and gray gull cried loudly and swooped into the water in front of them, making her jump.

  The man watched as the bird dove for a fish, and then, quite casually, he turned to her. His familiar eyes, a stormy gray blue, locked onto her startled gaze.

  Everything fell silent, even the waves and the gulls — silent compared to the roaring in her ears.

  The gasp that escaped her lips, though, that sounded overly loud.

  He stood up, facing her, and she stopped breathing completely for an instant.

  Taking a small step back, frowning at him, shaking her head in disbelief, she uttered only, “Finn?”

  It came out as a whisper and a question.

  Would he vanish? Was he a ghost? Or perhaps he was merely a man who looked like her dead husband, a man who would scorn her as a bedlamite ready for the asylum.

  She realized that she was reaching out a shaking hand toward him.

  Then he spoke.

  “Rose.” Not a question, more like an affirmation that he knew who she was. Spoken in a familiar voice.

  With every part of her being, she knew that it was indeed him.

  She snatched her hand back. Her knees started to tremble and her heart pounded in her chest. She fought against the buzzing in her head that warned of fainting. She would not give in to it, she was determined, sucking in great inhales of air until her head cleared. Then her feet carried her toward him at a lightning fast pace, and she struck her fists against his solid chest, while hot tears coursed down her cheeks.

  She continued to beat her hands against him, unable to stop herself as rage and fear, sadness and confusion coursed through her.

  How dare he? How dare he stand there, alive and calm, and as if they’d only parted company that morning?

  She became aware of the feeling of his shirt fabric under her palms and, below that, the warmth of him. His pounding heart, his blood coursing, his lungs working. He was very much alive!

  Chapter Eight

  After a few moments, Finn gently took hold of Rose’s wrists and held them still.

  Gasping in air, she could do nothing except stare up into his familiar face — so beloved to her, she had nearly wished her own death rather than live without seeing him again.

  In his eyes, she saw terrible sadness, and what else?

  “Rose,” he said her name again, softly.

  All the fight went out of her, leaving her with the intense desire to sleep. Wrenching her arms free, she plunked herself down upon the bench. A moment later, Finn sat beside her.

  “Rose!” she sputtered, looking not at him but at the ocean — the beautiful and fearsome ocean that had supposedly swallowed him whole over three years past.

  “Is that all you have to say? How can it be you? You’re dead!”

  “People don’t die and then come back,” she heard him say, causing her to whip her head around and gawk at him.

  “That’s exactly what you’ve done,” Rose argued. “It is you? Isn’t it?”

  “Ay,” Finn admitted, “but I didn’t die.” He shook his head, his mouth a grim line.

  She took her eyes off of him again because it was almost too painful to look at him and, instead, stared out toward the horizon.

  “The ship went down, all hands lost, no bodies recovered.” She spoke the words that had echoed in her brain over and over in the first few days after the sinking.

  Rose could see that he was staring at her profile, yet she couldn’t look at him again. She was overwhelmed — her brain buzzing with the impossibility of it, her heart squeezing with pain and then with intense gladness.

  At last, Finn began to speak. “Storm clouds came up so fast, it was as if they were being pulled and pushed on purpose until they were directly over us. Thick and gray.” His words were flat, unemotional. “The wind howled like a banshee. None of it was predicted for that April day. The ship w
as doomed from the start. Poor design,” he added matter-of-factly.

  “The center of gravity was too high,” she said quietly, recalling his words when he’d told her his concerns.

  “You remembered. Yes, it did precisely as I feared when a few waves washed over her bow. Tipped like a top-heavy tree in a hurricane. I saw the first men washed into the sea, and then we all went in.”

  Rose realized she was listening with her eyes closed, simply taking in the sound of his voice and making sure it was real and familiar. That this man was truly her dead husband.

  “When it was over, I ended up clinging to a plank no bigger than a door. Another two sailors grabbed on. Eventually they died.”

  “Eventually?”

  “I lost track of time,” Finn explained, “but I think I floated for about four days, maybe five.”

  “With no food or water,” she murmured, recalling how she, herself, had existed on a few cups of tea and little else for the first few days after he’d been reported dead. To think that he was on the sea on a board, without even the comfort of a sip of water.

  “I started seeing things,” Finn continued. “I saw you walking toward me one day, and I was so damn happy. When you got closer, you disappeared, of course. My heart felt as though it didn’t beat evenly, and my leg muscles especially started to twitch. I went to sleep at some point, and when I awoke, I was being hauled onto the deck of a fishing vessel, like a bloody great tuna.”

  “Where have you been?” Was that really her own voice? It sounded frail and desperate.

  “After I was rescued, I was taken up into the Icelandic waters. They were going out for four months, and no amount of bribery would turn them around. After all, I didn’t exactly have anything to offer them except a promise of future payment. There was nothing I could do.”

  “Nothing you could do,” Rose repeated. “Surely, you haven’t been fishing for over three years.”

  “No, only about two and a half months,” he said. “I had strange visions, and of course, I had lost a lot of weight. Apparently, I was out of my head when the fishermen found me. I woke every night for weeks in a cold sweat, screaming until the captain made me sleep on deck away from his men.”

  If she’d been with him, she would have put her arms around him and held him while he slept. She’d heard of men coming back from the war between the states having terrible nightmares even while awake and worse, becoming violent. She would not ever have felt afraid of Finn, no matter how he behaved.

  “Eventually, the visions stopped, and I learned to fish, but I hated it.” He sounded fierce about that, the first passion he’d displayed since she’d come upon him.

  “It was a good thing they found me and kept going. If someone had brought me straight to land, I think I never would’ve gone to sea again. Eventually I got passage on another fishing vessel that came close to the first. It was heading for Great Britain. I was put off in Plymouth and made my way north to Newcastle.”

  Rose shook her head, unable to comprehend his going in the opposite direction to home. And to her.

  Finn shrugged. “Shipbuilding at its finest. That’s what was in England and Scotland. I needed to learn more, and I learned from the best.”

  She nearly asked, “What about me?” yet held her tongue. She was, after all, neither frail nor desperate, and so much time had passed, she could wait a little longer to hear if he had thought of her at all.

  “After half a year, I went to Glasgow. They’d had a hard lesson after the capsizing of the Daphne. You may remember that. It was in all the papers.”

  She nodded. In all the papers, just like the Garrard.

  “I needed to learn more, so I did. Their university has the best naval architecture program in the world.” Finn crossed his arms and looked away from her.

  Rose let that sink in — the priority he’d placed upon educating himself, which apparently far surpassed his feelings for her — and then she asked the question that popped into her bewildered brain. “When did you come back?”

  “Last month, I landed in Portland.”

  A month! He’d been on the same soil as her for that long. Why did it feel like a personal failing that she hadn’t known somehow?

  “I went home for a bit,” he added.

  Home. Of course to him that meant Maine. He hadn’t been in Boston all that very long when she’d first met him.

  “When I got there, my father said he almost didn’t recognize me. I wasn’t the same.”

  Finally, she let herself turn and study his profile. More lined perhaps, and a new scar on his brow by his right temple. He was wearing his hair a little longer, and when he realized she was examining him, he turned to her with a serious look in his eye that hadn’t been there before.

  “I would recognize you anywhere,” she declared, wondering at the distant way in which they were speaking to each other. That she wasn’t in his arms being soundly kissed seemed unthinkable. Yet he was like a stranger, and she couldn’t imagine wrapping herself around him as she once did.

  Finn gave her a wry smile, returning her scrutiny with a brief flicker of his gaze over her face.

  “You might not have, not if you’d seen me as I was when I got to England. It took a long while to seem like myself again. I still have such strange dreams sometimes when I think I’m awake.” He gave her that curious, new serious look. “You could be a dream right now for all I know. I’ve had this conversation with you a hundred times over the past few years.”

  She felt tears collecting. “I am real. I’ve been here all along. You could have found me any time you wanted.” She couldn’t help the bitterness in her voice. “I don’t understand why you didn’t send word after you reached Plymouth or Newcastle . . . or even a month ago.”

  Inadvertently, she’d put her hand on his arm, and he covered it with his own. She looked down at their touching hands as did he. Then they locked gazes.

  “I told you Rose, I wasn’t the same. As soon as I reached England, I started trying to get back to you.”

  “I guess you didn’t try hard enough.” She knew she sounded bitter and simply couldn’t help it.

  He stared at her, long and hard, before he spoke again.

  “I had no money and no proof of identity; no one to recommend me or to vouch for me. I had to find work so I could earn my passage home.”

  Finn withdrew his hand from her and crossed his arms.

  “I did the only thing I could, I found a shipyard and got a job. Then I decided it would be better to make something more of myself before I came back.

  Rose knew why, too. Because she hadn’t introduced him to her family. She felt a hot rush of shame.

  Into her silence, he continued, “What if I’d shown up unwell as I was, with strange dreams plaguing me, and you suddenly had to introduce me to your mother and the rest of your kin? Your strange, off-kilter husband!”

  She had no one to blame but herself for his feeling that way. She dropped her glance from him. In the next instant, she raised it back to his face. It was too incredulous that he was even actually there, and she feared taking her eyes off of him in case he disappeared.

  When he remained silent, she asked, “Why did you come back now?”

  His gaze returned to the horizon. “Do you wish I hadn’t?”

  “Why would you ask that?” Even as the words were out of her mouth, she considered what his return meant. The end to all her plans. For the first time since she’d run toward Finn, she thought of William.

  Her expression must have told him something.

  “I’ve certainly complicated matters,” he said. “After all, you are getting married.” He didn’t say it as a question, rather in a strange tone as if her doing so were extraordinary.

  “I . . . .” What could she say? She’d mourned deeply and then finally fallen in love again. The full ramifications of Finn’s return dawned on her. “Obviously, I cannot marry. I am married.”

  “Ay,” he said, and it came out on an exhalati
on, like a weary sigh. After a pause, he added, “What do you want to do, Rose?”

  She hadn’t expected that question. She didn’t think she had a choice. They were married though they had never lived as man and wife.

  “I don’t know what you’re asking. Oh, Finn!” She closed her eyes and groaned.

  “You’re not the only person to call me that, but when you say my name and make that noise, it reminds me of our last night together.”

  Her stomach fluttered, and she realized it was a familiar feeling, one she hadn’t felt in years — something similar though not the same with William. Dear William! He would be hurt beyond words.

  “What if you’d come back too late?” she asked, imagining the horror of becoming Mrs. Woodsom only to find out later that she was not legally married after all, that she’d committed bigamy. “Why did you even let me get engaged?”

  “I came as soon as I read it in the paper. The English follow Boston’s society as we Americans do that of London and Paris,” he said. “You were already officially engaged by the time I started my voyage, so it didn’t matter if I went to Portland first.”

  “When exactly did you get here?” Rose asked. “In Boston, I mean.”

  “Three days ago.”

  Again, she wondered at the idea of Finn being so close and her, completely unaware.

  “Why didn’t you come straight away to see me?”

  A strange look came over his face. “I didn’t want to startle you.”

  A laugh escaped her, sounding anything but happy, thinking of what happened at the Tremont.

  “Then why did you show up in the middle of my engagement party?”

  Finn shook his head. “I tried to get close to you the day before, but you were surrounded by females. I only knew Claire, and I couldn’t let her see me before I’d spoken to you. Then I heard about the party.” He looked sheepish.

  “I had to see you,” he added, “though I didn’t think you would see me. Suddenly, you were standing there — looking right at me. I wasn’t sure you would know me. Then you looked scared, and I panicked and left.”