“I didn’t know that,” he said. “But this has nothing to do with that. Quite by chance, Mother has learned that Hannah is corresponding with a man in Boston.”
“How could that be?” I asked. “I pick up the mail …” And then I thought that I didn’t always. Sometimes Hannah stopped at Dr. Allen’s on the way back from the Academy. “What’s the man’s name? Do you know it?”
“Yes, it’s Dr. Horace Chandler. Does that name mean anything to you?”
It did not.
“Mother went in the other day and noticed a letter on the stack waiting to be stamped, with the return address of Hannah Cobb. She asked Dr. Allen about it and he told her that there had been two or three letters from that address to Hannah in the last three months.”
“What shocking behavior.”
“Well, we don’t know that yet. Hannah may have a perfectly good reason.”
“I don’t mean Hannah. I mean your mother and Dr. Allen.”
“I’m sure they were thinking of her best interests. She’s only thirteen, after all. And she’s very vulnerable, I think. Very easily taken in.”
“Isn’t there a law against reading other people’s mail?”
“No one opened the letters,” Benjamin protested, making his voice serious and patient. “They only read the postmarks, which is public information.”
I knew he was right, but I felt put out that this secret correspondence, for which there was doubtless some reasonable explanation, should have been discovered by my future mother-in-law, whom I knew to be unsympathetic to my sister.
“You seem agitated by this, Sallie,” Benjamin went on. “As well you might. What do you think we’d best do?”
“It’s simple enough,” I said coldly. “I’ll ask her and she’ll explain it.”
We walked a few more steps in silence, and then Benjamin said, “Yes, I think that would be the best course.”
Our charming walk was ruined, though we changed the subject to Olie’s health, which is improved. It irked me that our first argument, for I saw it as that, should come over my sister and my aunt. It didn’t bode well and I was cast down, but when we arrived at the house Benjamin took my hands and pressed his lips to my cheek, so tenderly that I felt reassured, and he said, “Sallie, in all matters of importance, I will always consult you, and you must speak your mind plainly. Others may have secrets, but let there be none between us.”
How my heart lifted at these words. I looked up at him and said, “So let it be, my love.”
And this made my darling smile, and with a last, brief kiss we parted friends, as we have always been and will be forever and ever, amen.
Inside the house was quiet and I felt descend upon me, after the delight of Benjamin’s company, the burden he had put me under. Hannah was at school, Father at a vestry meeting, Dinah, doubtless, napping at the kitchen table as she does these days. Hastily I went up the stairs and stood at my sister’s bedroom door. Though I knew she was not in the room, I rapped my knuckles against the wood, hesitating as the expected silence greeted me from the other side. I turned the knob and stepped inside.
How many times had I entered this room without a thought, to borrow a book, or a skein of wool from the basket, or to leave a message on the writing table, advising Hannah of a meeting or an errand to be done? But now I stood in the doorway feeling like a criminal, angry at myself for so willingly taking on the role of spy, a role I’d chosen myself and which I evidently required as preparation for the direct confrontation to come.
The room was orderly, as it always was; the counterpane neatly spread, the washstand clean, the cloth folded over the edge of the bowl. The surface of the writing table was clear, but for the pen in its stand, the inkwell, and the blue leather book with the gold pineapple embossed on the cover—like mine that is green—in which Hannah writes her poems. She has often read to me from this book. The poems are on natural themes, the seasons, the beauty of the woods or the sea. They are odd, which they would be given Hannah’s peculiar view of the world. Much circling of death, also great value attached to liberty. There’s a dark romantic in my sister. When we read Jane Eyre together, she was sick for Rochester and believed that he was a real man. In Jane she had no interest.
Poor Father, I thought. He gave us each these books to write in daily, as he does, an accounting of our spiritual progress. Hannah fills hers with poems and in mine we have this incessant catalog of my doings. How disappointed he would be if he knew what all our scribbling was about.
Father says Hannah reads too many novels and not enough Bible, in which, he maintains, all the best stories are to be found. There on Hannah’s bookshelf was her small collection of fiction, the ones she borrowed first and then purchased with her allowance: Mr. Scott, Mr. Dickens, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Hawthorne, Mrs. Gaskell, the Misses Brontë, and the poems of Mr. Poe, Lord Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, and Miss Rossetti. On the chest of drawers beneath the window was the sewing basket, on the bedside table, a book—The Moorland Cottage. Nothing hinted at anything amiss in my sister’s small territory.
In search of some evidence of her recent preoccupations, I decided to have a look at the last pages of her poetry book. I opened it from the back. Hannah writes draft after draft, going over them with changes until the lines are nearly indecipherable. Then she writes a final version. I read one titled “Dream Light,” much scribbled upon, but the final version was copied out neatly.
In the dream of the sun-struck meadow,
From whence flows the warm daylight?
How is it we wake to a moonlit room,
And the meadow lost from sight?
If a sun inside lights up the mind
When the dream lit day grows dark,
And we wander in the gloom unkind,
Where dies that spark?
I turned to the last page and read:
Who holds the light that penetrates
The dark above the stair,
Must have the heart to celebrate
The spirit lingering there.
This made only thin and unpleasant sense to me. The preceding page was covered in a scrawl that unnerved me, as it was unreadable, not English; though some of the letters were Arabic, others were obscure. What could it mean? Then, on an impulse, I held the book by its spine and fanned the pages. A folded page of newsprint fluttered to the desk.
It was a clipping, but from what source wasn’t clear. Everything but the section title MESSAGES had been cut away. The heading read “Received by Mercy Dale,” and the text was as follows:
Don’t believe the advice you’ve been given, but follow your heart, as it is always in my keeping and will not lead you astray, your loving husband, David.
A second message followed:
I am content here and all is well with me. I see our dear parents every day and they send blessings to you. Have no fear that you are alone in this sad time. We rejoice whene’er we speak of you and think of happy times together at Mill Creek. With you always, your devoted brother.
Why had my sister clipped and kept this article and none other? I truly dreaded our confrontation, but that we must have it was borne in upon me by this scrap of print and the strange writing in her book. I folded the paper and stuck it back into the book carelessly. I wouldn’t bring it up if there were a way around it. How much better if I hadn’t come snooping among her things. Shamed, anxious, entirely flummoxed, I left her room.
I said nothing to Hannah that evening, only watched her at dinner, careful not to stare, yet on the alert for anything that might hint at her true state. She talked about the songfest the students are planning for the end of the session, which Mrs. Tabor has kindly invited me to join. I attempted to express sufficient enthusiasm for this invitation, and indeed these singing rounds are great fun, but I was distracted and fearful of overdoing my responses. Hannah was natural, but I felt perfectly false.
I had resolved that our conversation should take place outdoors. Today was again bright and cool, pleasant in a
ll its aspects and unlikely to incline any but the most obdurate heart to gloom. Occasionally, if I’m shopping in town, I stop by the school to walk home with Hannah, and it was my plan to meet her in this way. She came out of the schoolhouse in a group, chatting with Amy Wemberly, and she showed no surprise to find me waiting there. Farewells were said to Amy and we set off for home. Hannah, taking a package from my basket to relieve me of the weight, asked, “What’s in it?”
“A capon,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. She settled the package in her arms like a babe. “Poor fellow.”
I smiled, amused by her concern for the bird, and I thought that really nothing could be more normal, more companionable, than strolling through the town with my sister. She was looking particularly well, her cheeks lightly flushed, her gray eyes, which can sometimes be so dark, so brooding, now were clear and light. She’d wrestled her wild hair into a single braid but it had loosened and stray tendrils played about her neck and forehead. “How was school?” I asked.
“Mr. Finley lectured us on the subject of his rock collection.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I do recall Mr. Finley’s rocks.”
We could have gone on like this. I felt no desire to bring her to the subject of her correspondence with Dr. Chandler, though that name was burning in my brain, along with the clear consciousness that when I spoke it, my relations with my sister would be seriously altered, possibly forever. I reminded myself of the articles, the strange writing, and most of all, of Benjamin’s conviction that the problem of Hannah was best addressed by me.
And so I addressed it. We were passing the Universalist Church, which Father calls “the Univices,” and we both glanced up at the screech of a hawk circling near the tower. “Dearest,” I said, as we resumed our walk. “I have to ask you about something.”
“It sounds like something serious,” she said.
“It is. It’s that. Well. It’s been noticed that you are corresponding with a Dr. Chandler in Boston.”
“Noticed by whom?” she asked calmly.
I hesitated. Was I compelled to keep secret the name of the instigator of this conversation? “Mother Briggs,” I said.
Her lips compressed in a smirk; her eyelids lowered, then flashed open wide. “She’s lying,” she said.
This possibility hadn’t occurred to me, and for a moment I turned it this way and that in my mind, but unlikelihood remained its distinctive feature. “Why would she do that?” I asked.
“She dislikes me. She blames me for Natie’s death.”
“Surely not,” I protested.
“She made it up to hurt me. Have you told anyone else? Please tell me you haven’t told Father this libel.”
“No, I haven’t. I came straight to you. But evidently Dr. Allen has seen the letters as well. I don’t think he would lie about the mails.”
She pressed her upper teeth into her lip, her head bowed, the picture of guilt in search of an escape.
“Hannah?” I said.
“Everyone in this town is so small-minded and mean. I’m suffocating here. I can’t breathe.”
“That’s not true,” I countered. “Your family cares for you very much.”
“As long as I’m docile, as long as I sit through Father’s sermons without protest.”
“Why should you protest?”
She was silent. At the turn toward the house we both stopped, still without speaking. “Let’s walk to the harbor,” I suggested.
She nodded and we went on. “It seems to me you’ve something burdening your mind,” I said. “You must know that you’ll find no more sympathetic listener than me.”
Again she nodded. We walked out Harbor Lane, where the workers have wrapped the hotel in scaffolding, adding a third floor. The breeze off the water was fresh and brisk enough to make me wish I’d brought my shawl. Then my sister sent an icy dart to my heart.
“Mother talks to me,” she said.
“In dreams,” I suggested hopefully.
“In spirit,” she said. “I see her.”
“Oh,” I said.
“And others.”
“Others?”
“People who are with her. William and Harvey are there.”
William and Harvey were our brothers who died before we were born. “Where do you see them?” I asked.
“In the spirit world. They speak to me too.”
“Often?”
“Not so often. I have to concentrate very hard to hear them.”
“I see,” I said.
“But Mother is with me often.”
I looked out at the sun, still high enough to wash a pinkish light over a fishing schooner just setting out, its triangular sails churning up the masts. A charge of pity and fear ran through me and I was unable to speak. What could I say that might restore my sister, whom I loved with my whole heart, to sweet reason? She was of a fanciful nature, but she wasn’t a liar, at least not a good one; her effort to discredit Mother Briggs had folded almost at once. What tack should I take to relieve her of these delusions, which had evidently taken her over almost entirely? Sensing my hesitation, she spoke.
“I have a gift,” she said. “It’s like a gift for music or painting. I can’t just ignore it. I can’t make it go away because other people don’t like it.”
“Is that what Dr. Chandler says?” I asked, feigning an interest I hardly felt.
She gave me a quick, hard look. So Dr. Chandler could be admitted to without a fight. “He does say that. But I didn’t need him to tell me.”
“How did you come to be in touch with him?”
Here the glance was furtive. “I read an advertisement in the New Bedford paper. He prints a journal; it’s called Spiritual Condolence, and I was curious about it, so I wrote to him. Well, his name wasn’t in the advertisement. I wrote to the journal.”
“To offer your mediumistic services,” I suggested. “Is that the right word?”
“No, I didn’t do that. Not at first. I just inquired about the journal, about how it came to be.”
“And Dr. Chandler wrote back at once.”
She nodded. Something stronger than anger was closing my throat, not at my sister, but at this charlatan in Boston.
“Oh, Sallie.” Hannah sighed. “It’s such a relief to tell you. I send in messages that I receive, that I don’t always understand, because they’re not really for me, and he puts them in the journal.”
So my sister was Mercy Dale.
I took her arm in mine. We’d come to the end of the promontory and stood gazing out at the outer harbor. “I know everyone here thinks there’s something wrong with me,” she said. “And Father is so adamant against those who believe … who believe as I do. He wants us to keep our minds and efforts always directed upon the living, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but why should we turn our backs on those we have known, those we have loved, who are only waiting for us to listen to be heard?”
“What sorts of things does Mother tell you?” I asked, to show my goodwill.
“She’s pleased about your engagement.”
“That’s a blessing,” I said.
“She’s sad that she can’t reach Father.”
It’s difficult to describe my feelings at these tender messages, which might as well have been nursery rhymes, for all the import of them. So the dead were as banal as the living, I thought.
“She is happy in the place where they are,” Hannah concluded. Still holding her by the arm, I turned away from the harbor, and she came along without comment. As we entered Allen Street, she said sadly, “Even you don’t believe me.”
“I believe you miss our mother very much and wish she was still with us. And I share that wish.”
“So you think my seeing her is just wishful thinking.”
“If you like.”
“Well,” she said lightly. “It doesn’t matter, Sallie. There are people who do believe me. Quite a few of them in fact.”
“Not just Dr. Chandler,” I said.<
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“Many of them are ladies of excellent reputation and good society in Boston. No one makes a fuss there and my gift may provide great solace to many.”
Again I was at a loss for words.
“Are you going to tell Father?” she asked.
We had come to our house and I lifted the latch of the gate. “I don’t know, darling,” I said. “I don’t know what to do. I’m vexed past reason at you for being so credulous.”
She stepped back, as if struck. “I’m not credulous. I just can’t pretend I don’t see what I see. It’s cruel to try to stop me. If you tell Father, Sallie, I don’t know what he’ll do.”
“How can I keep such goings-on a secret, these letters to a man you know nothing about, these publications! Does he know your age? No, I thought not. How can I keep this from Father, who is responsible for you to God and man alike?”
“If I promise to give up writing to Dr. Chandler, will you not tell him?”
I felt I had been reduced to accepting a scurrilous deal in order to protect my sister from herself, and from Dr. Chandler, whoever he was. “That would be a start,” I said. “Yes. If you promise to cease this correspondence, I won’t tell Father what you have told me.”
“I may as well, then,” she said wearily. “If you do tell him, he’ll make me stop. He’ll snatch the letters from the box and lock me in my room, so I may as well give in.”
And with that agreement, unsatisfactory as it was, we went into the house.
There was such a fierce storm last evening, it seemed the heavens were in a rage. The thunder rolled, the lightning flashed in jagged bolts, and the rain poured down all at once as if a tub had been turned over. The west wind drove it in horizontal sheets. Father, Hannah, and I sat in the parlor, he reading, we pretending to embroider, and at each boom of thunder my sister raised her eyes and lifted her needle with a faint smile.
In the morning, Benjamin came calling, and we walked out to the graveyard to refresh the flowers on the markers of the Briggs and Cobb families. Of course he wanted to know what I’d learned from Hannah, but, perhaps for shame, I felt unwilling to say more than that she had agreed to cease all correspondence with the gentleman from Boston. “Well, what manner of correspondence was it?” he asked frankly.
The Ghost of the Mary Celeste Page 6