The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

by Valerie Martin

  He had wanted to see America since he was a boy. He had imagined it intensely, particularly the great western territory, and he was familiar with American scenes sketched by the American writers he admired. But none of these writers had bothered to mention a perplexing and ubiquitous detail of American life: America was overheated. In the hotel lobbies, hotel rooms, lecture halls, train stations, restaurants, and eating clubs the temperature was consistently more suited to orchids than to human beings. Even the dining room in the stately residence of tonight’s host, the charming, urbane Craige Lippincott, rivaled the caldarium in the Baths of Diocletian.

  His bedroom was mercifully temperate. Once the door was closed and the window thrown open and he was stripped down to his woolen combinations, his pores dried out and he could feel the flush draining from his cheeks. He was pleasantly befuddled from the excellent wine and full from the dinner, which had gone on for many courses, and many hours, served by silent waiters dressed like haberdashers—so democratic, these Americans.

  The bed was enormous and piled with comforters, but these could be pushed aside and the sheets against his skin were deliciously cool and silky—what were they made of? He stretched out full length and gazed up at the baronial vaulted ceiling. “Yoove come a lang way, laddie,” he said softly. “An’ nee jist athwart th’ wild wide brine.”

  He was thirty-five years old. With scarcely a hint of what he might achieve, but driven by a furnace of ambition to strive in every field that opened before him, he had made himself up. To all he met now, he was a success, a man to be reckoned with. The wealthy American gentlemen, doctors, writers, editors, all were eager to dine with him because he was someone they felt they ought to know. After so many tasteless, insipid meals among the crowds of dull-witted strangers, this at-home dinner with ten cultured and powerful men who knew one another and took a lively interest in everything, but particularly in literature and medicine, had soothed his amour-propre like a plunge into a river of balm. Not once had the name Sherlock Holmes crossed the lips of his fellow diners. Not once had he been asked what he thought of America.

  In fact he recalled, but distantly, there had been a noticeable lack of enthusiasm for his prediction that the English-speaking races must one day, perhaps not so far in the future, unite under one flag. Mr. Owen Wister, who blinked at this suggestion repeatedly as if before a blast of grit that affected his nearsighted eyes, pursed up his full lips—there was something effeminate about the man—and sputtered, “Whatever for?” Very well, he hadn’t urged the point. He hadn’t gone on about it ad nauseam as the Bok fellow had about the suffragist cause.

  How agitated they all were by the woman question! Bok edited a ladies’ magazine and Mitchell tended a clientele made up exclusively of wealthy neurasthenics, but even Wister, who did have some fine stories to tell about his western travels, expressed his solidarity with the cause of female enfranchisement. They were voting already in the West, he announced, and all agreed that the West was where the future of the great republic lay.

  As he turned onto his side, pulling in a pillow the size of a ewe, he congratulated himself on having kept his views on the subject to himself. And then it had changed, the subject, but to what? He rolled onto his back and stretched his arms out wide on either side—what luxury after too many nights in the Pullman cars. Innes always took the top bunk because, he said, he was younger and could sleep anywhere. The thought of his good-natured brother sent a smile flickering over the doctor’s lips, as sleep came, closing his eyes, silencing his thoughts. The bed was not moving anytime soon, and neither was he.

  In the night he woke to hear someone calling his name. The voice was familiar; he’d heard it infrequently over the course of many years, calling him from sleep in just this way. It wasn’t urgent, but there was an element of entreaty to it. “Arthur.” He took it to be the vapor of a dream.

  As he gazed into the darkness of the spacious room, his senses alert to the domed weight of air overarching the bed, there stirred in him a feeling of alarm. This voice had not wakened him for over a year, and he had reason to believe it never would again, for in that time the speaker, having moved over many years from one closed and distant room to another, had arrived at his final residence, a very small room indeed in the cemetery at Dumfries.

  Yet here he was, still calling. Doyle lay still, listening to his heart pulsing doggedly in his ear. Nothing had changed. Neither death nor an ocean was a barrier.

  “Papa,” he said tentatively into the enormous silence. “I’m here.”

  Of course, no answer. Just the sadness and shame always associated with turning away, as he did now, closing his eyes and wishing he didn’t know what he knew, namely that his father had died alone in a madhouse, where, for thirteen years, he had devoted his heavy accumulation of free time to painting pictures of sprites and fairies and the angel of death.

  In the morning, on waking, Doyle recalled his anxiety and the voice calling him in the night. Sleep was a treacherous business. He could have dreamed he’d dreamed a dream of waking, for all he knew. Pulling himself up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed, he consciously thrust his dead father firmly out of his mind.

  Now, as he trimmed the block of black bristles over his upper lip before the dressing mirror, the conversation round the dinner table played again in his thoughts. The subject had rambled from the treatment of hysteria to the question of psychic transference and the efficacy of mesmerism and hypnotism as medical procedures. It was a topic that interested Doyle, and he had offered the company a summary of his forthcoming tale—it would appear in the next issue of Harper’s Weekly—which he believed might entertain them. The story concerned a promising young doctor, very much a materialist, who is invited by his charming and beautiful fiancée to witness a demonstration of hypnotism by a visiting lady adept. This lady proves to be unlovely, over forty, not well dressed or appealing in any part—she’s even a cripple and uses a crutch to walk—but of course she does have intense and searching eyes. She makes bold claims for her dark art, and vows she can require a subject to do her bidding even if she is nowhere near him. To prove his superiority, the doctor submits himself to a course of hypnotic treatments. He is scarcely a challenge to the hypnotist’s powers and very soon finds himself completely under her spell. When he makes up his mind to resist and free himself from her influence, she vows to take vengeance upon him, and it evolves that she has such complete control of his thoughts and compulsions that, during black-out spells of which he has no memory, he wantonly, and even in the case of the fiancée violently, destroys all his prospects for future happiness.

  The assembled gentlemen, attending closely to this plot summary between the fish and the meat course, found it worthy of comment. Dr. Weir Mitchell opined that this scenario was, in his view, not entirely outside the realm of possibility. Some of his patients were so highly suggestible it was as if they had no minds to lose. Owen Wister put in that the story reminded him of the clairvoyant his friend Henry James’s brother William was so keen on investigating in Boston. He’d begun seeing her in the hopes of discrediting her, but his failure to do so had resulted in his allowing her a too central position in his life. “Of course,” he added, “Mrs. Piper is a most charismatic creature. Even Mrs. James has great faith in her authenticity.”

  Dr. Mitchell had heard of this case and observed that William James called Mrs. Piper his “white crow.”

  “And why is that?” Doyle asked.

  “He says to disprove the statement that all crows are black you needn’t look at all crows; you need only produce one white one.”

  Doyle nodded with the others, hiding his mystification behind a thoughtful brow. He was gratified when Wister persisted. “What have white crows to do with psychics?”

  Lippincott chuckled. “He means that to disprove the statement ‘All psychics are frauds,’ you need only produce one who is not.”

  Bok, who had heard of Mrs. Piper, said, “There’s no doubt, she’s an imp
ressive candidate. But I believe Mrs. Piper is no match for our own Violet Petra, though I haven’t seen or heard of her for several years now.”

  “Oh, Violet Petra is still very much among us,” said Dr. Mitchell. “She has agreed to be tested by my colleagues Bishop and Bradley, who are both charter members of the Society for Psychical Research. Bishop told me he’s kept her secluded for weeks on end, but there has been no diminution in her powers. He’s quite the believer in Miss Petra.”

  The talk then turned to the useful work of the SPR, created to debunk and expose the glut of fraudulent mediums and séance mongers who were a plague upon the reason of ordinary folk. So it was with some pride that Doyle confessed he’d recently become a member of the sister organization in London, founded by Myers and now headed by Arthur Balfour.

  “Then,” said Mitchell, “as you are a psychic investigator, you really should have a look at Miss Petra. I’d be curious to hear the impression of a foreign observer. And I’m sure she’d find time to transmit any messages from the spirits who are hovering over the creator of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

  Yes, that was right. Mitchell had made the only mention of the great detective in the entire evening. Now Doyle patted the hand towel against his damp mustache, recalling with satisfaction his response to this patronizing jibe from the distinguished windbag, Weir Mitchell. “Perhaps I should,” he’d said. “Perhaps she’ll have a message from Holmes himself. He’s dead, you know.”

  At breakfast the doctor and his brother laid their plans for the day. Dr. Doyle was bound for Newark, but Innes would be at his leisure in the town. Their host suggested a tour of the state buildings, or a visit to the picture gallery. As they spoke, a servant appeared and presented a salver scattered with cards, which Lippincott examined one by one, separating them into two stacks. “Your fans have detected your whereabouts,” he said, sliding a stack of half a dozen across the tablecloth to his guest.

  “There never was such a pack of superior sleuths as there is among his readers,” observed Innes.

  Four of the cards were from ladies who hoped the author could find half an hour in his busy schedule to come and talk to a splendid literary club, meeting, tea, or luncheon. One, addressed to Sherlock Holmes, offered the services of an excellent hat maker. The last was from Dr. Mitchell. Doyle squinted at the nearly illegible scrawl on the back.

  “Why do doctors always have such crabbed handwriting?” asked his host.

  “It’s professional vanity,” Doyle replied. “And contempt for the pharmacist.” He cracked the mystery of Mitchell’s different versions of the letter R and the message came clear. “As you’ve an interest,” he read out, “I’ve contacted Dr. Bishop, who would be pleased to introduce you to Miss Violet Petra anytime tomorrow afternoon, at his home, 742 Walnut. I think you will find it worth your trouble. Please reply appointing time, yours sincerely, Silas Weir Mitchell, M.D. P.S. Bishop is a great admirer of your new medical stories, as are we all!”

  Craige Lippincott, who sipped his coffee while listening to the message, smiled at the postscript and set his cup in the saucer. “That’s so like Weir, that last bit.”

  “The book has hardly been out a week,” said Doyle.

  “Still, you may believe him. He’s a great reader and keeps up with everything new.”

  “And this Dr. Bishop?”

  “Oh, Bishop is a fine old gentleman. He’s Colonel Bishop as well. He saw some hard service during the war. He and Mitchell were at Turner’s Lane Hospital, where they sent the nerve injury cases. Of course, those injuries often included a lot more than the nerves.”

  Doyle turned the card over, rubbing his finger against the embossed name on the front. “I suppose I could go tomorrow. Is it far from here?”

  “A ten-minute walk. If that sort of thing interests you, you might go. You’ll enjoy Bishop. He’s a brilliant fellow, in his way, and a great sportsman. He was quite a boxer in his youth.”

  “Was he?” Doyle raised his eyebrows at his brother, who drew down the corners of his mouth and shrugged.

  “Very well,” said Doyle. “I’ll go along and see these gentlemen and their psychic wonder.”

  All morning long a sullen mass of slate-blue clouds brooded over the rooftops of Philadelphia. As Dr. Doyle set off from the Lippincott mansion for his appointment at Dr. Bishop’s, the first patter of drops struck his hat. He’d just passed an hour with an enthusiastic journalist from the Philadelphia Times who asked him for his impression of America and urged him to bring Sherlock Holmes back from the dead. “So you believe the dead can return,” Doyle replied cheerfully.

  “Well, no. I mean, not really,” the young man demurred. “But he might not really be dead, you know.”

  “I think it’s safe to say he may never really have been alive,” suggested the author.

  “Of course,” the flustered reporter agreed. “I know that.”

  It was tiresome, the daily interview, and he did his best to liven it up, but the newspapers wanted pap for the masses, and he dutifully supplied it. So steadfastly did he decline to speak ill of America that his refusal had been noted in the press. He was the rare British writer who admired America, who had always wanted to visit, who vowed to return.

  He had scarcely walked a block when a low, distant rumble announced the imminence of the storm. In the second block, as if some frayed seam in the clouds had split, a great sheet of water swept down from above. Doyle was not much given to regarding the weather—one went out in it, no matter what—and his pace was naturally brisk. As the puddles quickly gathered underfoot, he charged along the pavement, oblivious to the weight his woolen tweeds were taking on and the sodden condition of his stockings. In fact, this thorough soaking suited him, as it constituted a change, something unexpected in the tedium of his schedule. The American rain, at least, wouldn’t ask him how he felt about American rain.

  He was also enlivened and pleasurably engaged by the nature of the coming interview, the only one in over a month in which he was not the subject. The role of psychic investigator appealed strongly to his sense of himself as both a scientist and an adventurer in the realms of psychological possibility, of thorny questions, which, in his view, might yield solid, empirical answers. He was a good judge of character and not easily duped. Many of these mediums and clairvoyants were doubtless frauds, so his mission was a complex one—to be circumspect and alert, yet open, to outfox foxes, to separate the true gold from the dross. He had a limited experience in the field, some thought transference exercises, which had persuaded him that such phenomena were indeed possible, a séance or two, unrewarding but not entirely discouraging, and an investigation of a haunted house he had undertaken with Major Podmore, which had proved no more haunted than any house in which an unhappy young woman resides with her repressive family.

  As he approached the stern gray stone façade of Dr. Bishop’s town house, he had, he assured himself, no expectation that anything extraordinary would happen within its precincts. This was the correct attitude to take. Americans were a credulous race; they wrote letters to fictional characters, they coined religions as if there were a shortage on the market. He vaulted up the few steps and turned the bell.

  Dr. Bishop himself greeted Doyle at the door, relieved him of his coat and waterlogged hat, and ushered him into an overheated parlor where a tall, sallow-faced young woman seated near the requisite blazing fire jumped up from her chair and stood stiffly, nervously blinking her eyes like a daydreaming student who has been called upon in class. Was this dreary personage the renowned clairvoyant?

  She was not. Dr. Bishop acknowledged that it was his pleasure to introduce his distinguished guest to Miss Constance Whitaker, who would be the registrar for the sitting this afternoon. Miss Whitaker held out her hand in the automatic fashion of Americans, and Doyle pressed it briefly in his own. “I’m so thrilled to meet you, sir,” she said, blushing urgently.

  As Miss Petra was not in evidence, the three stood talking about the weather; it h
ad been a wet fall in Philadelphia and an unseasonably cold one. Dr. Bishop praised Miss Whitaker’s abilities at transcribing the sittings of their subjects. Today’s report would be the seventeenth they had carried out with Miss Petra, and some excerpts were to be published in the Boston Society’s proceedings in the coming months.

  Doyle hid his astonishment at being kept waiting beneath the set smile and amiably quizzical manner he had perfected for all such uncomfortable moments. He asked Dr. Bishop questions about his boxing enthusiasm and found him to be, as advertised, quirky and intelligent. He was also hard of hearing. Doyle found himself raising his voice and speaking with exaggerated care. At last the bell sounded and his host rushed off to the door, leaving him to contemplate Miss Whitaker’s awed and awkward silence.

  “Have you been assisting Dr. Bishop very long?” he asked kindly.

  She started, as if pinched. “Oh,” she said. “I’m not sure.”

  They both heard the rustle of movement and exchange of voices in the hall, and then Miss Petra appeared in the doorway, where she paused a moment, as if offering herself for viewing. Dr. Doyle, the investigator, took her in closely. She was a very small, slight creature, not in her first youth. Not at all what he had expected. She was dressed neatly, though oddly, in muted colors, a pale lavender silk blouse beneath a tight-fitting mauve velvet jacket of a stylish cut. Her gray silk skirt, rucked up at the back and sadly out of date, was too short, so that an inch or two of her black stockings showed over the tops of her neat black boots. Her hair was artfully arranged and pinned tightly at the back. The loose curls at the front, he noted, were shot with silver. Her eyes, large, of a translucent gray that seemed to give off light, frankly studied him. He noted a slight protrusion of the soft tissue in the left eye, possibly an orbital pseudo-tumor—no treatment for it, and none necessary for the most part, but it could be painful. She had good posture, her long neck was extended, her chin lifted to hide the weakness in the jawline. She’d applied a touch of rouge to suggest the blush of youth on her cheekbones, but it didn’t succeed in hiding from Dr. Doyle the likelihood that Miss Petra was over forty.