“It’s an interesting town,” I said. “I spent some weeks here last year, for the Borden trial.”
He grimaced. “That awful business. Why were you here for that?”
“I’m a journalist,” I said. “I was covering the trial for my paper in Philadelphia.”
This considerable tipping of my hand was designed to provoke a range of emotions in my dining companion. The first, I anticipated, was a deepening of what I took to be an habitual suspicion of anyone connected with the business of making information public. Then there was the combination of horror and interest kindled in most quiet gentlemen by the very idea of a woman in the thick of things, jostling with tough-talking male reporters for access to thieves, murderers, swindlers, and politicians, filling her notebook with the details of anything that qualified as scandalous, sordid, and newsworthy. He’d probably been thinking I was an old maid librarian or someone’s crackpot aunt who carried her knitting around in a briefcase, and lo, I was a female with a nose for news.
We addressed our plates for a few minutes as I allowed him to work through the conflict I represented to his sensibilities—I never tire of watching men struggle to fathom what I am. In the end, after another mouthful of fish had been thoroughly masticated, he laid his fork down on the plate and said, “A journalist.”
Was that a glimmer of respect I detected?
“Don’t be anxious,” I said. “I’m on vacation.”
“Truly?” he said. “You’re not out to solve the mystery of the Mary Celeste?”
“I assure you,” I said.
The waiter approached to clear our plates away. “Coffee and pie goes with the special,” he informed me.
“Is there a choice of pie?” I asked.
“Apple, custard, lemon crème.”
“Take the apple,” said Arthur, looking knowledgeable and pleased with himself.
“The apple,” I said.
The waiter stacked our plates on one hand and sailed away to the kitchen. I reached for my briefcase, unfastened the latches, and took out the package. As I handed it to its owner, I said, “You know, it’s an odd thing, but Conan Doyle’s name keeps popping up in connection to your family.”
“He wrote a scurrilous story about the ship,” Arthur said. “Do you know about that?”
“I do,” I said. “He was also partly responsible for Miss Petra’s decision to go abroad, and hence to send you this book.”
He turned the package over, set it between us, and pulled at the string. “Well, what book is it?” he said petulantly. “Not one of his. My mother was gone before his time.” The string came loose and he stuffed it into his waistcoat pocket. Then he folded the brown paper back carefully, revealing a green cloth book embossed with a small gilt pineapple. He lifted the board cover, turned over the marbled flyleaf, and read the handwritten inscription on the following page:
THIS BOOK FOR MY DAUGHTER SARAH,
WITH LOVE FROM HER FATHER.
MAY 12, 1860
He turned to the next page, which was entirely covered in a neat cursive hand. The ink had faded to brown. He read the first few sentences to himself. Before he closed the book, I made out the first four words—My sister has dreams.
“It’s my mother’s diary,” he said, resting his palm gently across the cloth cover. “From before I was born.”
I said nothing, thinking of how he must feel, how I would feel, if a total stranger brought me a diary written by my mother in her youth. “Did you know of its existence?” I asked after a few moments.
“I did not,” he said.
“Are you certain it’s hers?”
“I have a few letters still. It’s her handwriting.”
The waiter arrived with our coffee and pie. Arthur rewrapped the book and set it carefully aside. When he raised his dark eyes to mine, his gaze was gentle and diffident. “I don’t know how to thank you, Miss Grant,” he said. “You’ve brought me my mother’s voice.”
For a few months I was on the lookout for a letter from Violet, though I had no reason to think she would write. Her correspondence had generally been in the form of a summons. I assumed she had arrived in London and had submitted to the tests of the investigating gentlemen. After that, well, I didn’t like to think about what might happen after that. I hoped she had found a better way of life. Several years passed, busy ones for me, and though Violet was sometimes in my thoughts, I couldn’t let her know, as she hadn’t left me an address.
When the letter from the Boston law firm of Clarence, Fogg, & Little arrived on my desk, I had no premonition that it might have anything to do with Violet Petra. The Boston postmark puzzled me. My friendship with Lucy Dial, which had so flourished that we were in more or less constant touch with each other, was my only real connection to that city. Lucy and I had our eye on a little house on Cape Cod, which we were in hopes of purchasing together with the intention of renting it out and eventually retiring, or at least summering there together in future, and my first thought was that it must have something to do with this venture. Had the owners come down enough on their price to bring the sale into our range? Eagerly, I took up my letter knife, slit the envelope open, and unfolded the single page inside.
Mr. Albert Little wrote to inform me that he represented the estate of Violet Petra, who had been missing for more than five years. All efforts by his office to contact her had been to no avail, and she was last known to have boarded a steamer to Britain in November 1894. In the intervening years she had made no effort to contact the firm or to withdraw funds from the account in her name. It was assumed that she had passed away, possibly at sea.
The law required that, as her heir, I be notified and that I contact Mr. Little’s office as soon as possible. In order for his firm to follow Miss Petra’s wishes and execute her will as she intended, it would be necessary to petition the court to declare Miss Petra legally dead. Mr. Little looked forward to assisting me in the matter and hoped to hear from me at my earliest convenience.
I folded the letter and closed my eyes, overcome by a surge of sadness and shock too powerful for tears. She was gone; she had been gone, year after year, and I hadn’t known it. It hadn’t occurred to me, when I left the hotel that gloomy day in November, that I would never see Violet again. I recalled her bitterness and anxiety, as well as her wry acceptance of her complex fate. Her caustic remark—“Even I may have my little moment of courage”—came back to me. Had she? I wondered. Or had she simply despaired?
Sadder still was the news that she had named me as her heir. To have lived, as she had, in the constant company of strangers, without family, with no dearer friend than I was—really little more than an acquaintance—struck me as terrible. But perhaps I was simply the poorest person she knew.
It was a consolation to me that we had parted that afternoon in the hotel lounge on such good terms. She had been gratified to discover that my good will toward her could survive the revelation that she was not what she pretended to be. Perhaps what we both learned that afternoon in Philadelphia was that Violet Petra was a great deal better than she pretended to be. That much, at least, is all I want the indifferent world to know about her now.
THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA
Hindhead and London, 1898
“Matilda Briggs was not the name of a young woman, Watson,” said Holmes in a reminiscent voice. “It was a ship associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared.”
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, “THE ADVENTURE OF THE SUSSEX VAMPIRE”
The new study was lined with windows, which gave out over the gardens to a stretch of heath and from thence to the valley all the way to the Downs. The walls were richly paneled and hung with curious watercolor paintings of fairies parading in gardens, of enormous birds talking to people smaller than they were, of an angel, wings spread, hands folded, hovering over a field, of strange pale horses, skeletal men, and helpless women, their skirts streaming behind them, cascading like a waterfall from the roofto
p of a tall, gloomy building. On one wall a few harpoons were displayed together; a stuffed falcon brooded on a bookcase; a bear skull had a corner of the mantelpiece to itself. The desk was massive and dark; the carpets thick and Belgian. It was a study befitting, at long last, what Conan Doyle had so precipitously become, an author of wealth and reputation. For the past three years he had traveled abroad, living in hotels and, on his return, in rented lodgings, and during that time he was constantly wrangling with architects, deranged neighbors, builders, lawyers, tradesmen of every stripe; and there were problems with the electricity, the heraldic arms in the great stained-glass window of the entry, siting the stables, procuring the furnishings. He had hired a coachman and bought a landau and two horses, paying extra to have the family crest displayed on the carriage and the harness. Bills poured in, for laying the cellar, sinking the well, erecting the engine house for the electricity and the cottage on the grounds, for other outbuildings, landscaping, paving; it was an avalanche requiring constant attention to details, and the burden of it all fell entirely on him, as his poor wife was, had been, would be, very ill.
And now, at last, he was in residence, and so was she, plying her needle patiently in the room above his study. They both had the south view. He sat at his desk, in his comfortable flannel suit. The electric lamp cast a steady light on the page before him. He was composing a letter to his mother, asking her for the third time to come to his new house for Christmas. His pen scratched, making an audible whisper in the quiet April afternoon. Did I tell you that Sidney Paget is coming down to paint my picture for this year’s academy?
His mind wandered; the pen stalled. What would he wear for his portrait? Would Paget insist on formal wear, or could he be taken in his flannels? Outside his window a croaking band of ravens marched into view, keeping a loose formation like soldiers on maneuvers. Raucous creatures with eyes as shiny as the black stone of Mecca, big as cats and just as fearless. He never saw them without thinking how grand it would be to discover a white one among them, and he never had that thought without the image of the unfortunate Miss Petra popping up like a disturbing jack-in-the-box in his mind’s eye.
His white crow.
He didn’t feel responsible for what had happened; how could he? He had hardly known the woman, though she had mightily impressed him. Myers had made the arrangements in concert with Dr. Bishop in Philadelphia. Doyle had gone off on his tour, confident that he had put her in the hands of professional, qualified investigators who would have been, he still believed, awed by her powers. On his return from America, he was in London only a day before heading off to Davos to join his invalid wife, his children, and his sister. It was a year before they settled in yet another rented house near the site of his future mansion, and a few months after that before he communicated with his friends at the SPR. Miss Petra, Myers informed him, had not arrived. There was some question as to whether she had gotten on the ship at all, as her hosts in Brooklyn admitted they’d left her on the dock. But her luggage was aboard and scattered about the stateroom; one steward said he might have seen her. The Cunard authorities were understandably reluctant to admit that one of their passengers had gone overboard without anyone noticing, and Myers himself was of the opinion that, as he didn’t know what she looked like, she might well have milked the society for her transatlantic fare and simply disappeared into the crowd on the dock. She evidently had no family—no one was looking for her. Cunard held her luggage for someone to claim, but after a year they disposed of it. As Doyle rehearsed this defensive explanation, one detail refused, as it always did, to jibe with Myers’s theory. If she had wanted to fleece the SPR for her passage, why would she have left her luggage in the stateroom?
He’d asked this at once, and Myers had replied impatiently, “Why, to make us all think she’d gone overboard so we wouldn’t seek her out. She wanted to disappear.”
It wasn’t a foregone conclusion, but he found it hard to credit the confident little woman he’d met with such relentless cunning. It was equally difficult to imagine her willfully going over the rail of a ship. She had betrayed no signs of depression or even agitation. She had, in fact, struck him as unusually composed.
Perhaps Myers was right, and his white crow had always meant to fly away.
At some signal they alone apprehended, the belligerent congregation outside his window burst into the air and swooped off toward the town in a squawking black swarm. Doyle returned his attention to his letter, scribbling a few last lines about his brother’s shoulder injury. If she wouldn’t come to see his house, perhaps the temptation of Innes in a sling would bring her round. Or did she really prefer spending Christmas in her cottage on Bryan Waller’s estate, fussing over his Christmas pudding until it was just as he liked it?
He didn’t write this last bit. Instead he signed himself devotedly, folded the page, and slipped it into the envelope, which he had already addressed. This he placed atop another, larger envelope, in which was secreted a square card bearing a message that began, My own darling girl. She would be in London in three days, and so, incidentally, would he. The dreamy thoughts that ensued were interrupted by a timid knock at the study door. Irritation sounded firmly in his command, “Come in.”
It was Vanderhoek, his little Dutch page, as he liked to call him, begging, as always, his pardon, but there was a lady calling and she’d sent in her card.
“A lady?” he said. He wasn’t expecting a visit from a lady. The young man handed over the card, stepping back at once in his eagerness to appear unassuming. “What manner of lady is she?” Doyle asked, turning over the card, on which the name Matilda Briggs was printed in square black letters.
“A tall lady,” replied the servant. “Most elegant in her dress and refined in her manner. But I believe she is a foreigner.”
“But?” said Doyle.
“She has an accent, sir. I don’t identify it.”
“Could it be German or Austrian?”
“I think I could tell that, sir. I believe she is not a German.”
Doyle dropped the card negligently upon his blotter. “The name means nothing to me,” he said. “Did she state her business?”
“She said she had information on a matter she believed to be of interest to you, sir.”
Doyle chuckled. “Elegant in her dress?” he repeated.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well,” he said, “show her in. I like to keep up with the fashions.”
The Dutchman went out and Doyle busied himself in taking up a few books stacked on a table between the fireplace chairs and stowing them on the mantel. Then he returned to his desk, drew out a sheet of paper from the drawer, took up his pen, and wrote the words “a foreign lady calls.” He could hear the familiar, always encouraging sound of skirts rustling against the parquet in the hall, coming steadily closer, but he kept his eyes on his page, starting a doodle of a horse, until Vanderhoek announced, “Miss Briggs to see you, sir,” at which point he laid the pen down with just the finest shade of reluctance, and, narrowing his eyes, looked up at the shimmering form hesitating in the doorway.
Now this is elegance, he thought. Miss Briggs was a column of heliotrope, silver, and gold, from the gleaming crown of ash-gold hair fastened in a love knot with a silver comb to the tips of her embroidered kid boots peeking out from beneath a full gored skirt of deep purple silk with a sheen to it that called to mind the surface of a mirror. Her pouched bodice, high-necked and long-waisted, was of heliotrope satin with a complex of tucks, each tacked into place with a running stitch of deep orange, a pattern repeated in the folds of the tight muslin sleeves from elbow to wrist, and at the inset of the gigot bulge at the shoulder, which was not so full as some he had seen. Doyle was not a fan of the gored skirt, it so often resembled a bell, but this one fit like wax over the hips, cascaded in folds to a full base, and gathered at the back to give the illusion of the now unfashionable bustle—how he missed the bustle. Furtively he noted the details of this costume—he would give a
full account of it to his sister Lottie—but he stood up at the same time, coming out from behind his desk with a pleasant surprised smile, such as he didn’t doubt this lady was accustomed to seeing. Her face was lovely, though not English. Her complexion was fair, her eyes deep set, hawkish, dark, almost black, her chin was a little heavy and her nose rather sharp. Her full, lightly rouged lips looked designed to bestow fond kisses. French, he thought from the look of her, and now he was eager to hear her accent. He had only a moment of anticipation, for as he took her hand she said, “Dr. Doyle. I so appreciate your willingness to see me, as I’m sure you have many demands upon your time.”
Not French. “Not so many,” he said. “And, in fact, I was just thinking of having a break for tea. Will you join me?” He indicated the chairs before the empty grate. She nodded agreeably, gliding past him, and perched like a fluttering dove on the indicated cushion, her long back stretched forward into the room. “With pleasure,” she said. She placed a silvery beaded bag he hadn’t noticed on the table next her.
“You do me honor,” he said, stepping into the hall to signal the hovering Vanderhoek and send him off in search of tea.
Miss Briggs didn’t move, though her eyes followed him as he closed the door and crossed the carpet to take the seat opposite her.
“Now,” he said. “I’m curious to hear the reason for your visit, Miss Briggs.” He noted two details as she replied. First, she lowered her eyes when he said her name, second, that she had a scar on her forehead, descending from the hairline, an old wound that had undoubtedly required stitches.
“I’m by way of a messenger,” she replied. When she hit the double ss she turned it into sh, which gave a shushing sound to the word. Not Italian, certainly. “I’ve come at the behest of a friend who must remain nameless. She is in possession of an object she believes will be of interest to you.”
The Ghost of the Mary Celeste Page 26